Natch worked out a complicated system for col aborating on the MultiReal code that evening. The Revolution of Selfishness notwithstanding, his stores of trust were stil much too low for him to give Brone unfettered access.

And so Natch spent most of the night studying the virtual castle in Minds.p.a.ce and part.i.tioning it into logical subdivisions. It was a fiendishly difficult task, considering there were so many alcoves of the castle-no, entire wings-that Natch did not understand. He found buried structures constructed with a queer logic that defied al conventional wisdom. The further Natch delved, the more surreal it became. There were strange trapezoidal shapes and whimsical loop-de-loops programmed with methods dating back to Par Padron's time, if not further. There were subroutines that looked like the sloppy work of a hive child and yet accomplished the impossible nonetheless. There were repeating patterns, optical il usions, meta-referents to metareferents, echoes of genius or madness.

By the time the first devotee reeled down the stairs for the day, Natch had put together a rudimentary system of col aboration. He explained the whole thing to the group at their morning meeting.

The Tha.s.selians would be al owed to work on MultiReal in teams of three for no more than two hours at a time. Each team would be given access to a different, mutual y exclusive section of the castle. Natch would supervise everyone's activities at al times. There would be no discussing work with col eagues. The Tha.s.selians would be restricted to a limited set of bio/logic programming bars and hand gestures. And when Natch closed up the program for any reason whatsoever, al activity would cease immediately.

"If anybody violates any of these rules, I'm gone," announced the entrepreneur.

"Permanently. No appeals, no arguments, no warnings. Are we clear?"

A garden of PokerFaces bloomed on the devotees' faces to cover their irritation. Bil y Sterne, gave a supplicating look at Brone, which the bodhisattva quickly stifled with an imperious look of his own Natch knew perfectly wel this was a ludicrous way to work. The Tha.s.selians could only make so much progress in such confined s.p.a.ces, and Natch could only accomplish so much himself without a ful y cooperative team. But it would have to suffice until Brone and his disciples had earned Natch's trust.

Brone didn't put up a jot of resistance. Instead he hopped onto one of the nearby platforms and held his synthetic hand out palm down, like a preacher blessing his congregation. "You heard the man," he said. "Those are the rules of operation, and we're going to abide by them in letter and spirit. I'm counting on al of you. Keep on your toes, and keep each other compliant. Any questions?"

The devotees stood there mute, the very portrait of obedience.

"Al right, Natch," said the bodhisattva, withdrawing a programming bar from his shoulder satchel and hefting it in his real hand. "When do we start?"

Natch eyed his old hivemate coldly. Brone's forced cheerfulness was real y starting to burn him, and he relished the opportunity to douse it altogether.

"You don't start at al ," said the entrepreneur. "I stil don't trust you. Al you get to do is watch."

Pierre Loget sputtered out a mouthful of nitro, and a few of the devotees held their breath.

Natch silently activated MultiReal just in case. He was stil reeling from the chase at the Tul Jabbor Complex and doubted he could muster up the energy to use it effectively. But Brone doesn't know that, does he?

thought Natch.

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

And so Possibilities 2.0 stumbled into development.

It had been a long time since Natch had the leisure to stretch out in Minds.p.a.ce, to rev up, to push his mental engines to redline. For the past few weeks, he had been so busy dealing with the various political and logistical roadblocks in his path-the Defense and Wel ness Council, the Meme Cooperative, Jara's insubordination, the drudges-that his programming skil s were beginning to rust. He would find himself staring at bricks of code, bio/logic tools in hand, unsure how he had gotten there or where he was heading next.

Should he use the L bar or the N bar here? What was the point of this recursive function he had started?

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

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

It was as Brone promised. Development with no interruptions.

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

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

The atmosphere changed significantly at night. Some of the devotees would get a little rowdy on the upper floors after dark, drinking, singing at rafter-shuddering volumes, skulking off arm in arm for the occasional tryst. It reminded Natch of the hive. He could hardly blame them for their excesses, given that they were al stuck out here with nowhere to go and n.o.body to talk to. The diss showed up on occasion to take advantage of the Tha.s.selians'

engineering skil s, but none of them were keen on socializing. Natch could only imagine how Brone's minions were feeling. Certainly some of them had left friends, col eagues, and loved ones behind when they decided to join the Revolution.

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

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

Uncertainty was Natch's al y here.

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

But those questions were elementary compared to the conundrums they would face in Possibilities 2.0. Philosophical questions, ontological questions, questions straight out of the science fiction stories Natch used to read as a boy.

How many alternate realities could a person sustain at the same time, and how far should those realities be al owed to diverge? Under what circ.u.mstances could an alternate reality be abandoned, and what would happen then? Did alternate realities need to be filtered for the rest of the world, so that some people would see possibility x and some would see possibility y? If so, how would MultiReal handle the mechanics of that filtering? If not, what would happen if two of your alternate selves b.u.mped into each other?

One evening Natch found himself discussing the limits of MultiReal with Brone.

Astounding that they could progress so far without knowing answers to such basic questions. It was enough to make Natch's knees buckle.

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

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

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

"This is more than just a hypothetical," continued the entrepreneur. "I caught those Council officers in the Tul Jabbor Complex with MultiReal just by watching them on video. But what if those officers weren't even in the same auditorium?

What if I was watching somebody in a total y different auditorium halfway around the world? Or-or on an orbital colony somewhere? Could you stil open a col aborative choice cycle on them? s.h.i.t, does the other person even need to be there at al ? Could I just catch Len Borda in a MultiReal loop right here, right now?"

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

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

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

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

n.o.body answered, but several people started taking notes. Natch pressed on, his brain spinning at a furious pace.

"The other thing that's been bothering me ... We've been so focused on limits of s.p.a.ce that we've forgotten about limits of time. So far we've only tested MultiReal on short interactions. Kicking a soccer bal . Deciding which way to turn.

But how does the program determine how long a choice cycle can be? Can you keep the choice cycle open for a whole run down the field? Or heck, fire up Possibilities right when the opening whistle blows, and then just loop the whole game over and over in your mind until your team wins."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He approached Brone in his backroom office.

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

The bodhisattva smiled. The prospect of seeing his enemy suffering physical y seemed to give him cheer. "I was wondering when you were going to ask about that," he replied. "The shaking and the blackouts-don't think I haven't noticed."

"So it's your code that's causing them?"

"Maybe," said Brone, his smile curling into a smirk.

"Wel , you need to do something about it," snapped Natch. "I can't work like this."

Natch folded his arms in an attempt to keep steady and eyed the room Brone had claimed as his personal headquarters. He didn't know how long Creed Tha.s.sel had been making modifications to this old hotel, but Brone seemed to have left the room exactly as he had found it. Yel owed photos of some long-forgotten Texan dynasty on the wal s, a dilapidated metal desk, cracked brick on the floor, a prodigious leather sofa on which he was now reclining. A real window, with actual gla.s.s, though how it had survived the centuries since the Autonomous Revolt intact Natch couldn't guess.

The bodhisattva put his feet up on the splintered oak table in front of him and clasped his hands behind his head. "I could make some modifications,"

he said, affecting nonchalance. "We've been able to tweak that cloaking program for the rest of the crew. Bil y has the occasional flutter, but everyone else is coping with the black code just fine."

"So then tweak it."

Brone sniffed. "And why should I?"

The two enemies stared each other down, Natch fil ing up with increasing rage and Brone sliding deeper into insouciance with every pa.s.sing second.

It was a peculiar game of bluffs. Natch knew that Horvil's so-cal ed mind control trick wouldn't work here. Even if Natch could use MultiReal to find that one possibility in a thousand where Brone decided to do his bidding, he would need to repeat the same trick over and over again possibly for hours. As he had discovered with Khann Frejohr on his balcony, that was excruciatingly hard work.

Natch simply didn't have the strength for it. But he couldn't admit that to Brone, could he?

"Fix it," said Natch between clenched teeth, "or I'l leave. Right now. I'l leave and take MultiReal with me, and your 'Revolution of Selfishness' wil be over before it even gets off the ground."

Brone shrugged. "Ah, but if you leave, that jittering is only going to get worse. Much worse. I've seen what that black code can do. The first volunteer ended up with the Prepared. I'd absolutely hate to see that happen to you."

"I'l take my chances. I can fix it myself."

"Real y? Then why haven't you?"

Silence. The sounds of clanking silverware from the devotees' dinner came wafting down the hal way.

Brone's face softened into something resembling capitulation. "Understand my position, Natch. I need you here. You and I are the only ones who are real y capable of finishing the MultiReal project. Pierre and Bil y are talented programmers, I grant you that-but they're two-dimensional thinkers, or Margaret Surina would have licensed the program to them in the first place. But admit it, you need me too. You can't make al those thousands of bio/logic connections by yourself, and in case you hadn't noticed, Old Chicago's not exactly teeming with a.s.sembly-line programming shops.

"So I'm in a bind, Natch. You can use MultiReal at any point to run out of here, and we can't stop you. This black code is the only bargaining chip I have.

So let's be reasonable businesspeople. Let's fol ow the example of the diss, and let's barter. You give me something I want; I'l give you something you want."

Natch, muttering under his breath: "So what do you want?"

"Only what's fair," replied Brone, opening his arms with a gesture of welcome that had more than a hint of saccharine. "Give me access to MultiReal like you've given the rest of the devotees. I'm not asking for core access. I'l stick with the same subset of programming tools, I'l abide by the rest of your rules. Just let me do something instead of sitting back here kil ing time."

"That's al ?".

"That's al ."

The entrepreneur pursed his lips. He could feel the slightest decline of the road ahead into a long and slippery slope. Brone finding tool after tool to barter with. Natch granting more and more concessions.

But he held the final trump card, didn't he? Core access to MultiReal. That was al that mattered in the end. MultiReal couldn't give Natch the power to control someone else's life; but it could give him the ultimate power to control his own.

Give Brone what he wants this time, Natch told himself. You're much too powerful for him to take MultiReal away, and he knows that.

"Fine," he said. "But I want Loget to tweak the black code. Not you. We might be working side by side here, but I stil don't trust you."

The bodhisattva rose and gave an ingratiating bow. His prosthetic eye caught the light and twinkled. "I wouldn't expect anything less from you, Natch,"

he said. "I'l make sure Loget is on the case first thing tomorrow morning."

40.

Natch was starting to remember why he had never sought out Pierre Loget's company.

The man's brain ran on dandelion logic, scattering to the four corners of the Earth in the slightest breeze. Loget began the morning chattering about Hegelian dialectics, then flitted on to modern Patronel ian dance and the thermodynamics of hoverbird flight without any discernible segue.

"The black code," insisted Natch after ninety minutes of this. "Have you finished tuning that f.u.c.king black code?" He was lying faceup on one of the icy crescent platforms, arms tied lightly at his sides so the shaking wouldn't knock him over the edge. Loget, meanwhile, was hauling chunk after chunk of Natch's OCHRE code into Minds.p.a.ce while he babbled about nothing.

"Just be patient," replied Loget. "This takes time."

"How much time?"