"I'm being completely serious. I watched that sil y speech of Rey Gonerev's the other day.

I've read al Ridglee's and Sor's absurd al egations: Natch doesn't care about MultiReal! He just wants money and power!" Brone let out a morbid chuckle as he sidestepped a piece of corroded plastic sheeting.

"Ridiculous! You could have easily sold MultiReal for more money than you could ever spend in a lifetime. So why keep it?"

Natch thought back to Jara's question al those weeks ago, when MultiReal was nothing more than a wil -o'-the-wisp hovering over the horizon. So what is the end? Where do al those means lead to? A hundred words jockeyed for position on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn't choose among them.

He simply stared ahead and said nothing.

Brone shook his head. "Typical Natch," he said. "You've been clawing your way up the Primo's ratings your whole life just to get an opportunity like this, haven't you? Like we were programmed to do in the hive. And you can't tel me why?"

The habitual sneer was creeping back onto his face, but Natch didn't mind. A disdainful Brone was much more familiar than a welcoming one.

"Like it or not, Natch, you are the paragon of our trade," continued his old hivemate.

"Even Margaret Surina was no match for you! She spent half a lifetime honing this technology to perfection-and then you came along at the last possible minute and stuck your name on it. As if you had anything to do with building Margaret's Phoenix Project! As if you even knew what it was when you signed up for it."

On another night, Natch might have raged at his former hivemate or sought to beat him b.l.o.o.d.y. Tonight, he was simply drained, beyond emotion. "But you knew what it was, didn't you?" he said. "Or, at least, your little sycophant Pierre Loget did."

Brone did not dispute Natch's characterization of his devotee. "Yes. As you know, Loget was the first one Margaret approached about licensing her Phoenix Project. You did know that, Natch, didn't you? Or is this something else she conveniently forgot to tel you?"

"I knew." I completely failed to see the importance of it-but yes, Margaret did tel me.

"Wel , Loget's a first-rate engineer, but he's something of a buffoon," continued the bodhisattva. "Margaret practical y laid MultiReal in his hands, and he didn't know what to do with it. It was only after Loget bungled the job that she went to the Patels-and Loget, meanwhile, came to me, the bodhisattva of his creed.

"But we're getting off track. We were talking about you, Natch. We were trying to unravel exactly why you've been defending MultiReal so doggedly these past several weeks. Here's what I believe. I believe that Serr Vigal was right. You want MultiReal because you believe it wil give you freedom."

Natch, irritable, kicked at a jagged chunk of asphalt. "So why didn't you just f.u.c.king say that?"

Brone did not take umbrage at the entrepreneur's impatience or alter his steady walk down the boulevard in the slightest. "Because it proves a point, Natch. I understand you. I know what you're searching for, because it's the same thing I've been searching for since the hive. Margaret Surina cal ed it freedom from cause and effect. But only Kordez Tha.s.sel had the courage to cal this freedom what it real y is: selfishness."

The bodhisattva came to a halt in the middle of what must have once been a mighty crossroads, a center of ancient commerce. Four separate roads converged and mingled in a daisy loop, while doddering towers kept vigil. A hand-painted sign labeled COFFEE sat atop the doorway of one tower.

Natch did a double take, feeling like he was reading the punch line for an obscure joke.

Brone had suggested they get coffee, but Natch had taken it for a figure of speech, an excuse to get out of the old hotel. Did he real y expect to find anything drinkable in these ruins? Apparently so, for he disappeared inside the doorway without another word.

Natch took a quick glance behind him to make sure the way back to the dilapidated hotel was clear, not because it was any kind of sanctuary, but because at the very least it was a familiar setting. There was stil this eerie feeling of constant surveil ance, like there were eyes around every corner. He turned back to the COFFEE tower and looked through the murky windows for signs of life. There seemed to be people stirring in there after al , residents of this horrid city, though who and how many Natch could not tel .

He fol owed Brone inside.

Not only were there people inside the building, but the substance they were slurping from their crude stoneware mugs did indeed smel like coffee.

Brone gave a genial nod to a group of thirty-something men lounging on a pair of tired sofas; the men nodded back. Their clothing was ragged, but not so ragged that it couldn't simply pa.s.s as bohemian in connectible society. Natch fol owed Brone down a narrow staircase, tight-lipped, wary of what might be waiting at the bottom.

It was a cafe.

Perhaps not a cafe like those that dotted the sidewalks and shopping cl.u.s.ters of Shenandoah, but close enough. A score of old wroughtiron tables were arranged loosely in a low, wide interior courtyard that might have been open to the sky back in pre-Revolt days. Now a pair of monstrous concrete pil ars slanted across the skylight, both blocking out the sun and keeping the rubble at bay. There were perhaps twenty people scattered throughout the cafe in clumps of two and three, nursing cups of coffee.

So these are the diss, thought Natch. Most of the sources he had seen on the Data Sea portrayed them in two-dimensional stereotype: grimy street urchins clothed in rags, militant proles plotting sedition. But, fashion sense aside, these could have been the patrons of any other cafe in Shenandoah or Vladivostok or Beijing; only the technology was missing. It felt disconcertingly like initiation. No multi projections, no holographic viewscreen displays, no private messages. Here among the diss, ConfidentialWhispers real y were confidential whispers.

n.o.body seemed to object to Natch's or Brone's presence, despite the fact that they clearly did not belong. Only when the bodhisattva lifted a pair of earthenware cups off a shelf and fil ed them from a nearby thermos did someone take notice. A gruff woman with hair like straw walked over and exchanged a few indecipherable words with Brone. Satisfied, the woman nodded and shuffled back to her table.

Moments later, Natch was sitting with Brone at one of the wrought-iron tables, drinking coffee. Perhaps not the best he had ever tasted, but decent enough. "What's going on?" said Natch, puzzled. "Did you threaten that woman?"

"Threaten?" The bodhisattva smiled. "No, I didn't threaten anyone. We have an arrangement with these people. We do mechanical repairs for them; they tolerate our presence and provide us with the occasional ... amenity." Brone made an ostentatious slurp from his cup, then smacked his lips.

Natch took a dubious look at their surroundings. There was a dank pile of earthenware shards sitting in the corner, evidence of a broken mug that had been simply swept out of the way and forgotten. Besides tepid coffee, what kind of amenities could residents of a place like this possibly provide?

"Don't tel me you've bought into the government propaganda," said Brone, reading the disdain written on Natch's face. "The diss aren't out here because they're paupers, Natch ... they're here because they're dissidents."

Natch made a sour look. "Could've fooled me."

The bodhisattva sniffed drol y. "Yes, admittedly some wander out to the old cities because they can't hack it in connectible society. But most of them belong to the diss because they prefer it here. They've taken our society and stripped it down to its bare essentials." He made a slight gesture toward a group of middle-aged men who seemed to be playing cards using actual laminated cards.

"Tel me you don't understand that impulse, Natch. No Primo's ratings, no fiefcorp tax break pressures, no drudge gossip-just simple transaction. Barter.

Here's what I can do for you ... now what can you do for me?

"You want freedom from society's pressures? You want the complete and utter freedom that Margaret and Kordez were looking for? Rey Gonerev was right. This is the only place you're going to find it today, in the diss cities. Which leads us back to-"

"Selfishness." The entrepreneur expel ed a loud breath ful of contempt and slammed his cup down on the table. Hot coffee sloshed off the side, narrowly missing his hand. "Listen, you brought me out here. You saved me from Len Borda. Great. Thank you. But I'm not going to sit and listen to your el iptical bul s.h.i.t forever. Get to the f.u.c.king point."

Brone smiled and gave his old hivemate a placating nod. He took another large swig of coffee, then set the mug aside. "Fine," said the bodhisattva, leaning forward with an intense look in his eyes. "Let's get down to it then. We were talking about Kordez Tha.s.sel. Old Kordez may have been a bit ...

unhinged, shal we say ... but his teachings led me to a startling discovery. Selfishness is not evil,' Natch. It's not 'wrong.' On the contrary-it's simply lowtech. Tel me this ... if you and the Patel Brothers could both achieve number one on Primo's, would you object?"

"It doesn't matter," muttered Natch. "We can't, and that's that."

"You're right, of course," said Brone. "The universe doesn't give us this option. Instead it gives us the zero-sum game. In order for you to win the highest ratings on Primo's, the Patel Brothers and Lucas Sentinel and Bol iwar Tuban and al of those other fools must lose. Am I right? For someone to be on top, by definition someone else must be on the bottom.

"Oh, you can mask the sting of defeat by rewarding the effort and not the result. We al tried very hard to reach number one on Primo's, so we al win!

But the selfish ones like you and me, we refuse to partic.i.p.ate in this childish game. We play to win, and so people cal us cruel. They cal us malicious. But I know you, Natch-you're not malicious. You don't wish anyone else harm, even the Patel Brothers. You just want to be left alone to concentrate on your own priorities.

"But what options do the selfish ones have? We can bury our desires. We can press on and ignore the slanders from the Sen Sivv Sors of the world.

Or we can run away to a place like this. A place where the bonds and restraints of community are practical y nonexistent." Brone made an expansive gesture around the cafe. The woman with the straw hair was managing to keep one eye on Natch while stil keeping up with her companions' debate over orbital colony politics. "Society has never been able to resolve the conflict between the group and the individual, because we simply haven't had the technology.

Until now."

Natch could feel a trickle of sweat creep down his brow and make its way to the side of his nose. "MultiReal," he breathed.

The bodhisattva nodded. "Exactly! What did Margaret Surina promise us? She promised us the ultimate freedom. The ultimate empowerment. She said she would give us the path to complete control over our destinies. Sadly, Margaret did not live to deliver on her promises-but you and I wil . That's what Possibilities 2.0 is about. Together you and I wil deliver a world of complete and total selfishness without destruction.

"A world permanently wiped clean of the zero-sum game."

Natch had caught a number of suspicious looks from the corner of his eye in the past fifteen minutes, but only when Brone paused his little oration did the entrepreneur realize what was going on. He had not been imagining the stares and the surveil ance, nor was he imagining the deference they were paying the bodhisattva here. The diss weren't merely tolerating Brone's presence; they were protecting him. Natch studied the woman with the straw hair and her companions, now pointedly staring back at him, and he wondered what these people pos sibly stood to gain from this whole Revolution of Selfishness. He wondered what they would do if he gave in to his impulses and clocked Brone over the head with a coffee mug.

"So you want to use MultiReal to end the zero-sum game," said Natch, doing his best to ignore the watching diss. "How?"

"Let's start at the beginning," replied Brone. "What makes MultiReal so revolutionary?

The ability to dodge darts and hit basebal s? No, of course not.

Those are parlor tricks-gimmicks to get people's attention. Margaret's real breakthrough was figuring out how to unharness the brain from the bridle of real time. Mil ions of possible outcomes mapped out in the s.p.a.ce of an instant. Loget's told me al about it: a giant grid stretching out in every direction.

Infinite possibility is only a state of mind!

"Now here's where you need to abandon linear thinking. With infinite possibilities at your disposal-with al those realities ripe for the plucking-why stop at just outputting one?"

Natch snorted. "Because there's only one you," he said. "I'm not an idiot. I know what you're getting at. Throw two coins, catch them both. But you can't catch them both. You've only got one set of hands. We proved that back at the hotel."

Brone dril ed Natch with his intense stare. "One set of real hands, yes. But what about in multi?"

Natch pursed his lips but said nothing.

"Clearly our little demonstration at the hotel proved one thing," continued the bodhisattva. "Our minds have more than enough processing power to run several tracks of consciousness at the same time. Consciousness is itself little more than a parlor trick, a low-bandwidth il usion. We've known this since ancient times. Yet we've never been able to duplicate it, until now.

"You say multiple simultaneous realities are useless in a world where we only have one set of flesh and bones," said Brone. "Fair enough. But how much time do we actual y spend in that world of flesh and bone anymore? This is a programmable world, Natch! We live sixty percent of our lives in virtual environments. Your Vault account is just a row on a stratospheric database table. The layout of your apartment is mal eable and subject to change with a thought. The postings you make on the Data Sea, the music you listen to on the Jamm, the bio/logic programs you tinker with in Minds.p.a.ce: al virtual.

The physical world doesn't hold us back anymore. The only barrier is that single consciousness-and Margaret's MultiReal program shatters it."

The entrepreneur's head felt bloated, too clogged with contradictions to respond properly.

"But what good is it? Why would you want to live multiple lives like that?"

"What good is it? What good is any technology?" Brone was getting too agitated for the chair to contain him, so he stood and leaned on its back like a lectern. "Technology expands choice," he said. "It liberates us from cause and effect, just like Margaret promised. Don't you remember her speech a couple of months ago? I remember every word of it. What would our lives be like if we had made different choices? In the Age of MultiReal, we wil wonder no more-because we wil be able to make many choices. We wil be able to look back at checkpoints in our lives and take alternate paths. We wil wander between alternate realities as our desires lead us.

"Just imagine it! Two roads diverge in a wood. Why choose between them when you can take both? You can sp.a.w.n separate multi projections to travel them and give each one a separate consciousness to experience them. Who's to say you can't choose two different jobs, two different companions, two different Vault accounts? And if one of these lives leads to bad consequences-wel , then wipe it out! MultiReal can erase your memories, Natch, and the memories of those around you! Don't tel me you've lived your entire life without regrets."

"Of course not," said Natch, "but-"

Brone abruptly yanked off his prosthetic arm and slammed it on the table. Al conversation in the cafe ceased. "Don't tel me you've never made a choice you wanted to take back," he snarled, his voice br.i.m.m.i.n.g with sudden rage.

Awkward and embarra.s.sed silence held sway in the room as everyone watched the pale limb sitting on the wrought-iron table. Natch took a sidelong glance at the middle-aged card players, who were staring at him with open contempt. He doubted that the diss knew the story of the Shortest Initiation, but clearly they understood the inference of Brone's gesture. Natch cursed the bodhisattva silently. How funny that his handicaps only seem to be an inconvenience when it suits him, he thought. He remembered how Brone had used the limb to similar effect during their meeting last month.

The silence continued for another minute, and then final y everyone turned back to their mugs of coffee as if by unspoken consensus. The bodhisattva reached over and quietly reattached his appendage without a word.

"Listen," hissed Natch. "I see what you're trying to do, but this Possibilities 2.0 would never work. You'd have to get governments to rewrite laws. The Vault and the Data Sea engineers and Dr. Plugenpatch and who knows who else would have to buy into it."

"I never said it would be easy," replied Brone blithely, taking his seat once more. His anger seemed to have dissolved as quickly as it had appeared. "I never said it would happen overnight."

"But even if you do get everyone to agree," said Natch, "there's something else you're not taking into account. Once one person uses MultiReal to do two things at the same time, everyone else has to keep track of those alternate realities too."

Brone shrugged. "So?"

"For process' preservation-think about the basebal example. Hit a basebal two different ways, you've just doubled the number of alternate realities.

Then for every hit, you've got an outfielder making two different catches. Quadrupled.

The umpire makes two different cal s for each catch. The guy on base runs or doesn't run.... This whole thing would spiral out of control in an instant.

Sixty bil ion people creating alternate realities at the drop of a hat and banging them up against each other? f.u.c.k, where would you store al that data? How would the computational system handle it? You give everyone the ability to permanently double or triple realities-we'd get pummeled al day long until our OCHREs gave out. We're getting bombarded with infoquakes as it is."

The bodhisattva of Creed Tha.s.sel took a long, loud slurp of coffee. He leaned back and hung his good arm over the back of his chair, staring at Natch with eyes narrowed. "And do you think that's a coincidence?"

Natch felt a sudden fear grip his sternum. "You mean-"

Brone shook his head in befuddlement. "I can't believe I need to explain this to you, after everything you've learned about Len Borda. Borda knows that Possibilities 2.0 is within our grasp, Natch. Remember, he's the one who funded the project in the first place. He knows better than anyone what this program can do. He knows the Data Sea can handle the load. So what better way to keep us from pursuing it than to frighten us?"

Natch remembered the explosion of darts at the Tul Jabbor Complex, the ferocious precision of the Defense and Wel ness Council officers. Hundreds of darts striking him within his mind, hundreds of merciless public executions, averted only through the magic of MultiReal. He remembered the shrewd visage of the high executive before the demo at Andra Pradesh. Len Borda was a man who knew what he was doing.

"After the first infoquake, what did Borda do?" said Brone, his voice lowering in volume even as it increased in intensity. "He pressured the Prime Committee into giving him the authority to shut down any bio/logic program on the Data Sea that crosses his path. Do you think he wants to lose that power?

"He wil . And soon.

"Because we can take down the Defense and Wel ness Council, Natch! We can bring government back into the hands of people's freely chosen LPRACGs, where it belongs. With a ful y functioning MultiReal network in the hands of every man, woman, and child, the Council wil instantly become irrelevant. How could you possibly tyrannize people armed with multiple realities?

"Think of al the revolutions throughout history. b.l.o.o.d.y, wasteful, expensive, ful of needless suffering. We can avoid al that, Natch! With MultiReal, we can change the world without firing a single shot. A perfect, bloodless revolution. An instant, irreversible gift of freedom to humanity!"

Brone had begun to raise his voice again, to metamorphose into the same zealot who had set the Tha.s.selian devotees aflame last night. By the time he finished his little speech, the bodhisattva was standing once more and pounding his fist on the tabletop. The diss watched with guarded expressions on their faces, but Natch would not make the mistake of cal ing them indifferent again.

These people were clearly vested in Brone's success. They believed in the Revolution of Selfishness, and they were ready to fight for it.

"Look around you, Natch!" said the bodhisattva, sweeping his arm in an arc at the makeshift cafe. "Multi connections are weak out here in the diss cities. Council surveil ance is a farce. The Meme Cooperative, the Prime Committee, and the drudges don't exist out here.

"We have everything we've ever dreamed of in Chicago! The flexibility to do whatever we want, to fol ow our ideas to their ultimate conclusion, and f.u.c.k the rules! We have some of the best bio/logic engineers in the business at our disposal, and a network of anonymous devotees spread throughout the world. And virtual y unlimited funding, courtesy of the creed.

"You'l have to disappear for a while, Natch. We'l wait until the whole affair at the Tul Jabbor Complex has died down, until Len Borda's infoquakes have gone into remission. Meanwhile, we'l be out here, careful y perfecting our code.

And then, just when the world is convinced you're dead and buriedwhen even Borda believes that you've vanished for good-we'l strike! We'l release Possibilities 2.0 onto the Data Sea and bring humanity to the next stage of evolution."

Natch's head spun like a whirligig from one incoherent thought to the next. Was this real y what Margaret Surina had envisioned, real y what she had planned for? How did this differ from what Khann Frejohr had proposed? What would Serr Vigal say about this? Reeling with ethical vertigo, he slumped down in his chair, ducked his head, and clasped his hands behind his neck.

"So what if you're wrong?" he managed faintly. "What if Margaret was wrong? What if those infoquakes aren't coming from Len Borda, and MultiReal total y floods the computational system? Possibilities 1.0 was resource-intensive enough-Possibilities 2.0 is on a whole different scale altogether.

Everything could break down. Bil ions of people could die."

Brone sat back and folded his hands in his lap. The entrepreneur looked at him only to find himself staring at the nacreous green mechanical eye.

"Now you see the dilemma," he said. "If we don't act-if we deliver MultiReal into the hands of the Defense and Wel ness Council -the carnage would be incalculable. The consequences? A totalitarian regime without end. A regime that cannot be overthrown. And then how many bil ions would die?"

39.