Multireal (61 page)

Pierre Loget sputtered out a mouthful of nitro, and a few of the
devotees held their breath. Natch silently activated MultiReal just in
case. He was still reeling from the chase at the Tul Jabbor Complex and
doubted he could muster up the energy to use it effectively. But Brone
doesn't know that, does he? thought Natch.

Brone did not seem daunted in the slightest; he took Natch's
smackdown with uncharacteristically good humor. The bodhisattva
nodded and jammed the programming bar back into its case. "Suit yourself," he said, hopping off his platform and striding down the corridor without another word.

And so Possibilities 2.0 stumbled into development.

It had been a long time since Natch had the leisure to stretch out in
MindSpace, to rev up, to push his mental engines to redline. For the past
few weeks, he had been so busy dealing with the various political and
logistical roadblocks in his path-the Defense and Wellness Council, the
Meme Cooperative, Jara's insubordination, the drudges-that his programming skills were beginning to rust. He would find himself staring
at bricks of code, bio/logic tools in hand, unsure how he had gotten there
or where he was heading next. Should he use the L bar or the N bar here?
What was the point of this recursive function he had started?

But then Natch would feel himself unwind. He would stare at the
milling Thasselians, the crescent platforms, the prelapsarian luxury of
this Chicago hotel, and he would think, I'm safe.

Not completely safe, of course. Not completely without risk. But
here in the demesne of the diss, he was sheltered from meddlesome
drudges and politicians. Brone's black code made him invisible to the
Council, and Brone's money freed him from economic pressure. Best of
all, he had completely escaped the competitive grind of the bio/logics
business. In Old Chicago, Primo's ratings were as inconsequential as
moon dust; Frederic and Petrucio Patel were a universe away.

It was as Brone promised. Development with no interruptions.

There was still the question of how to deal with the Surina/Natch
Fiefcorp. Natch berated himself once again for ever believing that he
understood Jara. Now, because of his mistake, Jara had core access to
MultiReal-which meant she had the ability to sabotage all the Thasselians' work. Was Natch doomed to spend his days in an endless catand-mouse game with Jara, each trying to undo the other's work? So far, the fiefcorpers had kept their hands off, but certainly that wouldn't
be the case forever. Horvil had already erected enough roadblocks in
the software to seriously slow things down.

As for the Thasselians, they were hewing to the tack Brone had set
for them. Quiet and compliant, they did exactly what they were told
without demurral. Even Billy Sterno and Pierre Loget, programmers
whose skills equaled or exceeded Natch's own, carried out his instructions to the letter.

The atmosphere changed significantly at night. Some of the devotees
would get a little rowdy on the upper floors after dark, drinking, singing
at rafter-shuddering volumes, skulking off arm in arm for the occasional
tryst. It reminded Natch of the hive. He could hardly blame them for
their excesses, given that they were all stuck out here with nowhere to
go and nobody to talk to. The diss showed up on occasion to take
advantage of the Thasselians' engineering skills, but none of them were
keen on socializing. Natch could only imagine how Brone's minions
were feeling. Certainly some of them had left friends, colleagues, and
loved ones behind when they decided to join the Revolution.

And Brone? Brone kept to himself. Natch had figured his old
enemy would take every opportunity to study the intricacies of MultiReal, but nothing could be further from the truth. From time to time
he would appear on the programming floor and stroll around slowly,
saying nothing. Yet he hardly gave the program a second glance.

Natch still couldn't exclude the possibility that this was all just an elaborate ruse. Brone had waited more than a dozen years to exact his revenge
for the Shortest Initiation; what was another week or another month? Perhaps he was trying to figure out how to mount a successful attack against
Natch without failing miserably like the soldiers in the Tul jabber Complex. Luckily Brone knew nothing about the exhaustion that set in after
running through thousands of continuous choice cycles, and Natch had no
intention of cluing him in. Uncertainty was Natch's ally here.

The only time the two of them had any real interaction was during policy and strategy sessions. There were still hundreds of logistical
questions that needed to be answered on the basic Possibilities 1.0
interface alone; Possibilities 2.0 would be impossible to master until
they had answered these questions. How would the system resolve
MultiReal conflicts? How many choice cycles could a user process in
that split-second mental interlude? What would happen if the user
failed to select any choice cycle? Natch had been too pressed for time
to explore issues like these when he was still with the fiefcorp. Now he
found it difficult to sift through them without Horvil's and Jara's help.

But those questions were elementary compared to the conundrums
they would face in Possibilities 2.0. Philosophical questions, ontological questions, questions straight out of the science fiction stories Natch
used to read as a boy. How many alternate realities could a person sustain at the same time, and how far should those realities be allowed to
diverge? Under what circumstances could an alternate reality be abandoned, and what would happen then? Did alternate realities need to be
filtered for the rest of the world, so that some people would see possibility x and some would see possibility y? If so, how would MultiReal
handle the mechanics of that filtering? If not, what would happen if two
of your alternate selves bumped into each other?

One evening Natch found himself discussing the limits of MultiReal with Brone. Astounding that they could progress so far without
knowing answers to such basic questions. It was enough to make
Natch's knees buckle.

"I'm not sure I understand which limits you're talking about," said
Brone.

"Spatial limits, for one," replied Natch. "Let's go back to the soccer
analogy. If a player on one end of the field can flip on MultiReal and
catch a player on the other end of the field in a collaborative choice cycle
... where does it end? Where's the-where's the cutoff?"

The bodhisattva drummed his faux fingers on the tabletop as he
mulled over the question.

"This is more than just a hypothetical," continued the entrepreneur.
"I caught those Council officers in the Tul Jabbor Complex with MultiReal just by watching them on video. But what if those officers weren't
even in the same auditorium? What if I was watching somebody in a
totally different auditorium halfway around the world? Or-or on an
orbital colony somewhere? Could you still open a collaborative choice
cycle on them? Shit, does the other person even need to be there at all?
Could I just catch Len Borda in a MultiReal loop right here, right now?"

Billy Sterno piped up from across the table. "We could limit a
choice cycle to line of sight," he said.

Natch pushed himself away from his chair and paced over to Sterno
with his eyes blazing. "So you're saying I can affect the outcome of a
soccer game even if I'm just a spectator in the stands? Can I fly over
the stadium in a hoverbird, look down on the field with a telescope,
and make the goalie miss the ball?"

"We could base it on causation," said Brone. "There has to be a
causal link between all parties involved in a MultiReal loop."

"Fine-but how do you measure that? How do you quantify it?
Everything that happens on the field affects you in some way, even if
it's infinitesimally small. What if you've bet a hundred credits on the
game-is that enough of a causal link to engage someone on the field
in a MultiReal loop?"

Nobody answered, but several people started taking notes. Natch
pressed on, his brain spinning at a furious pace.

"The other thing that's been bothering me ... We've been so
focused on limits of space that we've forgotten about limits of time. So
far we've only tested MultiReal on short interactions. Kicking a soccer
ball. Deciding which way to turn. But how does the program determine how long a choice cycle can be? Can you keep the choice cycle
open for a whole run down the field? Or heck, fire up Possibilities right
when the opening whistle blows, and then just loop the whole game
over and over in your mind until your team wins."

Sterno scowled. "But that means everyone would have to calculate
all the interactions in the game instantly. I don't care how fast this
thing works. No way is there enough time to resolve all those MultiReal conflicts between one second and the next."

"So you could buffer it," replied Natch. "Let's say it takes ten or fifteen seconds to go through all the choice cycles for a whole soccer
game. That's probably enough time for millions of choice cycles.
Maybe billions. MultiReal could just start outputting the first few seconds and spool the rest as you go."

"How fast does this program work anyway?" said Sterno. "How
many choice cycles can you run through in a split second?"

Natch stopped short. He had no idea. The answer touched on
advanced Prengalian physics and involved questions that even the
world's greatest minds could not answer.

The bodhisattva touched his fingertips together under his chin.
"Natch, you know the software better than any of us," he said. "Margaret had sixteen years to work these problems out. What did she
conclude?"

"I don't know," said Natch. "She's dead, and I never got the opportunity to ask her. The only other person who might know is sitting in
a Defense and Wellness Council prison somewhere."

The meeting ended shortly thereafter on a note of grim silence.
Does MultiReal have any limits? the entrepreneur found himself wondering.

Even if they managed to work through the list of technical problems, a whole other set of legal and ethical questions awaited them.
Natch was hesitant to even raise the subject. The fact of the matter
was, catching another person in a collaborative MultiReal process was
morally shady. It meant forcing someone to participate in a software
interaction without his consent-or even his knowledge, since MultiReal erased putative memories as a matter of course. How long would
the L-PRACGs stand for that?

Most troublesome of all was Natch's suspicion that there was
nothing the law could do to stop it. Some of the programming hooks
MultiReal used were buried so deep in the framework that changing
them would upend fifty years of bio/logic progress. Natch had not even
been aware that these hooks existed. They must have lain hidden in the
standard OCHRE system for generations. How had Margaret known
where to find them? Had Marcus Surina put them there? Or maybe
even Prengal?

Natch kept the door to his room locked and barricaded at night.
He made sure that MultiReal remained fully functional despite all
their manipulations, and kept it at the ready. Just in case. Just in case.

In the end, it was the black code that caused Natch to renegotiate the
terms of the agreement with his old hivemate.

The trembling that had been pillaging the nerves of his left arm
began to make exploratory raids throughout his body. He would find his
neck muscles twitching uncontrollably at certain times of the day. More
than once, Natch opened his eyes only to realize that he had blacked out
some indeterminate time before. He would immediately switch into
paranoid mode, shut down the MindSpace bubble, and do a thorough
review of every data strand the Thasselians had touched in the past hour.
But as far as Natch could tell, Brone's devotees remained on the level.

He approached Brone in his backroom office.

"This black code cloaking program," said Natch, too exhausted to
make any attempts at subtlety. "Does it have any side effects?"