Multireal (13 page)

"You get exhaustion," moaned Ben, still sprawled on the field
trying to catch his breath.

"They're at an impasse," said Natch. "An infinite loop, until
someone gives up ... or his OCHREs run out."

Horvil pulled his cousin to his feet and gave him a vigorous thwack
between the shoulder blades. "Eh, you'll be okay," said the engineer.
"Ready to take on the Harper Bulldogs in no time. So what did it feel like?"

Benyamin bobbled his head and cracked his neck. Horvil's goodnatured clap on the back actually seemed to have helped him recover
his equilibrium. "Pretty much like you'd expect. Just the same thing
over and over. And over and over and over ..."

"How many times?" said Natch.

"I dunno. You lose track. Felt like hundreds, maybe even thousands. It's like an enormous grid that you scroll through in your head,
but you have to expend this tiny bit of effort for every move. Doesn't
seem that bad at first, but it adds up. I couldn't take it anymore.
Finally just gave up and cut the whole process off."

Quell did not bother to pick himself up off the grass, but simply
lay there with his head propped up on one elbow. He had to be packing at least twice as much mass as Ben, and yet he seemed just as winded.
"So here's our challenge," he said. "You've seen two instances of MultiReal running at the same time. But at our exposition, we're going to
have twenty-three."

Horvil's head slumped to his chest. "Oooh," he moaned.

Natch stood with his arms folded. "Don't tell me that it never
occurred to Margaret in the last sixteen years that something like this
might happen."

"Of course it occurred to her," replied Quell calmly.

"And it's been tested?"

"Sure, it's been tested ... just not with twenty-three people at the
same time. Listen, Natch, don't get ahead of yourself. Let me show you
the next demo. Horvil, take your programming bars over to the workbench, go pull up the common tools library...." A long and tortured
series of mathematical formulas sprayed from his lips. Horvil soaked it
all up, nodded, then dashed through a door in the stands to find the
bio/logic workbench.

Natch paced slowly up and down the sidelines, kicking at the grass
with one foot as they waited for Horvil to complete the program modifications. He had been in possession of MultiReal for a month now, and yet
he still knew so little about it. The most powerful work of bio/logics ever
created, the pinnacle achievement of the Surinas. But there were still basic
concepts about MultiReal he did not understand and simple questions he
could not answer. Even Horvil had knowledge gaps large enough to pilot
an OrbiCo space freighter through. Natch silently cursed Len Borda and
Magan Kai Lee for keeping him on the defensive for the past few weeks,
for keeping him on the run and away from MindSpace.

Ten minutes later, the engineer emerged from the bowels of the
stadium brandishing his programming bar satchel like a trophy.

Quell arose and brushed himself off, then reached for the soccer
ball that had rolled to a stop near his feet. "Again," he said, tossing the
ball Benyamin's way.

The young apprentice did a few quick stretches, trying to psyche
himself up, unsure whether to be prepared for victory or defeat. He
wound up for the kick-

And found each kick thwarted by Quell's goaltending, time and
time again.

"Something's ... strange," said Ben, finally conceding defeat. "I'm
using MultiReal, just like before-but it just stops at some point. It
leaves me hanging there in midloop."

"Limited choice cycles!" cried Horvil, rushing onto the field before
Quell could utter a single syllable. "I think I get this now. We put a
limit on the number of reality loops Ben can do at one time-but your
version of MultiReal still has no limits."

The Islander nodded. He strolled back to the cart with the ball
clutched in one palm like another man might clutch an apple, then
deposited it gently on the top of the stack. Apparently the demonstration was over.

"So why would anyone buy a MultiReal program with limited
choice cycles?" complained Benyamin. "It's useless. If someone else can
always trump you-"

"Not always," interrupted Horvil. "The other guy would only win
if he's got MultiReal activated too-and if he's not running a limited
version like yours. I suppose if you're both running limited versions,
the person with the most choice cycles wins."

Natch made his way to the bleachers and gripped the cold metal
railing with trembling fists. One of his last conversations with Margaret began to unroll in his mind, and for a moment he felt like he was
back in Andra Pradesh watching the bodhisattva prepare for one of her
dull presentations.

It had been an offhanded statement of Margaret's: Frederic and
Petrucio have a limited license. They can release MultiReal products, but they
will be subordinate to yours.

Natch, puzzled: Subordinate how?

The Patel products will have a limited number of choice cycles, Margaret
had explained, whereas yours will be infinite.

He had nearly forgotten about that snippet of dialogue, given that
it had taken place during an argument about how the bodhisattva had
lied to him. Only now did he understand what had transpired there.
Natch seethed. This was good news, to be sure-but how many more
of these moments would he have to endure? How many elements of
this MultiReal affair would become clear only weeks or months after
the fact?

"So that's how Margaret decided to resolve conflicts among the
MultiReal licensees," he said.

"Margaret explored a lot of different ways to deal with these conflicts," said Quell. "She spent years, but never came to any definite conclusions." The Islander walked to the sidelines and found a seat on the
bench normally reserved for the visiting team. "Actually, that's not
quite the right way to put it. Margaret came to the conclusion that she
shouldn't come to any definite conclusions."

Ben frowned. "What does that mean?"

"That means she wanted to keep the options open. Give the owners
and licensees every possible scenario, and let them sort it out for themselves. Margaret thought there might be different flavors of MultiReal
available from different resellers. Maybe each company would come up
with its own a la carte pricing. So she built every possible solution she
could think of into the program and made it easy for an engineer to flip
them on and off." The Islander threw one arm over the shoulder of the
chief engineer, who had just planted his sizable ass on the bench.
"Horvil's already demonstrated how easy it is to select the options. The
hard part is deciding which ones to choose."

The engineer sat pensively, not speaking for a moment. "This
exposition is going to be a nightmare unless we make some decisions
before those lottery winners hit the field," he put in finally.

"Then why aren't we consulting Margaret?" asked Ben, ever ready to pin words on the silent questions in everyone else's mind. "She
already knows all the pros and cons. She's been working on this for sixteen years. Why don't we ask her for advice?"

Horvil turned to Natch. He wanted to know the answer to this
question too.

"I've tried to contact her," said the fiefcorp master with a frown. "She
won't answer. Won't accept my multi requests. She's just sitting there on
top of that bloody Revelation Spire, and she won't come down."

"Well, somebody has to be talking to her," continued Benyamin.
"Quell? Don't tell me you haven't seen Margaret since the demo."

The Islander was busy removing his coin-shaped apparatus and
replacing the burdensome collar around his neck. At Ben's question,
his gaze instantly slid inward to some troublesome emotional vista.
"Yeah, I've seen her," he mumbled. "A few times. She's ... not doing
well. You're not going to get a lot of help from Margaret."

"What's wrong with her?" asked Horvil.

Quell stood and shifted from one foot to the other, then back again.
"She's ill," he said laconically.

Natch shook his head. "It's not Margaret's problem anymore," he
said. "That's why I hired Merri and Jara, to work on these kinds of policy
questions. You three need to concentrate on getting all those bugs ironed
out so Possibilities doesn't choke in front of a billion people."

"This should be easier than last time though, right?" said Ben.
"We had MultiReal interacting with hundreds of millions of people in
that auditorium. This time it's only twenty-three."

"You're forgetting something," replied Horvil with a reprimanding finger wag. "At the demo, we really just did five hundred million
one-on-one interactions in a row. Nothing complex about that. Heck,
it was all rigged off a mathematical progression, so Natch didn't even
have to think about it. But next week at the exposition, we could have
twenty-three conflicting realities to work out. That's twenty-three
times as bad-no, twenty-three times exponentially as bad."

Natch shrugged, already halfway to the door that would lead them
back to the Harper tube station. He wasn't worried. If there was any
bio/logic engineer in the world capable of hunting down such a challenge, it was Horvil. With nine days to go, his old hivemate would
have twenty-three-way MultiReal conflicts mounted and stuffed on his
mantel by the time the exposition was under way.

The fiefcorp master turned to make sure the others were following
him and was confronted by the odd sight of Benyamin wriggling his
arms and legs like a man trying to bring back the circulation. "What's
with you?" he said.

Ben snapped his head up, embarrassed. "Sorry, Natch. Those
MultiReal choice cycles can be exhausting-but it is such an incredible rush."

I0

Two days passed with a cyclone of activity. Impromptu meetings swept
across the horizon and threw previously settled decisions up in the air
again. Fiefcorpers breezed into Natch's apartment with no advance
notice at all hours of the night, and there were no apologies offered or
expected.

Jara couldn't sleep. Every time she lay in bed and felt herself
sliding under, she would come thrashing awake with Natch's name on
her lips and Magan Kai Lee's words buzzing in her ears:

As long as Natch refuses to cooperate with us, the SarinalNatch MultiReal Fiefcorp is my top priority.

We are exploring every transaction your fiefcorp has ever done, every piece of
code you've ever launched onto the Data Sea. This MultiReal exposition you are
so diligently preparing for will not happen.

We will bury Natch.

Shouldn't she have warned Natch by now that the Defense and
Wellness Council was still gunning for him? Wasn't that her duty as a
fiefcorp apprentice? Then again, certainly this would not be news to
Natch. He might have achieved a temporary triumph over the
Council, but the entrepreneur knew better than to declare victory so
soon. What more could Jara really tell him?

The internal argument raged as the night wore on. She composed
a dozen messages to the fiefcorp master, discarded them, started again.
The script for the MultiReal exposition, meanwhile, sat in a fetal state,
shapeless and unformed.

Finally, at half past six, the analyst kicked off her blankets and summoned a view of the building's exterior on the viewscreen. She half
expected to find a team of Defense and Wellness Council officers staring
back at her taking notes. There were Council officers out there, all right, but they were far below, strolling placidly through the London mist
along with everyone else. Was this a message in and of itself?

Jara collapsed back into her warren of pillows and tuned the
viewscreen to the latest John Ridglee.

If the Prime Committee gives out civilian medals for bravery, then I propose somebody nominate Natch.

How convenient, thought Jara, stubbornly clinging to her midnight
malaise. We issue a press release, and all the drudges who hate Natch suddenly
get amnesia. She continued reading: