All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. -Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” i LESSONS LEARNED i Len Borda was dying. Or so Marcus Surina told his twelve-year-old daughter, Margaret, one blustery winter morning, the two of them striding through the hoverbird docks, wind at full bore, the sun a frail pink thing cowering behind the clouds. He won’t die today, of course, said Marcus. His voice barely registered above the clanging of the cargo loaders and the yelling of the dockworkers. Not this week or even this month. But the worries hang from the high executive’s neck like lusterless pearls, Margaret. They weigh him down and break his will. I can see it. Margaret smiled uncomfortably but said nothing. If the city of Andra Pradesh had a resident expert on untimely death, it was her father. Before he had accepted the Surina family mantle and assumed his birthright as head of the world’s most prominent scientific dynasty, Marcus had wandered far and wide. He had teased the boundaries of human space, flirted with dangerous organizations in the orbital colonies. Death was a constant presence out there. And yet, High Executive Borda seemed an unlikely candidate for the Null Current. He had been a hale and headstrong man upon his inauguration just weeks after Margaret was born. A NEW EXECUTIVE FOR A NEW CENTURY, the headlines had proclaimed. Some predicted that the troubles of the office would prove too daunting for the young high executive. They murmured that Borda had never been tested by hardship, that he had come of age in a time of plenty and had inherited the job uncontested. But his stature had only grown in the intervening decade. Try as she might, Margaret could find no lingering gaps on Borda’s calendar, no telltale signs of weakness or indecision. As far as she was concerned, the high executive was on his way to becoming a fundament of the world, an eternal force like rock or gravity or time itself. But Marcus Surina remained firm. You develop a sixth sense out on the frontiers, he said, examining the hoverbird manifest for the third time. You begin to see things outside the visible spectrum of light. Patterns of human behavior, focal points of happenstance. Travel the orbital colonies long enough, and you learn to recognize the omens. Margaret stirred. Omens? A strange word coming from the lips of her father, the quintessential man of science. The omens of death, continued Marcus. Plans that wander from their steady paths. Appetites that suddenly grow cold. Thoughts that lose their ballast in midsentence and drift off to places unknown. Her father stopped suddenly and turned his hyperfocus on a dented segment of the hoverbird wing no bigger than a finger. Three aides-de-camp hovered a meter away, anticipating a word of command or dismissal. Some people, you can look in their eyes and see that the Null Current is about to pull them under, Margaret. You can see the inevitability. Just like you can see the stalk of wheat as the thresher approaches, and know that the time’s come for a newer, stronger crop to bask in the sun. Marcus made a gesture, and the aides scattered like duckpins. Then he was striding off again, and it was all Margaret could do to keep up with him. She shivered as she ran, whether from the cold of encroaching winter or from the strangeness of the man before her she could not tell. Lusterless pearls? Wheat and threshers? His clattering metaphors made her teeth ache. The girl resolved to be patient. In less than twelve hours, her father would be gone, off to the distant colony of Furtoid with the rest of the TeleCo board, and routine would slink out from the alcove where it had been hiding these past few days like a bruised animal. She called him Father, but it was mostly an honorary title. Marcus had spent four years of the last twelve on the road, and here at Andra Pradesh he was constantly fenced in a protective thicket of apprentices, scientists, business associates, capitalmen, government officials, drudges, bankers, lawyers, and freethinkers that even a daughter could not penetrate. He would stop by her quarters unannounced, cloaked by the night, and quiz her on schoolwork like a proctor checking up on a promising student. Sometimes he would speechify as if Margaret were the warm-up audience for one of his scientific presentations. Other times he would assign her outlandish tasks and then vanish to some colloquium on Allowell or some board meeting in Cape Town. Prove Prengal’s universal law of physics for me, he told her once. It took Margaret three months, but she did. Margaret had no doubt that she did not have a normal upbringing. But how far off-kilter things were she had no way of judging. The Surina compound was a cloistered and lonely place, despite the crowds. Her mother was dead, and she had no siblings. Instead she had distant cousins innumerable, and a team of handlers whose job it was to confine her life in a box and then call that order. But there were some things the Surina family handlers could not shield her from. Lately Marcus’s face had grown sterner, the lines on his forehead coagulating into a permanent state of anger and anxiety. Margaret suspected there were new developments in her father’s battle with the Defense and Wellness Council. Len Borda wanted TeleCo. He wanted her father’s teleportation technology either banned outright or conscripted for military purposes; nobody was sure which. And now, this past week, tensions seemed to be coming to a head. Margaret couldn’t quite comprehend what the fuss was about. She had watched a dozen trials of the teleportation process from unobtrusive corners, and it wasn’t anything like the teleportation she had read about in stories. You couldn’t zap someone instantaneously from one place to another. The procedure required two people of similar biochemical composition to be strapped into a metal container for hours on end while particle deconstructors transposed one body to the other, molecule by agonizing molecule. Margaret wondered why High Exec utive Borda found the whole idea so threatening. But whenever she asked one of the TeleCo researchers about it, he would simply smile and tell her not to make premature judgments. Marcus had big plans up his sleeve. Give the technology a chance to mature, they said-and generate much-needed revenue for the TeleCo coffers-and she would one day see wonders beyond her imagining. The world would change. Reality itself would buckle. She took the TeleCo scientists at their word. That look of inevitability, said Marcus, wrenching Margaret back to the present. They were taking the long, silent lift to the top of the Revelation Spire, where her father had his office. That look of death. I’ve seen it, Margaret. I’ve seen it on Len Borda’s face. The high executive knows that the thresher is coming for him. Margaret shook her head. But he’s not that old, is he? You’re older than he is and— Age has nothing to do with it. The girl wasn’t quite sure what to do with that statement. How to make her father understand? How to pierce that veil of myopia and arrogance that kept Marcus Surina from the truth? But-but-I was talking to, jayze, and. jayze said that you’ve got it all wrong. She said that the Council’s coming for you. The high executive’s going to bust down the gates to the compound any day now and take TeleCo away-Marcus Surina laughed, and the worry lines on his face broke like barricades of sand washing away with the tide. At that moment, they reached their destination, and the elevator doors opened. Marcus put one brawny arm around his daughter and led her to the window. You see that? he said. Margaret wasn’t entirely sure what she was supposed to see. They stood on top of the world in a very visceral and literal sense. The Revelation Spire was the tallest building in human space, and built on a mountaintop, no less. Far below, she could see the Surina compound and a blue-green blob that could only be the Surina security forces con ducting martial exercises. Sprawled in every direction outside the walls was the unfenceable polyglot mass of Andra Pradesh, city of the Surinas, now getting its first taste of the seasonal snow. Margaret could think of no safer place in the entire universe. You see that? Marcus repeated. It’s winter. Everything is shrouded in snow, and the world seems bleak and hopeless, doesn’t it? The girl nodded tentatively. The gloom doesn’t last, Margaret. It never lasts. Remember that. But— He gripped her shoulder firmly and turned her around to face him. Marcus Surina’s eyes shone brilliant blue as sapphires, and she could smell the cinnamon of morning chaff on his breath. Listen, he said quietly. Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone, especially your cousin Jayze. Len Borda’s lost. Our sources in the Council say he’s spent too much time and money coming after teleportation, and he’s ready to move on. That’s why the board’s going to Furtoid. To negotiate a settlement. By this time next week, it’ll all be over. Do you understand? We’ve won. The girl blinked. If the victory bells were ringing, she could not hear them. Always remember this, Margaret. No matter how bad the winter, spring is always right around the corner The girl nodded, smiled, let Marcus Surina fold her in his arms for a last embrace. Better to leave him with this memory of hope at the top of the world than to shower him with cold truths. Spring might always be right around the corner, she thought. But there’s always another winter behind it. 2 Lieutenant Magan Kai Lee stood at the window of a Falcon hoverbird and watched the Potomac scroll away until it was lost in the snow. December of 359 had proven an exceptionally good month for snow. The pilot quietly veered off the established flight path, leaving the sparse morning traffic behind while they plowed through the mist a dozen meters above the river’s froth and foam. Today, at least, the hoverbird’s egg-white finish made decent camouflage. Magan looked out the port window and saw the Shenandoah River slide into view. “Ulterior admission,” he said quietly. Full stop. It was a small craft, designed by Defense and Wellness Council engineers for first-response situations. Twelve could fit here with comfort, and today there were only three. The pilot could hear his superior officer’s command just fine. “Impulse open and locked,” he replied in acknowledgment. Full stop. Seconds later, Magan could hear the decrescendo of engines shutting down and the ethereal whir of antigrav kicking in. The hoverbird came to rest twenty meters above the treetops. Within the space of a heartbeat, the illicit advertising began dribbling in to Magan’s mental inbox. Guerrilla messages, automated, probably keyed in to the whoosh of the hoverbird’s vapor exhaust. COZY WINTER GETAWAYS on the SHENANDOAH: Affordable Prices! Hoverbird in Need of a Boost? Read Our Special Report THE MAKERS OF CHAIQUOKE SALUTE THE SHENANDOAH COMMUTER The hoverbird’s third occupant blocked the flow with an irritated tsk. Rey Gonerev, the Defense and Wellness Council’s chief solicitor, rose from her seat and stood at Magan’s side. She parted her long braided hair to reveal a thin face with skin of deepest cocoa. Magan could feel the neural tug of her ConfidentialWhisper request. “You sure we’re not overdoing this?” she asked, her words appearing silently in his mind like adjuncts of his own thought process. Magan ignored her and watched the skyline. His mind was sifting through combinatorial possibilities in preparation for their mission. Rey Gonerev had no place in his reflections at the moment. The solicitor pursed her lips. “Lieutenant?” Receiving no response, she shrugged and retreated to her seat, keeping the ConfidentialWhisper channel open just in case. Magan turned his attention to the circular table that comprised most of the hoverbird’s rear section. He waved his hand over the surface, causing a holographic map to blink into existence. It was an example of true Defense and Wellness Council austerity: the meeting of two rivers reduced to a handful of intersecting vectors, with the hoverbird itself nothing more than a triangle of canary yellow. As Magan studied the hilly terrain with a critical eye, four more yellow triangles arced into the display and halted in formation alongside them. He looked out the window and surveyed the line of sleek white hovercraft floating above the Shenandoah, silent as vultures. The lieutenant noted approvingly that the noses of the hoverbirds were in perfect alignment. There was a momentary squawk of pilots confirming their rendezvous and their mission number. Then one craft broke off from the rest and took a vanguard position. A blue dot on the map indicated the presence of the team leader: Ridgello, a veteran from the Pharisee front lines and one of Magan’s most trusted subordinates. The team leader opened a voice channel to the rest of the troops. “Broad strokes imply a declension of purpose, and such things cannot be ascertained with present information,” he said. We commence operations in approximately six hundred seconds, after we receive the technical crew’s signal. Any questions? “My question,” said Rey to Magan over the ConfidentialWhisper channel, “is whether this whole thing is overkill.” The skepticism in her voice would have earned a swift reprimand had it come from anyone else. But Magan had learned long ago that kowtowing to superiors was simply not part of Rey Gonerev’s nature. She would continue dropping little bombs of snarkiness all morning until he had answered her. “If you insist on observing,” replied Magan over the ‘Whisper channel, “the least you could do is follow standard procedure and use Council battle language.” The solicitor made a dismissive shrug. “This isn’t a military issue,” she stated icily. “It’s a policy question, and you know it.” “This policy comes from High Executive Borda.” “But Magan-nineteen dartguns, six disruptors, and three technical crew, just for one unarmed man? You’ve taken out whole Pharisee outposts with fewer boots on the ground.” Lieutenant Lee gritted his teeth, perfectly aware that he had no cause to gainsay her. You know she’s right, he told himself. And there’s nothing you can do about it. He seethed momentarily with ire for the unsorted, for the unordered, for the chaotic and unplanned. Magan turned and gave Rey Gonerev an appraising look. She had risen once again from her seat and was standing alongside the pilot watching the formation. Gonerev should have been the type of volatile element that Magan tried to suppress from the Council hierarchy. Instead he had worked hard to put Rey Gonerev in the chief solicitor’s office, and it had taken him some time to realize why. It was precisely because she refused to kiss ass, because she was not Len Borda’s toady and did not aspire to be Magan’s either. Gonerev could always be counted on to cut through bureaucratic and organizational hypocrisy like a machete slicing through so many thin vines. It was no wonder the pundits had nicknamed her “the Blade.” Ridgello had just received final status reports from the other four hoverbird teams. “Perhaps we need to cover extremities and observe full zoning regulations,” he said. Commander Papizon will signal us when he’s overridden the building’s security and compression routines, and then it’ll be time to move. “This man is not to be underestimated,” Magan told the Blade. “He is as sly as a snake.” “But-” “Enough. The high executive has made his decision. My duty-and yours-is to carry it out.” Magan cut the ‘Whisper channel with a curt swipe of one hand, and even the Blade knew that further argument was useless. Ridgello concluded his preoperational briefing with a question for Magan Kai Lee. “South by southwest makes for a defensive maneuver,” he said. Anything to add, Lieutenant? Magan could feel the randomness algorithm hijack his thoughts and twist them into unrecognizable shapes designed to sow confusion among any eavesdropping enemy. “Keep pushing for higher ground, regardless of any spiking temperatures,” he said. “It’s a tribute to your preparedness that we have a robust strategy at all.” He could imagine the same process at work in reverse in each of the soldiers’ heads, realigning and reassembling his gibberish into something more comprehensible. Remember that the subject is expected to be unarmed, and lethal force will not be required. If we encounter his apprentices, they are to be taken alive. Silence ensued. Magan watched the drifting snowflakes and tried to clear his mind. He could see the officers through the window of the next hoverbird polishing their dartguns, choosing which canisters of black code-laden needles to load. Rey Gonerev was making small talk with the pilot in plain speech, as if deliberately flaunting her defiance of military convention. A little more than a month ago, Magan had never heard of this man, this fiefcorper who was the object of their mission. He had come from nowhere, really, a shameless entrepreneur who had clawed his way out of the bear pit of bio/logic programming. Nobody was quite sure how he had wormed his way into Margaret Surina’s good graces, or how he had gained control of her MultiReal technology so quickly. Then he had showed up in Len Borda’s chambers, mere hours ahead of a major product demo, looking to make a deal: the Council’s protection from some group of assassins in black robes that had ambushed him on the streets of Shenandoah-protection from the black code swarming through his bloodstream even now like barracudas. In exchange: access to MultiReal. The high executive had kept his word. He had raised his hand and sent three legions of his best troops scrambling for Andra Pradesh. The fiefcorper’s product demo had gone off as planned.* link And what had the entrepreneur delivered in return? Nothing. He had failed to show up for half a dozen scheduled meetings over the next week, leaving Magan and his underlings to sit alone in a series of conference rooms feeling foolish. Urgent messages and ConfidentialWhispers had disappeared into the void, unacknowledged and unanswered. Threats had gone unheeded. Borda had responded to this charade with the subtlety of someone conducting an orchestra in a suit of armor. He had sent whiterobed Council officers to shadow the man twenty-four hours a day, then had those officers parade before the man’s windows with dartguns drawn. When that had failed to apply the appropriate pressure, he had ordered the troops to accept no excuses and firmly escort the man to the Council’s administrative offices in Melbourne. Still the fiefcorp master managed to elude them. He would disappear for days at a time right under the officers’ noses-nobody knew where or how. Two days ago, Len Borda’s patience had reached its limit. He had called Magan Kai Lee to his chambers in the middle of the night, telling him to drop everything and bring the intractable fiefcorper back to the negotiating table, by force if necessary. “In handcuffs?” Magan had asked. “In chains,” Borda had replied. Lieutenant Lee had looked at that weathered face, that bald capstone of a head. The high executive had stared back at him with a gaze of acid. Magan felt his fingertips flex involuntarily, yearning to take hold of the dartgun holstered at his side and aim it at that caustic, lichlike countenance. Borda had merely sat there, defenseless but utterly without fear. He knew that Magan would not break their agreement. And Borda was right. In the end, Magan Kai Lee had done what he was told. He had retreated back to his quarters, filing the impatience away in yet another mental side room that was full dangerously close to bursting. He had called up Papizon, and the two of them had sketched out this endeavor, with occasional input from the Blade. The next forty-eight hours had been a haze of architectural blueprints, supply requisitions, and scouting reports. An incoming blip snapped Magan back to the now. It was time. Go. All at once, the Defense and Wellness Council hoverbirds blasted into motion. They quickly shifted into single file as they sped toward Shenandoah like a poison arrow, with Ridgello’s hoverbird the barb and Magan’s VIP ship the fletchings. Magan took a parting glance at the crossing of the two rivers. He thought of the flow of illicit advertising and wondered what kind of societal parasite would resort to such a scheme. Natch, he thought, you brought this on yourself. Five hoverbirds darted out from behind the Blue Ridge Mountains, skirting close to the ground, where they blended in with the snow. Traffic was a farce this early in the morning. The sun hung close to the horizon, unsure of itself. Papizon, what’s your status? said Ridgello. Even scrambled, the tactician’s voice sounded serene and unhurried. Security is under Council control, he said. We’re decompressing the building now. Target apartment will be just inside the northwest entrance in ninety seconds. And Natch? asked the team leader. We saw him enter the building last night at approximately ten o’clock local time. He’s been active in MindSpace ever since. There are human and data agents watching every exit. Magan and Gonerev exchanged looks of cautious optimism. So far, so good. Let the Blade call the plan overkill; once they had the fiefcorp master safely onboard a Council hoverbird en route to Melbourne, this whole operation would be yesterday’s lessons learned. Rey Gonerev Joined Magan at the command console. The yellow triangles were rapidly converging on a blinking red star. A sixth triangle hunkered down beneath the building in the pipes of the city’s underground transfer system. That would be Papizon and his technical crew. Magan switched the rear windows of the hoverbird to battlefield display, blocking out the rapidly receding December landscape. Perspectives from six different soldiers filled the screens: here a man rubbing the barrel of his multi disruptor with a soft cloth, there a woman stretching her calves and muttering about the cold. Following regulations, Magan flipped through each of the twenty-five officers in turn to verify the connections. He found Ridgello calm and collected and not the least bit nervous; operations like this were his gruel. The hoverbirds zipped over a large hill and went into a steep, nosebleed descent behind a copse of trees. The pilot cut the inertial cush-ioners to stifle the noise. Rey Gonerev grunted as her head bounced against the low hoverbird ceiling, but Magan remained composed. He thanked a thousand generations of Chinese heritage for making him too short to worry about such obstructions. They touched down in the snow with a soft thud. All five yellow triangles were now clustered on a slope next to the blinking red star. Seconds later, the doors whooshed open and the Defense and Wellness Council was on the move. A disciplined sprint up a snow-covered slope, dartguns drawn. A building that curved atop the next hill like a natural extension of the landscape. Two dozen figures in white fatigues with muted yellow stars edging through a small huddle of fir trees. The fog of heavy breath. About ten meters up, a door opened and spat forth a middle-aged woman holding a mug of steaming nitro. A black platform slid beneath her feet in the blink of an eye to serve as balcony. She yawned, stretched, cracked her knuckles. Take her down, snapped the team leader. Six pinpricks of light slid across the woman’s torso. The dart-rifles sang. The woman collapsed, ceramic mug of nitro tumbling after. Magan watched from his ship as Ridgello’s team zipped across the snow and dashed through the building’s northwest entrance. Rey flipped a window to focus on one of the three soldiers ascending the unconscious woman’s balcony via magnetic cable. One of the officers glanced back over his shoulder at the copse of fir trees, which looked perfectly undisturbed. Ridgello was good. Magan felt confident that nobody inside the building had noticed anything unusual. The interior hallway was brightly lit. Ridgello’s team flew down the corridor, swift as ghosts, until they reached the first door on the left. Two officers lined up on either side of the door, dartguns drawn and needles loaded. Ridgello blasted the apartment security with a Defense and Wellness Council priority override, and the door slid open. A dozen troops swarmed into Natch’s apartment. Rey Gonerev let out a gasp. The apartment was empty. A half-eaten sandwich lay on the kitchen counter alongside a cold mug of nitro that had obviously been untouched for hours, perhaps days. One of the viewscreens was broadcasting a spirited melee from a fencing tournament on 49th Heaven. A triangular blob of code rotated inside a MindSpace bubble in Natch’s office with no hand there to rotate it. Even more telling, however, was the absence of the ubiquitous shoulder pack of bio/logic programming bars that fiefcorpers always kept within reach. “You said he was here, Papizon,” barked the Blade. “Where is he?” A puzzled stammer came over the connection. “You mean, hehe’s not there?” “No, he fucking isn’t.” “But the scope says … There’s still … If Natch isn’t there, then who’s working in MindSpace?” Ridgello, the only one still using battle language: No sign of him, Lieutenant. The troops had relaxed their guard by now and were all casting dazed looks at one another. One of them scratched his beefy head with the barrel of his disruptor gun, against all weapons protocol. Officers were poking through closets and peeking under tables on the off chance that Natch might be cowering in some undiscovered corner. A woman standing behind the workbench in Natch’s office turned to face one of the interior windows and was startled to read the text printed there in bold letters: A PRIVATE MESSAGE FOR MAGAN KAI LEE Back in the hoverbird, Magan blanched. Rey Gonerev’s face showed some amalgam of disgust and amusement. The snake knew we were coming, thought Magan. How could he possibly have known that? Magan counted the people who had known the details of this operation ahead of time on three fingers: the Blade, Papizon, himself. Not even Ridgello had known what was going down until late last night. The team leader had seen the text by now. Do you want to read this, Lieutenant? he said. Magan felt his mind downshifting, looking for a more acceptable gear. The smart thing to do would be to ignore the message and get his people out of there as fast as possible. But wasn’t that what Natch was expecting him to do? The message on the window was such a transparent ploy to get Magan into the apartment that the fiefcorp master must be counting on him to not take the bait. In which case … shouldn’t he do the opposite? The lieutenant cursed silently. How difficult it was to use logic on a creature whose entire nature rejected the concept. Magan opened the supply chest at his knee, grabbed a canister of black code darts, and snapped it onto the barrel of his dartgun. “You’re not going in there, are you?” said the Blade incredulously. “Shit,” replied the Council lieutenant, striding for the door of the hoverbird. “I guess I am.” Within two minutes, he had made it up the hill to the tenement building’s northwest entrance. Magan was approaching middle age and no longer possessed the feline agility of his younger troops, but he still doubted that any of the building’s occupants had seen him. Magan glanced up at the balcony of the third-floor apartment, where the officer standing guard confirmed his assessment with the okay signal. Two other guards were escorting the unconscious woman back to her bed, where she would wake up in a few hours with a splitting headache. Even the dropped mug of nitro had disappeared back inside. The yellow-starred officers in the apartment saw the look in Magan’s eyes and gave him a wide berth. He walked into Natch’s office, ushered the massive Nordic team leader out the door, and opened the message on the viewscreen with a gesture. SMILE FORTHE CAMERAS. Magan frowned. What kind of message was this? Suddenly his eyes widened. “Out! Everybody out!” he snapped, unencrypted, startling the Council officers into a pellmell gallop for the exit. “No, he knows we’re here-southeast exit!” The group skidded to a halt and reversed directions. Rey Gonerev was yelling something in his ear, but Magan couldn’t process it quickly enough. He managed to decipher the solicitor’s words just as they burst into the southeast courtyard: “No, stay inside. The drudges, the drudges!” Standing in the snow outside Natch’s building was a pack of men and women whose eyes were lit with predatory glee. Magan recognized many of their faces on sight: the craggy visage of Sen Sivv Sor, the dandyish face of John Ridglee, the weasel smirk of V. T. Vel Osbiq. The drudges. Ridgello, clearly irritated, gave his troops the signal to sheathe their weapons. The Council lieutenant summoned PokerFace 85a to mask his own roiling emotions as the drudges formed a receiving line and began peppering the retreating officers with questions for their readers. “Lieutenant, why has Len Borda decided to seize MultiReal by force?” “Who approved this mission?” “Has the Council consulted the Prime Committee about this?” “What charges are you planning to bring against Natch?” “Is this legal?” Magan Kai Lee trudged through the courtyard, saying nothing, trying to figure out the exchange rate of this new situation. He could practically taste the bile in the back of his throat. “You see, Rey?” he said over ConfidentialWhisper. “This snake has fangs.” 3 Natch stood at his workbench and waved his left hand. A shimmering bubble the size of a coin appeared in the air before him. The bubble quickly expanded until it encompassed most of the workbench, until it enveloped him entirely and blanketed the rest of the world in a translucent film. MindSpace. An empty canvas, a barren universe. Anything was possible here. With his right hand, Natch undid the clasps to the weatherbeaten satchel that sat on the side table. The satchel flopped open to reveal its hidden treasure: twenty-six thin metal bars, branded with the letters of the Roman alphabet. Natch’s fingers wandered blindly to the bar labeled F and slid it whisper-quiet from its sheath. As soon as the bio/logic programming bar passed the borders of MindSpace, spikes and finials burst from its sides like a butterfly’s wings emerging from the cocoon. Natch swished the bar back and forth in front of him, and the butterfly took flight. The fiefcorp master raised his left hand again and spread his fingers wide. The MindSpace bubble exploded with a sinuous curve of interlocking spheres, a virtual centipede in hues of purple and brown. The canvas was covered down to the last square centimeter, and yet still the shapes multiplied. Too close in. Natch hitched his thumb back, zooming out to a better vantage point. The spheres only grew in density as they receded, until they became atomic particles in a solid block of gray. Farther out, the block was now merely one of thousands, a brick in the wall of an ominous castle of programming code. Natch, impatient, continued jabbing his thumb backward. Now even the castle was just one small portion of an immense oval-shaped structure. Parapets and walkways in aqua and silver swirled through the whole and made daring forays across the central void. A MindSpace megalopolis. At last the entire structure lay visible before him. Natch could pan out no farther. He extended his left index finger and rotated his hand ninety degrees counterclockwise, causing a legend to appear atop the block of code. POSSIBILITIES Version: 0.76 Programmer: The Surina/Natch Multi Real Fiefcorp Possibilities was the fiefcorp’s brand name for MultiReal. MultiReal: the product of sixteen years’ isolation by one of the world’s most brilliant scientists, with virtually unlimited resources at her disposal. MultiReal: the crowning achievement of an entire line of Surinas stretching back for generations. And now the program belonged to Natch. The entrepreneur hefted the spiky programming tool in his hand, testing its mass. He rotated the castle around and around, looking for just the right spot…. There. A soft place, a weakness in the virtual masonry. All at once, Natch raised the bar over his head and struck at the castle wall with furious strength. Clang. The bar bounced off the castle and set his right hand vibrating. Natch grabbed the bar again with both hands, wielding it like a crazed samurai. He began delivering savage blows to the structure before him. Again and again he struck, snarling with rage. Finally one of the blows smashed through the brick, and the castle wall shattered into a thousand pieces with a deafening crash. Natch peered at the interior of the vanquished castle, expecting to see a skeleton of virtual boards, planks, and girders. But the structure was completely hollow and had no visible means of support. This was no mere emptiness, no simple absence-of-something-else; it was a yawning chasm of nothingness, a force of void that seemed to pull at him with intense gravity. As the fiefcorp master stood, paralyzed with fear, the program began to crumble all around him. Blocks that had been anchored and secured by a thousand connections were buckling under the strain, pulling loose, succumbing to the Null Current. Soon objects across the room were sliding toward him; programming bars were making kamikaze leaps from his satchel; even dishes were somersaulting in from the kitchen to get swallowed by the growing darkness. Natch felt the tug in his knees first. He struggled to get to the office door, thinking that if he could just shut out the nothingness, he would be all right. But soon the void was pulling at his entire body. He managed to hook his fingers around the doorjamb just as he lost his feet. For a minute, maybe two, he hung there with his heels in the air and his fingernails clawing for a handhold on the door. And then a chair slid in from the living room and bashed his knuckles. Natch lost his grip. He began tumbling end over end into the chill of the darkest night. Nothingness. He came to in a wintry patch of forest, a torch in his hand. A sickening smell that Natch identified as burning flesh wafted through the air. Natch dashed through the trees. He was in a hurry, but he couldn’t say why. Paths crisscrossed on the forest floor below his feet, but he didn’t know where they had come from or where they were going; better to trust his instincts. And right now his instincts said to head west, toward the rapidly falling sun. He ran through the foliage as quickly as he could. Thorns and sharp branches lashed his face. Then Natch heard the screaming. Stop! Wait, stop! Don’t! Don’t! Don’t! And then a long shriek of anguish and pain, underlined by the snarling of a confused and angry bear. The distant tumult of rushing feet through the leaves. The wet sound of human flesh ripping. Natch could not move. The light from the torch sputtered and went out. In the split second before the dark enveloped him once again, Natch looked up and discovered he was no longer holding a torch-it was the bloody stump of a boy’s arm. Then he awoke. Natch slowly lifted his eyelids and let the world soak into his consciousness one millimeter at a time. He took inventory of his surroundings. It was a familiar setting. His hands lay palms-down on faux ivory armrests, and he could feel faux leather at his back. Sunlight tapped a staccato message on his face from behind a latticework of redwoods passing by at superhuman speed. Natch had practically memorized every twist and turn of this Seattle express tube over the years. The entrepreneur took a closer look at the window. Something floated there in boldface awaiting his arousal from sleep. COUNCIL STORMS NATCH’S APARTMENT IN PLOYTO SEIZE MULTIREAL Natch gave a tired nod. So those fools took the bait after all. He skimmed through a few dozen drudge clippings, stacking them on the window like bricks. There was video from fifteen different angles, and some anonymous wit had given the whole thing a symphonic score. Natch summoned the baffled face of Magan Kai Lee and watched his entire walk of shame back to the hoverbird four times. At last you have some breathing room, the fiefcorp master told himself. Now you can stop running and go home again. Natch had woken up on a tube train every day this week. He had traveled the entire world over the past few weeks in an effort to skirt the Defense and Wellness Council. Yesterday he had seen the desert sands of old Texas territory, pausing for a brief multi foray to Shenandoah to set his trap; the night before, he had skimmed the surface of the Indian Ocean. But there were a number of close calls. Natch could find only so much anonymity when his face had been burned into the public consciousness through a hundred interviews and drudge reports. A group of teenagers in Sao Paulo had seen right through his false public directory profile, and Natch had had to pawn off one of his new bio/logic programming bars just to keep them quiet. Counting the one he had flung at his black-robed pursuers in Shenandoah a few weeks ago, he was now two bars short of a complete set. Then there was the disturbing incident with the crazy woman in central Europe. She had worn the bright blue uniform of a healer, but had reached the age when many abandoned curative treatments and sent in their applications to join the Prepared. The woman had walked up to him in plain view of three whiterobed Council officers, indignant, demanding that Natch explain the “dirty tricks” he had performed at the demo in Andra Pradesh. Natch’s mind had been gliding through some remote place, and he had nearly panicked. But suddenly people had stood up to defend him with voices raised and fists clenched. Soon a handful of L-PRACG security officers had gotten involved, and the Council officers had scurried over to investigate. A small-scale brawl had erupted between Natch’s supporters and his detractors. Libertarians shouting Down with Len Borda, governmentalists bellowing Respect the law. Natch, dumbfounded, had offered no resistance when two libertarians calmly tugged him out the door and thrust him onto a tube running in the opposite direction. He had managed to escape before Len Borda’s people realized exactly what was going on. In a world of sixty billion people, simple mathematics dictated that Natch must have millions of sympathizers on the libertarian side of the political spectrum. A hundred million people probably sup ported his fight to keep MultiReal out of the Council’s hands from sheer spite for Len Borda. But to discover that people had coalesced on this issue, that they were willing to stand up to armed Council officers … Natch simply didn’t know how to process it. Once aware of this undercurrent of libertarian sympathy, he began to see signs of it everywhere he went. Natch found posts of support on the Data Sea, speeches by L-PRACG activists, drudgic calls for embargoes against the central government. Suddenly he realized he had underestimated the number of his supporters by several orders of magnitude. A minority, perhaps, and still skulking in the shadows, but gaining strength every day. And now the Council’s raid on Natch’s apartment building had altered the dynamics of the situation altogether. He called up Sen Sivv Sor’s reportage on the window. COUNCIL STORMS NATCH’S APARTMENT IN PLOYTO SEIZE MULTIREAL I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Nobody is worse at bungling public relations than High Executive Len Borda. In the three weeks since Natch’s MultiReal demonstration at Andra Pradesh, the Fefcorp master has disappeared from the public eye. This morning, we found out why. Because Borda, in his supreme wisdom, has already decided to renege on his assurances of safety, and to seize MultiReal from its rightful owners without provocation. What else can we conclude from the dazzling display of stupidity executed by one of Borda’s lieutenant executives, Magan Kai Lee, this morning? You all saw it right here, dear readers. If not for an anonymous tip-off to the drudge community early this morning, the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp might have already been dissolved by now. And its fiefcorp master might be rotting away in some orbital Council prison. It’s astounding the lengths some will go to in order to preserve the vaunted status quo. Which is why— Natch had read enough. He banished the potpourri of Data Sea ramblings from the window and let the redwoods show through once more. Yes, Natch’s clever MindSpace tricks had enabled him to reverse the tide of public opinion, if only for a day or two. Even the staunch governmentalist Mah Lo Vertiginous was grudgingly admitting that the Council had blundered today. Borda and Lee would not dare pull another stunt like that anytime soon. Natch caught his reflection in the window. So why are you still sitting on a tube train heading in the wrong direction? he asked himself. Why didn’t you get off at the last stop and make your way home? He conjured a picture of the city of Shenandoah in his head. Home. But when he saw those undulating streets and shifting buildings, all he could think about was the mercenary precision of the black-robed figures who had ambushed him there. He could still feel the pinpricks of their black code darts and the icy rush of poisonous OCHREs suffusing his bloodstream. The void, the nothingness. Natch stumbled upon an unexpected realization: he was afraid. You find yourself capable of strange things when you run out of choices, Margaret Surina had told him last month. Now Natch understood what the bodhisattva meant. For three weeks, he had been fleeing from the Council, catching the occasional update from Horvil or Serr Vigal over ConfidentialWhisper, taking quick glimpses at the evolving Possibilities program whenever he found a rented MindSpace workbench he could trust. Nobody had heard a syllable from Margaret in all that time. Nor had the Patel Brothers stirred from their lair to stop Lucas Sentinel and Bolliwar Tuban from thrashing them in the Primo’s ratings. And what about Brone? Natch blacked out the window and displayed the message he had received the other day in small, precise lettering. Why is the vaunted master of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp running away? What does he think he will gain by fleeing from tube train to tube train? Does he think his enemies are just going to up and disappear? How long before he realizes he needs additional allies to complete the MultiReal programming and bring the program to market? When will he finally accept the helping hand that an old enemy has held out to him? When will his need for funding, equipment, privacy, and security outweigh the irrational hatred he carries around his neck? There was no trace of a sender or signature. Natch supposed he could use some arcane tools of the trade to track down the message’s origin, but of course there was only one person who could have sent it. A snippet of dream floated through Natch’s head: a bear, screams, the bloody stump of an arm. Where was Brone? What was he doing? Certainly after all that had happened during the Shortest Initiation, after all the machinations Brone had gone through to put Natch in his debt, he wasn’t planning to just sit on the sidelines. After all, he was the head of a major creed organization, the Thasselians, with vast stockpiles of credits and half a million anonymous devotees at his disposal. Opportunities for mischief were plentiful. It was a time of suspended animation, of delayed choices. And now Natch’s ruse against Magan Kai Lee had set things in motion once again. You’ve faced challenges before, Natch told himself. Brone, Captain Bolbund, the ROD coders, Figaro Fi, the Patels. What’s different? What are you so afraid of now? It was the black code swimming through his veins. Somehow it had aged him in a way that none of his adversaries had managed to do before. He could practically feel it tinkering away inside of him, deconstructing his innards, disassembling his mind. Every day, Natch sensed that he was losing a small piece of this inner turf to the encroaching void, to the winter, to the nothingness. The nothingness was coming to claim him. And Natch knew that all the battles he had fought before were merely the opening skirmishes of a much larger campaign against this nothingness. It was a campaign he could not afford to lose. 4 Magan spent the next four hours on three different hoverbirds, watching time and space drift by the window. “Towards Perfection, Lieutenant Lee,” chirped a voice from the cockpit as Magan stepped aboard the last hoverbird. Obviously the pilot had been too absorbed in the complex trigonometry of space flight preparation to catch the news. “Anything I can get you before we lift off? Commissary’s got a nice batch of weedtea, straight from-” Magan cut her off. “Nothing, Panja, thank you.” “How about-” “To DWCR, please.” Panja quieted down. She had flown Magan to DWCR hundreds of times in the past few years-only a small number of pilots had clearance to fly there-so she had learned to read his emotions well. Something must have gone terribly wrong. Magan took a seat in the back row of the hoverbird and strapped on his harness. The pilot conducted the ship’s mechanical tests without a word, then set them on their way. Magan watched the clouds approach and fell into a light sleep until the ship alerted him that they were making the final approach into DWCR. To those in the know, DWCR was the Defense and Wellness Council Root, Len Borda’s center of operations-and those who could not define the acronym weren’t aware of its existence anyway. But even most of those privileged enough to work at DWCR couldn’t pinpoint it on a map. The location was highly classified, and officers like Panja had to withstand a battery of loyalty tests before they were admitted to the inner circle. Magan himself had spent several years stepping on a red multi tile without knowing exactly where he was being projected. But he never minded such obfuscation, even when it served to block something in his path. A system with a hidden solution remained a system with a solution, after all; a welcome change from the centerless anarchy his life had been before enlisting in the Council twenty-five years ago. Magan knew that, with scrupulous planning, he could master any system that confronted him. He knew that time and chance were the only obstacles between him and the pinnacle of the Council hierarchy. Eventually the secrets of DWCR would be his. Nearly ten thousand Council employees were not so confident. Magan saw them huddled in their offices week after week wasting hours in useless conjecture. Some believed the Root sat in one of the many unexplored crevices of Luna. Others favored the Pacific Islands or the Antarctic or the uninhabitable sectors of Furtoid as more likely candidates. But so far Len Borda’s engineers had succeeded in keeping the Root impervious to any known positioning or tracing program, and prodigious sums of money were expended to ensure that the mystification would continue for years to come. Nonetheless, Magan knew the secrecy could not last indefinitely. Secrets had a gravity of their own that sucked in the curious and the determined. Had the high executive planned for that contingency, or was he relying on the secrecy to last forever? The bodhisattva of Creed Bushido had the perfect aphorism to describe such closed-mindedness: Short-term plans, long-term problems. In actuality, DWCR was a disk-shaped platter in orbit at the outermost reach of Earth’s gravitational pull, only a slight rocket thrust away from either floating off into the aether or spiraling planetward to a fiery, cataclysmic doom. Lieutenant Lee watched out the port window now as the platter slid into view. A single observation tower jutted from the bottom with priapic majesty, as if waiting for something to impale. Panja docked the hoverbird without a sound, and Magan stepped through the airlock as soon as DWCR had given them the all-clear. Generals and military planners filed curt nods with Magan as he strode the Root’s maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Without proper clearance, he could wander these shifting corridors of gunmetal gray for days. Someone had made an attempt to inject some color on the walls, but the smattering of pretentious landscapes and portraits of executives past did little to lighten the atmosphere. Magan made his way to the observation tower and kept his ears open for the hallway gossip. He heard rumors of military deployments, complaints about research budgets, details of appropriations bills before the Prime Committee … but not a single comment about the failed raid early this morning. Magan frowned. The only thing worse than listening to officers chatter about the Council’s failure was not hearing them chatter about it at all. He sighed as he reached the central elevator and cleared his mind. The elevator did not head upward. Instead it dropped, leading Magan to a floor on the tip of the observation tower. Borda’s private chambers. When he emerged from the elevator, the Council lieutenant found himself standing on the deck of an ancient sloop-of-war. The ship swayed tipsily in the waves, sending the occasional spittle of SeeNaRee brine splashing on Magan’s face. Still-smoking cannons on the deck spoke of a recent battle against some enemy hovering just out of sight in the fog. Standing at the prow of the ship was High Executive Len Borda. Borda listened to his lieutenant’s version of events with rising ire, his back to the mast and his nose pointed out to sea. “Bloody drudges,” he said in a rumbling basso that not even the waves could drown out. “If I wanted their opinion, trust me, they’d know it.” Some called the high executive arrogant, but that word seemed beside the point. After nearly sixty years running the world’s military and intelligence affairs, Borda needed no tone of intimidation. He spoke with the timbre of a man who had been the final arbiter for so long that he had forgotten any other reality. Magan watched Len Borda move to the railing and run his hand over the intricately carved wood. He seemed to be scanning the murky horizon for a sign of the enemy, which would be the French, if memory served. Why Borda devoted so much attention to this virtual playground, Magan could not fathom. He admitted that the SeeNaRee programmers had a terrific eye for detail and historical accuracy. But Borda was spending more time here than in the world of flesh and blood lately, and that was not a good sign. “Today is December twenty-seventh,” said the lieutenant after a long and uneasy silence. Borda shrugged. “What of it?” “The new year comes in four days. After what happened this morning, do you really think you can gain control of MultiReal in four days?” One stony eyebrow lifted itself on Borda’s forehead and then subsided, like a breaker on the SeeNaRee ocean. “Four days is a lifetime,” he said. “I was willing to deal with Natch behind closed doors. He’s the one who decided to bring this fight into the public eye.” Borda scowled. “Let’s see how he handles a full onslaught.” Magan clenched his fists into a tight ball behind his back, then slowly forced himself to stop, take a breath, unwind. Could Len Borda really be so foolish as to try the same thing again? Had his mind become so entrenched that he could do nothing but continuously loop through the same routine? “And what if this onslaught of yours fails?” Borda was not nearly so successful at hiding his emotions, and he didn’t bother with PokerFace programs either. The gritted teeth and the trembling jaw told Magan everything he needed to know. The high executive was planning to break their agreement. “Forget about the fiefcorp master for a moment,” said Borda. “I need your help with something else.” The high executive waved his hand and summoned a block of text to float against the gauzy gray sky. Magan pushed the anger aside and read the letter with a growing crease on his brow. Congress of LPRACGs Office of the Speaker Melbourne In accordance with my duties as speaker, I am writing to inform the Defense and Wellness Council that the Congress has officially opened an inquiry into the causes of the computational anomalies known as “infoqual