Multireal (5 page)

The yellow-starred officers in the apartment saw the look in
Magan's eyes and gave him a wide berth. He walked into Natch's
office, ushered the massive Nordic team leader out the door, and
opened the message on the viewscreen with a gesture.

Magan frowned. What kind of message was this?

Suddenly his eyes widened. "Out! Everybody out!" he snapped,
unencrypted, startling the Council officers into a pell-mell gallop for the exit. "No, he knows we're here-southeast exit!" The group
skidded to a halt and reversed directions. Rey Gonerev was yelling
something in his ear, but Magan couldn't process it quickly enough.
He managed to decipher the solicitor's words just as they burst into the
southeast courtyard: "No, stay inside. The drudges, the drudges!"

Standing in the snow outside Natch's building was a pack of men
and women whose eyes were lit with predatory glee. Magan recognized
many of their faces on sight: the craggy visage of Sen Sivv Sor, the
dandyish face of John Ridglee, the weasel smirk of V. T. Vel Osbiq.

The drudges.

Ridgello, clearly irritated, gave his troops the signal to sheathe
their weapons. The Council lieutenant summoned PokerFace 85a to
mask his own roiling emotions as the drudges formed a receiving line
and began peppering the retreating officers with questions for their
readers.

"Lieutenant, why has Len Borda decided to seize MultiReal by
force?"

"Who approved this mission?"

"Has the Council consulted the Prime Committee about this?"

"What charges are you planning to bring against Natch?"

"Is this legal?"

Magan Kai Lee trudged through the courtyard, saying nothing,
trying to figure out the exchange rate of this new situation. He could
practically taste the bile in the back of his throat. "You see, Rey?" he
said over ConfidentialWhisper. "This snake has fangs."

3

Natch stood at his workbench and waved his left hand. A shimmering
bubble the size of a coin appeared in the air before him. The bubble
quickly expanded until it encompassed most of the workbench, until
it enveloped him entirely and blanketed the rest of the world in a
translucent film.

MindSpace. An empty canvas, a barren universe. Anything was
possible here.

With his right hand, Natch undid the clasps to the weather-beaten
satchel that sat on the side table. The satchel flopped open to reveal its
hidden treasure: twenty-six thin metal bars, branded with the letters
of the Roman alphabet. Natch's fingers wandered blindly to the bar
labeled F and slid it whisper-quiet from its sheath. As soon as the
bio/logic programming bar passed the borders of MindSpace, spikes
and finials burst from its sides like a butterfly's wings emerging from
the cocoon. Natch swished the bar back and forth in front of him, and
the butterfly took flight.

The fiefcorp master raised his left hand again and spread his fingers
wide. The MindSpace bubble exploded with a sinuous curve of interlocking spheres, a virtual centipede in hues of purple and brown. The
canvas was covered down to the last square centimeter, and yet still the
shapes multiplied.

Too close in. Natch hitched his thumb back, zooming out to a
better vantage point. The spheres only grew in density as they receded,
until they became atomic particles in a solid block of gray. Farther out,
the block was now merely one of thousands, a brick in the wall of an
ominous castle of programming code. Natch, impatient, continued
jabbing his thumb backward. Now even the castle was just one small
portion of an immense oval-shaped structure. Parapets and walkways in aqua and silver swirled through the whole and made daring forays
across the central void. A MindSpace megalopolis.

At last the entire structure lay visible before him. Natch could pan
out no farther. He extended his left index finger and rotated his hand
ninety degrees counterclockwise, causing a legend to appear atop the
block of code.

Version: 0.76

Programmer: The Surina/Natch Multi Real Fiefcorp

Possibilities was the fiefcorp's brand name for MultiReal. MultiReal: the product of sixteen years' isolation by one of the world's most
brilliant scientists, with virtually unlimited resources at her disposal.
MultiReal: the crowning achievement of an entire line of Surinas
stretching back for generations.

And now the program belonged to Natch.

The entrepreneur hefted the spiky programming tool in his hand,
testing its mass. He rotated the castle around and around, looking for
just the right spot.... There. A soft place, a weakness in the virtual
masonry. All at once, Natch raised the bar over his head and struck at
the castle wall with furious strength.

Clang. The bar bounced off the castle and set his right hand vibrating.

Natch grabbed the bar again with both hands, wielding it like a
crazed samurai. He began delivering savage blows to the structure
before him. Again and again he struck, snarling with rage. Finally one
of the blows smashed through the brick, and the castle wall shattered
into a thousand pieces with a deafening crash.

Natch peered at the interior of the vanquished castle, expecting to
see a skeleton of virtual boards, planks, and girders. But the structure
was completely hollow and had no visible means of support. This was
no mere emptiness, no simple absence-of-something-else; it was a yawning chasm of nothingness, a force of void that seemed to pull at
him with intense gravity.

As the fiefcorp master stood, paralyzed with fear, the program
began to crumble all around him. Blocks that had been anchored and
secured by a thousand connections were buckling under the strain,
pulling loose, succumbing to the Null Current. Soon objects across the
room were sliding toward him; programming bars were making
kamikaze leaps from his satchel; even dishes were somersaulting in
from the kitchen to get swallowed by the growing darkness.

Natch felt the tug in his knees first. He struggled to get to the office
door, thinking that if he could just shut out the nothingness, he would
be all right. But soon the void was pulling at his entire body. He managed to hook his fingers around the doorjamb just as he lost his feet. For
a minute, maybe two, he hung there with his heels in the air and his
fingernails clawing for a handhold on the door. And then a chair slid in
from the living room and bashed his knuckles. Natch lost his grip. He
began tumbling end over end into the chill of the darkest night.

Nothingness.

He came to in a wintry patch of forest, a torch in his hand. A sickening smell that Natch identified as burning flesh wafted through the
air.

Natch dashed through the trees. He was in a hurry, but he couldn't
say why. Paths crisscrossed on the forest floor below his feet, but he
didn't know where they had come from or where they were going;
better to trust his instincts. And right now his instincts said to head
west, toward the rapidly falling sun. He ran through the foliage as
quickly as he could. Thorns and sharp branches lashed his face.

Then Natch heard the screaming.

Stop! Wait, stop! Don't! Don't! Don't! And then a long shriek of
anguish and pain, underlined by the snarling of a confused and angry
bear. The distant tumult of rushing feet through the leaves. The wet
sound of human flesh ripping.

Natch could not move. The light from the torch sputtered and
went out. In the split second before the dark enveloped him once
again, Natch looked up and discovered he was no longer holding a
torch-it was the bloody stump of a boy's arm.

Then he awoke.

Natch slowly lifted his eyelids and let the world soak into his consciousness one millimeter at a time.

He took inventory of his surroundings. It was a familiar setting.
His hands lay palms-down on faux ivory armrests, and he could feel
faux leather at his back. Sunlight tapped a staccato message on his face
from behind a latticework of redwoods passing by at superhuman
speed. Natch had practically memorized every twist and turn of this
Seattle express tube over the years.

The entrepreneur took a closer look at the window. Something
floated there in boldface awaiting his arousal from sleep.

Natch gave a tired nod. So those fools took the bait after all.

He skimmed through a few dozen drudge clippings, stacking
them on the window like bricks. There was video from fifteen different
angles, and some anonymous wit had given the whole thing a symphonic score. Natch summoned the baffled face of Magan Kai Lee and
watched his entire walk of shame back to the hoverbird four times.

At last you have some breathing room, the fiefcorp master told himself.
Now you can stop running and go home again.

Natch had woken up on a tube train every day this week. He had
traveled the entire world over the past few weeks in an effort to skirt the Defense and Wellness Council. Yesterday he had seen the desert
sands of old Texas territory, pausing for a brief multi foray to Shenandoah to set his trap; the night before, he had skimmed the surface of
the Indian Ocean.

But there were a number of close calls. Natch could find only so
much anonymity when his face had been burned into the public consciousness through a hundred interviews and drudge reports. A group
of teenagers in Sao Paulo had seen right through his false public directory profile, and Natch had had to pawn off one of his new bio/logic
programming bars just to keep them quiet. Counting the one he had
flung at his black-robed pursuers in Shenandoah a few weeks ago, he
was now two bars short of a complete set.

Then there was the disturbing incident with the crazy woman in
central Europe. She had worn the bright blue uniform of a healer, but
had reached the age when many abandoned curative treatments and
sent in their applications to join the Prepared. The woman had walked
up to him in plain view of three white-robed Council officers, indignant, demanding that Natch explain the "dirty tricks" he had performed at the demo in Andra Pradesh. Natch's mind had been gliding
through some remote place, and he had nearly panicked. But suddenly
people had stood up to defend him with voices raised and fists clenched.
Soon a handful of L-PRACG security officers had gotten involved, and
the Council officers had scurried over to investigate. A small-scale brawl
had erupted between Natch's supporters and his detractors. Libertarians
shouting Down with Len Borda, governmentalists bellowing Respect the
law. Natch, dumbfounded, had offered no resistance when two libertarians calmly tugged him out the door and thrust him onto a tube running in the opposite direction. He had managed to escape before Len
Borda's people realized exactly what was going on.

In a world of sixty billion people, simple mathematics dictated
that Natch must have millions of sympathizers on the libertarian side
of the political spectrum. A hundred million people probably sup ported his fight to keep MultiReal out of the Council's hands from
sheer spite for Len Borda. But to discover that people had coalesced on
this issue, that they were willing to stand up to armed Council officers
... Natch simply didn't know how to process it.