David Edelman - Infoquake

Jara closed her eyes and tried to screen out the chaos. She could only imagine the computational mayhem caused by half a billion multi projections spraying billions of simultaneous requests at the Data Sea.

Things were no better when she opened her eyes.

The Council officers were on the move. Men and women in white robes advanced on the stage with grim looks on their faces, dart rifles drawn. A handful of disruptor blasts sent multi projections flickering out into nothingness, clearing a path to the front of the arena. The rest of the crowd began scattering this way and that in confusion. Meanwhile, the Surina security forces had drawn their rifles as well and had formed a rapidly tightening circle around the stage. Several dozen guards on both sides lay twitching on the ground with black code darts jutting from their torsos.

Unbelievably, Margaret was still speaking. Either none of the darts was flying in her direction, or none of them had managed to hit her yet. Her face was ghosted over with panic, yet she stood firm and tried to make herself heard over the tumult.

"The creation of multiple realities," she said. "It sounds like a tale we tell children in the hive. But soon we will consider multiple realities as common as OCHREs, as practical as bio/logic programs, and as necessary as oxygen.

"What would our lives be like if we had made different choices? In the Age of MultiReal, we will wonder no more-because we will be able to make many choices. We will be able to look back at checkpoints in our lives and take alternate paths. We will wander between alternate realities as our desires lead us.

"The ever-changing flux of MultiReal will become reality.

"Just as bio/logics freed us from the tyranny of the body ... just as the Universal Law of Physics freed us from the tyranny of nature ... just as teleportation freed us from the tyranny of distance ... so MultiReal will free us from the tyranny of cause and effect itself.

"Throughout human history, we have been striving towards greater freedom. Freedom is our destiny and our birthright. And in the age to come-in the Age of MultiReal-we will all be empowered to pursue our individual freedoms however we choose.

"And I say this:

"Only when we can truly choose our own destinies will we be completely free."

Jara could not say for certain whether or not Margaret had finished her speech. Because at that moment the Surina security guards elbowed their way onstage, a mere two steps ahead of the Defense and Wellness Council troops. Jara watched with mouth agape as a whiterobed officer raised her dartgun at Margaret Surina and prepared to fire.

But then an enormous man with a blonde ponytail swooped out of nowhere and wrapped his arms around the bodhisattva, shielding her from harm. My goodness, thought Jara, is that an Islander? The Council officer aimed her weapon high and let off a warning shot. Within seconds, the man had whisked Margaret through the stage door. A number of Surina functionaries quickly scrambled after her.

Among those hustling backstage, Jara noted with slack-jawed amazement, was a certain lean fiefcorp master whose wolfish grin she would have recognized anywhere.

Dozens of kilometers above the earth's surface, a cluster of hydrogen atoms danced in a copper tube. After several billion oscillations, the hydrogen maser clock declared that a second had passed.

It was midnight.

The news passed via subaether to a processing station run by the Meme Cooperative. The station-itself a small metallic box also floating in geostationary orbit-consulted its internal tables and determined that the time had come to spawn a data newt for the Pierre Loget Fiefcorp. The newt was born mere picoseconds after midnight.

A data newt did not need sixteen years of hive education to fathom its purpose. The mother station had stamped a destination into the newt's very atomic structure, a destiny to fulfill. But it was impossible to know what paths the data structure would need to take or what obstacles it would face along the way. And so the newt was endowed with a level of autonomy and given all the logical tools it would need to carry out its duties. Internal schedules, communication routines, self-replication instructions, maps of the quantum universe. Then the mother station ushered the newt out into the world.

The newt accessed its internal schedule and noted that its first stop was a set of spatial coordinates in a nearby processing station. Upon its arrival, the station challenged the newt to state its credentials and destination. The newt consulted its fore table and found the answers to these perplexing questions: Pierre Ulyanich Loget Fiefcorp, BizWorks 139.5f, Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp. Satisfied with the newt's response, the station directed its microscopic visitor towards a collection of static information belonging to the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp.

A rote conversation ensued. Was BizWorks 139.5f listed as an acceptable expense in the Natch Fiefcorp data stores? Yes, it was. Did the unique identifying code stored in the newt's memory correspond to the one expected by the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp? Yes, it did. Was the price quoted by PulCorp agreeable to its customer? Yes, it was.

The answer triggered an innate response in the data newt. The newt replicated itself, stamped its clone with a subset of the required tools, and waited patiently as the newcomer sped off to the Vault. Billions of newts had already queued up at the nearby Vault processing center to retrieve and deposit payments large and small, but there was no disagreement or jockeying for position in a world of indelible, unalterable rules. The data representative of the Pierre Loget Fiefcorp slid into line in its prescribed position. After a few nanoseconds, the newt reached the front of the queue and presented the Vault agent with its transaction: Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp, Pierre Ulyanich Loget Fiefcorp, 0.03 credits. The Vault agent made all the appropriate inquiries and finally responded with a credit authorization. What happened to the credit authorization after that was of no concern to the cloned newt; it reported a transaction summary back to its master and returned to the mother station.

With a credit authorization in its databanks, the data newt at the Natch Fiefcorp data stores determined it was ready to proceed. It consulted the fore table to look for its Defense and Wellness Council-sanctioned processing precedence, and lined up behind OCHRE transmissions, geosynchrons, Prime Committee statistical algorithms, and agents of L-PRACG taxation. Finally, the newt arrived at the front of the line and completed the task for which it had been born: the recording of an order by the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp for a replacement part on one of Horvil's bio/logic programming bars.

All that remained was housecleaning. The newt spawned another clone to relay the order back to the mother station. Meanwhile, the newt consulted its own aft table for special instructions on completing a business transaction. The L-PRACG with jurisdiction over the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp dictated that all programs must log a record of their activities in the fiefcorp's data stores. This task done, the newt performed a quick self-examination to see if it had lost data integrity or left any stray bits of information in the fiefcorp's holdings or needed to do any unusual acts of maintenance. All indications were that the newt had conducted a clean transaction.

And so the data structure left the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp holdings to perform a sweep of the remaining 4,293 fiefcorps on Pierre Loget's subscription list.

Several thousand nanoseconds later, the newt returned to the mother processing station-the prodigal son back home at last. The data structure reported a summary of its activities for the statistical programs to compile and then reported back to the Meme Cooperative energy stores. There the newt uncomplainingly self-destructed, having successfully fulfilled its mission of existence.