Geosynchron Page 2
FROM AUTHORS
"Just when we thought cyberpunk was dead, David Louis Edelman bursts on the scene with defibrillator paddles and shouts Clear.' If there's any web more tangled than the World Wide one, it's the Byzantine networks of high finance; Edelman intermeshes them in a complex, compelling series. This DOES compute!"
Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of FlashForward
"David Louis Edelman's vision of the future is so alive and full of energy the pages are practically buzzing. Wonderfully intricate with smart, satisfying complexity, Infoquake and its sequel, MultiReal, serve up a world where mind-bending technologies promise a freedom nearly as endless as the Machiavellian ambitions of those who would control them"
Nick Sagan, author of Idlewild, Edenborn, and Everfree
"A thoroughly successful hybrid of Neuromancer and Wall Street, MultiReal is the kind of thought-experiment we need more of around here: rigorously backgrounded, tightly plotted, and built around one of the most intriguing neurotech conceits I've encountered in years. William Gibson once observed that the street finds its own uses forthings. David Louis Edelman reminds us that both boardroom and back room do as well-and the people who lurk in those places are a lot scarier..."
Peter Watts, Hugo Award-nominated author of Blindsight
As much as I loved Infoquake, MultiReal is better. It's The West Wing, in the world of big business, in the future, all last second deals and human emotion finding desperate chances and tense negotiations, but this time with added sex and violence. ... This world, almost uniquely in modern SF, isn't just a commentary on the modern scene, but might also come to pass.... This will get my Hugo vote for Best Novel. Edelman is pushing forward a new sort of SF here, one based not in the myths and magic of the Singularity... but in the continual, ongoing process of history, culture, and, yes, capitalism.... I eagerly await the end of the trilogy, and want this to win stuff now."
Paul Cornell, Hugo Award-nominated screenwriter for Doctor Who
GEOSYNCH RON
D A V I D LOUIS EDELMAN
GEOSYNCH RON
V O L U M E 3 O F T H E J U M P 225 T R I L O G Y
an imprint of Prometheus Books
Amherst, NY
Published 2010 by Pyr(r), an imprint of Prometheus Books Geosynchron. Copyright (c) 2010 by David Louis Edelman. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Inquiries should be addressed to Pyr 59 John Glenn Drive Amherst, New York 14228-2119 VOICE: 716-691-0133 FAX: 716-691-0137 WWW.PYRSF.COM
14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edelman, David Louis. Geosynchron / by David Louis Edelman. p. cm. - (Jump 225 trilogy ; v. 3) ISBN 978-1-59102-792-8 (pbk. alk. paper) 1. Corporations-Fiction. I. Title. PS3605.D445G46 2010 813'.6-dc22 2009042451 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
1. The Prisoners 7
2. A Game of Chess 77
3. The Consultants 143
4. Nohwan's Crusade 209
5. Tyrants and Revolutionaries 275
6. The Guardian and the Keeper 375
APPENDIXES
a. A Synopsis of Infoquake and MultiReal 447
b. Glossary of Terms 456
c. Historical Timeline 477
d. On the Orbital Colonies 485
e. On the Islanders 489
f. On the Pharisees 493
g. On the Autonomous Revolt 496
AFTERWORD 501
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 507
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 509
I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by.
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
i
THE PRISONERS
i
Margaret Surina is rejuvenated.
She hovers wraithlike in the thin membrane between existence and nothingness. Skin the olive tinge of the Indian subcontinent, robe a billowing tent of blue and green, fingers long and precise as praying mantises. Hair tar black but streaked with white, manifestation of the paradox behind those sapphire eyes.
That Natch can see her at all is miracle enough. In this place he has no eyes, no face, no corporeal presence whatsoever. It is a cocoon of pure mind, where there are no points on the compass and where even time loops upon itself and disappears in a dizzying spiral of infinite improbability. Here in this place, Margaret is merely a perception of a perception, like an awareness or a manufactured memory.
Natch wants to ask her, Don't you realize you're dead?
He saw the empty husk of her at the top of the Revelation Spire. He stood in the courtyard at Andra Pradesh watching her corpse as the self-appointed guardians of wisdom pontificated about the passing of ages and the withering of flowers and other such nonsense. Yes, Margaret Surina is dead, there can be no doubt about it. Why then does she keep blatantly disregarding her nonexistence? Why does she keep appearing to Natch and intoning words of solemn absurdity?
MultiReal is becoming part of you, Margaret tells him. You're not just its owner anymore, Natch-you're the guardian and the keeper. That grating habit of enunciation to the point of ludicrousness, the way she treats each syllable like a wayward child to be nurtured. MultiReal is yours now, Natch. I was foolish to have held on to it for so long. I am not my father. I'm not strong enough to make these decisions. But you ... Natch, I picked you for a reason-because you'll resist Len Borda to your dying breath. You will resist the winter and the void. Understand this-something my father was trying to tell me. The world is new each day, every sunrise a spring and every sunset a winter. I know you'll understand this. You will stand alone in the end, and you will make the decisions the world demands. The decisions I can't make. I know this. I know it.
Natch has heard this rant before. It's what Margaret told him just hours before her demise, sitting in the pinnacle of that cold tower with Quell the Islander at her side, her mind permanently broken. It made no sense to him then, and it makes no sense to him now.
Margaret segues into a new stanza of insanity that Natch doesn't recognize. Onwards and upwards, she says. That was the dream of Sheldon Surina, my ancestor and the father of biologics. Towards Perfection, no matter what the cost. But it was not Sheldon Surina's fate to pay that cost, any more than it was Marcus Surina's any more than it is mine.
Now that fate has fallen to you and you alone, Natch. You are the geosynchron of the human race.
Natch wants to shut out the visage, to banish Margaret back to the elaborate sepulcher where the Surinas laid her, with its gold and pearl and its bas-relief carvings. But Natch has no eyelids in this place, no way of banishing the apparition floating before him. The bodhisattva keeps talking about momentous choices for him to make and earthshaking decisions in his future. But what are they? What does she want from him? How can he decide anything when Margaret won't tell him what it is he's supposed to decide?
Go away! he tries to shout. Leave me the fuck alone! I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't want to know. He tries to shout, but he has no voice.
And then the nothingness enfolds Natch in its bosom and he sees no more.
2
The nothingness loosens its hold on him. The world is still black, yes, but Natch is there. Arms legs torso head all intact; lungs breathing oxygen; body occupying space and slogging forward through time's amber one second at a time. Alive. Alive. Alive.
He is lying on something cold and metallic. Fluid rushes through his ears, signaling steep vertical movement. Climbing. Something thunks against the platform below him three or four times. It sounds like hailstones.
A male voice, a real human voice, from somewhere nearby: "That was
close."
Heavy breathing, more climbing. The thunks disappear.
"So now what?"
"I don't-I don't know." A second male voice, weary and pensive.
"After all that, you don't know? For process' preservation ... I just got hit with a fucking pipe. In the shoulder. Do you even know how much that hurts? Thing was probably covered with rust too."
The identities of the voices elude him. Natch's brain feels like a machine jammed in low gear. He can't process the words. He can't open his eyes. He can't move or speak.
"I'm sorry about your shoulder," says the first voice in a condescending tone that indicates no sorrow whatsoever. "You didn't have to come."
"Shut up, you bloody idiot. Of course I had to come. I couldn't just let you go fetch him alone, could I? Get yourself killed. And then I'd have to pay for a fucking funeral." Restless shifting around. "So there he is, the bastard. Why are we even discussing this? He makes my skin crawl. Send Magan Kai Lee a message and let's get paid already."
A pause. "It's not that simple."
"Not that simple? Would you rather Len Borda get hold of him? Listen, we don't have much time. It's getting violent out there. Didn't you hear about that gun battle in Melbourne? A hundred Council officers firing on each other in the middle of the street-"
"Of course I heard about it."
"There's two sides, point I'm trying to make. Borda and Lee. We picked a side. Getting in on the ground floor, that's what you said. Why are you suddenly changing your mind?"
"That was before we knew the truth."
"The truth?" Coarse, mocking laughter. "Face it, what we used to think of as the truth is dead. Too much confusion. Truth doesn't exist anymore."
"Just give me some time to think this over. A day or two. We can fend Magan off for that long. And it's not like he's going anywhere." The inflection of the voice seems to indicate the prostrate body of Natch.
"Well, don't take too long. A day or two is all we have before Magan realizes we've got something to hide and starts asking questions."
The two men descend into troubled silence as the fluid sloshing through Natch's skull levels off. He slides back into unconsciousness.
Alive.
Natch awakens with a feeling of profound, wearying disappointment.
He is still enveloped in blackness, but this is a blackness free from magic or mystery. He is sitting in an ordinary wooden chair with his arms and legs lightly tied to it and a blindfold over his eyes. The light seeping through the blindfold and the ambient noise around him indicate that he is sitting in a large, enclosed space, perhaps a gymnasium or even a small auditorium. Natch rocks the chair side to side for a moment and feels a hard, tiled surface beneath him. Where he has ended up, he can't imagine.
Natch tries to untangle the thread of events that have led to the present moment. He fled the carnage at the Tul Jabbor ComplexCouncil officers firing on Council officers, Council officers firing on him. He leaped into a waiting hoverbird with Petrucio Patel's black code dart embedded in the back of his leg. He was taken to Old Chicago, where his old enemy Brone persuaded him to join his Revolution of Selfishness. (Multiple lives experienced simultaneously! An end to the tyranny of cause and effect!) But when Natch discovered the pattern of lies beneath Brone's stories, he ran. He ran into the wilds of Old Chicago, and then ... and then ...*
After that, an impenetrable void of blank memory. A big smear of nothingness. Natch can't remember if he was pursued, or how that pursuit ended. Certainly Brone would not have let him leave that old hotel without consequences. But the thread of memory simply ends on those streets. Natch's internal systems tell him that barely forty-eight hours have passed since he escaped the hotel in Chicago. That hardly seems possible. If someone were to tell him he actually spent ten years enmeshed in that web of nothingness, he would accept it as fact.
When he awoke, there was an opaque conversation between two gruff men in what Natch now realizes was the rear compartment of a hoverbird. Did these men drag him onto the hoverbird from the streets of Chicago? Did they rescue him-and if so, from whom, and why?
Natch wonders if his mental inbox might hold some clues, but the thought of checking messages makes him ill. He prived himself to the world shortly before that fatal day at the Tul Jabbor Complex; he has neither checked his messages nor read the news since. He can picture all that pent-up information as a towering heap of debris at the mouth of a river, spilling over the banks until it clogs the horizon.
And yet why should he try to relieve that pressure? Let the mail pile up until the calendar cycles to the end of days and the Data Sea comes stuttering to a halt. Natch has abandoned that life. He does not want to know what happened in Old Chicago, or what has become of Brone and the disciples of his creed, or who picked him up in the hoverbird, or where he has gotten off to.
He recalls a conversation with Jara, right after he achieved number one on the Primo's bio/logic investment guide. Standing in his apartment with bio/logic programming bars in hand. Flush with accomplishment, ready to challenge the world.
Do you really think number one on Primo's is the end? he told her. Then you don't understand anything, Jara. Getting to number one on Primo's isn't an end at all-it's a means. It's part of the process ... Just a step on the ladder.
Jara was skeptical. So what is the end? Where do all these means lead to?
It was once so simple, so visceral. There was a wall and a ladder and a shining, radiant thing on the other side for the taking. Then Natch reached the apex of that ladder in Brone's hotel in Old Chicago, and he saw what lay in wait for him. Possibilities 2.0: a world of complete, unrestricted possibilities. A world without restraints or boundaries, where multiple realities can exist and commingle freely.
A world of utter void.
He saw what was waiting for him, and he ran from it.
Natch flexes his forearms, testing the tensile strength of his bonds. He can still feel the tremors and the throbbing pains that have been plaguing him since that black code attack in Shenandoah, many weeks ago. Quiescent for the moment, but not gone. Obviously his captors noticed them too; these ropes are clearly designed to do nothing more than prevent him from tremoring right out of the chair.
Around him, Natch can hear the echo of footsteps, possibly within shouting range. The faint whir of machinery thrums in the distance, indicating the presence of civilization and all it entails. The musty smell of mold wafts through the air. There is a puzzle here to solve, but Natch resolves not to expend any mental energy in solving it. He has no doubt that he can free himself from the chair, even without the aid of MultiReal. But ... why should he? Better to just sit and do nothing. He will eventually find out where he is and who has captured him-or he will sit here until the shaking takes control of him at last and his OCHREs give up their dance of sustenance and the Null Current pulls him under. Either result is the same.
"Hey! Wake up!"
The voice emanates from a spot perhaps five meters in front of him. It is a familiar, if not a particularly welcome, voice. The last time Natch heard that voice, it was accompanied by the pungent smell of garlic. "I'm not asleep," he tells Frederic Patel.
"Aren't you going to take off that fucking blindfold already?" says Frederic, irritated. "You're not going to just sit there in the dark forever, are you?"
"I might."
The younger Patel brother lets out a rasping sigh that makes Natch think of a serrated blade sawing through tree trunks. He decides to take off the blindfold, if only to hasten Frederic's departure. He wriggles his right arm free of the rope, reaches for the blindfold, and yanks it off his face.
Natch's initial impressions were correct. He is sitting in the middle of a large, circular chamber with a radius of perhaps thirty meters. Next to him sits a skeletal side table topped with a plate, a sandwich, and a large jug of water. A rather prosaic white ceramic tile coats the floor from wall to wall. The edges of the room are shrouded in shadow, but he can faintly make out a doo
r on the opposite wall. The whole chamber is contained inside a dome of solid concrete that also reaches a height of about thirty meters, putting Natch in the nucleus of a perfect hemisphere.
Frederic Patel stands a short distance away, arms folded over his barrel chest. Short, stout Frederic Patel, with jowls like a bulldog's and the temperament to match. "You've been sitting there for hours," complains the engineer. "Aren't you hungry or thirsty?"
"No," replies Natch.
A minute drifts by. The impatient tapping of Frederic's right foot is causing a rather comical rippling of flesh along one fat thigh. The entrepreneur gets the feeling that Patel is expecting some kind of petulant outburst. Natch is happy to disappoint him.
"Well?" barks Frederic. "Don't you want to know where you are? How you got here?"
"No," says Natch.
Frederic's infuriated sigh fills the dome. "You are such a pain in the ass. Listen, do me a favor, huh? Eat that bloody sandwich so Petrucio doesn't yell at me." The tapping speeds up until the younger Patel brother's foot is a blur of angry motion. After another twenty seconds of silence, a florid Frederic throws his hands up in the air and stomps off. "Suit yourself." Natch can hear the sound of angry footsteps as Patel retreats through some second doorway behind him, beyond his peripheral vision.
The entrepreneur stares at the sandwich for a good ten minutes, then frees his trembling left hand and takes a hold of it. Crusty sourdough bread, seasoned faux pork, an assortment of peppers, lettuce so crisp it crinkles under his fingers. Natch takes a single bite and lets the flavors mix on his tongue, then swallows. The sandwich is more tantalizing than anything he has eaten in weeks, but he wasn't lying to Frederic. He's not hungry.
Instead he gazes up at the pockmarked concrete of the dome, trying to pick out clues to his location. The Patels' business is based out of Sao Paulo, if Natch remembers correctly. A bustling yet ancient city, full of ghosts. He has no reason to think that Frederic and Petrucio would take him anywhere else. Then again ... he has no reason to think they would put him in a hoverbird, drag him to some empty chamber, and tie him to a chair in the first place. He remembers the black code dart in his leg that Petrucio put there after a long and wearying battle of MultiReal choice cycles. Clearly there is some connection between that dart and Natch's winding up here. But ... what?