Multireal (59 page)

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 tell you?"

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

"Well, Loget's a first-rate engineer, but he's something of a buffoon," continued the bodhisattva. "Margaret practically 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 will give you freedom."

Natch, irritable, kicked at a jagged chunk of asphalt. "So why
didn't you just fucking 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 called it freedom from cause and effect. But only Kordez Thassel
had the courage to call this freedom what it really 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 really 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
still this eerie feeling of constant surveillance, 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 all, residents of this horrid city, though
who and how many Natch could not tell.

He followed Brone inside.

Not only were there people inside the building, but the substance they
were slurping from their crude stoneware mugs did indeed smell 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 pass as bohemian
in connectible society. Natch followed 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 clusters 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 pillars 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 really were confidential whispers.

Nobody 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 filled 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 tell 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 drolly. "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. "Tell 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 expelled a loud breath full 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 elliptical bullshit forever. Get to the fucking
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 Thassel. Old Kordez
may have been a bit ... unhinged, shall 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 low-tech. Tell 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 Bolliwar Tuban and all 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 all tried very hard to reach number one on Primo's,
so we all win! But the selfish ones like you and me, we refuse to participate in this childish game. We play to win, and so people call us cruel. They call 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 practically nonexistent."
Brone made an expansive gesture around the cafe. The woman with the
straw hair was managing to keep one eye on Natch while still 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
will. That's what Possibilities 2.0 is about. Together you and I will
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 surveillance, 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 baseballs?
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. Millions of possible
outcomes mapped out in the space of an instant. Loget's told me all
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 all 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 drilled 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
illusion. 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 actually 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 malleable 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 MindSpace: all virtual. The physical world doesn't hold us back anymore. The only barrier is that single consciousness-and Margaret's MultiReal program
shatters it."