Geosynchron (57 page)

Magan Kai Lee sat in the office at the base of DWCR's observation
tower-his office, his observation tower now-and anxiously consulted
the time. Borda's invading force at the Twin Cities had laid down their
arms on hearing the news of the high executive's surrender. Natch's
mission remained the only loose end to tie up.

"There are surreptitious targets which must be ascertained," said
Magan. Natch must have had enough time to take Brone down by now.

Jorge Monck was idling in the hallway near the room Natch had
entered, pretending to hold an impromptu business meeting with
three of his colleagues, also Council operatives. Time's not really a factor
in there, Lieutenant Executive, he said. And Magan realized that he was
correct. Whatever the outcome of Natch's and Brone's duel, it should
have been instantaneous. Unless Brone was not actually in that room
after all ... in which case, shouldn't Natch have emerged and taken up
the search in another location?

"I'm mystified by the increasingly cloudy skies," he told Jara. Two
more minutes, and we're going in.

The fiefcorp master sounded supportive from the war room in
Manila. I think you're right. We can't just sit here forever.

A hundred and twenty seconds stretched out as if time had become
elastic. Monck and his operatives were casually making their way
towards the double doors Natch had snaked through a good twenty
minutes earlier. Magan called up the view from Monck's battle suit and
was pleased to note that the Council operatives looked exactly like any
other random group of fiefcorpers loitering the hallways between
meetings. The sun peeked through a skylight overhead in plump,
jovial defiance of the circumstances.

Go.

In the space of an instant, Monck's operatives metamorphosed from
nonchalant executives and bureaucrats to hardnosed agents of the
Defense and Wellness Council. Weapons came sliding out of hidden
gunbelts as they lined up on either side of the double doors in standard
formation. Close-range dartgun shooters low and inside, officers with
crackling multi disruptors in a flanking position, sharpshooters at a
distance ready for anything that flew through that opening. Two operatives covered the approaching hallways in case one of the figures in
black robes decided to come investigate.

Jorge Monck gave the slightest of nods.

The doors slammed open. The Defense and Wellness Council burst
through, fingers tense on triggers.

Magan could already tell something was wrong before he could
even make out the scene in the room. Nobody was firing weapons, nor
were they lowering them. Instead there was just a general confusion.

The room was arranged like a small theater, with a stage at one end
and a dozen rows of chairs facing it. The stage could have conceivably
held half a dozen people, but right now there were only two: Brone,
wearing the black robe with red trim that had become his trademark;
and Natch, glassy-eyed, unconscious, and propped up on a chair facing
the audience.

Audience? Yes, there was an audience, and they were familiar faces.
Sen Sivv Sor, John Ridglee, Mah Lo Vertiginous, V. T. Vel Osbiq, other
pundits both libertarian and governmentalist. The last time Magan
had fallen into this particular trap, the drudges' faces had radiated perverse glee at his predicament. Today they were somber and reflective to
the last. Perhaps it was the sight of Natch, hollow and lifeless as a marionette. Or perhaps they recognized that this was no longer just
sportive amusement; the fate of the world was on the table, and both
Brone and the Defense and Wellness Council had anted up.

Ringing the perimeter of the room were a dozen armed Thasselians
in their black robes, though they seemed to have taken no notice of the invading Council operatives. Pierre Loget was among them, beaming
like an idiot.

"Perceptive interested parties?" muttered Jorge Monck. Shoot him?

Magan felt an animal urge from some primal sector of consciousness telling him to shoot first and deal with consequences later. But
then he saw the arrogant, once-handsome stare of the bodhisattva of
Creed Thassel, and Magan knew that Natch had been correct. Brone
had already planned for that contingency. Hold off, he replied.

Brone cleared his throat, and for the first time Magan noticed that he
was propping himself up with some kind of pipe that might have been
salvaged from the wreckage of Chicago. The bodhisattva looked frail,
exhausted, just footsteps away from death. And yet on his ruined, prematurely wrinkled face there sat a macabre smile of satisfaction. Brone hobbled downstage, stabbing the pipe onto the stage with each step-clank!
clank!-only pulling himself up to meet it with great effort.

The bodhisattva stopped at the foot of the stage and swept a hand
at the audience of drudges. "What do you think?" he said. His voice
gargled as through blood, but somehow still managed to resonate with
cruel pride. "I got the idea from our friend over here. Quite a
showman, that one." He hitched his prosthetic thumb over his
shoulder to indicate Natch. Then he addressed Monck, whom he had
ascertained to be the group's leader. "So is it Magan Kai Lee who you're
reporting to or Len Borda?"

Tell him, said the lieutenant executive.

"Lee," replied Monck, his voice emotionless, his gun still centered
on Brone's forehead.

"Ah, I underestimated you once again, Lieutenant Executive Lee,"
said Brone, offering a slight and yet entirely serious bow. "I figured
that the old bastard would get the best of you. But despite what I told
Merri and Petrucio, I'm glad to see that I was wrong on that score."

Monck was having none of the bodhisattva's mocking dignity.
"Tell me why we shouldn't shoot you right now."

Brone nodded. "A reasonable question. There are two answers.
First, because we possess MultiReal, and you do not. You don't have the
power. The second reason, as I'm sure Magan has guessed by now, is
that Possibilities 2.0 is rigged to automatically launch on the Data Sea
on the instant of my death.

"So if I were you, Lieutenant Executive-or is that High Executive
now?-I would hear me out for just a few more minutes."

"Is Natch dead?" asked Monck.

Brone turned and gave a pitying look at the entrepreneur. "Dead?
No, he's perfectly fine in there. And he'll be perfectly fine until I've
launched Possibilities 2.0 on the Data Sea and I release him. I wouldn't
have Natch miss that for the world."

Tense silence. Sixty seconds passed, during which Monck and his
team silently took up positions around the room, keeping their dartguns trained on the bodhisattva.

"I know that Natch has depicted me as some kind of monster,"
continued Brone. "He's got you thinking that I'm looking to slaughter
millions of people for my own amusement. Not true.

"My Revolution of Selfishness is about providing options, not
taking them away. And so even though I have the power to release Possibilities 2.0 to the world right now, with no hesitations ... I stand
here and hesitate. I don't presume to choose for you. Instead I have
assembled here a cross section of the world's most renowned drudges
from across the political spectrum. Governmentalist, libertarian, connectible, unconnectible, rich, poor. I think you will agree that this is
not a stacked deck."

The bodhisattva turned to the pundits and addressed them
directly. "I leave the decision of whether to release Possibilities 2.0 to
the world in your more than capable hands. You've heard the arguments in the court of public opinion over the past several months. You
know the stakes; you know the options. So now you'll be the ones to
decide. No more intermediaries, no more phony opinions of compro mised elected officials standing in the way. No more bribes from the
rich or excuses from the well connected. There is just you, the drudges,
whom I have selected to stand for the collective will of the human race.

"Do you want the power of Possibilities? Or do you want the rigid
rules and restrictions of the Defense and Wellness Council? Do you
want the ultimate freedom and the ultimate empowerment that Margaret Surina promised you? Or do you want a shackled world of two
dimensions, the faux freedom of our ancestors?

"The fate of the world is in your hands."

37

Smaller than air, they dance between the molecules of oxygen that
drape the Earth; they tango with the granules of salt that permeate the
sea; they gambol on the caterpillar's back and the butterfly's wings.

You will swallow dozens of them every day without noticing or
complaining. Yawn, sniff, gulp, lick your lips-odds are you will
imbibe a few of them. And why should they complain? As far as
they're concerned, tissue is tissue and matter is matter. Some will
slowly worm their way through layers of your blood and fiber until
they are excreted from pores and sweat glands; free at last, they will
eventually find their way back into the machinery of the world's
weather system. Others will be press-ganged into service by the
OCHREs in your body and converted into their component amino
acids. Still others will huddle in the lining of your intestines until you
walk through the gates of the Prepared, then hitch a ride with you into
the grave and soak into the bedrock of the Earth for a million yearsquiet, dormant, waiting. The spare change of the universe.

They are the level I geosynchrons, and they have one function: to
sit at the threshold of the nothing and wait for the world to speak.

The world speaks.

The thing happens.

Stasis shatters and change charges into being and there is no reason
why except because this is the way the universe has been constructed.

The duty of the level I geosynchrons is merely to listen and report
the raw data of the world. Changes in ionization, movements of subatomic particles, fluctuations of wave and cosmic force-all the level I
geosynchrons can do is observe and flip the rotation of a qubit, thereby
transcribing these events in the language of mathematics. Exactly what
it is they are recording is of no import to them. Electrons spin and whirl and shift orbit; information is recorded; the purpose of the level
I geosynchrons is fulfilled.

It's not up to the level II geosynchrons to comprehend this data
either, for they are the worker bees of the weather system. Their job is
to uncomplainingly carry out the orders of their superiors higher up in
the chain, whether those orders are to gather information or to impede
the velocity of the wind, to bump the atmospheric temperature of their
minuscule domains up a fraction of a degree or to tamp it down. Of all
the quintillions of microscopic geosynchrons in the system, it is the
level Its who are the most numerous. Ask someone to describe the word
geosynchron, and most likely that person will describe to you the frenzied
activity of the level II. Rushing to and fro, vaulting from place to place,
the domain of the level II is a world of tasks accomplished, of weather
directives made actual and three dimensional.

So it's up to the level III geosynchrons to take notice of the gathering atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic Ocean. They're the lords
of pattern recognition, the level Ills. They can scan through voluminous amounts of data, compare them to the hundred years of uninterrupted weather information in their memory banks, and detect
emerging trends in their first picoseconds of existence. The level III
geosynchrons have seen every point on the curve from tropical calm to
raging inferno, and every gradation in between.

Today, as battle rages in Melbourne and Natch attempts to weave
his way through the Kordez Thassel Complex unseen, the level Ills see
atmospheric pressure dropping as off a sheer cliff. They see mounting
winds and increased turbulence.

They see a weather event that is truly unprecedented.

It's the ultimate outlier of weather events. It's the once-in-tenthousand-year hurricane. It's the storm that humanity has talked
about, planned for, and prayed against since History first yawned and
rubbed the stardust from its eyes. The storm that every civilization
must either muscle through or collapse under the weight of, like a thousand flourishing ecosystems before that perished utterly from the
Earth.