Geosynchron by David Louis Edelman

short tower, only three stories, and it's painted light peach
like so much of the architecture out here. But the builders placed it at
the end of a man-made promontory out into the ocean, so the view is
impeccable. A smattering of lovers and tourists share the view with
him from a distance just large enough that nobody can quite make out
his face.
    The gun Natch used to shoot Petrucio and Hiro is now floating out
with the tide, where it will likely be netted by the local L-PRACG
trashsweepers and then analyzed by the Defense and Wellness Council.
Natch is unclear how long information about the gun's recent firing
will survive in its memory banks, and whether that will be enough to
trace it back to him. If the Council can indeed deduce that Natch used
the weapon to make his escape, then Petrucio will be off the hook.
Regardless, any such deduction is days away at the earliest.
    The entrepreneur hadn't expected much in the way of gratitude,
but Patel was still capable of surprising him. Not only had he given
Natch a comradely pat on the shoulder as they left the hoverbird, but
he had offered something much more valuable: a process for disabling
his tremors and blackouts. Which, Petrucio had assured him, are
caused by the code that provides backdoor access to MultiReal, and not
by any Thasselian programming.
    "This isn't a permanent cure, you understand," Patel had said.
"There isn't one. You'll probably have to keep tweaking the code a few times a year for as long as you own the program. But if you follow these
instructions, it should buy you two or three months."

    Natch had stared at his throbbing left hand with a peculiar mixture
of relief and apprehension. "But ... how do you know about this?"
    "Because Frederic and I had the tremors too, back when we had
access to that security back door. So did Margaret. Manifests differently
in everyone, of course. Frederic had a stutter, and I had a twitching
eyelid. Margaret said it was one of the consequences of letting threehundred-year-old code roam free in a modern OCHRE system."
    The entrepreneur's jaw had dropped. "Three hundred years old?"
    "That's what she said," Petrucio had continued with a dismissive
hand gesture. "Who knows whether she was telling the truth. Who
knows if she even knew the truth."
    Natch recalls the specter of Margaret Surina he saw atop the Revelation Spire a few weeks ago. Only hours before her sudden and inexplicable suicide, if Brone's story could be believed. Her eyes were
probing the walls for imaginary enemies, and her mind was a tattered
remnant of what it used to be, barely cognizant of anyone or anything
but Quell the Islander. The ultimate consequence of sixteen years of
cohabitation with that MultiReal back door? He looks down at his
own trembling hand again, product of a mere few months of exposure.
It's plausible.
    All he knows is that he does not want to end up like Margaret.
    He wants to live.
    The realization, only hours old, shows no signs of subsiding. It's a
peculiar feeling. A feeling that makes his extremities quiver and his
stomach hollow-not totally unlike the want that has powered him as
long as he can remember-but this is a sensation that points outward
to the world rather than curling in on itself.
    Natch wants to live, but what irony that the world he wants to live
in no longer exists.
    Margaret had warned him of this. She had stood in front of a bil lion people and prophesied a world free from the tyranny of cause and
effect.

    What would our lives be like if we had made different choices? she had
said. 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.
    But what are the terms and boundaries of this new reality that
Natch has wandered into?