Free Geosynchron by David Louis Edelman Page B

you want me to say."
    Again, the wry smile. "Frederic and I thought it was impossible
too, at first. Time only moves in one direction, right? Prengal Surina
proved that. But then I had an inspiration. If you send a multi projection into a real building, and that real building collapses on top of you,
do you die? No, of course not-because you're not actually in the
building in the first place. It's just an illusion. Neurons firing."
Petrucio taps the side of his head with one finger. "When the building
collapses, the multi network can sense trauma coming an instant
before it happens. It cuts off your projection and you wind up standing
on your red tile again. So I thought: if you can project a virtual body
into space ... why not project a virtual body into time?"
    "That doesn't make any sense," says Natch, shaking his head. "Virtual time? What would that even look like?"
    "Tell me what time it is."
    "What-"
    Petrucio cuts him off. "You'll find out. Just tell me what time it
is.
    The entrepreneur turns his attention to the internal clock that has
been acting as metronome for the bio/logic symphony in constant performance since the hour of his birth. "It's 10:04 a.m. Sao Paulo time."
    Petrucio puts the palms of his hands together and touches his fingertips to his nose. "You're sure about that."
    Natch makes no response. Ever since he hit number one on
Primo's, ever since he got enmeshed in Margaret Surina's tangled skein
of MultiReal programming, all of the sureties in his life have been vanishing one by one. Career, friends, ideals. Why should time be the
exception?
    "In actuality," continues Patel, his demeanor maddeningly placid,
"it's 10:03. You want to know what virtual time looks like? You, my
friend, are living in it."

    Natch grips the armrest of his seat as his stomach does backflips.
He remembers the feeling of queasy vertigo that wormed through his
extremities when Brone and Pierre Loget demonstrated how he could
stand in two places at once. He's suffered this primordial shock so often
these past few months it should almost feel commonplace by now. But
no matter how hard he tries, Natch simply can't adjust to this new
world of constant gut-wrenching change. "You did this to me," he
mutters over ConfidentialWhisper. "At the Tul Jabbor Complex. The
black code you hit me with when I jumped on the hoverbird."
    Petrucio gives the slightest nod of affirmation. "Magan's idea," he
says.
    "This doesn't help me at all. So my clock's out of sync. I still have
no idea why that matters."
    "Let's take a step back." The programmer settles deeper into his
seat and waves one hand in the air like a professor diving into a
didactic lecture. "What does MultiReal do? It lets you explore alternate realities in your mind, before they happen. Glorified probability
calculation, right? Run the program with someone else present, and it
becomes a collaborative process. You still see the potential realities,
but now the other person is effectively telling you what they're going
to do, before they do it. MultiReal can project all this much, much
faster than real time, because it's all just mathematical calculations in
your head." Petrucio points again to his own head, with its neatly
combed slick of hair. "Once you've chosen the reality you want, you
still need to make it actual. It hasn't happened yet; it's just potential.
So you close the choice cycle and turn that possibility into a reality. If
we're using the baseball analogy ... you choose where you want the
ball to go. You close the choice cycle. MultiReal tells your body to hit
the baseball just like so, and tells the other person's body to catch it, or
not catch it. You with me so far?"
    "Yes."
    "It only takes a fraction of a second for your brain to project all those realities and for you to make a choice. But the actual hitting and
catching of the baseball takes several seconds. So what are you doing
during those several seconds?"

    Natch frowns.