Geosynchron (67 page)

Natch pauses. "The Children Unshackled told them to go there?"

"That is my assumption."

"I assumed-I assumed they would be furious at me. For choosing
to activate Margaret Surina's failsafe. Your message to me, it instructed
me not to, I think."

"Never presume to know what the Children are thinking, Natch.
Don't forget that they exist outside of time, space, and causality. I suspect they already knew the choice you would make and are comfortable with it."

"I'm never going to see rain again," says Natch.

His guardian hums in curiosity. "I didn't realize you liked rain,"
says Serr Vigal.

"I don't. That is ... I suppose I've never really thought about it
before. But I think once something is about to get taken away from
you, it develops great significance. You start to wonder if-if you
missed something important about it. If you failed to appreciate what
was in front of you the whole time."

The laughter comes bubbling out of the neural programmer like
water from a boiling kettle. "I do believe we'll make a philosopher of
you yet, Natch."

A long pause.

"We didn't talk enough," Natch blurts out.

"I don't feel that way," replies Vigal after some thought. "It seems
to me like we've talked about almost everything that's worth talking
about."

"That's not true! There are a million things we never talked about.
Furniture ... music ... literature ... rain. We never talked about rain."

"We may still get the chance someday," says the neural programmer, his voice tentative.

"No, I told you. I've made my decision. I'm going to activate Margaret's failsafe ... soon. You said that Brone released Possibilities 2.0
on the Data Sea. I'll need to activate the failsafe in the next few minutes. And after that ..." The words drift off into the nothingness.

Natch doesn't need eyes and ears to know what Serr Vigal is doing
in the moment of silence that follows. Vigal is tugging at his salt-andpepper goatee, giving the ideas in his head a dress rehearsal before letting them out on the main stage. "Are you absolutely sure you know
what's going to happen when you activate the failsafe?"

Pause. "What are you suggesting?"

"I'm thinking ... Please, Natch, hear me out. MultiReal is a technology that allows one to explore alternate realities. Separate paths.
Petrucio has already demonstrated how to use the technology to effectively live sixty seconds in the future. What if ... what if ..

Natch cuts his guardian off with a weary sigh. "I know exactly
what you're going to suggest. This could be one of those alternate realities. We could all be living in a virtual future right now."

"And?"

"Ridiculous," scoffs the entrepreneur.

"Come now, Natch! This isn't idle woolgathering. This isn't just
one of Serr Vigal's silly far-flung ideas. Margaret Surina has destroyed
the boundaries between the possible and the actual. If a choice cycle
can be kept open for sixty seconds, why not an hour? And if you can
live hours in the future, why not days? Weeks? Months!

"Imagine this, Natch," continues Vigal, his voice growing more
feverish and flustered by the second. "Margaret is sitting at the top of
the Revelation Spire preparing to activate the first phase of her failsafe-the phase where the code infiltrates everyone's bio/logic systems
and begins tracking memories. She has doubts about whether the
world is ready for MultiReal. But what if she also has doubts in the failsafe? What if she decides to take an extra layer of precaution-and
introduces the failsafe itself in a potential alternate reality?"

"So you believe we're in a potential alternate reality inside another
potential alternate reality?"

"I believe it's possible, that's all. The technology is out there to do
this, Natch. Margaret has demonstrated it. Petrucio Patel has demonstrated it. You've lived it. Just-just admit that it's plausible, that's
all. Just admit that much."

Natch can hear the desperation mounting in Vigal's words, and he
figures it's time to put a stop to it. "Sure, I'll admit it's plausible-in
the same way it's plausible that we could all be living inside a dream.
In the same way that everything you experience might be a hallucination produced by some mad scientist stimulating your neural cells."

Willful silence.

"Vigal, this game doesn't lead anywhere. It's interesting to speculate about, I suppose. But regardless of whether I'm living in `reality'
or some kind of ... simulation of reality, or hybrid reality, or whatever
you want to call it ... the choices don't change. So yes, I suppose it's
possible that after I activate the failsafe, we'll all get snapped back to
December of 359 again, before any of us had even heard of MultiReal.
But in terms of this reality, nothing has changed. I still need to activate Margaret Surina's failsafe in order to save millions of lives ... and
you still need to prepare yourself for the fact that I'll be gone."

In the silence that follows, Natch realizes that the neural programmer has made up his mind, and no amount of logic or persuasive
argumentation is going to change it. Which makes him feel more
futile than he has felt since Brone put him in this darkness. Ever since
that moment, he's been trying to spare his friends the agony of worrying about him, of worrying about the state of the world. Better they
believe he will die than they believe he will spend his remaining years
a stunted human being wandering the Pharisee Territories. Better they
believe the world will forget all about MultiReal than they realize that
this struggle will continue for generations to come. But if Serr Vigal
and Horvil and Jara and Magan Kai Lee are going to believe what they're going to believe regardless of the evidence ... then perhaps
this is all just wasted energy.

Once Natch activates the failsafe, it won't matter. The Pharisees
will take him away, and he'll disappear from civilization for good.
Those around him will forget these conversations. They will assume
that he has disappeared inside his shell and vanished into his own selfishness. The world at large will eventually piece together what happened and likely come to the conclusion that Natch is to blame.

Which is perfectly fine with him.

Natch feels a sudden urge to just activate the failsafe and get it
over with. True, he's in virtual time now, and he could potentially dally
away hours in here without having wasted more than a minute or two
in real time. But what does he gain by it? He was ready to activate the
failsafe when he knew it would kill him. He's just as ready to activate
it now. He takes inventory of his emotions, trying to think of things
left unfinished, questions left unanswered. He knows he will never get
another chance to tie up loose ends.

And then he thinks of one question he needs to ask. "Vigal, are you
my father?" Natch blurts out.

A pause. "I'm surprised that you'd ask me that," mumbles the
neural programmer hesitantly.

"Why?"

"I always took your silence to mean that you already knew the
answer to that question. So all these years you simply didn't know?
Did you think I was trying to ... hide something from you? Or ...
did you ..." Vigal slips into confusion, backtracks, starts again. "I
suppose this is my fault, Natch. I really should have discussed this
with you. Putting the burden of such a question on you, that wasn't
fair of me, and I'm sorry."

"So you are my father?"

"Let me ask you ... does it really matter? Would anything have
been different if I had called you my son all these years instead of my charge? I admit I was never particularly good at parenting ... but you
know it's not something I ever asked for. It sort of ... fell into my lap,
you might say. But I felt like a father. I certainly sacrificed like a father.
I've, I've loved you like a father. So, I ask again ... does it matter?"

Natch sits for a moment in the nothingness. "No, I suppose it
doesn't."

Serr Vigal exhales as if he has just put down a heavy weight. "Then
I'll answer you. No, Natch, I'm not your father. Your mother and I
never-we didn't-let's just say that despite what everyone thought,
it was a platonic relationship."

Natch says nothing.

"I tried to figure out who your father was. When I arrived at Furtold to pick you up all those years ago, I spent a month combing
through records, asking questions, playing detective. But I think ... I
think I was asking for the wrong reasons. I found out nothing. The
records were a disaster in those times. Don't forget, Natch, this was
shortly after the Economic Plunge-and Furtoid has always been drastically underfunded, even in the best of times. There were wanderers
and mercenaries passing through every day, and the colony had been
paying genetic donors for decades. I think they were desperate to build
up a population any way they could. They didn't have the manpower
to keep track of it all ... I suppose your father must have been one of
those men, one of the ones who wandered through. But there's no way
to prove that, after all these years."

Natch smiles. "How appropriate."

There is another long pause as the entrepreneur begins preparing
himself for the failsafe. The blindness. The confusion and pain.

"So I suppose this is good-bye?" says Natch.

He can hear that Serr Vigal is weeping.

"What's wrong, Vigal?" he asks gently.

"I-I won't have you forgotten, Natch. I won't have you castigated
and blamed for all the death and destruction that's to come when the fact of the matter is that you're saving billions of lives. And no, don't
tell me it's inevitable you'll be hated. It's not. I need ... I need to
know what to tell the world. If they ask me why you did this, why you
activated the failsafe. Tell me what to say, and I swear I'll remember it
somehow."

Natch thinks for a moment.

And suddenly, as he thinks about what to tell Vigal, Natch can see
more clearly than he has seen before. He can see through the blackness,
past the barricade of nothingness that separates him from the rest of
the world.

He sees a world picking itself up from destruction and despair,
from the twin ravages of large-scale computational chaos and the
greatest tsunami civilization has ever seen. A world where the estimates of the number of dead range from several hundred thousand to
several million, where several of the major computational systems have
crashed spectacularly but are now slowly being resuscitated....

He sees a man in a black robe being dragged away from a long, low
complex of buildings near the Twin Cities by a group of Defense and
Wellness Council officers. The man is screaming with impotent rage,
cursing Natch, cursing the high executive, cursing the world, cursing
the narrow cell in an orbital prison that is to be his for decades to
come....

He sees two women embracing at the hoverbird docks of London
in front of a battered but intact OrbiCo medical freighter....

He sees a Surina standing on the floor of the Tul Jabbor Complex
with twenty-three skeptical members of the Prime Committee looking
on. The audience is composed in equal parts of connectible and
Islander, and while they are still segregated in their separate sections
of the auditorium, they are listening to one another and respectful....

He sees a new fiefcorp celebrating its recent victory in climbing to
the top of the Primo's bio/logic investment guide, a victory spearheaded by the efforts of a small woman with dark curly hair and a tall man with a thin mustache and a black-and-white swirled pin on his
jacket. Their young chief analyst looks on with overt cynicism while
their portly chief engineer keeps one nervous eye on his boss, constantly on the lookout for a sign of recognition that is yet to
appear....

He sees the new high executive presiding over an open government
commission to study the new technology that has come to light in the
wake of the recent mysterious Memory Event. The high executive calls
for the formation of a memecorp to oversee the development and eventual commercialization of this new technology. He calls for the heir to
the Surinas to have an honorary seat on the board. But who better to
lead this new memecorp than the fiefcorp master of the new number
one on Primo's? ...

And finally he sees a caravan slowly making its way across an arid
land uncluttered by the zigzagging flight paths of hoverbird traffic,
untrammeled by the tracks of tube trains. The caravan turns off the
gravel road it has been traveling down and camps on the roadside.
Children hop out and scurry from car to car, playing games with ball
and stick. There's a man there, a large mirthful figure with grizzly hair
and beard, who emerges from one vehicle leading by the hand his
charge, his friend and his responsibility.

It's a man in his early thirties. Blind as if he had never known
light, deaf to the world around him. To him there is no memory and
there is no time; there is only the deathless and undifferentiated now.
Yesterday is the same as today is the same as tomorrow, but all is well
because he has seen the nothingness at the center of the universe and
he is at peace.