Multireal (19 page)

"This is just wrong," said Benyamin, a contentious frown on his face.
"Crippling MultiReal won't help anyone. It'll only help Frederic and
Petrucio drive us out of business. Once we're gone, the Patels will own
the program outright and start selling unlimited choice cycles anyway."

"I don't think so," replied Jara. "You didn't see that presentation
at the Kordez Thassel Complex. Frederic and Petrucio agree with me."

"What if the Patels only want you to think they agree? How do you
know Magan Kai Lee didn't put them up to this?"

Jara's brow furrowed. The very mention of that name was enough
to spike her blood pressure and make her sweat. "Why would he do
that?"

Benyamin put a hand on her shoulder. "Because once we bring our
version of MultiReal down to their level, the Council can use the
Patels' version to get to us-and we won't be able to stop them."

Jara opened her mouth, nonplussed, but the pat response she was
waiting for to leap to her rescue did not come. She was ashamed to
admit that such a tactic had never even occurred to her. Everything
always came back to the Council in the end, didn't it? "I guess that's
just a chance we'll have to take," she said under her breath.

13

January 2: the day the fiefcorp was scheduled to unveil the winners of
the MultiReal exposition lottery. The day that twenty-three lucky citizens would be given an appointment to experience the wonders of
multiple realities firsthand.

The morning dawned blustery and brutish, with a fresh assault of
hail in Shenandoah, a barrage of rain in London-and news of another
infoquake in central Asia.

The Defense and Wellness Council managed to suppress the news for
forty-eight hours. But even Len Borda's agents couldn't keep such a scoop
hidden from the drudges forever. By midmorning, details were splashed
across the headlines of every gossipmonger on the Data Sea. This infoquake
was not nearly as severe as the last one, which had left hundreds dead and
thousands wounded from Earth to the orbital colonies. The computational
blizzard was centered in Tibet, though flurries were observed as far away
as Andra Pradesh and Vladivostok. The death toll hovered at a mere two
dozen-but the details of their demise were almost gruesome enough to
eclipse the MultiReal exposition lottery. Drudges pounded the Council
with questions about the cause of the infoquakes, but all the Council flaks
could do was utter bureaucratic euphemisms for we don't know.

Forty thousand drudges, channelers, and capitalmen wedged
themselves into a sunny Sao Paulo soccer stadium that morning to witness the lottery drawing. It was the same venue Natch had rented for
the exposition itself, and with its newly reupholstered seats and
dizzying array of giant viewscreens, the stadium made quite a spectacle. Merri worked the crowd with the help of Robby Robby's merry
band of channelers, salting the cognoscenti with a heavy coating of
marketing buzzwords. By midday, chatter about the latest infoquake
had died down to a whisper, and the drudges were ready for Natch.

But Natch was not there.

Jara couldn't believe the entrepreneur would put everyone through
this crap yet again. It had to be foul play, a clandestine strike by the
Council, a mugging, black code. Then a flustered Serr Vigal rushed in
at the last minute with news from Natch. He was on a tube train with
Quell heading for Andra Pradesh and would not attend the drawing.
A stunned Horvil spattered the freshly painted walls of the stadium's
locker room with a mouthful of ChaiQuoke.

Panic had yet to set in when the apprentices received another surprise guest. Robby Robby oozed into the locker room, leading by the
hand the world-renowned soccer star Wilson Refaris Ko. The man was
rugged and handsome, with troll-sized hands and a chin the size of a
graveyard shovel. "So where do I pick 'em?" grinned Ko.

"Pick them?" said Jara, feeling like her head was full of yarn. "Pick
what?"

Ko, confused, scratching his ass: "There's usually a barrel with
little plastic tags in it."

Horvil laughed. "You got a barrel that holds three billion plastic tags?"

"We've already got a program to pick the lottery winners,"
explained Jara. "All you need to do is read the names. Right?" She
looked to the other fiefcorpers for backup, but nobody else had any idea
what Ko was supposed to do. Jara shrugged. "Right. I'll go out there
and introduce you, and you just read the names."

"Oh." The man was crestfallen.

Ko might not have had the keenest intellect, but what he lacked
in brainpower he made up for in star kinetics. His panther strut caused
men and women of all sexual orientations to drop their jaws, and his
husky reed of a voice could mesmerize even the sourest drudge. Jara
never knew for certain whether Natch had hired him directly or if his
appearance was the work of Robby Robby, but it didn't really matter.
When Ko walked onto the field, there was not a murmur to be heard
from the crowd.

The soccer player cleared his throat and prepared to recite the
names fed to him by Horvil's algorithms. Jara could sense a billion
necks arching forward in front of viewscreens across the world. "And
the winners of the Surina/Natch MultiReal lottery are ..."

A leukocyte specialist from Dr. Plugenpatch. A mother of four
pledged to Creed Bushido. An OrbiCo technician who spent most of
his time jetting between the colonies of Allowell and Nova Ceti. A
bio/logic programmer in Beijing ...

The names rolled on. Jara breathed a sigh of relief, although she
couldn't say why. You could tell precious little about someone from a
name and job description; any one of those lottery winners could easily
be on Len Borda's payroll. Or Khann Frejohr's, or Creed Thassel's, for
that matter. But the names were out there now, and it was time to sit
back and let the Data Sea journalists do their detective work.

His task completed, Wilson Refaris Ko cut his multi connection and
vanished back to the Neverland of self-important celebrities. Merri
took his place on the platform at the end of the field, smiling, her
boldest Creed Objectivv pin riding high on her chest.

Ben tried to convince his cousin not to go out there, to wait until
they had gotten Natch's explicit approval before announcing the exposition rules.

"You're really upset about this, aren't you?" said Horvil.

The young apprentice shoved his hands in his pockets and gave a
sallow nod. "I'm not upset because I don't agree with the decision," he
said. "If Natch decides we should give MultiReal users limited choice
cycles, that's fine. It's just Jara hasn't even talked to him about it. She
made up her mind without consulting anybody."

"She consulted Merri and Vigal. They both agree."

"Do you?"

The engineer bobbed his head back and forth slowly like the pendulum of a fat grandfather clock. Did he believe that MultiReal should
be released with limited or unlimited choice cycles? He didn't know.
Usually Horvil was content to wallow in the numerology and let
Natch make the policy decisions. But like a black hole, MultiReal
warped the very moral and ethical dimensions around it. Horvil could
feel the program's infinite density tugging at strings inside him that
he had never realized he possessed. This program demanded that he
abandon his neutrality and pick a side.

But not quite yet. "I dunno if I agree or not," Horvil said at length.
"I think I do. But I haven't really given it enough thought."

Ben was clearly disappointed. "Well, Natch's opinion is the only
one that counts, unless Margaret decides to come down from that
tower. I wish he'd answer his fucking Confidential Whisper requests."
The apprentice kicked an empty bottle on the locker room floor and
watched it ricochet off the concrete wall. "Come on, Horvil. You know
what Natch would say. You know what he's going to say when he hears
about this. He'll agree that the market should set the number of choice
cycles."

"Well, think of it this way. These rules are just for the exposition.
We still have plenty of time to change our minds before we launch
Possibilities on the Data Sea."

"That's not the point. The point is-"

Horvil rolled his eyes and reached out to pinch his cousin's lips
shut. "The point is, Ben, Natch isn't here. Somebody needed to make
a decision. Jara made it." And without waiting for a reaction, the engineer was out the locker room door and heading for the field.

Jara didn't want the haze of multivoid to end. She wanted to grab onto
the nothingness and embrace it tightly. Some days she remained on the red tile in her hallway for several minutes, filtering out the sights and
sounds of the apartment with a Cocoon program until she could bear
to look at the world again. Today, she merely stood on the tile with
eyes shut.

It's been a good day, she thought.

The drudges were well pleased with the lottery results. Her fellow
fiefcorpers had performed admirably: Merri had looked stoic, Horvil
knowledgeable, Vigal calm and unruffled. Benyamin had stayed out of
the way. Best of all, Jara had already anticipated most of the drudges'
questions, and so the fiefcorp was able to stay on script most of the
afternoon.

Nobody paid much attention to what Merri labeled the Equitable
Choice Cycle Model, but Jara had not expected them to. The public
simply didn't have enough information about MultiReal to comprehend the issues at stake. But Jara knew that it was only a matter of
time. The words she scripted would resonate long and loud for decades
to come. All that mattered was that the Patel Brothers would understand. Frederic and Petrucio would get the message that the
Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp was willing to be reasonable. (Still,
Jara was careful to emphasize that the Equitable Choice Cycle Model
would be in effect only for the exposition. She didn't want the Patel
Brothers to get too comfortable.)

Six more days to the MultiReal exposition, she thought. Six more days
until the public gets a real taste of multiple realities. After that, there's no
telling.