Multireal (22 page)

The engineer tossed his programming bar over one shoulder with
a well-practiced motion, where it landed on a pillow and rolled to join
several others on the floor. He called up bug reports and began crossreferencing the source of the errors. Billboard holographs, mostly,
along with the occasional Data Sea news feed.

Horvil turned back to that insignificant thread drooping in MindSpace like a flaccid phallus. What were the odds of twelve thousand
specific calls to that strand in one morning? Astronomical. This was no
coincidence. Someone had bought advertising space on those billboards and posted just the right image with just the right resolution at
just the right time: a perfect storm of sabotage. But how had the saboteurs found the flaw? Unless they had stumbled on it by accident,
which seemed unlikely, they would have had to reverse-engineer the
whole thing from scratch. Not an easy task.

Horvil's mind triangulated with furious speed. Who could spare
those kinds of resources? Who could afford to rent all that billboard
space for those incriminating holographs? And who had the motive to
muck with Horvil's code anyway?

Horvil silently tallied up all the bio/logic programs out there that
bore his signature. Optical programs, mental process refiners, memory
aids. Four dozen? Five? Certainly if one program was vulnerable to
such attack, they all were.

The yellow jacket floated on the surface of the hoverbird window, lifeless, inert. If Natch stared long enough, he could see it drift from side
to side like a buoy bobbing on the ocean. There was a faint hum
coming from some subterranean register as well. Natch knew it was
just a trick of the hoverbird's audiovisual system, a way to hint at information that only a properly configured MindSpace workbench
could provide. But until he arrived back in Shenandoah, this poor
man's display would have to do.

He was still a few hours out from Shenandoah, closer than he would
have been if he had taken the tube with Quell. But the Islander was so
upset at the state of affairs in Andra Pradesh, he had decided to stay
behind for another day to see what he could accomplish. Natch bristled,
thinking of the MultiReal exposition in less than a week and the mountain of programming changes that needed to go to the assembly-line
shop in the next forty-eight hours. But in the end he decided to give
the Islander some leeway and just get himself home as fast as possible.
Thus, a chartered flight, in a four-seater Falcon hoverbird. The pilot had
never made any attempt to talk to him; she simply tuned the cockpit
windows to a geosynchron weather report and lifted off.

As Andra Pradesh became a memory and Europe fled in the hoverbird's wake, Natch stared at the yellow jacket on the window, evidence
of the MultiReal code in his head. Who planted you there? he asked the
insect. What are you doing? What relation do you have to the black code?

What are you waiting for?

Natch was startled out of his reverie by a ConfidentialWhisper
request. Horvil. The fiefcorp master waved the blob on the window
away until it was nothing but a ghostly presence, a malicious idea.
Many meters below, he could see the choppy waves of the English
Channel. "What?" he snapped brusquely, shaking his head to jumpstart his synapses.

The engineer's tone was tired and fatalistic. "We've got a problem,
boss."

"Well? What is it?"

"The Council."

Natch felt a sudden nausea wash over him. It was the same primitive queasiness he had felt the night before initiation, when he had
been outflanked and humiliated by Brone, and somehow he knew this was not just another petty harassment. "So what did they do this
time?" said Natch, molars grinding.

Horvil let out a 'Whisper-audible sigh. "They sabotaged my programs," he said. "Twelve of 'em so far and counting. No, don't say I'm
being paranoid-this has their fingerprints all over it. They figured
out a way to generate all these complaints to the Meme Cooperative,
and the Meme Cooperative's been funneling them to the Bio/Logic
Engineering Guild. They're accusing me of-get this-deceptive programming."

"So you've gotten some complaints. When has that ever-"

"Not just some complaints. More complaints than the Guild's ever
received for one programmer." Horvil might have sounded amused if
he didn't sound so exhausted. "Four million and counting. They're
starting up a whole task force."

Natch blinked, hard. Four million complaints?

But before he had a chance to process this new datum, he was
assaulted by a fresh Confidential Whisper request, also labeled urgent.
Merri. "Natch," she moaned in a tone redolent of fresh sobbing.
"They've-I've-"

Natch slumped down in his seat. "Let me guess. The Council."

Merri's nod was evident even through ConfidentialWhisper. "I
don't know for certain-but it has to be them. Someone convinced
Creed Objectivv to suspend my membership. Here, look." The fiefcorp
master felt the neural twitch of an incoming message. He pointed at the
hoverbird window and summoned a document whose quasi-mystical
font could only have germinated in an Objectivv art department.

Horvil, still prattling on in the background: "I haven't heard anything from the Meme Cooperative yet, but the Engineering Guild is
pissed. They've taken away my Guild card until this is all cleared up."

"I don't understand," said Natch. "Why would Magan Kai Lee care
about some stupid trade guild?"

"It's political," replied the engineer. He seemed remarkably non chalant, almost jocular, for someone whose career was under siege.
"Lots of bad blood between the Guild and the Cooperative. Goes back
twenty years. The Guild's been accusing the Co-op of coddling the
business interests. So the Co-op keeps one-upping them lately, pushing
the envelope. If the Guild takes away your card, then you can bet the
Co-op's going to take away your license-"

Natch switched focus back to the channel manager. Labor politics
always made him irritable, and all he really needed to know was that
the Council was taking aim at Horvil's license to do business. He
scrolled feverishly up and down the Creed Objectivv letter that Merri
had received. There was only the typical bureaucratic obfuscation: all
flourish and no content. "So what's going on, Merri?" he said. "Why
did they suspend you?"

"My chapter manager says it's about ... `pledging under false
pretenses.

The entrepreneur writhed under the neural miasma, wishing for
the luxury of a molded tube seat instead of the Spartan practicality of
this hoverbird chair. "Listen, I'm sorry to hear about this, but-"

"But what does it matter to the fiefcorp?" Merri sighed. "Well, the
Objectivv truth-telling oath is a potent tool, Natch. Channelers
who've pledged not to lie have a big advantage. So if the Meme Cooperative thinks we're gaming the system ... If they think I joined the
creed specifically so the fiefcorp could take advantage of the oath ..."

"All right, I get it. Unfair competition. Customers filing lawsuits
left and right: I only bought their program because of the oath, and the oath
is a sham." Perhaps not enough for any kind of conviction, but enough
to get an investigation under way. Enough, maybe, to get Merri's
license from the Meme Cooperative suspended.

Natch's heart raced. The contours of Magan Kai Lee's scheme were
beginning to take shape. Not a military onslaught but a bureaucratic
one, with the Cooperative as rifle and business licenses as ammunition.
But why? What did Magan get out of suspended licenses?

Two more high-priority pings, almost simultaneous. Benyamin
and Serr Vigal. Whatever else the Council was capable of, they had certainly mastered timing and coordination.

"It appears that the Vault has put me under investigation," muttered Vigal without preamble.

"My mother, Natch," said Benyamin, one beat away from abject
terror. "She shut down the assembly-line floor."

"She what?"

"It was that programming floor manager, Greth Tar Griveth. She
must have blabbed something to my mother-that's the only thing I
can think of. The Council swooped in and opened an investigation.
But that's not the worst part, Natch. My mother, she went into a rage
when she found out. She actually ordered the floor to roll back the
changes to MultiReal they made last month."

The hoverbird made a sudden shimmy from the turbulence.
Natch's stomach lurched. "They're rolling back-?"

-and even Primo's uses the Engineering Guild's routines to
determine their rankings," continued Horvil, still operating under the
assumption that he had the fiefcorp master's full attention. "That's
what the rumor is anyway

Vigal: "I don't understand it, Natch. Some fool at the Vault has
decided that I'm funneling money from my memecorp fund-raising
into the fiefcorp. He says the receipts don't add up. The lawyer I talked
to even accused me of slipping money to the Surinas, of all people ..."

"I know what you're thinking, Natch." Merri. "You thought I took
the Objectivv truth-telling oath years ago. But no, I only took the oath
about nine months before I signed on with you. About the same time
you started courting me for the job ..."

Natch tried to parse through the confused babble streaming
through his head, the overlapping ConfidentialWhispers, the worried
moans. He tugged at the hoverbird harness as if preparing to stand up
and pace off the built-up frustration. But there was no room to pace in this cramped vehicle. So instead he sat in his seat, paralyzed, as the avalanche of bad news came crashing down.

"We've got to do something, Natch. If we don't get to that factory
floor quick, they could really mess things up. It might take us weeks to
sort through it-"

"The Vault's put a hold on all my memecorp accounts. I tried to
get on a shuttle to the cognitive processes conference this morning,
and they wouldn't even let me board...."

"The silver lining here is that the Guild doesn't have any power to
block access to the MultiReal code. Cooperative doesn't either, really.
So I can still get the program ready for the exposition, you just can't
pay me for it...."

"What should I do, Natch? The creed must be so disappointed in
me.... I don't even know where to start...."

"You know I've always been lazy about balancing the books,
Natch, and it's just so complicated with money going in and out all
over the place. You don't suppose that somewhere in the past few years
I might have misplaced a few-"

"Horvil's going to hate me...."

Natch turned to the window for a calming vision of the sea and saw
only the illicit chunk of MultiReal code they had found in his head.

A ping. A text message, from Quell.

Be on your guard. We spotted a whole cluster of Council hoverbirds on
the outskirts of Andra Pradesh a few hours ago, headed your way. Looks
like they might be following you.

Natch sat back, activated a bio/logic routine to stanch the flow of
sweat from his brow, and dialed the Confidential Whisper discussions
down to a murmur. Stop, he told himself. Calm down.

He inhaled deeply and let the rarefied hoverbird oxygen rush into
his lungs. The Council wants you in a panic, he thought. They want you confused. They want you to make mistakes. He found a snapshot of memory
and held it up: a young boy, sullen and wild-eyed, threatening to
report the capitalman Figaro Fi to the authorities. He had blown his
chance at getting seed money for a fiefcorp and wasted several years of
his life as a consequence. And why? Because he had been flummoxed
by Brone.

But that's not going to happen again.

You can beat them.

Natch uncurled his fingers from their death grip on the armrest
and slid into a straight and narrow mental groove. He watched himself coolly line up the fiefcorpers' woes as if in spreadsheet columns.
Horvil's termination from the Bio/Logic Engineering Guild. Merri's
suspension from Creed Objectivv. Vigal's supposed financial improprieties. Ben's mother's attempt to roll back their MultiReal code. Quell's
security issues at the Surina compound. Margaret's stupor. Jara's-

The panic lapped briefly over his mental seawalls, bolstered by
exhaustion and doubt and black code. Why hadn't he received any
word from Jara?

He tried pinging her. No response. Again, and again. Still nothing.

Stay focused, Natch admonished himself. Think. What's the Council
trying to do? Magan Kai Lee had unleashed a torrent of suspensions,
improprieties, and investigations on him, all scrupulously planned and
nearly impossible to trace back to the Council. But what did it really
add up to in the end? Clearly he was missing something. Where did he
factor in? What catastrophe did Magan have waiting for him?

The last ConfidentialWhisper arrived from Robby Robby. "Bad
news for ya, Natchster," said the channeler. He paused, waiting for
some interjection from Natch that did not come. "Just tried to bring
my team out to Sao Paulo for a look around the soccer stadium, and
they wouldn't let us in. Told me the exposition's been canceled. Can
you beat that? Jara's orders, they said. I tried to set them straight, but
they-"