Multireal (56 page)

Natch studied his surroundings. It was an uncanny simulation, accurate down to the loose flagstone on the patio that Natch remembered
digging at with his foot many a lazy summer afternoon. The palm
fronds felt as rubbery as real palm fronds, and the rich olfactory
melange from the garden was a scent firmly entrenched in his memory.

But this was no pedestrian work of SeeNaRee. Natch strolled around
the entire garden, then circumnavigated the hive building a few timesimpossible under standard rules of SeeNaRee. He remembered the giant
hollowed-out diamond with the hidden exits from his last encounter
with Brone. Clearly his old hivemate had only disdain for such rules.

Natch sat on the edge of the planter and tried to absorb the idyllic
calm of the garden. He could barely move, but he needed to marshal
his strength for whatever Brone had planned. He needed to be ready.

But ready for what?

Obviously he couldn't declare victory over the Defense and Wellness Council just because he had narrowly escaped their clutches this
time. Officers had actually fired on him in plain view of the public, in a
sacred hall of government, no less. Natch couldn't be sure the code in
their dartguns was of the lethal variety. But based on the agonized
twitching of the bodies caught in the crossfire, Len Borda had moved
beyond mere light-paralysis routines. No, if he couldn't wrest control
of MultiReal from Natch's hands, then the high executive was prepared
to assassinate him in cold blood and deal with the consequences later.

Natch shivered. Could he ever be safe from the Council again?
Even a black code cloaking mechanism couldn't protect his Vault
account from being seized by the government. They couldn't prevent
people from recognizing his face or his voice or his mannerisms. Magan
Kai Lee had claimed he could keep Natch out of Borda's reach-but
even if Natch could trust him, the claim seemed unlikely.

He looked at his hands, now shaking uncontrollably. A sudden pain
lanced through his head, as it had been doing every hour with fascistic
regularity for days. How could he know for sure the black code was a
device for cloaking his bio/logic signatures, as Brone said? Certainly the
lack of pursuit was a strong piece of circumstantial evidence, but not
conclusive by any means. The chaos from the infoquake and the disguised hoverbird alone could have thrown the Council off his scent.

And what about the two other pieces of foreign code wending their
way through Natch's bio/logic systems? There was still the matter of
the MultiReal yellow jacket, not to mention whatever program
Petrucio Patel had infected him with. How had Petrucio managed to
hit him? Why had MultiReal just stopped like that?

Natch buried his face in his hands. He felt leprous, unclean. Could
he even trust his own thoughts with those insidious OCHREs in his
neural system? One black code program was bad enough; now he had
three. Three times the black code, a thousand times the potential
malevolence.

So many questions and so few answers. Natch felt a moment of
extreme claustrophobia and panic. Run away! he told himself. Get as
far away from here as you can!

He looked for some sign of the hoverbird hatch he had leapt
through a scant half an hour before. Unsurprisingly, he found only the
virtual hive building and the imposing walls that surrounded the
garden. But what good would an emergency hatch do anyway, kilometers up in the sky? Natch had no parachute, no oxygen supply, and no
experience using either of those things anyway.

And even supposing he could fashion some miraculous escape and
safe landing ... what then? Could any of the fiefcorpers shelter him?
The Council would probably have them all under the strictest surveillance now-besides which, they might not want to help him. Natch
had threatened to trash Horvil's and Ben's careers. He had not raised a
finger to help Merri fight the bogus charges that had gotten her suspended from Creed Objectivv. He had left Serr Vigal lying unconscious
on the floor of the Tul Jabbor Complex. Quell had vanished. He had
stretched the controlling clamps on Jara to the snapping point.

Natch was struck with a sudden inspiration. He knew what had
happened at the Tul Jabbor Complex. He knew how Petrucio Patel had
been able to shoot him with the dartgun.

Snippets from the soccer demonstration in Harper echoed through
Natch's head. Ben kicking the ball, Quell blocking every kick. Something's ... strange, Benyamin had said. I'm using MultiReal, just like
before-but it just stops at some point. It leaves me hanging there in midloop.

Limited choice cycles! Horvil had shouted. 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.

Someone must have modified the MultiReal program while Natch
wasn't looking. Set a limit on the number of daily choice cycles and
brought the program down to the level of the Patel Brothers' licensed
version. Natch had drained his reservoir of daily choice cycles with all of those acrobatics in the auditorium of the Tul Jabbor Complex.
Petrucio had not.

I suppose if you're both running limited versions, Horvil had said, the
person with the most choice cycles wins.

So someone had decided to alter the parameters of the MultiReal
program. Who would make such a decision except Jara?

It didn't make sense; none of it made sense. Why would Jara purposely cripple MultiReal like that? Unless ... yes, everything was
quickly falling into place. He could picture the scene. The Patel
Brothers dropping subtle hints in Jara's direction, appealing to the
naive do-gooder inside her. Throwing her a few crumbs in exchange for
hobbling her version of MultiReal with limited choice cycles.

How could you do this to me? he howled in his mind at the analyst.
Don't you see what you've done? You let the Patels infect me with another piece
of black code! How could he have ever trusted Jara with core access to
MultiReal? How could he have ever trusted her with anything?

And were the rest of the fiefcorpers any better? Jara might have
made the decision, but Horvil's would have been the hand that implemented it. Certainly Benyamin, Merri, and Vigal weren't excluded
from the process either.

Natch knew then: he could not go back. He was through with the
Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp.

Outside the fiefcorp, his prospects weren't much better. His reputation in the fiefcorp field had been trampled into dust; the Meme
Cooperative had suspended his business license; and certainly after the
free-for-all at the Tul Jabbor Complex, the Prime Committee would
soon vote to take possession of MultiReal.

Who else was there? Robby Robby was unlikely to jump into the
Council's crosshairs for Natch. Andra Pradesh would offer precious
little sanctuary, now that Suheil and Jayze Surina were running the
place. Khann Frejohr and his libertarian allies wouldn't stick their
necks out for him again. The drudges would take his statement, but they couldn't offer him any protection from troops in white robes-not
anymore.

Natch had literally nowhere to turn.

What did Brone want with him? If he wanted to see Natch dead,
he could simply have sat back at the Tul Jabbor Complex and let the
Council do the job for him. Why save him from the high executive's
wrath and cart him off somewhere in a hoverbird? Was he to be tortured and forced to hand over MultiReal? Or did the bodhisattva have
something even more nefarious in store?

The entrepreneur hauled himself up from the planter and wandered along the property wall. What salvation he was hoping to find
there he couldn't say, but he refused to simply sit and accept this kidnapping without a struggle. He put his palms against the brick and
began tracing the mortar with his fingertips. The door had to be here
somewhere....

Natch could not have guessed how long he searched. But suddenly,
he found it: an exterior hoverbird hatch, camouflaged by the brickwork.

He stared at the brick for several minutes. What if I opened that hatch
and just ... Jumped? he thought. A few minutes of terror, easily diluted
with bio/logics and a single instant of pain. Then eternal tranquility. He
would be forever out of the Defense and Wellness Council's reach.

There was a question of pressurization. Natch tried to recall what
he knew about the thermodynamics of hovercraft. Was it possible for
a mere human being to open an exterior hatch in midflight?

The entrepreneur slid to the ground and sat with his back to the
hatch. He gazed at the Proud Eagle garden, unsure of what to do. An
hour passed. Two. And then the slight lulling movement of the hoverbird came to a halt.

Wherever Natch was going, he had arrived.

A sliver of daylight appeared behind the doorway, then widened into a
full circle. Natch hopped quickly through the portal back into reality,
almost beyond caring what awaited him on the other side.

The hoverbird had parked in a bombed-out courtyard so littered
with debris that Natch momentarily thought he had stepped into
another one of Brone's twisted works of SeeNaRee. Pulverized concrete
served as the garnish for a yard of twisted steel girders, jagged piles of
glass, and fused-together scarecrows of ancient plastics. Standing at the
far end of the courtyard was a red brick building so rigid, so
unyielding, so perpendicular that it had to be of ancient vintage. The
skyline beyond the courtyard was dominated by a huge cluster of
ruined buildings leaning into one another like old tombstones.

Brone had taken him to one of the diss cities. The old cities,
bombed and ruined centuries ago by Autonomous Minds run amok.
Broken letters dangling off the side of a neighboring tower clearly
spelled out CHICAGO FIRST NATIONAL.

Chicago. Natch's mother had lived here once.

Brone, Pierre Loget, and a dozen others stood at the end of a ragged
path that ran through the minefield of rubble. Steps and a portico in
the ancient Roman style led to a dark passageway.

Natch looked around for a means of escape but found none. The
idea of hijacking the hoverbird seemed quite preposterous, particularly
since the pilot who knew how to fly it had already exited the craft.
Escape on foot? The courtyard was lined by a black wrought-iron fence
that had been newly installed and painted. Even if Natch had the
strength to climb it, he doubted that he could successfully navigate the
spikes without impaling himself. Use MultiReal? He remembered
that he was out of choice cycles for the day; besides which, in his
exhausted state, the program might kill him. And once outside, he
faced the same question as before: where would he go?

Loget and the other black-robed figures retreated through the passageway and into the building, leaving Brone and Natch alone. Brone raised his eyebrows and inclined his head toward the passageway. It
was almost an inviting gesture. Finally Natch thrust his hands into his
pockets and followed the path through the open door.

A short, black hall. The smell of household cleaning compounds.
Ambient light shining from beyond an archway.

And then-applause?

Natch emerged in a cavernous room that might once have been the
grand atrium for an upper-crust hotel. Two hundred people could have
fit on the marble floor that had been scuffed by centuries of footprints,
while another few dozen might have lined the dual stairways that
hugged the side walls and came together on the mezzanine above.
Whatever furnishings had adorned the place in ancient days had long
since been carted off; instead the floor was lined with perhaps three
dozen burnished metal platforms extending up on long stalks of silver.
The crescent-shaped platforms hung in the air at varying levels from
two to fifteen meters high, like a field of phantasmagoric flowers. Atop
each platform sat an ordinary bio/logic workbench, and standing
behind each workbench was a figure giddy with applause.

Natch's step faltered as he rubbed the sand from his eyes. The men
and women clapping and cheering his arrival seemed disconcertingly
happy to see him. More than that, many of them were actually faces he
recognized. Billy Sterno, a pair of top analysts from the Deuteron Fiefcorp, an engineer who used to work for Lucas Sentinel.

There were words floating between the stalks in a clownish font,
colored cherry red: WELCOME, NATCH!

"A-all these fiefcorpers," stuttered Natch. "They're Thasselians too?"

Brone beamed proudly in the fashion of a motivational speaker
showing off his disciples. "Yes, Natch-we're all devotees of the teachings of Kordez Thassel here. But these aren't just Thasselians-they're
your comrades now! Comrades and fellow revolutionaries."

Natch rubbed his forehead, where he was experiencing one of his
periodic spikes of pain. "Revolutionaries? What are you talking about?"

The bodhisattva extended his arms out in a solicitous gesture to
the figures riding their elevated platforms, and there was an immediate
crescendo in the applause. "I'm talking about the last revolution!" he
cried. "The revolution of ultimate freedom!" More hooting and hollering from the crowd. "The revolution against cause and effect!" They
were stomping on their platforms now, causing a strange metallic
clang to reverberate around the room. Brone was in full demagogue
mode, shaking his fists in the air and tilting his head back. "I'm
talking about the Revolution of Selfishness!" Another raucous cheer, even
louder than before, which set the windows to vibrating.