David Edelman - Infoquake

Quell, who had been standing quietly, now poked his sizeable nose between the two bickering apprentices. "Maybe a demonstration would help," he said. Merri looked up in shock at the giant Islander, apparently noticing him for the first time. "I can't show you the latest version until it's back from the shop, but I can show you one of the prototypes Margaret and I put together."

Merri and Jara looked at one another and nodded simultaneously.

"Good," said Quell. "Horvil, help me change the SeeNaRee. Can't do a thing with this miserable collar."

The Islander whispered in his ear as Horvil cast his mind out to the Facility databases. A succession of three-dimensional pictures flashed in his head. He chose one, and the African veldt disappeared with a flash.

The air around the apprentices suddenly filled with bass-thumping music, the kind of xpression board monotony that instinctively caused teenaged girls' hips to gyrate. Then came the smell of freshly cut grass. The apprentices found themselves standing at the nexus of two inter locking diamonds in the dirt. A smattering of white hexagonal bags lay at the corners.

A baseball stadium.

"No, no, Horvil. I want a classic field," said Quell. Horvil nodded and switched to the more traditional playing field endorsed by the classic leagues. Soon, the fiefcorpers were standing in a stadium set up like those the ancients had played: a single diamond, four bases, an enormous outfield. Without prompting, the engineer called up a catalog of baseball bats containing everything from laser-polished aluminum to synthetic ash. Horvil selected a squat Kyushu Clubfoot, summoned a cart of classic league baseballs, and then handed the equipment to Quell. "Smoke and fucking mirrors," muttered the Islander as he fumbled with the virtual bat, trying to get a grip on it. Not an easy task without a sense of touch, Horvil realized.

"See that target?" Quell pointed to a bull's eye painted on the outfield wall captioned with the words BETCHA A BOTTLE OF CHAIQUOKE YOU CAN'T HIT ME. Then he flexed a muscular set of pectorals, tossed a ball up in the air, and knocked it towards right field. The ball hurtled into the wall at the precise center of the target.

"So you can hit a baseball into a bull's eye," sneered Jara. "What does that have to do with multiple realities?"

The Islander said nothing. Instead, he reached into the cart of baseballs, threw them into the air one by one, and smacked them towards the ChaiQuoke promo. Bang bang bang bang. All twenty-four baseballs plunked the bull's eye in the same exact spot. Quell threw his ponytail over his shoulder and made a low purring noise of satisfaction.

Jara gaped at the collection of virtual balls lying under the bull's eye. Words escaped her.

A light went on in Horvil's head. He trotted around the infield, his jaw swaying this way and that with excitement. "Don't you get it, Jara? The whole thing's just mathematics. The swing of the bat, the grip, the angle you're holding it, all those neurochemical reactions in your brain-you can describe it all with math. Possibilities just lets you try out different variables and choose the outcome you want."

Quell nodded. "An oversimplification-but yes."

Horvil flopped down onto the grass and stretched out, snow angel style. "So that's why we modified those dendrite modules ..."

Ben paced slowly towards the ChaiQuoke advertisement and rubbed the paint, as if he expected to feel some kind of magnetic generator in the wall. Meanwhile, Merri retreated into the visitors' dugout and watched the proceedings with hollow eyes as she tried to get a handle on her teleportation-induced trembling.

"Let me get this straight," said Jara, seating herself delicately on the grass next to Horvil. "Multi Real-Possibill ties-creates alternate realities inside your head?"

Quell strode onto the pitcher's mound. His voice took on the tone of a drill instructor. "Let's start from the beginning.

"Forget about MultiReal for a minute. What happens when you throw a ball in the air and swing a bat? The mind takes in sensory input-the sight of the ball, the weight of the bat, the feel of the wind-and processes it. You decide on a course of action. Then the brain sends instructions down the spinal cord into your muscles, right? Electrical pulses tell your body what to do. You swing the bat. It all happens in a fraction of a second.

"But we can track all those electrical pulses, right? We can reduce them to mathematical equations. Isn't that how multi works? OCHREs in the brainstem intercept these pulses and transmit them onto the multi network instead of into your own body.

"So what happens if you take these electrical commands from the brain and plot out the results? You get a simulation of what's going to happen. You can see if the swing of the bat is going to turn out the way you want.

"Now, let's go a step further. Once you have a mathematical model in place, what's to stop you from trying out different scenarios? If I had twitched my right arm like this instead of like that, what would have happened? What if I had gripped the bat a little harder, swung a little faster? You make thousands of tiny unconscious decisions like that every instant. Why not just loop the whole process in your mind and compute it over and over again with different variables until you find a result you're satisfied with? Keep swinging until you hit one out of the park.

"Then-and only then-you choose the reality you want to happen, the pre-determined reality. Your mind now has an optimized set of instructions to send into the nervous system. The brain outputs those electrical pulses to your body-what we call closing the choice cycle-and it happens."

Horvil was making incoherent burbling sounds of delight. But Jara was not convinced. "That's all well and good if you're just trying to hit an inanimate object," she said, hands planted belligerently on her hips. "But what if you've got an outfielder out there trying to catch it first? People aren't mathematical models. You can't just use algebra to predict what they're going to do. What then?"

Quell was unruffled. "Ben," he called out across the field. "Go ahead. Try to catch it." The young apprentice nodded, summoned a SeeNaRee baseball glove, and assumed the crouch of a seasoned right fielder in front of the ChaiQuoke target.

Thwak! The Islander knocked the first ball over Benyamin's shoulder, a perfect hit.

Thwak! The second ball flew inches past his face.

Thwak! Another hit.

The charade went on for another dozen swings, with Ben failing to catch the ball each time. Even seemingly easy pop flies slipped through his fingers and smacked unerringly into the wall. The irritation was beginning to show on the young apprentice's face when Quell raised his hand and signaled that the demonstration was through.

"That program has to be pretty good," said Horvil, eyebrows aloft. "Ben's no Angel Palmero, but he's caught a few fly balls in his day."

"It wouldn't have mattered," replied Quell dismissively. "Angel Palmero wouldn't have done any better." He stood the Kyushu Clubfoot on its end like a mercenary displaying his weapon. "MultiReal is a collaborative process."

Horvil's cousin came trotting over from the outfield, clearly perturbed at his poor defensive performance. "Wait a minute-I didn't collaborate with anything."

"You don't think you did. But for every missed catch, there were dozens of alternative reality scenarios played out inside our minds before they ever actually `happened.' The whole sequence looped over and over again-dozens of my possible swings mapped out against dozens of your possible catches-dozens of choice cycles-until I found a result I liked."

"But I don't remember any of that happening."

"No. You wouldn't. Not without MultiReal."

Benyamin and Jara sank down into the grass with Horvil, overcome by the dizzying spiral of probabilities and possibilities. Horvil wasn't doing much better. Questions were clambering to the forefront of the engineer's head, but no answers accompanied them. No bio/logic program could conceivably turn the concept of cause-and-effect on its head like that-and yet, somehow, MultiReal just did.