[APPLAUSE]

Hi, Mel!

MELPOMENE:
YO.

JEZ:
Our next guest here on Cat and Muse would be the first to tell you that technology isn’t just about Botox and Wonderbras. Barnes & Noble Explorations named INFOQUAKE its SF Book of the Year in 2006, calling it “the love child of Donald Trump and Vernor Vinge.” SFFWorld said INFOQUAKE “may be THE science fiction book of the year” and that “the genre might not be the same after this book.” About MULTIREAL, Publishers Weekly has already said that “MultiReal itself is firmly established as one of the most fascinating singularity technologies in years.”

Say hello to one of the stars of David Louis Edelman’s JUMP 225 trilogy, including INFOQUAKE and the upcoming MULTIREAL…Jara!

[APPLAUSE]

Heya, Jara!

JARA:
Good afternoon. At least, it’s afternoon here in London. I’m not sure what time it is in the dark, dank depths of Jackie Kessler’s website.

JEZ:
Here it’s always Miller Time. So…MULTIREAL. Can you give me a blurb?

JARA:
I’ve heard MULTIREAL described as “Boston Legal meets The Matrix” and “a hybrid of Neuromancer and Wall Street.” Not that I have any idea what those things mean. I don’t have time to keep up with the dramas these days.

JEZ:
I understand that MULTIREAL focuses on a very difficult time of your life.

JARA:
[NODS] It’s all about the recent events when the Defense and Wellness Council tried to take away our fiefcorp’s main line of bio/logic software. Which I’m sure you’re probably sick to death of reading about in the news anyway…

JEZ:
Me? I’ve given up reading. Too much thinking causes wrinkles. Why don’t you start from the beginning?

MEL:
GOD CREATED THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH.

JEZ:
Not that Beginning.

JARA:
Okay. I’m a marketing analyst in a company that sells bio/logic software. You know, bio/logics, the programming of the human body? “Hack the body, and the mind will follow,” as they say. Invented by Sheldon Surina, what, 350 years ago now?

JEZ:
Here’s where I nod and say yes. [NODS] Yes. Do go on…

JARA:
David Louis Edelman wrote about it in INFOQUAKE. If you’ve read that book, you know that my boss, Natch, managed to connive his way into co-owning some mysterious new technology called MultiReal. Then he had us rush to put together a marketing demonstration for it in three days with the whole world falling to pieces around us.

JEZ:
Sounds like a typical manager: doesn’t care about the challenges, demands unreasonable results, then takes all the credit. So what does this MultiReal thing do?

JARA:
I don’t entirely understand what MultiReal does. None of us do, not even Natch. Margaret Surina, the woman who invented it, claimed it can “create alternate realities,” but none of us really understand what that means either.

JEZ:
I think my Dear Creator would call it a “First Draft.”

JARA:
Typical Natch, that didn’t bother him at all. He just wanted to push ahead, no matter what the cost and who he ran over in the process.

JEZ:
Hmm. Less a manager, then, and more of a marketer…

JARA:
Of course, then the government decided that MultiReal was too dangerous to put out there to the public, and the Defense and Wellness Council decided to take it away from us.

JEZ:
Of course.

JARA:
If you believe the libertarians, the Council just wanted to use it as a weapon of oppression. So they spent the past few months throwing everything they could at us. They filed lawsuits, they started a campaign of vicious rumors against us, they sent undercover officers to follow us around. They even sent a strike force to invade Natch’s apartment.

JEZ:
Must be some apartment. Hate to think what the rent on that sort of place would be.

JARA:
Much more than my apartment.

JEZ:
[BURSTS OUT LAUGHING]

JARA:
If all that wasn’t bad enough, the Council tried to put a wedge between the members of the fiefcorp and drive us apart.

JEZ:
A headache, I take it?

JARA:
You try to keep a company together with the whole world looking on and government troops knocking at your door. It’s not easy.

JEZ:
With all this stuff happening, is there anything good?

JARA:
Let’s just say that I really found myself in the past few months. If you know anything about Natch, you know that he can be a manipulative son of a bitch. He’d been leading me on since the moment I joined this company, both personally and professionally. And I just sat here and took it.

JEZ:
Poor sweetie.

JARA:
So when the Defense and Wellness Council started offering me opportunities to steer this company in the right direction–a more ethical direction, without all of these dirty tricks and shady games that Natch likes to play–I took those opportunities.

JEZ:
Mel, make sure you jot down all of this Natch’s info. He sounds like ripe pickings for some of the Lower Downs. [COUGHS] Pray continue, Jara. You were saying…?

JARA:
I stood up to Natch. Ask anyone in the bio/logics industry, and they’ll tell you that the company’s better off.

JEZ:
Sounds like you’re attracted to Natch.

JARA:
[BLUSHES, LOOKS AWAY] Well, I–

JEZ:
Wait. [GLANCES AT CUE CARDS] Says here that you also had some romantic friction with someone named Horvil. Who’s that?

JARA:
Natch’s chief engineer, his best friend, the one who’s always trying to make light of every situation. I don’t know why his parents didn’t just name him “Falstaff” and get it over with.

MEL:
HUMOR IS SUBJECTIVE.

JEZ:
Forget the humor. I want to hear more about the friction. Are we talking not enough lube? Or something else?

JARA:
[ROLLS EYES] Nothing like that. No, Horvil told me towards the end of INFOQUAKE that he had feelings for me. Which totally threw me for a loop and had me in a very awkward position during the events of MULTIREAL.

JEZ:
Oh? Like, did he try to pretzel with you and you weren’t that flexible…?

JARA:
[SHAKES HEAD] For a while I started to feel like I was part of a very bizarre love triangle, where everyone likes someone else, and nobody gets any satisfaction out of it.

JEZ:
Well then, since we’re on the subject, what’s your romantic fantasy?

JARA:
Honey, why would I need to fantasize? You’ve got access to the Sigh virtual sex network as well as I do.

JEZ:
[BLINKS] Say what?

JARA:
Hundreds of thousands of channels of specialized programming at your fingertips. You can have any body or any scenario you want. And it’s all virtual, so there’s no messes and no hard feelings.

JEZ:
Ooh.

MEL:
NO PAIN, NO GAIN.

JEZ:
Hush, Muse. I’m seeing some real possibilities here…

JARA:
Personally, I’m a fan of a channel called Doppelganger. It’s easy. You send them a photo or a video of your lust object, and they use their algorithms to track down that person’s look-alikes. There are tens of billions of people in the world hooked up to the Data Sea–chances are that one of them is looking for someone who looks just like you too.

JEZ:
Sweet!

JARA:
The closer the match, the higher the fee.

JEZ:
Ah, nothing that good is cheap. Trust me. Which is better: sex or chocolate?

JARA:
We’re living in the Age of Bio/Logics, Jezebel–why choose? Just log in to the Sigh network or load up a SeeNaRee environment where you can have them both at once.

JEZ:
Okay, I’ll put you down as a “both.” So, in MULTIREAL, were there any parts of the story where you were like, David, sweetie, what the Hell are you making me do? Or were you and your Creator in sync the entire time?

JARA:
Oh, I’m not going to blame him for my mistakes. I know I made plenty of them.

JEZ:
You can blame him. I blame my own Creator all the time. [GLARES AT COMPUTER SCREEN]

JARA:
Listen, when you’ve got the world’s most powerful government agency gunning for you, and a ruthless boss trying to manipulate you, and packs of drudges watching your every move so they can broadcast your mistakes to everyone on the Data Sea in real time… it adds up.

JEZ:
So David Edelman is the epitome of all evil?

JARA:
[SIGHS, SHAKES HEAD] Edelman recorded everything faithfully.

JEZ:
Hmm. If you had your way, what would you change about MULTIREAL?

JARA:
I wish David Louis Edelman didn’t make me look so dour all the time. I know it was a trying few months, and I suppose I did my share of crying and agonizing about my career. It’s only natural-–I’m in my mid 40s, after all, and I was apprenticed to a man in his late 20s. Who wouldn’t be a little self-conscious about that?

JEZ:
Talk to me when you’re 4,000 and you have to answer to a human in their thirties.

JARA:
Would it have hurt Edelman to write a little more about my fun side? Honestly, not every trip I took to the Sigh was to vent my sexual frustration about Natch.

JEZ:
Ooh. ‘Splain, please.

JARA:
I just took a trip to Luna to see my mother a few months ago… wait, no, I suppose it was… Okay, so that was four or five years ago. That doesn’t make me a workaholic, does it?

JEZ:
Er. Okay, next question…If you could make David do anything, what would it be?

JARA:
I would make him hurry up and finish book 3, GEOSYNCHON, so the world will know the real story of what happened after the end of MULTIREAL. It’s very important that the world hears the truth about those events.

JEZ:
Heh, I do so love the added plug for the third book. If MULTIREAL goes Hollywood, who should play you in the movie?

JARA:
If by “going Hollywood,” you’re talking about the dramas… well, Edelman told me that he actually plugged me into Doppelganger at one point. They pointed him to a woman named Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. I saw her picture, and I suppose there is a resemblance.

JEZ:
Nice! What about Natch?

JARA:
Edelman wouldn’t tell me who the algorithms came up with. He just laughed and muttered something about “six degrees of separation,” which I didn’t understand at all.

JEZ:
Creators are weird that way. Finally, if you could be evil for one day, and you were granted spiffy evil powers, what would the powers be and how would you use them?

JARA:
[LAUGHS] What a question! I think between bio/logic programming, the Sigh network, SeeNaRee, and MultiReal, I’ve got all the evil powers I need, thank you very much.

JEZ:
[CHUCKLES] Duly noted!

Avid Fans, give another round of applause to one of the stars of David Louis Edelman’s JUMP 225 trilogy and protagonists of the upcoming MULTIREAL…Jara!

[APPLAUSE]

[Really, this isn't Jara. But it is Jara's Dear Creator, David Louis Edelman.]

You can get MULTIREAL starting in July and the first in the trilogy, INFOQUAKE, now at Borders, Barnes & Noble, Mysterious Galaxy, other BookSense bookstores, Amazon, and other fine stores near you.

That’s it for this episode of Cat and Muse! Until next time, remember: love your inner demon.