instigated by his OCHREs. Processes whose names he didn't know, routines that had been installed by hive technicians before birth and running constantly since then. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Thousands, probably.'
'And do you know who wrote them all? How do you know they're all going to work together flawlessly?'
'That's why we have governments. That's why there's Primo's and the Council.'
'Governments. Primo's. The Defense and Wellness Council.' The Islander spat out the words as if they were the names of particularly odious criminals. 'Do you trust them?'
'Not entirely. But I'm not gonna sit around all day and weed through bio/logic programs either.'
Benyamin, who had been listening a few paces behind, now came trotting up on Quell's right side. 'But we have a system for opting out of these standard bio/logic programs,' he said. 'The Islander Tolerance Act of 146. High Executive Toradicus signed it.'
'Spoken like a true governmentalist,' said Quell, though his tone of voice was not unkind. 'Create an opt-out provision, and put the onus on our taxpayers, on our governments. The Technology Board has a huge team that does nothing but register these `Dogmatic Oppositions' twenty-four hours a day to keep your bots and data agents out of the South Pacific. And who do you think pays their salaries? Do you think your Prime Committee has ever sent a bloody credit our way to fund their Tolerance Act?'
Horvil blushed furiously. He had heard of Dogmatic Oppositions, of course, but to him the term had just been verbal dressing tossed around in Khann Frejohr's speeches. He had never met anyone to whom these things actually mattered. 'Politics,' muttered Horvil. 'I hate politics.'
At that, the Islander let out a titan-sized laugh of such gusto that all the security guards in the hallway instantly felt for their dartrifles. 'If you hate politics,' said Quell, 'you're in the wrong fiefcorp.'
'So how many programs do you have running in your system?' snapped Horvil.
The Islander looked at Horvil with an expression that hinted at fondness or amusement. 'Twelve. And seven of them are for my asthma.'
Horvil had started to drift into an interior monologue about the evils of politics when he was jarred back to reality by their arrival at Quell's workroom. The Islander made an obscure hand signal to a unit of blueand-green Surina security officers, and a dozen of them instantly marched up to the workroom door and formed a protective ring around it. This was no loose formation like the one Horvil saw here half an hour ago; these troops had their fingers on the triggers of their guns and were clearly ready to use them. 'Thank you,' said Horvil inanely as he stepped into the room with Ben and Quell and closed the door behind him.
Two dozen guards at the gates to the Surina complex, thought Horvil. And then more guards blocking the way into the Surina Enterprise Facility ... and now even more right outside the door ... You'd need an army to get past all those dartguns.
Then he remembered that Len Borda did have an army. Several armies, in fact. He shivered.
Quell was obviously used to the pressure. He marched into the center of the workbench and waved his hand around the table. Ben and Horvil jumped back in awe as a dozen interlocking modules of pink and blue appeared in the MindSpace bubble. Horvil now understood the need for the large workspace; the program took up every square centimeter and extended halfway to the ceiling like a Gothic castle. Connection strands stretched from module to module in startling and intricate patterns, some circumnavigating the whole mass several times. Even an observer who knew nothing about bio/logic coding could lose himself for hours studying the beautiful detail, the interplay of colors, the endless number of aesthetic themes that replicated across the surface of the program. Horvil had seen entire nervous system simulators that were less complex.
'So this is MultiReal,' he gulped. Next to the Byzantine topography of the MultiReal program, Probabilities 4.9 would look like a pastel-colored pimple.
'That-that's amazing,' stuttered Ben.
Quell's face showed a mixture of pride and sadness, the palimpsest of some epic experience that Horvil could hardly begin to imagine. 'After sixteen years of work,' he said, 'it ought to be.'
'Sixteen years?' said Horvil, his jaw hanging low. He couldn't imagine working on the same program for sixteen months.
'And that's just Margaret's part of it. Half of this code was passed down by her father when he died-and she contracted out a lot of bits and pieces.' Horvil nodded as if Quell's statement were self-evident. 'Now are we ready to start coding?'
The two cousins nodded in sync, and they got to work.
Probabilities 4.9 did indeed look quite puny beside the gargantuan MultiReal engine. Its double helix shape was a child's trick in comparison, a second-rate sleight of hand. Horvil found the sight of the two programs side-by- side a big metaphor for the entire situation Natch had gotten them into. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp? thought the engineer, wishing he could just erase the Probabilities ROD and pretend it had never existed. This is the Margaret Surina MultiReal Fiefcorp, plain and simple. We don't belong here. We're completely out of our league.
Quell spent the first half-hour pointing out the MultiReal program's basic hooks to his fellow apprentices. There wasn't enough time for a more in-depth explanation. When the Islander wrapped up his brief overview, Horvil still had no idea what an alternate reality was or why you would want to create one. But now he felt confident he could at least steer this MultiReal vessel, even if the workings of its engine room remained a mystery.
Horvil was gratified to see that his original estimate of the work involved was accurate. Clearly, it would be madness for Quell, Horvil and Benyamin to attempt to make all those thousands of connections in less than seventy-two hours; even Natch would have to admit that. So the two senior engineers spent the next few hours making detailed blueprints for the assembly-line shop and marking up their code on templates even the greenest programmer could follow. There wasn't enough room inside the workbench for Ben to squeeze in, not alongside two men of such bulk. So he kept to the corner of the room, where he took notes on a holographic tablet and stared intently at Quell's finger-weaving technique. Horvil felt like an ancient relic swinging around his clunky bars of metal, but there was nothing he could do about it.
As the day ebbed away and night fell, Benyamin began to grow impatient. He kept sidling up to Horvil and slipping him urgent Con- fidentialWhispers about the time. 'I told the assembly-line manager I'd get this to her by midnight,' he said.
'What do you want me to do?' 'Whispered Horvil in return. 'It's just not done.'
'If the shop doesn't get it by midnight, they can't guarantee they'll finish by Tuesday.'
'And if we rush to get it to them by midnight, I can't guarantee it will work on Tuesday.' Benyamin quieted down.
Midnight passed, but Quell and Horvil labored on. Ben began popping in and out of the room to make use of the multi facility down the hall.
Once the basic blueprint had been constructed and Probabilities sat loosely tethered to the MultiReal engine, another job awaited the fiefcorpers: security. Sending an assembly-line coding shop the full Possibilities program in all its manifold glory would be an invitation to disaster. Horvil wouldn't take such a risk with even an ordinary bio/logic program; there were too many thieves, cutthroat competitors and black coders who would love to get their hands on commercial source code. So Quell and Horvil spent the early morning hours fastidiously cordoning off enormous chunks of programming, locking out sensitive areas and encrypting the sections that would have to remain open.
By the time they finished, the program would look like any other large-scale project that passed through an assembly-line floor. An economic modeling program, perhaps, or the basic subsystem for an internal organ. No one would be able to tell they were really working on Margaret Surina's famous MultiReal engine.
Quell turned out to be an ideal co-worker. He didn't clog up the grinding gears of Horvil's concentration with a lot of chatter, and what he did say was always concise and to the point. After a few hours, the two dropped nouns and verbs altogether and stuck to the lingua franca of mathematics. The engineer had to admit he was starting to like this Islander. And he could swear the feeling was mutual.
Horvil finally tossed aside the bio/logic programming bars a few minutes shy of six in the morning. They had worked through the night without a single break. He gazed at their handiwork, and then exchanged a silent glance with the Islander. The look was unambiguous. MultiReal isn't ready. It's not going to work. But now they were bumping up against the unstretchable limitations of time, and Benyamin was positively apoplectic. The two
