Multireal (30 page)

Natch turned his attention back to the window, which had been
recycling fiefcorp industry news for the past few hours. He could feel
the black code inside him, a thousand vessels of doom just waiting to
unload their toxic cargo on his OCHRE systems.

He could handle black code. He could handle the Defense and
Wellness Council and the Meme Cooperative and the Patels, too. He
could handle anything the world threw at him. The world might just
depend on it.

2I

Horvil reclined on the bed with arms held high in a position of surrender. His parents had long ago relinquished their piece of the estate to
Aunt Berilla and moved on to warmer climes-the controlled heat
domes of Nova Ceti, to be specific. Yet here his old room sat, unchanged,
like a mausoleum for his teenage years. The same battered chair with
nailhead trim still hunkered near the door. The same hearty ficus plant
still towered over the southwest corner of the room, an embarrassment
of fecundity. And the windows were still broadcasting raucous advertisements for Yarn Trip's reunion concert in Beijing, even though the concert had come and gone eight years ago, and the band had long since
broken up again, re-reunited, then split (theoretically) for good.

Horvil remembered the day of that concert. He had stomped out
of the house after an argument with Berilla and rented his own apartment the very same afternoon. But every time he came back here, his
aunt rewound the window decorations to that same frozen instant. As
if one day, Horvil might thaw the moment and resume life in the
manor like nothing had changed.

He sensed an incoming Confidential Whisper. Aunt Berilla.

"You can't avoid me forever, Horvil," she said, voice properly petulant.

"Well, I'm right down the hall," replied the engineer. "Come on
over. We can listen to Yarn Trip together. I always forget-were you
into their molten lava phase or their mocha grind phase?"

An audible frown. "You know I've got a meeting to prepare for."

"Really? Sure you're not just afraid to face the fiefcorp after what
you did? I mean, shutting down the programming floor's one thing,
but actually trying to roll back the changes-"

"This isn't about the fiefcorp. It's about you. Why haven't you followed up with Marulana already?"

The engineer harrumphed. "Don't think I'm gonna take the job,
that's why."

"But this isn't some dull bureaucratic position. Chief engineer for
Creed Elan, Horvil! A position of responsibility. A job of consequence,
for process' preservation! You'd have a staff. You'd have a budget and
the best equipment. And you wouldn't have to put up with him."

"Not that again. I don't want to hear it."

He could feel Berilla's frustration from all the way across the mansion. She abruptly changed course. "Listen, Horvil, you tell those
people they're welcome to stay for a few more hours until everything
blows over. But I won't have drudges camped at my gates forever! I
will not have my household disrupted like this. Do you hear me?"

Horvil prived himself to Aunt Berilla's communications without a
word. Then he closed his eyes, turned to face the wall, and played Yarn
Trip's turbulent "Shitscape Symphony" on his internal sound system.
Twice. Loud.

Jara found a study down the hall and appropriated it as a temporary
office. The room looked like it might have lain untouched for several
generations, or perhaps been transported here intact from antiquity
through some subversion of time and space. There were a lot of rooms
like that in the mansion. Jara looked at the treepaper books sitting on
the shelves and shook her head at the ancient names filigreed on their
spines. Coleridge, Toynbee, Kipling.

She lay down on the couch, draped one arm over her forehead, and
cried for a good ten minutes.

What had happened to her career? How had she devolved from
such a bright and promising student to a pariah in her own fiefcorp?
Jara tried to retrace the winding path that had led her to this
moment-the affair with the proctor, the years with Lucas Sentinel, the obsession with Natch, the dalliances with Geronimo-but it all
seemed sickening and improbable.

You can't even say the faefcorp situation is all Natch's fault, Jara told herself. You're to blame almost as much as he is. You participated in Natch's lies
and schemes for three years without saying anything. You even spread false
black code rumors when Natch asked you to. Magan Kai Lee threatened the
company right to your face, and you didn't do a thing about it.

Jara felt a sudden urge to contact Geronimo again, but the urge
came from a place far removed from lust. Then she pictured Rey
Gonerev, reading a bureaucratic report about Jara's Sigh activities with
a knowing smirk on her face. I've read so much about you in the Council
files that I feel like I know you ... intimately, the Blade had told her. So
Jara restrained herself.

A knock sounded on the door, and in came Benyamin.

"I looked into the situation with the assembly-line floor," said the
young apprentice, "and it's not good."

Jara felt like rolling over and telling Ben to go away. "Not good how?"

"Greth Tar Griveth-that woman who blackmailed me-she
made a big mess." Benyamin flopped his arms aimlessly like limp
dough, unable to muster the energy for a more emphatic gesture.
"Turns out she was taking that money and using it to bribe some of her
people. I don't know if Magan Kai Lee put her up to this or what. But
Greth's people have been sabotaging the MultiReal code. Throwing in
little surprises of their own."

Exhaustion had taken Jara's senses, and she couldn't quite get her
mind to spark. "How bad is it?"

"Well, Greth only had limited access to the code in the first place.
There's only so much damage she could do. But add the rollback on
top of it, and you've got ... Well, you've got a big mess."

"Does MultiReal still work?"

"Sure, it works just fine, for your basic one-on-one interactions. But
we won't be able to do that twenty-three-way soccer game anytime soon."

Jara ran her hands through her hair and yanked hard at the roots
in frustration. "And what does your mother think of all this? Is she
ever going to come out of her office and talk to us? Come to think of
it-why hasn't she kicked us out of her house yet?"

"I-I don't know."

The analyst lay quietly for a moment. A ray of sunshine poked
through a slat in the blinds and jabbed her in the eye, prompting her
to turn onto her right side and bury her nose in the couch's crook. She
had no doubt that Horvil could weed through all the changes and
restore MultiReal to full functionality. But with the program's creator
dead and its chief engineer headed for some orbital prison, how much
time would that take? Weeks? Months? He wouldn't even be able to
use an assembly-line floor to do the heavy lifting.

"So are you going to do anything about it?" asked Benyamin, his
voice suddenly querulous.

Jara shook her head. "I don't know, Ben. I don't know if there's
anything else I can do. Let me mull this over for a while, okay?"

"But-"

"Please. "

Ben disappeared. Jara lay there and debated the merits of sleep.
Not ten minutes later, Merri found her way into the study.

The people in this company sure aren't acting like they're suspicious of me,
thought Jara. Why can't everyone just leave me the fuck alone? The blonde
channel manager hesitated in the doorway for a full two minutes before
Jara finally grew tired of waiting. "So what's the problem?" she said.

"It's my companion," squeaked Merri.

"Bonneth?" said Jara, taken aback. "Is she okay?"

"At the moment ... yes. But when that last infoquake struck ...
Jara, she was totally cut off from Dr. Plugenpatch. For hours. She tried to
keep me from finding out, but I could hear it in her voice." Merri's hands
twisted at the hem of her blouse until Jara thought she might rend it in
two. "This is all my fault. I was the one who insisted on moving to Luna in the first place, because I thought the artificial gravity would be better
for her condition. If another one of those infoquakes hits up there ..
Her sentence floated away into the thick wallpaper of books.

Comprehension dawned on Jara with a nauseating rush. She had
assumed Merri's misery was a mixture of sorrow for Margaret Surina
and apprehension about her own fate at Creed Objectivv. I guess she
deserves more credit than that, thought the analyst. These infoquakes represented a real and immediate danger to countless millions like Bonneth with obscure diseases. OCHREs and Dr. Plugenpatch and
bio/logic software formed a symbiotic triangle; remove one of the
three, and the whole structure would collapse. To someone with Bonneth's condition, even a brief outage might very well be fatal.

Jara felt herself souring involuntarily. Did Merri think she was the
only one who had these problems? Jara's mother lived on Luna too.
Terraformers had made great progress on the moon in recent decades,
but it still remained largely uninhabitable without bio/logics. If an
infoquake delivered a catastrophic blow to the Data Sea, would Jara's
mother be any better off than Bonneth?

"So what do you want me to do about it?" Jara croaked finally,
rolling onto her back to face the ceiling and the skewering sunlight.

"I don't know," said Merri. "I just thought you might have some
advice...."

"Well, I don't," replied the analyst. "Why does everyone keep
coming to me for advice about things I can't control? I have enough on
my plate right now without worrying about hypotheticals. You're just
going to have to tough it out. Do the best you can."

"Okay," managed the blonde woman, already shifting toward the
door. "One more thing, though ... We can't decide whether we
should say anything in the drudge statement about Quell...."

"I told you, talk with Robby! You figure something out for once!"
Jara's voice strained and finally cracked. She regretted the words as
soon as they escaped her mouth.

The channel manager let out another quiet "okay." Jara rested her
forearm over her eyes to block the glare and waited for Merri to leave.
Which, eventually, she did.

Seething with self-recrimination, Jara drifted off to an uneasy
sleep.