Multireal (28 page)

The analyst almost dropped her bereaved expression on the spot.
"Uh-sorry, John," she said to Ridglee's hypnotically bobbing left eyebrow. "No comment." Then she walked into the crowd, hoping the
others would follow.

But John Ridglee was only the first in a long line of drudges on the
London tube platform, each squawking a more outrageous question
than the last. Most of the questions were predictable ("How do you feel
about Margaret Surina's death?" "Where's Natch?"), some were easy to
ignore ("Did you kill Margaret?" "Who's getting fired next?" "Who
are you fucking these days?"), but many were simply incomprehensible
("Have we atoned for the sins of Tobi Jae Witt and her Autonomous
Minds?" "Can you name three chemical components unique to moon
plants?"). Regardless, the analyst managed to keep her cool and say
nothing but a quiet "No comment" to her interrogators.

Once Jara made it off the tube platform, she was in for another
surprise: cheers. Standing on the opposite street corner was a crowd
that straddled every major demographic. Men, women, old, young,
Terran, colonist, rich, poor. Some of them bore a rising sun on their
chests, insignia of Creed Libertas. "Don't be discouraged!" shouted a
woman from the crowd. "Take heart!" cried another. Their words of
support were so banal that they only added to the surrealism of the
situation.

Rabid drudges, crazed creed devotees, sullen fiefcorp apprentices
... Jara could only imagine the stack of messages she would find in her
inbox when she stopped priving herself to the world. A flexible-glass
bottle arced out of the sky and narrowly missed her head. She switched on Lucas Sentinel's Cocoon 33 and tuned it to a low setting that muted
the noise but left her other senses intact.

Horvil pinged her on ConfidentialWhisper. "There's a guy here
says he's from the Diss L-PRACG Movement. They're worried that
we're headed for another Economic Plunge. Should I-"

"I don't care if he's Sheldon Surina," Jara said with mental teeth
firmly gritted. "Don't say a fucking word to anyone."

The throng began to disperse as the fiefcorpers made their way
toward the palatial estates lining the western bank of the Thames. The
rabid libertarians stayed with them for a few blocks, but quickly lost
interest after the drudge onslaught tapered off. Jara started to wonder
if they had run this whole gauntlet for nothing, when she rounded the
last corner and saw a fresh crowd camped at the gates to Berilla's estate.
She allowed herself a sigh of relief.

The gates creaked open just wide enough to admit Horvil, Benyamin,
Merri, and Vigal. Jara felt like she had wandered into an ancient painting
as the others strode down a cobblestone path that looked like it had been
built for automobile traffic, or even horse-drawn carriages. The path was
lined with an exquisitely manicured hedge that served as boundary for a
crisp and well-tended lawn. Jara's entire city block on the East End could
have occupied that lawn, with room to spare. The house they were headed
for stood an obscene distance back from the gates. It extended east to west
in hand-laid brick like a Roman villa.

Jara waited patiently for the others to make it inside the gates
before turning to face the pack in apparent afterthought.

"I'm really sorry," she said, her voice appropriately choked. "You've
caught us all a bit unprepared. Give us-give us two or three hours,
and someone will be back out here to deliver a statement, okay?" Then
she gave a stiff bow and dashed up the walkway to join the rest of the
fiefcorp.

"Thanks, everybody," Jara broadcast to the others over ConfidentialWhisper. "Well done. That should do the trick."

"Do what trick?" scowled Ben.

Jara could hear Horvil's snort from several paces away. "Don't be an
idiot, Ben."

"But I don't see what-"

"All five of us, sitting in your mother's estate in West London. Two
hundred drudges camped at the gates waiting for us to make a statement. It's probably the safest place in the entire universe right now."

Benyamin cut his multi connection as soon as the doors closed behind
them.

Jara stood in the marbled atrium with the rest of the fiefcorp,
simultaneously afraid to sit still and afraid to move. Just yesterday, the
Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp had been headed for a triumphal
exposition before billions of potential customers. Now the fiefcorp
was-what? Under new management? On hiatus? Defunct?

Moments later, Ben emerged in the flesh from a side hallway and
led the group to a large parlor in the house's west wing. Jara kept
waiting for the infamous Aunt Berilla or one of her factotums to burst
out of some antechamber, but not so much as a liveried attendant came
to greet them. Horvil or Benyamin must have told Berilla they were
coming. Either she didn't care enough about their presence to raise a
fuss or she cared too much to give them the satisfaction.

The group stood in the parlor and stared at the carefully preserved
trappings of an earlier age. Cherrywood furniture, stately purple curtains. Nobody said anything. Finally Jara stepped forward.

"Listen," she said, her voice low and husky. "I know ... I know
this is all very confusing. It's confusing to me too. I have no idea what's
going on. I don't know what's happening with Natch or Margaret or
the leadership of the fiefcorp or your contracts or-or anything. But
here's what I suggest." She took a breath. "Let's just pretend that every thing's normal right now. Until we have more information, let's just
all ... do the best we can." She trailed off lamely, hearing the razzes
from Natch's imaginary audience in her head.

Hesitant nods from the rest of the fiefcorp. A shrug or two.

Within minutes, they were turning the stuffy parlor into a bona
fide war room. Benyamin cleared the drapes off the windows and
replaced them with Data Sea news feeds. Horvil converted an antediluvian rolltop desk into a bio/logic workbench with the press of a button.
Jara and Merri went around picking up crystal knickknacks, while
Vigal found enough seating to form a makeshift conference area.

"Someone get ahold of Robby Robby," said Jara when everyone had
settled down. "Let's start working on that statement for the drudges.
Merri?"

The channel manager crumpled onto a delicate chair next to the
sideboard. "Sure," she replied in a hoarse whisper. "What are we going
to say?"

Jara could feel her mind shift onto an express track. "Start with
this: `The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp joins the entire world in
expressing its sorrow at the passing of Margaret Surina. Margaret's
brilliance, wisdom, and compassion set an example for all to follow."'

"That's good shit," put in Horvil.

"Okay." Merri nodded. "I can work with that."

"The drudges are going to want more detail," said Serr Vigal,
reclining on a plaid sofa so stiff it might never have actually contained
a human being before. "They're going to ask about the dispensation of
Margaret's shares, the work she left behind, what happens to MultiReal, that sort of thing."

Jara shrugged. "It doesn't matter. All we can tell them is what we
know, right? And we don't really know anything. So let's just keep it
brief and bland."

"I'll do the best I can," said Merri, climbing slowly to her feet like
one of the walking dead.

Jara gave her a perplexed look. The channel manager was not the
type to bemoan her fate or engage in clumsy theatrics. "Don't worry,"
said Jara. "Robby can help you massage the wording. That's what we're
paying him for. Take as long as you need-we've got to keep that
crowd out there for a few hours, at least. Maybe longer."

The analyst swiveled around to face Horvil, who had already managed to unpack half of his bio/logic programming bars on an antique
cherrywood hutch. "Horv, I need you to scour the dock for me. Make
sure Natch didn't actually follow through on those threats and release
Possibilities when we weren't looking."

The engineer blinked rapidly with his eyeballs tilted rafterward.
"Nope."

"Good. Then why don't you do everything you can to unprepare
that program for launch. Wipe the fore and aft tables, the pricing
structure, everything. Put up as many barriers as you can to stop Natch
from pulling that again. We don't want him just throwing MultiReal
out to sixty billion people on a whim."

"Natch won't like that," said Benyamin with a grimace.

"No, he probably won't," replied Jara. "But look at it this way.
We're not doing anything he can't undo later. We just need to ... slow
him down a bit."

"Why? If his license is suspended, he can't launch a bio/logic program on the Data Sea anyway. Or, at least, he can't charge for it."

Jara was growing very frustrated very quickly with Benyamin's
contrarian attitude. "Not officially he can't," she said. "Not legally. But
when has the law ever stopped Natch from doing anything?"

The young apprentice gave a grudging nod. Even he couldn't argue
that point.

Horvil stood behind the desk and called up Possibilities in MindSpace. Displayed on such an old workbench, the program looked positively minuscule. "You know, Pierre Loget has this great dock management routine I've always wanted to try," he said. "Lets you craft these sophisticated fore and aft tables, ties in with your accounting ...
puts all kinds of access controls on everything. I bet DockManage 35'd
tie Natch's hands for a few hours."

"Go ahead," said Jara. "Ben, what's going on with your mother's
assembly line? Are they still rolling back the MultiReal code?"

Benyamin shook his head. "They pretty much stopped doing that
when the infoquakes started."

"Good. Let's cut off their access while we still can. Shouldn't be a
big deal to just revert to the last functioning version before they
started tinkering, should it?"

"If MultiReal was a normal program, no, it wouldn't be a big
deal," interjected Horvil. "If Margaret had built it with standard workbenches and standard bio/logic programming bars from start to finish,
no. As things stand ... yes. It's going to be a real pain in the ass."

Jara sighed. "See what you can figure out, Ben. Ask some questions, but keep it quiet. Let's see if we can bring everything back to
normal in the next couple days."

Serr Vigal leaned forward with his hands folded on his lap, looking
small and fragile. "Is there something I can do to help?"

The analyst blinked. It suddenly occurred to her that the neural
programmer had his own company to deal with. He would have been
on a shuttle heading for that cognitive processes conference right now
if all this chaos hadn't happened. "Why don't you help me go through
the news coverage," she said. "We need to know what's going on out
there, and we can't rely on InfoGathers to convey all the subtleties."
Vigal nodded.

Jara stopped and took a look around. Aunt Berilla's sterile parlor
had become a hive of activity, full of industrious hands and discreet
conversations. That's good, thought the analyst. We need to keep busy. She
moved next to Vigal on the sofa and began combing through Data Sea
video feeds.

It didn't take long to track down footage from Andra Pradesh. Drudges, videographers, and curiosity seekers by the hundreds were
converging on the Surina compound. A privileged few had already
been at the premises when the chaos began. As a result, there were
hundreds of different viewpoints and conflicting spins to sort through.

After a few minutes, they located a feed from a tourist group that had
been locked in the Center for Historic Appreciation by anxious Council
guards. Jara felt the tug of some indefinable emotion when she saw the
monolithic scientist statues in the atrium and remembered her own little
epiphany there last month. Huddling scared at the feet of Sheldon Surina.
Deciding to give the MultiReal demonstration in Natch's place, even if
that meant confronting the Council. Horvil's unexpected declaration of
affection. She cast a peripheral glance toward Horvil now, but the engineer had his nose buried in one of the rolltop desk's cubbyholes.

The tourists were all focusing their attention on the empty courtyard out the window, but nothing seemed to be happening. A few officers of the Defense and Wellness Council strode by, weapons at the
ready. Surina security was nowhere to be seen.

Suddenly the doors to the Revelation Spire burst open and spat out
a gaggle of Council officers. They were dragging along some colossal
figure who was shackled in their midst. For a moment, it looked like
the man might actually be trying to walk on his own power. Then one
of the white-robed officers bashed the back of the giant's knee with a
rifle butt, hard, and he slumped down again.

One of the observers zoomed in for a closer look.

Jara gasped. It was Quell.

Within moments, the gang of white-robed soldiers had muscled
the Islander across the courtyard to their waiting hoverbirds. The view
bobbed and weaved anxiously, searching in vain for an angle that
would show what was happening. Minutes later, a trio of Council hoverbirds took flight and zipped away southward.