Infoquake (44 page)

Quell turned out to be an ideal co-worker. He didn't clog up the
grinding gears of Horvil's concentration with a lot of chatter, and what
he did say was always concise and to the point. After a few hours, the
two dropped nouns and verbs altogether and stuck to the lingua franca
of mathematics. The engineer had to admit he was starting to like this
Islander. And he could swear the feeling was mutual.

Horvil finally tossed aside the bio/logic programming bars a few
minutes shy of six in the morning. They had worked through the night
without a single break. He gazed at their handiwork, and then
exchanged a silent glance with the Islander. The look was unambiguous. MultiReal isn't ready. It's not going to work. But now they were
bumping up against the unstretchable limitations of time, and
Benyamin was positively apoplectic. The two engineers sighed and nodded as one; it would have to do. "You ready to take the baton,
Ben?" said Horvil, stretching his sore arms above his head.

Benyamin's raven-black hair was in complete disarray from the
action of nervous fingers. "I've been keeping the shop up-to-date on
our progress," he said. "They're all ready to go. Just give me the word,
and I'll get them started."

"Do you think they can do all that barwork in time? That's a big
mound of coding, and Natch'11 be onstage in less than forty-eight
hours."

"I don't know. I've never had to put them on such a tight deadline."

The engineer's eyes narrowed. "No, Ben, don't tell me you're
taking it-there. You can't, are you insane?"

Benyamin cast his eyes to the floor and stuck his hands in his
pockets, mirroring one of Horvil's standard poses. "We don't have a
choice anymore. I had a couple of assembly-line shops willing to take
on the job last night, but now this is the only one. And I had to call
in a few favors even to get them on board."

Quell watched the cousins' conversation from the opposite corner
of the room, where he had stretched out on the floor. "What's going
on?"

Horvil let out a tsk. "He's going to bring MultiReal to my Aunt
Berilla's shop-his mother's company."

"One of her companies," corrected Ben. "One of her many companies."

"They do good work, I'll give them that-but it's not like they
actually have to compete against anybody. Creed Elan throws them all
kinds of softball projects without even soliciting bids. Which isn't any
real surprise because Berilla is like this with all the Elan bodhisattvas."
He held two chunky fingers together like Siamese twins attached at
the hip.

"Don't you get it, Horvil?" Ben replied defensively. "Nobody else'll take on the project this late. We have to use them now."

The Islander shook his head in confusion. "So what's the problem?"

"The problem is that Aunt Berilla absolutely hates Natch with a
passion. Don't ask me why. She doesn't want anything to do with him.
She doesn't want us to have anything to do with him. If she realizes this
is Natch's coding job-if she thinks it'll help Natch in any way-she'll
yank it right off the floor. No, even worse, she might actually sabotage
the fucking thing."

"She won't find out," Ben insisted. "Really, Horv, this is all under
control."

Horvil sighed. "Let's hope so."

They returned to the conference room to find Jara and Merri in the
midst of a heated debate. Jara had been up all night weeding through
marketing theories for a model to use in the presentation until, desperate, she had asked Merri for help. Since the moment she stepped off
the teleportation platform, the channel manager had been slingshotting around the globe to sales meetings with Robby Robby. She hadn't
even found the opportunity to change out of the horribly unfashionable gray robe TeleCo made its customers wear during the transfer
process. Yet, she had readily agreed to help, a decision she now
appeared to regret.

A pack of SeeNaRee hyenas studiously watched the back-and-forth
from a safe distance in the brush.

"Tell her we need something simple," said Jara, turning to Horvil
as if looking for an ally.

Merri frowned. In a futile effort to stop the trembling, a common
side effect of teleportation, she was gripping her thighs hard enough
to draw blood. "The Four Phases of Technological Evolution are
simple. They're not-"

"Creed propaganda."

"They're not creed propaganda. Just because they're part of Objective doctrine doesn't mean they're not universal. Everyone knows the
Four Phases-it's a part of the culture now."

"I've heard people talk about them at Creed Elan," said Benyamin.

"You see? It's really very simple. Observation: humanity distinguishes itself from nature. Exploitation: humanity establishes its dominance over nature. Synergy: humanity learns to become one with
nature. Transcendence: humanity surmounts the rules of nature altogether. Take the example of teleportation ..."

Jara threw her hands up in the air. "Natch wants simple. Fifteen
minutes or less. Petrucio Patel kept crowing about `safe shores' in his
promo. We've got to be excitement and adventure on the high seas. I'm
sorry, Merri, but the Four Phases will just put everybody to sleep. We
need a sales pitch, not a sermon."

Quell, who had been standing quietly, now poked his sizeable nose
between the two bickering apprentices. "Maybe a demonstration
would help," he said. Merri looked up in shock at the giant Islander,
apparently noticing him for the first time. "I can't show you the latest
version until it's back from the shop, but I can show you one of the prototypes Margaret and I put together."

Merri and Jara looked at one another and nodded simultaneously.

"Good," said Quell. "Horvil, help me change the SeeNaRee. Can't
do a thing with this miserable collar."

The Islander whispered in his ear as Horvil cast his mind out to the
Facility databases. A succession of three-dimensional pictures flashed
in his head. He chose one, and the African veldt disappeared with a
flash.

The air around the apprentices suddenly filled with bass-thumping
music, the kind of xpression board monotony that instinctively caused
teenaged girls' hips to gyrate. Then came the smell of freshly cut grass.
The apprentices found themselves standing at the nexus of two inter locking diamonds in the dirt. A smattering of white hexagonal bags
lay at the corners.

A baseball stadium.

"No, no, Horvil. I want a classic field," said Quell. Horvil nodded
and switched to the more traditional playing field endorsed by the
classic leagues. Soon, the fiefcorpers were standing in a stadium set up
like those the ancients had played: a single diamond, four bases, an
enormous outfield. Without prompting, the engineer called up a catalog of baseball bats containing everything from laser-polished aluminum to synthetic ash. Horvil selected a squat Kyushu Clubfoot,
summoned a cart of classic league baseballs, and then handed the
equipment to Quell. "Smoke and fucking mirrors," muttered the
Islander as he fumbled with the virtual bat, trying to get a grip on it.
Not an easy task without a sense of touch, Horvil realized.

"See that target?" Quell pointed to a bull's eye painted on the outfield wall captioned with the words BETCHA A BOTTLE OF
CHAIQUOKE YOU CAN'T HIT ME. Then he flexed a muscular set
of pectorals, tossed a ball up in the air, and knocked it towards right
field. The ball hurtled into the wall at the precise center of the target.

"So you can hit a baseball into a bull's eye," sneered Jara. "What
does that have to do with multiple realities?"

The Islander said nothing. Instead, he reached into the cart of baseballs, threw them into the air one by one, and smacked them towards
the ChaiQuoke promo. Bang bang bang bang. All twenty-four baseballs
plunked the bull's eye in the same exact spot. Quell threw his ponytail
over his shoulder and made a low purring noise of satisfaction.

Jara gaped at the collection of virtual balls lying under the bull's
eye. Words escaped her.

A light went on in Horvil's head. He trotted around the infield, his
jaw swaying this way and that with excitement. "Don't you get it,
Jara? The whole thing's just mathematics. The swing of the bat, the
grip, the angle you're holding it, all those neurochemical reactions in your brain-you can describe it all with math. Possibilities just lets
you try out different variables and choose the outcome you want."

Quell nodded. "An oversimplification-but yes."

Horvil flopped down onto the grass and stretched out, snow angel
style. "So that's why we modified those dendrite modules ..."

Ben paced slowly towards the ChaiQuoke advertisement and
rubbed the paint, as if he expected to feel some kind of magnetic generator in the wall. Meanwhile, Merri retreated into the visitors' dugout
and watched the proceedings with hollow eyes as she tried to get a
handle on her teleportation-induced trembling.

"Let me get this straight," said Jara, seating herself delicately on
the grass next to Horvil. "Multi Real-Possibill ties-creates alternate
realities inside your head?"

Quell strode onto the pitcher's mound. His voice took on the tone
of a drill instructor. "Let's start from the beginning.

"Forget about MultiReal for a minute. What happens when you
throw a ball in the air and swing a bat? The mind takes in sensory
input-the sight of the ball, the weight of the bat, the feel of the
wind-and processes it. You decide on a course of action. Then the
brain sends instructions down the spinal cord into your muscles, right?
Electrical pulses tell your body what to do. You swing the bat. It all
happens in a fraction of a second.

"But we can track all those electrical pulses, right? We can reduce
them to mathematical equations. Isn't that how multi works?
OCHREs in the brainstem intercept these pulses and transmit them
onto the multi network instead of into your own body.

"So what happens if you take these electrical commands from the
brain and plot out the results? You get a simulation of what's going to
happen. You can see if the swing of the bat is going to turn out the way
you want.

"Now, let's go a step further. Once you have a mathematical model
in place, what's to stop you from trying out different scenarios? If I had twitched my right arm like this instead of like that, what would have
happened? What if I had gripped the bat a little harder, swung a little
faster? You make thousands of tiny unconscious decisions like that
every instant. Why not just loop the whole process in your mind and
compute it over and over again with different variables until you find
a result you're satisfied with? Keep swinging until you hit one out of
the park.

"Then-and only then-you choose the reality you want to
happen, the pre-determined reality. Your mind now has an optimized set
of instructions to send into the nervous system. The brain outputs
those electrical pulses to your body-what we call closing the choice
cycle-and it happens."

Horvil was making incoherent burbling sounds of delight. But
Jara was not convinced. "That's all well and good if you're just trying
to hit an inanimate object," she said, hands planted belligerently on
her hips. "But what if you've got an outfielder out there trying to catch
it first? People aren't mathematical models. You can't just use algebra
to predict what they're going to do. What then?"

Quell was unruffled. "Ben," he called out across the field. "Go
ahead. Try to catch it." The young apprentice nodded, summoned a
SeeNaRee baseball glove, and assumed the crouch of a seasoned right
fielder in front of the ChaiQuoke target.

Thwak! The Islander knocked the first ball over Benyamin's
shoulder, a perfect hit.

Thwak! The second ball flew inches past his face.

Thwak! Another hit.

The charade went on for another dozen swings, with Ben failing to
catch the ball each time. Even seemingly easy pop flies slipped through
his fingers and smacked unerringly into the wall. The irritation was
beginning to show on the young apprentice's face when Quell raised
his hand and signaled that the demonstration was through.

"That program has to be pretty good," said Horvil, eyebrows aloft. "Ben's no Angel Palmero, but he's caught a few fly balls in his day."

"It wouldn't have mattered," replied Quell dismissively. "Angel
Palmero wouldn't have done any better." He stood the Kyushu Clubfoot on its end like a mercenary displaying his weapon. "MultiReal is
a collaborative process."

Horvil's cousin came trotting over from the outfield, clearly perturbed at his poor defensive performance. "Wait a minute-I didn't
collaborate with anything."

"You don't think you did. But for every missed catch, there were
dozens of alternative reality scenarios played out inside our minds before
they ever actually `happened.' The whole sequence looped over and
over again-dozens of my possible swings mapped out against dozens
of your possible catches-dozens of choice cycles-until I found a
result I liked."