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 a.s.sembly-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 pa.s.sed, 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 a.s.sembly-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 compet.i.tors 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 pa.s.sed through an a.s.sembly-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 b.u.mping 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 a.s.sembly-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. "n.o.body 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 pa.s.sion. 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 f.u.c.king 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 sh.o.r.es' 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 ba.s.s-thumping music, the kind of xpression board monotony that instinctively caused teenaged girls' hips to gyrate. Then came the smell of freshly cut gra.s.s. 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 cla.s.sic field," said Quell. Horvil nodded and switched to the more traditional playing field endorsed by the cla.s.sic 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 cla.s.sic league baseb.a.l.l.s, and then handed the equipment to Quell. "Smoke and f.u.c.king 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 baseb.a.l.l.s, threw them into the air one by one, and smacked them towards the ChaiQuoke promo. Bang bang bang bang. All twenty-four baseb.a.l.l.s 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 gra.s.s and stretched out, snow angel style. "So that's why we modified those dendrite modules ..."

Ben paced slowly towards the ChaiQuoke advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 gra.s.s 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 a.s.sumed 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 gra.s.s 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 mult.i.tudes 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 a.s.sembly-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 f.u.c.k," 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! n.o.body 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 b.u.mped 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 pa.s.sionate 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 acc.u.mulating 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?