4

THE SURINA/NATCH
MULTIREAL
F I EECORP

Dozens of kilometers above the earth's surface, a cluster of hydrogen atoms danced in a copper tube. After several billion oscillations, the hydrogen maser clock declared that a second had passed.

It was midnight.

The news passed via subaether to a processing station run by the Meme Cooperative. The station-itself a small metallic box also floating in geostationary orbit-consulted its internal tables and determined that the time had come to spawn a data newt for the Pierre Loget Fiefcorp. The newt was born mere picoseconds after midnight.

A data newt did not need sixteen years of hive education to fathom its purpose. The mother station had stamped a destination into the newt's very atomic structure, a destiny to fulfill. But it was impossible to know what paths the data structure would need to take or what obstacles it would face along the way. And so the newt was endowed with a level of autonomy and given all the logical tools it would need to carry out its duties. Internal schedules, communication routines, self-replication instructions, maps of the quantum universe. Then the mother station ushered the newt out into the world.

The newt accessed its internal schedule and noted that its first stop was a set of spatial coordinates in a nearby processing station. Upon its arrival, the station challenged the newt to state its credentials and destination. The newt consulted its fore table and found the answers to these perplexing questions: Pierre Ulyanich Loget Fiefcorp, BizWorks 139.5f, Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp. Satisfied with the newt's response, the station directed its microscopic visitor towards a collection of static information belonging to the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp.

A rote conversation ensued. Was BizWorks 139.5f listed as an acceptable expense in the Natch Fiefcorp data stores? Yes, it was. Did the unique identifying code stored in the newt's memory correspond to the one expected by the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp? Yes, it did. Was the price quoted by PulCorp agreeable to its customer? Yes, it was.

The answer triggered an innate response in the data newt. The newt replicated itself, stamped its clone with a subset of the required tools, and waited patiently as the newcomer sped off to the Vault. Billions of newts had already queued up at the nearby Vault processing center to retrieve and deposit payments large and small, but there was no disagreement or jockeying for position in a world of indelible, unalterable rules. The data representative of the Pierre Loget Fiefcorp slid into line in its prescribed position. After a few nanoseconds, the newt reached the front of the queue and presented the Vault agent with its transaction: Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp, Pierre Ulyanich Loget Fiefcorp, 0.03 credits. The Vault agent made all the appropriate inquiries and finally responded with a credit authorization. What happened to the credit authorization after that was of no concern to the cloned newt; it reported a transaction summary back to its master and returned to the mother station.

With a credit authorization in its databanks, the data newt at the Natch Fiefcorp data stores determined it was ready to proceed. It consulted the fore table to look for its Defense and Wellness Council-sanctioned processing precedence, and lined up behind OCHRE transmissions, geosynchrons, Prime Committee statistical algorithms, and agents of L-PRACG taxation. Finally, the newt arrived at the front of the line and completed the task for which it had been born: the recording of an order by the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp for a replacement part on one of Horvil's bio/logic programming bars.

All that remained was housecleaning. The newt spawned another clone to relay the order back to the mother station. Meanwhile, the newt consulted its own aft table for special instructions on completing a business transaction. The L-PRACG with jurisdiction over the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp dictated that all programs must log a record of their activities in the fiefcorp's data stores. This task done, the newt performed a quick self-examination to see if it had lost data integrity or left any stray bits of information in the fiefcorp's holdings or needed to do any unusual acts of maintenance. All indications were that the newt had conducted a clean transaction.

And so the data structure left the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp holdings to perform a sweep of the remaining 4,293 fiefcorps on Pierre Loget's subscription list.

Several thousand nanoseconds later, the newt returned to the mother processing station-the prodigal son back home at last. The data structure reported a summary of its activities for the statistical programs to compile and then reported back to the Meme Cooperative energy stores. There the newt uncomplainingly self-destructed, having successfully fulfilled its mission of existence.

A few billion oscillations of hydrogen later, another second passed.

More than twenty-four hours had gone by since Margaret's speech, and Jara had slept for none of them. Had she not been propping herself awake with Doze-B-Gone 91 and AntiSleepStim 124.7 and two cups of nitro, the analyst might have taken more notice of her surroundings. Instead, Jara sleepwalked past the guards at Andra Pradesh and up three stories of the blue Surina Enterprise Facility with hardly a glance in any direction.

She opened the conference room door and found herself standing in a corporate boardroom from antiquity.

Jara blinked hard, twice, wondering if the opulent surroundings were the hallucinations of a sleep-deprived mind. The oval-shaped room sported a faux mahogany table that could have seated twenty, glass windows that overlooked a panoply of phallic skyscrapers, and a wet bar complete with Waterford crystal and Kentucky bourbon. But Jara was in no mood to start tapping things to figure out whether they were real or SeeNaRee. She approached the table and slumped onto a chair, which automatically scooted in and adjusted to the contours of her body. This one, at least, was virtual.

The analyst, consulting the time, realized she had arrived fifteen minutes early for their fiefcorp meeting. Jara scowled an order to the building for another cup of nitro, and then called up the morning drudge reports on a nearby window.

Nobody could quite recall who had coined the term infoquake, but within hours it had become common currency throughout the civilized world. Infoquake: a mysterious computational disturbance of unknown origin and awesome destructive power. Even the handful of residents living at remote experimental colonies beyond Jupiter were now bandying the word around like they had been speaking it for years.

Unfortunately, the terminology was just about the only thing the pundits could agree upon.

"Once again, the Data Sea has exhibited its juvenile tendency to turn everything into a conspiracy," wrote the drudge Mah Lo Vertiginous.

According to the preliminary analysis from Creed Conscientious, the infoquake was a simple bottleneck of information; nothing more, nothing less. An unheard-of concentration of multi projections in a single space, vying for access to the same facts and figures on the Data Sea. Is it so hard to imagine that a series of overloaded data agents could cause OCHREs to fail?

But Vertiginous' opinion was by no means the majority along the drudge circuit. Sen Sivv Sor had a considerably darker view of the previous night's events:

Some governmentalist cretins would have you believe we suffered from a simple bottleneck of information last night. Unfortunately, dear readers, nothing could be further from the truth.

Since when does a simple bottleneck of information stop several hundred weak hearts from beating? Since when does a simple bottleneck of information cause a generator malfunction on Furtoid and send two hundred people to an icy death? Since when does a simple bottleneck of information wreak havoc with the gravity control on 49th Heaven and fling three dozen people into freefall?

Mark my words: Disasters like the infoquake are not natural occurrences. Wherever you find such poisonous medicine, there's a human hand nearby administering the dose.

"Let me guess," said a voice. "Tokyo circa the Second American Revolution."

Jara whipped her head around to find Horvil surveying the room. The elaborate SeeNaRee only seemed to heighten the engineer's already high spirits. As soon as he spotted the wet bar, Horvil bounded across the room on some undefined errand of mischief. His movement revealed a nervous-looking youth who had been standing in the engineer's shadow.

"It's not Tokyo," said Jara. "It's New York City, before the orbital colony hit. See, that's the Hudson River over there." She regarded the young man with a cynical eye, noticed his inky black hair and five o'clock shadow, and decided he must be a relative of Horvil. His face had the same air of bonhomie, but Jara could also see an undercurrent of piety that could only have been a genetic gift from the infamous Aunt Berilla. "You must be Benyamin."

The youth nodded and gave a polite bow in Jara's direction. "Towards Perfection," he said. "I guess you're Jara. Horvil's told me a lot about you."

Jara shot a suspicious glance at the engineer, who had begun to juggle the Waterford crystal. Over his head, patterns of reflected sunlight danced crazily on the ceiling. "Oh, has he?"

"Don't worry," said Horvil. "I really only told him a tiny bit. Just the good things."

Benyamin sensed the tension and immediately assumed the role of diplomat. "Ah, the drudges," he said, nodding at the chaotic display of fully justified type on the window. "You know, Khann Frejohr thinks High Executive Borda caused it."

"Caused what?"

"Well, the infoquake."

Horvil had moved from three pieces of stemware to four, and their arcs of flight were growing longer by the second. "Yeah, I saw that speech he gave last night," he said. "The evil work of the Defense and Wellness Council. Len Borda's last-ditch effort to muzzle the Sarinas once and for all. You gotta love that Khann Frejohr."

"What a load of shit," said Jara with a grimace. "Come on, Horvil. Borda pulled his troops out of Andra Pradesh almost as soon as the infoquake was over. If he wanted Margaret dead, she'd be dead by now." She waved her hand, banishing the news coverage from the window screen. "So how did Borda react to Khann's speech? He must have gone completely offline."

Benyamin nodded. "That's putting it mildly. He shut down the Sigh and the Jamm and all other `resource-intensive pleasure networks' until further notice."

"He shut down-?"

"Len Borda isn't our problem right now." The three fiefcorp apprentices swiveled around to find Natch standing in the doorway. Jara saw that he had come with wolf's grin and invisible audience in tow, not to mention an impeccable pin-striped suit that would have been at home in ancient New York. "So let's get down to business already."

Horvil caught three pieces of stemware but accidentally let the fourth slip through his fingers. The virtual Waterford landed on the marble floor with a clang but did not break. "What about Vigal? And Merri?" asked Horvil.

"Vigal's off to another one of his seminars in Beijing," said Natch. "Effects of Orbital Colony Gravitational Fields on Neural Pathways, or something like that."

"Nothing stops a scientific conference," muttered Jara.

"And I'm right here," said Merri. The blonde channel manager had apparently snuck in while nobody was paying attention. Merri had taken a seat near Natch's side of the table and projected a set of notes visible on the dark wood in front of her. Her penmanship was crisp and perfect, something that gave Jara an inexplicable pang of jealousy.

"So what's everyone waiting for?" cried Natch in a sudden fit of pique. "Sit the fuck down."

Natch planted himself in the cushioned leather chair at the head of the table and surveyed his four apprentices with a barely suppressed smirk. A snapshot of the Council troops tromping through the Surina courtyard loomed large on the window behind him; Jara realized she must have accidentally left open one of her morning news stories. The four apprentices gazed expectantly back and forth between the photo and their fiefcorp master. Margaret Surina, the Defense and Wellness Council, investor meetings, infoquakes, MultiReal-hadn't the time finally come for Natch to let them know what was going on?

The entrepreneur turned to Jara with pronounced matter-of-factness, his face a riddle. "Why don't you start us off with an analysis of the latest sales figures," he said.

Jara shrugged. Sales figures? Who can think of sales at a time like this? But she knew Natch, and had prepared a brief analysis this morning anyway. She snapped her fingers briskly, causing a three-dimensional chart to hover over the surface of the conference table. Lines in primary colors raced one another to see which could climb to the top right corner the quickest.

The analyst indicated an uncharacteristic dip at the end of a green line labeled MENTAL INDEXX 39. "Looks like one of our programs took a hit yesterday," she said. "An 18 percent drop in the last twentyfour hours. It must have suffered a few glitches during the infoquake." She gave Horvil the evil eye. "Billy Sterno's DataReorg 55c had a 43 percent jump in sales during the same period."

Horvil sat back confidently, measuring the table as a possible resting spot for his feet. "Glitches happen. Mental Indexx 40'11 bring 'em back into the fold."

As she crunched the numbers, Merri plucked at the chart lines like guitar strings. "I see there's a silver lining here as well."

Jara smiled. "Yeah, I see it too.... It looks like the Patel Brothers had a few glitches of their own, and Primo's took note." The chart shifted from sales figures to Primo's scores. If anything, the incline of the race became even steeper. "So even though we lost market share to Billy Sterno, we gained ground against the Patels on Primo's. Looks like we're back up to number three!"

Horvil broke out in a spirited cheer, which Merri and Benyamin echoed with a pair of quiet grins. Natch seemed oddly oblivious, a mystery that Jara did not feel like pursuing. Maybe this info quake was the end of the whole thing, she thought. Maybe all this hassle will just go away, and my last ten months will be business as usual.

"Okay, so if we look at the big picture, what've we got?" said Horvil.

"82.4 percent gross increase in revenues so far this year," stated Jara, "most of that after we hit number one on Primo's. And only a 17 percent increase in expenditures." She banished the bar chart to datalimbo with a wave of her hand. "I'd say we're doing pretty well."

A look of concern slowly rippled across Merri's face. "Only a 17 percent increase in spending-how is that possible?" The soft-spoken channel manager began counting on her fingers. "In the last week alone, we've bought new bio/logic programming bars ... analysis algorithms ... these conference rooms ... not to mention hiring a new apprentice ..." She nodded her head towards Benyamin, who merely sat with a bland smile on his face. Merri took a deep breath. "I was hoping, Natch, that you might be able to explain some of this."

Natch raised one eyebrow. A private in-joke with his invisible audience. "What do you want me to explain?"

"Well, for one thing, I don't see any of this showing up on the books...."

"Jara does the books, not you."

"Yes, I know, but still-"

Jara had had enough. Her longed-for ten months of peace and quiet suddenly imploded. She lodged her left elbow firmly on the table and used it as a base to launch an accusing finger at the fiefcorp master. "Come on, Natch! First you start fundraising for a product we don't make, and then out of the blue you start spending money we don't have. You totally ignore the Primo's ratings. And now you've gotten us involved in this whole mess with Margaret and the infoquake. You've put us off long enough, Natch! What the fuck is going on?"

She had unleashed enough verbal thunder to send any of the other apprentices scampering for cover, but Natch remained unmoved. He gave a sidelong glance to Horvil, but the engineer was gazing at Jara with dumb awe.

"All right then." Natch's eyes glittered. He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head, as if he needed a cradle for all that excess brainpower. "In a little over twelve hours, I will officially dissolve the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp. We are getting out of the regular bio/logic programming business. Tomorrow, you will all be apprentices in a new fiefcorp devoted exclusively to MultiReal."

His announcement was greeted by a stunned silence. Jara had a protest half-formed in her mouth but strangled it when she remembered the portability clause in their contracts, a clause which essentially gave Natch the right to pass off their apprenticeships to whomever he chose. She looked at Merri and Horvil and saw their faces meld into bland expressions of unconcern, a telltale sign that they had both flipped on PokerFace 83.4b. Benyamin closed his eyes and ducked his head as if he had just been punched in the gut.

"When did you decide all this?" said Jara weakly.

"Yesterday."

The silence remained. A pigeon fluttered by the window with a loud broo.

"Now, I know you're all getting impatient with just room and board," Natch continued, touching his fingertips in front of his face. "Your shares all mature this year, and some of you are thinking of cashing out. So I'm prepared to sweeten the deal. Yes, that includes you, Ben. Cash out your shares today and I'll release you from your apprenticeship with no penalty ... or sign on to a two-year contract with the new fiefcorp for ten times the compensation, plus bonuses. The offer stands until midnight tonight, Shenandoah time."

Jara felt a wave of emotion crash over her. A week ago, she had wanted nothing more than to be set free from Natch's shackles, to run as far as possible and not look back. She remembered that carefree Meme Cooperative official in Melbourne, sitting at his desk all day, his mind adrift in some SeeNaRee fantasyland. For process' preservation, I could use a job like that, she thought. A nice, dull desk job of looking at datamaps and bar charts sounds perfect right about now.

But then suddenly Jara thought of her old proctor from the hive, the one who had stimulated the governmentalist ideals of her youth and negotiated the surrender of her virginity while he was at it. Had he been somewhere in that crowd last night, as spellbound by Margaret's lilting voice as the rest of them? Would the bodhisattva's words have filled him with hope, or would he have some cynical counterpoint to make?

And what would he think of Jara now, almost twenty years down the road, ready to throw aside the remainder of her ambitions and slip into a SeeNaRee stupor?

Horvil interrupted her reverie with a loud clearing of the throat. "So what's gonna happen to all those programs we've been slaving over?" he said. "NiteFocus and EyeMorph and Mental Indexx and the rest of them?"

The engineer might as well have asked about the fate of an obsolete set of bio/logic programming bars. "They'll be sold off," Natch replied with a shrug. "You didn't think we were going to upgrade them forever, did you? We won't have time to maintain those old programs, and the money they generate is nothing compared to what MultiReal is going to pull in."

Across the table, Jara could see a little piece of Horvil die at Natch's pronouncement. The programs he had weaned and nurtured from RODs and hive projects into Primo's powerhouses would soon belong to the graveyard of history. Qubits of information stranded on some forgotten atoll on the backwaters of the Data Sea.

"Natch, let me be honest here," said Horvil, a tinge of anger clouding the engineer's voice. "I really had no idea what Margaret was talking about yesterday."

"It was a vague speech," agreed Benyamin with a sigh.

"I mean, what is this MultiReal? What does it look like? What does it do? Did Margaret ever sit down and do a-a needs analysis or a survey or something to figure out if an

ybody wants multiple realities? I've tackled a lot of tough problems in my life, but I can't remember a single time I said to myself, You could fix this if you just had a few alternate realities."

Jara found herself nodding her head vigorously in agreement. "Listen, Natch, even if Margaret is on the right track, what makes you think this, this, daydream of hers will work? We have no idea how good an engineer this woman is. That licensing agreement you made with her might be totally worthless."

"The licensing agreement is dead," said Natch. "I'm a co-owner now. "

"What?"

"Hold on, everybody. Act confident. Pretend you know what's going on.... Towards Perfection, Margaret. How are you?"

Jara whipped her head around, only to see Margaret Surina herself watching from the doorway. Part of the SeeNaRee? No, this woman was real. Of course she's real, you idiot, Jara chided herself. She lives right across the courtyard. The analyst slammed on PokerFace 83.4b as quickly as she could, and the rest of the staff followed suit.

"Perfection, Natch," said Margaret, with a slight bow. "What a great environment." She rapped her knuckles on the illusory table, and gave a wan smile at the SeeNaRee-generated knocking sound.

"We're just wrapping up a few details here," said Natch, his voice laced with SmoothTalker 142. "Why don't you go ahead and take a seat? I'm sure a few of these chairs are real."

Margaret shook her head quietly. On closer inspection, Jara realized that this was not the same serene woman who had confidently faced down legions of Defense and Wellness Council troops last night in front of 700 million people. The bodhisattva looked as if she had been eviscerated. She had not changed clothes since the speech, and from the diminished sparkle of her eyes, it looked as if she had not slept either. "I'm afraid I can't," she sighed, making a noticeable effort at nonchalance. "There's so much going on. All that trouble out in the orbital colonies ..." Margaret's voice cracked, and for a minute Jara could have sworn she was fighting back tears. "Len Borda is furious."

Natch chuckled. "He'd be even more furious if he knew you were here with me."

"That's a chance I'll have to take. I ... just came to tell you that, if you're ready, my people will be sending out a release to the drudges."

"Ready as I'll ever be."

"Outstanding." Margaret exhaled loudly. She looked as if she might melt into the ground right then and there. "We can iron out the details over the next few weeks."

"So you've spoken to Quell then?"

"Yes. He has decided to stay with the MultiReal project. He's busy getting everything prepared; he'll be here Saturday at noon."

"With access to the program, I assume."

"Naturally."

Jara was growing irritated at this light exchange. So many pleasantries, so little content. Natch and Margaret Surina could very well be reciting memorized lines.

"Then Perfection to you, Margaret," said Natch, rising and giving a deep bow. "It's a pleasure doing business with you, as always."

"And you, Natch. Sheldon Surina once said, There are no ends, only means. So here's to a long and fruitful partnership."

And with that, she turned and walked away.

"A partnership," said Merri, as her PokerFace morphed into a look of concerned perplexity.

Natch nodded and made a motion like someone stifling a yawn. He had replaced his inscrutable mask as soon as Margaret had turned her back. "The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp," he said. "Surina/Natch with a slash. But don't worry, it's mostly a silent partnership. Margaret's handing over all the day-to-day operations to me."

"Suring/Natch!" Horvil bellowed with glee, then pounded out a drum fill on the table. "Surina/Natch! I can't wait to hear what Aunt Berilla thinks about that."

"So Margaret provides the product and the capital-" began Merri.

Natch cut her off. "Not the capital. Not all of it, anyway."

"Then where did that come from?" asked Jara, leaning forward to project her venom as close to Natch as possible.

"A third party."

"What third party? One of those loopy capitalmen you and Merri reeled in at your fundraising pitches last week?"

"It doesn't matter," snapped Natch, suddenly annoyed. Jara congratulated herself on derailing his train of thought, if only for an instant.

"So Margaret provides the product, and an apprentice, and meeting space," continued Merri, shrugging off the interruptions. "Not to mention a name with four hundred years of history. I don't mean to be presumptuous, Natch ... but what do we bring to the table?"

The fiefcorp master sat back with fingers intertwined and raised one eyebrow. Jara could practically hear the ominous trumpets blaring out notes of suspense inside Natch's head. "Me."

Jara threw up her hands. "You?" she spat out.

But Natch would not be thrown off-track again; like a mutating virus, he had already adapted to her caustic attacks. "You're missing the point," he said calmly. "Margaret is scared. You all saw her standing there a few minutes ago. She looked like a fucking ghost. She needs to get MultiReal out to the public, and she needs to do it quickly, before she becomes a victim of another assassination attempt."

Horvil's eyes went wide and his jaw plummeted. "Assassination attempt?"

"Why do you think those Council troops were there last night? And for process' preservation, what do you think the infoquake was? It was a distraction. It was Len Borda's attempt to create pandemonium so he could do his dirty work while no one was looking. Except he made a few miscalculations, and Margaret managed to slip away. Come on, you didn't really believe that bullshit about a simple bottleneck of information, did you?"

"I did," muttered Benyamin, blushing furiously. Jara remembered Sen Sivv Sor's words in that morning's editorial: Wherever you find such poisonous medicine, there's a human hand nearby administering the dose.

"Well, it's nonsense. Borda wants MultiReal to disappear. He wants Margaret dead. And the only way to prevent that is to spread MultiReal far and wide before Borda gets a chance to strike. Because once everyone from here to Furtoid is swimming in multiple realities, the Council won't be able to stop it.

"So Margaret needs a good product, and she needs it quickly. People around her are dying. The Council has already proven they'll march right into her compound without a second thought. She's never had to work under pressure before, and she just doesn't know how to take a product to market on a tight deadline. What does Margaret need? She needs the best programmers in the world to put together something marketable now.

"That's where we come in.

"You want quality? The Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp is the best in the business. We've got the best analyst and the best engineer and the best channel manager around. You want fast? We climbed to number one on Primo's faster than anyone in history. We know how to work under pressure and we won't be intimidated by anyone."

As Natch's words pricked Jara's skin and sizzled her hormones to a white-hot intensity, she felt a sudden charge of electricity in the room. He actually called me the best analyst in the business, she thought. An hour ago, she was ready to submit to the doldrums of a government desk job. Jara looked around and noticed that Benyamin and Merri both had an excited gleam in their eye, and Horvil was actually fidgeting in his chair like an eight-year-old boy. How in the world does he take control of a room like that?

"So how long do we have?" said Jara.

"Ten days," replied Natch. "We make our first presentation at seven p.m. on December 11th, Andra Pradesh time. MultiReal goes on sale the next day."

Silence descended upon the bio/logic apprentices and snatched the breath from their lungs. It was already late evening here in Andra Pradesh. Assuming that Margaret's apprentice arrived with the MultiReal program by Saturday at noon, that would leave them approximately eight days. Eight days to learn a brand-new technology that promised to revolutionize the world; to adjust to the parameters of a new company structure; to go through the entire product conceptualization and development cycle; and to perfect that product for release to billions of voracious consumers. Jara felt like crying. For such a huge project, eight weeks or even eight months would have seemed too short a time.

"And what about the Council?" piped in Benyamin.

"What about them?" replied Merri.

"Well, if Len Borda was prepared to murder the richest woman in the world to get his hands on MultiReal ... what makes you think he'll hesitate to come after us?"

Jara quietly tallied up in her head all the Council officers she had seen wandering around this week, prowling the narrow sidestreets of Andra Pradesh, the avenues of Shenandoah, the cobblestone paths in front of her London apartment. She usually paid them little heed, the soldiers in white robes. Keepers of the peace, minions of High Executive Borda and his Javertian obsession with public safety. To be on the run from such a ubiquitous enemy-it was simply unthinkable.

Natch was grinning that feral grin of his. His eyes had focused on an invisible spot in the middle of the room, a place where nobody else was looking. "You still have a choice," he said. "Until midnight tonight Shenandoah time, you are all still apprentices of the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp. You can either jump on board the new company with both feet or bail out while you have the chance."

Horvil let out a squeak. Natch swiveled his way. "Gorda?" whimpered the engineer.

"Len Borda," said Natch contemptuously, grinding his teeth as if chewing his words. "The high executive might have scared Margaret out of her wits, but he's never dealt with me."

The two men in the tube car were trying very hard to be nonchalant. Too hard. The taller one with the mole on his cheek completely avoided looking in Natch's direction, while the short, dark one swept his attention past the fiefcorp master at precise metronomic intervals. Neither of them took more than a token sip from his mug of nitro.

Natch expected better surveillance tactics from the Defense and Wellness Council.

The entrepreneur spent the dark hours bouncing between Cisco and Seattle staring at redwoods. He expected Jara's notice of resignation at any minute. But midnight Shenandoah time arrived with no message traffic of consequence, just the usual jumble of political propaganda and L-PRACG-sanctioned advertising. He gave one last glance at the Council spooks and allowed himself to fall into a light sleep.

Natch awoke at three in the morning to find the strange men gone. He wondered how long it had been since he had actually slept horizontally in a bed rather than vertically on a contoured tube seat. No matter. He still had plenty of time to make his way back east and prepare the fiefcorp's catalog of bio/logic programs for sale before Quell arrived with the MultiReal databases. Once the sale of their catalog hit the market, Natch would have boldly marched across the Rubicon; there would be no turning back. Had a general ever led his troops into battle with such nebulous weapons?

Then he stepped off the tube at Cisco station, only to be confronted by an image of his own face.

On the viewscreen, Natch recognized the three-meter-high photo from the media blitz following his ascent to number one on Primo's. He stood and watched his doppelganger tick off a few important points on his fingers to an unseen interviewer. His face showed that stern look of concentration he got while pacing and talking business.

Superimposed over the image:

SOLD TO THE LOWEST BIDDER!

Margaret Surina Enters into Partnership with Unscrupulous Fiefcorp Master; Future of Groundbreaking MultiReal Technology in Doubt (Read about it in this morning's John Ridglee Update)

Natch hustled through the tube station, an act he could have performed blindfolded by now. Five minutes later, he left the local line behind and boarded a larger express train that would take him across the continent to Shenandoah station. A young man with a purplestriped goatee elbowed his friend in the side at Natch's approach. The two gave him mute looks of disgust and vacated the cabin as soon as the fiefcorp master sat down.

Must be quite an article, he thought.

Natch projected the story onto the faux leather chair in front of him. Compared to Sen Sivv Sor's curmudgeonly countenance, Ridglee's was young and foppish, with left eyebrow so far aslant that it was almost in orbit. His commentary was similarly skewed. The article contained little news beyond that contained in the Surinas' press release, relying instead on a grab bag of fictional anecdotes and unattributed rumors. Yet the drudge had certainly done a thorough job of digging up the details of Natch's past. Everything was there: the Shortest Initiation, the confrontations with Captain Bolbund, the citations from the Meme Cooperative, the hardball tactics he had used over the years against the Patel Brothers.

The tube hurtled underground for the nearly two-hour trip across the continent. As daylight gave way to the tunnel's artificial glow, Natch watched his name take over the Data Sea.

Within twenty minutes, the delegates at the Congress of LPRACGs were already quarreling over his partnership with Margaret. The Sarinas are a public treasure! cried the Speaker on a viewscreen half a meter from Natch's head. Are we just going to sit back and let this man peddle their works all over the Data Sea like a common ROD? Dozens of glum representatives nodded in agreement.

The dour voice of Khann Frejohr broke in from the libertarian side of the chamber. It's just like the governmentalists to suggest it's our duty to interfere in the workings of a free marketplace...

Primo's began advertising a special supplement that promised to analyze Natch's professional career in depth.

At the first opportunity, Sen Sivv Sor weighed in on the crisis, denouncing the young fiefcorp master in ways Ridglee had only hinted at. All of the other major players in the biollogic industry are devotees of the creeds, even the despicable self-serving ones like Creed Thassel, wrote Sor. But I have looked Natch directly in the eye, dear readers, and saw no evidence that he possesses any morals or ethics at all.

On the viewscreen, the hooknosed Speaker was crazily waving her index finger around in the air. We have plenty of precedents for government intervention in the markets, Khann. Didn't the Prime Committee break up the OCHRE Corporation?

The libertarian snorted. That was two hundred fifty years ago, Madame Speaker. Besides which, the Committee was acting to disband a monopoly. Sounds like democratization to me.

Then how do you explain Dr. Plugenpatch's success? A quasi-governmental entity with open standards that has gloriously extended life expectancy ...

Natch leaned his head back and let out a deep-belly laugh. The fools, the fools! He was climbing the peaks of tall mountains, and down below the Powers That Be could do nothing but scramble around and bicker over the pebbles. He could see the paradise that awaited him at the top now: lunar estates, immutable wealth, the stewardship of an entire industry.

And what an industry it would be! Natch didn't know precisely the shape a MultiReal business would take-an egalitarian product sold to the masses? A technology channeled to the L-PRACGs? Military licenses to the Council and the Prime Committee? No matter what path the business took, it would inevitably lead him to the same glorious future.

Natch laughed again. Three more riders in the tube gave him peculiar looks and rose to find other seats.

Natch's good mood lasted through the morning, until Horvil began flinging panicked multi requests in his direction. Natch knew his old hivemate was in a panic; that was the only logical explanation for Horvil being awake and alert before noon.

"Drop everything," said the engineer, materializing in Natch's foyer and lumbering his way towards the office. "Drop everything, everything, everything."

Natch was in MindSpace, stacking chunks of recursive code on a ledge of NiteFocus 50 like a boy lining up dominos. After fifty iterations, he would have expected the program to be perfect, but the more mindpower he devoted to NiteFocus, the more problematic it seemed to become. "What is it, Horv?"

Horvil emitted a harrutnph and sliced his left hand through the line of dominos to catch his boss's attention. "You're going to want to turn off the bubble for this, Natch," he said. "Trust me." The fiefcorp master looked on skeptically as Horvil waved his hand at a viewscreen on the opposite wall.

A holographic projection of Petrucio Patel appeared in front of the screen. He was by far the handsomer of the two Patel brothers, and actually cut quite a dashing figure in his triple-buttoned suit and wispy black mustache. The projection was a recording, of course; Natch knew from experience that his hated rival was much taller in real life.

"Towards Perfection," said Petrucio Patel in a rich baritone. "We say that all the time to one another, for hello, for goodbye, for peace, for health. `Towards Perfection.' But do we really know what it means? Well, Sheldon Surina knew. The Father of Bio/Logics said that Perfection is a safe shore in the tempest. "

"Slick bastard," Horvil mumbled under his breath.

"Shhh."

"Isn't a safe shore what we're all looking for?" continued Petrucio Patel. "But as the events of last night have clearly shown us, we live in a time without charted waters or safe shores ... unless you're using one of the Patel Brothers' new MultiReal programs, under direct license from Margaret Surina herself."

Natch could feel a hole open up in the small of his back, out of which slithered a host of hidden anxieties. The Patels with a license to sell MultiReal? How was that possible? He turned off the MindSpace bubble and sank onto a stool.

Petrucio waved his brown-skinned hand and summoned forth a typical programming floor. Behind him in the shadows, half a dozen apprentices toiled away in their MindSpace bubbles, while the portly silhouette of Frederic Patel waddled from one workbench to the next. "PatelReal 1.0 will bring you a whole set of practical applications for multiple realities that are safe enough to use in your own home," said Petrucio. As soon as the word safe passed from his lips, a second Petrucio materialized on his left. Same triple-buttoned suit, same debonair smile.

"PatelReal easily keeps track of the confusion and complexity of multiple realities," said the second Petrucio. And with a nod, he brought forth a third clone. "PatelReal can help you navigate the troughs and waves of multiple realities ... and bring you to a safe shore! "

Finally, the third Petrucio Patel snapped his fingers, causing the rest of the display to vanish. "The Patel Brothers: a safe shore in the tempest," said the lone remaining Patel. "Now, we know you have questions-and we have answers! Come attend the world's first demonstration of MultiReal technology next Tuesday, at the Kordez Thassel Complex near the Twin Cities. See PatelReal 1.0 in person! Until then, Towards Perfection-and a safe shore!"

The slick programmer took a bow, and vanished.

Questions buzzed like hornets inside Natch's head, too many and too fast to handle. He sat paralyzed on his stool, feeling like he himself had wandered into some kind of alternate reality. Horvil collapsed in a quivering heap on the visitor's chair in the corner.

Just when Natch thought he had everything figured out, just when he knew who all the players were in this game, the rules had suddenly changed. How could he have agreed to form a new company with Margaret when his greatest enemies had already struck a licensing deal with her? Was this entire MultiReal project a trap? Who else had a piece of MultiReal?

Natch's mind flashed back to the bio/logics industry gathering before Margaret's speech and his confrontation with Frederic Patel. So that's the game you two are playing, eh? the engineer had said, and Natch had naively assumed that Frederic had been speaking to him.

Natch's legs began to ache; he climbed slowly to his feet and began marching back and forth across the office. He needed to explore the practical dimensions of this latest news, not to mention the legal and financial dimensions. It wouldn't be long now before word of this debacle reached the drudges. Merri, Jara and Benyamin would have questions. Vigal would be sending him an awkward message of condolence any minute now.

Two minutes later, a multi request did indeed click inside his head. But it was not from a fiefcorp employee. Natch grabbed a bio/logic programming bar off his workbench and clutched it like a samurai warrior as he accepted the request.

Brone.

"Gaaah!" shouted a distressed Horvil as the Thasselian strode into the room. If the engineer had been present in the flesh, his recoil would have sent him tumbling backwards and probably smashed the chair to bits.

"Still the same after all these years, I see, Horvil," Natch's old enemy said with a minuscule trace of amusement.

"But-but you're ..."

"What? Dead?" said the bodhisattva with a dismissive snort. "No, not yet, I'm afraid, despite your friend's best efforts."

Natch eyed his old enemy frostily. The prosthetic arm, false eye and scars were still evident, but now Brone wore them as comfortably as he wore his expensive cream-colored suit. Horvil did not seem to have even noticed his handicaps yet.

Then Natch caught sight of the three vertical stripes pinned to Brone's chest, the emblem for Creed Thassel, and the tumblers in his mind began to turn. The Thasselians ... Brone ... the Kordez Thassel Complex ... Petrucio Patel's demo next week ...

"Did you have anything to do with this?" he snapped.

A puzzled Brone blinked several times in quick succession. "Did I have anything to do with what?" he replied calmly.

Natch looked his old hivemate in the eye and tried to penetrate that thick gauze of death. Could he actually be telling the truth? "Play it back, Horv," he said with a shrug. "I'm sure that promo's all over the Data Sea anyway."

Horvil had caught sight of Brone's rubbery right hand, and now couldn't stop staring at it. "Fffft," he said, tilting his head slightly in the direction of the viewscreen.

The Bodhisattva of Creed Thassel looked around for somewhere to sit, but his search only turned up the chair that Horvil had planted himself in and the stool Natch was zealously guarding. He turned towards the viewscreen, then stood in a dead-on imitation of politeness while the holographic Petrucio went through his spiel. A small smile gathered on Brone's face as he watched the performance.

"Quite clever," said Brone after Patel faded into nothingness. "The whole world's in an uproar over this `infoquake' nonsense ... and now the Patel Brothers of all people are going to show us the way to safety. How disingenuous."

"You didn't answer my question," said Natch through gritted teeth.

"Creed Thassel might be a small organization, Natch, and yes, I am the Bodhisattva of Creed Thassel. But there are still a few hundred thousand devotees on the rolls. Even if I knew whether Frederic and Petrucio have embraced our philosophy-which I don't-you certainly can't expect me to know what they're up to twenty-four hours a day."

"They're holding a demo at the Kordez Thassel Complex."

"Creed Elan and the Vault directors and the Meme Cooperative hold meetings there all the time," shrugged Brone. "You don't suspect them of being Thasselian spies, do you?"

Natch growled vehemently and raised the programming bar in his hands as if preparing to strike. Why did Brone always have to show up when his head was so full of cobwebs? "So what the fuck are you doing here?" he said.

"Business." Brone drifted over to the workbench and began studying the bio/logic programming bars with his virtual fingers.

Horvil, his jowls flapping, whipped his head back and forth between the two old rivals. Comprehension dawned on his face in a sudden rush. "He's the `third party' that's financing us?"

"'Third party'?" said Brone mockingly, his gaze suddenly focused on the engineer. "Your master and I are business partners now, Horvil. Surely you know that already. Natch needs some quick cash to get in on Margaret Surina's game. He goes looking for all those business associates who like him and trust him enough to make this kind of investment-and he can't come up with a single name. Certainly a mathematician like you can see the inevitable approach of consequence."

The engineer gave his master a wounded look. "You could have come to me."

Brone walked over and regarded Horvil with an otherworldly stare. The engineer flinched out of reflex. "Be realistic, Horvil. What would your Aunt Berilla think? She'd start moralizing. Or worse, she'd start asking for shares. No, Natch would rather go to a faceless organization like Creed Thassel, where he can work strictly on a cash basis." Brone knelt slowly on the floor and leaned forward until he was close enough to kiss Horvil's nose. "And do you know why?"

The engineer was trembling. "Why?"

"Because he wants MultiReal all for himself," he rasped. "And he doesn't want anybody to get a piece of it-especially his old friend Horvil, who will understand how it works much better than he does."

Natch had had enough. He stalked around the workbench and stood toe to toe with his old rival, causing Horvil to scurry across the room for cover. Brone was at least ten centimeters taller than the fiefcorp master, but the ferocity in Natch's eyes lent him a presence that dominated the room. "All right, this little business arrangement ends right here," he hissed.

The bodhisattva arched an eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

"I mean I'm ready to pay off your loan in full, right here, right now. And then you can get the fuck out of my apartment and never set foot in here again."

Brone pursed his lips like a proctor considering the request of a dim-witted pupil, then sidestepped Natch's glare and took a seat in the chair that Horvil had so recently vacated. Within seconds, he had retreated back into his detached emotional fortress. "Margaret Surina's money."

"Of course."

"I predicted you would do this," said Brone, crossing one leg over the other. "But I will admit I did not expect you to hit Margaret up for money to pay me off so soon. I thought you would be smart enough to let bygones be bygones and recognize a potential alliance when you saw one."

"You really think I'm going to stay in debt to you one minute longer than I have to?"

Brone shook his head in that maddeningly supercilious way of his. Natch suddenly wished the man were here in the flesh so he could muscle him outside and toss him over the balcony. "Where is the mind I used to respect so? Where is the killer intellect Figaro Fi used to speak of? Natch, that pittance of a loan I gave you was an act of trust. It was a foundation on which to build.

"Think, Natch! You know how much trouble you had finding investors. The drudges despise you across the board, and you can certainly imagine what the Defense and Wellness Council thinks of you right now. What happens when Margaret Surina grows tired of you, as she surely will? Who will you turn to then? Or are you naive enough to think you can do all this alone?"

Natch had retreated back to the safe fortification of his workbench, where he stood silently and wondered how much of this he could take before he severed Brone's multi connection. Why hadn't he done so already? Horvil stood in the corner and watched their tete-a-tete with a miserable look on his face.

"Natch, when are you going to realize that you're in over your head?" continued Brone in a completely even tone of voice. "You must know by now that Margaret isn't dealing with you in good faith. I can see it in your eyes. You don't know what she's up to, do you? What makes you think you're not being made a fool of?

"And here sits Brone, the man whom you wronged all those years ago. He is angry. Yes. He hates you and would love to see you dead. Yes. Indisputable facts. But when you get into a tight spot, Brone shows up with Creed Thassel money to bail you out, and offers you a loan at Vault standard rates. He may insult you, but at least he puts all his cards on the table.

"I cannot be any more forthcoming, Natch. I want to throw the past aside and start a new business. You should be asking yourself one question now: Why trust your fate to a woman whose motivations you don't know, instead of trusting your fate to an old enemy whose intentions are written all over his face?"

Natch tightened his grip on the metal bar and slowly advanced towards his old enemy. A miasma of fury was radiating from his every pore, clouding his vision and blocking out the sound of Horvil's whimpers from the corner. "I don't trust my fate to anyone but me," he said.

He reached the chair and took a crushing swing at it with his bio/logic programming bar. But it was too late; Brone had already cut his multi connection and vanished.

"You lied to me," Natch growled like a hunted tiger.

"I was planning to tell you about it when things calmed down," replied Margaret.

The words Brone had spoken a little over an hour ago still burned in the pit of his stomach. What makes you think you're not being made a fool of? "Don't split hairs with me, Margaret. You should have told me everything from the start."

The bodhisattva merely yawned and continued sorting through her notes for the presentation she was about to give to Creed Surina. The presentation had nothing to do with MultiReal or business mergers or bio/logics; it bore the aggressively mundane title Revised 4th Quarter Budget for Diss Technology Distribution Program. Even a fleeting glance over Margaret's shoulder at the formation of integers lining the spreadsheet columns was enough to make Natch drowsy. He looked out into the audience of the small auditorium, where a few sluggish creed bureaucrats had begun to take up residence. In the fifth row sat an old woman who had dozed through the ending of the last meeting and looked like she might snore through this one too. Margaret was handing control of MultiReal over to Natch so she could conduct tedious seminars like this?

"I'm waiting for an answer," said Natch.

Margaret frowned. "An answer to what? Would it have made the least bit of difference if I had told you all about the Patel Brothers' license in the first place? No, it would not have. If you hadn't reacted so strongly to Len Borda's involvement, I might have told you at the beginning." She tapped on a header in the spreadsheet and then craned her neck as a video clip of a lethargic diss child filled the viewscreen behind her.

"The least you could do," he said under his breath, "is tell me the details of your agreement."

"Frederic and Petrucio have a limited license. They can release MultiReal products, but they will be subordinate to yours."

"Subordinate how?"

"The Patel products will have a limited number of choice cycles, whereas yours will be infinite."

"And exactly what is a `choice cycle'?"

Margaret sputtered out a sigh and rubbed her forehead. "It's complicated. Quell will explain everything to you."

Natch crossed his arms petulantly over his chest. He paced to the edge of the stage from which Margaret would be delivering her soporific report in half an hour. Everyone from here to 49th Heaven was discussing this mighty new technology and speculating about the kinds of secrets Margaret and Natch were exchanging; in reality, however, Natch could barely catch her attention.

"So you didn't tell me because you thought I would back off," he grunted.

"It occurred to me, yes."

"That means you basically lured me into this deal on false pretenses, knowing I wouldn't say no, that I would have to jump at this kind of opportunity. And now that the word is out, you know I won't back down."

Margaret turned towards the fiefcorp master with haunted eyes. "You find yourself capable of strange things when you run out of choices," she said, as if she had been condemned to watch a gruesome execution over and over again.

"Tell me why," Natch demanded. "You owe me that. Why Frederic and Petrucio Patel, of all people? You had to know they hate me with a passion."

The descendant of Sheldon Surina leaned her elbows on the podium and delicately parked her chin on her palms. "I went to Pierre Loget first. But he was evasive and I didn't trust him. So then, almost nine months ago, I approached the Patel Brothers. They sat down with me and swore up and down that they wanted to bring MultiReal to the public, that they could see a glorious new age of opportunity arising."

"So what happened?"

"Someone bought them off."

Natch inhaled sharply. Everywhere he turned, he saw a place someone else had long since scouted out and claimed for his own. "How do you know?"

"I suppose I don't really know at all," said Margaret with a weary, far-off look. "The Patels deny that they're in collusion with anybody. But sometimes we can just sense these things, can't we? Too many coincidences, too many nosey questions, too little fear of the consequences. The entire Patel Brothers Fiefcorp got onboard a hoverbird a few weeks ago and disappeared for two days, I don't know where. They've clearly been bought by someone."

"So why don't you just break the license? Cancel the agreement."

"Believe me, I've tried." She pulled one hand out from under her chin and extended a bony finger off to the east. "Dozens of legal experts have been working around the clock in the Enterprise Facility trying to find loopholes in the contract. We've got lobbyists rubbing elbows with the Prime Committee, and delegates in the Congress of LPRACGs pushing legislation. That contract is ironclad."

Natch shook his head in disbelief at the morass Margaret had made out of the whole affair. Did this woman completely lack an imagination? "Listen, Margaret," he said, "it's just a contract. They're just words. Cut the Patel Brothers off from the MultiReal databases and put the burden of proof on them. They'll have to file something with the Meme Cooperative or the L-PRACG courts. Getting a final decision could take years."

The bodhisattva sighed and turned back to her presentation. "And give Len Borda the perfect excuse to send another legion of Council troops here? I don't think so."

Natch threw his hands up in the air, a despondent plea to the halfempty auditorium. Down in the fifth row, the old woman flopped over with a loud snort while Natch looked on in contempt. Margaret had foisted her problems off on him, but he had no such luxury. If someone needed to take action to keep the Phoenix Project out of the Council's hands, that someone would have to be Natch.

You find yourself capable of strange things when you run out of choices.

On Saturday morning, Natch was the first to arrive at the Surina Enterprise Facility, and so his mood dominated the conference room SeeNaRee. The fiefcorp apprentices found themselves sitting at a table in the middle of the African veldt. But this wasn't the modern veldt any of them knew, that bustling metropolis crammed full of autonomous business clusters, tube tracks and Sudafrican suburbs; it was the veldt of some mythical African past. Giraffes chomped at lofty tree limbs. Lions roared their displeasure through a thin tissue of mist. Ghosts and spirits floated past in ethereal majesty.

By a quarter past noon, there was still no sign of Quell or the MultiReal programming code. Horvil and Ben would have been content to gossip about family business all day, but Natch had no use for idle time. "Let's just get started," the fiefcorp master snapped. "We can't afford to wait for Quell anymore. Has everyone seen the Patel Brothers' promo?"

His question was met with an uncomfortable silence. All the apprentices had seen it, but their critical faculties were so dulled by weeks of constant surprises that nobody knew what to make of it.

"I don't understand, Natch," began Jara. "Margaret just unveiled this MultiReal technology three days ago. And now the Patel Brothers are already selling it?"

"They had a nine-month head start," put in Merri.

Jara let out a guttural curse. "Nine months-that's when everyone started catching up with them on Primo's," she said. "I just knew there had to be a reason why their programs were such easy targets."

"I don't understand this whole fucking thing!" cried a frustrated Horvil, banging his fist on the table hard enough to send a flock of marabous scurrying. " 'Multiple realities' ... `safe shores' . . . It sounds like voodoo to me! Does anybody understand this MultiReal stuff? What the heck would you need an alternate reality for? Has the whole world gone entirely offline?"

"Well, apparently Frederic and Petrucio understand it," muttered Benyamin.

Natch had been listening to his apprentices' jabber with eyes closed, as if participating in an internal dialogue with an unseen consultant. "How do you know?" he said.

Jara felt her mental gears grind to a halt. The rest of the apprentices sported dumb looks as well.

"Petrucio didn't say they were going to launch a MultiReal product on Tuesday," Natch continued. "All they're doing is holding a demo. As far as we know, the Patel Brothers are months away from launching anything that'll float on the Data Sea."

"Which means-"

"Maybe Frederic and Petrucio don't understand this technology any better than we do. Maybe they never got much cooperation from Margaret, and now they're frantically trying to put together something that will look halfway decent for their demo. A good channeler can make lots of deals before there's anything to sell. The Patels could be trying to shut out the competition before anyone else realizes there's something to compete over."

Horvil snorted. "What about us?"

"Us?" said Jara, starting to comprehend the vector of Natch's thoughts. "Horv, Margaret never said anything about products in that speech of hers. She called MultiReal a scientific breakthrough. As far as the public knows, we could be planning to hold on to the core technology and collect licensing fees. Or we could be some kind of charitable technology bank."

"So you think the Patels are bluffing," said Merri. "Putting up a a smokescreen to scare everyone else out of the MultiReal business." As a devotee of Creed Objectivv, she seemed to find the entire possibility distasteful.

"More or less," said Natch.

Silence briefly engulfed the room. Natch's eyes remained closed. Jara could hear the cawing of vultures overhead, the rustling of amorphous beasts out in the brush. Nobody ever said that SeeNaRee had to be subtle, she thought.

"Well," said Benyamin faintly, "why can't we do the same thing?"

Natch's eyelids snapped open, and the blue orbs beneath emitted a ghoulish glow. The virtual sun dipped below the treeline as if on cue and cast them all in shadow. "That's exactly what we're going to do," he hissed through a fierce grin. "The Patel Brothers made the first strike by releasing this promo and scheduling a demo so quickly. But on Tuesday, we're going to beat them at their own game-because we're going to demo our products first."

Jara groaned. "And how do you expect us to do that?" she cried, her hands balled into miniature fists. "It was bad enough when you wanted us to create an entire industry in eight days. Now you want us to do it in three?"

The fiefcorp master did not even pause. "Yes."

"Natch, who knows how long the Patels have been preparing for this demo? Days, weeks, months! Horvil's right-we barely even know what this program is. None of us had even heard of MultiReal this time last week. How are we supposed to get started? We don't have the code, we don't have the expertise, we don't have anything to work with."

"Not true," Natch replied tersely. "We have all the bio/logic code we need."

Merri ran her fingers through her blonde hair quizzically. "Natch, I thought you started liquidating all our bio/logic programs this morning."

"All the released programs, yes. But not the old ones we've taken off the market. Not the Routines On Demand."

"RODs?" yelped Horvil, springing up from his chair. "I don't believe this. You're pitting us against the Patel Brothers with some of your shitty old ROD programming?"

Natch smiled cruelly. "Not my old programming, Horvil. Yours."

All the color drained from the engineer's face. He sat down gingerly, not even bothering to put on a PokerFace to mask his dismay. "Oh no, Natch. You're not talking about Probabilities 4.9, are you? Man, that program is in sorry shape. It's nowhere near ready for production."

The fiefcorp master nodded. "That's the one."

Horvil whimpered incoherently.

Jara cut in. "Natch, I don't see any record of Probabilities 4.9 on the Data Sea." She narrowed her eyes, casting her mind out in a wider net. Primo's ratings, fiefcorp launch schedules, Meme Cooperative filings, drudge reviews, InfoGathers-all came up empty. "As far as I can tell, this program was never released. It doesn't even look like it's been run through Dr. Plugenpatch."

"Well, of course," said Natch, irony oozing from his pores. "Do you think we'd put the code to our top-secret weapon out on the Data Sea, where anybody could see it?"

"You wouldn't let me release it," whined Horvil. "You said it was shit."

Merri interposed a hand into the middle of the table, attempting a peacemaking gesture. "Horvil, if our MultiReal demo is riding on this program-"

"And all our contracts too," snarled Jara.

-then maybe you'd better tell us what it is."

Horvil gathered his breath and sucked in his voluminous gut. He started reciting a sales pitch that had long since calcified in memory. 11 'Probabilities 4.9 is designed to take chaotic real-world events and quantify their random elements into a meaningful array suitable for prediction. Its intended audience is any person looking for an array of random elements on which to place a wager. For instance, Probabilities 4.9 might track the number of dust motes in a particular square meter and determine the odds of any one dust mote hitting the ground first ..."'

"It's a gambling calculator," said Jara, shaking her head. "We've quit the bio/logics business to sell a gambling calculator?"

"Actually, it's more like a statistical distribution engine that-"

"Probabilities 4.9 is absolutely not a gambling calculator!" said Natch, rising from his chair and waving his fist like a tin-pot dictator. "It's the turbine that powers Possibilities 1.0, the first in a revolutionary line of MultiReal products based on the principles of Margaret Surina! It will quantify and order multiple realities! It will find the patterns within the chaos!"

Jara's temples were beginning to throb. She could feel panic lapping up against the seawalls of her mind, threatening to spill over and flood her synapses. All our contracts and our shares are riding on some tossedoff contraption of Horvil's...... So what's the plan then, Natch? Are we just going to go out there and pretend this Probabilities thing is MultiReal?"

"No, I'm afraid Horvil's right. It's a piece of shit."

"Hey!"

"Probabilities 4.9 is really just going to be the front end for Margaret's MultiReal code. When Quell gets here, we'll hook the two programs together in MindSpace. They operate in the same general field. There ought to be some similarities we can work with. Enough to get us through the demonstration, at least."

Merri had been watching the back-and-forth between Natch and Jara like a spectator at a duel. "I think I'm beginning to understand," she said. "Horvil knows the Probabilities code inside and out ... Presumably, this apprentice of Margaret's knows the MultiReal code inside and out ... So, if we can just build a bridge between the two, we can make this demo work."

"Precisely."

Horvil had already pushed aside the injury to his pride for the more pressing issue of an intellectual challenge. Using the tip of his finger, he was busy sketching lengthy equations on a virtual slate. The engineer ended up with a very large and unwieldy number at the bottom. "Totally impossible," he said.

"What?" asked Natch.

"This is going to take a lot of grunt work, Natch. A lot. If this MultiReal program is as complex as Margaret says it is, it's bound to have thousands of nodes we'll need to hook up. Tens of thousands, maybe. Even if you and me and Quell and Ben work on this nonstop, we couldn't get it done until"-Horvil scribbled his way through a maze of algebra-"December 19th."

"You see?" cried Jara. "There's no way we can do all this by Tuesday. No way."

The fiefcorp master flashed her the barest hint of a suggestive look, which Jara could feel right between the shoulder blades. Natch extended his finger towards Benyamin. "You've managed assemblyline coders," he said. "Do you know a shop that can pull this off at the last minute?" The young man looked wide-eyed at his cousin, inhaled deeply, then nodded. "Good, then it's settled."

Jara felt the tingling between her shoulder blades diffuse down her back and into her spine. She remembered getting this feeling while playing chess against her grandfather, a professional who had jousted with the masters in the 49th Heaven tournaments. Inevitably, halfway through every game, she would discover that her grandfather had accounted for all of her two-dimensional feints, that the moves she had taken at face value were but the smallest strokes of an overarching blueprint that had been in place since the first tentative pawnstep forward. Natch possessed this same talent. Had he known where Benyamin would fit in the grand scheme when he hired him? Had he known all those years ago that Horvil's Probabilities code would one day prove useful? Did he have some hidden purpose reserved for her?

"So that still leaves Jara and me," said Merri quietly. "What should we be doing?"

"Yeah, I suppose we get to stay behind and keep the home fires burning," Jara snapped with a swagger she didn't feel.

Natch focused the full force of his sapphire orbs on Jara. "You have the most difficult job of all. You write the script."

"That's not difficult. I bleed marketing copy, Natch."

"But this isn't like any marketing copy you've ever written before, Jara. Those people out there-they hate me." He made a sweeping arc with one hand that encompassed nearly the entire veldt. "By the time I step out on that stage on Tuesday, the drudges will have convinced everyone I'm a public menace. You need to counter their propaganda-and explain a completely foreign technology-and get the audience revved up-all in fifteen minutes or less."

"Fifteen minutes?" the analyst yelped.

"Margaret's speech was too long. Much too long. Ours needs to be different. We need to get the audience keyed up in an emotional way. I don't want anybody thinking too much about this technology. I just want one simple demonstration that cuts to the chase. How simple? A four-year-old should understand MultiReal after I'm done speaking, that's how simple it's got to be."

Merri cleared her throat politely. "And me?"

"Work with Robby Robby and his channelers. Start warming up the leads. And then, the instant the presentation's over, bang! I want a fucking sales blitzkrieg out there. Take no prisoners."

Jara looked around and saw nothing but eager faces spiked with adrenaline. All the apprentices had feared this new fiefcorp was flailing around in the dark, aimlessly searching for direction. But Natch has a plan, Jara thought. We should have known. He always has a plan.

"There's one more topic we need to cover," Natch said with an abrupt change of tone. Either he was suddenly being sincere, or he had made new strides in his mask of personableness. "The Defense and Wellness Council is out there, and they don't want this demonstration to go forward. You all saw what happened at Margaret Surina's speech. When this meeting is over and I send out the announcement of our demo, we've got seventy-two hours til showtime-and once Len Borda knows that, he might resort to something desperate."

"What about the Patels?" said Jara. "Are they going to come after us too?"

Natch scratched his elbow thoughtfully. "I don't know. I can't see the angle in them resorting to violence. And Frederic and Petrucio never do anything without an angle."

Horvil eyed a pack of hyenas in the distance as if they might be Council informants. "So what do you want us to do? Lock our doors? Hire bodyguards?"

"Maybe we should just lie low until Tuesday," suggested Ben. "Find somewhere the Council can't get to us."

Merri gave the young apprentice a dark look. "Like where?"

There was a long pause. Somewhere in the distance, a cluster of African bats shrieked. The Defense and Wellness Council had a presence in every city on the globe, every chartered settlement on Luna and Mars, every jerrybuilt outpost orbiting the sun from Earth to the asteroid belt. Was there anyplace in the whole of human civilization where Borda couldn't find them?

Natch leaned forward, balancing his chin on the tips of his two index fingers. "All right, then," he said. "Everyone's going to come out here to Andra Pradesh. The Surina compound's got plenty of accommodations and the best programming facilities in the world-not to mention armed security."

"What good is that going to do us?" said Jara with a grimace. "The Council marched right inside the gates the other day while Surina security just sat there and watched. What makes you think they'll stop Borda this time?"

The entrepreneur closed his eyes once more, and Jara realized he had explored this situation a thousand times already in his head. "Where else can we go? Any place that's primitive enough to escape the Council's notice is too backwards for us to put together a demo in. And I've looked everywhere ... the Islands, the Pharisee Territories, OrbiCo space freighters. It's the same wherever you look. At least in Andra Pradesh we'll see them coming."

"What-what about Serr Vigal?" stuttered Horvil.

"Vigal will be all right. He's got his own private security team at the conference, and everyone knows he doesn't have much to do with our day-to-day operations. He promised he'd show up for the demo."

"Natch, what about me?" Merri's tone of voice was distraught, almost tearful. "I don't think there's any shuttle that can get from Luna to Terra that fast. The presentation will be over while I'm still in transit."

"I haven't forgotten about you. I've made you a reservation at TeleCo later this afternoon."

Jara's eyes went wide with disbelief. "Teleport-from the moon? Are you kidding? Do you know how expensive that is? That's like our entire third quarter budget right there."

"Not as expensive as replacing a dead channel manager at the last minute," said Natch.

Nobody could argue with that.

Ten minutes later, Natch cut his multi connection. He stood on the red square tile in his hallway and took stock of preparations for Tuesday's performance. All the pieces were set on the board: the auditorium space had been reserved, the proper documentation had been filed with the Meme Cooperative, the press release had been blasted to every corner of the Data Sea. He gave the drudges another fifteen minutes before they started a blitzkrieg of their own.

He consulted the time and shook his head. Precious seconds were ticking away, time disappearing forever into the void. He would need to drive his staff hard in order to complete this massive undertaking. He would need to thrash a little sloppiness out of Horvil; to wink and cajole a little extra effort out of Jara; to give Merri that zone of comfort that allowed her to produce consistently excellent work. Benyamin's motivations were still a mystery to him, as were those of the Islander Quell. But Natch felt confident he would find their hooks before this crunch was through.

The fiefcorp master made a quick list of things he would need at the Surina complex. His satchel of bio/logic programming bars. A few shirts. An extra pair of pants. The gabardine suit he had purchased for important events. Natch tucked the hermetically sealed packets of clothing into his satchel, wolfed down a sandwich, and was on his way. As he left the building, he imagined he could hear his apartment breaking down and compressing into its component pieces.

November afternoons in Shenandoah were dreary affairs. It would not be unusual to expect a dusting of early snow, but Natch's LPRACG weather service was predicting rain. Indeed, a group of ominous dark clouds had assembled on the city's western edge, trying to decide whether to advance downtown or move on to riper targets. The threat of rain was enough to empty the streets. Why slog through the rain when you could multi to some sunny locale halfway around the globe?

The large viewscreen down the road from Natch's building had long since moved on from its ChaiQuoke advertisement. Now it showcased a bosomy woman with a lustful gaze that followed everyone who passed by. Above her shoulder were the words:

I'LL BE WAITING FOR YOU IN 49TH HEAVEN.

Vacation packages for all ages and income brackets.

But Natch paid as little heed to the sign as he did to the mounting rain. His head was already inside MindSpace at the Surina Enterprise Facility, toying with the intricate code stored in the MultiReal databases. By the time he made it halfway to the TubeCo station, his hair had drooped mopstyle onto his forehead, bogged down by the afternoon drizzle.

He leaned forward to shake off the watery accumulation, causing the first dart to whizz past his right ear.

Natch snapped his head up and saw a small needle embedded in the side of the building he had been walking past. Undoubtedly, the dart's payload of OCHREs was discharging harmlessly into the concrete.

Darts ... OCHREs laden with ... black code!

Natch's animal instincts took over as he sprinted for cover. He caught a glimpse of a figure in a black robe flecked with crimson, shouldering a dart-rifle. Firing.

Thwip! Thwip! Two more projectiles slammed into the wall mere centimeters away, sending miniature starbursts of rainwater into the air.

Natch dove around the corner into an alleyway of sorts, a temporary opening between buildings that did not need the space. An avenue of shadows that would be gone long before anyone got around to naming it. Natch dimly realized that ending up here was no accident; this assault had been well planned.

He risked a glance back across the street, where he had seen the figure in the black robe. If the man was a Council officer, he was not wearing any of the standard issue uniforms. The robe draped him from head to toe, and the red formed some kind of pattern-Chinese characters, perhaps. Illegible at this distance, in any event.

The man was making brusque hand signals in several directions. He was not alone.

Two figures went tearing past the alleyway in an attempt to establish a flanking position on the other side. In one fluid motion, Natch drew a bio/logic programming bar from his satchel and hurled it like a discus.

The bar hit home, and one of the black-robed figures went down with a grunt. Definitely human, definitely male, and definitely not a multi projection. He doubted he had used enough force to cause major damage, but a solid metal bar in the gut was enough to bring anyone to the floor for at least a few minutes.

Natch could see more scrambling motions in the shadows, and more figures in identical black robes. He swung his head around wildly, looking for someone on the street to yell to, some method of escape. But the street was empty and the only way out of the alley lay some fifty meters ahead of him. Natch bolted down the corridor, frantically trying to think of a bio/logic program he could use for selfdefense. Forty meters to the end of the alley ... thirty meters ... almost halfway there ...

And then Natch felt the pinprick of a needle in his back, near the base of his spine, and the black code slammed into him.

He flopped around and saw one of his mysterious pursuers standing at the end of the alleyway, dartgun mounted on his shoulder. Before Natch could react, he was hit twice more in the side and the right forearm.

As the malevolent dart tip OCHREs flowed into his bloodstream, he felt surprisingly little pain. All the same, he knew it wouldn't be long before the insidious machines had nullified his defenses and reprogrammed his internal systems. The rules of the Meme Cooperative, the strictures of Dr. Plugenpatch, the protective matrix of OCHREs, and the red blood cells in his body-all could be circumvented, given time and expertise and direct access to the major arteries carrying cellular traffic.

Natch tried one last desperate ConfidentialWhisper request to Horvil, but it was too late. He collapsed face first into a puddle of rainwater and continued down below street level into darkness.

The apprentices, conscious of the press of time, cut their multi connections and made arrangements to cart their bodies to Andra Pradesh. Only Jara stayed behind at the Enterprise Facility to await Quell's arrival.

Horvil's tube ride to Andra Pradesh was uneventful. No Council officers in white robes lurking around, no strange looks from fellow tube passengers other than the ones Horvil was used to getting. The engineer had ascended halfway up the steep hill inside the Surina compound gates before it occurred to him that a three-day stay at Andra Pradesh might require more than his bio/logic programming bars and a thermos of nitro.

He was the first one back at the safari SeeNaRee. Quell had still not arrived. While Jara tried to wrap up the first draft of a speech outline before she fetched her body from London, Horvil made camp at the antiseptic conference table. He conjured up a diagram of Probabilities 4.9 and began poring over the details, trying to familiarize himself with a program he had unceremoniously discarded five years ago. It was like reading old hive poetry; the coding was sloppy, the connections strained and amateurish. Probabilities 4.9 would not even have passed muster at Dr. Plugenpatch five years ago, and the bio/logic standards had evolved so much since then. He couldn't wait to find a workbench and tear into this program in MindSpace.

Suddenly, a shadow fell across the table, obscuring the holograph. Horvil looked up in irritation. Not another one of those SeeNaRee elephants

It was no elephant. An immense man stood before him, possibly fifty years old but with the physique of someone half that age. A pale blonde ponytail slunk down one shoulder and splayed out over his great barrel chest. The man could have cracked Horvil's head like a walnut between his biceps and forearm, but his demeanor was calm, almost sardonic. "I presume you're Horvil," he said.

Horvil balked, his mind a blank. "And you are?"

"I'm your new apprentice," replied the man. "Quell." He extended a hand in Horvil's direction at precisely the same time Horvil arose and started to bow. The plump engineer stared at the calloused and manyringed hand in confusion.

"You're supposed to shake it, you idiot." Jara walked up and placed her tiny palm in Quell's. To do so, she nearly had to get up on her tiptoes. "Towards Perfection. I'm Jara, Natch's bio/logic analyst. Don't mind Horvil-not everybody here is that clueless about your customs." The big man enclosed her virtual hand in his flesh fist, and they went through the awkward mechanics of a handshake. Finally, she pulled her hand away in frustration. "Maybe you can see why we bow instead."

Quell did not miss a beat. "And maybe you can see why I insist on shaking anyway."

All at once, comprehension came flooding into Horvil's head. He caught sight of the plain tan breeches and the thin copper collar suspended from the man's neck. The breeches were cinched tightly around his waist with a snakeskin belt that looked like it was actually made out of snakeskin. "Y-you're an unconnectible!" the engineer exclaimed in surprise.

"Yeah," replied Quell, "although I think the term you're looking for is Islander."

Horvil was so fascinated with the man's collar that he completely missed the faux pas. He had seen plenty of Islanders at a distance, of course-they did sometimes venture beyond the borders of their little demesne in the South Pacific-but actually meeting one in person was a different matter altogether. Horvil tried to picture what this room would look like to Quell if he removed that collar. No SeeNaRee, no Jara, no multi projections of any kind.

"I thought you were a bio/logic engineer," he said, thoroughly baffled. "Weren't you supposed to bring us the MultiReal code?" Horvil peeked around the Islander as if he expected to see a string of MindSpace blueprints bobbing behind him on a string.

"I am an engineer," said Quell with scarcely masked impatience. "And don't worry, I have the access to the code."

Horvil peered up and down the big man doubtfully. "If you're an engineer, where's your bio/logic programming bars?" He patted his own neatly folded knapsack and felt the reassuring heft of the metal inside.

The Islander let out a breath. He had obviously dealt with such skepticism many times before. "Let's just get this over with," he groused in a dangerous tone of voice. "We don't have time to fuck around. Follow me." He pivoted on one heel and stomped towards the metal doorframe standing incongruously in the middle of the veldt. Horvil and Jara looked at one another, shrugged, and set off in pursuit. All at once, the African SeeNaRee was replaced by the blue stretchedstone walls of the Surina Enterprise Facility.

Quell strode through the halls as if the Facility had been constructed solely for his benefit. None of the Surina security guards seemed eager to contradict this impression. They parted dutifully for the Islander with deep, respectful bows, while casting suspicious glances at Jara and Horvil. Throngs of businesspeople hustling to and from meetings stepped aside because of the Islander's intimidating presence. Finally, Quell led them to a door surrounded by Surina security people and walked into the most gorgeous workspace Horvil had ever seen.

The room's four walls bore no SeeNaRee or decorations of any kind, not even one of those extendable programming bar holsters that Horvil had seen in so many offices lately. Quell's workbench, however, was anything but shabby: a four-sided metal monstrosity with a sliding panel that allowed access to its center. The Islander snapped his fingers and conjured up a gigantic MindSpace bubble, large enough to hold three or four of Horvil's programs simultaneously. A serpentine block of bio/logic code wended partway around the bubble in hues of gray, brown and violet.

"Watch this," commanded Quell. And then he plunged his bare hands straight into the middle of the holograph.

Horvil gasped as connection strands rose like snakes charmed from a basket and wiggled their way to the Islander's fingers. Soon, Quell had amassed a bundle of data fibers in each hand, which he proceeded to weave in and out of the code blocks with astonishing alacrity. The connections looked just as well seated as if they had been stuck there with a pricey set of programming bars.

"I didn't even know you could do it that way," said Horvil. He thought of the clunky silver slabs roosted against his side and felt a rush of inferiority.

"How do you think people made code before bio/logic programming bars?" replied Quell. His noodling did not seem to have any purpose other than demonstration; he was tying and untying the same collection of strands over and over again. "With their bare hands, that's how. On the Islands, we remember such things."

"But-the connection strands-they're floating to your fingertips

The big man's eyes twinkled with a craftsman's pride. Suddenly, he clenched his hands into fists, and the snakes drooped limply back to the desk. "The rings," he said, twitching his fingers in the air. "They each broadcast a unique signature, just like a programming bar."

Jara had been watching Quell's display with characteristic skepticism. "So what is this thing?" she said, gesturing at the roller coaster structure of the program. "That was a nice demonstration, but how do we know it even works?"

"This thing is EnviroSelect 14," retorted the Islander. "And you know it works because it's been choosing the SeeNaRee for you every time you've stepped into a Surina conference room."

Jara pursed her lips, embarrassed. "Oh."

When they arrived back at the conference room, Benyamin was waiting for them. He didn't show the least bit of surprise at Quell's traditional Islander handshake, causing Horvil to wonder how his younger cousin could be so much more worldly than he. There was no sign of Merri yet, but that was to be expected; teleportation was challenging enough without the additional complications caused by 380,000 kilometers of space. She would not be here for a few more hours yet. Jara took one last look at her notes, muttered something unintelligible but definitely not pleasant, and then cut her multi connection.

Horvil and Ben dutifully followed Quell back through the hallways to the workroom where the engineering would begin. The Islander seemed inclined to walk several meters ahead of the two cousins, but Horvil managed to hustle to the big man's side.

"I was hoping you could explain something," said the engineer. "Obviously, you can make bio/logic programs with those funky rings there, but how do you test 'em?"

Quell eyed his counterpart with scarcely concealed suspicion. "What do you mean?"

"I thought Islanders didn't run bio/logic programs because bio/logics is unholy, or something like that."

"You're thinking of the Pharisees. That's not us at all. We run bio/logic programs in the Islands every once in a while; people there install some of the basic OCHREs. Our Technology Board just discriminates a lot more carefully than your connectible governments."

"We discriminate pretty carefully," said Horvil in a wounded tone of voice.

Quell shook his head, and for a second the engineer thought he was going to burst out laughing. "How much code do you have floating around your system right now, Horvil?" he said.

Horvil thought carefully, trying to account for all the programs he activated willy-nilly every minute, the background code created by his L-PRACG and the Prime Committee, the constant hum of molecular activity instigated by his OCHREs. Processes whose names he didn't know, routines that had been installed by hive technicians before birth and running constantly since then. "I don't know," he said. "Thousands, probably."

"And do you know who wrote them all? How do you know they're all going to work together flawlessly?"

"That's why we have governments. That's why there's Primo's and the Council."

"Governments. Primo's. The Defense and Wellness Council." The Islander spat out the words as if they were the names of particularly odious criminals. "Do you trust them?"

"Not entirely. But I'm not gonna sit around all day and weed through bio/logic programs either."

Benyamin, who had been listening a few paces behind, now came trotting up on Quell's right side. "But we have a system for opting out of these standard bio/logic programs," he said. "The Islander Tolerance Act of 146. High Executive Toradicus signed it."

"Spoken like a true governmentalist," said Quell, though his tone of voice was not unkind. "Create an opt-out provision, and put the onus on our taxpayers, on our governments. The Technology Board has a huge team that does nothing but register these `Dogmatic Oppositions' twenty-four hours a day to keep your bots and data agents out of the South Pacific. And who do you think pays their salaries? Do you think your Prime Committee has ever sent a bloody credit our way to fund their Tolerance Act?"

Horvil blushed furiously. He had heard of Dogmatic Oppositions, of course, but to him the term had just been verbal dressing tossed around in Khann Frejohr's speeches. He had never met anyone to whom these things actually mattered. "Politics," muttered Horvil. "I hate politics."

At that, the Islander let out a titan-sized laugh of such gusto that all the security guards in the hallway instantly felt for their dartrifles. "If you hate politics," said Quell, "you're in the wrong fiefcorp."

"So how many programs do you have running in your system?" snapped Horvil.

The Islander looked at Horvil with an expression that hinted at fondness or amusement. "Twelve. And seven of them are for my asthma."

Horvil had started to drift into an interior monologue about the evils of politics when he was jarred back to reality by their arrival at Quell's workroom. The Islander made an obscure hand signal to a unit of blueand-green Surina security officers, and a dozen of them instantly marched up to the workroom door and formed a protective ring around it. This was no loose formation like the one Horvil saw here half an hour ago; these troops had their fingers on the triggers of their guns and were clearly ready to use them. "Thank you," said Horvil inanely as he stepped into the room with Ben and Quell and closed the door behind him.

Two dozen guards at the gates to the Surina complex, thought Horvil. And then more guards blocking the way into the Surina Enterprise Facility ... and now even more right outside the door ... You'd need an army to get past all those dartguns.

Then he remembered that Len Borda did have an army. Several armies, in fact. He shivered.

Quell was obviously used to the pressure. He marched into the center of the workbench and waved his hand around the table. Ben and Horvil jumped back in awe as a dozen interlocking modules of pink and blue appeared in the MindSpace bubble. Horvil now understood the need for the large workspace; the program took up every square centimeter and extended halfway to the ceiling like a Gothic castle. Connection strands stretched from module to module in startling and intricate patterns, some circumnavigating the whole mass several times. Even an observer who knew nothing about bio/logic coding could lose himself for hours studying the beautiful detail, the interplay of colors, the endless number of aesthetic themes that replicated across the surface of the program. Horvil had seen entire nervous system simulators that were less complex.

"So this is MultiReal," he gulped. Next to the Byzantine topography of the MultiReal program, Probabilities 4.9 would look like a pastel-colored pimple.

"That-that's amazing," stuttered Ben.

Quell's face showed a mixture of pride and sadness, the palimpsest of some epic experience that Horvil could hardly begin to imagine. "After sixteen years of work," he said, "it ought to be."

"Sixteen years?" said Horvil, his jaw hanging low. He couldn't imagine working on the same program for sixteen months.

"And that's just Margaret's part of it. Half of this code was passed down by her father when he died-and she contracted out a lot of bits and pieces." Horvil nodded as if Quell's statement were self-evident. "Now are we ready to start coding?"

The two cousins nodded in sync, and they got to work.

Probabilities 4.9 did indeed look quite puny beside the gargantuan MultiReal engine. Its double helix shape was a child's trick in comparison, a second-rate sleight of hand. Horvil found the sight of the two programs side-by-side a big metaphor for the entire situation Natch had gotten them into. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp? thought the engineer, wishing he could just erase the Probabilities ROD and pretend it had never existed. This is the Margaret Surina MultiReal Fiefcorp, plain and simple. We don't belong here. We're completely out of our league.

Quell spent the first half-hour pointing out the MultiReal program's basic hooks to his fellow apprentices. There wasn't enough time for a more in-depth explanation. When the Islander wrapped up his brief overview, Horvil still had no idea what an alternate reality was or why you would want to create one. But now he felt confident he could at least steer this MultiReal vessel, even if the workings of its engine room remained a mystery.

Horvil was gratified to see that his original estimate of the work involved was accurate. Clearly, it would be madness for Quell, Horvil and Benyamin to attempt to make all those thousands of connections in less than seventy-two hours; even Natch would have to admit that. So the two senior engineers spent the next few hours making detailed blueprints for the assembly-line shop and marking up their code on templates even the greenest programmer could follow. There wasn't enough room inside the workbench for Ben to squeeze in, not alongside two men of such bulk. So he kept to the corner of the room, where he took notes on a holographic tablet and stared intently at Quell's finger-weaving technique. Horvil felt like an ancient relic swinging around his clunky bars of metal, but there was nothing he could do about it.

As the day ebbed away and night fell, Benyamin began to grow impatient. He kept sidling up to Horvil and slipping him urgent Con- fidentialWhispers about the time. "I told the assembly-line manager I'd get this to her by midnight," he said.

"What do you want me to do?" 'Whispered Horvil in return. "It's just not done."

"If the shop doesn't get it by midnight, they can't guarantee they'll finish by Tuesday."

"And if we rush to get it to them by midnight, I can't guarantee it will work on Tuesday." Benyamin quieted down.

Midnight passed, but Quell and Horvil labored on. Ben began popping in and out of the room to make use of the multi facility down the hall.

Once the basic blueprint had been constructed and Probabilities sat loosely tethered to the MultiReal engine, another job awaited the fiefcorpers: security. Sending an assembly-line coding shop the full Possibilities program in all its manifold glory would be an invitation to disaster. Horvil wouldn't take such a risk with even an ordinary bio/logic program; there were too many thieves, cutthroat competitors and black coders who would love to get their hands on commercial source code. So Quell and Horvil spent the early morning hours fastidiously cordoning off enormous chunks of programming, locking out sensitive areas and encrypting the sections that would have to remain open.

By the time they finished, the program would look like any other large-scale project that passed through an assembly-line floor. An economic modeling program, perhaps, or the basic subsystem for an internal organ. No one would be able to tell they were really working on Margaret Surina's famous MultiReal engine.

Quell turned out to be an ideal co-worker. He didn't clog up the grinding gears of Horvil's concentration with a lot of chatter, and what he did say was always concise and to the point. After a few hours, the two dropped nouns and verbs altogether and stuck to the lingua franca of mathematics. The engineer had to admit he was starting to like this Islander. And he could swear the feeling was mutual.

Horvil finally tossed aside the bio/logic programming bars a few minutes shy of six in the morning. They had worked through the night without a single break. He gazed at their handiwork, and then exchanged a silent glance with the Islander. The look was unambiguous. MultiReal isn't ready. It's not going to work. But now they were bumping up against the unstretchable limitations of time, and Benyamin was positively apoplectic. The two engineers sighed and nodded as one; it would have to do. "You ready to take the baton, Ben?" said Horvil, stretching his sore arms above his head.

Benyamin's raven-black hair was in complete disarray from the action of nervous fingers. "I've been keeping the shop up-to-date on our progress," he said. "They're all ready to go. Just give me the word, and I'll get them started."

"Do you think they can do all that barwork in time? That's a big mound of coding, and Natch'11 be onstage in less than forty-eight hours."

"I don't know. I've never had to put them on such a tight deadline."

The engineer's eyes narrowed. "No, Ben, don't tell me you're taking it-there. You can't, are you insane?"

Benyamin cast his eyes to the floor and stuck his hands in his pockets, mirroring one of Horvil's standard poses. "We don't have a choice anymore. I had a couple of assembly-line shops willing to take on the job last night, but now this is the only one. And I had to call in a few favors even to get them on board."

Quell watched the cousins' conversation from the opposite corner of the room, where he had stretched out on the floor. "What's going on?"

Horvil let out a tsk. "He's going to bring MultiReal to my Aunt Berilla's shop-his mother's company."

"One of her companies," corrected Ben. "One of her many companies."

"They do good work, I'll give them that-but it's not like they actually have to compete against anybody. Creed Elan throws them all kinds of softball projects without even soliciting bids. Which isn't any real surprise because Berilla is like this with all the Elan bodhisattvas." He held two chunky fingers together like Siamese twins attached at the hip.

"Don't you get it, Horvil?" Ben replied defensively. "Nobody else'll take on the project this late. We have to use them now."

The Islander shook his head in confusion. "So what's the problem?"

"The problem is that Aunt Berilla absolutely hates Natch with a passion. Don't ask me why. She doesn't want anything to do with him. She doesn't want us to have anything to do with him. If she realizes this is Natch's coding job-if she thinks it'll help Natch in any way-she'll yank it right off the floor. No, even worse, she might actually sabotage the fucking thing."

"She won't find out," Ben insisted. "Really, Horv, this is all under control."

Horvil sighed. "Let's hope so."

They returned to the conference room to find Jara and Merri in the midst of a heated debate. Jara had been up all night weeding through marketing theories for a model to use in the presentation until, desperate, she had asked Merri for help. Since the moment she stepped off the teleportation platform, the channel manager had been slingshotting around the globe to sales meetings with Robby Robby. She hadn't even found the opportunity to change out of the horribly unfashionable gray robe TeleCo made its customers wear during the transfer process. Yet, she had readily agreed to help, a decision she now appeared to regret.

A pack of SeeNaRee hyenas studiously watched the back-and-forth from a safe distance in the brush.

"Tell her we need something simple," said Jara, turning to Horvil as if looking for an ally.

Merri frowned. In a futile effort to stop the trembling, a common side effect of teleportation, she was gripping her thighs hard enough to draw blood. "The Four Phases of Technological Evolution are simple. They're not-"

"Creed propaganda."

"They're not creed propaganda. Just because they're part of Objective doctrine doesn't mean they're not universal. Everyone knows the Four Phases-it's a part of the culture now."

"I've heard people talk about them at Creed Elan," said Benyamin.

"You see? It's really very simple. Observation: humanity distinguishes itself from nature. Exploitation: humanity establishes its dominance over nature. Synergy: humanity learns to become one with nature. Transcendence: humanity surmounts the rules of nature altogether. Take the example of teleportation ..."

Jara threw her hands up in the air. "Natch wants simple. Fifteen minutes or less. Petrucio Patel kept crowing about `safe shores' in his promo. We've got to be excitement and adventure on the high seas. I'm sorry, Merri, but the Four Phases will just put everybody to sleep. We need a sales pitch, not a sermon."

Quell, who had been standing quietly, now poked his sizeable nose between the two bickering apprentices. "Maybe a demonstration would help," he said. Merri looked up in shock at the giant Islander, apparently noticing him for the first time. "I can't show you the latest version until it's back from the shop, but I can show you one of the prototypes Margaret and I put together."

Merri and Jara looked at one another and nodded simultaneously.

"Good," said Quell. "Horvil, help me change the SeeNaRee. Can't do a thing with this miserable collar."

The Islander whispered in his ear as Horvil cast his mind out to the Facility databases. A succession of three-dimensional pictures flashed in his head. He chose one, and the African veldt disappeared with a flash.

The air around the apprentices suddenly filled with bass-thumping music, the kind of xpression board monotony that instinctively caused teenaged girls' hips to gyrate. Then came the smell of freshly cut grass. The apprentices found themselves standing at the nexus of two inter locking diamonds in the dirt. A smattering of white hexagonal bags lay at the corners.

A baseball stadium.

"No, no, Horvil. I want a classic field," said Quell. Horvil nodded and switched to the more traditional playing field endorsed by the classic leagues. Soon, the fiefcorpers were standing in a stadium set up like those the ancients had played: a single diamond, four bases, an enormous outfield. Without prompting, the engineer called up a catalog of baseball bats containing everything from laser-polished aluminum to synthetic ash. Horvil selected a squat Kyushu Clubfoot, summoned a cart of classic league baseballs, and then handed the equipment to Quell. "Smoke and fucking mirrors," muttered the Islander as he fumbled with the virtual bat, trying to get a grip on it. Not an easy task without a sense of touch, Horvil realized.

"See that target?" Quell pointed to a bull's eye painted on the outfield wall captioned with the words BETCHA A BOTTLE OF CHAIQUOKE YOU CAN'T HIT ME. Then he flexed a muscular set of pectorals, tossed a ball up in the air, and knocked it towards right field. The ball hurtled into the wall at the precise center of the target.

"So you can hit a baseball into a bull's eye," sneered Jara. "What does that have to do with multiple realities?"

The Islander said nothing. Instead, he reached into the cart of baseballs, threw them into the air one by one, and smacked them towards the ChaiQuoke promo. Bang bang bang bang. All twenty-four baseballs plunked the bull's eye in the same exact spot. Quell threw his ponytail over his shoulder and made a low purring noise of satisfaction.

Jara gaped at the collection of virtual balls lying under the bull's eye. Words escaped her.

A light went on in Horvil's head. He trotted around the infield, his jaw swaying this way and that with excitement. "Don't you get it, Jara? The whole thing's just mathematics. The swing of the bat, the grip, the angle you're holding it, all those neurochemical reactions in your brain-you can describe it all with math. Possibilities just lets you try out different variables and choose the outcome you want."

Quell nodded. "An oversimplification-but yes."

Horvil flopped down onto the grass and stretched out, snow angel style. "So that's why we modified those dendrite modules ..."

Ben paced slowly towards the ChaiQuoke advertisement and rubbed the paint, as if he expected to feel some kind of magnetic generator in the wall. Meanwhile, Merri retreated into the visitors' dugout and watched the proceedings with hollow eyes as she tried to get a handle on her teleportation-induced trembling.

"Let me get this straight," said Jara, seating herself delicately on the grass next to Horvil. "Multi Real-Possibill ties-creates alternate realities inside your head?"

Quell strode onto the pitcher's mound. His voice took on the tone of a drill instructor. "Let's start from the beginning.

"Forget about MultiReal for a minute. What happens when you throw a ball in the air and swing a bat? The mind takes in sensory input-the sight of the ball, the weight of the bat, the feel of the wind-and processes it. You decide on a course of action. Then the brain sends instructions down the spinal cord into your muscles, right? Electrical pulses tell your body what to do. You swing the bat. It all happens in a fraction of a second.

"But we can track all those electrical pulses, right? We can reduce them to mathematical equations. Isn't that how multi works? OCHREs in the brainstem intercept these pulses and transmit them onto the multi network instead of into your own body.

"So what happens if you take these electrical commands from the brain and plot out the results? You get a simulation of what's going to happen. You can see if the swing of the bat is going to turn out the way you want.

"Now, let's go a step further. Once you have a mathematical model in place, what's to stop you from trying out different scenarios? If I had twitched my right arm like this instead of like that, what would have happened? What if I had gripped the bat a little harder, swung a little faster? You make thousands of tiny unconscious decisions like that every instant. Why not just loop the whole process in your mind and compute it over and over again with different variables until you find a result you're satisfied with? Keep swinging until you hit one out of the park.

"Then-and only then-you choose the reality you want to happen, the pre-determined reality. Your mind now has an optimized set of instructions to send into the nervous system. The brain outputs those electrical pulses to your body-what we call closing the choice cycle-and it happens."

Horvil was making incoherent burbling sounds of delight. But Jara was not convinced. "That's all well and good if you're just trying to hit an inanimate object," she said, hands planted belligerently on her hips. "But what if you've got an outfielder out there trying to catch it first? People aren't mathematical models. You can't just use algebra to predict what they're going to do. What then?"

Quell was unruffled. "Ben," he called out across the field. "Go ahead. Try to catch it." The young apprentice nodded, summoned a SeeNaRee baseball glove, and assumed the crouch of a seasoned right fielder in front of the ChaiQuoke target.

Thwak! The Islander knocked the first ball over Benyamin's shoulder, a perfect hit.

Thwak! The second ball flew inches past his face.

Thwak! Another hit.

The charade went on for another dozen swings, with Ben failing to catch the ball each time. Even seemingly easy pop flies slipped through his fingers and smacked unerringly into the wall. The irritation was beginning to show on the young apprentice's face when Quell raised his hand and signaled that the demonstration was through.

"That program has to be pretty good," said Horvil, eyebrows aloft. "Ben's no Angel Palmero, but he's caught a few fly balls in his day."

"It wouldn't have mattered," replied Quell dismissively. "Angel Palmero wouldn't have done any better." He stood the Kyushu Clubfoot on its end like a mercenary displaying his weapon. "MultiReal is a collaborative process."

Horvil's cousin came trotting over from the outfield, clearly perturbed at his poor defensive performance. "Wait a minute-I didn't collaborate with anything."

"You don't think you did. But for every missed catch, there were dozens of alternative reality scenarios played out inside our minds before they ever actually `happened.' The whole sequence looped over and over again-dozens of my possible swings mapped out against dozens of your possible catches-dozens of choice cycles-until I found a result I liked."

"But I don't remember any of that happening."

"No. You wouldn't. Not without MultiReal."

Benyamin and Jara sank down into the grass with Horvil, overcome by the dizzying spiral of probabilities and possibilities. Horvil wasn't doing much better. Questions were clambering to the forefront of the engineer's head, but no answers accompanied them. No bio/logic program could conceivably turn the concept of cause-and-effect on its head like that-and yet, somehow, MultiReal just did.

Horvil heard the echo of Margaret Surina's words, spoken three and a half days ago, an incomprehensible lifetime in the past: The everchanging flux of MultiReal will become reality. MultiReal will free us from the tyranny of cause and effect itself.

He thought of the crack team of security guards standing guard just outside, and the multitudes of armed troops patrolling the premises. It seemed like a pitifully small amount of protection. Who knew what MultiReal was really capable of? Who knew what lengths the Defense and Wellness Council would go to in order to possess it? Horvil tried to imagine working under this pressure every day: furtive looks over your shoulder, armed backup whenever you flipped on your workbench. He felt claustrophobic from working in Andra Pradesh for a single evening. Quell and Margaret Surina had been doing this for sixteen years.

Merri's tired voice echoed from the dugout. "I think we've found our demonstration." Jara whipped her head around hawklike towards the channel manager, thought for a moment, and then nodded with mute agreement.

Suddenly, Benyamin perked up. "Wait a minute!" he cried. "If we already have the demonstration we're going to use on Tuesday, then we don't have to worry about the assembly-line shop, do we?"

Quell shook his head, causing the young apprentice's demeanor to cloud over once again. "It's a collaborative process, remember? The MultiReal engine Margaret and I put together won't work in front of a big crowd-at least not yet. We need a good predictive engine like Horvil's Probabilities ROD to sort through all the permutations."

Ben shifted uncomfortably. "A collaborative process running among hundreds of millions of people-that's gonna take a heck of a lot of computing power, isn't it?"

"Oh fuck," moaned Jara, burying her head in her hands. "Infoquakes."

Rivers of fear coursed through Horvil's skull. He thought back to the disturbance at Margaret Surina's speech, those sickening few minutes of paralysis and vertigo. Computational vortexes, communication breakdowns.

The Islander's countenance turned predatory. "That's exactly what Len Borda wants you to think," he said.

"And what ... what if he's right?" said Merri quietly from her alcove in the dugout. The trembling had started up in her arms again, but Horvil wasn't sure if it was a lingering effect of the teleportation or a new surge of fear.

"Margaret Surina is not an imbecile. In all the time she worked on MultiReal, don't you think this problem occurred to her?" Quell's face had turned blood-red with rage, and Horvil could see his fists clenching on the bat until it vanished. "People have been talking about computational resource limitations for years now, long before anybody ever heard of infoquakes. This is not new. Are there risks with MultiReal? Of course. But give us a few more years to optimize the code, and we can limit the risks. In a rational and responsible society, there's no reason why this program shouldn't see the light of day."

A cold wind blew through the bleachers and made a whistling sound off the metal railings. Suddenly, his tirade over, the Islander seemed to have aged a dozen years. "You think you see all the possibilities now?" said Quell. "Think again. There are possibilities that will scare the living wits out of you. Possibilities you haven't even dreamed of."

Robby Robby's grin began just below one ear and undertook an impossibly long journey down his chin to reach the other. Merri could find no evidence a single granule of stubble had ever blemished that slick face.

"You're looking particularly good this morning, Merri," said the channeler, his voice lightly greased.

The fiefcorp apprentice held back a smirk. She didn't take Robby's Casanova act seriously; she had seen enough of the man's tactics to know it was just part of his sales patter. Robby Robby never walked down any path unless he was convinced a pile of credits awaited him at the end. Still, Merri wondered if her fiercely protective companion-her fiercely protective female companion-would regard his charade quite so casually. "So we're here to discuss the market survey," she said in a no-nonsense tone.

"The market survey, yes." Robby bobbed his head, which Barb-urShop 125k had coifed with a perfect cube of hair. Behind him sat his entire troupe of two dozen channelers, fresh young faces either untouched by experience or polished smooth by it. All had adapted the same ridiculous cube-haired 'do as Robby. "The folks we're contacting are confused, Merri. They've all heard of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp-we've got huge amounts of name recognition. And of course, after that mess with the infoquake, who hasn't heard about MultiReal by now?" Robby's channelers gave sanctimonious nods of agreement up and down the conference table.

Merri smiled. "So is there a problem?" she asked. Of course there was a problem.

"Well, when our pollsters started asking folks if they were interested in MultiReal, almost 95 percent said yes. Great numbers across the spectrum! But when we asked people whether they thought MultiReal was something they might actually buy ... What was that number again, Friz?"

"17.3 percent," replied Frizitz Quo, a perky Asian channeler sitting to Robby's right.

The grin on Robby's face narrowed a few microns. "17.3 percent interested in buying MultiReal. I don't need to tell ya, Merri-that's not an encouraging number! Nobody knows what this MultiReal stuff is for."

Merri gave a rueful sigh and placed her hands palm up on the table in a gesture of sincerity. During the past few months, she had learned that body language was crucial in the channeling business. "This is a brand-new industry, Robby," she said. "The sky's the limit. We've barely even started counting the possibilities." She thought back to Quell's demonstration yesterday and tried to use deductive reasoning to figure out more practical uses for MultiReal. But as usual, her mind came up blank. "Baseball, for one."

"Yes, baseball." Robby nodded slowly in an unconvincing imitation of agreement. To a pathological yes-man like Robby, the only way to express a differing opinion was to agree less vehemently. "So that leads us to your script. This baseball thing-is Natch going to be able to do that at the demonstration? Is it possible?"

"It is," said Merri firmly. "I've seen it."

Robby scratched his head as he pored over the latest draft of Jara's speech, which he had projected onto a viewscreen at one end of the table. Even with the font size bumped up to drudge-headline proportions, the entire script still fit easily within two screenlengths. Robby made a show of flipping through the presentation again, pretending to read it carefully when Merri knew he was really holding a ConfidentialWhisper conversation with his staff - and it was a heated conversation, if the worried grooves on the channelers' foreheads were any indication.

"You know, Merri, I've been working with Natch for a few years now," said Robby. "I know this guy pretty well. I've heard what he has to say about the Surinas and their creed babble, and it ain't pretty."

Creed babble? Merri bristled at the slick channeler's characterization, and immediately began rallying a passionate defense of creedism inside her head. Then she imagined how the Bodhisattva of Creed Objectivv would respond-we often calla thing babble that we cannot ourselves understand, he would say with a good-natured shrug-and she simmered down.

"The point is," Robby was saying, "our man Natch is cynical to the core. Are you sure he's okay with this?"

"I've given you access to a whole library of detailed analysis, Robby. You've got an entire history of the Surina name, a list of the Surina clan's accomplishments and inventions, and all those stellar Primo's ratings Natch has been accumulating over the past few years. Robby, this is going to be one of the biggest technological advances the world has ever seen, and Natch wants you with us on the ground floor! Trust me, he can definitely do everything in that script." Merri paused to take a deep breath. She couldn't remember the last time she had been so agitated.

"I'm curious, though," Robby mused with a sly look. "If Natch is so committed to this Surina stuff, how come he didn't show up for the meeting today?" He gestured ever so slightly towards the empty chair at the opposite end of the table.

Merri had been wondering precisely the same thing, but she was not about to tell Robby that. She felt the keen temptation to lie, to slip free from the bonds of her Objectivv oath, if only just this once. Natch had some last-minute coding to finish up. He's doing an interview with Mah Lo Vertiginous right now. He's meeting with Margaret across the courtyard in the Surina residence. Who would be the wiser?

The depths of this game had suddenly become unfathomable to Merri. Even with company allies in a private meeting, messages were being broadcast, challenges made, gauntlets thrown down. What place did Absolute Truth have in this cesspool?

Instead of lying, Merri found herself plastering a WinningGrin 44 on her face. "Robby, you know what a perfectionist Natch is," she said. "How he wants everything done his way, down to the last detail. You know he's going to insist that every last connection strand is absolutely perfect before he goes out on that stage."

Again the placating smile, the fake burst of comprehension. "No doubt!" Robby ejaculated. "So that just leaves us with one more topic."

"Yes?"

"The Council." Merri quickly tossed a PokerFace 83.4b atop the WinningGrin. "They've been-heck, Merri, they've been harassing my boys and girls here." He tilted his head in the direction of his "boys and girls," who all murmured their assent.

Suddenly, Merri felt very tired. "What do you mean by `harassing'?"

"It's just your typical Defense and Wellness Council aggravation," said Robby, sweeping his concerns over one shoulder with a long, bony hand. "Requests to see our permits, people following us around, that kind of thing. Friz here got cited for `walking too close to a tube track' the other day." Friz, the junior channeler, jutted his bottom lip forward and gave his best hangdog look. "Nothing we can't handle, of course. But you know, if we have another one of those infoquakes ..."

Robby Robby let the sentence drift off, but Merri was all too ready to complete it. If we have another one of those infoquakes, the Council might swoop down and take MultiRealfrom us by force. The public might get frightened away from the product altogether. The drudges might start calling for Natch's head. Any way you look at it, it's entirely possible none of us will make a single credit off this crazy enterprise.

Again, Merri found herself stretching the bonds of her oath, reaching for the sweet opiate of prevarication. She adopted her most confident tone of voice and enhanced it with bio/logics. "Robby, nobody knows what's really going to happen out there tomorrowmuch less next week or next month! Your team is going to be put on the spot, and you might have to do a lot of improvising. You'll probably have to endure a few more of those bogus citations from the Council. But Natch is utterly committed to this product. He hasn't just staked our careers on it; he's staked his own. And in the years you've known him, has Natch ever steered you wrong?"

The channeler seemed to be weighing his options for a few excruciating seconds. His eyes flickered on the black-and-white swirl of the Objectivv pin riding her left breast. Finally, Robby dispensed one of his Cheshire cat smiles. The same smile quickly rippled down the table until all two dozen channelers were wearing it. "I gotcha, Merri," said Robby. "You're absolutely right. If this is what Natch wants, this is what Natch gets. We trust in Natch."

I wish I did, Merri said to herself glumly.

Benyamin was experiencing deja vu, but it had nothing to do with any of Natch's bio/logic programs.

He was standing on the balcony overlooking his mother's assembly-line floor where he had stood for most of the past year. Two hundred workbenches lay in a grid below him. He was younger than many of the programmers, and had less coding experience than almost all of them. It felt like nothing had changed in the past few months, like he had never decided to step out from under Berilla's oppressive wing and seek a job in the fiefcorp sector.

As always, Ben listened for some undercurrent of resentment running through the staff. Were they jealous of this kid who had leapfrogged to the management office straight out of initiation? Did they resent the fact that the monthly interest on his trust fund exceeded half their salaries combined? The answer to these questions, it seemed, was still no. If there was any embittered muttering going on here, it was drowned out by the rumble caused by hundreds of clanking bio/logic programming bars. The assembly-line coders were oblivious. Too busy concentrating on tunes from the Jamm and holding Confidential Whisper conversations with distant companions.

"Thirty-one percent done," came a smoky female voice, late forties or early fifties.

Benyamin turned to find Greth Tar Griveth, the woman who had replaced him as floor manager, walking onto the balcony from his old office. Her office now. Ben sensed that the job, which had been a whistle stop on the track to success for him, was more like a post of permanent exile for Greth. She had only been here for six weeks, but she had already adapted the vacant stare, the careless flip of the hand, the bored mid-sentence yawn that had been hallmarks of Ben's seventh and eighth months.

"Only thirty-one percent?" said Ben with a groan. "But we need this done in less than twenty-four hours!"

Greth stood next to him at the railing and let out a weary ffff. "We'll get it done. I think."

"You think?"

"The second shift is coming on now, and they're much quicker than the first. Plus, we just finished up a gig for the Elanners, so we'll have some more coders to put on the job. Look, over there."

Greth Tar Griveth pointed at the rightmost row of programmers, where Ben could see the Surina/Natch templates slipping silently into the production line. One by one, the workers in that quadrant of the floor completed their current projects and watched blue and pink chunks of code pop up in their MindSpace bubbles. Small bricks in the Gothic castle that was the MultiReal engine. Other coders were gazing numbly at pieces of the Probabilities ROD. If any of them suspected they were plugging away at the world's most notorious compendium of bio/logic code, they showed no sign.

Nor did the salty assembly-line floor manager have a clue what program her crew was laboring away on. Ben had made sure that the words Natch, MultiReal and Surina did not escape his lips, and he praised the Fates that his apprenticeship to the Surina/Natch Fiefcorp was not yet common knowledge in Creed Elan circles. Still, he took no chances, and made sure a fat sheaf of credits was sitting in Greth's Vault account to dissuade her from asking questions.

"Here's the real test," said Greth, pointing to a gangly kid in the epicenter of the floor whose workbench could have rivaled Horvil's in sloppiness. "They call that kid The Robot. Arrived just after you left, and already he's leading the floor in output. Never complains, never says much of anything."

Ben fastened his gaze on The Robot, who was wrapping up work on someone else's tangled web of a program. Indeed, the young man was tearing through the template with astounding speed. Ben watched as The Robot whirled the mass around with one hand, grabbed the programming bar he needed with the other, and then caught the template backhanded, just in time to make the appropriate connection. "So why's this guy a good test?" said Ben.

"Because he's got absolutely no imagination," replied Greth. She stretched, nearly poking Benyamin in the eye with a stray elbow. "Give him your ordinary coding job and he'll sweep through it in record time. But make the slightest flaw in your template, and he just folds. Look."

True to her words, as soon as the kid moved on to his next job-a golden program that looked like a bowl of fruit-he froze up. The bio/logic programming bars in his hands hovered in place, vibrating like stuck gears. Ben could practically hear the ConfidentialWhisper conversation from his supervisor guiding him through the obstruction. After a ten-minute pause, The Robot hesitantly got back to work. Soon, he was a blur of motion once again.

"If he can handle the templates your cousin put together," said Greth Tar Griveth drily, "we'll be okay."

Ben held his breath as The Robot finished up his current assignment and made the swirling-hand motion signaling his readiness to accept a new template. A pink blob, one small corner of the MultiReal engine, appeared in front of him.

The Robot whipped through the template in twenty-two minutes.

Greth loosened her grip on the railing and let out a deep breath. "It'll be close, but I think we'll get your job done on time. Maybe even twenty or thirty minutes early."

Ben inhaled a draught of cool air, expelling a warm puff in return. The billow of air failed to accomplish the calming effect he had intended. "That's cutting it a little too close."

"Yes," replied Greth, not bothering to contradict her predecessor. It is."

Horvil had almost forgiven the Surina guest lodge for the lumps in its mattress and found a route to sleep, when an urgent ConfidentialWhisper reached his mental inbox. The engineer accepted it. He found himself flailing against the wall under the galewind force of an angry Jara.

"Emergency meeting!" she cried. "Emergency meeting now! Everyone report to the Enterprise Facility!"

Horvil groggily threw on yesterday's clothes and made his way across the Surina compound, discovering along the way that he had put on only one sock. The central courtyard was aflurry with security officers going about their midnight routine, questioning passersby, relentlessly patrolling, checking their weapons and loading dart canisters from their belts. Horvil was not surprised to find the Islander Quell in their midst. He told the newest fiefcorp apprentice about the meeting, and the two quickly followed Jara's beacon to a conference room on the fifth floor of the Enterprise Facility.

They wandered into a piece of SeeNaRee titled Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grandejatte. Jara stood beside a cool river rendered in tiny pinpricks of color, while Parisian matrons in ridiculous hooped petticoats sauntered on the opposite bank. Her fiery mood made a sharp contrast with the calm pointillist trees. Horvil was about to chide Quell for his SeeNaRee program's poor selection when he caught sight of Merri in the river a few meters down, wading barefoot and watching the ducks. Obviously, the channel manager had arrived here first.

Benyamin showed up moments later, and the five apprentices sat at a plain conference table overlooking the river. "So what's the emergency?" said Ben Jauntily.

Jara gestured to the empty chair at the head of the table. "Natch."

"What's wrong with him this time?"

"He's disappeared."

Four blank faces gazed back at her.

"You mean-he hasn't been in touch with you at all?" cried Horvil. "I thought he was supposed to be at that meeting with Robby Robby this afternoon."

Merri shook her head. "He didn't show up."

"Well, where the fuck is he? Hasn't anybody talked to him since the last fiefcorp meeting?"

Nobody answered. A cloud of black and gray dots descended on them from the east, threatening to dump pixels of rain on the congregating Parisians.

"I've tried requesting a multi connection," said Jara, rubbing the pulsing vein on her temple. "I've sent him at least twenty Confiden- tialWhispers. Nothing. I even tried Margaret, but her secretary says she's been holed up with those diss L-PRACG people for three days straight now. Natch isn't there."

"Did you try Serr Vigal?" asked Merri.

Jara nodded grimly. "He's not answering me either, although that's not a big surprise. I checked the schedule of that conference in Beijing. He's probably delivering the keynote address right about now."

"Maybe Natch is ... testing us or something," said Ben to nobody in particular. "Maybe he's just trying to make sure we're on our toes. I know he has some pretty unconventional management tactics."

"Unconventional, yes," replied Horvil. "Totally fucking insane, no."

"Doesn't the man have any private security?" asked Quell.

Jara glared at the Islander as if he had grown a horn from his forehead. "Are you kidding?"

Quell let out an animalistic grunt. "I can't believe this," he snarled. "No common sense, just like Margaret. Natch knows he has enemies, doesn't he? The Patel Brothers, the Defense and Wellness Council, the Pharisees, all those programmers and ROD coders and drudges he's pissed off over the years. The list is practically endless."

"Don't forget Lucas Sentinel," put in Horvil, counting on his fingers. "And the Meme Cooperative. Brone. Creed Thassel. Creed Elan. My Aunt Berilla-"

Ben groaned out loud.

"All right, that's enough!" shrieked Jara, slapping one open hand against the table and sending a loud thwak echoing through the SeeNaRee. The Parisians snapped their heads up in surprise, as did the rest of the fiefcorp. "It doesn't matter right now. We could sit here for a week naming people who hold a grudge against Natch. What we need to do is stay focused. We've got a presentation tomorrow at four o'clock, and I intend for us to be ready for it."

Horvil felt a smile slowly creep onto his face. There was no officially designated Number Two in the fiefcorp hierarchy, but Quell, Merri and Benyamin seemed ready to follow Jara to the heart of a simmering volcano. At that moment, Horvil was too. "So what do you want us to do?" ventured the engineer.

"I want you to go looking for Natch," said Jara. "You've known him longer than any of us, Horvil. See if you can get into his apartment and look for clues. Go everywhere he might possibly be hiding. Quell, I want you to comb every centimeter of the Surina compound and make absolutely sure he's not holed up here somewhere. As for you two, Ben and Merri-just keep working. If those assembly-line programmers don't finish in time-or if the channelers aren't ready-this is all going to be a moot point anyway."

"I've got a friend with the Elanners who runs a private detective agency," said Ben. "Maybe I could-"

Jara cut him off. "No. We don't want word of this to leak out to anybody outside the fiefcorp. Anybody, do you hear me? Not even Margaret or Robby. The last thing we need is for the drudges to start spreading rumors. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Natch is cooped up here with us, working on Possibilities."

"And what are you going to be doing, Jara?" asked Merri.

Jara clawed briefly at the vein in her temple, which had begun to throb once more. "I'm going to stay here and come up with a plan."

"A plan for what?" said Ben.

"A plan for what to do if Natch doesn't show up tomorrow."

The panic that had been bubbling beneath the surface now struck the fiefcorp like a miniature infoquake. Merri looked like she might pass out at any minute, while Quell gripped his connectible collar as if preparing to snap it in two. Horvil could feel his OCHREs working to slow a madly racing heart, and he would have bet anything his cousin was using his faraway look as cover while he reviewed his apprenticeship contract. Even the painted denizens of the SeeNaRee were milling around, opening and closing their parasols in confusion.

Only Jara appeared to have mastered her emotions. She stood up and placed her hands flat on the table. "Listen," she said through gritted teeth, "there's only so much time we can spend looking for Natch. You all know him as well as I do. If he doesn't want to be found, he won't be found."

"Why wouldn't he want to be found?" Merri asked.

Glum silence shrouded the table.

"If any of us had the slightest inkling of how Natch thinks, we wouldn't have signed on to this bloody fiefcorp in the first place," said Jara. "Let's get moving. It's one-thirty now. Everybody report back here at nine a.m. sharp."

Natch stood alone on the beach.

Civilization had not reached this place yet, or maybe it had left long ago and taken all of culture's detritus with it. The billboard advertisements, the black code darts, the tube tracks, the hoverbird clouds, the political manifestos, the buildings both large and small, the silly trappings of fashion-all of them gone.

The world reduced to sand, sky and sun.

The world a million years after humanity had breathed its last gasp.

The sun had risen to its midday perch and looked as if it might stay there for a while. Beneath his feet, the sand had begun to absorb the heat. As the temperature rose and the sand began to sizzle, tiny creatures burrowed their way to the surface of the beach. Sand mites by the millions scrambled around, wildly looking for some relief from the burning, but there was none to be found.

Natch closed his eyes and cast his mind out to the Data Sea to find a bio/logic program that would protect his tender soles, but he could find none. No bio/logic programs, no chatter from the drudges, no Data Sea. Was the vast corpus of human knowledge extinct too? Had it ever existed at all in this place? He opened his eyes again and scanned the horizon, looking for something, anything. A tree to shelter under, a rock with a cool face to it. But the world was completely flat and featureless.

He had begun to hop up and down to ease the burning, when he felt an icy drop of water tickle his feet.

The tide was rising. The water carved rivulets in the sand dunes as it spilled onto the beach. Natch leapt down towards the sea and dunked his feet in the spray. He heaved a tremendous sigh of relief and allowed the anxiety to slip from his mind.

Minutes passed before Natch noticed the vast panicked retreat going on in the sand. Millions of tiny creatures-sand mites, miniature crabs, black segmented insects-all dashing pell-mell for higher ground. The saltwater was licking his ankles before he came to a sudden realization: the insects weren't fleeing the heat, they were fleeing the tide.

He turned and headed back up the beach. But the tide was rising faster than he could run. By the time he overtook his own footprints running in the opposite direction, they were submerged beneath half a meter of water. Natch began running as fast as he could, lifting his legs in the air, stork-like, to stay above the tide.

The ocean had risen up above his knees when he realized he was not going to make it. The angle of the beach was too shallow, the progress of the tide too rapid. The strip of land he had been aiming for receded farther and farther away with each second. Natch stopped for a minute and turned around to see if there was another place he could head for, someplace safe from the rising tide. But there was nothing in any direction now but endless sea.

He began scrambling madly for higher ground. His splashes were the only noise that could be heard anywhere; the ocean itself did not crash or break or even ripple. Its surface was unbroken and lifeless. Eternal.

The water rose up to his chest, and Natch abandoned all hope of wading. He tried to leap up into a swimming position, but a remarkably strong force pulled on his legs, keeping him down. A deep underwater vortex into which the entire world would eventually sink.

Natch struggled wildly, clinging to his ambitions and desires. MultiReal was out there somewhere. So were number one on Primo's, a lunar estate, riches, glory. But one by one, he could feel all his cares draining out of him and sliding deep into the watery void. There were no fiefcorps down in that demesne of the drowned, no fiefcorps or memecorps or bio/logic programs or Primo's ratings.

He desperately tried to keep his head above water, but the current was too strong. The tide of nothingness, the Null Current, pulled him under.

Natch could see the light of the sun receding. He could feel the tug of the nothingness below, which was his final destination. His struggles and his worries seemed so petty once the Null Current had pulled him in. Down here, desire was irrelevant, because the undifferentiated mass of nothingness that was his destination allowed no changes, accepted no arguments, admitted no standards by which to measure and compare. In the deeps, there was nothing to want because there was nothing to gain, nothing to fix because there was nothing to break.

He stopped struggling as the darkness closed in, as the surface became a distant memory, as he was sucked down by the vortex that had no end, the vortex that spiraled down infinitely until it was no longer a vortex, until he and it and everything else melted together and merged into one endless eternal line, a vector pointing nowhere, a vector whose beginnings were irrelevant and improbable, and whose end was forever unreachable.

The apartment building was not much to look at by West London standards, but for Shenandoah, it had style in abundance. One might have said the building jutted out from the side of a hill, if not for its sine-wave shape that architects often used to camouflage the constant structural flux. A more appropriate description would have been that the building rippled or undulated from the hillside. Not the kind of thing you found crammed amidst the pointed abbeys at Bishopsgate.

Horvil had been inside the building a thousand times, of course, at all hours of the day and night. But he usually skipped the exterior view and multied straight to the network gateway in Natch's foyer. Funny how you could spend so much time embedded in a place that you didn't really know what it looked like from the outside.

From the ground, the engineer looked up the side of the tenement and saw several balconies like the one where he, Natch and Jara had stood and tested NiteFocus 48. It seemed like a million years ago, during a vanished era of innocence. Now all the building's balconies were occupied by strangers.

Horvil walked inside the front doors, nosed around the atrium for a few minutes, then ascended the lift to Natch's flat. He hesitated at the fiefcorp master's door for a few seconds. If Natch wasn't here, the apartment security program would probably let a trusted presence like Horvil invoke emergency protocols and enter. But that would trigger warning messages to Natch and possibly the building management as well. He didn't mind Natch receiving such a message-the entrepreneur might actually respond and put an end to this madness-but how much could you really trust a landlord these days? A series of gloating drudge headlines flashed in Horvil's brain: BREAK-IN LEADS TO MASSIVE MANHUNT FOR MISSING FIEFCORP MASTER.... NATCH LEAVES APPRENTICES HIGH AND DRY.... MISSING ENTREPRENEUR `A WORTHLESS HUMAN BEING,' SAYS LANDLORD.

Horvil entered, stood in the foyer and counted to twenty. Nothing happened.

It took Horvil only a few minutes to determine there was no bloody corpse stinking up the premises. No scattered debris on the counters, no slack body standing on the red tile, no sign of a struggle. But he could see no evidence the place had been inhabited the past few days either. Not that Natch's messes could compare to the colossal disasters Horvil usually left for his cleaning bots, but a few half-drunk cups of chaff or nitro could usually be found on his table at any given time. Today, however, nothing.

Horvil knew the real test was not in the common areas, but in the office. That was where Natch spent most of his time anyway. The engineer poked his nose into the room and made a major discovery: Natch's bio/logic programming bars were gone. Of course, they could be lying in one of the drawers under the workbench, drawers that a multi projection could not physically open. But in all the years Horvil had known him, Natch had never set his programming bars anywhere but the top of the bench or on a side table within easy reach.

Wherever Natch went, he took his biollogic programming tools with him, thought Horvil. So what does that mean?

The fiefcorp apprentice wandered to the window and tuned it transparent. Natch would have headed northeast past the billboard (BANDWIDTH CONSERVATION IS PEOPLE PRESERVATION: A message from Creed Conscientious), towards the main city, towards the TubeCo station.

Towards the small cluster of officers in white robes now pointing in Horvil's direction.

Horvil instantly flipped on the window's sunblock and ducked out of the officers' line of sight. Don't be so paranoid, Horv, the engineer scolded himself. Just Council officers doing a routine patrol. They weren't pointing at you.

But was it really so implausible to think Len Borda's goons might be scoping out Natch's apartment? Especially now, when he was mere hours away from demonstrating MultiReal to an audience of billions?

Horvil scurried out of the apartment and down the lift, whether to hide from the officers or to follow them, he could not say. He stood in the atrium and looked out the window, still vacillating between courses of action, when his eye caught a glint of metal on the ground reflected from the just-risen moon, past the billboard in the gutter on the side of the road. Horvil launched NiteFocus 50c and fine-tuned his vision with Bolliwar Tuban's TeleScopics 88 to make sure. Yep, definitely a bio/logic programming bar.

Eventually, the coven of Council troops moved westwards toward the hoverbird facilities. The engineer thrust his head outside the front door and scanned the horizon, left to right and back again. None of the officers carried bulky, shoulder-mounted disruptors, but who knew which of the surrounding buildings contained one the Council could summon at a moment's notice? When the coast was clear, he darted northwest as fast as his feet could carry him.

Horvil kneeled to the ground and examined the object closely, wishing his multi projection could solidify long enough for him to pick it up. A thin rod of burnished metal, nondescript but for the Roman letter S embossed near one end and a small dent in one corner. The kind of dent a tightly wound programmer might make by repeatedly whacking the bar against a hard workbench.

If this was indeed Natch's bio/logic programming bar, then what were the odds of Horvil finding it here? The fact that the municipal LPRACG had not swept it up by now was a pretty astronomical coincidence in itself.

And if it was Natch's-how did it get here? And what did its presence mean?

Jara had the same questions.

"I'm not saying it means nothing," said the analyst, looking drawn and haggard from lack of sleep. "I'm not saying the bar doesn't belong to Natch. But there have to be hundreds of people who walk by that spot every day carrying programming tools. Anybody could have dropped that bar."

"But the dent," protested Horvil. "The fact that the bars weren't in his apartment ..."

"Circumstantial evidence. And besides, what if you're right? What if that was Natch's stuff lying on the street? It's useless information. Unless Natch left a trail of metal bars leading across town like breadcrumbs, it won't help us."

Benyamin rocked back and forth in his seat impatiently. "The least we can do is send someone to go get it."

"No," said Jara. "Multi projecting to Shenandoah is one thing, but sending someone there in the flesh is another. What if someone's trying to use that bar to lure us away from the Surina compound? We came here to Andra Pradesh to keep safe. We need to stay here."

The young apprentice muttered something under his breath and arose from his chair with a look of defiance. "I'll go," he said.

"No, you won't," snapped Jara. "You need to ride herd on those assembly-line programmers and make sure we've got a product ready to show this afternoon. Now sit down." Blood rushed to Benyamin's face. He looked to Horvil, Merri and Quell for support, but found only awkward silence. Horvil gave an almost imperceptible gesture downwards towards the chair, and his cousin crumbled to his seat.

"I think we need to try contacting Serr Vigal again," said Quell.

Jara shook her head. "What's the matter with you people? We've been through this, Quell. We keep going round in circles, the same arguments over and over again for hours." The analyst scoped out the conference table for a suitable object to use as a projectile, found none, and pressed her fingertips to the mahogany all the harder. "Even if Vigal was returning my messages, we can't have him deliver the speech. He's just not a good enough huckster. Have you ever sat through one of his neural programming speeches? They're excruciatingly boring."

"I'm afraid to say it, but I agree with Jara," offered Merri.

"But Vigal's got a reputation in the programming community," said Quell. "He's got a following. He knows what he's talking about."

"And after the tenth time he stops mid-sentence to scratch his bald head, people are going to wonder where Natch is. They're going to think something has gone terribly wrong in the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp, and consumer confidence in us is going to plummet before we can even get a product to market. Blowing your first major company presentation is worse than not doing one at all."

"So why don't we cancel already?" mumbled Horvil, his head bowed to the table under the confining archway of his clasped hands, as if waiting for a guillotine to drop.

"Because we have an alternative," said Jara.

The Islander let out a brutish noise halfway between a grunt and a laugh. "Now you're the one who's going around in circles. How many times do I have to say this? Margaret won't do it. She's handed the project off to Natch-she's not going to jump back into this whole business again."

Jara frowned, brushing one finger slowly over her bottom lip. "I realize you've known Margaret longer than any of us-for process' preservation, I've never even met her except for that two-minute appearance she put in at the fiefcorp meeting the other day. But I'm just not convinced. We've got a first-rate demonstration. Merri's been working with Robby Robby to get the crowd fired up. The entire thing is laid out. All Margaret has to do is stand up and deliver it. How can she refuse?"

"The infoquake," said Quell. "She keeps saying the whole thing was her fault. She thinks those people died because of hear"

"Delusions of grandeur," muttered Ben.

Quell glared sharp slashing daggers at the young apprentice. "When you're the daughter of the Surinas," he snarled, "there's no such thing as a delusion of grandeur."

"That notwithstanding," said Jara, "I have to try to convince her. For process' preservation, Quell-this woman is a scientist. She'll listen to reason, won't she?"

Jara marched through the Surina Center for Historic Appreciation with her miniature fists clenched. Security guards haloed her like massive blue-green planets orbiting a small but furious star. She approached the atrium through an archway labeled Subaether Court. A score of disgruntled visitors glared at Jara when she passed, as if she were responsible for their being muscled out of the atrium.

But the fault lay with the nondescript woman in the center of the domed room gazing up at the statue of a skinny man with a large nose. He was not the largest of the scientific titans adorning the dome, but his stone effigy had an almost mythical presence. The man stood calmly with one hand extended, not offering a welcoming gesture so much as making a commanding sweep. At his feet were carved the words:

ANYTHING WORTH DOING IS WORTH PERFECTING

-Sheldon Surina

Next to the Father of Bio/Logics, Margaret Surina was a half-presence at best. She looked like she might disintegrate inside her bodhisattva's robes at any moment. Her face was solemn, even apologetic. An internal monologue flashed behind her eyes like distant lightning.

Jara could spare no time for pity. She shook herself loose from the Surina guards and stalked to the bodhisattva's side. The guards established a perimeter around the room and kept their distance. "I've been trying to find you for almost two hours," said Jara.

Margaret did not even acknowledge Jara's presence. "The Texan governments tried to assassinate him," said the bodhisattva, her gaze never leaving that of her ancestor. Even carved in stone, Sheldon Surina bore a look of self-importance. "The public hated him for a long time too. People always forget about that. The Three Jesuses called him a devil, and the Pharisees slaughtered thousands of his supporters for sport. He came up with the idea for MindSpace sitting in a cave in the Himalayas."

"Natch has disappeared," said Jara.

"I know."

The bio/logic analyst took a step back in surprise. Margaret knew? Then why hadn't she answered all the messages and Confidential Whispers Jara had been flinging her way? As one of the firm's senior partners, why hadn't she immediately called a meeting to discuss alternative plans for the presentation? Jara felt like crying at the unfairness of it all. Why does it feel like I'm the only one willing to fight for this fiefcorp? Why is it that when push comes to shove, Natch disappears, Serr Vigal prives himself to all communication, and Horvil just falls apart? And yet I'm the one who's trying to get out of this whole nightmare. I'm the one who wants to put this MultiReal shit behind me and get on with my life.

"If you want to honor Sheldon Surina's memory," Jara said in a slow and deliberate tone of voice, "then you'll stop feeling sorry for yourself and help us figure out an alternate course of action."

Margaret recoiled as if she had just been slapped. "I have no idea where Natch is. I didn't do anything to him."

"I'm not suggesting you did. But you're the one who set this whole thing in motion."

"Indeed?"

"Come on, Margaret! You created this fucking program, you dragged Natch and the rest of us into this business. You stood up there in front of billions of people and announced a bold new era of multiple realities. It's too late to back out now. You have a responsibility-no, an obligation-to see it through."

"An obligation to whom? To you?" The descendent of Sheldon Surina snorted haughtily. "I don't know you."

"You know Natch," said Jara. "You know Quell."

Margaret firmed up her jaw, looking again at the cool stone representation of her ancestor. Natch's name had produced barely a ripple on the bodhisattva's face, but mention of the Islander had obviously shaken her. "My obligation," she replied, "is to him." By him, clearly, Margaret meant the big-nosed stone statue and not anyone this side of the grave.

Jara stomped her foot and, only by sheer force of will, restrained herself from yelling at the venerable bodhisattva. Hadn't she been through this same scenario with Natch just a few weeks ago, when he all but announced his intention to frame his apprentices for that little black code scheme? Was there something inherent in the bio/logics trade that caused fiefcorp masters to lose their moral bearings? "So after sixteen years of working on this thing, you're just going to give up ,,

"Now who's playing the victim? You're not an invalid, Jara." Until that moment, Jara had not quite been sure the bodhisattva even knew her name. "I'm quite certain Natch didn't hold a dartgun to your chest and force you to sign an apprenticeship contract. When you start a new business, there always are risks. You didn't think Natch and I were going to take all those risks while you sat back and watched millions of credits pour into your Vault account, did you?"

Blistering words clawed at Jara's windpipe, struggling for release. But at that moment, a Surina security guard trotted up to Margaret with a fist raised chin-level in salute. The bodhisattva gave the man a sidelong glance. Then the color drained from her face in response to some word she heard over Confidential Whisper.

"Go ahead," rasped Margaret, stumbling towards the window with a hand clutching her stomach. "You might as well tell her."

The officer turned to Jara and saluted smartly. "The Defense and Wellness Council is coming."

"What?"

"Several hundred hoverbirds have been spotted on the outskirts of Andra Pradesh. Three or four legions of Council officers are heading this way."

Jara felt her knees buckle, and before she knew it, she was sitting on the ground, woozy, her back leaning against Sheldon Surina's toes. Was it going to happen this easily? Just like Margaret's speech last week, Len Borda's troops were going to surge into the Surina compound and disrupt the proceedings-maybe even seize MultiReal by force-in front of the entire world.

Margaret pressed her forehead against the glass. A look of doom washed over her face. "You see?" she cried. "He's never going to stop, not until I'm dead and MultiReal is under his control. And what can anybody do about it? What can anybody do about it?"

Jara said nothing. Words seemed quite beside the point.

"Nothing to say? I thought so." The bodhisattva cast a hateful glance back at Jara, reached into a gap in her robes, and drew a sleek silver dart pistol. "Well, don't worry. The high executive is about to find out that confiscating MultiReal won't be as easy as it looks.

"The Spire!" she roared to her security detail, then stormed out the front door into the courtyard. Her cordon of guards followed close behind.

Millions of spectators had already poured into the Surina auditorium to await the first public demonstration of MultiReal. Despite Creed Conscientious' pleas, nobody seemed deterred by the prospect of another infoquake. They wanted to catch a glimpse of the infamous Natch, to see if he really deserved his reputation among the drudges. They wanted to measure Margaret Surina's accomplishments against those of her ancestors. More than anything, they just wanted to bask in the glow of history.

A carnival atmosphere swirled through the arena. Drudges and politicians of every ideological stripe wandered around broadcasting their analysis of the spectacle to their constituencies. Fiefcorp apprentices flaunted product slogans on their shirts and foreheads in vivid glow-in-the-dark colors. Creed devotees multied into the arena dressed in full creed regalia, while bodhisattvas from fringe groups stood on chairs and preached to anyone who would listen. Groups of children clustered together under the aegis of their hives, accompanied by stern-faced proctors of business, programming, politics and ethics. A few dozen L-PRACG activists multied into the auditorium stark naked and began chanting a tepid protest of Vault lending practices. One by one, they were caught in the beam of the Surina security disruptors and their multi connections cut. Council officers were nowhere to be seen.

Merri had been standing at the foot of the stage since the first thirty-five thousand spectators arrived and the auditorium began overlapping multi projections. She felt a strange sense of privilege to be here as a real body; it was quite literally a one-in-a-million opportunity. Fiefcorp apprentices living on the moon usually did not receive this kind of privilege.

Her reverie was interrupted by a reedy voice Merri had heard all too often over the past few days. "Say you run an assembly-line programming floor, and you're on a tight deadline. You don't have time to make mistakes." Merri zeroed in on the source of the voice, and saw Frizitz Quo not three meters away, holding court before an audience of Meme Cooperative officials. "Every time one of your workers fumbles a connection, that's a few precious minutes you've wasted. A few credits MultiReal could have saved you. Now multiply that by a few hundred workers, and that's real money...."

Merri tuned out the sprightly Asian and called up the grid that would show her the location of Robby Robby's entire team of cubeheaded channelers. A diagram of the arena appeared in the air before her, speckled with purple dots to indicate the coordinates of each team member. A legend in the corner of the diagram silently tallied up audience demographics.

Robby Robby himself had roped together an ad hoc group of nearly six thousand orbital colony residents, and was busy preaching the gospel of-something. Merri tuned in a video feed. "We know what you're going through out there," exclaimed Robby, his idiotic grin wobbling sympathetically. "The last to know. The last to hear. The last to be noticed. Right?"

A lukewarm cheer from the crowd.

"Who suffered during the infoquake last week? Was it the terrans? Was it the lunars? No, of course not-it was you. Am I right? You citizens of Allowell, of Patronell, of Furtoid, of 49th Heaven, of Nova Ceti, and all the rest-it was you who bore the brunt of that terrible catastrophe, wasn't it?"

A righteous buzz of discontent. A few raised fists.

"Well, keep those multi connections right here in Andra Pradesh, ladies and gentlemen, because tonight the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp is gonna show you a whole new dawn for orbital colonists ..."

Merri cut off the feed and shook her head. Robby and his channelers had been wandering all over the map during the past few hours, voicing new sales motifs at every exchange. Her instincts told her she should rein Robby in, insist he stay on message. But did it really matter what the channelers said at this point? They were pitching a technology nobody understood to crowds that had no idea whether they should or should not care. Merri couldn't really ask any more of Robby's staff than to keep the audience interested and upbeat.

She was about to head backstage for a much-needed break when she felt a tug at her elbow. "There you are!" cried a worried Benyamin. "I've got to show you this. You won't believe-"

Merri put a calming hand over Ben's. "Slow down," she said. "Take a deep breath. How's the assembly-line going?"

"Almost done. They're putting the final touches on right now. But this is more important."

The channel manager let him drag her across the stage and up into the mezzanine. She was feeling the first twinges of impatience when the word Petrucio caught her ear.

"Yes, yes, yes, of course it's true that the Patels are licensing MultiReal from Surina/Natch," stated a rail-thin woman of Polynesian descent, who stood on a makeshift podium fielding questions from several thousand fiefcorp masters. "Why bother to deny it? The MultiReal you're going to see here today is the same MultiReal Frederic and Petrucio will be demonstrating later tonight. Same product, different brand."

Merri fed the woman's face into the public directory and soon verified her suspicions. She had never actually seen Xi Xong outside a viewscreen, where her emaciated frame often sat alongside Robby Robby, Phrancoliape and The Felwidge Group in drudge roundups of the top channeling firms. But given the amount of work Xong did for the Patel Brothers, Merri should have expected her appearance here tonight.

"There have to be some kind of Meme Cooperative regulations against this," 'Whispered Benyamin. "That woman can't just come here into our audience and start stealing customers, can she?"

"I'm afraid she can," replied Merri with a sigh. "There's not really much we can do about it. If we kick her out, she'll only draw more attention."

As it was, Xong did not seem to have any trouble attracting attention. With her opal-bedecked kimono and her glittering nail polish, she presented quite an elegant contrast to Robby's slick hucksterism. "The Patels look forward to a long and prosperous relationship with Margaret and Natch," continued Xi Xong, responding to a muffled question from the crowd. "Competitors? Why, certainly the Patels have had a little friendly competition with Natch over the years. What of it?"

"Friendly?" protested one of the onlookers. "They've done everything but try to kill each other."

A frothy laugh bubbled from Xong's china doll lips. "Don't believe everything you hear from the drudges!" she said with a dark twinkle in her eye. "So there's no love lost between Natch and my clients. What does that matter? MultiReal is a wide-open market, and there will be more than enough room for two fiefcorps here. Besides, don't they say that a rising tide lifts all boats? As long as that tide pushes a few boats towards our safe shores, then everyone wins."

Merri couldn't help but admire the woman's poise, even if her wardrobe was too gaudy for the channel manager's taste. She caught sight of one of Robby's boyish cube-heads bounding up the aisles, and for a split-second wished she could exchange sales teams.

"Do you want to know what the worst part is?" said Benyamin. "She's not the only one here trying to poison Natch's reputation."

Merri frowned. "Who else?"

"You might as well ask who isn't here. Lucas Sentinel has a whole group here spreading lies. PulCorp, Billy Sterno, Bolliwar Tuban, the Serlys, the Deuterons, Studio Fitzgerald-they've all got their own people mouthing off in the wings."

"Jara was right."

"About what?"

"It's too late to cancel. With all these fiefcorps looking for blood, we've got to pull this demonstration off, or we're finished in this business."

Jara tried on several courses of action in her head, but none of them fit. She could run, but there really wasn't anywhere to run to. She could hide, but that would be utterly futile given the surveillance technology at the Council's disposal. Jara thought about what the protagonists of the dramas did in these kinds of situations. They relied on glib words and cool detachment, of course, two things that Jara did not possess. What would Natch do?

A low crescendo of thunder swept across the courtyard and set the window panes vibrating. Rhythmic thumps. Boom boom, boom boom. It took her a few minutes to decipher the sound as that of a thousand boots marching on travertine in perfect synchronization. She listened intently for signs of battle-the high-pitched whine of continuous dartgun fire, the muffled boom of disruptors, all the war noises the dramas had trained her to recognize over the years. But if there was indeed a skirmish going on outside, none of it was reaching Jara's ears.

The tourists who had been kicked out of the atrium half an hour earlier came scurrying by. Over her mother's shoulder, a toddler gave Jara a curious look as they fled past Albert Einstein into Relativity Hall. They were followed shortly by a phalanx of panicked green-andblue Surina guards, fumbling with their dartguns as they scrambled to reach some defensive checkpoint. Jara dissolved as much as possible into Sheldon Surina's open-toed sandals, but nobody paid her any attention. Obviously, Len Borda had not even bothered repeating his fiction about protecting the scientist statues this time.

Outside, the first row of Defense and Wellness Council officers strode past the window. Their white robes looked positively spectral in the cloudy afternoon light, an affront to the notion of camouflage. Their faces bore the kind of stone-like neutrality that only bio/logics could produce. They were aiming squarely for the Revelation Spire, where Margaret was presumably holed up in a high story awaiting some kind of apocalyptic showdown. Jara peered out another window that gave her a view closer to the Spire. She had seen a squadron of Surina security forces there earlier, but now they had vanished.

What would Natch do under these circumstances? Jara knew exactly what he would do: he would go ahead and give the presenta tion anyway, until someone physically dragged him off the stage or blew him into a million pieces.

An idea popped into Jara's head, an idea that had been percolating for hours even though she had refused to acknowledge it.

Why couldn't she deliver the presentation?

Casting her mind out to the Surina facilities, Jara discovered that the spectators were indeed staying put in spite of Len Borda's little incursion. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp was scheduled to hit the stage in little more than an hour, and the auditorium already held almost 400 million multi projections. If these numbers kept up, this would be an even larger crowd than the one Margaret had garnered last week-maybe even large enough to rival the 1.3 billion who had attended Marcus Surina's funeral forty-six years ago.

When the tromp of the troops became deafening, Jara put her hands over her ears and slithered even farther into the shadows. Still feeling exposed and vulnerable, she reached into her bio/logic bag of tricks and turned on Cocoon 32, a Lucas Sentinel program that had helped calm her down many times in the past.

Jara could instantly feel the tumult from the outside world fading away as her OCHREs filtered out the sounds around her and dimmed her sight until everything had faded to a dull gray. No ConfidentialWhispers, no incoming messages. No background chatter from the Data Sea.

Could she really stand up in front of a billion people and demonstrate a technology she barely understood herself? And not just any technology-perhaps the most radical invention in the history of humanity, and one that was almost completely untested.

There were a million reasons why she couldn't deliver the presentation. Jara had no experience speaking in front of large crowds. She had a bad reputation in the bio/logics industry. She hadn't swung a baseball bat in nearly twenty years.

But what other options did she have at this point? Slink off to a tube station and go home? Wait for the hubbub to die down and then drop a groveling Confidential Whisper to Lucas Sentinel asking for her old job back?

Face it, Jara, she told herself. You want to fail.

The thought surprised and angered her. She wanted to fail. She wanted Natch's latest business venture to go down in flames. The analyst conjured a mental picture of herself: a small, fluttering, frightened thing, cowering at the feet of marble goliaths, men and women with minds and hearts and wills of stone.

And suddenly something inside of her rebelled. That's not me, she thought. I can't be like that. To settle for failure-that's like accepting death. If I just sit back and let things happen, I might as well have never lived in the first place.

Jara took a deep breath, counted to twenty, and flipped off the Cocoon. She had made her decision.

At just that moment, a familiar figure came barreling around the corner. He screeched to a halt in the middle of the room as soon as he saw the analyst, but the tub of jelly around his gut obeyed the laws of inertia and kept going. The statue of Isaac Newton looked on with amusement as Horvil toppled to the ground in accordance with the good scientist's theories.

"Oh, thank goodness!" bellowed the engineer, crawling his way across the floor to Jara's side. "I've been looking all over for you."

Jara gave her fellow apprentice a look of steely determination. "Horv, I'm going to deliver the presentation."

Horvil's mouth gaped open. "No luck with Margaret?"

She shook her head. "Quell was right. Margaret's gone totally offline. She ran to the Revelation Spire with a dartgun. I think she's going to make some kind of last stand up there. So with Natch gone and Margaret out of the picture, I guess it's up to me."

The engineer's face turned white. "Jara, there are Council officers out there. Thousands of 'em."

"I don't care. I'm not just going to sit here and do nothing."

"Before they let you set foot on that stage, they'll stick you with black code darts like a pincushion."

"Then they'll have to do it in front of a billion people."

Horvil's face took on a look of panic. His eyes tilted upwards as if beseeching the Father of Bio/Logics for an infusion of sanity. "Listen to me," he said, grabbing Jara's tiny hands and clutching them tightly within his own. "We can delay the presentation. Nothing says we have to do ours before the Patel Brothers do theirs. We can just lay low and do the whole show some other time."

"Are you completely deranged? If we put this off, the Patel Brothers will eat us for lunch. They'll pounce on us, and we'll have to spend the next month digging ourselves out."

"So what? Is it really worth it, Jara? Maybe Margaret's right. Just let it go."

"Horvil, these are our lives we're talking about here. This is our business. Don't you care about the fiefcorp and MultiReal and-and everything we've worked for in the past five years?"

"No."

Jara blanched, momentarily struck dumb. "No?"

The engineer's face blossomed into a shy smile completely devoid of irony. "All I care about is not losing you."

Jara sat stunned, unsure what to say. Was he trying to put her off her guard? Or maybe this had something to do with their unspoken rivalry for Natch's favor? Certainly the big lummox couldn't be sincere. In the three years she had known him, Horvil had barely uttered a single word that wasn't laced with sarcasm. Jara sighed. Why was it that as soon as she found her own moment of mental clarity, everything else had to slide out of focus?

"Horvil," she said gently, bundling her hands inside the warm nest of the engineer's palms. "I hope you can understand this. But I have to make that presentation. I just have to. This isn't about the fief corp or Natch, or-or product release schedules. It's about me. It's about ... not backing down. Not failing."

The engineer considered this for a moment. Jara couldn't imagine what thoughts were running through his head. Could a rich boy from the other side of London who had never had a moment of financial instability in his entire life still understand a crisis of conscience? "You have to promise me you'll be all right," he said.

Jara smiled sadly. "I'm afraid that's not up to me."

There was no burst of comprehension, no sudden epiphany behind Horvil's eyes. But finally he nodded and clenched the analyst's hands tightly. "Okay," he said. "So how can I help?"

"You can help me navigate. Do you know if there's a back entrance to the arena?" She gestured through the window at the now-familiar sight of Council officers roaming freely around the Surina courtyard. Their ranks ringed the Revelation Spire like a white crown, and lined the boulevard to the arena's front doors as well. The Surina security guards were nowhere to be found. "Obviously, we can't go that way."

Horvil jutted his chin out with determination, and the two of them rose to their feet. "As a matter of fact," he said, "there's a side entrance, through the museum here. Quell took me past it yesterday."

Jara brushed off her trousers and gave the Surina statue a respectful nod. "Let's go then."

The fiefcorp apprentices zipped past the statue of Tobi Jae Witt and down the hall. They dodged their way through a warren of curio tables and around a variety of large metal contraptions that had once housed Witt's experiments in artificial intelligence. The halls were now mostly empty of people. The few stragglers they did see were either terrified tourists looking for an escape route or Surina security forces hustling back towards the square.

Something about the conversation in the atrium had completely changed Horvil's demeanor. Minutes ago, he had been fearful for Jara's safety. But now he was taking the lead, lumbering into corridor inter sections as if preparing to use his belly to shield her from a barrage of darts. Jara looked at the engineer with a broad smile on her face. She wondered whether Horvil planned on taking the stage with her, and whether she would try to stop him if he did.

Horvil and Jara crossed over a walkway that bridged the Center for Historic Appreciation with the auditorium. They tried to keep low to avoid attention, but most of the soldiers below were fixated on the Revelation Spire anyway. Hundreds of dart-rifle barrels poked from the notches in the Spire walls, daring the Council troops to come any closer.

"The arena's just past that door," said Horvil. "The stage entrance is down the stairs."

Jara opened the door to the arena and found herself confronted with a sea of white robes.

The gathering crowd still stood at half a billion strong, but their ranks now included a large number of Defense and Wellness Council troops. The officers surrounded the stage and lined every aisle in the place. Just like last time, they silently shouldered their dartguns, their faces sculpted of stone.

Horvil gulped. "You ready?"

"As I'll ever be."

They galloped down the stairs, opting now for speed rather than stealth. The two reached the bottom and rounded the last corner. Sure enough, the corridor angled upwards and ended in a single metal door that would lead them directly onto the arena stage. Jara had not expected this last approach to the stage to be unguarded. But when she saw the three people standing in front of the door, she gasped and snapped on a PokerFace 83.4b.

Serr Vigal, the preeminent neural programmer.

Len Borda, High Executive of the Defense and Wellness Council.

And Natch, master of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp.

Jara took an awkward step backwards, tripped, and fell neatly into Horvil's arms.

She didn't realize that Len Borda was so tall. He towered over the rest of them like a thin rock pillar, his bald head its capstone. Anywhere in the world, she would have recognized his dour face instantly, whether or not he wore the Council's white robe and yellow star.

Jara tried but could not shake her head clear of historical vertigo. Standing before her was the High Executive of the Defense and Wellness Council himself. The man who had led the world's most feared military and intelligence organization for fifty-seven years and counting. The man who had personally sparred with giants like Lucco Primo, Kordez Thassel and Marcus Surina. The man who had singlehandedly defeated the Economic Slump of the 310s. The man who had mastered the intricacies of his post long before Jara was born.

She thought of all the wild and unverifiable rumors she had heard about Len Borda over the years. The secret interrogations ... the hidden fortresses ... the pitiless military strikes ... the all-pervasive network of spies and snooping programs. And now that face was directly in front of her. Were the firm grooves on the man's brow a manifestation of evil intent, as the libertarian drudges contended, or merely the chiseled remnants of nature's implacable forces?

The High Executive barely noticed her presence. "I will speak to the crowd," he said to Natch in a gravelly basso profundo. "You have ten minutes."

Jara glanced at the fiefcorp master. At first glimpse, Natch appeared calm and collected, dressed in a sharp navy-blue pinstripe suit. Only someone who had studied his every pore and wrinkle ten thousand times could tell he was tottering on the brink of collapse. She detected traces of the stimulant program QuickPrep 49q on his face. "I need twenty," Natch said firmly.

"Twenty then." Borda's tone of voice left the impression that twenty minutes was what he had been after all along. He waved a hand, and the door to the arena stage slid open, bathing him in the spotlight.

Jara mustered all of her courage and spoke to the retreating high executive. "What about all those troops out there?" she cried.

Borda paused and gave her an unyielding look. The look of a man who could pinpoint her precise location, down to the minutest degree, in the orgchart of the universe.

The analyst felt a hand on her shoulder, and turned to find Serr Vigal. "Jara, the Council is here for our protection," he said gently. "It was Natch's idea."

She gaped at the neural programmer, uncomprehending. "And ... Margaret?"

"She'll be fine," replied Borda. "Unfortunately." The high executive continued through the doorway and disappeared onto the stage. The door closed behind him.

Natch was already huddled with Horvil, listening intently to the engineer's instructions on how to operate the MultiReal program. There was no time to break down all that complexity into bite-sized pieces; Horvil was speaking pure calculus at this point. Natch gave no sign he understood the formulas his old friend was reeling off.

Jara turned to Serr Vigal. The neural programmer looked exhausted, and his eyes were full to the brim with concern for his protege.

"Natch was hit with black code," said the neural programmer in response to her unspoken question. "He just woke up a few hours ago."

"The Patels?"

"Maybe, maybe not. He doesn't remember very much."

The fiefcorp master and the engineer were now dashing around trying to find a conference room with SeeNaRee capabilities. Quell happened to show up at that precise moment, and he quickly led them to an out-of-the-way door under the stage. Natch, Horvil, Jara, Quell and Serr Vigal rushed in and found themselves standing at home plate on the baseball diamond again. Horvil conjured up a ball and a Kyushu clubfoot, then tossed them to the fiefcorp master. Natch took a deep breath, threw the ball skywards, and swung.

He missed.

He picked up the ball, chucked it in the air, and missed again.

On the fifth attempt, Natch finally connected. But the bottom edge of the bat barely nicked the ball, causing it to limp towards first base and roll to a stop in the infield.

"I can't get this fucking thing to work, Horvil!" cried Natch, flush with rage. "Didn't Ben's people hook those programs together? What the fuck have you all been doing these past few days?"

"Benyamin's team got the job done," said Quell, doing his best to ignore the fiefcorp master's slight. "I tested the program myself."

The engineer patted his boss's virtual shoulder. "Just as you begin the swing, you've got to reach out with your mind towards the Possibilities interface and make sure you don't-"

"Never mind," Natch said gruffly. "There's no time. I'll figure it out. Jara, show me the script."

She did. Let me do the presentation instead, she almost said. I'm ready, I've had a chance to experiment with Possibilities 1.0 in the past few days. But Jara could see the iron resolve in Natch's eyes, the single-minded insanity that kicked in whenever he was backed into a corner. Her little catharsis at the museum withered, wormlike, into the dust. It was inevitable. Natch would never turn down a chance to perform in front of an audience of this size. As she had predicted, he would either deliver a perfect presentation, or die trying. Jara wondered fleetingly how the living, breathing audience upstairs compared to the invisible audience Natch had been playing to in his head all those years.

"Jara, tell me whether the auditorium can handle all these calculations," said Natch suddenly. His eyes were yellow and coyote hungry. "Tell me we're not going to cause a hundred more of those infoquakes."

"Well, the Surina people think that-"

"I don't want to hear it! Tell me yes or no."

The bio/logic analyst pursed her lips for a full three seconds in thought. She had never hated Natch more. She had never found him so irresistibly sexy. "Yes."

"Good! Now go find Ben and Merri. The three of you comb the crowd and find the most sickeningly sweet little girl on the face of the earth. I'm talking five years old, pigtails, the whole thing."

"They don't allow anyone younger than eight on the multi network, remember?"

"Fine, eight years old then. But not a day over eight. Tag her spatial coordinates with a beacon so I can find her. Horvil!" The engineer saluted briskly, looking as if he were ready to give his life for the cause. "Go find a workbench. I need you to do the quickest programming job you've ever done in your life. We've got a couple of alterations to make."

"What did you have in mind?"

Natch spouted off a few polynomials. Horvil turned to the Islander, who nodded. "It can be done," muttered Quell. "Maybe." Seconds later, the three of them bolted out the door and down another hallway.

"I've never seen him so frightened, Jara," said Serr Vigal, as the two of them walked back towards the stairs and a door that would take them into the audience. "I don't think I've ever been so frightened for him either."

Jara wrapped a comradely arm around the neural programmer's waist. Nobody would have mistaken Vigal for a young man, but he seemed to have aged twenty years in the past few weeks. "I'd be frightened too if I got shot full of black code," said Jara. "But don't worry, Vigal. He's already survived one attack, and with all those Council officers swarming through the arena, I doubt anyone would be stupid enough to try another."

Vigal gave her a curious look. "I don't think you understand. Natch isn't afraid of another black code attack. He's still worried about the first one."

"You mean ... ?"

"Natch is still infected. The program didn't self-destruct after it knocked him unconscious. In fact, we think it was the code that woke him up."

"Well, what does the code do? What's it waiting for?"

"We don't know. That's what we're afraid of."

Anyone who might have suggested two weeks ago that half a billion people would be standing in the Surina auditorium awaiting a product demonstration from Natch-Natch the scoundrel, Natch the upstart, Natch the arriviste-would have been roundly denounced by the bio/logic pundits on the Data Sea who Clearly Knew Better. Now the drudges were asking themselves, if an unknown businessman could jump to the top of the hierarchy with such stunning swiftness, if one man could leapfrog generations of accepted practice and standard operating procedure, then was anything safe anymore?

High Executive Len Borda emerged from the stage door and the crowd went silent. The audience, which had just watched a second incursion of Council troops with good humor, suddenly clouded over with gloom.

The high executive marched to center stage and swept the auditorium with his piercing gaze. Half a billion onlookers waited expectantly without uttering a single word. A minute passed.

Finally, the Council chief spoke in a voice like rolling thunder. Borda's words were unhurried, untouched by focus groups, and spoken with a formality that might have been labeled pompous if the labelers did not fear having their Vault transactions scrutinized to the last decimal point by men in white robes. "My word is the will of the Defense and Wellness Council, which was established by the Prime Committee two hundred and fifty-two years ago to ensure the security of all persons throughout the system. The word of the Council is the word of the people."

A shudder whipped through the crowd like electricity. Those words had rarely been known to precede a happy occasion.

"Last week, thousands of lives were lost in the orbital colonies due to a new computational disturbance on the Data Sea known as an infoquake," continued Borda gravely. "The Council and the Prime Committee have been studying this phenomenon but have yet to draw any conclusions as to its root cause.

"The epistemological implications of this phenomenon may be uncertain, but the duty of the government remains unchanged.

"It is the solemn obligation of the Defense and Wellness Council to prevent any such disturbance from happening again. Towards that end, the Council has proposed to the Prime Committee a number of temporary measures designed to curb the risks of computational disorder. I have just been informed that the Committee has unanimously approved those measures."

The crowd's silence was broken by a low murmur from contingents of hard-core libertarians. Even though the High Executive still followed parliamentary procedure, everyone knew that the final word belonged to Borda and Borda alone. Who could recall the last time the Prime Committee rejected one of the Council's military "recommendations"? Remember the statues in the Center for Historic Appreciation, whispered the dissidents in the crowd. Remember that flimsy excuse they conjured up last time to advance their agenda.

"These are the strictures that the Prime Committee has enacted into law as of eight p.m. Melbourne time," said Borda.

"Until further notice, multi attendance will be capped at 500 million persons in any one location.

"All persons assembled at tonight's event will have their access to the Data Sea severely limited.

"And in the case of an infoquake or another eruption of black code, the Council will enforce its right to shut down programs on the Data Sea at its sole discretion."

The murmurings of unrest from the libertarians flared into full-out yells of protest. High executives had always had the ability to shut down certain programs deemed harmful to the public welfare-as long as they ran their decisions through the Prime Committee and the Congress of L-PRACGs first. But now, had the infoquake given Borda license to act unilaterally, without consultation?

A vocal element of the crowd began stomping its feet. Dire headlines appeared in drudge columns throughout the Data Sea. Chants of Borda must go echoed in one corner of the arena, until a rash of Council officers stormed in that direction and began conspicuously fingering the triggers of their multi disruptors.

Borda was unmoved. He stood and waited for the commotion to simmer down before proceeding. "The mandate of the Defense and Wellness Council-the entire reason for its existence-is to preserve the safety of every citizen in the civilized domains, from the four corners of Earth to Luna, Mars and the furthest orbital colonies," said the High Executive dispassionately. "Should the infoquake be deemed a natural occurrence, then the Council will continue to take measures necessary to prevent it from happening in the future.

"But if it should be determined that the infoquake was an act of war by rogue elements of society ..."

Borda's words hung in the air for a moment.

"... then let it be known that the Defense and Wellness Council will not stand idle. Our armies are poised, on high alert, around the globe and throughout the human territories. The Council is ready to take action against any group-any group-that tries to take advantage of a sudden lapse in Data Sea integrity.

"We are prepared to act, immediately and irreversibly, without appeal or exemption.

"Whether the Council acts or not is up to you."

Borda extended one long, bony talon from his fist and aimed it into the midst of the crowd. The audience grumbling instantly came to a halt, as 500 million people held their breath. And then, without any more formalities, the High Executive cut his multi connection and vanished.

Natch had woken up from his mysterious slumber four hours earlierwoken up alone and in one piece, lying mummylike on his own bed with no recollection of how he had gotten there. Vague and incomprehensible images hovered in his head, just beyond the reach of his irises. He could not say whether they were dreams or memories or something in between.

For advice, he had turned first to Serr Vigal, reaching his old mentor on an emergency message protocol the two had used for urgent communications since Natch's days in the hive. It had taken them less than half an hour to conclude that the black code was still active in Natch's system, and that only one man had the clout to scare off any potential attack. By the time Natch and Serr Vigal materialized in the Defense and Wellness Council's administrative offices barely three hours before the presentation, the fiefcorp master was ready to agree to almost anything that would buy some time.

So Natch had promised Len Borda access. Access to MultiReal in exchange for protection from the black code.

But what exactly did access mean? The term had come from the High Executive's mouth, not Natch's, and so he really had no way of knowing what subtle shades of meaning Borda applied to the word. How did access differ from cooperation? And did it also imply control? Did it at least fall short of the wholesale thievery that Margaret had been trying to prevent?

Or had Natch just given Len Borda the very thing Margaret Surina had been trying to keep from him for all those years?

If he had not been so pressed for time, perhaps Natch could have dickered with the Council over subtle interpretations. Once again, Margaret's words arose from the graveyard of the mind to haunt him: You find yourself capable of strange things when you run out of choices. Hadn't Natch indeed run out of choices? Anyone who would go to the trouble of assembling a strike force like the one that had ambushed him in Shenandoah certainly had the power to put together a lethal piece of black code.

Lethal black code. The implications made Natch's bones tremble. A program that could tear through his bodily defenses like rice paper and cause his OCHREs to run amok. Who could predict what would happen? A jolt of electricity into the brain? Blockage of the main arteries leading to his heart? Or perhaps something slower, more insidious, more painful?

But it wasn't cowardice that had driven him into Borda's office. I'm not a coward, Natch had insisted to himself, over and over again like a mantra. I'm not a coward. There's a lot more at stake here than my own life. The High Executive had provided all kinds of rationalizations for Natch's actions. After all, who could say what his black-robed assailants were after? Perhaps they wanted Natch to go onstage in front of 500 million people and unleash a ferocious black code attack. Perhaps they wanted to gain control of him so they could unlock access to MultiReal or kill one of his colleagues.

Or maybe these people in black robes wanted Natch to kill you, Vigal had mused out loud in Borda's direction, oblivious to the seven or eight Council disruptors that suddenly spun towards his sparsely carpeted head.

Borda himself had not expressed the slightest inkling of fear at the neural programmer's suggestion. I'd like to see them try it, he had said, his amusement registering on some subconscious level of the conversation.

And now, as Natch stood at the stage door watching Borda wrap up his impromptu speech, another possibility came streaking to the forefront of Natch's mind. What if the thugs who had assaulted him in that Shenandoah alleyway were working for the Defense and Wellness Council?

He thought about the offhanded way in which Len Borda had tossed him an additional twenty minutes of speech prep time while pretending to give him only ten. The High Executive was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted. What if this entire episode was some kind of trap? What if the assailants in the black robes had been sent to push him straight into Borda's clutches-and Natch had unwittingly done their bidding?

After the High Executive cut his multi connection and vanished, Natch looked at the millions in the crowd and tried to will himself to take those last few steps to center stage. But doubts weighed at his heels like shackled cannonballs. What if he had made the wrong decision to enlist the Council's help? What if he couldn't get MultiReal to work? What if his demonstration caused another infoquake?

The anxiety crescendoed to a mind-splitting intensity-and then suddenly switched off.

The presentation did not matter. None of this really mattered.

Natch was already doomed.

Black code prowled his system like a merciless reaper, relentless, insatiable, and ready to mow him down at any time. Even if the Council was dealing honestly with him-even if they had no involvement with the shadowy figures in the black robes and sincerely wanted to protect him-Natch doubted that Borda could act swiftly enough to stop the rogue program from taking his life. The black code had become a part of him. An internal attack could happen at any moment, between one breath and the next. It could happen now.

He took the first tentative step up the narrow ramp towards center stage. It was a straight path, without detours or alternate routes. Natch could either walk away, or he could soldier on and trust that he would get through the presentation in one piece. He would have to trust that Borda would abide by his promise; he would have to trust that Jara's script would wow the crowd; he would have to trust that Horvil and Quell's engineering had done the job, that Benyamin's assembly-line shop had performed as advertised, and that Merri and Robby had wedged open enough minds in the audience to give him a chance.

Natch reached center stage an empty husk.

Millions upon millions of people stood arrayed before himpeople of all shapes and sizes and colors and creeds swirled together. Chattering insects. The temporary organic effluence of the Null Current, dredged from the water for a brief flickering instant between tides, an aspect of the endless sea of nothingness that surrounded them all.

Jara's words floated to the front of his mind.

"Towards Perfection," said Natch. The auditorium amplified his words to every corner of the arena. He was surprised to find his voice rich and melodic and unstressed.

Natch paused for a moment to scan the crowd, then did a doubletake, exactly as Jara's script dictated. Five hundred million pairs of eyes were scanning him back. The entrepreneur made an incredulous gesture towards the stage door, where a fictitious staff stood egging him on. "That's funny," he said. "I expected to be talking to you about what's real and what's MultiReal-but I didn't expect this whole setting to be so surreal." The joke was not really funny at all, and yet millions of people were laughing anyway. Of course, the presence of sev eral thousand grim Council officers standing at attention with dartri- fles drawn did lend a certain absurdity to the whole scene.

The fiefcorp master smiled and continued. "MultiReal is the creation of new realities," Natch announced. "Alternate realities. Separate realities. The ability to visualize many things at once in order to do one thing exactly as you want.

"And what will we do with these realities?

"We'll do the same things we've always done, of course-eat, work, strive, struggle, make love-only better. Smarter. With more control.

"Now, my engineers wanted me to stand up here and blather on about the architecture of our program. All those MindSpace connections, all those complex mathematical formulas Margaret Surina has worked so hard on for the last decade and a half. And my analysts, they wanted me to talk about budgets and cost/benefit ratios and a lot of nonsense I didn't understand.

"But I said-why don't we just show them a simple demonstration?"

The fiefcorp master blinked and summoned from the arena a Kyushu Clubfoot bat and regulation baseball, just as he had done twenty minutes earlier. He shifted his grip ever so slightly, trying to find the perfect spot on the bat, the spot that his fingers melted into like an extension of his own multi projected fingers. There would be no opportunity for mistakes.

"There's an ancient legend about a player who could hit a baseball wherever he pointed. He would point to a seat in the stands, wait for the pitch, and then-wham! Knock the ball right there. They say he was the greatest baseball player who ever lived. Well, today I'm going to try to channel some of that magic for you."

Natch broke into a grin, stretched out his arm, and then whirled around in a 360-degree arc. His pointing finger encompassed the whole crowd.

He tossed the ball high into the air and swung the bat.

He activated Possibilities 1.0.

A resounding crack echoed through the arena.

Jara had found a comfortable position in the middle of the crowd where she could get an objective reading of the audience. So far, the speech she had written was performing as planned. Natch's folksy tone of voice was soothing nerves and smoothing wrinkles, providing an antidote to the poisonous invective the drudges had been spewing over the past few days.

Her apprehension began when Natch did his spinning-andpointing routine. The script had been clear, hadn't it? Natch was supposed to point at an audience member-a single audience memberand start popping fly balls his way, one after another in quick succession, then repeat as necessary. What kind of fool stunt was the fiefcorp master trying to pull?

Jara nearly collapsed in shock and horror when Natch swung the bat.

There was just one ball flying through the air-and Natch was making no motion to hit another.

Already Jara had begun a mental search for scapegoats. Was Natch unable to activate the Possibilities program? Had Horvil and Quell bungled the coding somehow and caused the MultiReal engine to sputter? Did Benyamin's assembly-line shop miss a few connections? Was this another of the Patel Brothers' perfidious acts of sabotage, or the work of the black code flowing in Natch's veins?

And of all the hundreds of millions of people to choose from, why had Natch decided to hit the ball directly to her?

Jara stretched out her hand and winced as the ball landed squarely in her palm with a soft thud. She felt the light sting of horsehide on flesh. The analyst turned the ball over in her hand and brought it closer to read the letters printed around the stitching.

OF COURSE IT'S NOT REAL-IT'S MULTIREAL

The fiefcorp apprentice blinked, shook her head, and looked at her empty palm. You're daydreaming, Jara, she told herself. There's no baseball in your hand.

But this was no daydream. The baseball had been there-and now it wasn't.

A few seconds later, gasps of astonishment simultaneously burst out of five hundred million spectators as comprehension slowly filtered through their brains. Five hundred million stinging palms, five hundred million empty hands. A collaborative process.

Jara smiled in spite of herself.

"You have just experienced the awesome power of Possibilities," said Natch after the initial shock had worn off.

"Five hundred million swings of the bat. Five hundred million possible catches. Five hundred million possible separate realities, all created up here"-the fiefcorp master tapped his forehead-"and experienced out there." He gestured broadly to the audience.

"But we don't live in a world of multiple realities. MultiReal may give you hundreds of millions of possibilities, but we still have to make a choice. A single choice. And so the path I have chosen is-this one."

Natch snapped his fingers, causing a spotlight to spear a tiny figure far away in the crowd. A wave of applause came crashing towards Jara, rippling out from the center of the spotlight until it enveloped the entire audience. In the center of the spotlight stood a girl not more than eight years old holding her father's hand, grinning adorably and brandishing a MultiReal baseball in her elfin little fingers.

"Let the word impossible be permanently eliminated from our vocabulary!" cried Natch. "There are no more impossibilities! We have entered a new Age of Possibilities-a new Age of MultiReal-and from now on, the choices are yours.

"Towards Perfection, and I thank you for choosing to attend."

Robby Robby stuck to Horvil's side like a bad odor.

"They're going absolutely offline out there, Horv-o!" the channeler squealed, his cube of hair bobbing enthusiastically to some triumphant march playing inside his head. "My team is getting mobbed-it's like being in the middle of a fucking orgy! Everyone wants to hear more about MultiReal!"

"Yeah," said Horvil, his own face sporting a lopsided grin. "Including me." Robby let out a laugh that continued much too long to have any correlation to the wit of Horvil's comment. If Merri hadn't shown up and ushered him out to join the sales blitzkrieg, he might have kept going until his spleen ruptured.

The chaos continued for over an hour after Natch had vanished from the stage. Horvil's cousins and uncles and cousins-of-cousins and third-cousins-twice-removed-by-companionship multied in from every crevice of the known universe to pat him on the back. Every member of the extended family except for Aunt Berilla, whose hatred for Natch apparently outranked her pride in Horvil and Benyamin. Once the family had dissipated, friends and business acquaintances that Horvil didn't even recognize began pressing in from all sides asking for more details about MultiReal. The engineer did his best to provide vague answers, especially when some of his "old hive buddies" revealed that they had taken up the drudging profession.

Horvil shook off his pursuers and scanned the foot of the stage for the rest of the Surina/Natch apprentices. They all seemed to be in the same pickle. Jara was being mobbed by a horde of L-PRACG represen tatives trying to negotiate a bulk rate on the spot. Ben was happily enfilading an entire squadron of creed devotees with upbeat chatter about MultiReal. Quell was engaged in a vigorous argument with a small pocket of Islanders, all tugging uncomfortably at their connectible collars. Merri was presumably still off crowd surfing with Robby Robby. Only Natch and Serr Vigal had made a clean getaway.

Somewhere in the middle of the confusion, Horvil noticed a line of white-robed Defense and Wellness Council officers moving silently out the door, their guns safely holstered.

"Did you hear?" he said in a rush as Jara walked up to him. "Sen Sivv Sor tracked down the little girl who caught the baseball. Apparently, the kid lives in a hive that just got its budget slashed by a bunch of L-PRACG bureaucrats. Can you believe that luck? I wonder who Natch wants as our next spokesperson. A stray kitten? A monk? Or maybe a prostitute with a heart of gold who-"

Why am I laying it on so thick? thought Horvil.

Jara waited patiently for the engineer's shtick to ramble to a close. "Good publicity is good publicity," she said softly, distantly.

Horvil smiled and nodded, then began inching away from the analyst towards an exit. He could ponder the mysteries of womanhood another time. Right now, too many loose ends needed tying up. Like who had ambushed Natch and shot him full of black code? What kinds of surprises did the Patel Brothers have waiting for them later tonight? And how in the world had Len Borda gotten mixed up in all of this?