Free Multireal by David Louis Edelman Page B

Someone's missing. Where's Quell?"
    Merri settled into a quiet corner on the floor next to the balcony
and sat with her legs crossed. "Quell went to get a bite to eat," she said.
"He kept complaining about the food in your building, so we found
him an Indian restaurant down the street. He should be back in a few
minutes."
    "Where's he been sleeping?"
    The channel manager shrugged her shoulders. "I think he rented a
room somewhere."
    "Fine," said Natch with a flip of his hand. "Okay, Jara. Scheduling.
Go."
    "This was the day of our presentation at Andra Pradesh," said Jara,
pointing to the holographic calendar. The square marked Tuesday,
December 6 popped off the calendar like a kernel of corn on the flame.
"And here's today." December 28 leapt up, causing the previous three
weeks to cascade off the surface of the holograph. "The public hasn't heard a peep out of us in three weeks. No press releases, no timetables,
no demos, nothing."

    "Natch's been a little busy," snorted Horvil, who had appropriated
the chair-and-a-half for his ass and the matching ottoman for his feet.
    "Granted," said Jara. "But the public doesn't know that. Three
weeks is an eternity in bio/logics. It's a good thing the Council pulled
that little stunt yesterday, because people were wondering if he was
still alive."
    "Don't even joke about that," muttered Vigal, balancing his cup of
tea on one palm as he found a place on the couch between Ben and Jara.
    "Magan Kai Lee swoops down here with dartguns blazing, and you
call that a little stunt?" said Horvil. "If Natch hadn't warned us to stay
clear, we could've all been killed."
    Jara did not back down. "Come on, Horv," said the analyst. "The
Council just wanted to scare him. They weren't planning on killing him."
    Ben let out a harrumph. "How do you know that?"
    "Because," replied the analyst as calmly as a proctor explaining
arithmetic to a hive child. "Natch can't hand MultiReal over to the
Council if he's dead, now can he?"
    Benyamin's mouth clamped shut. Silence enveloped the apartment.
    Jara continued. "Listen, Ben. We're talking about basic Data Sea
networking principles. Len Borda can't just steal the MultiReal code
from Natch. He needs core access, or Natch could just lock him out of
the program whenever he felt like it. And core access on the Data Sea
isn't something the Council can fake. They'd need the matching signatures tied up in Natch's OCHRE system. It's practically impossible
to crack."
    Serr Vigal nodded sagely. "She's right," he said. "Even the Defense
and Wellness Council can't circumvent Data Sea access controls."
    The young apprentice refused to give up. "They could get core
access from Margaret."
    "Sure," said Horvil, picking at a loose thread on his jacket. "But think of it this way. There're two people in the world with the master
key to MultiReal. One of them's holed up in a tower with five thousand armed guards, and one of them's just hanging out in an apartment
building. Who would you go after?"

    "This is all beside the point," continued Jara. "Without Natch's
cooperation-or Margaret's-Borda wouldn't even be able to find the
code. You can't just trace subaether transmissions. He'd have to search
every qubit on the Data Sea with pattern recognition algorithms. Even
using the fastest computational engine in existence, that'd take ..
    Arithmetic fluttered behind Horvil's closed eyelids as he yanked
the string on his jacket free. "Two thousand one hundred twenty-nine
years. No, wait. Maybe four hundred eighty-eight years. Or ..."
    Jara raised her eyebrows and extended an open palm in the engineer's direction. "A long time, at any rate."
    "But if the Council couldn't find MultiReal, then nobody could find
it," protested Ben. "It would just float on the Sea forever with all the
other useless crap. If Len Borda's trying to get rid of MultiReal,
wouldn't that suit him just fine? Get rid of Natch and Margaret, and
then nobody has core