"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 d.i.c.kered 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 a.s.sembling 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 a.s.sailants 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 spa.r.s.ely 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.saulted 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 a.s.sailants 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 cannonb.a.l.l.s. 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 a.s.sembly-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 fict.i.tious 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 Minds.p.a.ce connections, all those complex mathematical formulas Margaret Surina has worked so hard on for the last decade and a half. And my a.n.a.lysts, 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 encompa.s.sed 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 a.s.sembly-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 a.n.a.lyst turned the ball over in her hand and brought it closer to read the letters printed around the st.i.tching.

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 f.u.c.king 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 prost.i.tute 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 a.n.a.lyst 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?

5.

DEMONS OF.

THE AETHER.

"I swear to you, Natch," said the man, "I had nothing to do with this. I didn't hire anybody to ambush you in the street. I don't know any group that runs around in the shadows wearing black robes attacking people, and I wouldn't have anything to do with them if I did."

Natch's eyes blazed with doubt as he looked at Petrucio Patel.

He could only guess why Petrucio had agreed to come talk with him here in the Surina Enterprise Facility, mere hours before the Patel Brothers were due to take the stage at the Tha.s.sel Complex. Natch's cold rage would have been evident from the instant Petrucio stepped into the conference room and found himself enveloped in the windswept Arctic tundra, a forbidden land with Lovecraftian menace lurking over every hillside. If he didn't already know that his rival was beyond such emotions, Natch might have guessed that Petrucio was experiencing shame or guilt.

"I don't believe you," said Natch.

Petrucio burst into laughter. "You don't believe me! You think Frederic and I hustled the fiefcorp off to Shenandoah and started handing out robes and dartguns? Wait-you didn't see a short, fat one in the group, did you? Maybe that was Frederic. He's quite the marksman, you know."

Natch's face remained deadly serious, and Petrucio muzzled his glee with great effort. He peered back over his shoulder at the 35meter dropoff just behind his heels. A long way to plunge just to see if the SeeNaRee's automatic pain cutoff was operational. Petrucio straightened his tie and brushed ice crystals off his jacket, gestures to signal his command of the situation. "Natch, what would we gain by hiring some goons to hit you with black code? It just doesn't make any sense. How do I know you're not just making the whole thing up?"

"Don't be a fool, 'Trucio," snapped Natch irritably. "You've got the whole MultiReal market to gain. Billions of customers and no compet.i.tion."

"That's absolutely ludicrous. We're not just your compet.i.tors anymore, Natch-we're your licensees. If I hired someone to kill you, who knows where control of MultiReal would end up?"

"It would stay with Margaret, who's scared for her life-"

-and wants nothing to do with us anymore. Follow the logic, Natch! She'd just find someone else to partner with. Haven't you ever heard the old adage about preferring the enemy you know to the enemy you don't?"

"How pithy. You're the second person to tell me that this week."

"Obviously, you have a lot of enemies then. Listen, Natch, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that the Patel Brothers are your friends. I don't like you. I never have. But just because we're not your comrades doesn't mean we don't know how to compete honorably."

Now it was Natch's turn to let out a hearty laugh. "What about MemoryMiner 98c? Do you call that honorable?"

Patel sighed and stroked his elegantly waxed moustache in consternation. "I don't know if there's anything I could possibly say to convince you that I had nothing to do with this so-called black code incident. Okay, I'll admit, MemoryMiner 98c-that was a s.h.i.tty thing to do. But that was a long time ago, Natch. And what about all of those dirty tricks you've played on us in the past couple years? Remember DeMirage 24.5? NiteFocus 13, 34 and 48? Your reputation in this business isn't exactly unblemished. Shall we count citations from the Meme Cooperative and see which company is the cleanest?"

"Fine, let's."

Petrucio rolled his eyes. "I've already told you, Natch. We don't do business like that anymore. I've gone through a lot in the past year. This whole MultiReal opportunity has turned the company upsidedown. I've been far too busy preparing for our presentation-which, in case you've forgotten, starts in two hours-to worry about you. My companion died-"

"Please, Petrucio, spare me the sad stories. You slept with half the channelers in the eastern hemisphere behind that woman's back. Don't tell me you've had some kind of eleventh-hour conversion."

The elder Patel's nostrils flared and his moustache twitched in rage. Natch thought Petrucio would definitely cut his multi connection now, but instead the man stayed and slowly mastered his anger. "After my companion died, I made some changes in my life," Patel said in a low voice, whipping aside the lapel of his jacket to reveal a small pin in the shape of a black-and-white swirl.

Natch blinked hard and took a step back in surprise. Petrucio Patel a truthteller? "Anyone can wear a pin," Natch gulped.

"Check the membership rolls-it's public information. I took the oath a few weeks after she was gone. The Bodhisattva of Creed Objective himself administered it to me. You know what that means, don't you? It means I would be honor-bound to tell you if I knew anything about any black code."

"How come this is the first time I've heard anything about it?"

"The creed has several hundred million members. Not all of us who pledge are cra.s.s enough to advertise it on our chests, like your friend Merri."