Jump 255 - Multireal Part 9

"Sorry," said the Islander to Natch under his breath. "I know you want answers. But I don't have them."

Natch shrugged. "I believe you." He lifted his right hand up, waving the glinting programming rings under Quel 's nose. "Mind if I keep these for a while?

The Islander rubbed his chin for a moment, and Natch could see he was trying to decide if he should ask why. Final y he nodded. "Go ahead. I've got another set back at Andra Pradesh." He reached into the pocket of his breeches and withdrew a smal black felt bag, which he handed to Natch. Natch deposited the rings one by one in the bag and then cinched its drawstring closed.

"Listen, Natch, I need to make something clear," continued Quel , lowering his voice.

"Everyone in this fiefcorp seems to think I understand everything about MultiReal. But I don't. Of course, I know a lot more than you do ... but even sixteen years ago, MultiReal was already bigger than any piece of bio/logic programming on the market. Some of the pieces of that program are over a hundred years old, Natch. I've seen routines in there dating back to Prengal Surina. I wouldn't be surprised to find s.h.i.t written by Sheldon Surina. The Surinas, they invented bio/logic programming. One family, unlimited resources, three hundred sixty years. Does anyone real y know what they're capable of?"

Quel shook his head, angry at everything and nothing at once. The taunting of the Council officer across the street caught his eye once again. The Islander hefted an imaginary dart-rifle to his shoulder and fired off a single round, with a click of his tongue as sound effect. His white-robed adversary rattled his very real dart-rifle in the air and shouted something insulting, unintel igible at this distance.

"You have to understand, Natch," continued Quel with more than a little bitterness in his voice. "Those Surinas, they don't let you in. Not even me, not even after twenty years."

Natch frowned. He knew the feeling al too wel . Sometimes it seemed like the entire world was nothing but a vast edifice designed to keep him out.

He caught a quick glimpse of Horvil and Vigal out of his peripheral vision, stil deep in conversation.

"Listen, Quel ," said Natch. "I need answers soon. This can't wait. The MultiReal exposition's a week from today, and I've stil got Magan Kai Lee breathing down my neck." He made an angry gesture at the squads of Council officers below.

"So what are you going to do?" asked Quel .

"You're going to Andra Pradesh to see Margaret?"

The Islander nodded.

"Then I'm coming with you. No, don't say it-I've already tried to multi there half a dozen times. Her idiotic security force won't even let me in the compound. But if I show up there in person, with you, they'l let me in. Then you're going to take me to the top of the Revelation Spire, and I'm going to get some answers from Margaret."

"What if Margaret stil refuses to see you?"

"Oh, she'l see me," replied Natch, his voice venom. "She'l see me, or I'l tear that whole b.l.o.o.d.y compound down brick by brick."

12.

Jara strode through the crooked hal ways of the Kordez Tha.s.sel Complex cursing the chil . The Tha.s.selians did this on purpose, she thought bitterly, wondering if some fiefcorp with a warmth-generating program had thrown the creed a few credits to lower the thermostat. I don't care if it is January in the Twin Cities-there's no excuse.

The a.n.a.lyst closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind. Fiefcorp greed was a fruit that ripened in al seasons and could be found by the bushel anywhere you looked. She needed to stay focused on the subject at hand: the Patel Brothers.

Jara couldn't figure out what kind of playbook Frederic and Petrucio were working from.

Obviously they had shifted tactics since their first MultiReal demo, which even the most Natchophobic of drudges cal ed an overproduced, underimagined failure. Today's demo was an industry-only event. No creed officials or L-PRACG bureaucrats or curious onlookers would be on hand to provide distractions; not even the drudges were invited, unless they specifical y covered the bio/logic programming beat.

What mischief were the Patels up to now? Were they real y in league with the Defense and Wel ness Council, as Margaret suspected?

Jara fol owed Robby Robby's beacon, which led her from the Tha.s.sel Complex's gateway zone through a drunken loop of frigid hal ways and final y to a smal clump of people outside the auditorium entrance. She hung back for a moment, checking Data Sea profiles. You never knew who was on the Council's payrol , and after her London encounter with Magan Kai Lee, there was no level of paranoia to which Jara would not sink.

The slick, square-jawed individual blathering away in the group's epicenter was, of course, Robby Robby. He had abandoned his cubed hairdo at some point this past week for a frizzy style that would have looked at home on a clown or a cultist. Next to Robby stood Phranco-liape, one of the Data Sea's most respected channelers, his distinguished white beard making a vibrant contrast with his rich African skin. Three quick pings to the public directory tagged the youths standing in Phrancoliape's shadow as his junior apprentices.

So far, so good. Then Jara spotted the last member of the group and nearly bolted for the exit. Xi Xong, the Patel Brothers' dowager channeler extraordinaire.

Jara hadn't quite decided what to do when Robby Robby spotted her. "Watch out, Twin Cities!" bel owed the channeler in a voice loud enough to warp time and s.p.a.ce. "The official Surina/Natch delegation is now a.s.sembled!"

Her cover blown, Jara walked up and gave a polite bow to the group. "Keep it down, Robby. I'm not supposed to be here, remember?"

"Eh, don't worry your pretty little head," replied Robby. "'Trucio knows you're here, and he doesn't care. Right, Xi?"

Xi Xong's face was painted as heavily as a Kabuki mask. "Of course, darling," she said in that faux high-society accent of hers. "The Patels always keep things aboveboard and out in the open. Not like Jara's boss." She turned toward the a.n.a.lyst with a vicious smile that revealed too many teeth.

"Speaking of which ... tel me, how is Lucas Sentinel these days?"

Jara could feel the blood flowing to her face unbidden. "I-I work for Natch now, Xi," she stuttered. "I haven't had anything to do with Lucas for, what, almost five years." And you know it, too.

The Patels' channeler emitted a whooping crane laugh. "I'm sorry, dear, you're right. I always get those two confused. Natch, Lucas. They're so much alike, don't you think?" Robby bobbed his head idiotical y, always on the lookout for a stray opinion to agree with. One of Phrancoliape's apprentices chuckled. "Wel , duty cal s," said Xong. "Perfection to you al ." And then she whirled around on one k.n.o.bbed stalk of leg and disappeared into the auditorium.

Jara bristled. How long were people going to browbeat her about her a.s.sociation with Lucas Sentinel? And what did she have to be ashamed about anyway? Lucas had been the one who demolished their working relationship with his fumbling attempts at seduction. Al Jara had done was spurn his advances. So why did it stil feel like a moral failure on her part?

Trying to regain her equilibrium, she turned to Phrancoliape. "So who're you shil ing for these days, Phranc?"

"Oh, Pierre Loget, same as always," replied the channeler in a warm baritone. He either did not notice the tangled barbs on Xi's words or was purposeful y ignoring them. "Now that you and the Patels have stopped worrying about Primo's, somebody has to keep Lucas and Bol iwar out of the top spot." The latter referring to Bol iwar Tuban, whose reputation for nastiness was on par with Natch's.

"So where is Pierre these days?" said Jara. "I read something about him on the drudge circuit the other day. John Ridglee says he's missing."

"Yeah, what do the drudges know?" one of Phranc's apprentices blurted out, a little too quickly.

The channeler himself let out a good-natured laugh. "Your boss has a tendency to disappear for weeks at a time too," he told Jara, waving his hand in dismissal. "Pierre likes his privacy, but the instant Sentinel gets within spitting distance of number one, he'l be back. Trust me."

And at that moment, a delicate bong echoed throughout the atrium of the Kordez Tha.s.sel auditorium, signaling the imminent start of the Patel Brothers' presentation. Phranc bowed to Jara and gave Robby Robby a comradely clap on the shoulder. Then he vanished along with his understudies.

Jara turned to Robby, who seemed blissful y ignorant of the entire concept of subtext.

"You ready?"

Robby lit up like a sparkler. "As I'l ever be, Queen Jara!" he crackled.

Standard procedure at an event like this dictated that al multi projections should materialize inside the auditorium and stay there. But this crowd was evidently too smal to bother with such rules. Jara turned to walk through the double doors and was a.s.saulted by a garish bil board advertis.e.m.e.nt across the way.

CHILL GOTYOU DOWN?.

Try Woo/Coat 95 by the Bol iwarTuban Fiefcorp She scowled, and resigned herself to the cold.

Robby and Jara hustled through the crowd and found seats in the upper reaches of the auditorium, where they would be safely anonymous. Fearing another outburst from Robby, Jara covertly masked her lips with one palm in the manner of someone engaged in a ConfidentialWhisper. The channeler left her alone.

So the a.n.a.lyst sat and watched the audience file in. The carnival atmosphere that had plagued the first two MultiReal demos was distinctly absent today. This was an exclusive and drearily dressed gathering of bio/logic professionals: thirteen thousand of them, to be precise, crammed into a s.p.a.ce that could have seated perhaps ten thousand live bodies. The crazies and the zealots were nowhere to be foundunless you counted the devotees of Creed Tha.s.sel, whose members were undoubtedly here under their cloak of secrecy.

And what about the officers of the Defense and Wel ness Council, standing grim and barren of emotion? Jara didn't recognize any of the faces of the officers near her, but that didn't mean she wasn't being watched. After al , the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp's big exposition was in seven days. When would Magan Kai Lee make his move? What was he waiting for?

After a few minutes, the lights dimmed and a hush settled on the crowd.

Smoke began to curl around the foot of the stage until it covered the entire floor. A soundtrack heavy on the bamboo flute echoed across the auditorium. The spotlight speared a circular platform that rose about a meter out of the smoke. Standing atop the platform was the jowly Frederic Patel, forehead furrowed, a pair of dartguns at hand. Seconds later, another platform rose on the opposite side of the stage carrying a similarly decked-out Petrucio. His waxed mustache practical y glistened.

"This rivalry has gone on long enough," said the elder Patel with an exaggerated sneer.

"Yeah?"

replied the younger. "I'd like to see you do something about it, 'Trucio."

"If you don't put down those guns, I wil . I've been waiting for this a long time."

"You don't have the courage," snorted Frederic.

Jara felt Robby's elbow dig into her side. "Phantom Distortions," he said, sotto voce. For once, the a.n.a.lyst was glad for the interruption. She knew she recognized the Patel Brothers' banter from somewhere, but hadn't been able to place it.

Jara had only seen Phantom Distortions once, several years ago, and thought it irritating and cliche-ridden. But the drama had won so many awards and penetrated so many strata of society that even she could recite its climactic scene from memory. This was the part where Juan Nguyen's character took careful aim at his traitorous brother andPetrucio fired the dartgun in his right hand. A sliver of poison vaulted across the stage and landed in the exact center of Frederic's belt buckle. "Aren't you glad I'm using SafeSh.o.r.es 1.0 by the Patel Brothers?" said Petrucio. And as Frederic stood there in slapstick dismay, the elder Patel proceeded to shoot a dozen more darts along his brother's belt line in quick succession.

The audience howled with laughter. It was a nice play on the real line: Aren't you glad I don't have the courage? delivered with maximum swagger. Jara al owed herself an appreciative smile. It looked like the Patel Brothers had final y figured out how to put together a decent marketing presentation, even if they were clinging to their lame "safe sh.o.r.es" motif with too much vigor.

Frederic made a cartoonish grunt of rage that seemed a little too convincing and then raised his own gun. "Wel , so am I, Brother," he said. And let fire.

In the original Phantom Distortions, this was the moment where comedy mutated into pathos, where the brothers' long rivalry exploded into the open with ruinous consequences. But in the Patel Brothers' version, Petrucio was too quick on the draw. The dartgun in his left hand shot off with a reverberating thwing-and mil iseconds later, there came the indescribable sound of two darts striking one another in midair and clattering to the stage.

Even Jara gasped. She had seen MultiReal's innards lying on a Minds.p.a.ce workbench, and stil Petrucio's feat hardly seemed possible.

Frederic continued firing with grim determination until the air grew hazy with darts. Each needle met its nemesis in midflight and ricocheted harmlessly off to the side. After a minute of this, Petrucio began to take the offensive, with similarly ineffectual results. Soon the brothers were fighting the kind of melee that only existed in the dramas: ridiculous amounts of ammunition, impossibly dexterous moves, and not a single hit on either side.

The muttering in the audience rose several decibels. Robby's tongue was flapping uselessly back and forth in his mouth.

Jara loaded up a mental imaging program and took a snapshot of the projectiles the Patels were blasting at one another. She zoomed in and studied them careful y. These darts appeared to be much larger than the normal variety, and they were coated with a mirrored substance that made them easier to see. The Patels were not firing directly at one another, but at an oblique angle that helped the odds considerably. But even given al that, Jara could think of no ordinary piece of bio/logics that would account for such marksmanship. This could only be the work of MultiReal.

Final y, at some predetermined moment, Frederic tossed his gun to the stage, where it was sucked down into the fume. "Al this bickering is pointless, 'Trucio," he said.

Petrucio nodded. "In a MultiReal-on-MultiReal fight, there's only one possible outcome."

"And that's a draw," said Frederic, hopping off the platform and waddling awkwardly toward his brother, who had also shed his weapons. Jara noticed that Frederic's acting abilities were noticeably strained when portraying emotions like remorse and reconciliation.

The two Patels locked arms and walked together toward the foot of the stage. Petrucio appeared to be so exhausted that he was almost limping, though he was doing his best to hide it. "After al ," said the elder brother, "couldn't we al use more safe sh.o.r.es these days?" Jara could have sworn he was deliberately looking in her direction.

"But it doesn't f.u.c.king work that way," Benyamin complained. "You didn't see Quel on that soccer field. When two people with MultiReal go up against each other, it al gets resolved like that." He snapped. "Instantly. In your head. If they were real y having a MultiReal-onMultiReal fight, then the winner would have hit the loser."

Jara stretched her neck and luxuriated in the SeeNaRee breeze. It was nice to be back in a virtual environment at the Surina Enterprise Facility, even if she had to put up with Benyamin's whining. She wasn't sure which beach this was supposed to be, or perhaps it was an amalgam of several. What did it matter? Jara could feel muscles in her neck unknotting and sluggish nerve endings in her fingers tingle with warmth from the SeeNaRee sun. She wondered fleetingly what had happened to Greth Tar Griveth's petty blackmail scheme.

Jara a.s.sumed that the lack of updates meant the situation was under control.

"I know that's not how MultiReal works, Ben," she said. "And the Patels do too. But what did you want them to do, get on stage and just stare at each other for an hour? I thought they did a pretty good job il ustrating the concept. Besides, that wasn't the end of the show. Petrucio took a bunch of questions afterward, and he explained the whole thing in detail."

"Shooting down darts in midair," put in Merri from her spot nearby on the sand. "We should have thought of that." She sighed as the tide came trickling up the beach to lick her bare toes.

"Listen, we don't have time to worry about the Patels," said Jara. "Right now we need to be thinking about computational rules. We're going to have twenty-three people bouncing choice cycles al over the place in a week. It'l be a nightmare unless we make some decisions."

The blonde channel manager combed her fingers thoughtful y through the damp sand.

"Why do we even need to worry about it?" she said. "Can't we just turn the whole MultiReal-against-MultiReal feature off?"

"You mean disal ow competing choice cycles altogether?" said Jara.

Ben shook his head. "I don't think that's practical." He wanted nothing to do with the decadent SeeNaRee Jara's mood had conjured up, choosing to sit instead at a rigid oak conference table wedged incongruously in the middle of the sand. "If you don't have any competing choice cycles, you're defenseless against anyone who uses the program against you. That means the first person to activate MultiReal would always win. Right? Talk about a nightmare! People would flip on the program every two seconds, on the off chance that something important was about to happen."

"So then let's just deactivate competing realities for the exposition," said Merri. "We don't have to figure everything out today, do we?"

"Not everything," said Jara, "but we can't put these decisions off forever, Merri. Things are moving so quickly, we might not get another window like this. We need to make some decisions today."

Benyamin smacked his palm on the table and looked up with inspiration gleaming through his pores. "What if we just let the market decide?"

Jara frowned skeptical y. "How would that work?"

"The whole program's based on choice cycles. Every time you jump to another potential reality, you create another one. So why not just charge by the choice cycle? That way you wouldn't waste money using MultiReal to grab the last cracker on the buffet table-you'd save your choice cycles for the things that real y matter. The things you're wil ing to pay for."

"A libertarian solution," mused Merri. Her circles in the sand grew wider and wider until the sea washed them away.

Jara leaned back on her elbows and let Ben's suggestion roam through her mental hal ways for a minute. It seemed like a solution that Speaker Khann Frejohr would love. It seemed like a solution Natch would love. "I don't think that would work either," she said after a moment of reflection.

Ben was peeved. "Why not?"

"It wouldn't turn out the way you think. You're basical y saying that the richest person in the room is always going to get what he wants. Do you real y want to put a system like that in place?"

"But sometimes that's just the way the world works," the young apprentice retorted. "You make more money, you have more choices."

"This is total y different, Ben. Remember Horvil's story about haggling with that street vendor? We're not just talking about kicking soccer bal s around here. Think about it-there must be a thousand Lunar tyc.o.o.ns with more money than half of Creed Elan put together. They'd get the upper hand on every deal. Al they'd need to do is keep dishing out money for more choice cycles. It wouldn't be fair."

"Life would be pretty harsh for the diss, too," added Merri. "You'd literal y get pushed around al day, and there'd be nothing you could do about it."

"And let's not forget the Islanders and the Pharisees," said Jara.

Benyamin rose from the table and began stomping to the edge of the water and back. "I can't believe I'm hearing this. Not fair?" He threw his hands up toward the sky. "This isn't a question of ethics, Jara. It's basic economics. If our product doesn't give customers unlimited choice cycles, then someone else's wil . Do you think the Patels are going to sel their customers a limited product?"

"They don't have a say in it," said Merri. "Natch said that limited choice cycles are built into the Patel Brothers' licensing agreement. They can't run a product with unlimited choice cycles."

"I didn't realize that," said Ben, vindication sculpted into his face. "This is great-we're going to crush them in the marketplace. If our version of MultiReal gives you unlimited choice, and theirs just c.r.a.ps out at some point ... who's going to buy from the Patel Brothers?"

Merri nodded hesitantly. Jara got to her feet and took a few steps toward the bay. She watched the tiny virtual sand crabs scurrying on the beach, jousting with each other in accordance with the SeeNaRee algorithms.

And suddenly she felt her thoughts line up like dominoes. Xi Xong tel ing Jara that Petrucio knew she was attending the presentation ... The two Patels blazing away at one another fruitlessly ... Frederic Patel discarding his weapon onto the stage ... Al this bickering is pointless, 'Trucio. In a MultiReal-onMultiReal fight, there's only one possible outcome. And that's a draw.