Infoquake (43 page)

"Watch this," commanded Quell. And then he plunged his bare
hands straight into the middle of the holograph.

Horvil gasped as connection strands rose like snakes charmed from
a basket and wiggled their way to the Islander's fingers. Soon, Quell
had amassed a bundle of data fibers in each hand, which he proceeded
to weave in and out of the code blocks with astonishing alacrity. The
connections looked just as well seated as if they had been stuck there
with a pricey set of programming bars.

"I didn't even know you could do it that way," said Horvil. He
thought of the clunky silver slabs roosted against his side and felt a
rush of inferiority.

"How do you think people made code before bio/logic programming bars?" replied Quell. His noodling did not seem to have any purpose other than demonstration; he was tying and untying the same collection of strands over and over again. "With their bare hands, that's
how. On the Islands, we remember such things."

"But-the connection strands-they're floating to your fingertips

The big man's eyes twinkled with a craftsman's pride. Suddenly, he
clenched his hands into fists, and the snakes drooped limply back to
the desk. "The rings," he said, twitching his fingers in the air. "They
each broadcast a unique signature, just like a programming bar."

Jara had been watching Quell's display with characteristic skepticism. "So what is this thing?" she said, gesturing at the roller coaster
structure of the program. "That was a nice demonstration, but how do
we know it even works?"

"This thing is EnviroSelect 14," retorted the Islander. "And you
know it works because it's been choosing the SeeNaRee for you every time you've stepped into a Surina conference room."

Jara pursed her lips, embarrassed. "Oh."

When they arrived back at the conference room, Benyamin was
waiting for them. He didn't show the least bit of surprise at Quell's
traditional Islander handshake, causing Horvil to wonder how his
younger cousin could be so much more worldly than he. There was no
sign of Merri yet, but that was to be expected; teleportation was challenging enough without the additional complications caused by
380,000 kilometers of space. She would not be here for a few more
hours yet. Jara took one last look at her notes, muttered something
unintelligible but definitely not pleasant, and then cut her multi connection.

Horvil and Ben dutifully followed Quell back through the hallways to the workroom where the engineering would begin. The
Islander seemed inclined to walk several meters ahead of the two
cousins, but Horvil managed to hustle to the big man's side.

"I was hoping you could explain something," said the engineer.
"Obviously, you can make bio/logic programs with those funky rings
there, but how do you test 'em?"

Quell eyed his counterpart with scarcely concealed suspicion.
"What do you mean?"

"I thought Islanders didn't run bio/logic programs because
bio/logics is unholy, or something like that."

"You're thinking of the Pharisees. That's not us at all. We run
bio/logic programs in the Islands every once in a while; people there
install some of the basic OCHREs. Our Technology Board just discriminates a lot more carefully than your connectible governments."

"We discriminate pretty carefully," said Horvil in a wounded tone
of voice.

Quell shook his head, and for a second the engineer thought he was
going to burst out laughing. "How much code do you have floating
around your system right now, Horvil?" he said.

Horvil thought carefully, trying to account for all the programs he
activated willy-nilly every minute, the background code created by his
L-PRACG and the Prime Committee, the constant hum of molecular
activity instigated by his OCHREs. Processes whose names he didn't
know, routines that had been installed by hive technicians before birth
and running constantly since then. "I don't know," he said. "Thousands, probably."

"And do you know who wrote them all? How do you know they're
all going to work together flawlessly?"

"That's why we have governments. That's why there's Primo's and
the Council."

"Governments. Primo's. The Defense and Wellness Council." The
Islander spat out the words as if they were the names of particularly
odious criminals. "Do you trust them?"

"Not entirely. But I'm not gonna sit around all day and weed
through bio/logic programs either."

Benyamin, who had been listening a few paces behind, now came
trotting up on Quell's right side. "But we have a system for opting out
of these standard bio/logic programs," he said. "The Islander Tolerance
Act of 146. High Executive Toradicus signed it."

"Spoken like a true governmentalist," said Quell, though his tone
of voice was not unkind. "Create an opt-out provision, and put the
onus on our taxpayers, on our governments. The Technology Board has
a huge team that does nothing but register these `Dogmatic Oppositions' twenty-four hours a day to keep your bots and data agents out of
the South Pacific. And who do you think pays their salaries? Do you
think your Prime Committee has ever sent a bloody credit our way to
fund their Tolerance Act?"

Horvil blushed furiously. He had heard of Dogmatic Oppositions, of course, but to him the term had just been verbal dressing tossed
around in Khann Frejohr's speeches. He had never met anyone to
whom these things actually mattered. "Politics," muttered Horvil. "I
hate politics."

At that, the Islander let out a titan-sized laugh of such gusto that
all the security guards in the hallway instantly felt for their dartrifles.
"If you hate politics," said Quell, "you're in the wrong fiefcorp."

"So how many programs do you have running in your system?"
snapped Horvil.

The Islander looked at Horvil with an expression that hinted at
fondness or amusement. "Twelve. And seven of them are for my
asthma."

Horvil had started to drift into an interior monologue about the evils
of politics when he was jarred back to reality by their arrival at Quell's
workroom. The Islander made an obscure hand signal to a unit of blueand-green Surina security officers, and a dozen of them instantly
marched up to the workroom door and formed a protective ring around
it. This was no loose formation like the one Horvil saw here half an
hour ago; these troops had their fingers on the triggers of their guns
and were clearly ready to use them. "Thank you," said Horvil inanely
as he stepped into the room with Ben and Quell and closed the door
behind him.

Two dozen guards at the gates to the Surina complex, thought Horvil.
And then more guards blocking the way into the Surina Enterprise Facility ...
and now even more right outside the door ... You'd need an army to get past
all those dartguns.

Then he remembered that Len Borda did have an army. Several
armies, in fact. He shivered.

Quell was obviously used to the pressure. He marched into the center of the workbench and waved his hand around the table. Ben and
Horvil jumped back in awe as a dozen interlocking modules of pink
and blue appeared in the MindSpace bubble. Horvil now understood
the need for the large workspace; the program took up every square
centimeter and extended halfway to the ceiling like a Gothic castle.
Connection strands stretched from module to module in startling and
intricate patterns, some circumnavigating the whole mass several
times. Even an observer who knew nothing about bio/logic coding
could lose himself for hours studying the beautiful detail, the interplay
of colors, the endless number of aesthetic themes that replicated across
the surface of the program. Horvil had seen entire nervous system simulators that were less complex.

"So this is MultiReal," he gulped. Next to the Byzantine topography of the MultiReal program, Probabilities 4.9 would look like a
pastel-colored pimple.

"That-that's amazing," stuttered Ben.

Quell's face showed a mixture of pride and sadness, the palimpsest
of some epic experience that Horvil could hardly begin to imagine.
"After sixteen years of work," he said, "it ought to be."

"Sixteen years?" said Horvil, his jaw hanging low. He couldn't
imagine working on the same program for sixteen months.

"And that's just Margaret's part of it. Half of this code was passed
down by her father when he died-and she contracted out a lot of bits
and pieces." Horvil nodded as if Quell's statement were self-evident.
"Now are we ready to start coding?"

The two cousins nodded in sync, and they got to work.

Probabilities 4.9 did indeed look quite puny beside the gargantuan
MultiReal engine. Its double helix shape was a child's trick in comparison, a second-rate sleight of hand. Horvil found the sight of the two
programs side-by-side a big metaphor for the entire situation Natch
had gotten them into. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp? thought
the engineer, wishing he could just erase the Probabilities ROD and pretend it had never existed. This is the Margaret Surina MultiReal Fiefcorp, plain and simple. We don't belong here. We're completely out of our league.

Quell spent the first half-hour pointing out the MultiReal program's basic hooks to his fellow apprentices. There wasn't enough time
for a more in-depth explanation. When the Islander wrapped up his
brief overview, Horvil still had no idea what an alternate reality was or
why you would want to create one. But now he felt confident he could
at least steer this MultiReal vessel, even if the workings of its engine
room remained a mystery.

Horvil was gratified to see that his original estimate of the work
involved was accurate. Clearly, it would be madness for Quell, Horvil
and Benyamin to attempt to make all those thousands of connections
in less than seventy-two hours; even Natch would have to admit that.
So the two senior engineers spent the next few hours making detailed
blueprints for the assembly-line shop and marking up their code on
templates even the greenest programmer could follow. There wasn't
enough room inside the workbench for Ben to squeeze in, not alongside two men of such bulk. So he kept to the corner of the room, where
he took notes on a holographic tablet and stared intently at Quell's
finger-weaving technique. Horvil felt like an ancient relic swinging
around his clunky bars of metal, but there was nothing he could do
about it.

As the day ebbed away and night fell, Benyamin began to grow
impatient. He kept sidling up to Horvil and slipping him urgent Con-
fidentialWhispers about the time. "I told the assembly-line manager
I'd get this to her by midnight," he said.

"What do you want me to do?" 'Whispered Horvil in return. "It's
just not done."

"If the shop doesn't get it by midnight, they can't guarantee they'll
finish by Tuesday."

"And if we rush to get it to them by midnight, I can't guarantee it
will work on Tuesday." Benyamin quieted down.

Midnight passed, but Quell and Horvil labored on. Ben began
popping in and out of the room to make use of the multi facility down
the hall.

Once the basic blueprint had been constructed and Probabilities
sat loosely tethered to the MultiReal engine, another job awaited the
fiefcorpers: security. Sending an assembly-line coding shop the full
Possibilities program in all its manifold glory would be an invitation
to disaster. Horvil wouldn't take such a risk with even an ordinary
bio/logic program; there were too many thieves, cutthroat competitors
and black coders who would love to get their hands on commercial
source code. So Quell and Horvil spent the early morning hours fastidiously cordoning off enormous chunks of programming, locking out
sensitive areas and encrypting the sections that would have to remain
open.

By the time they finished, the program would look like any other
large-scale project that passed through an assembly-line floor. An economic modeling program, perhaps, or the basic subsystem for an
internal organ. No one would be able to tell they were really working
on Margaret Surina's famous MultiReal engine.