Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Louis Edelman is the author of the highly acclaimed Infoquake. A Web designer, programmer, and journalist, Mr. Edelman has programmed Web sites for the U.S. Army and the FBI, taught software to the U.S. Congress and the World Bank, written articles for the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun, and directed the marketing departments of biometric and e-commerce companies. He lives with his wife, Victoria, in Washington, DC. Visit David Edelman's Web site at: www.multireal.net.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

MULTIREAL Volume 2 of the Jump 225 Trilogy

Prometheus Books

Contents

1. Lessons Learned...................................................72. The Nothingness at the Center of the Universe.....................493. Variables in Flux.................................................1714. Madness and Freedom...............................................2855. Possibilities 2.0.................................................3636. New Beginnings....................................................433APPENDIXESa. A Synopsis of Infoquake...........................................465b. Glossary of Terms.................................................470c. Historical Timeline...............................................491d. On the Creeds.....................................................499e. On Government.....................................................504f. On the Sigh.......................................................511g. On the Transportation System......................................515h. On Dartguns and Disruptors........................................519ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......................................................523ABOUT THE AUTHOR.....................................................525

Chapter One

Or so Marcus Surina told his twelve-year-old daughter, Margaret, one blustery winter morning, the two of them striding through the hoverbird docks, wind at full bore, the sun a frail pink thing cowering behind the clouds.

He won't die today, of course, said Marcus. His voice barely registered above the clanging of the cargo loaders and the yelling of the dockworkers. Not this week or even this month. But the worries hang from the high executive's neck like lusterless pearls, Margaret. They weigh him down and break his will. I can see it.

Margaret smiled uncomfortably but said nothing.

If the city of Andra Pradesh had a resident expert on untimely death, it was her father. Before he had accepted the Surina family mantle and assumed his birthright as head of the world's most prominent scientific dynasty, Marcus had wandered far and wide. He had teased the boundaries of human space, flirted with dangerous organizations in the orbital colonies. Death was a constant presence out there.

And yet, High Executive Borda seemed an unlikely candidate for the Null Current. He had been a hale and headstrong man upon his inauguration just weeks after Margaret was born. A New Executive for a New Century, the headlines had proclaimed. Some predicted that the troubles of the office would prove too daunting for the young high executive. They murmured that Borda had never been tested by hardship, that he had come of age in a time of plenty and had inherited the job uncontested. But his stature had only grown in the intervening decade. Try as she might, Margaret could find no lingering gaps on Borda's calendar, no telltale signs of weakness or indecision. As far as she was concerned, the high executive was on his way to becoming a fundament of the world, an eternal force like rock or gravity or time itself.

But Marcus Surina remained firm. You develop a sixth sense out on the frontiers, he said, examining the hoverbird manifest for the third time. You begin to see things outside the visible spectrum of light. Patterns of human behavior, focal points of happenstance. Travel the orbital colonies long enough, and you learn to recognize the omens.

Margaret stirred. Omens? A strange word coming from the lips of her father, the quintessential man of science.

The omens of death, continued Marcus. Plans that wander from their steady paths. Appetites that suddenly grow cold. Thoughts that lose their ballast in midsentence and drift off to places unknown. Her father stopped suddenly and turned his hyper-focus on a dented segment of the hoverbird wing no bigger than a finger. Three aides-de-camp hovered a meter away, anticipating a word of command or dismissal. Some people, you can look in their eyes and see that the Null Current is about to pull them under, Margaret. You can see the inevitability. Just like you can see the stalk of wheat as the thresher approaches, and know that the time's come for a newer, stronger crop to bask in the sun. Marcus made a gesture, and the aides scattered like duckpins.

Then he was striding off again, and it was all Margaret could do to keep up with him. She shivered as she ran, whether from the cold of encroaching winter or from the strangeness of the man before her she could not tell. Lusterless pearls? Wheat and threshers? His clattering metaphors made her teeth ache.

The girl resolved to be patient. In less than twelve hours, her father would be gone, off to the distant colony of Furtoid with the rest of the TeleCo board, and routine would slink out from the alcove where it had been hiding these past few days like a bruised animal.

She called him Father, but it was mostly an honorary title. Marcus had spent four years of the last twelve on the road, and here at Andra Pradesh he was constantly fenced in a protective thicket of apprentices, scientists, business associates, capitalmen, government officials, drudges, bankers, lawyers, and freethinkers that even a daughter could not penetrate. He would stop by her quarters unannounced, cloaked by the night, and quiz her on schoolwork like a proctor checking up on a promising student. Sometimes he would speechify as if Margaret were the warm-up audience for one of his scientific presentations. Other times he would assign her outlandish tasks and then vanish to some colloquium on Allowell or some board meeting in Cape Town.

Prove Prengal's universal law of physics for me, he told her once. It took Margaret three months, but she did.

Margaret had no doubt that she did not have a normal upbringing. But how far off-kilter things were she had no way of judging. The Surina compound was a cloistered and lonely place, despite the crowds. Her mother was dead, and she had no siblings. Instead she had distant cousins innumerable, and a team of handlers whose job it was to con- fine her life in a box and then call that order.

But there were some things the Surina family handlers could not shield her from. Lately Marcus's face had grown sterner, the lines on his forehead coagulating into a permanent state of anger and anxiety. Margaret suspected there were new developments in her father's battle with the Defense and Wellness Council. Len Borda wanted TeleCo. He wanted her father's teleportation technology either banned outright or conscripted for military purposes; nobody was sure which. And now, this past week, tensions seemed to be coming to a head.

Margaret couldn't quite comprehend what the fuss was about. She had watched a dozen trials of the teleportation process from unobtrusive corners, and it wasn't anything like the teleportation she had read about in stories. You couldn't zap someone instantaneously from one place to another. The procedure required two people of similar biochemical composition to be strapped into a metal container for hours on end while particle deconstructors transposed one body to the other, molecule by agonizing molecule. Margaret wondered why High Executive Borda found the whole idea so threatening. But whenever she asked one of the TeleCo researchers about it, he would simply smile and tell her not to make premature judgments. Marcus had big plans up his sleeve. Give the technology a...