Matthew Mather

THE

~~ COMPLETE ~~

ATOPIA CHRONICLES

Foreword by the author:

Each of the six books in this compilation follows one or two characters on their own personal journeys through the world of Atopia, intertwining together as the stories progress. It is important to note that the Atopia stories are “sidequels” to each other, all starting at the same moment in time and occurring simultaneously in the same world.

So, when reading, please keep in mind each new story starts over again at the same point in time, and that the sixth and final story is the one that will wrap them all together. Enjoy!

—Matthew Mather

~ BLUE SKIES ~

Book 1:

Olympia Onassis

1

Identity: Olympia Onassis

“NO! NO! YOUR other left!” I yelled at the idiot behind the counter, gesturing towards the pack of cigarettes I wanted. My anger was still peaking after the screaming fight I’d had with Alex in the street outside. We’d just broken up, and this time for the last time.

It wasn’t helping that I hadn’t slept properly in weeks.

The idiot stared at me and began to prattle on in some foreign chatter. How on earth they let so many people that didn’t speak a word of English through Passport Control stunned me. Even with languages going extinct faster than frogs, I’d read that the City still had over a thousand spoken throughout its many boroughs. What a mess.

Now the idiot shrugged as if to ask what to do next. The impatience of the people in line behind me almost overcame my need for a nicotine fix.  Almost, but not quite.

“Just wait a minute!”

I scowled at him while I searched around in my purse for my mobile. Squeamish of implants, I still used an old fashioned ear bud, but showing people that I had one made me feel self-conscious. I hated keeping it in all the time. Popping the mobile bud into my ear I repeated myself.

“The Camel Lights!” I yelled over the counter, jabbing my finger at the display case.

Whatever language he was speaking was instantly translated, “Like I said lady, those aren’t Camels, the package looks the same but you’ll have to go across the street to find those.”

He pointed helpfully out the door.

I was annoyed this person couldn’t speak to me in the official language of the place we lived in. Why was it that I had to bow to his deficiencies? Why couldn’t he service me properly? I made a mental note to leave a scathing review of this pharmacy in my social cloud. The owners of this place would regret this.

“Whatever, that’s fine, whatever those are,” I snarled.

He shrugged and reached into the display and then handed them over. Credits for the transaction were automatically deducted from my daily account as I walked towards the door, picking up a bag of freeze dried vegetable chips on my way.

Getting cigarettes was a regulated activity that required a pharmacist to personally verify my nano–cleaning certification. Of course this also aggravated me. I banged open the door to the drugstore as I stormed out, startling some incoming customers, and opening the cigarettes as I went.

Smoking was a bad habit I’d picked up from my mother. I hadn’t spoken to her in years, but then, my mother had barely ever shown any interest in me. She was a very difficult woman, always judging, and had driven my father away to some Luddite commune back in Montana with the rest of his family. I hadn’t been able to reach him in years. It wasn’t something I was going to forgive my mother for anytime soon.

I stopped just outside the door of the pharmacy to light up, taking a deep drag and feeling some facsimile of relaxation spreading into my body.

Midtown Manhattan blazed away before me in an orgy of advertising. Almost every square inch of space, from lamp post to sidewalk, was full of some sort of commercial heralding a new Broadway show or multiverse world. A holographic head danced above me that sparkled and wobbled slightly as the smoke from my cigarette drifted up into it.

I blew more smoke up at it as I absently watched it tell me, “Come to Titan, experience the methane rain.” The chaotic glow from the street had an almost pornographic luminescence to it, but it hardly registered on me. For me, it was just the frenetically familiar background of New York City.

Taking another long drag from my smoke, I glanced back up at the holographic head. There was just no sex appeal in that messaging. They should be saying something like, “Make love in the hydrocarbon desert.” I laughed silently to myself—make love, now there was something alien, never mind Titan.

Without warning, a robotic surrogate that I’d noticed lining up behind me in the shop came from nowhere and barreled into me, pinning me hard against the wall. It fumbled at my body, grabbing at me.

Blood drained from my face with the incomprehensible and previously unconsidered prospect of being raped by a robot. The draining blood, however, left a vacuum that was filled by a bolt of pure fury, and I lashed back, yelling and flailing.

“Get off me!” I screamed.

It bounced back much more easily than I’d anticipated. We stood staring at each other for a moment, my green and angry eyes meeting its dead, gunmetal grey orbs.

Giving what I could only interpret as a furtive glance, it shrugged an oddly robotic shrug before turning to disappear into the stream of pedestrian traffic. I lurched forward as if to give chase, but gave up almost instantly.

I was shaking.

Breathing hard and ragged, I wiped spittle from the side of my mouth. Looking down, I noticed that he had stolen my cigarette pack, and my trembling hands were somehow matching the wobbly holographic projection still touting Titan above me. In my right hand, the cigarette continued to burn happily away, completely unconcerned with my threatened violation. I shrugged and took a drag, calming my nerves.

Nobody walking by seemed to have noticed anything, or at least, nobody had wanted to see anything. I guess he’d just wanted the cigarettes, although why a robot would want cigarettes was beyond me.

This goddamn city.

I had half a mind to call Alex, but after screaming at him that I wanted to be left alone, right now wasn’t the right time. I’d report this when I got home after work, but I was already late for my presentation. Shaking my head, I dropped my smoke and ground it out underfoot and then ventured out from under the awning to merge into the sea of pedestrians flowing down West 57 Street.

I surged with the dense crowd for a moment, watching for an eddy current that could carry me towards curb. Up ahead, someone swore out loud and then stopped to stamp his foot in anger. Now motionless, a wave of people began flowing outwards and around him. I saw my chance.

Sailing up beside him, I ducked smoothly in behind and was caught perfectly in the opposite flow to go in the direction I needed, but then I ran straight smack into a ridiculous looking woman in sparkling red body paint and peacock feathers.

“Out of my way!” I scowled.

Shoving her aside, I rotated out and away towards the edge of the street. Elbowing my way to the curb, I outstretched my arm to join with the forest of other outstretched arms.

“Ten! Ten!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, offering ten times the going rate.

This was excessive, but I was tired and frightened and just wanted to get out of there. A cab merged fluidly from the traffic flow to pull up beside me, my generosity earning me dirty looks from people around me trying to get their own ride. In return, I offered them my finger as the tiny gull wing door of the cab opened.

I stepped inside and sat down. The relief was immediate. Cool, recycled air swept around me as the door closed to expose the silence within. I took a moment to collect myself, closing my eyes, exhaling softly, trying to relieve the pressure.

“Where to, lady?” asked the cab. It was a mini self–driving electric, one of those Hondasoft ones with the motors in the wheels—barely more than a plastic tub on roller skates, if you asked me, but a cab nonetheless. I took a deep breath.

Where to? To the office was where to.

“Ah…” I said, and then stopped.

What the hell was my office address? I sat bolt upright and rubbed my eyes, blinking hard. Where did I work again? I couldn’t remember where my office was, and I’d worked there for over ten years now. Fear gripped the pit of my stomach.

“Lady, where to?” asked the cab again impatiently.

Damn machines, it’s like they thought they ran the world. Don’t rush me you little bastard.

“One second,” I snapped at the cab a little shakily.

“Ah, Kenny, what is my office address?”

I posed the question to my tech assistant through the mobile bud I still had stuck in my ear.

“555 5th Avenue…” a perplexed Kenny began to respond, which I then relayed to the cabbie.

My face flushed.

How in the world could I have forgotten that? I needed a drink. The cab immediately accelerated and merged into the traffic. I sat back and took some deep breaths, trying to loosen up the tightness in my chest while we sped off towards my meeting.

2

CAREFULLY TAKING ONE bright paper napkin from the black conference room table, I wiped off a residue of sweat from the nape of my neck. I was nervous. Patricia Killiam, the famous godmother of synthetic reality, had decided to personally attend the meeting today, or at least her bio-simulation proxxi had.

This was much the same thing to Atopians.

I’d had to rush to get here, sprinting the last yards from the elevators, but I’d made it just in time. They’d immediately jumped me into my presentation to the Cognix people. That incident with the robot had really thrown me, and my pitch timing had been off. I was still shaking, even now. It made me look like an amateur.

The Cognix account was easily the biggest to ever come through our office, and I’d been named as the lead for closing the deal. Other people were always taking credit for my work, and winning this contract would enable me to finally take center stage. The pressure was intense.

With my part done, I sat back and watched my colleague Bertram finish the presentation. I was thinking of my fight with Alex. He’d wanted to move in together, but I really needed my space.

With him, it was always about spending time with his family and brothers and sisters, but they were always judging me. It was a constant source of friction between us, made worse when he kept insisting that it was just my own insecurities. The nerve. He also wanted kids, telling me how I was too focused on my career, but I had no idea how anyone could want to bring a child into this world. It was falling apart.

I couldn’t believe my boss had almost given this jerk Bertram the lead on closing the account. Look at him, pantomiming away in that ridiculous multi–phasic suit, flattering the boss, laughing at his own jokes. Whatever he was doing seemed to be working, however, from the way everyone was reacting to his pitch.

I needed a smoke.

Maybe I was getting too old for this. Kids nowadays had AIs running around doing most of their jobs for them. I had a hard time keeping up with it all. Thinking about kids brought me back thinking about Alex again. Perhaps I had made a terrible mistake. My stomach lurched.

“Cognix, making tomorrow your today!” gushed Bertram the jerk as he finished up, sweeping his hand into the distance with a flourish. There was a smattering of applause.

Wait a minute. That was my tagline. What the hell was he doing presenting that today? I was supposed to be using that tomorrow. We’d agreed on this.

“Something wrong Olympia?” asked my boss, Roger.

Was my boss in on this too?

“Olympia, do you have anything to add?” asked Roger again.

Everyone turned to look at me.

God it was stuffy in here. With a short intake of breath I thought of what I could say to make Bertram look like the fool he was. I tried to shake off sudden vertigo.

“I, uh, I…” I stammered, but I couldn’t get anything out.

All the air in the room evacuated itself and I felt a crushing pain in my chest. Panic flowed hotly into my veins. Gripping my chest, I wrenched myself up from the table and fled out the door in my search for air.

“Someone call a doctor!” I heard Bertram the jerk yelling out behind me as my vision faded and blackness descended.

3

“NOTHING MORE THAN a simple panic attack,” said the doctor.

That was a relief. I guess I knew I wasn’t really having a heart attack, but it was good to hear anyway. The terror had been real enough at the time.

The doctor’s bald pate reflected the overhead panel lighting like a shimmering, sweaty halo above his radiantly clean lab coat. A stethoscope hung uselessly around his neck. He leaned forward over his veneer mahogany desk and clasped his hands, bringing them up to support his chin in what I assumed was his thoughtful pose.

“Are you still smoking?” he asked.

Stupid question. Of course he knew I was still smoking. This was some kind of tactic to convince me to quit. I hated it when people were manipulative.

“Yes, I am still smoking, but I stay fit.”

He shrugged and shook his head, sensing this was a fight he didn’t want to get into. He looked at his notes.

“Well, this could be fixable via medication,” he suggested, but I cut that short.

“Look doc, thanks, but no thanks, I’m on a strict organic farmaceutical diet,” I explained hotly. “I need to limit the medications.”

Something about him reminded me of the endless string of men my mother had dated after she’d driven my father off. My parents’ relationship had been doomed from the start. Trying to mix a Greek and a Scot was a surefire recipe for disaster.

“Stress and anxiety are the big killers,” explained the doctor. “Olympia, you really have to take care of this.”

They’d had me as an excuse to try and justify their relationship, an excuse that hadn’t worked despite their best attempts to argue and fight their way through it. And with a name like Olympia McIntyre, I’d never felt like I fit in anywhere growing up, least of all at home. I’d taken my mother’s name, Onassis, as an adult. It was the only thing I wanted from her anymore.

“Olympia, are you all right?” asked the doctor. He’d noticed my attention wandering.

“Yes, yes,” I shot back. “There must be something else, what about some more nanobots?”

“Those still use medications,” he explained. “Mostly they’re just delivery systems.”

“So I have to figure this out myself,” I declared, rolling my eyes and shrugging theatrically, “meditation, relaxation…”

What a load of bullshit, I didn’t need to add.

“Yes, that would probably work best in the long term, but I’m not so sure this would work in your case.”

Now it was his turn to shrug, and hopelessly of course. The sheer magnitude of his uselessness almost overpowered me. I sat speechless for a moment while we stared at each other.

“So what are you suggesting then?” I asked, trying to keep whatever process this was moving along. My impatience grew. Why couldn’t he just fix me the way I wanted so I could get on with my life? It was always up to me to fix everything, to come up with all the solutions.

“Look, Olympia, I think we have something perfect for you, but I was just weighing the other options.”

“So?”

I shook my head and waited for his inspiration. He struck another irritatingly thoughtful pose.

“Stress and anxiety are deeply rooted problems in society,” he replied calmly, “while they respond to drugs, these don’t correct the underlying issues. Medical science has found ways to fix most major diseases, but the mind is a tricky thing.”

“I agree, so what are you saying?”

I was about to lose it. How in the hell did this guy get his medical degree? I just wanted to get on with my day and he was launching into some discussion on metaphysics. He adjusted himself in his seat, clearly miffed I hadn’t let him dive off onto whatever tangent he was about to wander off on.

“There is a new synthetic reality system that we’ve been testing with select clients,” he began, raising his hands to fend off my objections, “before you say anything, there are no implants, not really anyway. You’ve already used the delivery nanobots, and this is just one step further.”

I wagged my head slightly. “Okay…”

“All you do is swallow a pill with a glass of water. Nanoscale devices called ‘smarticles’ in the pill diffuse through your body and attach themselves to your neural system. They’re able to modify signals flowing through your neurons…”

“Look, I don’t need the details,” I interrupted, shaking my head again. I hated technical mumbo-jumbo.

He stopped and looked at me before continuing, “Okay, but if you ever decide you don’t like or want it anymore, a simple verbal command deactivates the whole thing and it washes back out of your system and is excreted. It’s as simple as that.”

Excrement. Several ideas linking the good doctor to excrement sprang immediately to mind. He smiled, but now I smiled back. I was excited. I’d suddenly realized what it was he was describing.

“And this has been tested?” I asked.

This must be the new Atopian Cognix system we were pitching at the office. It wasn’t on the market yet, but I knew they were doing highly restricted trials. I brightened up. It looked like someone on top had given me the nod. Maybe I would win the account after all.

“The system has been in clinical trials for years now and is fairly well understood. I can’t give you the brand name, but that shouldn’t make any difference. Does it?”

I was sure he knew I knew what he was talking about, but he had to go through the motions anyway. I played along, knowing that all this would be reviewed by someone at Cognix as soon as I gave my consent.

“No, not really, but if you say it’ll help,” I replied, trying to conceal my glee. I wondered if he would be feeding me any of my own marketing spiel.

“One of the major modern causes of stress and anxiety is advertising.” He paused, knowing I was an advertising executive. “My recommendation is that you should use this system to remove advertising from your environment for a time, see how you feel.”

“Sure, that sounds like a good idea,” I agreed.

He seemed unsure whether I was being sarcastic or not, but could sense my mood lightening. He shrugged slightly.

“Anyway, I’d recommend that you try it out. Should I fill in a prescription for its usage?”

Absolutely you will. “So I’ll have complete control over it?”

“Of course.”

There was a pause while we looked at each other.

“Are you ready?”

“What, now?”

“Yes, now, if you’re ready…”

Another pause, and then I slowly nodded.

He stood, holding a small package in one hand, and then turned to pick up a paper cup that he filled from a small sink behind his desk. Walking around his desk he stood in front of me and leaned back on his desk, handing me the paper cup and a small white tablet.

“Just swallow this. It includes a sedative to help keep you immobile during the initial data gathering session. This isn’t required to activate the system. It’s simply a part of the trial program.”

I took the pill and paper cup from him. He looked me directly in the eye.

“Olympia, do you give your consent to give your personal data to the program?”

Of course I did. I nodded again.

“This includes background personal data, you understand?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“As a beta system, we won’t be able to activate it today. You’ll have to come back later in the week, but we can install it now,” said the doctor.

I took the cup and pill from him and studied them briefly, then popped the pill into my mouth and washed it down.

“Okay so now what?” I demanded, handing the empty cup back to him.

“Follow me,” he replied.

He stood up and led me out of his office and into a smaller room with a human–shaped pod in it. It looked like one of those old tanning beds.

“Now you need to completely undress,” he said.

I quickly and lazily complied. The sedative was already taking hold and my brain had started swimming peacefully. I laid down into the pod and the slightly gooey gel inside it conformed around my body.

“Now just relax.” He lowered the top of the enclosure.

I felt it suction onto me, completely enveloping my body. In a semi–lucid dream state I could remember feeling tiny fingers probing and tickling me, lights and patterns flashing in my eyes and sounds like some kind of hearing test. My muscles twitched as small electric shocks seemed to race back and forth across my body. Sweet and salty liquids washed through my mouth as my nostrils filled with acrid smoke, and the whole thing cycled hot to cold and back again.

I quickly fell asleep, and dreamt of flying above fields of golden daisies, with sunshine filling a perfect golden sky. I dreamt of babies with blue eyes, alive but never living, their blue eyes filling blue seas with blue pain.

4

“OLYMPIA…”

“OLYMPIA,” CAME the voice again.

I was floating, peacefully alone, and some pestering thing had broken the tranquility. My brain tried to ignore it, but then there it was once more, “Olympia?”

I reluctantly opened my eyes to see an angel hovering above me, an angel that strangely reminded me of my cat, Mr. Tweedles. No wait, not an angel, it was a nurse. That’s right. I was back at the doctor’s office getting that thing activated, and they’d sedated me again. I closed my eyes, bringing up a hand to rub them, and then opened them again and sighed heavily.

“Yes?” I responded groggily. Irritably.

“Seems like someone needed a little more sleepy time,” laughed the nurse. “Come on, I’ll get you up and dressed.”

I propped myself up on my elbows and frowned at her. “How long was I out?”

“Hmm…” she considered, “about two hours I’d say. Everything seems to be working perfectly. In fact we’ve just activated the system. Your proxxi will explain everything to you once you get home. I would have woken you sooner but you just seemed so peaceful.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for that,” I said, swinging my legs off the side of the pod as I sat up, pushing off her attempts to handle me. Shrugging, she handed me my clothes.

“I can take it from here, thank you very much,” I stated flatly and aggressively, waving her away.

She took a look at me and narrowed her eyes slightly, but then her smile returned and she shrugged again and began to walk out.

“I’m going to bring you in to speak to the doctor before you leave okay? He needs to have a final word,” she said as she went through the door.

I finished getting dressed and walked out into the hallway. The nurse was watching me carefully from a distance, studying me. Silly cow. I stopped at the doctor’s office and half hung my head inside, making sure he could sense my need to get a move on.

“So how do you feel?” he asked, looking up from whatever he was doing. “Please, come in.”

“No, I’m fine. I mean, I just want to get going. This was supposed to be under an hour, I’ve got things to do,” I complained. “So just tell me quick, what do I need to know?”

He paused.

“You have a very powerful new tool at your disposal, just be careful with it, and don’t activate any of the distributed consciousness features yet.”

“Distributed consciousness,” I snorted, looking back towards the nurse who’d positioned herself behind me in the hallway. I bet she had no idea what we were talking about. “Where do they get these ideas?”

“If you want to talk with me,” continued the doctor, and I looked back towards him, “just say my name and you will be instantly patched through to me, anytime of the day or night.”

With some effort, I managed to disengage my disgust from the sweaty reflection off his head.

“Great,” I replied impatiently. “Got it.”

“When you get home today and feel ready, just say ‘pssi instructions’ and you will get all the information you need from your new proxxi.”

“Perfect.” I felt almost cheerful, sensing an imminent exit. “I’ll be in touch.”

With the tiniest of waves I bid him goodbye, and marched off down the hallway and out the door, purposely ignoring the nurse who was watching me all the way out.

The air outside was crisp and fresh, and for the first time in ages I felt a surge of optimism. I decided to walk myself home from the clinic. I could use a breath of fresh air.

I stopped to light up a cigarette.

I’d decided that I hadn’t made a mistake with Alex. I really needed my space, to be alone for a while. He never supported or defended me anyway. In fact, my whole life it had always been up to me to defend my own place. Nobody ever helped me with anything.

Fall was in fully now, and the leaves on the trees lining the streets were turning beautiful shades of crimson and yellow. The air had a refreshing edge. I strode energetically along the sidewalks, enjoying myself, looking at everything around me.

I didn’t feel any different, and part of me doubted that whatever they had done would work as well as it was billed, despite that I was personally marketing it all. The crowds on the Upper East Side were dense but navigable, and billboards and holograms cluttered the view, but it still made for a nice walk. Eventually, I made my way home to the personal oasis of my brownstone walk–up.

Mr. Tweedles sprang at me as I entered, and began purring loudly as he rubbed himself against my pant leg while I closed the door and arranged my things. The cat had been my friend Mary’s idea, to provide some companionship. I’d grown fond of him, but the thing was just so needy. I shooed him away, hating the thought of all the hair he was depositing on me with each purring caress.

I immediately made for the bottle of wine on my kitchen counter that I’d opened yesterday and poured myself a glass. Collapsing onto my couch, I luxuriated in the taste of the earthy Tempranillo.

Sighing, I realized I had to review the installation instructions for my new toy. I might as well get it over with, but I had no patience for dealing with anything technical.

Rummaging around in my purse, I found a cigarette. I’d already gone through another pack. With all the technological wizardry you’d think they could invent an endless cigarette. I shook my head and crumpled up the empty cardboard packaging and threw it onto the table.

“Pssi instructions,” I called out, lighting up my smoke.

“System activated,” I heard from a voice that seemed to be inside my head. “I will now appear on the chair beside you. Please do not be alarmed.”

With that, something materialized sitting beside me on my matching armchair, something that looked sort of like me. In fact, it looked exactly like me.

“I am your new poly-synthetic sensory interface, or pssi, proxxi,” it said. “I will now explain the system features to you. You can stop me at any time.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I objected, waving my glass of wine in front of me, “hold on a sec.”

I wanted to get Kenny, my techie and personal assistant from work, in on this. I fumbled around in my purse for my mobile.

“You don’t need your mobile anymore,” helpfully suggested my new proxxi, seeming to know what I was thinking. That stopped me in my tracks.

“Kenny?” I called out tentatively, and his projection instantly appeared floating in the middle of my living room.

“Yes boss?” he asked. “Whoa, you got some kind of fancy lens display system going on?”

I’d tripped his geek–chic alarm.

“Yeah, Kenny, great, just get over it okay? Please listen to what, this, ah, woman is saying,” I said pointing towards my new proxxi. “Pssi interface, or proxxi, or whatever, please continue.”

Kenny’s eyes grew wide as the proxxi began speaking and describing the system controls. I just sat back and let my eyes glaze over, enjoying my wine. Presently, the proxxi faded away and I turned to Kenny to finish up.

“Kenny, I hate dealing with all this technical stuff,” I complained, “can I give you root access to my system and you handle the settings and dealing with this proxxi? I don’t want to have anything to do with it, and quite frankly I find it, or her or whatever, disturbing.”

“Not sure boss,” he replied skeptically, “let me look into it.  From what I understood, you can’t hand off all the root functions, but give me a day or two to research it.”

His geek love was sparking hard.

“Just don’t waste too much time on it, right?” He’d just use this as an excuse to duck out of other work, the little weasel.

He nodded. “Okay.”

“Any problem I have, I just call your name and you pop up, right?”

“Exactly,” he agreed, “anytime, anywhere. Still, were you paying attention to the safety? If you need to reset the system there is this hardwired gesture recognition…”

He began motioning in the air, reaching towards his chest and twisting and pulling. It looked ridiculous.

“Look Kenny, I’ve got you, right? Or Dr. Simmons, or failing that I just call this proxxi thing, right?”

“Yes, absolutely.” He smiled and shrugged, stopping what he was doing.

“I really don’t like dealing with this AI and synthetic stuff,” I sighed.

“But you were listening to all that, right?” he asked, furrowing his brow in feigned concern. “This system is very powerful.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes Kenny, I was listening, but just take care of it for me, okay?”

“Right boss,” he replied with a shrug.

“Now, please set it so it removes all advertising as my doctor prescribed.”

There was a short pause while he spoke to my new proxxi on his end.

“All done,” he replied quickly. He smiled and raised his eyebrows.

That was fast.

I had to admit I liked the way I didn’t need the mobile bud anymore, and the technology looked pretty amazing, even from just the proxxi session.

Waving Kenny away, I settled back into the couch. Mr. Tweedles made an attempt to come up for some affection, and I shoved him away. Not on my new authentic leather couch. What the hell was he thinking?

It was time for bed. I picked my reading tablet up from the coffee table and walked off towards my bedroom. Quickly, I undressed and slipped under the covers, opening up the tablet to get back into reading a trashy romance novel I had been trying to finish, set in some ridiculous corner of the multiverse.

The pages of text quickly began to fade and blur as I tried to read them, and I fell peacefully off to sleep amid dreams of peaceful order and solitude.

5

THE NEXT MORNING I awoke early, feeling unusually refreshed. At this time of year, the sun just managed to sneak into the alleyway between the buildings next to me and was casting some cheerful rays in through my bedroom window.

Laid out peacefully in my bed under the covers, my body was lethargic from sleep. I dreamily watched motes of dust settle and spin in the sunlight streaming in from the blinds. My mind was completely at ease for the first time in longer than I could remember. Something was different, but what?

Then slowly, very slowly, the noise from the street began to filter into my consciousness, gradually rising until it filled the space it usually did. I realized then that the pssi interface had been filtering it out while I was asleep. No wonder I felt so refreshed.

Energized, I pulled back the sheets. Time to face the day! As I swung my terry cloth pajama legs off the bed, I called out to Mr. Tweedles, who trotted in obediently to rub up against me. I leaned down to pet him, then stretched and yawned and sat for a moment on the edge of the bed as I collected myself and put on my slippers.

“Okay, okay, enough!” I complained at Mr. Tweedles. I shooed him away and got up to pad off into the kitchen to pick up my morning cup of coffee that was waiting for me there.

Arriving in the kitchen, I began to fumble around for the holographic remote in the bowl of junk in the middle of the counter. As I rooted around looking for it, my morning Phuture News Network sprang into life by itself, dissolving the opposite wall of my living room. I blinked, surprised, and realized this must be my new pssi system again.

A message flashed up on the display. Mary had called again. I didn’t make friends easily, but her and I had met a few months ago at a coffee shop nearby and had struck up an immediate friendship. She was beginning to annoy me a little as we got to know each other better. A hypocrite, and very judgmental. I ignored the message.

Sitting down on a stool at my granite breakfast countertop, I passed my bowl of instant oats under the tap and a short jet of water filled it to the prescribed level. The oatmeal began sputtering and bubbling as the thermo-reactive particles in it prepared themselves, and I sat stirring it absentmindedly while I watched predictions of the day’s news to come.

The new pssi display was amazing, it looked so good I felt like I could get up and walk right through from my living room and drop right into whatever I was looking it. At that moment it was a swirling storm system somewhere out in the Atlantic, grinding its way towards some unfortunate Caribbean island.

The image was far superior to my old holographic, and much better than the contact lens displays I found so irritating and headache inducing.

“By the end of the week,” predicted the Phuture News weather anchor floating to one side of the display, “tropical storm Ignacia will reach hurricane status and quickly progress into the third major storm of the season.”

They were projecting it would wash all the way up the coast and threaten New York, an almost regular occurrence.

In an overlaid display, Phuture News droned on about soon to be emerging conflicts in the Weather Wars along with a list of other clashes and predicted famines and disasters. It seemed it was all they ever talked about. No wonder everyone was anxious and depressed, never mind the advertising.

Oh well, I thought as I spooned my oatmeal rhythmically into my mouth and they detailed the death and destruction, what could I do about it?

“Good morning. I hope you didn’t mind, but I filtered out the street noise last night. I thought it would help you sleep better.”

I looked up from my oatmeal to find myself looking at me, or rather, a similar version of myself. My proxxi was strikingly composed in a tight, fashionable business suit with her hair done up in a severe bun. She looked amazing. Oatmeal dripped off my spoon as I looked at her. My hair was a frizzy mess.

“I also took the liberty of preparing a relevant summary of world events that happened while you were sleeping,” she said brightly. I stared at her, feeling violated and annoyed. I just wanted to have my oatmeal in peace. I hadn’t requested any of this.

“I think that these may be most relevant regarding your work today,” she continued, and a blur of images hung in an augmented display space in front of me. I put my spoon down. “Instead of talking it would be easier if we could commingle my subjective reality with yours…”

I cut her off. “No, no, look, I just wanted to try this for the advertising block. I realize you are the main system interface but please, just communicate with Kenny, okay?” Anyway, my doctor had said to avoid distributed consciousness features, which is what this commingling of realities sounded like.

She shrugged. “Of course, Olympia. My apologies. I will interface with Kenny from now on until I hear otherwise from you.”

With that she faded away. Honestly, I found this proxxi thing unnerving, but at least she hadn’t given me any attitude. She’d just responded to my request and gotten on with it.

I returned my gaze to Phuture News and began eating my oatmeal again.

“News off please!” I announced, wondering how the pssi system would respond.

Magically, the display faded and my wall returned, but the system left behind a persistent visual overlay that was curiously both visible and somehow invisible at the same time. This technology was actually pretty amazing.

An image of some new war that was about to start hung in my new overlaid display. Maybe I shouldn’t start my days with Phuture News. But even as I muttered this aloud, I could see a Phuture News feed at the bottom of my display saying there was a ninety percent chance I would anyway. I laughed. Obviously the system was a comedian as well.

As I sat mulling this, I picked up the new edition of Marketing Miracles from the counter, a rare print magazine, and leafed through it. My brow furrowed. That’s odd. Then I figured it out.

“Kenny,” I announced into thin air, “could you switch the advertisement blocking system off?”

Immediately the pages of the magazine began to morph, shifting and dissolving until the same page appeared before me, but this time with the advertisements in it.

“And, Kenny, now back on please.”

The images and text on the page quickly shape shifted back and the adverts dissolved away. Amazing.

As I considered this, I realized that the news broadcast hadn’t had any ads floating across it either, nor had it been interrupted by any advertising breaks. Really amazing.

I sat bolt upright and listened hard to the noise from outside, paying attention more carefully. I could still hear the traffic and bustle of people, but the baseline clatter of the street hawkers and holo ads was absent.

Nice.

6

WE’D WON THE first phase of the Cognix account. It was the biggest our marketing company had ever been awarded and I was something of a hero around the office. Bertram had even been tolerable lately, but only just.

Today we were helping run an online press conference with Patricia Killiam, Cognix’s most famous scientist and primary press presence. The meeting was being held in one of the Atopian conference rooms. Many of the reporters were actually on Atopia with Patricia in the room, but most people, like me, were attending remotely. I started up the holographic promo-world for the reporters to get the show started.

“Imagine,” said an extremely attractive young woman, or man, depending on your preference, “have you ever thought of hiking the Himalayas in the morning and finishing off the day on a beach in the Bahamas?”

As she walked along an exotically anonymous beach, she began nodding, conveying to us that not only was it possible, but it was something that we needed, and that we obviously needed right away.

“Pssionics now enables limitless travel with nearly zero environmental impact. You’ll be having the most fun, with the lowest combined footprint, of anyone in your social cloud!”

“And you’ll never forget anything again,” laughed the girl, reminding us of everything we’d ever thought we’d forgotten. “You’ll never again have to argue about who said what!”

While we all contemplated the things our mates had gotten wrong over the years, her face shifted into a more serious demeanor.

“Imagine performing more at work while being there less. Want to get in shape? Your new proxxi can take you for a run while you relax by the pool!” she exclaimed, stopping her walk to look directly into the viewer’s eyes.

“Look how you want, when you want, where you want, and live longer doing it. Create the reality you need right now with Atopian pssionics, and sign up soon for zero cost!”

The woman faded into the slowly rotating Atopian logo.

A short silence settled while Patricia let it all sink in. She was the master at this, and she should be after all the years she’d spent punting for it.

“So, how exactly is pssionics going to make the world a better place?” asked an attractive blond from one of the entertainment outlets.

I watched Patricia carefully roll her eyes. She didn’t like the term ‘pssionics’, too much baggage. The blond reporter’s name floated into view in one of my display spaces: Ginny.

“Well Ginny, I prefer to use the term ‘polysynthetic sensory interface’ or just pssi,” replied Patricia, detaching from her body.

A computerized image of Patricia floated up above her body and continued to talk with the reporters while her proxxi walked her body along beneath the projection. Nobody batted an eye. They weren’t easily impressed anymore.

“We’ve been able to demonstrate here on Atopia that people are just as happy with virtual goods as material ones. You just need to make the simulation good enough, real enough.”

Everyone nodded as they’d all heard this before. I’d already heard this speech a dozen times myself, and my mind wandered off to thinking about how pssi had already changed my life. I certainly felt more rested. I began thinking of calling Alex, just to chat.

“Everyone!” announced Patricia, drawing my attention back to her presentation. That’s right. This morning they were going to be doing the weapons demonstration. It was a good marketing stunt to show off that they were serious.

“If you’ll allow me,” continued Patricia, “I’d like to take whoever is coming up to watch the test firing of the slingshot.”

Everyone nodded, and she took control of our visual points-of-view and pulled us up through the ceiling of the conference room and out above Atopia with dizzying speed. We shot upwards into the sky.

“So to answer your question, pssi will change the world by moving it from the destructive downward spiral of material consumption and into the clean world of synthetic consumption.”

Our viewpoint began to slow as we neared the edge of space. The curved horizon of the Earth was spread out in the distance, above oceans far below. The sun was just rising.

“Ten billion people all fighting for their piece of the material dream is destroying the planet, and pssi is the solution that will bring us back from the brink!”

Her finale was punctuated by a growling roar as the slingshot filled the air around us with a fiery inferno. The reporters clapped loudly in the background.

They couldn’t get enough of this stuff.

7

IT HAD BEEN a long day, and a creeping headache was just reaching a roaring finale by the time I finished late at night. After a few weeks of smooth sailing on the Cognix account, today we’d had our first major speed bump with the disaster of a Cognix-related project launch called Infinixx.

We were all in high damage control mode. The spectacle of Bertram in another one of his ridiculous outfits had just topped it all off. While I was slaving away, he’d spent most of the day trolling around the office assistant pool, looking for some ditzy new romantic victim.

Bertram and I had also just had a big argument about whether to use Patricia or some new young pssi-kid, Jimmy, as the main media presence for marketing. I was adamant about sticking with Patricia, but Bertram was just as convinced we should switch to someone newer and younger.

Everything and everyone at the office was getting on my nerves. I had to escape outside for a cigarette nearly every half hour to get away. I just wanted to be left alone.

I’d found out that Alex had started dating Mary. I didn’t care, but their hypocrisy made me angry. Is this what friends did? I was having a hard time getting it out of my mind, and I’d blocked all of their incoming messages and removed them from my social clouds.

Grabbing a handful of anti–inflammatories from my desk drawer, I got up to leave for the night, and downed the pills dry as I exited the giant brass and glass doors of our building out onto 5 Avenue.

I was lost deep in thought about how to spin the Infinixx mess when my senses were shocked by an expectational vacuum. Stopped in my tracks, I blinked out into the collecting dusk, looking out above the sea of people jostling past me.

It was as if a layer of noisy fluorescent dirt had been scraped off the City by the hand of God.

All the advertising was gone, as if it had never been there. I could actually see the buildings around me. The comparative calmness was mesmerizing, and I stepped out and into the quiet flow of pedestrian hubbub, looking up above and around me in wonderment. The flow carried me up 5 and into Central Park, and in a dreamy state I continued to walk around the edge of the park, staring at my City with new eyes.

I’d been using my pssi for a while already, but New York without advertising still had a creepy feel to it. But, it was definitely relaxing, and as my headache subsided, I decided to get a little exercise and finish the walk all the way home myself.

The gathering darkness was something else I wasn’t accustomed to. Normally the advertisements lit up the streets and sidewalks. As I neared home, staring up and around, I was nearly tripped up by a bum who was splayed out on the street. The stench of his body odor should have been forewarning enough, but the darkness and my wandering eyes betrayed me.

“Lady! Lady! Watch it!”

Looking down just in time, I danced awkwardly over the grubby human at my feet, knocking over his collection bowl. Nobody else around me even bothered to glance at the commotion as they swept past.

He cowered for an instant, with me jittering over him, and then shot outwards on all fours to collect the bills I’d scattered, darting this way and that underfoot the human traffic.

What a pathetic creature.

I should report this to Passport Control. I bet he’s not even supposed to be here, and even if he is, he should be deported. What possible good could be coming from him being here, dirtying up my neighborhood? He was worse than trash. At least trash you could package up and bury or burn somewhere.

“Get out of the way!” I spat at him as he sat back on his haunches.

He just looked up at me. I had expected to see a scowl and his anger reflected to fuel my own, but he simply stared at me.

“You think you’re important lady?”

People streamed past us. We seemed lost in the moment, staring at each other. Still the blank stare. Was he about to cry? Ah shit. I fumbled around in my pockets, but I had no change. Anyway, why should I help him? Nobody had ever helped me in my life. I’d always had to fend for myself, for everything.

I felt suddenly angry. In a flash my senses returned and I dismissed this human straggler. Turning away I merged back into the pedestrian flow.

“You should be more careful, life can throw you funny curveballs lady,” I heard him say while I was swept away.

“We’ll be seeing you here with us soon!” he shouted, in the distance, fading away.

I shivered. There was no way I’d let myself fall so far. He was probably lying anyway. That’s what they did. At that moment an incoming ping arrived from Kenny.

“What?” I asked, happy to move onto some new topic.

Kenny materialized walking in step beside me.

“That was close,” he commented.

“What was close?” Was he spying on me?

“That bum that almost knee capped you just now.”

“Kenny, how do you know what just happened?” My anger began brimming from its ambient low boil.

“Your pssi has an automated threat assessment, and since I’m the root user, a security alert popped up on my display,” he said defensively. “You know, there’s an automated collision avoidance system you could activate.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” I shot back. “You’re not watching me with that thing are you?”

“No, no, it’s just an alarm,” protested Kenny, his projection ducking and weaving around the foot traffic as he kept pace with me. “Like I said, as the root user, I get security alerts fed to me automatically. I just thought you may have needed some help.”

I looked at him. “So you managed to get root access to my system? I thought you said the system didn’t allow it?”

It was all the same to me. I hated dealing with that stuff. Having Kenny manage it made my life that much simpler.

“Yeah, someone from the company authorized it as part of the testing procedure. They gave us a backdoor workaround.”

“Good.”

At least something was going my way. Kenny was staring at me as I squinted into the darkness.

“What?” I urged. I could see he had something more to say.

“Well, I could set the pssi to adjust your perceptual brightness, even optimize contrast. That would make it easier for you to see things.”

I wasn’t too keen on the thing controlling my body, but this seemed reasonable.

“Sure, show me,” I replied, my anger fizzling.

Immediately, the scene around me brightened and the edges grew sharper. I knew it was dark out, but I could see everything clearly, in even sharper detail than full daylight.

“Kenny, that is actually…great,” I said after a moment. “Good work.”

He brightened up at my praise like a puppy. Before I could say anything else, Kenny started to speak again, his geek–citement bubbling out.

“Believe it or not, but we could filter out street people too,” he added. “I could also set it so that garbage and dirt is cleaned off the street, or remove graffiti. There are all kinds of reality skins you can set in this thing. We would need to initiate some of the kinesthetic features, though.”

I had turned onto 75 by then, my street, and could see a few street people hanging around on the corner up ahead, begging for money. They were more or less invisible to me anyway, the great unseen as it were, but seeing them there irked me.

“Sure, Kenny, let’s try it,” I replied with mildly venomous enthusiasm at the thought of wiping out these street vermin. The instant I said it, the panhandlers up ahead melted away, and the walls of the buildings suddenly washed free of graffiti. The sidewalk beneath me began to glisten as if it was newly laid.

“How’s that?” asked Kenny.

“That is amazing,” I replied.

It actually was amazing. It was my neighborhood, just a better version. Scrubbed clean.

In the distance, I saw a robot walk by.

“Could you also set it to remove all robotics, I mean, unless they directly address me?” They still made me nervous. This gave me another idea. “And remove all couples holding hands as well.”

Perhaps this was a little too much information to share with Kenny, but he just shrugged and nodded.

“All done. So this is the new pssi system that Cognix is going to release, huh?” asked Kenny.

I was busy enjoying myself, looking around and admiring my new neighborhood, but felt some irritation creep back in. Kenny was always looking to pick under the edges.

“I don’t know, Kenny, but they’re going to be giving it away soon so you’ll be able to play with it to your heart’s content, okay?”

“Cool,” he replied.

In an overlaid display space I could see him tuning into a media broadcast from Patricia Killiam. Our marketing program really did seem to be working.

8

NEW YORK CAN make you crazy, but if I’d ever had a bad day at work, this was the worst. I’d spent the past week almost sleeping at the office, preparing reams of new material for the Cognix launch. It was a simultaneous worldwide release, the biggest media campaign of all time, and we were in a fever pitch trying to get everything ready.

Storms were sweeping up the Eastern Pacific towards Atopia. Hurricanes by themselves were nothing unusual, and these weren’t close to threatening the island city, but Atopia had begun inexplicably moving itself much closer towards America. Without any explanation from them we had to somehow cover and spin this positively in addition to everything else going on.

Kenny had managed to install filters in my own pssi system so that Bertram the jerk, and the floosies in the assistant pool, were filtered out of my visual input unless they directly addressed me in some way. That had been great to begin with, but as the days went by, I’d started getting more and more frustrated with almost everyone.

The show stopper had come at the end of the week.

“Olympia,” came the call from my boss, “could you come in here please?”

This was the final decision on the final stage of the Cognix account, and I was nervous. The old school and the new school were facing down, and I felt the future of my career suddenly hanging in the balance.

Flicking off some Phuture News gossip girls, I collected my Cognix materials and sent them over to the conference room, closing down my workstation as I got up to leave. I ran a hand through my hair to straighten it out and absently brushed some lint off my shoulder as I looked out at the wall of the building facing my window, hardly ten feet away.

My reflected image hung thinly over the cold, chipped brick beyond. My heart thumped loudly in my chest, each contraction pushing blood tensely through my arteries, forcing it down into my veins, straining it into the smallest of vessels as the pressure built up. I tried taking a deep breath, but there was nowhere for the air to go.

Sweat beaded upon my forehead.

Shake it off, take the fight to them, I thought to myself. A vision of that bum on the street suddenly crowded my mind, and I looked down and away. “We’ll be seeing you soon,” was what he’d said. What did he mean by that? That will never be me.

My heart began racing.

Why are you thinking like this? You’re a high powered executive, a queen of New York. You have savings, you have important friends, you own your home, and you’ve even got Mr. Tweedles. I smiled at that. The doctor must have been right—the stress was getting to me. I just didn’t feel like myself.

Letting out a big sigh, I collected myself and made for the door. Everything would be fine.

Down the hallway I entered the conference room, and was surprised that projections of our Cognix customers weren’t filling the holographic wall. My boss and Bertram were sitting down on the other side of the long table, looking at me like they were waiting for my arrival.

I pulled up a chair opposite them, taking an aggressive stance as I sat down. I leaned into the table, feeling my old friend anger begin to make an appearance.

“What’s up guys?” I half asked, half challenged. I’d had enough of them already this week.

“Olympia, we’re glad you’re here,” began my boss stupidly, opening clasped hands that had been supporting his weak chin as if about to accept an award for incompetence.

I let go an audible groan.

“Roger, what’s up? Cut the bullshit. Did we lose the final phase of the account?”

“No,” he announced with pronounced lack of enthusiasm, “actually, we won.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“No problem at all. In fact, we want to use all of the materials you created. Great work!”

“Well, good then,” I replied carefully, softening up my seated posture.

“But…”

“But what?” I growled, leaning back into the table.

“We’ve made, ah, our client wants, ah, well, we want Bertram here to head the account. You’ll be working underneath him on this. I’d like you to show him the ropes, you know, you’re the expert.”

He smiled at me weakly while Bertram beamed enthusiastically. Worm. I smiled as I mentally uncapped the pot simmering inside me, feeling it boil over to explode through my temples.

“Are you out of your mind?” I yelled back at them both. “There is no way that I’m going to train this little shit eating monkey to do my job!”

Bertram shifted back in his chair, enjoying the spectacle, his grin floating disconnectedly in my red-shifted vision. My chest tightened as I attempted to let go another salvo. I gripped the table with white knuckles. My vision was swimming.

“Does this have anything to do with me not wanting to use that kid instead of Patricia?” I asked.

“No, nothing like that,” said Bertram, smiling. I didn’t believe him.

“Olympia, look, I understand how you feel,” pleaded my boss, “but you could learn a lot from Bertram too. Look how calm and collected he is.” He looked back at Bertram. “There is no rush on this, why don’t you take next week off, paid leave, and think about everything, okay?”

I stared down at the table, trying to get a grip on myself. Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad idea. I could use the time to plan out a strategy of how to undermine these idiots. Maybe it was best to just nurse my wounds.

“Fine,” I grumbled under my breath. I let the prospect of vengeance cool my soul. “Fine. Glad we won the contract, sir. I could actually use a little time off.”

“See,” said Roger, brightening up, “now that’s the spirit. Take as much time as you need, Olympia, we need you here in top shape. This will be a big job.”

Yes, I thought, this will be a big job.

§

Taking off early, I managed to get home quickly and was well through a second bottle of wine and curled up with Mr. Tweedles on my couch when night began to fall. An unusual early snow had started outside, and I watched squalls of snowflakes begin sweeping by in the streets outside through my large bay window.

The stress of the day had hardly abated. Even after polishing off the first bottle, I was having a hard time concentrating on a new romance novel I’d started. My mind was shifting back to plotting the downfall of Bertram and my boss.

Mr. Tweedles started purring and rubbing up against me. I’d been enjoying cuddling with him, but he’d rolled over onto his back, inviting me to scratch his tummy. I kicked him off the couch.

Sighing, I picked up two sleeping pills from the drawer in my coffee table, and taking a deep breath I washed them down with a mouthful of wine. Lighting up my last cigarette for the night, I called up Kenny.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied instantly, appearing with a careful smile in my primary display space. I bet he’d heard about my little incident today. I bet I was the talk of the office.

I’d show them.

“Kenny, look, could you set my pssi to filter out anything that I find annoying, until you hear different from me?” If I have some time off, I reasoned, I may as well try to depressurize and make the most of the tools at my disposal.

“Sure,” he replied, “I guess I could do that.”

“I’ll just ping you if I need anything, okay?”

“Sounds good, no problem,” he responded, and then added, “and hey, enjoy the time off, okay boss?”

If I didn’t know any better, I could have sworn he was being genuine. I clicked him out of my sensory spaces without another word and got up off the couch, drunker than I thought I was, to wander into my bedroom and collapse on the bed.

9

OH MY HEAD hurt. I groggily lifted it off the sheets and waited while my blurry vision adjusted to the half darkness of my bedroom. It was still early and I didn’t need to be up for work.

Wait a minute, it was Saturday. Finally, the weekend. As memories seeped into my brain, I realized that I didn’t need to go back to work this whole week, perhaps longer. Screw it. I flopped my head back onto my pillow and called out weakly for Mr. Tweedles.

“Hey, kitty kitty,” I called out, but without response. That was odd. Ah well. I conked back out.

In what seemed like moments later, bright light began streaming in through the window. It must have been fully morning. My head ached dully, so I flopped out of bed and made for the kitchen to get a glass of cold water.

Mr. Tweedles was still nowhere to be seen. Did I let him out last night? I didn’t usually let him out since he was a house cat, but I had been a little drunk.

Downing a tall, cool glass of water, I immediately felt refreshed. I should go for a run, I thought to myself. That would burn off some stress and get the gears going. There was nothing like a good run to fire up the imagination, and my mind was already cycling with ways to get back at Bertram and my boss.

So I moved back off to my bedroom to put on some cool weather sports gear, and moments later I was off jogging down my street, drinking in the cool autumn air and enjoying the crisp bite of the year’s first frost burning off in the early sunshine.

I admired the scenery, completely devoid of any ads, the streets sparkling and walls scrubbed clean, with no vagrants to spoil the view or inspire guilt. It was perfect. I jogged along 75 towards Central Park.

It was calm, but gradually I began to get the feeling it was too calm. There was a complete lack of other people walking on the streets, or even any people in cars. It was early morning on the weekend, but even so. As I made it to the corner of the park, I decided I’d better check in with Kenny to make sure my pssi was working properly.

“Kenny!” I demanded. “Kenny, could you check the pssi system for me?”

No response. I slowed up my jog a little, suddenly nervous. Maybe he was hung-over too.

“Kenny!” I yelled out again, and then stopped jogging and halted, waiting for a response.

“Kenny!” I yelled, and then screamed, “Kenny!!”

My voice just echoed back from the empty space of the park. No sounds at all. Panicking, I turned around and began to sprint as fast as I could back to my apartment, calling out people’s names as I ran.

Nobody answered.

“Pssi interface!” I screeched as I ran.

“Dr. Simmons!” I pleaded, but there was no response.

Maybe the pssi was just broken, I thought, maybe I should just try my mobile. I burst in through my front door and rummaged around my purse for my mobile. I popped it in my ear and began calling out people’s names, but still, nothing. Alarm settled into my gut. I ran back out into the street in a panic.

There were cars lining the street but no one driving them, no people anywhere, and no Mr. Tweedles. How was it possible I was walking around in the street, right down the middle and not seeing anyone? How was it possible?

My mind raced. I’d told Kenny to set the system to erase anything I found annoying. I’d given Kenny root executive control, and I certainly found Kenny annoying, as well as my doctor. My God, what had I done?

I ran down the street, tears streaming down my face, my chest burning. I would get to my office, someone would be there even on the weekend, they would see me, they could fix this even if I couldn’t see them. My legs tired and I began to walk, calming down. This was ridiculous. Don’t panic. Just stay calm.

Eventually I rounded the last block before my building, and, turning the corner, I thought of all the ways I was going to laugh this off with everyone, but then my heart fell through my stomach. My office tower was gone, replaced by some other morphed amalgamation that looked similar but dissimilar at the same time.

I began to weep, waving my arms around. Of course I’d found work annoying. In fact, I found almost everything and everyone annoying.

“Please, someone help me! I’m stuck in the pssi! Please someone help me!” I cried out into the empty streets, looking desperately around me.

I was utterly alone in one of the world’s most densely populated cities.

I let out a slow moan of dread.

10

AT FIRST I’D wandered through the empty streets of New York. In desperation I’d taken the New York Passenger Cannon, operating perfectly to timetable but yet empty of passengers, to San Francisco. Arrival there had just made things worse, however, as it was as empty as New York.

For the first few days, I’d tried to remember the deactivation gesture that Kenny had tried to show me, the hardwired failsafe, but I hadn’t been paying attention. What was that sequence, what was the motion? Walking around, I pulled and scraped at my chest, twisting and turning and muttering random words, hoping one of them would be the deactivation sequence. But nothing happened.

With a mounting sense of horror, I began to realize that perhaps I was the only person left, the last person on Earth, or at least the last person on whatever version of the Earth I had led myself onto.

I stopped at the end of the pier at Fisherman’s’ Wharf. This place was usually packed with tourists, but of course it was desolately empty.

Opening my purse I stared at the pack of cigarettes inside. It had become endless. No matter how many cigarettes I took from it, the next time I opened my purse, it was full again. I’d even tried throwing it away in a fit of frustration, but then there it was again the next time I felt an urge coming on. Shaking my head, I pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

I’d explored everywhere, tried everything. I didn’t need to bring any luggage with me for traveling as I could just pick up clothes, any clothes I wanted, right off the racks.

Restaurants were always open. At first I tried going into buffets, and row upon row of fresh, steaming food would always be waiting for me. After a little while I’d discovered that if I had an urge for anything, I could just go into a restaurant, and magically the meal I wanted would be there, ready for me to sit down and eat alone.

All of the mediaworlds were still broadcasting, but the news was filled with stories about families, about happy reunions and lost children newly found. I often spent my afternoons sitting alone in cinemas and watching endless reruns of old romance films.

Something had to be wrong with the pssi system. Weren’t the smarticles supposed to wash out of my system by themselves eventually? Somebody out there would figure it out, somebody would save me, and then just as suddenly as it had started, it would be over.

Perhaps I’d been upset with everyone, angry at the world, but I wasn’t anymore. I just desperately wanted to see someone, anyone, it didn’t matter. I’d become beyond terrified of being alone.

But still, nobody appeared.

11

HAD IT BEEN weeks or months? It was hard to tell. My psyche had begun to unglue itself as my conviction slipped that somebody out there would notice my absence.

How long could this last? My mind kept returning to my own marketing campaigns, to pssi’s main selling feature of dramatically stretching the human lifespan. Was it possible that I could be left wandering alone for years, decades, even a century?  Or more?

My mind frantically circled around and around the thought, unable to fathom it, clawing desperately at the edges of this prison without walls. I suspected that the system wouldn’t even let me kill myself. There was no escape.

Today I was wandering around Madrid, through Beun Retiro Park. It was as devoid of people as everywhere else my lonely travels had taken me. I was walking between rows of skeleton trees, across carpets of golden leaves that they’d shed like tears just for me. It was a beautiful day under a perfect sky as winter settled in.

At least, it could have been beautiful if there’d been anybody else there but me, by myself.

I thought a lot about Mr. Tweedles. Everywhere I went, I kept thinking I saw him, just up ahead, just passing a lamppost. I’d feel him brushing up against my leg, and then wake up, realizing I was still stuck in this nightmare. I think he’d been the only creature who’d ever loved me. I hoped someone was taking care of him.

My life hadn’t ended, but without anyone else, it had ceased to have any meaning.

Stopping next to the Crystal Palace in the middle of the park, I opened my purse to take out another of the endless cigarettes. I lit up, and then bent down to pick up one of the beautiful golden leaves from the gravel path. I studied it carefully and began to laugh, and then to cry.

It was so peaceful here. It was what I’d always wanted, just to be left alone, and I only had myself to blame, or to thank. My God, please, somebody had to notice I was gone.

My sobs of laughter rang out through the empty morning sunshine, under a faultless, empty blue sky.

~ CHILDPLAY ~

Book 2:

Commander Rick Strong

1

Identity: Commander Rick Strong

FROM THIS ALTITUDE, the stars had just begun to poke their pinpricks of light through the deep blue violet sky. The hazy film of the Earth’s atmosphere painted a milky edge onto the curved horizon as the sun rose up and morning broke fully.

Looking down I could just make out Atopia, flashing like a distant green gem beneath the wisps of stratospheric clouds, almost swallowed amid the endless seas below. From here, lacking any surface buildings except for the ring of the mass driver circling it and the four gleaming farm towers that rose up out of its center, Atopia appeared as a forested island a mile across, fringed by white sand beaches.

Returning my focus to the job at hand, I did another sweep of the area. But still nothing. I zeroed in on one of our UAVs, a giant but gossamer–winged creature whose photovoltaics glittered and reflected the morning sunshine back into the emptiness. I followed it with my projected visual point of view, watching its massive transparent propeller swing slowly around and around, urging it onwards into the edge of space.

“Good enough?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think that’s far enough,” responded Echo, my proxxi.

“Well, no hurry. Let’s make sure nothing is out here.”

I was kind of enjoying this lazy crawl across the top of the world with the UAV. I took a deep breath, watching the sun reflect off the seas from between the clouds below, trying to force a sense of relaxation into my body. The silence was serene and complete up here. I should come up more often, I thought to myself.

Just then, the new metasense I’d had installed prickled the back of my neck.

I looked around to see Patricia and her gaggle of reporters rising up from Atopia. In this augmented display space, each of their points-of-presence blinked and then brightened to a steady glow as they assembled around the test range. To me they appeared as a halo of tiny stars, hanging nearly ninety thousand feet up here with me.

They were waiting for the show to begin.

“Okay Adriana, let’s light this thing up,” I said to one of my system operators, pushing my focus back down to the dot of Atopia below and leaving the UAV to spin off into the distance.

Immediately, the speck of Atopia began pulsing with intense flickers of light, and I waited for the show to begin. I counted; one, two, three, four, and then the first flashes began to glitter in the near distance.

Tiny concentric shockwaves flashed outwards and away and the empty space began to shimmer, filling with hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands of white hot streaks that pancaked and mushroomed into a wall of flame. The inferno spread and engulfed me in a booming roar. I back-pedaled downwards and away, watching the sheet of flame envelope the sky.

“Very nice,” I declared, snapping back into my body at Atopia Defense Force Command.

Everyone was watching a three-dimensional display of the firestorm hovering over the center of the room, surrounded by the floating control systems of the slingshot battery.

“Would have been nice on that mission back in Nanda Devi, huh?” suggested Echo, standing with his arms folded beside me and admiring the show with the rest of the ADF Command team.

I took a deep breath.

“That’s just what I was thinking.”

Jimmy, my up-and-coming protégé, laughed, pointing towards his temple. “The wars of the future are going to be fought in here.”

“Wars have always been fought in there,” I chuckled back, “but even so, these babies sure make me feel better.”

The slingshot batteries were rotating platforms that could sling tens of thousands of explosive pellets per second into the sky at speeds of up to seven miles a second. The pellets were set to disintegrate and spread their incendiary contents at preset distances, creating a shield effect weapon that could put up an almost impenetrable wall of super heated plasma at ranges of up to a hundred or more miles away. This bad boy could take out incoming ballistic missiles, cruise weapons, aircraft, pretty much anything coming our way. Heck, I could have even taken out a mean looking flock of seagulls from two hundred clicks if I felt like it.

So far, seagulls were about all that dared come near us.

Atopia bristled with an array of fearsome weapons of which the slingshots were just one part of the high energy kinetic variety. Some of my other toys included the mass driver, the aerial and submarine UAV defense systems, not to mention the offensive and defensive cyber weapons. Everything was dusted down so heavy with smarticle sensor motes that even a flea couldn’t hop out there without me getting a bead on it. We were locked down tighter than a nun’s thighs, and that’s just how I liked it.

I looked around at the Command staff proudly. They were really starting to come together as a team. Just then I received a ping from Patricia Killiam, asking for a quick chat.

In an empty space beside me, the air began to shimmer, and her image slowly began to materialize. She was lighting up a cigarette and smiling at me, and dressed in a dark, short skirted business suit, old school style. Relaxed, but still somehow strict with her hair done up in a tight gray bun, and always well presented, never slouching. I liked Patricia.

“Finished playtime yet Rick?” she asked, shifting her hips from one side to the other and taking a drag from her smoke. She took a quick glance at the dissipating blaze on the main display, raising her eyebrows.

Today was the first time we’d tested the slingshots, and they’d more than lived up to their expectations. I checked a few last second details.

“Yeah, I think that about does it.”

“Good, because I think you scared the heck out of the wildlife I’ve managed to nurture on this tin can,” she admonished cheerfully, taking a puff from her smoke, “and the tourists want to go back in the water—not that you didn’t put on a good show for them. That was quite the shock and awe campaign.”

“Well you gotta wake up the neighbors from time to time,” I laughed.

We’d purposely decided not to pssi–block anything during the test to measure emotional responses during the weapons tests. I’d talked to Dr. Hal Granger about getting the best bang-for-the-buck out of our weapons exercises to impress on the rest of the world how not to mess with us. Hal projected the image of thoughtfulness on his broadcasts, but in person he was a bit of a toad—funny how that worked.

“Well, that’s your job, Rick, to help scare the world into respecting us. My job is to help scare the world into saving itself,” she said without a trace of humor. “Anyway, good work.”

“Did you see that thunderstorm coming in?” I asked after a moment. “We’ve been tracking that depression for weeks now, but we can’t avoid them all. Anyway, it’ll water your plants up top.”

She smiled.

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?” she suggested after a pause. I’d returned my attention to the slingshot control systems, but this thought snapped my mind back. I looked up at her.

“That’s actually a great idea,” I replied. Cindy, my wife, was having a hard time adjusting to coming here.

“So you really think that whole thing could be a good idea?” I added, coming back to an idea I’d been discussing with Pat earlier about Cindy.

“Yes, I think so,” she replied. I looked at her, sensing some hesitation, but her smile convinced me otherwise.

I nodded and smiled, then returned my attention to the slingshot systems.

“Thanks, Pat, see you later then.”

I smiled at her as she walked off and faded away without another word. This was definitely her party.

All that neo–hippie stuff that Atopia floated on in the waters of the world media didn’t mean that a lot of nasty people out there weren’t eyeing this little piece of heaven with very bad things in mind. Atopia was out in international waters, and as one of the first floating sovereign city-states, it had to be able to protect itself from all comers. At some point the Atopian masters of synthetic reality had to bow to where the rubber met the road in the dirty, physical world, and that was where I came in.

Atopia was closely allied with America, its original flag before independence, but America had enough trouble taking care of its shrinking sphere of influence. I should know after spending the best part of my career in the thick of the first Weather War skirmishes.

What had begun with China diverting water from rivers flowing out of the Himalayas had quickly turned the roof of the world into a global hot spot, but their double punch of seeding clouds to drop their rain before reaching India was what had really tipped the bucket. The combination had driven crop failures, mass starvations, and a nasty confrontation between the newly muscular superpowers.

While the initial conflict was long over, regional wars over a growing variety of resource depletions had continued to expand and had engulfed most of Asia. Of course, the world teetering on the brink of destruction was nothing new.

And now I was in the center of the cyber universe.

So the best and brightest of the world had begun emigrating to build the new New World, the Bensalem group of seasteads of which Atopia was the crown jewel. Atopia was supposed to be—was marketed as—this shining beacon of libertarian ideals. She was the largest of a collection of platforms in the Pacific off California, a kind of new Silicon Valley that would solve the world’s problems with technological wizardry.

Come to the offshore colonies, they said, for the security, fresh air, good food, the sun, the sea and first dibs on the latest and greatest in cyber gadgets. Come to escape the crowding, the pollution, the strife and conflict—and that, brother, was the truth. So the rich came here and to other places like this, while the rest of humanity watched us needily and greedily.

It was my job to protect them; the rich folks of Atopia, of course, not the masses of the rest of humanity.

I laughed to myself; tough guy, huh? Who was I kidding? I was a washed–up basket case who could hardly manage a night of sleep without waking up in a terrified sweat half the time. The only reason I was here was to try and make an attempt at reviving my relationship with my wife, Cindy. Without Cindy, I would be off in some sweaty corner of the world acting out a kind of ‘heart of darkness’ finale to my life in a psychotic blaze of glory.

Maybe that was a little dramatic. I’d probably be off soaking my sorrows in a bottle while desk jockeying in Washington—that sounded a little more likely. I smiled and began to run through the slingshot shutdown checklist, but then paused as I felt the old guilt begin to bleed out around the edges of my life again.

“Want me to pick up some flowers for her from Vince?” asked Echo. He always knew what I was thinking, especially when I was thinking about her.

“Yeah, that’s a great idea,” I responded without looking away from what I was doing. Noticing a breach report from Jimmy I added, “And could you look into what made that UAV malfunction? The damn thing circled back and burned up in the blaze. What the hell was it doing up there anyway?” I shook my head.

Echo nodded that he’d take care of it as he silently walked off. He was good at taking orders.

§

The excitement of the slingshot test hadn’t yet faded and I felt an energetic flow carrying me down the hallways back home.  The flowers Echo had gotten from Vince were perfect. Flowers were always a sure bet for making a woman feel special, weren’t they?

“Hi, sweetie! I’m home!”

I proudly held the bouquet of real flowers in front of me as I walked through the door. I’d snuck along the corridors as I’d arrived with them, trying to avoid the prying eyes and bad graces of our neighbors who would have seen the wasteful gift in my hands.

Cindy looked at the flowers less than enthusiastically as I entered.

She hadn’t even bothered to shower today and sat in a dreary heap on the couch, bags under her eyes, watching a dimstim projection. A large head floated in the middle of our living room, contorting itself in the middle of a joke while a laugh track droned on in the background. Cindy wasn’t smiling, though, her face just dully reflecting light from the display.

It was going to be another one of those kinds of evenings.

“Rick, you didn’t need to buy flowers,” she immediately complained. “What are the neighbors going to think?”

“Sorry, sweetie.” I felt like I was always being sorry these days.

Walking in, I could see it was Dr. Hal Granger’s EmoShow floating in the display space in the middle of the room.

“Could we turn off Dr. Emo, please?” I asked more edgily than I intended. “I get enough of him during the day.”

I felt stupid standing there with the flowers.

“Sure. He’s all that gets me through the days here, but no problem,” she announced as Hal’s head disappeared from the middle of the room, casting the place into sullen silence. With a great sigh she glanced at me and declared, “Well, I guess I’ll get a vase or something.”

She swung herself laboriously off the couch and got up to go into the kitchen area.

“How was your day?” I said brightly, trying to restart the conversation. She was rummaging around in some drawers in the kitchen, off to the side of the large, open main room of our apartment.

“It was fine,” she responded, lightening up a bit, “but this place is so depressing. I feel like I can’t get any space or air. This apartment is so…subterranean.”

I rolled my eyes, but carefully. By Atopian standards we lived in a palace. Our place was near the edge of the underwater shelf, not more than eighty feet down. A large curved window looked out into the kelp forests, and rays of sunlight danced through from the waves above, illuminating the brightly colored fish swimming past.

Most people didn’t even have an exterior window, never mind all this space and furnishings. That was the entire point of Atopia: with everyone here having deep and easy access to almost perfect synthetic reality, you didn’t need much in the way of space or material things in the physical world.

“Submarine,” I corrected her pointlessly, “you mean submarine.”

“Whatever. It’s dark and claustrophobic.”

She had found a vase and was filling it with water. The tap turned off after a few inches had filled its bottom, and then she walked purposely towards me with it in hand.

“Cindy,” I started, and then stopped. I searched for the right words. “Cindy, just try to use the pssi system. You can be anywhere, do anything you want.”

That was the wrong thing to say. I took the vase of water from her hands and cringed looking at her face. I was a real tough guy, all right.

“I don’t like the pssi system!” she spat out at me. Then she closed her eyes, counting to ten as she backed up a little. Her shoulders relaxed and she opened her eyes.

I said nothing.

“Okay, sorry, I just had a bad day. Sorry.” She shook her head.

“Look, pssi is great for watching stuff and surfing the net, but I don’t like all this…this…” she stuttered, searching for words and waving her hands around in the air, “all this flittering and stimswitching. It’s weird.”

“I know,” I acknowledged. I’d been subjected to enough of Dr. Hal’s EmoShow to know that acknowledging your partner’s feelings was important. “I know this isn’t working out the way we hoped, but I took on a commitment here, and I can’t very well crawl back to Washington with my tail between my legs now. I mean, just try and give it a chance, or at least go up on the beaches?”

I was holding the vase with one hand and waving the other towards the ceiling, pleading with her. She took the vase back from me and smiled as she poked at the flowers.

“I know you’re right, Rick. And these are beautiful flowers,” she said, leaning down to put them on the table. She stepped back and stood straight up to admire them.

“I’ll try harder,” she declared.

My heart filled with some small hope.

“Thank you, sweetheart.”

“It is nice being able to use pssi to spend time with my sister back home,” she admitted, “and she has such great kids.”

I could see what was coming next, and my heart sank back down fearfully.

“Rick, have you thought about what we talked about? What would make me really happy? The reason I thought we came here?”

“I’ve thought about it, sweetie. I’m just not sure that either of us is ready for it,” I replied. “Just not quite yet, okay?”

“Okay,” she replied, doing her best to smile as I walked over to give her a hug.

I had an idea.

2

THERE WAS STILL nothing quite like a hot cup of jamoke to get me kick started in the morning. I was back in Command, getting a bright and early start to the day, and going through my homework assignments, coming up to speed on the core synthetic reality platform that everything else depended on.

The pssi—polysynthetic sensory interface—system had originally grown out of research to move artificial limbs, using nanoscale smarticles embedded in the nervous system to sense and modify signals passing through it. Fairly quickly they’d learnt the trick of replaying stored nerve conduction patterns, and creating completely synthetic sensory spaces had followed in short order. In this they’d more than succeeded; to most Atopians, synthetic reality was more real than the real world.

You didn’t need to understand how it worked to use it, though. The proxxi program, a kind of digital alter ego designed to help users navigate pssi space, was almost as amazing as the platform itself. After only a year of using it, my own proxxi, Echo, felt as much a part of me as I was myself. It was impossible to imagine how I’d gotten along before. I clicked over to watch Patricia Killiam in another of her press conferences promoting the upcoming launch.

“Describe a proxxi again?” asked a reporter.

“Proxxi are like biological-digital symbiotes that attach to your neural system, sharing all your memories and sensory data as well as control of your motor system. You could think of them as your digital twin.”

“So why do we need one?”

“That is a very good question,” replied Patricia, smiling approvingly. “Did you know that more peoples’ bodies are injured today while they’re off in virtual worlds and games than in auto and air accidents combined? Proxxi help solve this problem by controlling and protecting your body while you’re away, so to speak…”

The press conference droned on as my own mind wandered off. Despite the endless list of projects to get through, my mind couldn’t help circling back to Cindy and my idea. I clicked off the visual overlay of Patricia’s press conference and focused back on my Command task list as the rest of my staff arrived for the day.

Patricia had just uploaded some of her latest weather forecasts, and we’d been surprised by her predicted upgrading of tropical storm Ignacia out in the North Atlantic. Our own weather systems hadn’t seen this, but as we reviewed her datasets it all suddenly fit together.

It worried me that even with all the technology we had we could miss this, even if it was in another ocean and off our radar screens.

Mother Nature was a far more tangible danger to Atopia than a foreign attack, and we had to do our best to steer clear of Her. Record global temperatures predicted an intense hurricane season, and we were already well into the seasonal dance of steering clear of disturbances coming our way. This usually wasn’t much of a problem out here in the East Pacific off the Baja. Most of the intense hurricanes and cyclones tended to keep to the North Atlantic and Western Pacific basins. Still, Atopia had a draft of more than five hundred feet below the waterline, and the thought of the fusion reactor core down there grinding into a seamount made me sweaty.

“Looks good to me,” I offered, shrugging.

A simulation graphic occupied almost the entire volume of the room, and a grunt from Solomon House was driving our point of view around it with dizzying speed. It was a month-ahead projection of winds, storms, surface and sub–surface ocean currents and temperatures, plotting an optimal course through it all.

Atopia wasn’t really a ship of course, she was a platform, but we could drive her around comfortably at a few miles per hour and more if we really needed. Staying away from bad weather also meant that the beaches were usually sunny, which was a plus even in a place where everyone was off in synthetic space most of the time. Long range future predictions indicated a gathering string of depressions coming our way, so we’d begun backing away north and eastwards towards the distant coast of America.

“Great! Well, that’s it then,” said the grunt, a pssi–kid named Eddy.

He floated in a lotus position in the middle of the display, toying with it. Officially the Command ops team needed my sign off, but they could see my mind was elsewhere. They were just humoring me with their detailed explanations. Eddy rode the disappearing projection like a magic carpet, receding into an infinitesimal point in the middle of the room.

I sighed and rolled my eyes, taking a sip from my coffee. Give me boots in the mud over this any day, but I was there and had to try to wrap my tired head around it.

I summoned up some energy.

“So you think I should bring on Jimmy, huh?” I asked, looking at a note from Patricia Killiam in the report. Her proxxi, a young looking woman named Marie, materialized in front of me, leaning on a railing and stretching her long legs between us.

“Yes, we do, absolutely,” Marie responded. “You know as much as we do that you need all the help you can get in this area.”

“I don’t disagree, it’s just…he’s just a kid.” I knew any objections would be pointless, but thought it worthwhile to at least express my opinion.

Patricia had taken Jimmy under her wing like her own child when his parents had abruptly left Atopia, so beyond his doubtless qualifications there were other factors involved. There were rumors of marriage problems and abuse involving Jimmy which struck a very personal chord. I’d had it rough growing up too.

“He’s a kid that knows more about conscious boundary security systems than you and the whole rest of your team,” she argued, and then added, “and pretty much more than anyone else for that matter. We have to stay on top of the threat posed by Terra Nova.”

Her eyes narrowed.

Personally I didn’t go for all this stuff about Terra Nova. They didn’t pose any tactical threat to Atopia, but they sure were worked up about it. On the outside, Atopia and Terra Nova were more or less viewed as two sides to the same coin, but the rivalry between these competing colonies was whipping up into a fervor. I wasn’t sure it was for the best.

“Yeah, you’re right,” was all I could think to say at that point. “Hey, this tub is your party. If you want some kid with peach fuzz for whiskers on the Security Council, it’s all good with me.”

“Jimmy is a special kid, Rick,” she mused. “Anyway, he’s our pick.”

She said this with some finality. I let it settle.

“Good enough for me, then.” I grinned.

“Good.”

She smiled winningly at me and faded away.

§

It’d been a long day, and I’d been mulling over my idea for Cindy the whole time. Standing alone in the featureless tubular corridor outside our apartment, I hesitated. Was it really what I wanted?

Our door slid open as I strode in.

“Hey honey, I’m home!” I yelled out as enthusiastically as I could muster, and then stopped and tried to make sense of what appeared in front of me.

Our apartment was gone. Well, not exactly gone, but replaced by a pssi projection.

Marbled columns rose around a sunken living area in the middle of the room, surrounded by a raised terrace, and there was a feast waiting on a low table with red and gold pillows littered around it. Incense filled the room and two hand servants quietly and quickly moved in towards me and bowed. A gentle wind blew in through billowing silk curtains, revealing the jumbled and exotic skyline of Mumbai framed in the distance.

Cindy swept in through one of the doorways to the side.

“Isn’t it just dreamy?” she exclaimed, running to jump at me. She was wearing a tight wrap around skirt with an almost transparent sheer red kurta on top. Draping her arms around me she kissed me wetly. “Thanks for those flowers yesterday—that was really sweet of you.”

“Looks fantastic,” I said encouragingly from beneath her kiss, bemused at the scene and her enthusiasm.

She took my hand and squealed, “Come on, let’s eat!” as she pulled me around the side of the room and down to the stairs to the table.

It was a very low table, the kind you had to sit at on the floor and squeeze your legs underneath, and she pulled me down onto the pillows and blankets at its side, kissing me again. Reaching over she pulled a bunch of grapes off the table and began feeding them to me one at a time.

“So how was work today?” she asked, popping a grape into my mouth.

I laughed and ate the offering.

“Long,” I replied, “but we’ve decided to nominate Jimmy to the Security Council as a specialist in conscious boundary systems. He’ll be a big help.”

“Jimmy—Bob’s brother Jimmy?” she asked.

“Yeah, that’s right, well sort-of brother anyway.”

I frowned. For brothers, adopted or not, Jimmy and Bob sure didn’t seem to talk much. Of course, I hardly spoke to my own brothers much either.

We pulled some pillows up around us, and the sun began to set as we chatted. This was the first time I could remember feeling totally at ease with Cindy in a long time. It was nice. Finally, perhaps things were turning around.

When I was about stuffed, she surprised me again.

“So Mr. Rick Strong, who would you like me to be tonight?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, casting her eyes down, and then looking back up at me as she bit her tongue between her teeth and smiled.

Yes, I knew what she meant.

“Would you like me to skin up too?”

I smiled playfully at her.

“Sure…” she giggled like a schoolgirl, “you go first.”

She had unbuttoned my shirt and was rubbing my chest, playing with one of my nipples. We hadn’t made love in months. She nudged me with a phantom for a stimshare and I quickly accepted, watching her shiver as my sensory input filled her. I hadn’t expected this when I walked in the door.

“No, you first, who would you like me to be?” I asked.

This wasn’t the kind of stuff I really went for, but I was happy to experiment a little. She looked at me shyly, and then looked away, embarrassed.

“Well, that Spanish guy in the crime dramas, you know, Julio…”

“Sure, sure…I know him,” I said, laughing. “Are you sure?”

She nodded.

Echo had already sent me the copyright release in an overlay the moment she uttered the words. Looking at the rates, I could see that skin time in this Julio guy was expensive. He must be popular with the ladies.

What the heck. I punched the ‘buy’ and ‘skin’ buttons simultaneously with a phantom and detached out of myself to look down at some Spanish guy sitting on the pillows, cuddling with my wife. It was hard to get used to this stuff, I thought, shaking my head, and then snapped back into my body.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

I sat up a little and put myself on display, raising my eyebrows and winking at her.

“Very sexy, Mr. Commander,” she laughed, “now it’s your turn.”

“Ahh…how about that Phuture News Network celebrity girl?”

“What?” she exclaimed, laughing and punching me gently in the shoulder.

“Yeah, yeah, that girl…you know the one.”

I laughed awkwardly. The Phuture News girl’s large breasts were about all that came to mind on such short notice.

“Okay,” she agreed, grinning shyly. “If that’s what you’d like.”

As I watched, holding her, she morphed into the Phuture News girl. With particular fascination, I watched her breasts swell under the transparent fabric of the kurta. She looked up at me bashfully.

Maybe I could get used to this.

A rush of animal desire coursed through me. I lifted the kurta, revealing her swollen breasts whose nipples popped to attention like little soldiers. I took one of them into my mouth, rolling it around with my tongue, hearing my wife softly moan as I scooped her into my arms.

Yeah, I could definitely get used to this.

§

Afterwards we were lying in the jumble of pillows beside the table, back in our own skins. Cindy was lying curled up beside me with one of my arms wrapped around her, and my brain was lazily tingling and thinking about how best to bring up my idea. She was trying, so maybe it was time for me to try too.

Baby steps, baby steps. I smiled at that thought.

Cindy gently twitched against me, dropping off to sleep, and then she twitched harder, and then again. Wait, was that a sob?

“Cindy?” I said gently, my brow furrowing and my brain fighting back from the fog it had drifted off into.

“Cindy?” I asked again, more urgently.

She turned to me, slowly, her eyes wet above cheeks streaked with tears. She wiped the tears away with the back of one hand, looking down and away from me.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know…”

“Come on, what’s wrong?”

She sighed and looked at me, shrugging her shoulders and hunching inwards as if to protect herself.

“I just didn’t like that, Rick,” she said softly. “The way you looked at me, you were happy I was someone else.”

The fog around my brain quickly evaporated, sensing imminent danger.

“Honey, that’s not true at all,” I said, knowing this was only half true. I raised myself up on one elbow to look down at her. “I was only doing it because you wanted to.”

That was true enough.

“I was only doing it because I thought that’s what you wanted,” she declared, wiping away another tear. “I want to make you happy, Rick. I know I haven’t been great to be around lately.”

“Aw, honey,” I replied, searching for the right way out of this, “look, I love you, and you’re the only person I want to be with.”

This was absolutely the truth.

“If anything, it’s me that wants to make you happy. I want to make us work again. It’s my fault, all this, I mean, you know what I mean.”

The guilt spilled back out and my emotions welled up. I knew she could see it.

“I love you too,” she replied simply. “I’m just not comfortable with all this pssi stuff. I am trying though.”

This suddenly seemed like the right time.

“Look, I’ve been thinking.”

“Uh huh,” she sniffled.

I took a deep breath.

“Like I said, I’m not sure if we’re ready for kids just yet, but maybe we are. Maybe we could take a half step, and get you more into the pssi system at the same time.”

“I’m listening,” she said, reaching up to tenderly stroke my chin with one hand.

“What would you think about proxxids?”

She crinkled her nose. “What, those are like little fake simulated kids right?”

“Well, yes and no,” I answered, “I’ve been looking them up and talking to Jimmy and Patricia. I think it could be perfect for us right now.”

Silence settled, and then, “I’m still listening.”

“They’re not just fake kids. They take our actual DNA code and mix it together as if it was a real fertilization, and then simulate the development process to generate what our real little baby would be like if we had one.”

I took a breath, watching her carefully before continuing.

“You can pick traits, of course, like eye color or more subtle stuff if you want, but that’s sort of the point,” I explained. “It’s like trying out a trial version of how your kid will look and behave.”

“Uh huh,” she replied skeptically, “why don’t you just get them to send you a bunch of mock–ups and we can stick them up on the wall and pick a model we like?”

The sarcasm was obvious, but lightened with humor. I could sense the clouds clearing.

“It’s not just that,” I added encouragingly, “these things, you have to take care of them, just like they were real babies…feed them, burp them, put them to sleep. You get the full treatment, and that’s really the point—you can see how your kid will behave at different ages before you have them, to make sure you’ll like what you’re getting.”

“And why would I want to do this?”

“Well, I thought that if we took care of a proxxid for a few weeks or months,” I answered, looking straight into her eyes, “we could see if we liked having a screaming kid around.”

I smiled at her.

“…and then?” she asked, smiling back.

“And then, well, if it felt right, we could have a real child, but we’d get to experiment a little first. What do you think?”

She cuddled into me and looked up into my face.

“Okay Mr. Rick Strong, I’m willing to give it a try.”

Maybe this whole thing would work out, I thought, and a great weight lifted from my chest.

3

BABY SHOWER—I’D never really understood the term. Why did they call it a shower? Because they showered the mother with gifts? Weren’t they supposed to have these parties before the baby arrived?

Anyway, I guess it didn’t matter, and I had to admit, he sure was a cute little sucker. Our Little Ricky had bright blue eyes—his daddy’s eyes.

This had turned into something of a coming out party for the Strong family on Atopia. The place was packed and everyone was milling about our apartment with drinks in hand, dropping into spontaneous little groups for small talk around the entertainment space I had Echo create for us. The star of the evening, of course, was Little Ricky, our bouncing baby proxxid, who burbled and gurgled away in his mother’s arms.

Cindy positively glowed.

From the corner of one eye, I could see Bobby Baxter, Jimmy’s adopted brother, making his way towards us with a stunning blond in tow.

“Congratulations Commander Strong!” he immediately blurted out when he got near, outstretching his hand.

I smiled and rolled my eyes slightly, but gripped his hand tightly and shook it.

“Thanks Bob.”

I still wasn’t quite sure if everyone was being genuine, or if they were gently poking fun at someone having a simulated baby.

“Is Jimmy coming?” I asked.

Bob shook his head. “You’d know more than me, Commander.”

Awkward pause.

“And of course congratulations to the lovely new proxxid mother,” laughed Bob as he let go of my hand and leaned over to kiss my wife on the cheek.

I looked past him to have a look at his date. She shifted uncomfortably, waiting to be introduced. The rumor mill was constantly circulating with stories about how Bob was wasting his life away, but he sure could pick his women.

“…and this lovely lady is?” I asked, smiling at his date intently. She smiled back. Stunning.

“Oh, ah,” mumbled Bob, “this is Nicky”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said as I reached out to shake her hand, gently pulling her close for a kiss on the cheek. Just being polite, of course.

“A pleasure,” replied Nicky, smiling radiantly.

Bob wandered off for a drink while my wife and I exchanged some pleasantries with his girlfriend. A few more women arrived and began mobbing my wife to have a look at the proxxid.

“Here, could you hold him for a second, Rick honey?” asked my wife.

I nodded, returning my attention to her. The group of woman all smiled watching me awkwardly take hold of him. Such a tiny package, so warm and soft; it was disarming to look down into his little face and see part of myself staring back up at me. I couldn’t help but smile.

“I’ll be back in a sec,” said Cindy. “I just need to get some juice.”

Little Ricky let out a loud squeal as she left, wriggling in my arms. The overhead lights reflected brightly in his wet little eyes and moist little lips and he smiled a toothless, gummy grin at me.

When we’d ordered the proxxid, it had come with some warnings, but I had a hard time seeing how an imaginary baby could be dangerous. We’d just try this one, and it certainly seemed to be doing Cindy a world of good.

Adriana, my slingshot lead at Command, stood beside me and poked Little Ricky gently in the tummy, tickling him to generate more squeals and giggles.

“Isn’t he just the sweetest little thing, Commander?”

If I wasn’t married and holding my synthetic baby, I would have sworn she was flirting with me. I couldn’t resist.

“He sure is, just like his daddy,” I replied with a smile.

She was the one with the sensorgy artist boyfriend. To me, it all seemed like pornography, but to them, well, I was just old. She smiled at me, and then looked back down at Little Ricky.

“Look at those bright blue eyes—you guys just have to make sure you get blue eyes when you have your kid, so beautiful…he’ll be a lady killer!” she exclaimed, winking at me, or so I thought. She tickled Little Ricky’s ribs again for more squeals. “What a happy boy!”

I laughed. Was she referring to him or me?

I bounced Little Ricky up and down a bit, basking in Adriana’s attention and thinking that this was what one did with babies. Perhaps it really was best to have a proxxid before attempting the real thing.

Cindy returned and tapped me on the shoulder, taking a sidelong glance at Adriana.

“I’ll take him back now, tiger,” said my wife.

She nodded towards the door. Vince Indigo, the famous founder of the Phuture News Network, had just appeared. He’d been one of the people who’d gone out of their way to welcome us onto Atopia. He looked tired and stressed, but smiled at me as I looked his way.

I gave him a small wave, and then cooed at Little Ricky one more time before handing him back to my wife. I walked over to grab a drink and say hello to Vince. It looked like he could use a drink as well.

“Congrats Rick!” he exclaimed as I neared, reaching out to shake my hand.

I motioned him over to the bar, taking his hand firmly. Again, I felt slightly foolish.

“Thanks Vince. Oh, and thanks for those flowers the other day, Cindy really loved them.”

“No problem at all.”

We’d reached the bar.

“So, what’ll it be?” I asked.

Vince surveyed the bottles, but then shook his head. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

That wasn’t like Vince.

“You sure?” I asked as I dropped some ice cubes into a cut glass tumbler, topping it off with some whiskey.

He shrugged.

“I’m just kind of busy…” His voice trailed off and he stared at the floor.

Definitely not the Vince I knew. I wondered what was up. Maybe he was trying his best not to offend me, thinking this whole thing was ridiculous.

“This thing, it’s just a little game,” I laughed, shaking my head and looking towards my wife holding our simulated baby. “I’m just doing it to keep her happy, you know how it is.”

At that, Vince’s attention seemed to suddenly sharpen.

“No, no, absolutely this is the best thing,” replied Vince warmly, “you need to do this, it’s the way of the future!”

He clapped me enthusiastically on the back. I snorted and took a sip of my drink, feeling less self-conscious.

“I mean it, Rick, you should have as many proxxids as you can before going on to the real thing.”

Vince seemed very genuine about it.

“You really think so?” I asked.

“I do my friend, I do.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it.

“Listen, I have to get going, though. Sorry. Give Cindy a kiss for me, okay?”

“I will.” I nodded, smiling.

He hesitated. Something was wrong. He wanted to say something but couldn’t. He just needed to be somewhere else, and not some baby shower.

“Go on, get going!” I laughed and clapped him on the back.

Vince nodded, smiling, and with a wave goodbye he faded away from this reality.

I took a long pull of my drink and looked around.

Bob was sulking on a couch in a corner, flicking little fireballs at what looked like tiny rabbits. I guessed that he didn’t understand baby showers either, and laughed as I poured myself another stiff drink to celebrate.

This proxxid was one of the best ideas I’d ever had. My heart was bursting with pride.

4

MAYBE THESE PROXXIDS had been a bad idea. While everything had started off great a few weeks ago, Cindy had continued to insist on the full treatment. This was my idea, she liked to remind me as she gently prodded me to get up and coddle our screaming baby at all hours of the night. I hadn’t slept properly in weeks.

It’d been a long and difficult day as I’d tried to get on top of the blended threats that were testing our defenses. Cyber attacks were constantly probing our perimeter, searching for vulnerabilities and weaknesses. They’d also just upgraded the large depression moving up the coast of Central America in the Eastern Pacific into tropical storm Newton, and another depression was fast following behind.

I had a pile more work to try and get done, but at the same time I wanted to spend quality time with Cindy and the boys. In the end, I’d come home as early as I could, but I regretted it as I stepped across the threshold into our space.

My home was a pigsty of toys, but then again my ‘home’ hadn’t resembled our old apartment in weeks. Today Cindy had turned it into a kind of suburban estate somewhere in Connecticut, complete with an enormous backyard with a trampoline and swimming pool. I guessed that it reminded her of where she grew up.

About half a dozen sim–kids were over to play with Little Ricky, and they were all screaming and running past me as I came in the door.

“Hey Dad!” squealed out Little Ricky as he flew past, chasing the others into the living room.

It was amazing how fast they grew up. I mean, really amazing. Proxxids were designed to give you the full spectrum of how your kids would look and act, and we had them aging at an exponential pace, so while Ricky had aged one year during the first month we had him, during the next three weeks he had aged five more years.

It was hard to keep in mind they were just simulations, and they didn’t seem to notice because of the built-in cognitive blind spots. Most people just stepped them through a few target ages to get the general idea, but Cindy seemed to be enjoying the whole, painful process.

“Hey Ricky,” I called back.

Despite my grumpiness I couldn’t help smiling at the glee on his face. At that point a big black Labrador appeared, scuttling around the same corner the kids had appeared from, the last in the chase pack. It shot by behind my legs and into the living room to set off a new round of excited screams. I raised my eyebrows.

“Biffy is the newest addition to the family,” declared Cindy proudly.

She was sitting at the dining room table and feeding little Derek, our second proxxid. She’d seen me eyeing the dog.

“Biffy huh? I thought Derek was the newest addition to the family.”

“That was so last week, honey.”

She hardly looked up at me. I thought she was joking, but she didn’t crack a smile.

Derek dribbled carrot baby food down his chin as Cindy tried to spoon it in. He looked up at me, let go a big squeak, and pounded his rattle on the tray holding the food, sending thick orange splatters up around the room and onto Cindy. She patiently smiled in a motherly way and kept trying to spoon it in.

“Well, it’s nice to see how their personalities would react with animals, no?” she asked, wiping carrot puree from her hair with the back of one hand. “Isn’t this what we’re trying to do, to try out different things?”

“Yeah, you’re right.” I shrugged.

I had to admit, my plan seemed to be working.

Since we’d had the proxxids in our lives, Cindy had begun using her pssi more and more. To begin with, she had just added some rooms to our place, and then she’d begun changing the configuration of our home and location more elaborately to suit her needs. It was something new almost every day, and it wasn’t unwillingly like before. She was taking to it as a part of her day to day life.

Not only that, but I had to admit she looked great at it. She was sticking with the whole nine yards of the proxxid experience, feeding and changing them, bringing simulated kids over for playtime, everything. It really did seem to suit her.

“So what do you think of brown eyes?” she asked while I admired her mothering skills.

She picked up Derek and sat him on her lap, looking into his face. I walked over to the both of them.

“I like brown too,” I replied looking down into Derek’s eyes.

I still found it a little unnerving how real these kids seemed, and maybe that was part of the reason for my own frayed nerves. Not sleeping in more than a week wasn’t helping either.

While Cindy had taken to the full blown experience, I was having a hard time balancing it with all my other responsibilities. Cindy was also interrupting me a dozen times a day to tell me about something one of them did and explain how great it was and how it related to this or that genetic expression.

“You seem to like everything, Rick,” she said, gently putting Derek down.

“Go on and play with your brother,” she told him, and he squeaked and began wriggling across the floor to the living room. She turned back to me.

“Rick, you’re the one who wanted to do this,” she sternly observed. “I just want you to participate a little more.”

Annoyed, I began to stammer, “I am…I mean I’m trying…” but I was cut short by a rising cacophony of shrieks.

The boys appeared from the living room and began running around the dining room table we were sitting at, laughing and chasing a flock of tiny flying dragons. I stopped, scratching the stubble on my neck irritably, waiting for them to disappear again.

“Do we really need to have a half a dozen simulated brats running around?” I demanded louder than I intended, my frustration mounting.

On the walk over here, I had decided to tell Cindy that I was ready to have real kids, and I was annoyed to have these things running around me screaming at such an important moment.

Her eyes flashed angrily at me, and then she turned to the kids.

“Boys, boys, we’re trying to talk here,” she said softly, shooing the flock of dragons back towards the living room. “Please.”

When I wasn’t looking, they’d all skinned themselves up as miniature purple tyrannosaurs, and were affecting puzzled little dinosaur expressions looking at the two of us. Little Ricky, the eldest, could take a hint, though, and quickly turned to lead the pack squealing back into the other room.

Cindy smiled and turned back to me.

“Did you see that? How he took the lead?” she pointed out. “We need to see how Little Ricky socializes, don’t we? I mean we picked a specific set of genes regarding his personality, and I for one want to see what this really means. Expression markers on a piece of paper are one thing, but…” The noise level in the next room exploded in screeches again, cutting her off.

I shrugged with wide eyes.

“Can’t we just turn the simulation off for a minute?”

I was getting a headache.

“You can’t just turn kids off, can you Rick?”

“No, but we can sure as heck turn these ones off.”

Echo materialized in my display space beside her, sensing something imminent. Cindy turned to him angrily.

“You mind your own business, mister!” she spat at him, wagging a finger in his direction. If a proxxi could be taken aback, he was, and rapidly dematerialized.

She turned back to me and added, “See Rick, this is just what I was talking about. If you find Ricky too rambunctious, maybe we should select for more introverted character traits. A part of this process is understanding how they will affect us and our relationship.”

I could see her point, but I already had a head of steam brewing.

“Look, I don’t want to have an introvert as a son. I had something important to tell you this evening…”

“And I had something important too, Rick,” she gushed out breathlessly before I could continue. “I want another proxxid.”

I was stunned. In another week or two Little Ricky would be ten years old, Derek would be heading into the terrible twos and now she wanted another one?

“We’re getting rid of these ones, though, right?” I asked incredulously.

“Getting rid of them?”

The whites of her eyes grew and she worked into a panic.

“We haven’t even gotten started with them. So you want to stop halfway through and call this whole thing a waste of time? Call my effort a waste of time?”

“Waste of time? I’ll tell you what a waste of time is, Cindy. I’m trying to make sure this tin can we’re floating in isn’t sabotaged or wrecked by some storm, and I’m strung out on Sleep–Overs from waking up to rock these stupid simulated babies to sleep every night!”

I hadn’t noticed that I’d started yelling, and suddenly everything was very quiet. The boys had circled back into the dining room, and the tiny dinosaurs were staring at me, tears welling in their little carnivorous eyes.

Derek started crying.

Cindy looked up at me and said quietly, “I just wanted to try having a little girl proxxid, to see what that was like.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose between my index and forefinger, my eyes tightly closed.

“I’m going to go back to work for a while, okay? I really have some stuff I need to get done. We’ll talk later. I’m sorry.”

Cindy tried to reach for me, but I shrugged her off and walked quickly back out the door.

§

Even with a full moon, it was almost pitch black under the dense tropical canopy. I’d just about worked myself up into a full sprint, dodging and weaving between the tree trunks.

Pssi was many things, but it was something else at night. The pitch darkness to my unaided eyes was overlaid with infrared and enhanced color images, so I could make my way easily even in the blackness. While I was primarily in charge of the run, Echo was subtly shifting my foot placements and balance here and there, and ducking my head slightly every now and then to adjust my trajectory through the jungle maze as I shot through it.

Echo had also networked in a few wild horses to stampede through the underbrush with us, and some monkeys swung hooting overhead. The net effect was a mad, euphoric rush through the undergrowth. It was the best way I knew to burn off steam.

The argument with Cindy had reminded me of how my parents had fought, and those bad memories jumped back into my mind. At first I’d gone back to the office to burrow into a pile of work, and Echo had said nothing, just working with me on the files. I’d really just wanted to tell her I was ready, but then that had happened. It felt like some kind of sign. I fought off the feeling.

Maybe that was what the proxxids were designed for, to help test you. If so, they were working.

My cheekbone bounced off something as I ricocheted off to one side and then cart wheeled into a thicket of palmettos. Wetness spread across my face. The hoard around me stopped, dousing the rampage in a sudden stillness.

“Maybe you should let me do more of the night driving,” said Echo. He waited for me to pick myself up.

I must have hit a tree branch. Ouch. The animals quietly dispersed, sensing an end to our fun.

“Naw, I like to keep myself as in touch with my body as I can, you know that.”

The more you used a proxxi to guide your body, the more you stood to lose neural cohesion, and that led down a slippery slope. I needed to be in total control of my body. When we used pssi prototypes in simulated combat training, I always made it a point to keep myself and my team in perfect neural coherence between our simulated and real bodies. Pssi was great for adjusting your aim or getting through trauma, but for the day to day stuff I still believed in plain old wetware as much as possible.

“For a guy who likes to keep in touch with his body, you sure can’t feel a thing,” commented Echo, standing beside me. “That’s going to leave a mark in the morning.”

I had my incoming neural pain network tuned down so low I had almost no sensation, at least none of the pain coming from my nervous system. My heart ached something terrible, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.

The perception of emotional pain was a funny thing. The more you tried to push it out, the more it seemed to dig itself in.

“Hey this is what we do in combat training,” I tried to tell him, but he knew me as well as I knew myself.

I tuned my pain receptors back up and felt a flood of pain from my face and ankle. It wasn’t smart to try and walk on a sprained ankle without your pain receptors fired up, not unless you had to.

“We’re not in combat training, soldier,” laughed Echo.

I limped towards the edge of the woods. Echo was walking beside me, and we were just at the edge of the beaches.

“You can’t turn off the pain, and you can’t beat yourself up either,” continued Echo as we reached the sand and walked out onto the empty beach. “You’re not your parents, Rick.”

“I know.”

“I’m not sure that you do, actually.”

A silence settled.

“Nice out here tonight, huh?” I said after a bit, changing the topic.

Echo just looked at me and nodded. “Yeah, it sure is.”

We laid down in the sand, side by side, and looked up at the bright stars hanging silently above us. I tuned the ultraviolet and x–ray spectra into my visual system, and watched the night sky begin to glow in neon blues and ghostly whites above us.

“Beautiful to be alive, isn’t it?” I said to Echo, wondering to myself if I was just trying to run away again.

I hardly noticed that Echo didn’t respond.

§

I stayed out the rest of that evening, not wanting to explain a bloody and bruised face to Cindy in the middle of the night. Dodging responsibility, I had Echo leave her a low priority message that I was sorry, but that everything was fine, and that I’d be staying at the office overnight.

§

The next day was a blur after not sleeping again, so I gobbled more Sleep–Over tabs. On top of everything else, my body was trying to recover from my self–inflicted injuries.

The Command staffers were sympathetically amused at my purple, swollen face. Even though I’d tried to secure a reality filter over the top of it, most of them easily overrode it for a laugh. I was mostly just waiting till the end of the day to speak with Cindy.

“You look the worse for wear,” said Jimmy as we started going over the daily threat reports after lunch. He was smiling.

“Yeah, yeah,” I replied with a grin, “I am supposed to be the fighting part of this unit, remember?”

“Of course, Commander.”

He rolled his eyes, and I looked down, shaking my head.

“Hey, do you want me to finish up with this stuff?” Jimmy offered. “I can see you have a lot on your mind.”

The reports and diagrams floating in the shared display space between us seemed to stretch off into infinite space. Just looking at them made my headache worse.

“Actually, Jimmy, that’d be great.”

“No problem.”

“Rick, why don’t you just take the rest of the day off? I think Jimmy is right, go and take it easy,” Echo added. “I just checked with Cindy, and she’s got some time too.”

I looked up at him suddenly. “You talked to Cindy?”

“Yeah, I sure did,” Echo replied. “She was just checking in on you while you were busy with Jimmy, and she said she had the rest of the day free.”

“Good, thanks guys,” I said, looking at the two of them. “I really appreciate it.”

“Oh, Rick, by the way,” said Jimmy as I began to get up to go. “Your wife asked me to help her with some stuff with your proxxids, you’re okay with all that?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” I said, waving him on, “whatever she needs.”

I forwarded him my proxxid credentials and flitted off to wrap up some details.

§

I opened the door to our apartment after Echo had walked me home, expecting a wave of screaming kids. It was completely quiet, however, and right away that got me worried. Tentatively, I looked around inside and found Cindy sitting on a small couch in the center. Our place was a pristine white, featureless projection, very calm and quiet.

It felt creepy.

“Oh Rick,” she exclaimed as she saw me enter, getting up off the couch and coming to me, “what did you do to yourself? Echo told me you went out last night? This was all my fault…”

“No, no, it’s not your fault. It was my fault.” I held up my hands. “I’m okay, it’s just a big scratch. I was out doing some night drills for work.”

She looked unconvinced.

“About last night Rick, I know you had something important to say…”

“And I still do,” I interrupted, “look, I know it’s been a long time getting here…but…I’m ready now, and I know you are.”

I smiled. She smiled back and wrapped her arms around me, kissing me.

“That’s wonderful news, sweetie.”

She looked happy, but I had expected a little more, so I repeated myself. “I want to have a real baby with you now, you understand?”

She nodded and smiled, “Of course I do, and that’s wonderful news. Well, let’s get it just right, then.”

I took a deep breath, feeling relief wash through my body.

“So, where are the boys then?” I asked, looking around.

“Oh, they’re gone now,” she replied casually, surprising me. As long as she was happy, which she seemed to be, it was fine with me, but I had to admit I felt some sudden pangs of regret.

“But,” she continued, “I do have someone I’d like you to meet.”

A crack appeared in the flat white wall behind the couch, and she led me by the hand towards it as the wall slid open to reveal a room beyond. I could hear a soft gurgling sound. We walked up to the edge of a cradle, and Cindy bent over to pick up a little baby girl lying inside it.

She held her up to me, and I took the baby in my arms.

“Rick, please meet Brianna,” Cindy announced softly.

I looked down into my new baby girl’s face, and she was amazingly beautiful. We could try this out for a while.

Maybe I’d always wanted a baby girl.

5

TODAY CINDY HAD transported our family into a Norman Rockwell–like setting. We were outside, sitting together at an old weather beaten oak table at the edge of an apple orchard, behind a vintage white washed cottage, complete with peeling paint outside and a musty interior full of yellowing family photographs on mantelpieces.

It was warm, hot even, as the sun lazily set under a cloudless blue sky. We were on Martha’s Vineyard in a circa 1940s wikiworld. The fading day had a languid, easy going feel to it, which was nice after a hectic day of chasing down cyber threats. Sea air rustled in through tall unkempt grasses atop sand dunes lining the nearby beaches.

Like getting a new fix, our first baby girl proxxid had injected new life into our relationship, and the days and weeks had passed with a sense of rejuvenated expectations. Jimmy and Echo had sensed what was going on, and the pair of them had volunteered to take on a lot of my Command functions, giving me the time to work things out with Cindy.

The highlight of each day had become a ritualized homecoming to explore a new metaworld that Cindy would create for us, and, of course, to play with the latest proxxid. As time went on, we’d progressed, one by one, through Brianna, our first girl proxxid, and then Georgina, Paul, Pauli and eventually to our new favorite, Little Ricky-Two.

“Adriana was right,” commented Cindy, looking down into Little Ricky-Two’s face, “blue eyes are the best. Just like Little Ricky’s.”

“Huh?”

I was deep into a Phuture News report predicting a flare-up in the Weather Wars. I flicked away tabloid splinters that tried to correlate this to some paranormal reports. Of course, a lot of people were tracking events in the Weather Wars, and with so many people getting advance notice of events on this scale, there was a good chance the event wouldn’t happen.

As I was thinking this, the new news reported that the offensive had been delayed, and was just as quickly canceled. Suddenly, a report came in that a tactical nuclear weapon would be launched against a target in Kashmir, but this was quickly aborted at the last instant. All sides were already at the negotiating table.

Accurate futuring technology had begun to bring out random behavior—being predictable meant everyone could see you coming, so being unpredictable and random had its advantages, but usually at the expense of lacking a certain strategic intent.

The irony of how ‘knowing the future’ made things less predictable didn’t escape me, but the serious strategists said that this perception was just the result of our primary subjectives being stuck in one timeline at a time. I sighed.

At the same time, Hurricane Ignacia had shifted directions entirely, and looked like it would slam into Costa Rica and could cross over from the Caribbean and into the Eastern Pacific. It had grown into a monster category four. We were already backpedaling away from Hurricane Newton, a steady category two as it wound its way up the coast of Mexico, and were suddenly faced with two major hurricanes in our oceanic basin with several other depressions already spinning up in the background. Not unprecedented, but certainly unusual.

A mosquito hovered uncertainly before me and I swatted it away, shaking my head.

“Remember the original Little Ricky’s eyes?” repeated Cindy. “I replayed them in Little Ricky-Two’s features. I just love them.”

She choked up as she said this, even though it had been more than six weeks since we’d discontinued the original Little Ricky proxxid. Sensing tears coming, I snapped out of Phuture News and focused my attention on Cindy.

“Oh, yes, of course,” I replied.

One of our favorite activities was to discuss and compare features of each proxxid. I thought I’d try launching into this to avert whatever was happening and focus her in the moment.

“I really like the cheekbone structure of Little Ricky-Two,” I suggested helpfully.

Cindy went completely still. In the sudden silence, I could hear the wooden grandfather clock in the main hallway of the cottage slowly ticking through the seconds. Something was terribly wrong, but I couldn’t understand what it was. Cindy stared down into Little Ricky-Two’s face. She seemed about to cry.

“Me too,” replied Cindy, catching herself, still staring into the proxxid’s face. With a deep breath, she recovered from whatever it was.

“Who’s my cute little baby boy?” Cindy whispered at Little Ricky-Two, shaking him softly and then squeezing him into her body. He burbled with delight, and cuddled his head into her as she held him.

“Are you okay?” I asked Cindy.

“Yes, of course,” she replied unconvincingly. Shrugging and smiling, she held the synthetic baby ever tighter.

A cicada’s whine played high in the distance, and I squinted into the sunlight slanting through the apple trees and watched her doting over the proxxid. This was all very nice, but my uneasiness was wearing my patience thin. I’d been more than ready to move onto the real thing for a while.

I held up one hand to shield my eyes from the sun and asked, “How about we step this one quickly through his age profiles, maybe see what he’d be like at five years old tomorrow?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Then maybe as a twenty-something the day after?”

Cindy shot me a hateful look and tightly cradled Little Ricky-Two.

“No, we don’t need to do that. I already have a pretty good idea.”

Feeling irritated, I looked down to inspect some crab grass sprouting desperately out from under one of the feet of the table. A breeze rippled the struggling blades of grass as I watched, bringing with it the moldering decay of spoiled apples out in the yard. I looked back up at Cindy, straining my eyes against the setting sun.

“What do you mean, you have a good idea?” I asked. “We only let the first Little Ricky develop to about five, and Derek was just a baby when we terminated. Don’t you want to see what they’ll be like when they’re older?”

“Rick, you just know these things when you’re a mother.”

She sighed.

“You can look at the simulations of them older if you like, but I don’t need to.”

She held Little Ricky-Two up in front of her and began cooing softly at him.

The discussion was apparently over. I felt both uncomfortable and annoyed. Little Ricky-Two was wearing tiny stone washed denim dungarees and a checked red shirt, just how we used to dress up the original Little Ricky.

“Isn’t that what the proxxids are for?” I asked her, my frustration beginning to mount.

“Honey,” she answered, still staring at Little Ricky-two, “I don’t want to argue with you, okay? It’s just not something I want to do.”

I sat for a moment, quietly putting my emotions in order before responding while I watched her nuzzling the proxxid some more.

“Cindy, please, put Little Ricky-Two down for a second.”

“Okay, Mr. Big Ricky,” she replied finally. She turned and sat the baby on her lap, cradling him defensively. Looking up at me, she was about to say something but I cut her off.

“Can we turn this simulation off for a minute?” I asked. “I’m really not comfortable here anymore.”

Hurt blossomed in her eyes and she seemed to resist for a moment, glancing back and forth at the cottage and then at me. She hesitated. Sensing my aggravation, the apple orchard and cottage faded away.

She still sat holding Little Ricky-Two in her arms and on her lap, but we were sitting back at our own dining room table in real space. Behind her, light danced down from the kelp forests, illuminating a school of angel fish that were swimming past the window walls of our apartment.

I leaned forward towards her and put one hand on her knee and said, “Cindy, I love you honey.”

“And I love you too.”

She took my cue to hold my hand in hers, but she held tightly onto the proxxid with her other arm.

“I know this was all my idea,” I explained, “and I’ve enjoyed it, and I think we’ve learnt a lot, but I think this is enough, don’t you? It’s time to get onto the real thing, don’t you think?”

I waited, expecting the worst.

She just smiled. “Yes, I think you’re right. This is enough.”

“Really?” I was surprised. “So we can move onto the real thing?”

She smiled back at me and bounced Little Ricky-Two on her knee.

“Well, give me a little time to myself, no?”

§

As suddenly as it had started, it was over.

The next day I came home from work and there were no more proxxids. It felt like a huge weight had been lifted from me. We were child free for the first time in months, like we were proxxid empty-nesters. It was a shock to my system to begin with—coming home to find only Cindy waiting for me, with no new proxxid to play with.

In retrospect, I’d actually enjoyed the process of picking out the perfect baby for us. Putting it all behind us felt like we’d crossed an important threshold, and I looked forward to having a real baby.

Most important, the experience seemed to have recreated Cindy. She was happy to simply be alive, and the clouds of her chronic depression had lifted. I figured it was the prospect of finally having a child together, the whole process we’d been through. Each day I would return from work and she was energized and refreshed, and we would enjoy long lovemaking sessions more often than not.

It was after one of those sessions, lying amid the mess of sheets and pillows, that I asked her, “Cindy, don’t you want to get pregnant, get off the birth control? I mean, we could be making our baby right now.”

“Silly,” she replied, poking my nose playfully with one finger, “just give me some time. I’m really enjoying myself right now.”

I couldn’t argue with that. She was being terrific.

“I don’t want to do it artificially,” I continued dreamily. “I’d prefer that we inseminate ourselves, or rather, I inseminate you.”

She giggled and I scooped her up into my arms.

“Is that good enough for you?” I teased.

“Sure is, Commander Ricky.”

“Hey, let’s stay in bed and splinter into the Infinixx launch party tonight,” I said, smiling at her. “No fixing your hair, no nothing. We can just stay here and cuddle and project ourselves there, all spiffed up. What do you think?”

She giggled again. “Like I said, I’m good with that, Commander.”

6

“THERE IS SOMETHING very unnatural going on here.”

With that statement, our mandroid guest reached down with one slender metallic arm to adjust the snug jumpsuit along her thin, gleaming legs. I couldn’t help feeling some revulsion watching her standing there, despite many friends who’d come back from the Wars in bits and pieces to be rebuilt robotically.

It was early Saturday morning, but we’d all been called into Command to review scenarios around the threat of the storms that were pinching Atopia towards the coast. Although we couldn’t figure out how yet, it seemed these storms weren’t natural, and our mandroid guest was presenting some possible explanations of what was going on.

On top of it, Patricia had suffered some kind of medical emergency after the disaster of the Infinixx launch a few weeks back. She said she was fine, but she’d been acting strangely ever since.

“So do you think the Terra Novans are involved?” I asked it, or her, or whatever. All the technical details on how this could be made to happen were academically interesting, but I needed to know who and why.

“We’re not sure,” it responded.

Neither was I. Something wasn’t right about this mandroid, nothing I could put my finger on, but she’d been rushed in by Patricia as an outside expert so I hadn’t had much input in the vetting process. Whatever had happened to her, it must have been incredibly traumatic. She was barely more than a stump of flesh suspended between spindly robotic appendages.

“So then where is this coming from?” I demanded impatiently.

“We can’t say for certain yet, but there’s something too perfect about these storms.” She just shrugged.

Too perfect? Too perfect for who, I wondered. This was a waste of time. I looked towards Jimmy, seeing if he had anything to add. He shrugged as well. Great. I rubbed my eyes, trying to wipe away my headache.

Cindy had begun to fall back into her depressions, and I was having a hard time focusing at work. Having a few drinks last night hadn’t helped anything either. Cindy’s depressions had become even worse than before, where just a short time ago she’d been doing so well. She didn’t even want to speak about having children anymore.

“Jimmy, do you think you could look into this more? I need to go and see Cindy.” Honestly, I needed to go and lie down.

“No problem,” he replied immediately.

I nodded my thanks and was about to flit off when Jimmy added something.

“Oh, yeah, I have that date tonight, if you remember.”

I looked up towards the ceiling.

“Oh, yeah. Susie, right?” I smiled and laughed. “So that’s going well then?”

“I can cancel if you want,” offered Jimmy.

“No, no, keep the date. You can’t let stuff like this stop you from living life. Anyway I know you’ll keep a few splinters around if I need you. I’ll be back.”

With that I flitted off home.

§

Opening the door to our apartment, a foreboding gloom enveloped me like a storm cloud dropping from the sky. It was dark inside, with the glimmering reflections of a holo projection playing off the walls.

“Honey?” I announced, worried, peering around the door as I entered.

Cindy was in a heap on the couch, the same as when I’d left many hours ago, and our home was a mess. The room was almost pitch black with Hal’s EmoShow playing endlessly in the center. I was anxious but not sure what to do, so I walked over to the couch and sat down with her. I put my hand on her knee.

“Honey, how are you doing?” I asked.

She put her hand on mine and sat up a bit. Hal’s head disappeared as she turned off the EmoShow, and the lights in the room came up a bit. At least she was trying.

“I’m okay,” she responded, but sounding less than okay. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” I replied. “But seriously, honey, what’s up? Please talk to me.”

“I’m just a little down. It’s hard, you know.”

“What’s hard, honey?”

She didn’t reply. She just looked at me.

“Do you want to speak to someone, maybe someone other than me, have you tried that?”

Maybe it was something to do with me.

“Oh, I’ve been talking to people, I have someone to talk to,” she replied. “It’s okay sweetheart, but thanks.”

“What about our plans?” I asked gently. “What about having a child, I thought that was what you wanted, what would make you happy? You were so great with the proxxids. Don’t you want to try and have our own child? We’re ready now.”

Cindy looked at me and smiled weakly.

“I know you are, honey.”

I was running out of things to say.

“Do you want to try some more proxxids?” I asked helplessly.

“No,” she responded, brightening up, “not anymore. I think I’m ready now.”

Cool relief poured into my veins.

“Honey, I’m so happy to hear that,” I replied, my heart in my throat.

I leaned over to kiss her, but she just held my head in her hands and kissed my forehead.

7

I GOT THE call the next day, on Sunday morning.

We were all back at Command again, running through the storm predictions for the millionth time as they swung around in perfectly the wrong way, trapping Atopia against the coast. We’d just decided that we needed to take some emergency action, and we were about to begin the escalation process when the call came in.

Echo patched the communication straight through and immediately requested to take over all of my Command functions. I glanced at him with a furrowed brow and took the call.

“Something is wrong with your wife, Commander Strong,” the doctor told me immediately, his image floating in a display space while I sat at my workstation.

“What do you mean, something is wrong?”

“I think you’d better come down here,” he said.

I immediately punched down and was standing beside him in the infirmary watching over Cindy, who was lying on a raised bed in front of us. The infirmary had an otherworldly look and feel to it with glowing, pinkish hued walls and ceilings that were there but not there in a soothingly anesthetic sort of way. The doctor was the only one in attendance, and he looked at me with detached concern.

“So what do you mean exactly?” I demanded.

I looked towards Cindy. She had all the appearances of being asleep.

“It’s a new phenomenon—we’re calling it ‘realicide’ or reality suicide.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s a condition where the subject, your wife, withdraws completely from reality to permanently lock their mind in some fantasy metaworld that they’ve created.”

“Can’t you stop it? Can I talk to her?”

“No, I’m sorry, we can’t reach her,” explained the doctor. “Her pssi and inVerse are completely contained within her own body, a kind of extension of her own mind. We have control over the technology, but not over her mind, and she’s chosen to do this herself.”

“Chosen to do what to herself?” I demanded.

The doctor shrugged and shook his head. Apparently he wasn’t sure.

“We could physiologically remove the pssi network by flushing out all the smarticles, but this could trigger an unstable feedback loop that could destroy her psyche in the process.”

I stared at him in silence.

“So what can you do then?”

“Well, Commander Strong, it would help if we understood why. Is there anything that happened recently? I noted that you’d been experimenting with the proxxids.”

“Yes,” I responded, feeling mounting dread, “sure we did. That’s what this place is for, right?”

“Commander Strong,” the doctor continued, “proxxids can have very powerful emotional side effects if not taken properly. Did you read the warning labels before taking so many of them? Tell me, Commander Strong, what did you do with the proxxids when you were done?”

8

THE INVESTIGATION HAD uncovered that Cindy hadn’t been terminating our proxxids. Instead she’d been secreting them away, one by one, in her own private metaworlds. As she’d become more pssi aware, she’d started constructing ever more elaborate worlds and hidden them deeper and deeper away from me to protect her ever growing family, using private networks and security blankets to cover her tracks.

It wasn’t all that hard, and I guess I hadn’t been paying attention. Her mood had been so great at the time that I hadn’t dug too deep into what she was up to when I was away.

All the questions she had been asking about the lifespan of the proxxids floated into sharp detail in my mind. She’d begun demanding more and more flexibility for each of them as we’d spawned them. I’d always refused, wanting to keep them as short as possible to try and move the process along.

Since they used a recombination of our DNA, based on our legal copyrights, both of us had to agree on the format of the proxxid before spawning. Once their processes had been started they could only be changed by resetting the system, effectively terminating that instance. So she hadn’t been able to modify them without destroying them.

Despite the mounting emergency facing Atopia, I could hardly muster the energy to spend any time at Command, especially after Jimmy had cracked into her private worlds and delivered copies to me.

Jimmy and Echo could handle what was going on as well as I could. Atopia would push through the storms, and even if it didn’t, what would it matter to me? I was busy fighting for my own piece of mind amid the wreckage that had become my life.

§

Proxxids weren’t intended to have been used this way. Cindy had overridden the proxxid controls using my own security clearance. A desperate mother could find a way around any obstacle that threatened her children.

As I accessed the copies of the worlds she’d created, I began a bizarre journey, watching them all grow up together in that little white washed cottage on Martha’s Vineyard I had once visited with her. It was like watching an ancient rerun of a television show about country living, complete with sheets flapping like white flags surrendering yesteryear on the clothesline out back.

I spent my days sitting and watching Little Ricky, Derek, Brianna, Georgina, Paul, Pauli and Little Ricky-Two playing together, growing up together, living out their lives. I smiled as I watched them, remembering them all as babies in my arms.

The simulation mechanics of the proxxids, which I’d forced upon Cindy, had created surreally accelerated lifespans where they’d aged from babies into old men and women in varying spans of barely three months in a crazy, non-linear time warp.

They didn’t seem to notice anything odd was happening because of the cognitive blind spot they had built into them, or maybe because, as children living the only lives they ever knew, they didn’t know any different. It was impossible to know.

She had only brought me there that one time. As it turned out, it was just after they’d had the first Little Ricky’s funeral. The illicit gang of proxxid children, my children, were all hiding upstairs when I’d arrived there that afternoon at the cottage. They were on the strictest of instructions to remain quiet. Most of them were still small children at that point.

I replayed, over and over again, that scene, standing with them in the darkened upstairs room as they giggled and hid, looking down onto Cindy and myself talking in the yard. I think she’d been on the verge of telling me, and was planning on bringing them all out as a big surprise.

Little Ricky’s funeral had been an emotional tidal wave for her, and she was trying her best to reach out to me, but I hadn’t let her.

She’d wanted my help to somehow extend their lives, but I had shut her down before she’d even been able to ask. My anger had cut her short, as it always had.

§

I found myself going back and replaying over and over again one scene in particular, just before Little Ricky’s death.

He was a wizened old man at that point, bent over and leaning on his cane as he came out the back porch of the cottage, the door squeaking on its hinges as he exited. Two of the girls came running past him as he opened the door, Georgina squealing as she was chased by Brianna.

Little Ricky wobbled unsteadily as they flew past, but he smiled at them. I smiled at them too.

“Come sit down, Little Ricky,” said Cindy, getting up from the great old weather beaten oak table we had sat at together, not so very long ago, but now seeming in another lifetime.

Time was a funny thing—even as I traveled through it freely back and forth to view what had happened, it was frozen now, my life as immobile as an insect caught in amber.

I was sitting at the table with them as I replayed the scene. A wasp buzzed by angrily on its way to a nest under the eaves as Cindy took Little Ricky by the arm to sit him down. Cindy carefully eased him into his seat, and sat herself down across from him, her hands on his hands across the table, looking into his eyes.

“I don’t know how much longer this old body is going to last, mother,” said Little Ricky, matter–of–factly. Tears spilled down Cindy’s face.

“Don’t cry mother, what’s there to be sad about? It’s a beautiful day,” he said, rocking his old head back to look up at the perfect blue sky and smiling. “What a beautiful day to be alive.”

They buried Little Ricky in a plot near the house, but only Cindy had cried as they’d lowered him in. The rest of them couldn’t figure out what there was to be sad about on such a wonderful, sunny day amid the apple trees on Martha’s Vineyard.

9

I LEARNT THAT we’d had Little Ricky-Two right after Little Ricky had died, I guess to try and fill the gap that had appeared in her life. As the rest of them soon passed as well, it had all just become too much for her.

Watching reruns of this family that I had, but never had, I was filled with a bittersweet sadness. But maybe, just maybe, Cindy had gotten what she’d wanted after all. Did living a full life in a few short months make it any less? Did I feel any less sense of meaning in my life, having watched my children grow up and grow old and pass before my eyes so quickly?

It was all very hard to say.

What I could say with certainty was that Cindy’s family had flatly refused to allow me to have access to her body for the purposes of having children, which I had petitioned for immediately.

“Commander Strong,” her father told me, “I know Cindy loved you, more than we could understand after you kept leaving her alone for each new tour of duty. You know you nearly killed her each time you went back out.”

“I know sir…”

“She begged you for children, and now that you’ve…” he tried to say calmly, but then lost his temper. “This is an abomination, man! What in the world are you people doing out there?”

There wasn’t much I could say, so I waited for him to regain his composure.

“Rick, I just don’t see how, in good conscience, and after everything that has happened, that we can let you have a child of our dear Cindy.”

I could understand her father’s point of view. They’d never much cared for her marrying a military man to begin with, and this had just proved their point, whether it made much sense or not.

They didn’t ask to move Cindy from Atopia, as this remained the one place where they could still hold out hope. The future was approaching awfully fast out here, and maybe there was a way we could fix what had happened.

§

“So you have no ideas left, doc?” I asked, at yet another review I’d requested.

“Commander Strong, we’re going to have to refuse any further meeting requests until we have something new,” said the doc’s proxxi. “It’s one thing to play with the inputs and outputs to the brain, but the actual place where the mind comes together…it’s a tricky thing.”

Jimmy was with me too, trying to help out. “Why don’t you just take it easy, Commander, I’ll keep you posted if we can figure anything out.”

So I left it in their hands. Apart from watching reruns of my family, I spent a lot of my time floating back up on the edge of space, following the UAVs in their lazy orbits around Atopia high in the stratosphere, looking down at the storms that threatened to crush and destroy Atopia.

They could figure it out without me. I had other things to do.

§

Sitting high in the bleachers, the drama of the little league game was spread out before me. Tensions were running high at the bottom of the ninth inning, and everyone around held their collective breath as the final hitter came to the plate.

Nervously shifting silhouettes far in the outfield cast long shadows in the last rays of a late summer sunset. I squinted into the sun, trying to make out which kid was which, and then turned my attention back to the hitter.

Strike went the first pitch. Then strike again went the second. Hushed silence as the pitcher went into his windup.

“Strike three!” thundered the umpire.

The scene turned into pandemonium, at least for half of us there. I smiled, watching the little figures running in from the outfield, and someone grabbed me by the arm.

“What a great game!” said the man standing beside me. “You got a son in the game?”

“I sure do,” I replied as my boy scampered up the stairs through the departing crowd. He jumped into my arms and hugged me, and I looked down into his eyes.

“We won dad!” he squealed at me. “Why are you crying, dad? We won!”

I wiped my face.

“You sure have your mother’s eyes, you know that?”

Little Ricky just smiled without understanding. Drying my eyes I took his hand, and we walked down off the bleachers, across the infield and into the dying sunshine.

~ TIMEDROPS ~

Book 3:

Vince Indigo

PROLOGUE

IN THE THIN air at the edge of space, I could feel more than hear the steady beat of the UAV’s massive propeller dragging me onwards towards my death. I’d been able to see this moment coming for a long time. The tight compartment I was in had never been meant to fit a human. I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the cold metal pressing against me through the thin pressure suit of the improvised life support system I’d rigged.

I shouldn’t have tried to escape.

Alarms signaling the start of the slingshot weapons test firing rang out across the multiverse spectrum. They would have canceled the test if they knew I was hidden up here in this thing, but in my desperate bid to erase my tracks I’d cut myself off entirely from the communications networks, concealing what I was doing, even why I was doing it.

It was a gamble that hadn’t paid off as the UAV’s control system signaled the system malfunction that I always knew was coming. It lurched sickeningly off to the left, cutting and sliding through empty space, turning inexorably back towards my doom.

In the near distance, the boom of the slingshot began, its thundering inferno blossoming as it demonstrated its fearsome power to the world. My heart was racing, my breathing ragged and shallow. For days, weeks even, I had been able to see this exact moment arriving, and yet here I was.

The awful growl of the slingshot built in power and began rattling the delicate cage of the UAV’s body. The cold metal pressing against me warmed, and then turned hot as the acrid stench of molten plastic burned into my lungs. I gagged, shrinking up into myself, terrified.

Engulfed in roaring flames the UAV pitched over, its metal and plastic skin coming apart in great fiery gobs as it disintegrated, offering me up into the emptiness. In seconds I was incinerated like Icarus flying too close to the firestorm of knowledge, spinning, falling, and burning as my wings fell away.

In my last instants of life, I caught a distant glimpse of Atopia, a cool green speck between the flames, her Siren song calling me back towards the endless seas below.

1

Identity: Vince Indigo

THE LAST DREGS of the night drained sleeplessly away, and despite the world’s best efforts, my life had filled with yet another new day. More dreams of death, but they weren’t just dreams. Or were they? I felt nauseous. You’d have thought that life would be easy as one of the world’s richest men living on the island colony of Atopia, the most sought after zip code on the planet, but the universe was frustrating my expectations.

It was still early morning. From beneath the sheets, my blurry eyes could just glimpse the dawning sky regaining its composure while the roar and flame of the slingshot test began to die down. Dread filled me as I watched stiletto tipped fishnet stockings stalking towards me from the living area. Then the lights flipped on as Hotstuff tore the sheets off me.

“Aw, come on!” I whimpered, weakly fumbling to grab back the covers.

Hotstuff was all done up in a bad schoolgirl outfit today, complete with a checked miniskirt and a starched men’s dress shirt. The shirt was done up from the bottom in a knot to expose her belly ring, and unbuttoned far enough down from the top to reveal hints of something naughty underneath. She knew I was depressed and was doing her part to keep me alert and in the game. What I didn’t immediately notice was the riding crop in her hand.

“Ouch!” I cried out as she whacked me with it.

She just giggled and wound back up to smack me again.

“What the heck?” I screeched, and jumped up out of bed to chase her across the room. She squealed, running away from me, and my bedroom morphed into the battle room we’d created to track my looming future death threats.

Hotstuff had already transitioned into wearing army fatigues. She playfully menaced me with the riding crop as I stood naked and rubbed my stubble with one hand and defended myself with the other.

Absentmindedly, I admired myself in a mirror on the opposite wall. Nearly seventy years old, yet with all the gene therapy I barely looked forty.  A thick shock of graying hair still hung playfully, if listlessly, over tired eyes that stared back at me.

“Two things before we get started, sir,” announced Hotstuff, snapping smartly to attention and giving me a salute with the riding crop. “Commander Strong’s proxxi asked for some flowers for his wife—which I provided from our private gardens—and Bob just pinged you to go surfing.” She raised her eyebrows as if to tell me that surfing obviously wasn’t an option today.

“Patch him through,” I replied groggily. Sensing Hotstuff hesitating I added, “Now Hotstuff!”

Bob immediately materialized before me, holding his yellow long board, smirking. He looked stoned already.

A great mop of blond hair lived a life of its own above his twinkling blue eyes, and while he had all the appearances of the uber-surfer, there was a persistent and unmistakable intelligence underpinning it all—the philosopher king of wave hunters. What a great kid, it was just too bad.

“So…surfing today?” asked Bob lazily.

Yeah, he was high. Sizing up Hotstuff’s outfit, he grinned appreciatively.

“No, sorry, Bob. Can’t make it. Something has popped up.”

“Popped up, huh?” laughed Bob, looking back at Hotstuff again. He’d begun projecting some nicely curling waves into my display spaces. “Come on, dude! It’s going to be monster out there today!”

“I really can’t,” I reiterated weakly. Jealously I watched the waves. My nerves were frazzled. Honestly, I could use a little relaxation, and I hadn’t been out surfing in weeks.

“What could you possibly have to do?” asked Bob. “I thought you were like the richest guy in the world? Get someone else to do it!”

“I wish I could…”

I looked pleadingly towards Hotstuff. She rolled her eyes and wagged the riding crop at me.

“Hey it’s your life mister,” she scolded, sensing I was going to do what I wanted anyway. “I suppose an hour couldn’t hurt, we don’t have anything imminent I can’t handle right now. But only one hour, right? After that it could get dangerous.”

I was already halfway out the door to get my wetsuit by the time she’d finished the sentence. Bob gave me a goofy thumbs-up before flitting away to rejoin his body in the hunt for waves. I’d catch up with him in a minute.

§

Bob and I were sitting on our boards and waiting for waves just inside the edge of the kelp forest, near the western inlet and not far from my habitat.

Atopian kelp, the base of our ecological chain, had been bioengineered to grow inverted with its holdfast now a gas filled bladder floating on the surface with the kelp blades spreading downwards hundreds of feet into the depths. It sprouted outwards at fantastic rates like a watery mangrove, beginning just at the edge of the underwater extremity of Atopia and stretching outwards from there to about two miles out through the water.

My wealth afforded me the luxury of my own private habitat, a household that was attached to one of the passenger cannon supports, sprouting up out of the water and into the sunshine. Most of the million-plus inhabitants here lived below decks in the seascrapers stretching out into the depths. Atopia was the ultimate in dense, urban city planning, but then that was the whole idea: with access to limitless synthetic reality, Atopians didn’t need much in the way of real space.

I’d been one of the earliest converts to the Atopia marketing program, pulling up stakes from my wandering existence around the Bay Area to move onto the original Atopian platform in the early 40’s.

America just wasn’t what it used to be anymore, with constant cyber attacks pushing into an insular downward spiral and the Midwest returning to the dustbowl of more than a hundred years earlier. No good end was in sight, and entanglements in the Weather Wars were squeezing the last drops of blood from a country already gone dry.

For me, in my rich, insular world, the kicker had really been the surfing. Floating free in the Pacific, Atopia was exposed to huge, open ocean swells. When they caught just right, these would break and curl into pipes that broke for miles as they swept around its perfectly circular edge.

Atopia was a magnet for the best surfers in the world, but it was hard for them to compete with residents who used pssi—poly-synthetic sensory interface— technology. There was a kind of religion to surfing, and outsiders thought that with pssi we were cheating the gods, but really, the gods were jealous.

These days, those gods seemed to be having a particular issue with me.

Bob was waiting for the ultimate wave, and while I’d managed to catch one good one, I didn’t have his attuned water-sense and was having a hard time relaxing into it. Time was pressing down heavily.

“Bob!” I yelled out across the water, interrupting a conversation I could see he was having with his brother-of-sorts, Martin. “Bob, I need to get going!”

“Already?”

“Yeah, I need to get back to that thing.”

My promised hour wasn’t even up, yet Hotstuff was flooding me with things we needed to get done. It was impossible to enjoy the surfing, perhaps even dangerous. I’d better get on with it.

“I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do,” declared Bob, shrugging. “Anyway, ping me if you change your mind. Hey, you should check out all that stuff on the news!”

“Thanks, Bob.”

With a wave goodbye I flitted off back to my habitat, leaving Hotstuff to guide my body home.

2

I CHECKED OUT the news Bob had sent me as I returned to the top deck of my habitat. There’d been a rash of UFO sightings in the Midwest last night, and he knew I was something of a paranormal fan boy. Today, though, more important things were on the agenda.

I strode back and forth like a caged animal, my mind racing, and then stood still as I made a decision, looking out towards the breaking waves.

“Ready for business?” demanded Hotstuff.

She was sitting and waiting for me on a stool at the deck bar, drinking a latte and going over the morning’s business news, impatiently tapping her high heels against the polished blue marble floor. Behind her, my carefully curated collection of some of the world’s rarest whiskeys and cognacs sparkled invitingly in the midmorning sunshine. It was about the time I’d usually be waking up, but I’d already been up since dawn.

“Do we have to?” I asked uselessly, thinking of how a little taste of the Aberlour would be nice.

“Some kind of action is required,” she observed. “Even inaction is an action, and perhaps the only kind of action you seem to enjoy lately.”

Hotstuff raised her eyebrows in disdain while she scanned the European financial reports.

“Okay then, summon the council,” I sighed, scratching my stubble.

Portals to my homeworld opened up off the deck, and I walked into our main conference room, shifting my attire into a navy sport coat with a stiff collared, open necked white shirt. Hotstuff strode in behind me, her braided bun of hair and short skirted business suit radiating efficiency and purpose.

One by one my councilors materialized around the long cherry wood conference table that glistened under the bioluminescent ceiling. About half of them appeared dull eyed, awakening to instantly patch in from whatever time zone they were in for this surprise meeting. The other half weren’t humans, but our trusted synthetics, and they appeared brightly and cheerfully, their smiles following me around the room towards the head of the table.

Then again, perhaps I had them mixed up, the dull eyed ones now looking like my synthetics. I had a hard time telling the difference anymore.

Everyone around the table, however, was most definitely female, and not just your run-of-the-mill varietals, but, like Hotstuff, more like a twelve year old boy’s fantasy. They posed casually but intently around the table as if a fashion shoot could be announced at any instant, with the long conference table springing into action as a catwalk.

My calling a sudden meeting like this was unusual, to say the least, and they all watched me cautiously. Information packets were dispersed and appeared on the table in front of them as I sat down.

“No need for pleasantries.” This wasn’t a social call after all. “Just have a look at your instructions. We’re going to be liquidating everything.”

A pause while they assimilated the data downloads.

“Questions?”

“No questions regarding the details, sir,” chimed one of them, Alessandria. “But, it may help to understand the motivation. Some of the assets you are seeking to liquidate, are, um, well, they’re not what you want people to know you’re in a hurry to sell.”

The motivation, now that was a good question. There were only two things I really knew; first, that I had no idea what I was trying to escape from, just that whatever it was, it was trying to kill me, and second, just sharing the idea that something was trying to hunt me down made my situation even more dangerous. To minimize risk I had to pretend nothing was happening.

“No reason,” I replied as casually as I could, “just the whim of a bored trillionaire. I don’t want to raise suspicion, so keep this on the down low, right?”

Perhaps this was the wrong choice of words.

“On the down low?” demanded Roxanne carefully, my resource manager for the Asia Pacific region. “You want me to just dump all the yachts, the islands, the racetracks…?”

“Yes.”

I said this with a twinge of remorse. The baubles of Indigo Entertainment, my latest and ill-fated attempt at a new foray into the business world, still held some sparkle in my eye. While I could lay claim to being super-wealthy, I couldn’t say the same about being super-intelligent.

Success in the business world was more about luck, and luck was hard to replicate. My luck had been helped along by a team of incredibly smart people, and born from a single-minded obsession with the future, or perhaps, just one future in particular.

“Don’t go out and dump it,” added Hotstuff. “Don’t attract attention, be subtle, go out there and do what we pay you for. Anyway, most of the Indigo Entertainment stuff is a waste of time.” Hotstuff looked towards me. I shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll need to explain ourselves very much.”

Roxanne considered this, shifting around in her chair.

“I may have someone who could be interested,” she said after a moment.

Then the paranoia set in. Perhaps liquidation was what whoever who was messing with me wanted, and was it possible that Roxanne was in on the fix? I looked carefully at her. Hotstuff sensed what I was thinking and headed me off before I could say anything.

“Very good,” Hotstuff replied to Roxanne. “Get to work then. Any more questions?”

Nobody objected, and one by one, just as they’d appeared, my councilors faded from the conference room.

When they’d all gone, Hotstuff looked towards me sympathetically.

“You’re going to need to trust your team,” she said slowly. After a pause she added, “You’re going to need to trust me.”

Visions of Kurt Gödel, the famous Austrian mathematician, sprang to mind. Suffering from deep paranoia, he’d only accepted food prepared by his wife to eat. When she fell ill one day and was sent to hospital, he refused to eat food given to him by anyone else. He died of starvation just shortly before his wife had returned.

“I just hope nothing happens to you,” I replied. “I’m not sure I could starve myself.”

While proxxi had full access to our memories and sensory systems and could usually guess what we were thinking, they couldn’t read our minds. Not yet, anyway. Hotstuff gave me a funny look.

I shrugged and smiled.

3

I WAS UP at sunrise the next day as well, my dreams again filled with nightmares, but nightmares that were spilling from dreamland into reality. The darkness was smearing into light, unconsciousness into consciousness, dream life into waking life; they were all becoming barely distinguishable from each other. Hotstuff was waiting patiently for me in our war room while I dragged myself into the bathroom for a shower to wake up.

I stared into the mirror, deep into my bloodshot eyes. Condensation from the hot shower fogged over my image as I inspected the angry blood vessels ringing my irises.

“Can we take a short break for surfing again this morning?” I asked Hotstuff, reaching down into a drawer below the sink to get my eye drops.

“I don’t think that is a good idea,” she replied immediately, shouting over the noise of the shower. “We have a lot to do, things are getting more dangerous.”

I sighed, unscrewing the bottle cap and holding it between my teeth. I leaned back, pulling back the lid of my left eye and depositing a drop into it. I sighed again, rubbing the eye, and then switched to the other one.

“Come on,” I grunted from between clenched teeth, holding the bottle cap in place as I lined up the dropper above my right eye. “A half an hour out on the…”

I suddenly gagged. The bottle cap had popped like a cork from between my teeth to lodge itself into my windpipe. My body convulsed as I tried to pull some air into my lungs. Hotstuff was immediately beside me, and had already alerted the emergency services. Panic exploded into my veins and I clawed at the bathroom walls, doubling over onto the floor, my chest heaving and vision fading away.

§

“See what I mean?”

I was standing back at the sink, staring back into my bloodshot eyes, but Hotstuff was there with me, holding out her hand to take the bottle cap from me.

That had been close.

I’d barely escaped that event, less than five seconds away in the future on an alternate timeline. I handed Hotstuff the bottle cap, and then after a split second of contemplation, handed her the whole eye dropper bottle. My eyes weren’t that bloodshot.

“Yeah,” I replied, “I guess surfing can wait.”

Whatever it was that was hunting me down, it had infected the very personal and immediate realities surrounding me.

“Forget the shower,” I added. “Let’s just get to work.”

The bathroom immediately morphed into my battle room. Hotstuff splintered a hyper-dimensional graphic into my display spaces that plotted several thousand alternate future worlds of my life. Many of the lifelines terminated abruptly, and therein laid the problem with going surfing—I had to save my own life today, and not once, but many dozens of times over.

Yesterday there had been over a hundred ways I could have died in the millions of future simulations that we had running for me as we tried to pick a safe path forward for my primary lifeline. My plan of trying to escape in the UAV, the one that was destroyed in the slingshot test yesterday morning, was one of my futures that I’d barely avoided.

I picked out and watched one of today’s more gruesomely predicted terminations playing itself out before me. A three-dimensional projection hung in the middle of the room that started with me being cut in half and then being burnt to a crisp in some freak accident outside the passenger cannon. I watched with a morbid curiosity. My planned trip on the passenger cannon was definitely off the list of things to do today.

The problem had originally surfaced some months ago, and it was accelerating at a worrying pace.

One morning a few months back, Hotstuff had announced to me that there was a high probability of being killed in a stratospheric HALO jump I had planned. My future prediction system that morning had told us that, due to inclement weather and the likelihood of my skydiving partner being intoxicated the evening before from a probable incident with his wife, there was a very large chance of an accident occurring. No problem, I had happily announced over my morning coffee, just cancel the jump.

A few days later I received another prediction informing me that there were a half a dozen scenarios involving my death. It had been a fairly simple task then to engineer a path through them all, but from that point the solution to my ‘non death’ had started to become increasingly bizarre and rarified. On top of it, I couldn’t tell anyone, or ask any help to navigate these future arcs—the solution sets became unstable unless I kept it to myself.

I suddenly began to find myself running around Atopia asking people to do odd jobs for me and flittering off to the four corners of the multiverse on inane assignments just to keep myself alive. Things had begun spinning out of control like a surreal and twisted joke.

We’d managed to rout almost all of the incoming threats yesterday by sending out bots and synthetics, and in critical cases myself personally, to nudge the advancing future timeline of my world this way or that. Today, however, some of the future death threats were beginning to creep into the hours and minutes just ahead. What had started out a few months ago as the odd warning of some low probability events to be carefully avoided had steadily progressed into a constant stream that signaled my impending death, and we had no idea how or why it was happening.

“Most of the bases are covered for today,” Hotstuff explained, summoning up a probability scatter grid that sprouted outwards from a few critical nexus points. “There are just a few events that you need to handle personally, starting with this one in New York.”

She pointed to the nexus closest to me, and the future reality of that event spun out around us. I nodded, trying to take it in.

Someone with lesser resources than me would’ve just died, without fanfare, and that would have been that. In my unique position and with my almost limitless resources, however, I could literally see everything coming and dodge and weave my way through it.

You’d have thought that someone edging up on seventy would’ve accepted their mortality with a little more grace, but here on Atopia I was still a spring chicken. I wasn’t ready to accept a trip on the ultimate voyage just yet.

Sensing my mind wandering, Hotstuff decided to summon up another particularly gruesome termination.  She growled playfully, swatting at me again with her riding crop while I watched myself being liquefied in the bio-sludge facilities. I felt like I was being stalked by the army of darkness with Betty Boop as my sidekick. Just how many ways could a person die? Her tactic was successful however, and I refocused on the New York project.

“You just need to steal a pack of cigarettes,” she explained while I watched the simulation play itself through.

“Sounds good,” I sighed. “Time to get ready for work.”

Sitting on the rooftop deck of my habitat, I took one longing look towards the breaking surf and grumpily got up from my chair to begin the day’s activity list to keep me alive. How exactly stealing a pack of cigarettes from some woman in New York would help me out was impossible to understand, but there it was.

Resisting the almost uncontrollable urge to procrastinate, I heard myself say, “Okay Hotstuff, let’s get this show on the road.”

The deck of my habitat faded away to reveal the grimy walls of a convenience store in New York. My consciousness had been implanted into a robotic surrogate—a robody—that Hotstuff had set into position. Even through the tinny sensory input, the overpowering odor and seediness of the place hit me like a wave of virtual sewage, as the pristine lines of Atopia disappeared from my sensory frames. I felt dirty, even in this robotic body, and had to fight back an urge to go and wash myself.

The target in question was yelling at the cashier behind the counter in front of me. In fact, she looked like she was about to hit him.

“Lady!” I shouted above her, raising my spindly metal arms in the cashier’s defense. “Lady, take it easy!”

She didn’t even notice me as she fumbled around in her purse, entirely engrossed in whatever it was she was trying to do. Her face registered deep disgust; she looked like she was having an even worse day than I was.

Eventually, after more theatrics, she managed to negotiate getting the pack of cigarettes from the cashier. I hung back, following her out the door, but at a distance.

She stopped outside to light up, standing under a wobbly holographic advertisement. After a few moments I saw my chance. I moved in quickly, taking her by surprise, pinning her against the wall. Terrified, she froze up, and I fumbled at her, trying to grab the pack of cigarettes. Quickly I pried it out of her hands.

“Get off me!” she screamed.

I jumped back, my prize in hand, and looked at her. Wanting to apologize, I stared for a moment into her green eyes, sensing anger and fear, but also a deeper anxiety, like I was looking at someone standing on the edge of a cliff.

Explaining myself wasn’t an option, however, so after an instant of contemplation I just shrugged halfheartedly at her and melted backwards into the pedestrian flow, leaving her there, shaking.

Somehow my stealing this pack of cigarettes would collapse a whole stream of dangerous alternate futures for me, so my job there was done.

4

TIME—EINSTEIN HAD famously said that it was purely an illusion, just a construct of the conscious mind. A nice idea perhaps, but try having this conversation with someone who had seen theirs ending. Time was something we all desperately wanted more of when it ran short, yet we waste it frivolously when we think we have enough.

I was in a bad mood after a long day of saving my own life dozens of times. Midnight was rolling around, and I’d just finished with the last of it. A full moon was out, and the air calm, as I sat out on the top deck of my habitat and watched glittering waves swell over the kelp. I leaned back in my chair and considered my problem for a moment.

The initial shock had worn off, but the irony was still steamrolling around my brain like a two–day–old hangover. Bob was right about one thing—I did have a hard time with anyone telling me what to do, but somebody seemed to have found a way to get my attention.

I decided I could use a walk to clear my mind.

“Hotstuff, could you drop me into Retiro Park, near the Crystal Palace?”

The surging ocean and the outlines of my deck faded from view, and were replaced with afternoon sunshine and the autumn green and golds of Madrid’s Buen Retiro Park. I was standing on a gravel path beside the Crystal Palace as requested. It was one of my favorite places to take a walk when I was having a hard time with something.

I looked down at my hands, admiring their apparent solidity, and then looked around the park.

It never ceased to amaze me how well this technology worked; I could smell grass being noisily cut by a mower somewhere in the distance. A woman pushing a baby carriage passed by and glanced at me and smiled. I could hear the gravel crunching under the carriage wheels and the soft burble of the baby inside.

Most people took the wikiworld, the collected audiovisual and sensor inputs of all people and networks and cameras spanning the world, for granted. But for those of us who had slaved away to make it a reality, it still carried a certain sense of awe.

I took a deep breath, straightened up, and began walking down the path.

The wikiworld was great, but the thing that had made me really famous was the future—literally.

Science was, at its root, just a hodgepodge of rules for predicting the future. How to achieve the same sort of success science had in the physical domain and replicate this to predict daily human life seemed beyond grasping, until I lit upon a place to start.

As I slumbered one morning in a semi-lucid state, my great idea came to me suddenly, as great ideas tended to do, and that idea was celebrity gossip. As social animals, gossip was something humans couldn’t do without.

I stopped on my walk to smile at a group of people gathered at a crosswalk in the park. They obviously knew each other well, and stood chatting.

As a student of history, I’d noticed that as civilizations became greater, they tended to become greatly interested in the tiny details of famous peoples’ lives. The Romans were the great innovators, but it was modern America that had really taken it to new heights.

When you started with any new technology, you needed to establish a foothold, a niche you could call your own, and I had been struggling to find a niche for synthetic future world predictions, or phuturing as I coined the term. A ‘phuture’ was an alternate future reality that sprouted off from the present moment of time. The future, with an ‘f’, was the actual, single future that you ended up sliding along your timeline into; but the future was only one of many possible phutures.

Weather forecasting and stock markets were well covered with established brands and pundits, but this wasn’t the kind of future I had been interested in. I wanted to know the future of individual people, on the most detailed possible levels. Early in life, I had developed an obsession with it.

A problem with making predictions, the ones involving people was that as soon as they knew about the prediction, they would tend to confound it, and the more people that knew, the more confounding these effects became. My discovery was that celebrities tended to act as a foil to this. Even when they were presented with a prediction concerning them, most enjoyed the attention enough that they would go along with whatever the prediction was.

We soon began to make a name for ourselves by scooping major news outlets to break stories that hadn’t even happened yet, beating entertainment and gossip media to the punch by featuring the celebrity headlines of tomorrow today.

Celebrity gossip had initially set the sails of the Phuture News Network as a commercial success, and we gradually expanded our predictive systems to encompass nearly every aspect of daily life. Advertising revenue had skyrocketed as we began selling ad space for things we could predict people would want tomorrow, but it was nothing compared to the money people were willing to pay for the service itself. Almost overnight we became one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Kicking gravel down the path, I sent up a small cloud of dust and overlaid a visual phuturecast onto it. I watched it as it was carried away by the wind, flowing into its future self as it dissipated and eventually disappeared.

On Atopia, we’d taken Phuture News to the next level and begun constructing perfect, sensory realistic phutureworlds. Some scientists had begun claiming that these weren’t just predictions, but portals into alternate parallel universes further forward along our timeline, and had started to use this as the technical definition of a ‘phuture’.

Not quite what I’d had in mind when I began the whole enterprise into divining tomorrow’s cocktail-dress-du-jour, but in all cases, people had begun to live, ever more progressively, in the worlds of tomorrow.

While the personalized future predictions we generated for people were private to them, as the owner of Phuture News, I had built in one proviso: I could confidentially gain access to any and all phutures generated in order to build my own personal and highly detailed phutureworlds.

To begin with, it had been fascinating to tie everything together; in being able to peer into the collective future of the world. At least, it had been fascinating to begin with, until I could see far enough forward. Then it had just become depressing.

But in all cases, it turned out that the biggest killer application of the future was the future itself, and sitting atop the greatest computing installation the world had ever known, I became the only person on the planet who could literally see into the world of tomorrow.

With great powers, they said, came strange responsibilities, and therein began the problem—for while I could see the future, it seemed that the future now refused to see me. At least, it refused to see me in it.

Hotstuff had already snuggled my body comfortably into bed as I collapsed my subjective away from Retiro park and back home. I sighed and pulled the sheets closer around me. It was time to get some sleep.

I had a feeling I’d need it.

5

“A GREAT EVIL will consume you all!” spat the deranged man from between tangled, yellowing teeth, his mottled face barely restraining a threatened apoplectic fit, as he balanced precariously atop an upturned four-gallon paint can.

Wheezing asthmatically, his eyes rolled up towards the damp skies before returning to earth and hunting through the crowd. His glassy gaze swung around to lock onto me, and I stared back. He trembled slightly, his already distended pupils widening as he peered into me.

“A great evil is already consuming you, sir,” he whispered, directly addressing me as I passed, and then screeched to the crowd, pointing at me, “A GREAT EVIL is upon us!”

I shivered and looked away, but nobody paid much attention.

It was early morning and I was off on another one of my walks to try and clear my mind, today through Hyde Park in London, and I was just passing Speakers’ Corner near Marble Arch. The steady thrum of the automated passenger traffic hummed in the background while the electric crackle of London City center hung just past the peripheries of my senses.

Early morning for me, but it was already well past midday here, halfway around the world from Atopia. The usual collection of crackpots and doomsayers had already installed themselves for the afternoon tourist crowds. I usually enjoyed standing and watching, listening to the passionate ramblings of the desperate men and women on their soapboxes, exhorting us to save ourselves. But today it felt wrong, or perhaps worse, it felt right.

Hunching inwards, I kept my eyes to the ground and wound my way through the crowd, making my escape towards the sanctuary of the park.

Even here in my virtual presence, I had to keep up my guard, a point-of-presence being a potential point of entry into my networks. I had a whole sentry system of future selves walking through the park in the immediate future ahead of me. Threading my way through the periphery of the crowd, my splintered ghosts walked seconds and minutes ahead of me, testing the informational flow through this path and that, dropping data honey pots here and there to pick up straggling invaders, testing for the safest narrow corridor into my future. Salvation for me was threading the eye of a needle, and it felt as if my hands were tied behind my back, or as if my limbs had been amputated.

Taking some deep breaths, I tried to relax.

The sun was bravely fighting its way through the wet skies, and small collections of people had begun to install themselves on the low-slung green and white striped loungers scattered across the grassy expanse at my end of the park. I was heading directly towards the Constabulary near the eastern end of the Serpentine. On my rambles through Hyde Park I always ran a historical skin so that I could enjoy the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and I could see its roof gleaming past a copse of trees in the distance.

It seemed I’d developed a thing for Crystal Palaces.

Right at that moment, however, that same reality overlay was projecting the Tyburn gallows next to a gaggle of old ladies who’d slumped into their loungers in the middle of the field. An execution was in progress, or at least a hanging. The ashen corpse of Oliver Cromwell spun slowly in the breeze, much to the delight of the crowd collected for the spectacle that had ushered London into 1661.

“Old Crommie is dancing the Tyburn jig!” leered an impish woman whose ghost, soiled in sodden rags and rotten teeth, appeared faintly near me amid that long ago crowd.

No matter which way I turned, death seemed to surround me. Quickly I cropped the reality skin into a narrow window of time around the present and 1851, and the crowd and execution dropped away.

Visions of the trail around the Serpentine pond floated into my consciousness as my splinters walked ahead of me, and I collapsed my probable paths to head towards Kensington Road and the entrance of the Crystal Palace, towards the quiet cool of the ancient oaks that stood there, quietly marking their own way through time.

Patricia Killiam had asked to speak with me today. Walking across the edge of the park I summoned up a media feed of her in another of her endless string of press conferences. As an early supporter of much of the deep technology behind the Phuture News Network, Patricia and I had become quite close over the years. In the overlaid visual display, a reporter was just asking her a question.

“Isn’t the world population stable now, even declining?” asked the reporter. “Shouldn’t that help calm the resource shortages?”

“The core problem isn’t population,” explained Patricia, “but that everyone wants to live lives of material luxury. Supporting ten billion middle class citizens on planet Earth was never going to work, and the only solution is to create a simulated reality that is good enough to satisfy our material cravings.”

It was probably the millionth time that Patricia had gone through this, and I could see the fatigue in her eyes, even the synthetic ones projected in the mediaworld I was splintering.

“And why is this proxxi thing such a key part of all this?” asked the same reporter.

“Right now, if you go off into an alternate reality,” she explained, “you just sit there like a potato. If something happens to your body in the real world while you’re away, you have no defense. Do you agree?” The reporters nodded.

“Your proxxi controls a dynamic image of your neural wetware so it can control your physical body when you’re away,” she continued. “This way you can seamlessly drop off into any synthetic space any time you like—even in the middle of a conversation your proxxi can finish it for you. It’s like an airbag for your body and mind, except that this airbag can act as your official representative.”

I could see some light bulbs going on in the audience.

“If you don’t want to go to that meeting or work cocktail tonight,” she finished, “just send your proxxi! Why not? It’s your life!”

This earned a big round of applause.

As the press conference split up, Patricia’s main point-of-presence shifted into my reality and she materialized walking in step beside me in the park. Her tired eyes watched me all the way through her transition. I could feel her weariness.

“So what’s all this about you dying today on Phuture News?” she asked as she appeared.

Now I understood why she’d wanted to chat in person. I tensed up.

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, old friend,” I replied quickly, shaking my head and smiling.

She raised her eyebrows. “At least you seem to have a sense of humor about it.”

Phuture News had begun publishing stories about the death of its founder today. The mounting density of my termination events had pushed my death into reality for everyone living in the world of tomorrow.

“Anyway, I wanted to check up on you in person,” she continued, “see if you needed anything.”

“Thanks, but don’t worry about me. I’m just fooling around with the system.”

A lie, but I had no choice. In my situation admitting anyone into the circle of trust was extremely dangerous. Expanding the network of people who knew what was happening would spread the probability matrices, and I needed razor sharp phutures to effectively head off the threats.

She watched me curiously, almost sadly.

“Playing? Are you sure? This seems like a funny way to have a laugh.”

“Don’t worry,” I reassured her.

She cocked her eyebrows at me.

“Really, don’t worry, and thanks for taking the time to drop in.”

She didn’t believe me.

By now we had reached the edge of the Serpentine. It was filled with small blue paddle boats being industriously driven around by enthusiastic tourists. Views of Kensington Palace crept over the weeping willows in the distance, and despite the brave advances of the sun, a light rain had begun to fall again.

“Is there, well, is there anything I can help with?” she asked. “You can trust me Vince, tell me what’s happening…”

The walls of my future squeezed ever tighter around me.

“No, like I said, everything is fine,” I reiterated. “And I do trust you Pat. I just still have a hard time believing you work for Kesselring now.”

Kesselring had tried to engineer a hostile take-over of Phuture News many years ago, back when it was a start-up, with plans to strip it down and profiteer from the future. He’d used some aggressive and illegal tactics to try and get what he wanted. Patricia had been on our Board back then, and had fought off Kesselring together with us. I had a hard time understanding how she was on his team now.

“A necessary evil,” replied Patricia. She looked off into the distance, and then looked back at me with world-weary eyes. “You promise to ping me if you need anything. I mean it, if you need anything at all.”

“I will.”

She looked at me silently. We’d known each other a long time.

“I mean it, I will,” I laughed. “I promise. Now go on, I know how busy you are.”

Patricia nodded and smiled warmly.

“You take care of yourself, Vince.”

With that, she faded away to leave me alone to finish my walk, or at least, alone with my crowd of future selves arrayed around me.

“It does seem to be getting worse though,” I said to myself glumly when she was gone. I was covering up my issue to the rest of the world as some kind of prank. Most people didn’t seem to think it was very funny, and neither did I.

I kicked some gravel down the winding path as I passed in front of the Crystal Palace. Watching the cloud of dust I’d created drift and settle, I wondered if it felt any regret as it came back to rest again on the earth.

6

“ARE YOU SURE that’s right?”

I laughed and pulled the girl closer. “Everything is right when I’m with you.”

She wriggled away, giggling. “Stop it Vince, come on, be serious! Is that the right time?”

I looked up at the curved clock face. It seemed about right.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Come on then, we’re going to be late!”

She pulled me along, and I looked up from the clock at the high vaulted ceiling of New York’s Central Station. This place always inspired a sense of awe in me, or, if not exactly awe, then a deep feeling of history. I felt a certain sense of nostalgia for all the human stories that had passed through this place, or, like me, were dragged through.

Looking up and around as we wound our way through the hustle and bustle across the white marble floors,  my eyes came to rest on the news display at one end. She was looking at it as well.

“Carrier Groups set to high alert in Straits of Taiwan,” read the rolling display, “China warns of pre-emptive cyber attacks.”

She let go of me, staring at the news display, and then looked back at me. Her blue eyes shone, twinkling in the station’s lighting. She was so beautiful.

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

I looked briefly up at the news again and then back into her eyes.

“Of course, these things always blow over,” I reassured her.

“Seriously Vince, you’re the expert. You’re sure, right?”

She stood stock still, looking into my eyes.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

We began running for the track again, hand in hand. Soon we were on the train, cuddled up together for the evening ride back into Boston, the soft ka-chunk, ka-chunk of the tracks lulling us into a peaceful slumber as the miles rolled away.

In what seemed like moments later, I awoke with a start, my heart racing. It was dark, much too dark. Somebody was yelling. Sitting upright, I looked out the window into pitch blackness.

Then the screams and the terrible squeal of metal tearing and gnashing into itself as the train car pitched back and forth. I jammed my feet into the seat into front of me, bracing myself for what was to come, holding onto the girl who clutched desperately back onto me.

And then the world exploded.

§

Sucking in air, I sat bolt upright in bed, looking around, trying to hold onto her, but she was gone. I hadn’t died in that reality, but then, that one was in the past, now an unchangeable part of my timeline. I hadn’t died in the train crash, but she had—Pamela, the love of my young life, back when I was an engineering student at MIT. I calmed my breathing, telling myself that everything was alright, but even now, nearly forty years later, I knew that it wasn’t, and that it never would be.

It was a perpetually recurring dream, dulled only slightly with time, of that nightmare of a night when I’d lost her. It was during the initial attack that had knocked out the power grids, the first shots of what would become known as 2C, the cyber wars of 2022. What had been intended as a warning shot to disable some regional power systems in Connecticut had cascaded uncontrollably, knocking out power grids all the way down the East Coast in the middle of the winter that year.

I’d promised her there was nothing to worry about, and it had cost her life. I’d been in the middle of my master’s degree at the MIT Media Lab, an expert in the cyber realm, and Patricia Killiam had been my thesis professor. I’d been studying the use of predictive systems in social networks, a pursuit which became a passion after the accident. If I’d just been able to see the future a little more clearly, been able to know a little more, I could have saved her. At least, that’s what I could never forgive myself for.

I wiped the sweat off my forehead, rubbing my eyes. Why had she returned to my dreams now? I sighed. It must be the baby shower I was going to later in the day. Family events always made me think of Pamela, of a life I’d lost so long ago, a life I’d filled with senseless fluff but was now defending with everything I had.

Perhaps it wasn’t worth it. Why was I even trying? I could perhaps save my own life, but the future of the world? I knew the future, and it wasn’t something I wished I knew. In fact, I’d been trying my best to forget. I laid back down in the bed and put my heart back away, closing my eyes.

I needed to try and get some sleep.

7

WASN’T A BABY shower supposed to come before a baby was born? Anyway, it didn’t really matter. I was here to congratulate the happy couple.

I’d just materialized in the entertainment metaworld that Commander Strong had created for his family’s coming out party. Well, his sort-of family.  Rick waved at me and I smiled and waved back, watching him hand his new simulated baby back to his wife.

Despite being a big believer in Patricia’s synthetic reality program, I couldn’t help feeling that these ‘proxxid’ simulated babies were slightly creepy, and I’d been hearing dark rumors hinting terrible things Dr. Granger had been using them for.

I would have avoided coming entirely, but this event had sprung up on my threat radar today. Convincing Rick that this proxxid, and having many more besides, was a good idea would somehow collapse a whole subset of threat vectors coming my way.

I didn’t like the idea of being so disingenuous, and I’d argued and tried to plan other contingencies all night with Hotstuff, but the alternatives were a lot more dangerous. After a little reflection, though, it didn’t seem a bad thing, and the happy couple seemed to be enjoying it.

“Congrats Commander!” I exclaimed as Rick neared, outstretching my hand. He shook it firmly, looking a little sheepish, and motioned towards the bar.

“Thanks, Vince. Oh, and thanks for those flowers the other day, Cindy really loved them.”

“No problem at all.”

We’d reached the bar. “So, what’ll it be?” he asked.

I surveyed the bottles. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

Right now wasn’t the time for a drink. It would have only been a synthetic drink for me, so I could choose whether to feel intoxicated or not, but the real issue was the interpersonal engagement. Taking a drink would necessitate having a chat, and I felt very uncomfortable about having to lie to my friend.

I shrugged weakly.

“You sure?” he asked, dropping some ice cubes into a cut glass tumbler and topping it off with a more than generous dose of whiskey.

“Yeah, I’m just kind of busy.”

I was struggling with what needed to come next. Rick fidgeted in front of me, taking a big gulp from his drink and smiling awkwardly.

“This thing, it’s just a little game,” he laughed, misinterpreting my discomfort as mockery. Knocking back another big swig from his drink he shook his head, looking towards his wife holding their proxxid. “I’m just doing it to keep her happy, you know how it is.”

The time had come.

“No, no, absolutely this is the best thing,” I said enthusiastically, “you need to do this. This is the way of the future!” I clapped Rick on the back to emphasize the point.

He snorted and took another big swig of his drink, his face brightening.

“I mean it, Rick, you should have as many simulated babies as you can before going on to the real thing.”

“You really think so?”

“I do my friend, I do.” I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it encouragingly. I felt terrible. I had to get out of there as quickly as possible. “Listen, I have to get going, though. Sorry. Give Cindy a kiss for me, okay?”

“I will.” He nodded, smiling.

I hesitated. Maybe I shouldn’t do this. Perhaps I should just come clean, see if he could help me with my problem.

“Go on,” laughed Rick, “get going!”

As much as I was struggling with lying to Rick, there was nothing I could do. I nodded goodbye and faded away from the sensory space of his party.

§

I needed a little break to think about things, so decided on a walk in one of my private spaces. I materialized walking along a dusty path next to the Crystal Mountain in the middle of the Sahara desert in Egypt, near the border of Libya.

This place held a mystical, almost magnetic, attraction to me, a massive single quartzite crystal that rose up hundreds of feet out of the barren, limestone landscape surrounding it. I’d recently installed my own private sensor network here, in secret, as the open wikiworld version lacked the resolution to really experience it, to enjoy the nuances and stark beauty of the place. It allowed me a place to wander truly alone; to enjoy some peace for short stretches in my newly frightening personal reality.

Night was falling, spreading its indigo carpet across the sky to reveal the cathedral of stars that shone only in the deepest of deserts. The perpetual wind here, the Sirocco, whistled softly, carrying with it the sand that over the aeons had etched the limestone bedrock into fantastical forms that sprang up out of the desert floor like giant gnomes and mushrooms, lending the lifeless place an interior life of its own.

Massive sand dunes sat hunched in the distance, slowly sailing their lonely courses across the bare bedrock, their hulks propelled by the same unrelenting wind that shaped this place. As they moved, they swallowed everything in their paths, but, just as inevitably as they consumed, they would eventually release as they moved on. You just had to stand still long enough, exist long enough, to be released.

I stepped slowly between the ghostly sandstone figures that towered above me, frozen in time in their mad dance together. The Crystal Mountain glowed in an ethereal purple above it all, its interior lit by a million tiny points of starlight.

It was a strange thing not being able to see my future hanging there in front of me. I mean, I could see my phutures, sense the nearness of their reality in the splinters of my distributed consciousness spreading out ahead of me, but now they all terminated abruptly. The fingers of time I’d carefully nurtured over the years had now been painfully amputated.

Where before the future had flowed straight ahead of me, like a train running to known destinations where I could just switch stations on a whim as the rails flowed past. Now all tracks ahead ended in flames. A suffocating fire enveloped me, the future choking the lifeblood out of my present. I felt trapped in the moment.

“Hotstuff, could you pop in for a sec?”

Hotstuff, my proxxi, obediently materialized next to me. In sharp contrast to the dreamlike landscape I had lost myself in, her vitality and energy sizzled into this space. She was looking extremely sharp in tight, striped riding pants and boots with a low cut, high necked red jacket. Her long blond hair fell in waves down her back and across her shoulders.

Some people liked to create some sort of alter ego as their proxxi, which was all fine for them. I preferred to have an attractive woman as my personal assistant. Plus I liked the idea of a woman driving my body around when I wasn’t in it.

“So did you hear what Patricia said the other day?” I asked as she appeared, trying not to dwell on the implications of me enjoying having a woman enter my body when I was away.

“What, that stuff about being concerned about you?”

“No, not that,” I snorted. “That you’re my airbag.”

I felt suddenly better, more protected, sensing the physicality of Hotstuff being near in this reality.

Hotstuff rolled her eyes and laughed, “If anyone here’s an airbag, boss, it’d have to be you.”

I laughed back, but then sighed heavily. I nervously fidgeted my phantoms limbs.

“Stop that,” she commanded.

She’d stopped walking herself, looking up to consider one of the limestone figures. It had a distinctly phallic shape. She turned and winked at me.

“Stop it,” she repeated softly.

“Stop what?”

I’d begun a nervous drum beat with the phantom limb that controlled my future social connectivity.

“Stop playing with your phantoms,” laughed Hotstuff, continuing to walk on, “you’re going to grow hair on them. Seriously, stop it. You’re jiggling your phutures back and forth, muddying up your timeline. Stay focused.”

I stopped and relaxed my phantoms, releasing them back to her. I sighed again. We’d reached a natural stone archway at the end of the limestone menagerie, on an outcropping above a steep drop to the plateau below. Sitting down together on the edge of the cliff, we looked down at the sand dunes spreading out into the distance, disappearing into the gathering gloom.

“Do you think someone is phuture spoofing me?”

Phuture spoofing was growing into a major business as hacking spilled into the worlds of tomorrow and phuture crackers began engineering their own timelines.

“Boss, we’ve been over this a hundred times, and I don’t see how someone could be phuture spoofing you,” replied Hotstuff. “In all cases, I’ve had specialized agents rooting through the Phuture News system and sniffers floating at choke points throughout the open multiverse, and nothing suspicious to report. To manage it on this scale, they’d need almost the same computing infrastructure as the Phuture News Network itself.”

Which would be impossible to hide, she didn’t need to add.

“So summarize where are we again?” I asked, shaking my head. I leaned back and looked up at the stars.

“So the good news is that we have made some progress,” she said brightly. “We’ve managed to plot a path to extricate your physical body from Atopia, which has given us a much larger playing field to work with.”

“Okay, that sounds good,” I replied carefully. “So what’s the bad news?”

“Well, the system is predicting about seven thousand possible outcomes for your, ah, demise in the next few days or so. Being out in the world has also opened up a lot of new possibilities for whatever is chasing us as well.”

“So that’s it then, I’m dead?” I stated sarcastically. The stars shone like steely pins, puncturing the night sky around me.

“No,” she noted, “that is not it. Don’t be so defeatist.”

I shot her a quizzical glance.

“You only have about a dozen more things you need to get done personally today so we can head this thing off,” she added. “Tomorrow is another day, just focus on today. Be in the moment.”

“That’s what you said yesterday,” I complained.

I could be petulant. It was the last redoubt of the rich and aimless, when faced with hard, honest work. After I’d gotten over the initial shock of almost dying day after day, I’d found the urge to beg off and go surfing almost irresistible, and it was annoying to me that I had to save my own life. This was the sort of stuff I was supposed to pay people for. Strangely, though, I was beginning to settle into it now, even secretly enjoying some of the new activity forced onto me. Of course, I wouldn’t ever admit it.

Hotstuff gave me a sidelong glance and raised one eyebrow.

“Hey tough guy, it’s your life. The probability is only about nine in ten you’ll kick the celestial bucket today if you wing it. You could go surfing if you like.”

I sighed.

“You know boss, this may not be an entirely bad thing…”

That stopped me in my tracks. I looked at her.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” I demanded, almost spitting the words out. I was going to point out that proxxi terminated when their owners did, but I held my tongue.

Hotstuff took a moment to choose her words carefully. “I mean, before, well…”

“Well what?”

“Before you were kind of aimless,” she explained. “You’d lost any interest in the future.”

I pondered for a second. “And you think this is better?”

“Well at least you’re up in the mornings,” she replied.

I snorted. “Yeah, to live another day and fight to stay alive.”

She looked at me, letting me consider what I’d just said. “See what I mean?”

I sighed. I was frustrated, but not as scared anymore. Perversely, in a way maybe she was right. I was certainly savoring the little moments of time that I could get to myself now.

“Whatever. Anyway, it’s getting better, right?” I asked hopefully.

“We’re managing it the best we can.”

“The best that you can, huh?” I replied dejectedly, looking up at my task list for the day as it appeared in one of my display spaces. Something popped out immediately. “So I need to short the upcoming Cognix stock?”

“Nobody will know it’s you. Look, I’m setting up defensive perimeters,” explained Hotstuff, “and we’ll drop some intelligent agents into them to look for any cross-phuture scripting. We’ll figure this out, boss, don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry?” Was she serious?

“I didn’t want to get your hopes up, but…”

“But what?”

“I think we’re starting to see a pattern, hidden deep in the probability matrices that connect together whatever is chasing you. A pattern in the future, but that points somewhere far in the past.”

Finally. Perhaps some progress.

“Can you explain a little more?”

“It would be easier to show you…”

8

DAPPLED SUNLIGHT STREAMED down through the jungle canopy high above, illuminating the hard packed earth below; it was casting a patchwork of light and dark that stitched together scenes of smoke rising from cooking fires, laughing children darting between thatched huts, and women sitting and gossiping together as they stripped the white skins off sweet potatoes, carefully wrapping each one in banana leaves and depositing them into a stone-lined pit.

The men were all off hunting today, chasing pigs that had escaped from neighboring villages in the thunderstorms of the night before. Monkeys barked through the underbrush, their catcalls joining the symphonies of songbirds whose feathers lit up the steaming forest like splashes of flickering paint against a knotted green canvas.

Picking up a smooth stone sitting on the earth, I casually ducked my head as a poison dart snipped past, barely missing me. One of the children cried out to my right. A mother picked the child up by his arm and spanked him. He’d been playing with his father’s blow gun, not knowing what he was doing, probably imitating his dad. Even inhabiting someone else, whatever was hunting me down was trying to kill this body as well.

The mother looked towards me and shrugged, apologizing. I smiled back, returning my attention to the witch doctor. Dodging death was nothing I got excited about anymore.

“In da roond,” explained the tribal elder, speaking in a kind of English-creole-pidgin that was the lingua franca of the Papua New Guinea highlands.

The two most linguistically diverse places left on Earth were also the most culturally and technologically polarized: this place, still barely out of the Stone Age, and New York City, the bustling megalopolis tipping the world into the 22 century. Each retained over a thousand languages, but where almost all in New York were machine translatable, and thus part of the new global lingua franca, almost none of the New Guinea languages were. I was struggling to understand what this elder was equally struggling to explain to me.

“Round, like, like in a circle?” I stuttered back in my best attempt at native Yupno. Speaking through this body was difficult.

A giant tree frog watched me lazily from its perch in the branches nearby. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a frog in the wild. Of course, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in the wild.

To get to this remote and rugged place, we’d had a portable communication base station dropped in, and then we convinced a nun running a nearby mission to come and persuade them to have one of the villagers drink a glass of water laden with smarticles, allowing my subjective to enter and control their body through the communication link.

It was the only way I could speak with this particular elder, the Yupna witch doctor and keeper of holy secrets. The smarticles hadn’t fully suffused into this body, so I felt numb and disconnected, and they would be soon flushed out, so I had to hurry.

The witch doctor shrugged and smiled, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. His eyes sparkled at me. I smiled back, my pssi filtering his body language into a form that made sense to me. My gaze shifted to a break in the jungle that revealed the glacier capped mountain ranges beyond, stretching upwards into the bright sky. He was trying to explain his perception of the shape of time, or rather, its lack of shape.

“Here and now”, “Back in the 20’s”, “Going forward”…the modern world was fixated on spatial metaphors for time, the idea of the past being behind us and the future ahead. Not the Yupno, though. In this remote valley it had forgotten, time had no linear form to its inhabitants. To them, it flowed uphill, backwards, in forms and in shapes. They laughed at our conception of its forward flow. This Stone Age culture experienced directly something Einstein had only glimpsed at through his equations.

The pattern Hotstuff had detected had led us here, and she was sitting on a log across the cooking fire from the elder and I, fetchingly dressed in tight safari shorts with her hair done up in a long single braid that she was playing with, nibbling on, and twirling between her fingers.

“He means time runs forwards and backwards, but not like a stream—more like currents in a lake,” she suggested. “No, like a reservoir, that’s more what he means.”

“Like a reservoir?” I asked the elder.

He nodded. With long arms, he reached up and circled his hands around slowly, finally coming to rest, ending at me. The Yupno had a way of pointing towards doorways when speaking about time, a curiosity I was just beginning to understand.

Inhabiting the body of this tribal member, I was trying to see if time felt any different for me. It didn’t, but something here felt odd.

Amazingly, the elders here hadn’t batted an eye at the idea of one of their own being magically inhabited by an alien spirit, nor the idea that I was conversing with an invisible ghost Hotstuff, in their midst. It seemed perfectly natural to them.

The witch doctor pointed to where Hotstuff was sitting.

“The spirit name?” he asked.

Hotstuff raised her eyebrows.

“Hotstuff,” I replied, shrugging to her.

“HOT stuff,” he repeated, “hot STUFF?”

I nodded, and he smiled ever wider.

“And your name?” I hadn’t thought to ask before.

He pointed at his own chest.

“Nicky,” he said proudly, and then added, “Nicky Nixons.”

I laughed and shook my head—Nicky Nixons the witch doctor.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Nicky Nixons. My name,” I said, pointing to myself, “is Vince Indigo.”

“Yes, in dee go…” he replied, nodding sagely, as if he’d always known, as if my name held a meaning he knew and I didn’t.

“Vince, this is all very touching,” interjected Hotstuff, “but we have to get going. We’re out of time here.”

She splintered some upcoming death events into my display spaces, one of them a bio-electronic Ebola-based retrovirus that ended with my internal organs almost instantaneously liquefying while I was brushing my teeth tomorrow morning. She immediately firewalled off the data tunnel from the jungle we were sitting in, just in case.

“It’s even getting dangerous just being here.”

I nodded.

“Okay, let’s get me going,” I replied. “But you stay a while and see what you can learn from him.”

It was time to get to work again. The sensory frames of the jungle and Nicky Nixons quickly faded away to reveal the confines of a small, sparse apartment, somewhere in the lower levels of the Atopian seascraper complexes. In augmented space, an endless array of workspace cubicles radiated outwards from the apartment, in the New London financial metaworld. The cubicles were busily occupied by thousands of copies of Willy McIntyre, one of Bob’s best friends, and my newly appointed stock trader.

“So I assume business is good?” I asked Willy, sensing the arrival of his primary subjective.

Hotstuff was feeding me a report on Willy’s business, and I could see that these weren’t just bots and synthetics he had working; these were full blown splinters, hundreds of them. I didn’t care what he was up to. I just needed to get in and out. Time was a ticking bomb for me, and I had to go and defuse a dozen other situations right away.

“Business is very, very good,” replied Willy, now standing beside me, and watching me watching his financial army at work below.

He looked like the cat that had just eaten the canary, and about ready to burst and let me in on some secret. In the report from Hotstuff, I could see that Willy had fully paid off the multi-generational mortgage for his family, and was well on his way to amassing a pretty sizeable fortune, but I didn’t have the time or energy to talk . Death was calling.

“Yeah, I’d noticed you’d amped up your Phuture News services pretty dramatically,” I said carefully, “but that’s not why I’m here. I’ll just send you the details of what I need right now. I can see you’re a busy man.”

I immediately uploaded the transaction I needed executed into one of his splinters.

“You want me to what?” he exclaimed. “You know this is going to look suspicious, especially with me working for Infinixx.”

“From what I’ve heard, you don’t work for them anymore.”

Willy stopped fidgeting and stared at me. “Yeah that’s right, but it will still look odd.”

“You wouldn’t be making any profit off this, and nobody will know,” I explained. “I know it seems crazy, but if you could do this for me, and keep it quiet, I can pay you an awful lot of money. I need you to dump all that stock and chalk up a huge loss for me, and I need you to do it from New York.”

I looked at his face. He was watching me watching him.

“And be careful,” I said after a moment, suddenly feeling he was in over his head.

“It doesn’t look like there will be any problems with this transaction, Vince, in fact…” he began, not catching my meaning.

“No, not with that,” I interrupted, “with what you have going on here.”

“There’s nothing going on here.”

We both stood and stared at each other.

I sighed. I needed to get going.

“Just be careful, okay?”

He hesitated, but then smiled.

“No problem, Mr. Indigo.”

This kid was going to get himself in trouble. He offered his hand to shake, and I shook it, but my mind was already elsewhere.

I quickly flitted off to the roof of the Cognix towers.

9

A DEEP, HAUNTING wail reverberated through the morning air, carrying me upwards, beyond the highest of the Himalayan peaks, but also inwards and backwards, deep into my mother’s womb. A million deaths surrounded me, all threaded outwards from my moment of creation, a cosmic embryo of existence secured by the thin timeline threading through it all that kept me alive.

§

My body was drenched in sweat under the hot sun that beat down from the Columbian sky. I was making my way across the Plaza de Bolivar, wiping the sweat off the nape of my neck with a t-shirt I’d pulled out of my backpack. Tourists were standing around in small groups, looking around at the grand framed portico walls, sweating together under the same sun that was baking us. Pigeons scattered at my feet.

I had to keep moving. A small security contingent was shadowing me from a distance, but I was trying to stay incognito. Out of the corner of my eye, a Coca-Cola sign called out from under the shade of an awning, and I shifted my path towards it and the small convenience shop at the corner of the plaza.

“Hola!” I announced as I entered, feeling the relief of cool air sweeping over me. I slid open the door to a small refrigerator at the side of the register, pulling out a can of soda, and, parched, opened it and began gulping it down. The shop keeper appeared from the back just as I was about finished it.

“Senor!” he exclaimed, his eyes wide as he stared at me.

“What?”

I put the can down. Was he that upset that I hadn’t paid for it first?

I reached into my pockets, feeling suddenly energized and awake. I fumbled around excitedly for some pesos. A small group of people had appeared in the shop, staring at me, which I knew could only mean one thing. Instead of feeling scared, I felt a rush of adrenaline, now excited about whatever was about to happen, even though I knew it was death.

My heart banged, my chest exploding. I couldn’t breathe. I looked at the shop keeper, now staring in horror at the can of soda in my hand. My vision began to swim as I made for the door, my knees giving way in a euphoric rush. At the edges of my senses, I could hear clapping, in fact, I could hear applause. I waved to my fans as the blackness descended.

§

The dung-chen horns sounded again, their low, baleful moans awakening my mind fully from its semi-lucid dream state. I blinked and looked out the window of the room I’d been sleeping in. The rising sun was announcing the start of a new day, though Lhasa was still enveloped in shade as the sun fought its way over the towering peaks surrounding the valley.

Still half asleep, I let my mind wander back to the death event in Columbia we’d just averted. They had been smuggling narcotics in the soda cans, and I’d unwittingly downed one before anyone could warn me off. We shifted the path of my walk later today through Bogota away from the Plaza de Bolivar entirely, just in case.

A troubling development was the flash death mobs. The same way that people would mob around an accident on a street corner to gawk, with future prediction technology and the wikiworld, people could now flit to nearly any spot on the planet to witness accidents taking place. They called them flash death mobs.

With so many predicted future deaths, I’d now attracted my own flash death mob fan club, and my future deaths were now small celebrations, with people flitting in to witness the endless sequences of clever deaths that I would narrowly avert. They figured this was a future installation art project of some kind, and I couldn’t afford to tell the world the truth, so I was just rolling with it.

I shook my head.

The patterns had now led us to Lhasa to study the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text dedicated to experiences that lay between life and death. It was maddeningly difficult to understand as most of it was coded in symbols. We had gone there to participate in the Monk Debates, to talk directly with the ones that really understood the text.

A familiar tapping echoed through the wooden doorway, slightly ajar, of the shared room I was sleeping in. I was inhabiting the body of a Buddhist monk from the Sera monastery on the outskirts of Lhasa. In return for borrowing his corporal form, I’d offered the monk a chance for some truly out-of-body meditation sessions using the pssi network, something they didn’t normally have access to here.

Smarticles were an internationally controlled substance. My transport of them outside of Atopia, and especially what I was doing here, was highly illegal.

“Don’t even try it,” I warned Hotstuff.

I pulled the bed sheets off myself. She stood there pouting in the doorway, all done up in a French Maid outfit, but of course still with her riding crop in hand. I stood and quickly pulled my maroon dhonka robe up and around myself.

Weeks had passed and death was closer than ever. I was still here, but barely. The day before there’d been nearly fifty thousand ways I could have died in the millions of phutures we were tracking, and I’d even had to fight off two sequences in real time and real space, an incredibly close call.

While we’d managed to slow down the contagion, we hadn’t been able to stop its spreading. We’d tried simulations of locking my body in a vault, but this made things worse, as the death events piled up, making even the slightest of exposures of my body to the outside disastrously threatening, eventually ending in some kind of terrorist strike against my hiding place.

We had hundreds of thousands of bots and synthetics running around now doing large and small things to sweep the death events back, but I was still the key to many of them. Today was going to be a big day, and by all indications we would be fighting death off more fiercely than ever.

“So what’s the bad news?” I sighed.

The rest of the sleeping mats in my room were empty, the other monks apparently much earlier risers than me, but then again, they were real Buddhist monks. I stretched, yawning, and rubbed my neck, expecting the worst. I needed to get some hot tea into this body before the morning meditation session.

“Good news!” exclaimed Madame Hotstuff, snapping the riding crop against my monk’s ass, urging me awake. She swished the air in front of her with the riding crop to leave it finally pointing towards the door. We began to walk. “Today it seems the threats have begun to recede—or at least, they’ve stabilized in number.”

“Really?”

My constricted future eased ever so slightly. Finally.

We walked out the door and into the hallway, passing a group of monks busily on their way somewhere. Hotstuff sashayed her way past them in her stilettos and knee high stocking, smiling at them appreciatively.

“Really,” she stated, looking back at me and snapping her riding crop against the rough hewn rock wall of the corridor. She smiled and gave a playful little growl. “It looks like the new ring fencing of a perimeter around your phutures has begun to pay off, that combined with this new meditation and awareness stuff.”

“So what was it then?” I asked. If we’d found a way to contain it, then there must be a path to the root source, some forensic process we could use to follow it backwards.

Hotstuff lowered the riding crop.

“Vince, honey, remember what Nicky Nixons said, what Yongdzin is saying. You need to stop thinking in deterministic terms. Remember the reservoir. Expand the reservoir, live in the moment.”

“Right,” I replied. “Live in the moment, effortless action.”

“Exactly.”

“Hotstuff…Hotstuff…” I intoned solemnly, pressing my monk’s hands together in a prayer while we walked.

“I do wish you’d chosen a different word for your mantra than my name.”

I opened my eyes and winked at her. “Hey, it works for me.”

“Well, as long as it works for you,” she sighed, smiling and rolling her eyes. “The patterns are solidifying. Whoever did this has left a trail of Easter eggs behind, we think leading to a back door. Nicky Nixons has been a lot of help.”

“Well remind me to thank him sometime personally,” I replied, now eager to have a look at what was on the agenda today.

We’d arrived in the cafeteria, if one could call it that, in the center of Sera Jey. I grabbed a cup of tea and sat down with Hotstuff at a wooden table in the corner. A list of the day’s activities floated into view over the bench.

“Not so bad for today, mister, not as bad as yesterday.”

By now we’d built up an espionage and counter-espionage network that outstripped any but the wealthiest of corporations and nation states, all with the specific directive of bending the future timeline to my will, to keep me alive. We’d funneled all the money we could from Phuture News and sold off all my assets to fund the program.

One thing in particular floated up through the threat matrices.

“So there’s no way around it?”

In all the long list of things I’d had to do, this one hit closest to home and I was struggling with it.

“No boss, sorry,” replied Hotstuff. “And you’d better take care of it before the morning meditation.”

I felt terrible about sabotaging the launch of the Infinixx distributed consciousness project, but there didn’t seem to be any way around it.  A Triad gangster network in Hong Kong would have used it to pinpoint some of my other activities, and disabling the launch was a key vector in keeping my lifeline intact.

I shrugged. Progress was progress. I’d better stick with what was working. Using a communication phantom I punched up Patricia’s networks, requesting an urgent, private meeting with her primary subjective.

A large Chenrezig statue, the Buddha of Compassion, sat at the head of the long chamber I was in. I stared up into its face, and then inspected its dozens of arms stretching out around it like star fire. Immediately above its main face, eleven of its other faces gazed down benevolently. I was struck by how eerily similar its array of outstretched arms resembled what phantom limbs used in the pssi system would look like, if they were visible in real space. Shaking my head, I turned my gaze out of the window to the majestic peaks around us.

The plains surrounding Lhasa were filled with permanent makeshift encampments of international troops that stood as a buffer between the Chinese and Indian bases that lined the opposite sides of the valley. The Americans were there as a part of the UN mission, as well as NATO forces, but the largest contingent was the African Union.

Africa was where many thought hope for the future could be found; where the engine of a new economic powerhouse was beginning to growl. It was closely linked with Terra Nova, the off-shore colonies competing with Atopia, with their own synthetic reality product.

“You want me to what?” asked Patricia, materializing at the seat across from me and pulling my gaze back from looking out the window.  A glittering security blanket settled around us. Patricia paused for a moment while the blanket sealed. “Do you have everything you need? What’s this about?”

She’d helped me smuggle the smarticles out of Atopia, even helped me set up my covert communications network, and all this without even asking me what it was for. I hadn’t been able to tell her, it was just too dangerous. Thank God for old friends.

“I’m fine,” I replied in a quiet voice. “I don’t need any more materials. I just need you to come help me right now with something, in your physical form.”

This sounded odd even before it came out, especially coming from the slight frame of my monk, diminutive in front of this world famous scientist.

“There are some things I need some direct help with, and it’s critical to get done right now. I can’t say more than that, except that it needs to be kept a secret.”

Patricia eyed me carefully. “You realize the launch of Infinixx is in less than an hour?”

“I’m not saying you can’t go, just go virtually. Isn’t that what your whole project is about anyway? And what’s the difference? I need your help right now.”

This was definitely weird, but I’d gotten over my squeamishness about these sorts of requests.

She hesitated.

“Look, you said I could rely on you if I ever needed anything right?”

“Yes, I suppose…”

“So I’m asking.”

She sighed. “I guess it won’t make any difference.”

“Perfect,” I replied, sensing this mission accomplished. “I appreciate it, Pat.”

An awkward silence ensued.

“So what’s going on with these storm systems?” I asked casually, changing the topic

I was curious to see if Patricia had anything more to say than what I got through the mediaworlds. I’d been so caught up in my own disasters lately I’d hardly paid attention to the storm systems that were threatening Atopia. With a little more breathing space, I’d started to let my mind assimilate more of what was happening on the outside. These storms were the big news.

“We don’t know,” she replied, shrugging, “but they’re definitely not natural.”

Not natural? I hadn’t heard that before.

“Really?”

“Something is going on, and we’re not sure what,” she replied.

No kidding, I thought to myself, but I just kept quiet.

10

FINALLY, IN LONGER than I could remember, I was really enjoying my walk through Beun Retiro Park in Madrid. Fall had begun to turn fully to winter, and all the leaves had fallen off the trees to create a beautiful golden carpet underfoot. Perfectly faultless blue skies hung overhead.

In my mind’s eye, I could see myself stepping gracefully to the side as a helicopter crashed down from the heavens, nearly crushing me on a walk through Stanley Park in Vancouver the next day. In another splinter, I could see a car swerve, bouncing into my beach cruiser as I turned into a parking lot in Malibu a few days later. The car clipped the surf board sitting in the back of the cruiser, sending it spinning around. I ducked just before the board would have decapitated me. It was all effortless action, like a ballet with death.

We’d found a solution to my problem. Since we’d stabilized them a few weeks back when I was in Tibet, the density of death events had quickly begun to fall. There were still nearly twenty thousand future fatalities we had to avoid to maintain my healthy timeline, but what had seemed terrifying and unfathomable just a few short weeks before, had become just a walk in the park. Literally.

I strode purposefully forward as I walked around Retiro Park, each step picking out another yellow leaf underfoot to grind into the gravel, imagining each to be a tiny harbinger of doom I was snuffing out with each step. Looking up from my work, I found myself standing in front of the Crystal Palace.

Down the path a little way, a woman leaned over to pick up one of the leaves, and then began laughing, and then crying, completely oblivious to everyone else around her. Not wanting to disturb her, I shifted my walk onto another trail. I glanced back over my shoulder towards the woman, but she was already gone. She’d looked awfully familiar.

To protect myself, I’d developed a kind of temporal immune system, stretching out into the alternate universes connected to me. An army of killer tomorrow-cells spun through the probabilistic spaces surrounding me, neutralizing threats, clotting dangerous portals and pathways both into the future and through the past. This immune system had become a part of me, a part of my living body, a highly attuned death-sense that allowed me to effortlessly thread my way through even the most dangerous of situations.

For once, the conspiracy theorists were right. Some of the tabloid worlds had begun publishing stories about a shadowy force that had been detected, pushing and pulling the future prediction networks.  The shadowy force they were referring to was me, but there was something else out there too. That something else that was the thing that was trying to hunt me down, but I was hunting it down as well.

What had more of my attention were the hurricanes that were threatening to pin Atopia between them. In my situation, it was impossible to ignore the idea that perhaps the storms were aimed at me, a final attempt to destroy my power base after attempting to trap me there. Try as I might, the idea just didn’t stick, and though the storms looked like they would damage Atopia, they were no real threat to me.

In my struggle to save myself, I had been reborn. I turned my face up to the morning sunshine, feeling its heat warm my soul. Where my life before had been sliding into apathy, the past few months had led me on a spiritual journey into an almost mystical place. Decoding the hidden pattern had helped us navigate the most stable path through my future, and it was leading us further and further back. A hidden truth I was just beginning to glimpse was buried somewhere in humankind’s history.

The solution, as such, was no solution, but simply to carry on. It was everything and nothing, both the beginning and the end. I was still engaged in a desperate struggle against death, as we all are, whether we saw it that way or not, but it had become more like a dance, with effortless action guiding me through. I’d reached a heightened state of being that I would never have been able to achieve any other way.

As this timeline had worn on, the world had begun filtering the incessant predictions of my death as the attempts of another bored trillionaire at getting attention. The world at large had erased me from their networks as phuture spam, and even the flash death mobs had gotten bored. The man with no future, who existed only in the moment, was invisible to a world fixated on anywhere but where they actually were.

On my end, I’d come to grips with, and even relish, my situation. My death had become a local solution to the universe that, with the massive resources at my disposal, I’d managed to bring under control in a tight but stable spiral, undertaking a list of nearly incomprehensible activities each day.

The irony just made it that much richer.

I was trapped by my own creation, unable to even tell people what was happening. Even more ironic was that I didn’t even know if it all was true. It was possible that I was just running around everyday doing it all for no reason. But then, this was life.

I smiled at that thought.

The existentialists did say that life was all about pulling the victory of meaning from the jaws of senseless absurdity, and in that, I’d discovered a purpose that I’d struggled to find before. That purpose was finding out who was doing this to me, and why, and the trail was leading back to Atopia.

And so, I became a man with no future, but a man that danced happily between the raindrops, or perhaps, between the timedrops.

EPILOGUE

Identity: Patricia Killiam

SITTING AND WAITING. Perfect the art of sitting and waiting, and you will live a long, long life.

I was in the main Cognix conference room, perched about two thousand feet up in the complex spanning the tops of the farming towers at the center of Atopia. The afternoon sun was shining in hotly through the glass window-walls, and I was sure he was making me wait on purpose, knowing I was here in person.

My mind was circling back to my press conference this morning, about what I’d been telling the reporters. Truths and half truths; I’d been mixing the both of them for so long I hardly knew the difference anymore.

How was pssi going to end up changing the world? To be honest, I really had no idea. The real power of pssi, I wanted to tell them, was harnessing the brain’s natural ability for adaptively rewiring itself to extend the human mind into the multiverse, but this would have earned me blank stares.

The human sensory and motor system had evolved to help us make sense of our environment and fend for ourselves within it, which had worked great when our ancestors were out hunting gazelle on the savannah, but the modern human environment was a massive flow of information and pssi made it possible to plug our nervous systems directly into it.

Explaining that to those reporters was just a bridge too far for me to cross with them. It was easier to let them run into some pssi-kids on Atopia somewhere—they’d get the idea soon enough.

I sighed.

Being present in the flesh was something I’d begun to do more and more lately, sensing my own time growing short. Up here in the conference room the security blankets blocked outgoing and incoming communications, so there was no escaping down a rabbit hole while I waited. However, there was no sense in letting time, illusion or not, go to waste, so I decided to limber up a little.

Taking a deep breath, I straightened up in my chair and clicked on the visual overlays of my phantoms, and they appeared arrayed around me. Concentrating, I began moving the phantom that controlled my spatial point of view. This little phantom was visible, floating disconnected beside my body like a little putty colored finger that I could move around.

Despite working with this technology for more than thirty years, it still felt strangely thrilling to feel this projection as a part of me, its tactiles and kinesthetics wired into my own sensory system so that I could feel it stretch and click through the boundaries of its interface.

The brain had an almost inexhaustible capacity to neuroplastically rewire itself. Learn to play the piano, and the brain devotes more of its motor cortex to your fingers. Cut off an arm, on the other hand, and your brain could adaptively learn to reroute its control of an artificial arm by reworking the way it used various packets of neurons.

Phantoms were just an extension of this. Without removing any existing limbs or digits, we had created virtual fingers and limbs in synthetic spaces using pssi—the poly-synthetic sensory interface—to connect them to the neurons in the motor cortex. It was like having a dozen extra hands to manage controls, directly wired into our brains like a part of our bodies.

The flip side of the coin was feeding data into our senses, whether touch, sight, sound or any of the dozens of other more minor senses humans possessed, to create an unlimited number of metasenses that warned or informed us of what was happening within the informational flow of the multiverse. Of course this included entirely synthetic sensory worlds we could transport ourselves into.

Now we could completely customize our bodies and senses to the way we wanted to interact with real and virtual worlds. Helped along by the neurotrophic growth factors we’d embedded into the smarticles suffusing through our nervous systems, we’d discovered that the brain had a stunning capacity to grow and adapt to the pssi stimulus, far beyond even our wildest imaginings at the beginning of the project.

I latched myself firmly into place at the conference table and connected my primary visual point of view to this spatial control phantom. As I stretched and moved it, my subjective point of view shot back outwards from the conference room to hover outside the building.

Then I dove down into the treetops below, stopping just above the Boulevard. Quickly I cycled this phantom back and forth, limbering it up, and then I unlatched the rest of my phantoms. As I sat in the conference room with my hands resting gently on the polished cherry wood table, my eighteen phantoms danced around me, and I concentrated as I felt each of them sliding through their interface points, coordinating my visual and metasense overlays.

These phantoms weren’t just projections; they were a part of my living, breathing body. It felt like I was dancing, and I leaned back in my chair, my eyes half closed and smiling, enjoying my performance.

With a short characteristic tone announcing his arrival, Kesselring, the principle owner and CEO of Cognix Corporation, materialized opposite me on the other side of the table. I quickly and immediately stowed my phantoms as if sweeping toys back into a toy chest. He smiled as he watched me packing them away, waiting for me to finish before he spoke.

Below a thick head of perfectly groomed black hair, Kesselring’s flecked hazel eyes shone intensely above a salt and pepper beard. The worn creases in his face projected just the right angles of intelligence and sagacity for a man of his stature.

“Great work with the press today, Patricia. You are the best. You looked great!” he announced with some enthusiasm, if perhaps a touch patronizingly.

“I do get tired of lying to them all the time,” I sourly complained.

Maybe I was annoyed at him for making me wait, or perhaps I felt silly being caught playing with my phantoms. Really it was because I couldn’t shake the surreal realization that we were planning a conspiracy of the vastest  scale, but, it wasn’t really a conspiracy, as in the end everyone would be complicit. We weren’t just building a better mouse trap here—we were building the best mouse trap of all time.

“We’re not really lying to anyone,” said Kesselring. “We’ve been over this a million times. I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing it up.”

“You’re right,” I sighed.

He was right.

We’d been over it countless times in the years since it’d become clear what we had to do, but as we neared the threshold, things just didn’t feel right anymore.

He changed the topic to what he’d really called this meeting to discuss.

“Do you think he suspects anything?”

I sighed deeply.

“Obviously he suspects something,” I replied, shaking my head, “but no, nothing to do with us, at least, not yet.”

The hamster wheel we had Vince running on hadn’t been my idea, but then again, it was only my deep connections into the Phuture News Network technology that made what we were doing to him possible. I’d also made some modifications to his proxxi, Hotstuff, to keep him where we wanted him. The intention had never been to actually harm Vince, but we couldn’t afford to let him see what we were planning, at least, not until it was too late to stop us.

“Good.”

“But he’ll figure it out eventually,” I pointed out. I was already having a hard time holding off his agents. “He’s already most of the way there.”

“Soon it won’t matter,” shrugged Kesselring. “And nobody would pay any attention to him anyway.”

A pause while I eyed Kesselring, trying to lay blame elsewhere for what I’d done to my friend. I took a deep breath.

“So we’re going to be giving it away for free?”

Kesselring smiled. “Free to install anyway.”

“And it doesn’t worry you that we’re not telling people the full story?”

He rolled his eyes and looked down into the conference table, tapping his fingers.

“Hal’s new work looks promising…”

“Christ, don’t get me started on Hal,” I scowled. I could see Kesselring was hiding something from me.

“I’m just saying…”

“I know what you’re saying.”

Using the problem to fix the problem was a disaster recipe for unintended consequences.

“As you yourself have said many times,” he pointed out, “we need to maximize saturation of the product introduction to maximize networking effects. The Terra Novan’s own synthetic reality system isn’t far behind us. We need to get our product in first and fast to capture the market.”

I sighed, shaking my head.

“That is not the goal of what we’re doing here.”

Kesselring looked at me steadily.

“Perhaps not your goal, but somebody has to pay for all this.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose, feeling the noose tighten around my neck.

~ BROTHERS BLIND ~

Book 4:

Bobby Baxter

PROLOGUE

“I CAN BE good at anything I want,” I explained proudly. “I just need to apply myself.”

I smiled impressively and took another swig from the bottle of fermented seaweed. It was my fourteenth birthday and I was drunk. Or rather, it was our fourteenth birthday.

My brother and I were sitting on railings at one of the entrances to the passenger cannon, suspended hundreds of feet above the Atopian beaches. The steady thwump, thwump of the cannon discharging its nightly cargo shipments reverberated powerfully in the air around us. We weren’t supposed to be here.

“How did you override the security controls again?” asked my brother.

“Easy as pie!” I boasted. “Get your proxxi in here, I’ll download the details and show him.”

My brother looked away towards the breaking surf below.

“You always want to explain it to my proxxi,” he complained.

“Come on, seriously?” I chuckled. “You know you’re not good at security stuff.”

“I’m not good at anything,” he replied quietly. “How is it possible that you have such an easy time with everything, but I struggle so much? Aren’t twins supposed to be the same?”

“We’re not identical twins,” I laughed.

He looked hurt.

“Hey now, come on. Don’t exaggerate. You’re like the funniest guy I know. That’s a gift!”

He sighed. “It’s the same with everyone. Everyone wants to talk to my proxxi.”

“That’s not true, come on.”

He sighed again, but then he brightened up. “But you are amazing, Bob. You can do anything.”

I smiled. “See? Now that’s the spirit!”

1

Identity: Bobby Baxter

I AM TEMUJIN, great warrior of the Mongol clan of the Ong Khan. The year is 1198 and the heat of the summer solstice has baked the steppes dry and cracked. We will soon replenish Mother Earth and soak Her with the blood of our enemies, and I will rise to my rightful and God-given place among my people as the Universal Ruler, the Ghengis Khan.

Opening my eyes slowly, I listened to the crisp snapping of our banners flapping in the breeze and watched the Tatars amassing in the dusty distance on the plains below. Sitting outside the royal yurt with my trusty saber balanced on my knees, my body was flowing and pulsing with the power of my ancestors.

Today would end in victory, or in glorious death.

“Bob, do you ever get the feeling none of this is real?” asked Martin, sitting over to my right with a great wad of half chewed venison dripping from his mouth. His eyebrows were cocked high as he leaned towards me with the question, waving the rest of the bloody deer haunch around in circles for emphasis.

While my brother had always scored great in logic and linguistics, he’d just as consistently scored extremely low in existential intelligence. I groaned.

“Dude, you are totally ruining this for me.”

I’d asked him to be my partner in the gameworlds today, at the urging of our mother, but I was feeling like I’d live, or die, to regret the decision. A sinking feeling settled into my gut.

“Yeah I know, but, you know what I mean,” he continued, enthusiastically diving in to rip another hunk of meat off the bone. “I mean, how can I know that I really exist?”

I studied him carefully, deciding what to say next, but right now I needed to prop up our audience stats. Sid and the rest of the guys were counting on me.

“In a nutshell, my friend, you can’t,” I replied, working up an angle to get his head in the game. “I think, therefore I am, as Descartes famously put it in 1644. Since then, really no progress.”

“Mmmmm,” was all Martin could add philosophically as he looked skywards. “So how can I be sure that you’re not just some gameworld zombie?”

“Again, my friend, you can’t,” I replied. “Although from my point of view, the issue is rather more about you.” I laughed and he joined in. “But if we’re worrying about whether people around us are mindless zombies, then the question is rather moot, no?”

Martin smiled at that, wiping his greasy face with the back of one hand. Before we could continue, Vicious rode up. Vicious was my best friend Sid’s proxxi. A seventies British punk rocker, in his best pasty whiteness, looked awfully comical with knobby knees poking out from under Mongol battle armor. The leather helmet must have been hell on his spiky hair.

A big smile spread across my face.

Vicious could sense my amusement and grimaced, but gamely soldiered on. Trying to keep in character, he leaned towards Martin and said, “Sire, Master Sid asked me to bring you your mount and…ah…ah fook it, mate, yer horse is ’ere.”

Right behind him rode up my proxxi Robert, also bringing my mount. Wisely, he said nothing as he tossed me the reigns, looking towards Vicious and smiling. Vicious scowled back, and they both trotted off to get Sid and themselves ready.

I sheathed my saber, Martin dropped the remains of his meal on the floor, and we stood to get ready.

“I mean, I know this is a gameworld,” said Martin over the top of his horse, “but don’t you ever get the feeling, back in the world, that all of this is impossible?”

I laughed.

Back in the world—now there was an idea fraught with complications. In a cosmos already sporting an infinite number of universes, in just one of these we’d begun spawning our own infinity of digital universes. Collectively, they’d begun calling the whole jumble the multiverse, on the assumption that infinity and infinity overlapped somewhere.

If there were an infinite number of universes, then logically one of them had to have exactly the train of events that an arbitrary gameworld, like the one we were in now, had going on. So when we flitted into a gameworld, in a sense we were creating windows into the parallel universe the simulation was tracking.

According to some, there was an equivalency of actually being there if a conscious observer couldn’t distinguish the difference. So, the question of the day was this: were we just creating simulated worlds, or were we actually tunneling past the event horizon of our own universe to create portals into parallel universes?

Perception was reality. Was therefore, reality equivalent to perception? A slippery slope if there ever was one. Thus the question of this world being real or not was rather more troubling than it may have seemed.

I leaned forward to pat and stroke my horse’s neck, calming it as it strained around to look at me. It knew today was going to be bloody. Taking a grip on my tall wooden-framed saddle, with one foot in a stirrup, I returned to Martin’s question.

“So what exactly do you mean—is all of this impossible?”

I knew it would be impossible to win this battle without settling whatever was on his mind. I looked towards him as I swung up onto my horse.

“Look, I’m not stupid, I know all the stuff about the infinite number of alternate bubbly universes, this one springing from that, all spawning into each other,” replied Martin. “Whatever. It still doesn’t answer my real question.”

I settled comfortably into my saddle and we started off. The Mongolian saddle was designed to allow the horse to choose its canter, leaving the rider free to deal with other tasks—it was more of a platform than a saddle, a fighting platform. These guys had been way ahead of their time. I twisted around to check my quiver of arrows.

“Which is?”

“Why something and not nothing?”

My patience was beginning, as often with him, to wear thin. Why was it that human beings had this God-shaped hole in their heads that needed to be filled when the mind grabbed at straws? God certainly wasn’t a part of my life, not anymore.

“What’s going on, you caught religion or something?” I asked, catching glimpses of the Mongol warriors praying to their shamanistic gods as we began trotting through the yurt city.

Rising smoke from the cooking fires enveloped us, and the place was thick with the tension of the coming bloodshed. I raised my fist in a show of power and victory to those that turned to watch me pass. I felt suddenly angry.

“Do you know how stupid it is that you’d believe in God?”

Martin shrunk away at the criticism. “What, just because you don’t, you think everyone else is stupid? So you think mum joining the Elèutheros is stupid? Sid is a member, do you think he’s stupid?”

I sighed. It wasn’t his fault.

“No, that’s not it. Sid’s different. And don’t drag mum into this…”

Our mother had been disappearing further and further into her religion, even as the technology had sped further ahead. The Christian Elèutheros sect had gained an incredibly strong following on Atopia, pitching itself against the libertarian ideals that Atopia was founded upon, against what they perceived as the ultimate decay of society. Sid was a part of the Elèutheros hacking community, a somewhat different side to the sect than my mother. I didn’t quite understand it all.

“You always treat everyone like they’re stupid,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “Anyway, that doesn’t really answer anything, it’s just replacing one non-starter for another.” Martin shrugged. “It’s kind of giving up, religion, isn’t it?”

We trotted along for a bit. I said nothing, letting him finish his thoughts while I calmed my own down.

“I guess it would be comforting, though, to give in to faith, especially if you really believed in some sort of supernatural evil,” Martin said reflectively as we reached the outskirts of our camp. “But really, what’s it all for?”

“Now you sound like you’re talking about the meaning of life,” I replied.

Crap, he was all over the place and I needed his head in the game, not distracted with metaphysics. He’d been terrible in the gameworlds lately, and I could see why with all this stuff floating around in his head.

I checked my dimstim stats and my fans weren’t digging the philosophical talk. I’d better cut this short and get to the blood and guts.

“Martin,” I said, turning to him and smiling with brotherly love, “I will share with you my personal philosophy on the topic.”

He shrugged and smiled as we bounced up and down. I began my performance.

“First off, you can’t answer the creation question. You need to double think it out of your brain.”

We trotted along the front line of my amassing warriors while I let this settle. Martin took out one of his daggers to inspect it.

“Second, the only meaning to life is the one that you give it,” I continued, “and don’t let anyone tell you any different.”

Martin considered this, nonplussed as he tested the edge of his dagger. I’d saved the best bit for last.

“Finally,” I opined grandly, “we will never resolve our existential angst in our identity world, and this is why we play out here.”

“What, like an escape?” he said, crinkling his nose, rubbing the dagger against his stubble.

“Not just an escape, my friend, it goes much deeper than that. Out there, at home,” I said, pointing towards the sky as if we’d descended from it, which in a sense we had, “you can’t get a satisfactory answer as to whether there is a Creator or if there is a meaning to it all. If you really sit down and think about it, it’ll just give you a headache, right?”

He shrugged his agreement.

“Here, though, in the gameworlds, in this world—there is a definite Creator. Whoever built this game, they are the Creator here,” I explained. “And there is a purpose—whatever it was they designed the gameworld for. For instance, today, we kick the shit out of the Tatars. That is the God–given purpose of existing here today and I know this for an indisputable fact.”

A smile began to creep across his face. He put the dagger away in his vest.

“The kicker, my friend, is that this isn’t just a game. If you believe, if you truly believe, then this place becomes real, and we know God and his plan intimately.” I raised one hand into the air and wagged my finger. “So to answer your original question Martin, this is real.”

Martin smiled ever wider. I was enjoying it, too, and our audience stats began to gain. My body surged with excitement, and my disbelief melted away into this reality. Sid, Robert and Vicious joined us at the center of the massing troops as I finished my monologue.

“This is not just an escape my friends, this is not just a game!” I shouted. “This is not just entertainment! This satisfies and solves a deep seated existential pain that cannot be answered in any other way!”

The excitement grew in Martin’s eyes.

“Martin!” I cried, “are you with me?!”

I raised my saber and bow, reaching skywards into the early morning sunshine. A flock of birds took to wing far in the distance.

“Are you going to kick some existential ass with me today?”

“I’m with you Bob!” Martin screamed.

The warriors around us roared, and with that, we galloped off towards the massing Tatars, surging once more unto the breach.

“Today, we ride with God!”

My army thundered across the steppes and into destiny.

2

WHAT WAS I AGAIN? I felt funny, disconnected, discom-BOB-ulated. Giggling, I looked down at myself, trying to focus my meandering mind. I had the shape of a giant yellow blob…wait, more like a giant yellow BOB…heh heh heh…with plastic skin, floating amid other aimlessly drifting blobs. Taking a deep breath, my blobness expanded and then contracted.

That was very satisfying, I thought, so I did it again, and a sense of relaxation began to soak through my membranes. My consciousness slipped backwards and sideways through time and space.

Another smaller blob, blue, collided with me, interrupting my introspection. The blue blob took a liking to me, and like two oil drops meeting on a watery surface, it began to merge into me, its blueness fusing with my yellowness to produce a bulging green smudge on my side. I tasted fresh blueberries in the back of my mouth.

Reaching out to the other blobs nearby, I discovered that I could swim through the goo and sweep them aside or towards me with some phantom telekinesis, tasting them as I went. And so began the game of collecting the tastiest blobs towards me, generating a flurry of savory color that mottled into my body as I twisted and spun through the rainbow rain.

After frothing things up so much, I couldn’t see anymore, so I stopped to let things settle. And the tiny blobs tickled all over as they floated up past me. I shivered. But these weren’t blobs, they were bubbles, and everything smelled so suddenly salty that I realized I was actually in the ocean.

Shafts of sunlight were stabbing down from the airy world above, to fade into the watery blackness below. I looked down at myself again to jiggle my newly hatched tendrils, and with an excited rush began wriggling off at full steam towards a mass of phosphorescent creatures dancing nearby in the voluminous darkness.

A translucent worm popped into view beside me so I halted.

Both of us were frozen amid specks of slowly sinking organic detritus that hung soundlessly in a stop–motion cloud around us. The worm snacked on one of the specks, and then another, watching me sideways. Curiouser and curiouser.

“Bob,” said the worm. “Bob, hey buddy! Is that you?”

Yes, I thought, I am Bob.

“Yeah, I’m Bob. I mean, yeah, it’s me,” I replied, dazed and confused in a happy sort of way.

“Bob, it’s me, Sid. Where have you been? It’s been crazy down here. You should have been there for the last set! It was freaking intense. Things got a little weird for a while there and then I suddenly thought, jeez, where’s Bob? And so I came over here to clear my head, and whammo, there you were. Crazy, huh?”

I giggled as my mind seeped into the here and now. That’s right. I’d come here with Sid, out to Humungous Fungus beyond The Looking Glass. We’d dropped into this chillworld to watch the slingshot test fire as part of the sensorgy party that’d been going on for a few days.

Memories oozed into my amoebic brain.

“Hey Sid, wazzzzzup?” was all I could think to say.

“Not much, man, not much at all,” Sid–worm giggled back. “Hey, they’re about to start the slingshot test, you ready to go?”

“Giddy up.”

§

The sensorgy transmogrification of the slingshot weapons test was still resonating hard as we relaxed at the peripheries of Humungous Fungus. The fiery might of the weapons demonstration had been funneled into a multisensory party mash-up that all the pssi-boys and pssi-girls had been waiting weeks for, but now it was over and a post-party depression had begun to sink in.

Most of our friends were emo-porning their way down from their highs, but I preferred to stick with the old school process.

“That was intense, man!” glowed Sid-worm. We were floating through a patch of dimensionless deprivation space, trying to cool off our nervous systems.

I munched on some mouth candy at the edge of the dimensionless space, trying to think of what I was trying to think about, and then, sudden clarity as the lost idea reformed itself. My disembodied mind latched firmly onto the thought like a drowning man at sea finding a life raft, my consciousness pulling itself up for a breath of fresh air.

“Oh yeah, hey, Sid, so do you really think I should talk to him? I mean, it’s not going to make a difference anyway.”

“Absolutely my friend, I think this is more about you, about your experience. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I replied, unconvinced.

My sense of wonder at the world around me had begun to lose its fizziness, and my tendrils were going limp. As I blinked and looked around, I could still see the bending and patterning of the visual hallucinations, but my head had snapped back into some sort of real space.

I sighed.

“Anyway, time to get back. It’s my brother’s birthday and my dad asked me to come home for a family breakfast.”

“I’m sorry, I forgot,” Sid worm said softly. He looked up into the light, considering something. “Bob, I love you, buddy, and maybe it’s not for me to say…”

“What?” I was still pretty high. Was he asking me a question?

“Well, maybe you should slow down a bit. You’re wasted all the time. I understand, but, well…”

I laughed. “Hey, if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black.”

“I’m just saying…”

“I know what you’re saying,” I admitted after a pause. “Look, I appreciate it, but let’s just get going.”

An urgent ping from Robert, my proxxi, arrived.

“My dad is already complaining about me being late,” I added, looking at the ping.

“Yeah, all right. Let’s head.”

With that we began to surge upwards towards the light, leaving the dancing creatures below. I remembered when my brother and I used to dance in Humungous Fungus together under the lights of the phosphorous jellies. It seemed like just yesterday.

3

GROWING UP ON Atopia was great and all, but for me, pssi—the poly-synthetic sensory interface—was only good for two things; playing the gameworlds and getting stoned. Oh, and I guess it was cool for surfing too, so three things. Or, actually four. It was great for hiding the fact that I was stoned.

I was still buzzing from my excursion into Humungous Fungus, but I had Robert, my proxxi who controlled my body while I was out of it, filtering my movements and speech so that I appeared perfectly normal, or at least close to normal. Robert tended to overdo it in these situations, and if he wasn’t my proxxi I’d swear he did it on purpose.

As I came out onto the sun deck of our habitat overlooking the ocean, Robert nimbly handled seating me at the place open opposite my Dad. Martin was sitting to my left and my mum to my right, and sitting behind my mum was a guy dressed up in a toga with weather beaten leather thongs on his feet.

It was a beautiful morning, with a slight breeze just offsetting the unseasonably hot weather we’d been having lately. Gulls squawked in the distance over the kelp forests while waves swept calmly past on their way into Atopia.

My dad scrutinized me as I sat down.

“Bob, the least you could have done was be on time for your brother’s birthday breakfast.”

Martin smiled at me weakly from across the table. He knew I’d been out partying all night, and I felt suddenly bad. I smiled back at him and shrugged apologetically.

“And your food is cold already,” added my Dad.

Robert was filtering my speech, so when I responded, “So is your heart,” in response to my dad’s predictable dig, it came out of my mouth as, “Yes, sir. Very sorry for being late.”

This, of course, sounding like nothing I’d say, immediately got me in trouble.

“Are you stoned again?”

Robert did a pretty good job of having my face feign surprise. I just giggled away, safely detached inside my head.

“No sir,” responded Robert using my voice, while I sub–vocalized to Sid who was ghosting in on this, “Wouldn’t you be with a family like this?” Sid laughed too.

My dad leaned over and looked deep into my eyes. I burst out laughing on the inside while Robert covered for me.

“Dad, come on, I just didn’t sleep well last night, okay?”

Good one, Robert. That was true. I was out getting high all night and hadn’t slept a wink. My dad narrowed one eye and then just shook his head, straightening up and going back to buttering his toast.

“Anyway, Jimmy isn’t even here yet,” I pointed out, “why are you giving me so much trouble?”

“Jimmy has important things he needs to be taking care of right now.”

Unlike some of the people at this table, he didn’t need to add. It was like Jimmy was more of a son to him than his own sons were. It was always Jimmy did this and Jimmy did that, and I was getting more than tired of it. I sighed and angrily shook my head. It looked like it was going to be another one of those conversations.

“Bob,” complained my dad, “you’re twenty one years old. When are you going to find some direction in your life? You need to move on, son. You should have been here to see the slingshot test fire with us. We were all here. Jimmy was right there in the control room with Commander Strong.”

Here we go again. Robert deleted my expletives when he responded for me.

“Dad, I did watch the slingshots,” Robert replied for me, truthfully, “and I am doing something with my life. I have one of the top rated dimstims out there.”

It was true.

I was a professional vacationer, and thousands of people at a time paid money to stimswitch into me when I was out surfing. It was great money, and when pssi was released into the rest of the world I was going to be huge.

My dad wasn’t impressed at my entrepreneurial ambitions, however, and just ignored what we’d said.

“You have such an opportunity, Bob. What is happening here is a once–in–a–lifetime event and you’re right in the middle of it.”

That’s the problem right there, I thought, but this wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“I’m also one of the best surfers in the world,” I pointed out, something I figured any parent should be proud of. My imagined ranking wasn’t entirely fair since the rest of the world’s surfers didn’t have pssi, yet, which justified my obsessive need to be out there all the time.

My dad continued his ignoring game.

“You were one of the very first pssi–kids. You were top in your class at the Solomon House Academy before you dropped out,” he began to sermonize, wagging his toast–buttering knife at me. “Patricia Killiam was just asking me the other day about you, saying how impressed she was with your work when you were a Class I Freshman. She said there could still be a place at the Solomon House for you.”

He raised his eyebrows impressively as the knife came to rest pointing directly at me. My dad was the director of public relations for the entire pssi project, so it wasn’t just me he was chatting up about all this.

I groaned and rolled my eyes as I clicked off my proxxi filter. I’d handle this myself.

“A lot of stuff has happened shince then, wooden you say?”

I slurred out half the words. This got my Dad’s head shaking again and he looked skyward.

“Yes,” he responded, looking at me and then to Martin, “and look how well Martin is doing.”

He motioned with the knife across to the other side of the table. Martin smiled at me weakly, not wanting to get involved.

“Yeah, look at him,” I shot back, narrowing my eyes at both of them. “Martin and all of you are just the picture of shuper–booper family togatherness. And quit talking about Jimmy all the time, we’re your real sons.”

I aimed for thick sarcasm, emphasizing ‘real’, but I wasn’t sure if my enunciation was clear enough to convey it beneath the drugs. What had I taken again?

“Bob, honey, don’t be so mad. It’s his birthday today, let’s please be nice,” came my mum’s quavering voice. “Forgiveness is the key to life. Forgive yourself, son.”

I sighed. It looked like this was going to be a tag team event. I could see the guy behind my mum in the toga and sandals begin to lean forward as if to add something, but I leaned his way and angrily waved my finger at him to cut short whatever was coming from that corner.

“Not a word from you, okay?” I spat at him.

I was as patient as the next guy, but my mum having her personal Jesus following her around like a puppy dog, so that she could chat to him all the time, was getting on my nerves. It wasn’t so bad if her Jesus just sat there and spoke when spoken to, but it really drove me nuts when he started jumping into conversations.

“Mum,” I asked, turning to her, “what do I have to forgive myself for?”

“I don’t know, son. You have to figure that out for yourself,” she replied softly, in the way that only mothers can. “I know you can son, you have special abilities.”

My dad rolled his eyes, shaking his head at the three of us. He didn’t like it when mum started talking like this.

Our family had something of an unusual history, filled with flashes of brilliance and corners of darkness. My great-great-grandfather had been something of a nut. He claimed to have been able to speak with the dead and move objects with his mind. It was something my dad was ashamed of.

My grandfather had been almost as bad, and he and my father had stopped speaking a long time ago when my father had left New York to accept a job on the Washington beltway. The lunacy tended to skip a generation. My dad was just waiting for me to starting hear voices, and I honestly couldn’t blame him for worrying about me using drugs.

“There is evil in the world, son,” added Jesus for good measure.

I shot him my own evil glance.

“Only the evil that we make,” I replied, feeling suddenly defeated.

“Yes, the evil that we make.”

That stopped everyone in their tracks. I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes, fighting frustration on the one hand and a general sense of not being sure what was happening on the other. Maybe I could try a different tack.

“Look, all this stuff is great, but technology can make you stupid, you know?”

My addled brain was trying to find some way out of these woods I’d wandered it into. All four of them stared at me.

“Like a generation ago, Eskimos didn’t even have a word for ‘lost,’ and now without GPS they can barely find their way out of a frozen paper bag.”

“I believe they’re called Inuit,” suggested Martin. I looked at him hopelessly.

“That’s not the point. Look, I’m stuck in this thing, and I love all you guys,” I said, really thinking that I love most of you guys. “I have kind of a love–hate relationship with pssi right now and I want to use this stuff the way I want to. Okay, dad?”

My dad just shrugged.

“Okay, Bob. Whatever you think is best.”

He clearly didn’t think it was best.

“Just leave me to do stuff the way I want, in the time I want,” I said, grabbing some croissants and a glass of orange juice. “Anyway this was great. I’m going surfing. Is that okay with everyone?”

I was going to check on Vince to see if he wanted to go surfing.

Vince was the man.

4

THE SENSE OF TOUCH was the most underappreciated of all the senses, at least of the senses the rest of the world had. When the first elemental life had ventured out into the primordial goo, it was its sense of touch that kept it safe from danger.

Touch was the most ancient of our senses, existing before any sight, sound, taste, or smell existed. It was essential to the feeling of things being a part of your body. When you played tennis, did you think about the racquet hitting the ball as you swung? No. The racquet became a part of you. Tools that began as extensions of our bodies soon became a part of it.

It was the same with any tool we used, and pssi made it possible to make tools out of information flow in the multiverse and incorporate into our bodies in much the same way.

For me, the flow of information was an apt metaphor. As surfing became my obsession at a young age, my innovation had been to remap my tactile sense into the water around me.

Sitting on my surfboard, bobbing up and down between the swells, I could feel the pressure and shape and even the temperature of the water’s surface around me through my skin, and the thousands of neurons attached to each hair follicle could sense tiny subsurface eddies and water currents.

After nearly twenty years of dedicated practice, my brain had neuroplastically reformatted to devote a large part of itself to my water-sense, and I now had the most highly attuned tactile array of any pssi–kid, or for that matter, anyone else in the world. Sitting with my eyes closed, I could feel the water moving and undulating around me as a perfectly natural and integral part of my body.

I was one with the water, and it was one with me.

Still a little hung-over from the previous evening, I opened my eyes to awake from my reverie. Atopia sure was pretty from out here, with its thick forests rising up from white sandy beaches. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move and a beautiful stag suddenly burst forth from the forest underbrush. We eyed each other for a moment, and then he disappeared.

Above decks, the floating island of Atopia was covered in forests that were teaming with ‘wild’ animals, but like everything else out there, their neural systems were loaded with the smarticles that floated in the air and water around us. Everything here was a part of the pssi network, but I doubted that the animals ever realized they were off in virtual worlds as they stampeded through synthetic savannahs while vet–bots tended to their real bodies in downtime.

Not much wild was left in the world today. It was ironic that tourists now lined up to come to a completely artificial island built to perfect synthetic reality, all to enjoy a shred of the old reality hiding inside it by dusting themselves down in smarticles.

Smarticles were the pixie dust that permeated everything on Atopia, a system of nanoscale particles that worked as both a sensor and communication network, floating everywhere in the air and water. They suffused through the bodies of living creatures to lodge into their nervous systems to form the foundation of pssi.

Pssi enabled not just jumping off into virtual worlds, but also the sharing of experiences and even bodies. A philosopher had once rhetorically asked what it was like to be a bat, meaning that it was something we could never know, but out here on Atopia, you could inhabit a bat, a bear, a fish, a shark, a tree, and even, sometimes, yourself.

The beaming sun was drying the salt water into crystals on my skin, making it itchy as it baked, and I scratched my neck and shifted positions on my board. A breeze mixed the sea air with the musty odor of a tangle of seaweed floating nearby.

While the water was cold, my pssi tuned it out and I was perfectly comfortable. I just had to be careful my muscles didn’t get too sluggish when it came time for action.

Seagulls squawked and wheeled in the sky, and otters were playing out in the kelp not far away, chattering away about whatever otters chattered about. Some were floating around on their backs, eating a breakfast of clams they had scrounged from aquaculture bins below.

Out here I felt a certain peace that escaped me elsewhere, a deep meditative calm outside the madness. I came out here often to think about Nancy, to think about my brother, to think about how I had messed everything up. Looking up, I could see nimbus clouds striping the blue cathedral of the sky.

It was just another day in paradise.

After some fuss, Vince Indigo, the famous founder of PhutureNews, had agreed to come surfing with me this morning. He’d become my regular surf buddy this past year, but had recently, and suddenly, dropped off the map.

Convincing him to come out this morning had been a major struggle, and even then, he didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. He was just staring off into space, not his usual chatty self. I was about to call out to Vince, to see what was bugging him, when I was interrupted.

“Hey.”

I looked down to find Martin sitting on the front of my board. We bobbed up and down in the swells together.

“Hey to you too, buddy,” I responded sheepishly. “Sorry about this morning, I know it was your birthday.”

Martin always kept the same clean-cut, square jawed image going despite the vagaries of fashion—fashion being so ugly these days, apparently, that its look had to be changed almost hourly. I grinned back into his pale blue eyes, a reflection of my own, and admired the tight buzz cut he was sporting today. Buzz Aldrin came to mind, or perhaps better, Buzz Lightyear.

You could hardly have imagined two twins more different.

“Don’t worry about it. Dad always gets worked up about that stuff, I don’t care.”

“Yeah he sure does,” I laughed, “and thanks for not ratting on me. So, Inuit huh? No Eskimos left in this world today?”

“Not according to me, I guess.”

We laughed together. It was nice.

“I just get so tired of him talking about Jimmy all the time,” I added, and Martin nodded.

When we were growing up here, I’d been just about the only one who’d tried befriending Jimmy. He’d been something of an oddball kid, but he shared the same birthday as my brother and I, so I guess I’d felt some kind of natural affinity towards him.

When his parents had abandoned Jimmy as a teenager, Patricia Killiam, his godmother and head of Solomon House Research Center, had asked our family to take him in. No good deed goes unpunished, as they said, and the downward spiral our family had been in, just continued ever steeper. To our father, Jimmy was now the shining star and savior of our family honor.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” agreed Martin.

“I guess it’s hard to be encouraging if your son is a stoner surfer,” I laughed. “Anyway, who cares? I’m doing what I love.”

“Then what more could you ask for?”

I laughed and shrugged.

“Got some big action today?” he asked, changing the topic.

“Huge.”

I was sure he’d already checked out the big barrels being laid down across the northern crescent. Storm systems were generating some dangerous waves today, and that was just how I liked it.

“Anything interesting coming in?”

One of my phuturecasts was focused on incoming swells as it predicted the shape and size of the break, how the pipe developed and a dozen other factors. I could just sit here and watch the horizon for waves, but this way I could track swells coming from miles out and select the perfect one to get set at just the right point.

“Yeah, there have been a few nice ones, but I’m waiting for the real beast.”

Martin laughed. “Always the perfectionist, huh?”

“Well, with some things anyway.”

“Yeah, with some things.” He smiled and looked away.

“Bob!” came a yell from across the water. It was Vince, waving at us. “Bob, I need to get going!”

“Already?”

“Yeah, I need to get back to that thing.”

“I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do,” I observed.

Vince was one of the richest guys in the world, and lately all he’d be doing was surfing with me. I wondered what had suddenly gotten his hair on fire.

“Anyway, ping me if you change your mind. Hey, you should check out all that weird stuff on the news channels, and good luck!”

“Thanks, Bob,” he replied as his primary subjective flitted off, leaving his proxxi to guide his body home, “and good luck to you to!”

Both Martin and I waved goodbye, and then sat silently for a few minutes, enjoying the sea, sky and silence.

Martin looked down awkwardly. He was struggling with something.

“Bob, we should probably have a chat. I want to understand what’s going on with you.”

I looked down too.

“Yeah, I’ve been wanting to talk to you too…”

Maybe the time was right to bring up the gorilla in the room, but just then my metasenses started tingling.

“… but maybe in a few minutes?” I blurted out.

I detached my primary subjective point of view to spin it far out into the Pacific. My viewpoint coasted in just above the water, following a monster swell that was making its way towards us. It was huge, at least twenty feet deep, even out in the open ocean, and as I followed, it sprayed and frothed angrily, surging powerfully towards the glimmering speck of Atopia in the distance.

“This is the one I’ve been waiting for! I totally want to talk, but could I catch this wave first?”

I snapped hard back into my body and, using a phantom, punched up a visual overlay of how this wave would be breaking in a few minutes.

“No problem,” Martin laughed, pointing at the simulation. “Oh yeah, that’s gonna be huge!”

The wave would peak at nearly forty feet and generate an almond shaped pipe that would continuously sweep past the northern crescent for more than two miles. The system selected an optimal drop-in point and I quickly plotted some possible surf paths from ideas I had. It was a big wave and I’d have to travel fast to catch it right. The triangular fin of a shark I’d commandeered appeared, slicing through the water behind me, and I reached out to catch it and began racing across the water.

“Nice,” said Martin.

We skimmed the waves, the wind barely ruffling his hair. He was admiring my handiwork on the projection floating between us.

“So you’re going to pull a dead man stall, switch back to hide in the barrel and then finish with a rocket Tchaikovsky to back hang two?”

“Yes sir, that’s the plan,” I replied with a grin. “Hey can you switch to the back with everyone else so I can get this show on the road?”

Martin disappeared, and I let go of the shark’s fin and leaned forward on my board to begin paddling to the drop in, taking big, clean strokes. As the social cloud buzzed about the impending ride, my dimstim stats began surging as thousands of people stimswitched into me to enjoy the ride.

It was a funny feeling knowing that thousands of people were inside my skin. I couldn’t feel anything but I could sense it, and it sent shivers down my spine. As I snapped my full water–sense into place, the world dropped away, my senses sharpened and I began quickening.

With smarticles infused throughout pssi-kids’ nervous systems from birth, we’d quickly picked up on the trick of quickening by using smarticles to accelerate the conduction of nerve signals along axons. We could literally amp up the speed of our nervous systems this way on command, but only in short bursts as we depleted energy stored in the smarticles, and, more problematically, began to overheat our brains.

Quickening the body was one thing, but quickening the mind was entirely something else. It had to be managed in a very controlled fashion so as not to lose conscious coherence in the seat of the mind where it all came together. Like anything, it took time, patience and training to build up this capacity, and when it came to quickening, like surfing, I was one of the best.

With each breath, I concentrated on accelerating the quickening, feeling the world slow down as I sped up. Switching my visual field into surround mode, I literally had eyes in the back of my head—I closed my eyes as my visual cortex adjusted to the 360 degree view.

I focused instead on the ripples of water coming through my water–sense and the sinews in my shoulders and back stretching and pulling me across the surface as I accelerated my paddling tempo, quickly gathering speed to match the incoming monster. It began to grow behind me, rolling up and into my skin, surging towards and into me.

My board angled forward and began to skim faster and faster. With a final stroke I opened my eyes, grabbed my board and popped up onto it, leaning forward to accelerate as the wave urged me on. It wasn’t really behind me, the wave was me. I could feel it swelling through my water–sense as if my body was expanding and peaking, with little bits of me frothing off the top as it began to crest.

My board sped down the face of the wave as it began to break, and then I slowed as I neared its base and stepped to the back of the board, almost stalling as I sank back down a little. I smiled and waved to the crowds on the beach, and a collective gasp went up as they watched the monster booming down behind me.

An instant before disaster I jumped forward and cut the board back into the wave to sail up its rushing face. As the wave roared around the northern crescent, I started snapping a series of turns back and forth off its top. Nearing my finale, I finished with an acrobatic turn that dropped me freefalling into the thundering maw of the beast. The crowds on the distant beach squealed with excitement at my disappearing silhouette.

The noise inside was deafening, and it used all of my quickened water–sense to fall feet first onto the board and navigate the roaring and rushing world of foam. Crouching low, almost hugging my board, I let myself slide backwards as I was sucked into the back of the roaring whirlpool, my senses merging with it into a singularity, cradling my fragile body in a delicately maintained balance.

At the last moment, I leaned forward and accelerated away from the maelstrom at the back of the barrel. A crazily spinning translucent tunnel opened up ahead of me, revealing bright daylight beyond, and I eased ever further forward. I began to stand up taller and walked towards the front of my board and turned around.

Tchaikovsky was playing loudly in my dimstim now and I closed my eyes to begin conducting. I shot backwards out of the mouth of the barrel, propelled by a powerful jet from the collapsing tube. I back-hanged my two heels off the front, now with just the tips of my toes on the nose of the board.

Beginning to slow, I opened my eyes and turned around to walk towards the back of the board, listening to the mad applause from the thousands of dimstimmers who had enjoyed the show. The world began to return to normal time as I released the quickening, feeling the burning heat within my body begin to ease off. Sighing happily, I sank back into the water and straddled my board to float again gently in the water.

Martin appeared back on the nose of my board, giving me a little golf clap.

“Nice show, buddy. That was awesome!”

“Thank you, thank you very much,” I said, wiping the water from my face as I looked around happily, and then looked back at Martin and the tourists still clapping on the beach. I couldn’t resist showing off again.

The water began to thicken up around me as I summoned tens of millions of tiny zooplankton up from the depths below. I kept them near me when surfing, just in case.

With a few carefully placed kicks I levitated up out of the water, forcing millions of my little friends to treadmill their hardest just at the right point to support each step, and then I stood right up on the water and took a few steps to bow to the crowds with a flourish.

This brought gasps and more pointing from the tourists—they can walk on water!

Sinking back down, I grabbed onto my board again and dispersed my little helpers. Martin was shaking his head, grinning widely.

“That last part was a bit much,” he laughed, but I could sense a certain glumness.

“Buddy, you have to lighten up…live a little.”

I immediately regretted my choice of words, but Martin didn’t notice anything. I slicked back my hair again, trying to stop the water from streaming down into my eyes.

“Are you going to come out camping with me and Willy and Sid and the boys later?” I asked after a little reflection.

“Am I invited?”

“Of course,” I laughed.

“And you’re going to continue surfing today, even with the storm warnings in effect?”

“Come on, Martin…”

“Okay, anyway, I’ll see you later, camping will be great,” Martin responded brightly. “I just worry about you sometimes.”

I nodded.

“Are we still going to have that chat?”

“Maybe later.”

The moment had passed for him too.

“I have a lot of stuff to get done. You be careful with those storms brewing out there, could swing in some weird waves.”

“I will, I promise, and I’ll see you later,” I replied with a small salute.

With that, Martin nodded and winked as he signed off and faded from view.

5

HOW IN THE WORLD did I get roped into attending a baby shower for a proxxid?

It seemed everyone was having a simulated baby these days, but Nicky had somehow convinced me to come to this event. Anyway, wasn’t a baby shower supposed to be before the baby was born? This and many other questions filled my mind as we arrived in the entertainment metaworld created for the event. I was immediately dragged over to the Strong family for the obligatory salutations.

“Congratulations Commander Strong!” I said enthusiastically, smiling as I reached out to pump his hand.

Rick smiled back and shook my hand vigorously, rolling his eyes slightly.

“Thanks Bob.”

“And of course congratulations to the lovely new proxxid mother,” I laughed, reaching over to kiss his wife Cindy on the cheek, looking down at the baby in her arms.

“…and this lovely lady is?” asked Commander Strong, looking towards my date.

“Ah shit, ah, I mean, oh shoot,” I mumbled, turning to introduce my newish girlfriend. “This is Nicky. Hey do you want a drink?”

Nicky shot me a tight lipped smile, shaking her head, and turned to graciously introduce herself to the Strongs. I nodded and smiled, leaving them to it, and wandered off towards the alcohol stand. Maybe she didn’t want a drink, but I sure did.

I sighed.

A baby shower. How did I let these things happen to me?

Any party was, however, a great reason to get stoned. With that thought, I popped a tab of MDMA from my pocket into my mouth. Virtual drugs weren’t bad, but they weren’t quite the authentic experience, and I liked to style myself as a retro abuser. Ah, now I was rolling with the champions. Just another great day in the world of Bobtopia.

I grabbed a drink and walked over to sit down on a couch. We were now waiting for some last person to show up to sing the birthday song. Actually, we weren’t really waiting, since everyone everywhere knew exactly where everyone else was at any moment.

We were just, well, what the hell were we doing? I guessed we were waiting, but we all knew exactly how long we had to wait. There was a difference, wasn’t there? Or perhaps we had reached the end of waiting, and were now embodying some new verb that defined what waiting was when we all knew exactly how long we had to wait.

I decided then and there I was going to call it phwaiting and immediately published this inspiration into my social cloud. With my creative work done for the day, I scanned some Phuture News flowing across the bottom of my display spaces. More celebrities were about to drop dead or start doing tons of drugs or stop doing them and go into rehab.

Boring.

Flicking my phantoms, I opened an overlay and researched the definition of ‘wait’: transitive verb—to stay in place in expectation of. I guess we didn’t need a cool new word as this seemed to amount to what we were doing. Already, my proxxi Robert was splintering me over four thousand variations on the idea of waiting from the remaining distinct human languages.

The character of my inspiration suddenly hollowed. I posted an announcement regarding the death of phwaiting back into my social cloud and watched the meme explode and die.

At the same time, a fast trending news report splintered that the Chinese were talking about sending a manned mission to Mars. It had been about thirty years since China had landed men on the moon again, on their best guess of Mao’s birthday one holiday season, but their plans at a permanent moon base had fizzled when water deposits had proven harder to extract than imagined. Now their new grand plans just seemed ludicrous, even if Mars and half of the rest of our solar system seemed to be practically teeming with life.

Why spend any time or effort moving a physical body around when you could just flit anywhere in an instant using sensor networks? Everything that was happening in the outside world seemed so amazingly wasteful and nonsensical to those of us who lived on the inside of Atopia—but then again, soon everyone would be as blessed as us.

Bored, I collapsed most of my displays and opened up an overlay to watch a new game the boys had started. Sid, Vicious, Martin and my own proxxi Robert were already hot into some apocalyptic other-world battle, pinned down in a cave by an android army, flanked by giant armored worms. It looked like a lot more fun than what I was doing, so I tried to splinter in but Sid blocked me. He was right. Either I had to be there fully or not at all. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of them. Anyway, I could just joyride in Robert if I wanted.

The rest of my displays held forth on a multitude of other live wikiworld feeds. The Bieb was just delivering his inaugural address as the 52nd President of the United States, and in an interesting first was singing the first few lines of his speech. I guess the Bieb Bill had passed.

In another feed, Manchester United had scored in a Premier League game, and they’d begun replaying the goal with a stimcast of the hapless LA goalie that ended with him crashing face first into one of the goalposts, breaking his nose in a bloody explosion of pain. What they managed to broadcast was a pale reflection of what his pain would have really felt like.

Nervenet sensory broadcast technology was still in its infancy outside Atopia, but all that would be fixed with the release of pssi. Flicking off the news feeds, I focused back on the pitched battle the boys were in. Someone had just blown Martin’s head off. I shook my head. Martin was hopeless.

I checked my dimstim stats, and a few dozen people were still logged into my body. Christ, I was bored out of my head and there were still people who would prefer to be me than do whatever boring shit they could be doing on their own.

Glancing at my biostats, I could see that my heart rate was hovering in the mid-forties, my cortisol was a little high, my insulin low, but all systems go and things would be moving around soon as the MDMA hit.  Looking good Bob, I told myself, if your heart rate were any lower you’d slip into a coma—and that sounds pretty good about now.

The room was crowded, with people milling about industriously, getting drinks, engaging in small talk, doing whatever tiring stuff adults did at a baby shower. One side of the room was lined with retro–modern impressionists to match the sleek, minimal décor of the world they’d created for the event. The other side was a terrace, open to the outside, looking down from a few stories up onto the leafy beach promenade of east Atopia.

Sulking seemed like a good option at this point while I waited for the drugs to hit my bloodstream, so I opened up Bunnies and sent a sub–proxxi to get me another drink. Innocent little rabbits appeared floating in space in front of me, exiting their underground warrens, sniffing the ground for food.

I flicked my finger at one of them, and a fireball magically issued forth, flaming towards the hapless little creature.  It looked up, confused, and then squealed as the fireball engulfed it, spasming in agony and squeaks as its fur incinerated. The other rabbits ducked for cover, and then slowly crawled back out to sniff at their erstwhile compadre.

My eyes narrowed as I lined up the next victim.

“Bob, what are you doing?” came a subtext from Nicky. “Could we just be a little sociable?”

I grumbled and shut off Bunnies.

Lucky little bastard didn’t know how close he came to the big ticket.

The sub–proxxi was back with my drink by now and I thanked him, taking the proffered drink for a sip. Turning off my kinetic collision subsystems, I rolled out of the couch’s embrace and stood up to stride purposefully through one of the remote guests, a round, balding little man who affected a shocked look. Served him right if the best he could do was project a round, balding image; someone should tell him he can look anyway he wanted.

My brazen etiquette violation earned some raised eyebrows, but it felt way too crowded in here, so I decided on further anti–social behavior and flipped my pssi off at everyone. The lush environment of the entertainment world immediately disappeared as I slipped into identity mode, and the featureless confines of the small, rectangular room we were actually in appeared around me.

I felt better, taking another gulp of my drink, feeling refreshed as my own senses connected me to the world, when things took on a suddenly colorful sheen. On the other hand, that could be the Ecstasy kicking in.

The few people that remained in the small room were mostly in a corner near Nicky, who was still  chatting with Cindy Strong, now cradling empty space in her arms.

Nicky looked over, her eyes flashing at me. I imagined knives shooting forth from her, pinning me helplessly and gorily to the wall before a crushing shockwave of disappointment finished me off in a splatter of social distortion. The ferocity of the image forced me to click my pssi back on, and the hubbub and space of party re-saturated my senses.

Luckily, what I’d felt before was in fact the MDMA, so I now felt much happier about everything on the whole.

Of course, by that point, Nicky was completely pissed. She grabbed me by the arm to pull me around the corner and into the hallway where we could be alone. Well, sort of alone. My dimstim stats instantly shot up as the social cloud sensed my mood and the fight coming on.

“You know Bob,” hissed Nicky, “we just don’t communicate. I thought you said you wanted to come here and now you’re embarrassing me. Can I ask you a question? Are you stoned again? Can you shut off your fucking dimstim for a minute please?”

“That’s two questions,” I shrugged, “and no to both of them. Sweetie, my dimstim is my work, my bread and butter, and good or bad I can’t just shut it off.”

I tried to smile winningly at her.

She stared at me in silence.

“Okay, yes, I am a little stoned,” I admitted.

She rolled her eyes. “And how can you call that stupid dimstim work? And this thing with your brother…”

I shrugged again, but then dialed up a Dragon skin with a phantom when she wasn’t looking.

“Hey, my dimstim is how we met. Don’t knock it. And don’t bring my brother into this!”

Narrowing my eyes, I added, “At least I work.”

She’d annoyed me now, so I was purposely pushing Nicky’s ‘piss me off’ button. This was going to be good. She didn’t like being reminded she was daddy’s little girl.

“Bob, all you do is sit around all day playing games or simulating vacation time for a bunch of meta–perves,” she snarled as her voice gathered momentum and the Dragon skin began to take hold. Her eyes flashed at me while her face and upper body began to morph into a cartoonish and slightly frightening form in my display space.

“Well, I mean, I make my own money,” I pointed out, shaking my head.

At that moment, I couldn’t help letting out an enormous yawn right in her face, which really set her off. What had I taken? It couldn’t have been the Ecstasy, that didn’t usually make me yawn. Or wait, did I take some mushrooms before as well? That must be it. Or was it acid? Was I candy flipping or hippy flipping? I frowned, trying to remember.

“Let me FINISH!” she barked at me, barely managing to contain herself.

The Dragon skin was working itself up nicely now. Her eyes bulged out and her neck elongated and sprouted a row of ridges, while her skin took on a distinctly scaly texture.

“Bob, the only reason your stupid dimstim makes any money at all is because I let you have sex with me on it, I swear to God I have no idea what I was thinking…”

I began to shrink a little from the Dragon but couldn’t help goading her.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, all my success is only due to the fabulous Nicky.”

Holy shit. The Dragon skin was amazingly frightening when you were stoned. I shook my head and couldn’t help laughing.

“STOP cutting me off!” she screamed.

She always had quite the temper. Her eyes had now bulged outwards into huge melon sized orbs with slatted cat pupils, and her head was bobbing back and forth on a neck that issued forth and grew from her blouse while a great gray, pimpled snout sprouted from where her nose had been.

Fangs menaced.  Smoke began to curl from nostrils. Fireballs issued from her mouth. I cowered, giggling.

“Do you have that goddamn Dragon skin on? Jesus Bob!”

With that she turned tail, literally, and angrily stomped past me to storm out of the party. She left little burning patches behind her in the carpet.

“Nice Bob.”

It was Sid. He’d been ghosting the dimstim version of events, and now stood leaning on the wall of the hallway. I guess he’d already been killed in the battle I’d been watching. He laughed and shook his head.

“I’m not sure that’s the way to hold down a relationship.”

“Ah, she wasn’t for me. Anyway, she’s the one that chased me down.”

“Women, they always think they can change you, huh?”

“I guess.”

A pause while we looked at each other.

“Ready for some skin shopping?” I asked. I needed to get out of there.

“We’re going skin shopping?”

“Yes, my friend, I have decided my repertoire of skins now needs refreshing.”

As great as it was, the Dragon was getting old, plus it would be sad to use the Dragon on any girl after Nicky. I needed a new mythical creature with which to annoy the next woman in my life. I had a feeling Nicky wasn’t coming back into the fold anytime soon.

Sid just shrugged. “Sure. Why not.”

I sent an apology note about my little spat with Nicky to Rick and Cindy as we flitted out, and heard Sid asking, “What skins did you have in mind?” as we transitioned.

We appeared in what, for all intents and purposes, looked like a shoe store in 1920’s London, somewhere off Saville Row. Little boxes, whose covers danced with images and logos, lined the walls and aisles, and a smarmy synthetic salesman glided up to us.

“What can I do for you boys?” he asked, smiling.

“I don’t know, not sure,” I responded, not sure, plus high. “What have you got that’s new?”

He looked us up and down.

“You looking to skin up or skin out?”

“Either way, or both, just show us anything new,” replied Sid. Seeing my eyes swimming, he added, “And hurry up please.”

“Hmmm,” noted the salesthing as he put one hand to his chin. With the other he began swiping the wall, and the little boxes swept left and right and up and down at a blurring pace.

“We’ve got some new designer skins that do a great job of making everyone look good naked,” he began.

Both Sid and I rolled out eyes.

“Yeah you’re right, boring. How about this—more subtle—we’ve got some nice intelligence skins that make you look and act smarter.”

“Thanks buddy,” I replied, frowning, “what are you getting at?”

“Nothing, I’m just…okay then, look, we have some great new skins of Asia. The Snow Leopard, for instance…that’s all the rage now.”

“Naw, no animal stuff.”

“How about something more clever then? We have some that read your cognitive profile and make subtle changes to your wife or girlfriend to make them…”

Sid cut him off, “No wife or girlfriend stuff please.”

Sid looked at me and shook his head.

Smarmy the salesman tapped his finger to his mouth as he simulated thinking. “Okay boys, I have something really special, and it’s our new top seller.”

My interest piqued. “Go on, my smarmy friend.”

“We call it HappyTime—it’s a reality skin that makes subtle adjustments when you talk to or interact with people you know. It is guaranteed to help you lead a happier and stress free life.”

“Sounds good,” said Sid, “so what does it do?”

“Well, it makes slight changes in your perception so that you get the impression that you’re better off than your friends and family, diminishing the effects the further they are from you personally.”

Sid smiled. “So how does that work?”

“Well it doesn’t actually change anything, it just gives you the sense that your friend isn’t as happy with his new relationship as he really could be, or modifies how much you hear him telling you he makes at his new job,” it explained. “Little things so that you still get the gist, but modified so you feel like you’re doing better than they are.”

“And it works?”

“It works like a charm, proven by extensive research. You will lead a happier life, my friend, guaranteed or your money back.”

“Hey Sid,” I asked Sid.

“Yeah.”

“Am I actually getting paid big money for surfing and boozing all day while you slave away as a programmer at Solomon House?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, cool, I thought maybe I had HappyTime on already and I’d forgotten.”

“Fuck off, Bob.”

6

THE GLARE OFF the hood of the ’67 Mustang made me squint, and the sweat beading down from my forehead stung my eyes as I tried to wipe it away.  The police were just beyond the barricade, less than two hundred feet away, and I could hear them nervously loading their weapons and talking in short, staccato bursts into their walkie–talkies.

Waves of heat rose up from the tarmac that was melting into the soles of my Converse. Hot rubber mixed with the smell of burnt gunpowder and equal parts fear and body odor. Body odor.

Subtext Bob to Sid: Could you please dial down the BO, I’m choking over here.

Sid looked over and cracked a smile as he peeled his back harder against the side of the car. He had his sunglasses on and was soaked in sweat too, but looking cool as a cucumber and totally in his element. Sid’s grin widened as he pulled out a ridiculously oversized handgun he had somehow hidden in the small of his back.

“So what do you think, should we make a run for it?” I asked breathlessly.

“Hell yeah, little buddy,” came the reply as he magically produced a second cannon from somewhere on his person. “I’ll just crawl into the back and you squirm into the driver seat and get us going. We gotta meet up with the boys to have any chance at busting out of this one!”

“Okay, then, let’s do this.”

A voice came over a loudspeaker from the roadblock, down between the derelict buildings and burnt out car shells up ahead.  “Come on out with your hands up, we don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Rolling my eyes, I complained to Sid, who was already crawling cat–like into the back seat, “Can’t they come up with anything better than that?”

I immediately filed a request for snappier dialogue and then stowed my own anemic feeling .357 Magnum into the breast pocket of my leather jacket. I reached for the door handle and squeaked the passenger side door open, sliding in chest down across the stick shift, humping my body across. A bullet ricocheted off the concrete.

“Hold your fire!” came the voice on the loudspeaker again. “Come on out boys, we can still do this the easy way!”

“Bob,” Sid whispered urgently, “are you ready to go yet?”

I rotated my body around, reaching down to test the pedals with one foot as I hunched over to put the key in.

“You betcha, let’s hit it!” I replied.

With surging excitement I turned the ignition to fire up the five hundred horses under the hood. Pushing down the clutch, I jammed it into first and without looking over the dash, released it and hit the accelerator. The unbridled power of the engine surged us forward and we began peeling out in a cloud of vaporized rubber and exhaust.

I swerved wildly, trying to maintain some kind of control. The bullets started flying and I could feel them impacting the car, punching through the windshield, shattering the glass onto me. Sid was on his back, kicking upwards with his feet, trying to knock out the sunroof.

We were rapidly accelerating and I needed to risk it, so I peeked over the dash through the destroyed windshield. I saw an officer walk out and crouch in the middle of the street, hoisting something onto his shoulder.

“Sid!” I yelled. “Rocket launcher!”

“On it!” he screamed back over the roar of the engine.

I punched it into third. With a final grunt Sid kicked out the sunroof, and it went spinning out and away into space above us. In the same fluid motion he popped up through the open roof with a lunatic grin. Swinging out both of his cartoonishly outsized weapons, he began blasting away. Peeking out over dash again, I saw the head of the cop holding the rocket launcher explode in a mist of red spray.

The rest of them ducked for cover.

The bullets were coming fast as we neared point of impact with the barricade. Sid rotated his body backwards, jamming his back into the edge of the sunroof and bracing his legs underneath. He leaned out flat on the roof of the car, pointing both guns to each side. As we smashed through the barricade, Sid let go with a terrific volley of fire that took out four LAPD officers in explosions of blood and guts, as they looked up with surprise from their hiding places.

With a second crunching impact, we cleared the last of the cruisers, swerving hard to avoid as much of the blow as possible. I heard Sid grunt in pain, but then he lifted himself back up and swiveled around to face the gauntlet ahead of us.

Dozens of cop cruisers were parked on either side of the street, and they were taking dead aim at us. I gunned us into fourth and slid as low as I could in the seat, reaching to take out my own feeble weapon, hoping for the best.

The metallic tang of blood seeped into my mouth, and I looked down to see I was bleeding profusely. I’d been hit, but the shock of the fight was staving off the pain, at least for now. This gameworld didn’t allow tuning down your pain receptors—you had to deal with it. This was going to get messy.

Suddenly, one of the cop cruisers to our right exploded and lifted into the air, tumbling slowly back to earth in a fiery arc. Several cops ran out screaming in flames, wildly shooting their weapons. Sid picked them off quickly as another cruiser exploded and incoming automatic weapons fire began raining down on the police. They all turned to look up the street.

Willy and Martin were hanging off a cherry red GTO, blazing away at the cops with automatic weapons. Vicious was reloading what looked like a rocket launcher of his own. They waved at us merrily with their free hands. I gunned us into fifth and sat up higher in the driver seat, leaning forward to pull some of the remains of the smashed windshield out of the way.

It was all about style points from here and Sid did a beautiful job double fisting shots off both sides of the car, blowing away police officers one after the other with geometric precision as he looked skywards and let loose with a deranged cackle.

Our audience had spiked way up. As one of the best crews in the world at this game, we had over four million people tuned in to watch our escape scene today, and Sid was determined to put on a good performance for our fans.

Passing the last of the cruisers, he dragged a grenade out, pulled the pin with his teeth and sent it sailing right into the open driver side window. It exploded with a satisfying crunch and a few uniformed body parts bounced off a nearby chain link fence.

I congratulated him, “Nice work, Sid!”

Martin, Vicious and Willy had peeled off to follow closely behind in their GTO, and the low throaty growl of both engines mixed together in a bone shaking symphony. By now they would have put a general call out to all the special weapons squads, so we’d have hundreds of them chasing us down as we tried to leave the city.

Our gameworld audience had spiked to over six million and was climbing fast. This was going to be a great show.

“You hit?” asked Sid. He climbed down out of the sunroof.

“Yeah,” I replied, putting a hand under my shirt, wincing. My finger found a small hole on the side of my ribcage. “Not too bad. A through and through I think, but it would help if you wrapped me up. You hit?”

“Ah, I think my ear got blown off,” he said, holding one hand to a bloody mess on the side of his head as he doubled over in pain, “but the real problem is a gut shot.”

“Bad?”

It looked bad.

“It hurts like hell but it’ll bleed out slow, I should live for another couple of hours.”

Ah, not so bad then. I smiled. Maybe we’d make it out of Los Angeles after all.

As we sped up the street, I could see something walk into our way.

A pedestrian? Not cops, anyway. It was someone in a green suit, hunched over, and then there were more of them, blocking the road. Cars lined both sides of the street so I couldn’t swerve off, and I could hear growing sirens in the distance with flashing lights coming at us from all angles. Up ahead it had all the appearances of a herd of little green men now, completely blocking the road.

What the hell?

I jammed on the breaks and we skidded, squealing to a halt as we ploughed into the first couple of greenies, bumping over them messily amid roars of pain. The other car skidded to a stop behind us.

Furious, I flew open my driver side door as we stopped, weapon in hand, to confront whatever was going down here. Sid popped back out of the sunroof, grimacing, with both cannons out aiming front and center.

A short, stocky green man with pointy ears and a broad forehead, wearing spiked shoulder pads and holding an enormous axe, ambled up to me.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

I could see he had some vampires with him too.

“We are against the discrimination shown to the Bangladeshi.”

“What?” Then it dawned on me.

“Sid!” I yelled. “Sid, did you set the authenticated login to this world when you created it?”

Silence. Except for the growing whine of the approaching sirens.

“Sid?!” I asked again, looking back at him.

“Ah shoot,” he replied, wincing in pain. He looked down at the blood that was oozing from his gut wound. “I forgot.”

Dejectedly he banged both of his weapons down on the roof of the car.

These were obviously Comment Trolls. Without authenticated login, people could just connect into this world anonymously, which was fine if you just wanted to watch, but anonymity tended to bring out the worst in people.

With the massive audience we’d accumulated for this game, and with the login anonymous, we’d just attracted the mother lode of Comment Trolls. Hundreds of them were now blocking the road. They’d use the opportunity to broadcast their opinions, whether they had anything to do with this world or not.

“I’m sorry dude,” continued Sid, waving a gun in the air. “I was just so busy. My mother was over, I had a splinter set this world up…”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Perhaps I could reason with them.

“Dude, please, this is 1988 Los Angeles,” I complained to the lead Comment Troll. “We’re just trying to get out of here. There were no trolls in ‘88 Los Angeles, and no vampires either.”

I considered this for a moment. On closer inspection those were Forum Vampires he had with him. They could be useful.

“Maybe there were vampires. But come on guys, please.”

My dimstim stats were dropping as fast as our gameworld audience. I had to do something entertaining, and quickly. The head Comment Troll was right in my face now. He smelled real bad and had some butt ugly oily pimples going on.

“Master,” he growled at me.

Well, at least he was playing along in character. Not a total asshole, then. Perhaps there was an opportunity here.

“Master, we are sorry, but this is an open gameworld, and we have the right to express our opinions here.”

I nodded my head.

“Yeah, this an open gameworld, but only if you’re coming to get laid and get paid,” I explained in a sing song tone, smiling to expose my two gold capped front teeth and holding a West Side finger salute near my chest. “Look if you want to join the Bloods or the Crips I’m down with that, but don’t be a bitch and mess up our game, homie.”

I shrugged and held my hands up, wide eyed, shaking my head.

“Who are you to tell me what to do?”

“I’ll tell you who I am, my brother,” I said, bringing my .357 Magnum up between his eyes and pulling the trigger.

Curiously, it didn’t result in his brains blowing out the back of his head as it should have, but the bullet seemed to glance off his thick skull and ricochet in a splatter of oily blood and hairy flesh. I guess I’d never tried shooting a troll in the head at point blank range with a .357 before.

As I considered this, my left forearm exploded in pain. The troll standing next to him had swung his axe to lop off my left hand which I was lifting up to give the lead Comment Troll the finger with.

Blood spurted out of my severed appendage as I backpedalled away from the threatening horde, blasting away indiscriminately with my firearm. Sid was covering my retreat, picking off trolls and vampires as they advanced. They were tough sons–of–bitches, and we wouldn’t have made it except for the suppressing automatic weapons fire that Vicious and Willy added as we ran back.

Breathlessly we all rallied behind the GTO, and I ripped off my t–shirt and mashed my severed forearm stump into my leg, trying to wrap a tourniquet under my armpit. Sid leaned over to help me as Vicious and Willy continued to let go with their M–16’s.

“Where the hell is Martin?” I managed to pant out.

He should have been manning the rocket launcher. That would give those assholes something to think about. Sid ducked up to look inside the car.

“Aw man, I think Martin is dying,” he replied. He tightened up my tourniquet.

I wrenched around to take a look myself. Martin was writhing in the back seat, soaked in blood and whimpering.

“Goddamn baby,” I said, shaking my head. “Martin, what the hell?”

I turned back to Sid.

“Those guys were miles away, they had tons of cover. How the heck did he get so messed up?”

This was going to get a lot trickier with one man down, Sid barely functional and me missing an arm.

“You’re useless, you know that?” I yelled at Martin.

He whimpered back between the pain, “Sorry Bob, I didn’t mean to…”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re always sorry,” I muttered under my breath.

Sid stared at me disapprovingly. He was shaking his head.

“Dude, you shouldn’t be so mean to him all the time,” Sid reproached. “Talk to him, okay?”

I said nothing.

“Okay?” demanded Sid between the bursts of automatic weapons fire. “You promise?”

Rolling my eyes I sighed, “Okay, yes. You’re right. But let’s just get out of this first, okay?”

Looking back up over the GTO, I could see the trolls were reassembling and advancing by holding up their bloodied comrades in front of them as shields. They were fast too. This wouldn’t be easy. I looked around for the rocket launcher as Sid picked up an Uzi from the back seat and snapped in a clip.

We looked at each other, starting to enjoy ourselves. I was awkwardly trying to slide the launcher from the back seat, with my one remaining hand, to balance on my shoulder, when all of a sudden a massive burst of gunfire erupted from both sides of us.

The LAPD had finally arrived, and pandemonium erupted for a while as it turned into a three way pitched battle. By now, the vampires had taken wing and began swooping down on the hapless police officers who just screamed in disbelief.

A few of the braver cops continued to take some pot shots at us, but their overall enthusiasm for taking out gangland members seemed to dissipate after the first few were hacked to pieces by foul smelling demon spawn wielding their skull topped axes. Sid and Willy laid off a few more rounds at the trolls, but then just gave up, laughing.

§

I didn’t have long to live and I could feel the lifeblood ebbing away from this body. I propped myself up on the hood and leaned against the bullet–ridden windshield of the GTO. Martin had already died some time ago.

“Dude, that was actually pretty cool!” I admitted to the lead Comment Troll, taking the offered smoke from him to have a drag.

He was sitting up on the car with me. Most of his bloody forehead had been shorn away by my bullet, showing white bone underneath, but he was in a jolly mood.

“That gameworld audience went through the friggin’ roof,” he agreed. “There are already thousands of copycats going on.”

As he said this, an LAPD officer came running out of the bushes, disheveled and bloody but intact, running up to me.

“Mother of God, please help me, please,” he whimpered, his hands pressed together in a prayer position.

I just raised my eyebrows and shrugged, giving the smoke back to the troll. The officer looked at the two of us and began backing away, shaking his head and making small pathetic noises. At that moment a large, muscular troll burst through the same bushes the cop had come through.

“Ah ha!” the new troll announced. “There you are!”

He pounced on the officer, who managed to back away a step or two, holding his hands up defensively.

The troll began methodically hacking away at the officer with his axe. I had to close one eye as bodily fluids spurted and splattered onto me amid blood curdling screams. I looked at the troll leader, shaking my head with eyebrows raised.

He smiled back at me and nodded.

“Ah, Fred, Fred!” said the troll leader, raising one stumpy green arm.

Dripping in blood, Fred looked up from his whimpering prey. “Yeah?”

“Could you give it a rest, Fred?”

Fred pouted and frowned, and then sighed.

“Fine.”

Grumbling under his breath, he stuck the point of his axe through the police officer’s skull. This ended all the commotion. The troll skulked off.

My vision was swimming.

“Sid? You ready to go?”

True to his assessment, Sid had bled out slowly and hadn’t gotten another scratch. Sitting atop a pile of stinking corpses, he was now chatting up a female troll over near our Mustang.

“Yep!” he waved back, and picked up his gun and stuck it in his mouth.

“Cool.”

I picked up my .357, looked at the head troll and said, “Let’s do this again sometime.”

With a smile I opened my mouth and stuck in the barrel of my gun. Tasting the sharp tang of metal and gunpowder, I pulled the trigger. The last thing I felt was the curious sensation of my head exploding backwards into space and suddenly, I was floating in blackness.

Dead. At least in that universe.

It was a funny thing. We could now die a hundred, a thousand, a million times out in the synthetic worlds we traveled through—we just couldn’t die in our identity world. It was just that one place out of millions where we couldn’t die, it was a solution set approaching zero.

With all the flittering between worlds and bodies, stimswitching with friends, people borrowing your body and your body being driven around by your proxxi, you’d think it would get confusing to figure out where or when you were or how to get back into your own body, and it could be disorienting. That was why a basic feature of pssi, hardwired at the deepest level, was what we affectionately called the Uncle Button—when you gave up and wanted back into your own body, you punched it. You just had to remember that it was there.

I sighed as I floated in the dimensionless black space and performed the well worn ritual: look down to where your chest should be, reach into your chest, punch it, and whammo, I felt myself falling backwards.

Now I was jogging through trees near the eastern inlet. Sunlight was streaming down through the green canopy above.

“Taking me for a jog?”

“Uh huh, you asked me to, remember?” replied my proxxi, Robert, just a voice in my head. “Did you read the latest storm warnings?”

“No…” I replied, disinterested. I knew they were having a hard time steering out of the way of Hurricane Newton and it looked like we might have to battle through the edges of the storm, but what did I care. I’d just be off in the gameworlds anyway.

“Well it’s gotten a lot worse,” Robert explained, “you’d better not get too dug into the gameworlds this afternoon, and stay off the pharmacologicals.”

“In case of what?” I asked, surprised. It was rare Robert would ever ask me to do something.

“Just in case.”

I shrugged. Sure. He seemed worried.

“Do you want to transition control to you?” he asked, apparently satisfied.

“Naw,” I replied, “just take us home, just in case like you said. I’m going for another gameworld session with Martin.” I felt bad now for yelling at him.

“That’s probably a good idea,” replied my proxxi.

§

For the rest of the day we opted to go old school and return to Mongol battle. We all met up afterwards at a tiki–bar on the beach for some beers. It was well past nightfall, and the place was packed with tourists.

Martin loved the Mongolian battle worlds. He was still hopped up from the fight and was jumping around in the sand, howling away as he aped Bruce Lee style karate moves. Sid, Vicious, Robert and I watched him with amusement.

“Bob, that was awesome, you ducking and diving like that, it was like, superhuman!”

I’d had Sid remap my tactile water-sense for Mongol battle so that I could feel arrows coming at me like eddy currents through my skin. The incoming projectiles had become a part of my body, and as I quickened, I was able to duck and weave away with blinding speed, roaring through the battle as I hacked away at the Tatar scum.

“Yes, it was superhuman. That is perfectly accurate, we have superhuman abilities. We are in fact supermen. At least until the rest of humanity plugs into pssi, at which point…”

I paused to take a swig of my beer.

“We will just be, well, just men again.”

I shrugged and smiled. I could see that Martin wasn’t troubled by existential angst anymore. It was nice to be nice to him for once.

Sid smiled. He liked it when I was nice to Martin. He leaned over and whispered under his breath, “You’re going to talk to him, right? For you, you understand?”

I rolled my eyes but nodded.

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t give up do you?”

The surf had been pounding noisily as we all sat there, but a truly gargantuan wave suddenly thundered in, literally shaking the party lanterns hanging off the tiki–bar. Everyone turned to look out into the blackness. Those were some monster storms brewing out there.

Just then, a system of pssi alert channels began to activate.

7

FLOATING UP AT THE EDGE of space, my dad had asked us to get together as a family to see firsthand what was happening. We watched the two converging hurricanes swirling ominously in three dimensions below us. They had suddenly strengthened in the past day, both past category four now, and like two enormous threshing wheels, they now threatened to pin Atopia against the West Coast of America.

Atopia was still holding its own as we backed away, but we were now running out of room and the phuturecasts didn’t see any way around them.  Surface evacuation had just been ordered. Jimmy was right in the thick of the emergency preparations.

Dread filled me realizing the impregnable fortress of Atopia was somehow threatened.

Flitting back to our family habitat to get ready, I clipped back into my body. After a rushed inventory assessment with my proxxi Robert, it seemed I really didn’t need to bring much, so, with some time to spare, I let my mind slip backwards and away, to an early inVerse memory of my family I liked to escape to in times of stress.

§

Blinking in the sunshine, I could feel sand trapped wetly in the crack of my ass. At the time I was having too much fun to notice it as my brother chased me around the beach on his pudgy little legs. We’d just turned four, and I’d just passed the point where my parents had allowed my proxxi, Robert, to fully take over my body, but he hadn’t yet progressed there yet.

Despite being twins, my brother had always lagged behind me.

So as he chased me around the beach, squealing with excitement and waving his bright orange plastic digger, just before he could touch me I would flit out to another spot nearby, disappearing suddenly from in front of him to reappear a few feet away. He hooted with delight each time I did it, and I would stick out my tongue and waggle my hands, thumbs in my ears, and raspberry him. With squeaks of glee, he would change directions and run at my new spot.

I was laughing and laughing.

My mum and dad were sitting together on a beach blanket, my dad’s arm around her and mum with her great big sunglasses on, laughing with us. My mum was almost crying she laughed so hard, pressing her face into my dad’s chest, and this just egged me on as I flittered willy-nilly around the beach, taunting my baby brother.

I hadn’t seen mum laugh in years, and neither my dad for that matter. Quitting the inVerse, I wiped the tears from my eyes.

§

InVersing, going back to relive your own personal universe of stored sensory memories, was a dangerous thing if you let it get its tentacles into you. When you were happy, it didn’t matter, you never seemed to bother with it, but when you felt sad or frightened, sliding back into the past and becoming a person you once were, happy and carefree, was about as addictive as something could get.

ReVersing was worse still, going back and reliving the past, but running new wikiworld simulations from a decision point you’d made, and changing that decision to enable a new world to evolve and spin on from that point—a simulation of how the world could have been, not how it was.

Perhaps these weren’t just simulations, but portals into alternate realities that branched off from our own timeline. Windows into life as it could have been, as it actually was somewhere else. It was hard to tear yourself away when it was something, or someone, you desperately missed.

Many people I knew spent more time inVersing and reVersing, or as glassy eyed emo-porners, than they did living their lives in the present. Dr. Hal Granger said on his EmoShow that going back and reliving the past helped us grow emotionally, helped us to find resolution and happiness—I wasn’t so sure.

What my family had done, though, was much worse. It had made a certain desperate sense at the time as we’d tried to deal with our grief, as I’d tried to deal with mine. In fact, the whole thing had been my idea, and it was an idea I was regretting more than I could bear any longer.

Morning had broken in wet smudges while I thought about all this. I was sitting on the covered deck of our island habitat watching the huge swells generated by the coming storms gathering and slapping together like drunken sailors. Ragged, scudding clouds hung under an ominous and luminous sky.  The air was calm and proverbially quiet.

Waves were coming from every direction, sometimes breaking, sometimes wobbling together and rising up to double their height before awkwardly falling back over.  It was a chaotic and frightening scene, churning up the kelp forests as they sheared away beyond the perimeter.

Even the ocean was confused today.

A steaming cup of coffee, hot and thick enough to stand a spoon in, warmed my hands as I cupped them together. I could feel the heat and strength of the coffee seeping into my veins like a caffeine-pumping life support system. Watching the churning watery tumult, my surfer mind tried to force order from the chaos, tried to find a pattern from here to safety.

I flitted out of my body and into the local wikiworld, to a point about fifty feet off the deck right in front of me, and watched me watching the waves.  Robert, my proxxi, took a sip of coffee for me and waved at me. I just stared back.

Our habitat looked small and vulnerable from here against the backdrop of the ocean.  Dark, evil looking clouds were stealing quickly across the horizon, piling up in the sky in an enormous approaching wall. Swinging my gaze around to look inwards to Atopia, it looked muted and under threat as the roiling clouds and seas reflected dully off its glassine towers.

From this perspective, the huge incoming swells were rising up towards the beach, almost completely obscuring it as they surged and broke on their ride around Atopia.  Instead of their usual rhythmic thumping, the waves were breaking at different points, choppy, bewildered.

Massive clouds of spray were sent booming upwards from the collapsing waves, hanging the beaches in veils of misty white fog. As I watched, a sharp wind began to blow and gain in strength within seconds, snapping the flags to attention on top of our habitat.

The storms were upon us.

Clipping fully back into my body, I quit my procrastinating and began to scan a list of what needed to get finished for the evacuation, sipping my coffee, luxuriating in its hotness.

“Bob, do you have a minute?” asked Martin, pinging me on a dedicated family channel. I’d turned off all the other channels, even my dimstim, as I tried, for once, to focus on the here and now.

I looked at the list again before I answered, “Yeah sure, come meet me in my room.”

I could at least start to organize my stuff while we talked. I crossed the deck and made for the lower levels, dropping down a set of stairs and opening the door to my room. It was dark inside with the shades drawn. I didn’t come in here much these days. Accessing the room controls, I faded the glass walls to transparency while at the same time opening some vents to let some fresh air in. The fusty, closed-in smell of the room almost instantly gave way to fresh ocean air. I heard a knock.

“Come on in,” I called out.

Martin materialized near the couch set against the glass wall to the open ocean.  His eyes were downcast, and he fidgeted the fabric on his pant leg as he flopped himself down onto the couch. He looked worried, which was unusual for Martin.

“What’s up, bud?”

“Bob, so, I was looking at the evacuation manifest, and, well, I’m not on it.  I tried pinging dad about it but he’s ignoring me for some reason. Could you try to reach him? Do you know why?”

The words froze me in my tracks. Of course the evacuation list was an ADF function, and not a part of the Solomon House research project. Their personnel manifests would be different. Dad must be off splintered in a dozen places fighting for control of the public relations situation, trying to put a positive spin on Atopia being crushed by the two giant storms.

I shrugged and lied, “I have no idea, Martin. Anyway, who cares, let’s just get a move on, huh?”

Martin didn’t move or say a word. He just sat and wrung his hands, cracking his fingers, looking even more worried.  He looked about to cry.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I snapped.

“Martin, look,” I said, gathering my thoughts. I’d been thinking about doing this for a long while now, and I let some anger swell my courage. “I don’t know the best way to say this, but…”

Still I hesitated.

“Yes Bob?” he pleaded with perfectly unaware eyes.

“Martin, look…” I repeated.

He looked at me.

“You know you’re dead, right? At least some part of you must know this…” I trailed off, now suddenly unsure where to go.

There was silence, anxious silence, before his angry response. “Bob, are you stoned again?”

“Martin, I’m not stoned, and I’m not upset.” I was shaking my head, trying to find a way through this. “Actually, yes I am angry and upset, but not at you. I don’t know.”

If I didn’t get this out now, he would just forget. They had a cognitive blind spot working on his memories and perception, sort of like if you were walking in the desert and there was a hovercraft following a dozen paces behind you that dusted away your footprints as you walked, so there were a few steps behind you that you could see, but beyond that there remained just a general impression of where you had been, or more appropriately, who you had been.

“What, that I’m dead? Very funny asshole. You’re messed up, man, stop with the drugs, Bob. They’re screwing with your head. Just tell dad to get me on the evacuation list. I’m outta here.”

He got up and made to leave.

“Don’t leave Martin. This is important, and I’m not kidding and I’m not stoned.”

I moved all my phantoms to block his paths outwards into the multiverse, and pulled a heavy glittering security blanket down around us at the same time.

“Look at you! This isn’t even that much of a shock. If someone told me I was dead I’d laugh at them, but you’re getting defensive.”

“I’m not dead, Bob. I’m right here, talking to you,” said Martin, smiling awkwardly. He wasn’t telling me as much as asking me.

“Martin, don’t you find it at all odd that everyone else here has a proxxi but you?”

“I have a proxxi—Dean.”

“Uh huh. And when was the last time you were in your physical body?”

“I don’t know, it’s been a while,” he replied, shrugging as he cocked his head upwards. “What about that time that you and I went surfing and you crashed into that…”

“That was seven years ago, Martin, seven years…”

He just shrugged again and added more angrily, “So what? Maybe I’ve been detached for a while, but that doesn’t prove anything. I know lots of people who hardly spend any time at all in their bodies.”

He shook his head aggressively.

Meanwhile, my own frustration was mounting and boiling over. I could feel my cheeks flushing hot. I had to blame someone.

“It’s your goddamn fault he’s gone, Martin,” I screamed at him, finally letting it go. “Every day I have to look at your goddamn shit eating fucking grinning face and just take it. I just feel like smashing your face in, but what difference would it make?”

I was full on venting now, and the words were coming out before I even knew what I was saying.  The whole world shifted red as blood gorged into my veins, and my blood pressure indicator shot off the charts. I took a deep breath and watched it sink back down, trying to calm myself. Screaming wouldn’t accomplish anything.

Martin was silent, pale, his hands shaking a little as he wrung them some more. His voice quavered as he asked, “Bob, what’s wrong with you?”

I was calmer now, and I sighed heavily.

“Martin, it’s not what’s wrong with me. Or maybe it is. I think it’s what’s wrong with this place.”

“You’re not making sense, what are you getting all crazy for?” He was starting to cry now, perched on the edge of the couch.

I took a deep breath.

“Martin, look, my brother, Dean killed himself about six years ago, an intentional drug overdose. Brain dead at first, but they kept his body in stasis, vegetative, but you were still active, his proxxi. You were still attached to him, your proxxi smarticle network intimately wired into his dead body and holding all his memories, his emotions, until we switched off the machines and transferred you entirely into the pssi nervenet.”

My voice cracked as I tried to continue, “It was too much for us. It wrecked our mother, dad as well, and then there you were, but he suddenly wasn’t. Mum took to spending all her time with you, saying how much it helped her. All of us took to spending time wandering back into the inVerse you shared with Dean.”

He looked at me, his world falling away through the floor, trying to make sense of what I was saying.

“What do you mean? I’m your brother!”

“No, no you’re not,” I explained, shaking my head sadly. “We had Dr. Granger install a cognitive blind spot so you couldn’t see what was right front and center, but saw everything around it. One day, we pulled a linchpin somewhere in your mind and then you just thought you were him. We left the blind spot active to sweep away anything that didn’t fit.”

“Bob, Jesus, Bob…” pleaded Martin, tears streaming down his face.

With the anger having blown through, my sails deflated. I suddenly felt very sorry for him. Why was I doing this?

“At the time, I just couldn’t take it, and mum and dad couldn’t either. It was a way of fixing the pain, pretending it didn’t happen. If we just suspended disbelief that little bit more, our own blind spots took over and you became him.”

Watching his face twist up in pain, it was time for me to own up.

“To be honest, Martin, this was mostly my idea to begin with, but now it’s taken on a life of its own, you’ve taken on a life of your own. Now Cognix is using it as another application of pssi.” Never lose a loved one again!  “How much will people be willing to pay for that if we can show it works?  And it does seem to work, which is the worst of it.”

Martin wiped away his tears with the back of one hand.

“It’s funny, now that you tell me, I can see it all, even remember it all. I guess I always sort of knew it, but I love mum and dad so much…and you too.”

He wiped away more tears.

“But why do you blame me? Why are you so angry at me?”

“What, for impersonating my brother?” I snorted, but immediately regretted it seeing the pain flash in his eyes. I sighed again, letting my last sparks of anger fizzle.

“I think that Dean just felt like you were a better version of him, that mum and dad liked you better, that people were happier when you answered a call than if he did. He was a great guy, not that he didn’t have his issues,” I said smiling sadly. Dean was lazy and irresponsible, amazing and funny. “But he just had so much trouble keeping up with it all.”

“With all what?”

“With his pssi experiment!” I shot back, angry again. “Living in a hundred worlds at once, being here and there and somewhere and someone else all at the same time. Dean just figured, why not, I’ll just remove myself, and you’ll all be able to keep a better version without all the effort.”

I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself.

“In his messed up head he didn’t think he was dying, he figured he was leaving a better version of himself to continue on. That’s what he left in his note, anyway.”

I looked down at the ground, feeling my own tears coming, starting to cry. Why was it I’d been able to be so many things, to be so smart, but I hadn’t been there for him?

Martin looked at me, shaking his head. “But maybe I am him, Bob. I think like him, I look like him, and I remember everything—every memory he ever had.”

“But you’re not him,” I replied, shaking my head.

“So then what makes a person dead?”

A stupid question.

“Dead is dead,” I shot back. “When the doctors say you’re dead.”

“When the heart stops?”

“No, when the brain goes dead, when the memories are lost, the essence of the person…”

“Most of your own memories are in the pssi, Bob, would they be gone if you suddenly were?”

“No…”

“So if a person’s memories aren’t gone, if some essence of them remains, are they truly dead?”

I paused.

“Remember having a bath together in the sink, mum sponging us off and singing in the dark when the first fusion core went offline, remember that?”

I smiled as tears rolled down my cheeks. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Remember throwing our toys over the deck into the ocean when nobody was watching, getting our proxxi to cover for us, and how angry mum was when we went and hid in one of the shark’s mouths when we went swimming for them?”

“That was your idea,” I laughed, nodding.

“We were quite the gang growing up,” he continued. “Us and our proxxi…Bob and Robert, William and Wallace, Sid and Vicious, Dean and Martin, Nancy and Cunard…”

“Yeah, that was quite the gang.”

“Have you talked to Nancy much lately?” asked Martin softly.

“No, I…” I replied. “No, not since, well, since you…”

“You should talk to her Bob.”

He looked at me steadily for a while.

“Hey, do you remember that night? We were sitting on the guard rails to the passenger cannon entrance. We must have been barely teenagers, and we were drinking beer. You had Robert override the security system and we had the whole place to ourselves. It was just you and me, sitting there.”

He paused for a moment before continuing, “We talked about what we would do together when we were old men. You told me how you were good at almost anything, all you had to do was apply yourself and you could do anything you wanted.  I think you were drunk—I think we were drunk.”

“We were,” I whispered between my tears.

“But I remember most of all, I remember thinking how great you were, thinking how I wasn’t that great, how I had so much trouble with everything and wondering why. But most of all I remember thinking how much I loved you, and how proud I was to just be your brother. You were the star of the pssi-kid program back then, even way ahead of Jimmy, I was so proud…”

“Yeah, I remember that night Martin,” I managed to choke out between sobs. I was crying full on now.

“I’m still here, Bob.”

Martin was looking directly into my eyes, his voice soft and full of love.

Have you ever made one of those three-dimensional line drawings of a cube on paper?  Two squares offset from each other with a straight line that joined each corresponding corner to make a three-dimensional looking cube?  If you stared at it, it seemed that one of the faces was closer to you, but if you concentrated and willed it, suddenly the cube flipped and the other face switched to being closer. As I looked hard at Martin right then, my mind performed a similar flip, and suddenly all I saw was my brother, sitting there in front of me in flesh and blood. A wave of love sprang from my scalp to my fingertips, and I got up to go and sit on the couch with him and hold his hand.

“Dean…Martin…I missed you so much, it’s just this place,” I said, shaking my head and squeezing his hand.

“I’ve missed you too,” replied Martin. “You’ve been so nasty to me these past few years. I always thought you hated me for some reason. It hurt so much, and I had no idea why you acted that way.”

Tears streamed down my face, and Martin reached up to wipe them away. Then he rubbed his hand across his own face. His demeanor changed and he sat bolt upright, taking a deep breath. He reached down to squeeze my hands tightly with both of his.

“Bob, stop with all the drugs, will you? And all these women… it’s not going to change anything. Calm down. Talk to Nancy.”

“You’re right,” was all I could think to say. “I’ll stop, I’ll try…”

“Good,” he said, brightening up. “And Bob, if you really believe all that stuff about gameworlds being real…then Dean is out there somewhere still, and I’m your connection to him.”

“This is all messed up.”

I was staring at the floor now. Nothing made any sense anymore. My whole life I’d felt like I was running away from something, fleeing before some unseen danger.

From now on it would stop. Maybe he was right, maybe I could still find Dean out there. I was right in the middle of one of the most amazing places on earth, where the impossible was becoming possible almost daily. I just needed to apply myself, get out of this daze I’d slid into.

“Bob,” asked Martin.

“Yeah?” I answered.

“Bob, why are you crying?”

Cripes. The blind spot had caught up . I wiped away my tears.

“Nothing, Martin, nothing. I’m just worried about the storms and Nicky dumping me and all that crap,” I lied.

His face brightened up.

“Don’t worry big brother, I’ll take care of you. Anyway, like I was saying, could you get dad to add me to the evacuation list. I don’t know what’s going on there, but I have a lot to do, so I’d appreciate it if you could help me.”

“No worries Martin, consider it done,” I replied with a sigh.

“Cool. Thanks.”

Martin got up off the couch and prepared to leave.

“Martin,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Martin, I haven’t told you something lately.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

I smiled, pausing, and the world clicked back into sense for me.

“Martin, I love you. I love you a lot, and I haven’t told you in a while.”

He looked away quickly, catching his breath.  Bringing up a hand to wipe the corner of one eye, he looked back and replied, “I love you too, Bob, that is so good to hear.”

“Okay good—now get!” I laughed.

He laughed back and shook his head as he disappeared.

This place, all of it, felt abruptly wrong. Like a switch being thrown, I suddenly knew something wasn’t right here anymore, and that this same something had swallowed Dean in its path. Blind spots—we all had them. So what was it that they were hiding from us, what was it we weren’t seeing?

I decided I was going to find out.

~ NEVERYWHERE ~

Book 5:

Nancy Killiam

&

William McIntyre

PROLOGUE

THE POLICE STATION loomed before me at the base of the vertical farming complex, and I was gingerly making my way towards it.

The Boulevard was the only real street we had, a wide pedestrian thoroughfare that crossed from the eastern to western inlets, crossing between the four gleaming vertical farm towers that center–pinned the island of Atopia.

Glamorous palms lined both sides of the street, bordering the tourist shops, restaurants, and bars whose terraces spilled out into the kaleidoscopic melee between them. Even with the storms threatening and the evacuations announced, the atmosphere was still carefree and festive.

It had been ages since I’d been above, and I hadn’t been to these parts since I was a tween. I blinked in the sunshine and confusion around me and tried to think my way through what was happening.

I felt so alone and exposed. Here I was, stuck in the middle of something clearly illegal, but what else could I do? I looked up at the towers and imagined myself as one of the psombies inside. Out of options, I just shrugged and opened the police station doors.

Cool, administrative air swept over me and the clerk at the desk, an attractive young woman, smiled at me synthetically.

“Can I help you, sir?” she asked, as sweet as a police officer could be.

“Yes, I’d like to file a missing person report,” I replied, walking towards her as calmly as I could.

Her face registered just the proper amount of seriousness before she queried, “And who is the missing person, sir?”

I paused for a moment.

“Me,” I answered.

1

Identity: William McIntyre

A BRILLIANT CARPET of stars hung above us on the moonless night, somewhere in the Adirondacks of upper New York State. Our campsite was nestled between tall, majestic firs at the side of a quiet lake. We’d barely finished the canoeing and portage to get here before nightfall, and we were all spent. A deep silence settled upon the hissing and popping of the campfire. It was nice to hang out with friends and not feel the need to say anything. I almost felt completely relaxed for once—almost.

“It’s so peaceful out here,” I said, leaning forward to pick up a stick and poke the embers of the dying fire. I could feel a breeze blowing across my backside, but I let it go for now.

“You got that right, Willy,” replied Bob, slumped comfortably in his folding camp chair and balancing a beer on his knee.

“Yes sir,” added Wally, my proxxi.

“Willy, do you want another beer?” he asked, seeing me toss my empty can into the fire.

Wally was sitting to my right, Bob and Martin to my left, and Sid and Vicious opposite me on the other side of the fire.

“Naw. I’m good, Wally. Thanks.”

Poking the embers I watched their hot orange and red sparks dance around like tiny demons escaping from the charred wood. I extended my hands toward the coals to warm them and rubbed them together. It was going to be a cold night. A loon called out from the blackness above the lake with a haunting wail. It was time to go soon, but not yet.

“This is amazing,” drawled Bob.

We all sat entranced around the fire.

“This is so relaxing,” he continued. “Hey Willy, did you catch the slingshot tests this morning?”

I watched him smiling and taking another swig from his beer, grinning at me. He was usually smiling, the lucky bum. Then again, he didn’t have it that easy.

“I saw them, it was kind of impossible to miss,” I replied. “Were you with your family?”

He laughed. “Naw, Sid and I were out in Humungous Fungus watching the mash-up version.”

I grinned back. “I bet that was a lot of fun.”

“It was, but my dad gave me a lot of trouble.”

Wally pinged me with an alert. Oh shoot, I’d forgotten.

“Oh, ah, Martin,” I blurted out awkwardly, “happy birthday, by the way.”

Martin smiled, looking up at me from the fire.

“Thanks Willy,” he laughed, and then looked at Bob, “and dad wasn’t really mad, you know, he’s under a lot of pressure.”

“I know,” replied Bob. “I’m sorry I was late. Thanks for covering for me.”

“That’s what brothers are for,” chuckled Martin, shaking his head. “Right?”

“Yeah,” sighed Bob heavily, “that’s what brothers are for.”

An uncomfortable silence descended and everyone stared down at the ground, everyone, that was, except Martin. He looked around at us all with wide eyes.

“What, did somebody die or something?” he laughed out.

Bob snorted, shaking his head. “Naw, just forget it.”

“Forget what?”

“Just forget it,” snapped Bob. “You will no matter what anyway.”

Martin stared at Bob and shrugged, but Bob looked away.

More uncomfortable silence.

“I can’t believe more people don’t come out into nature to experience this,” said Bob after a while, changing the topic. “It’s just amazing. You know, doing things with your own two hands, getting back to the basics.”

Now everyone nodded, except Martin who’d returned to staring blankly into the fire.

“Yeah,” I agreed, but Bob could always tell my moods.

“Are you still worrying?” he asked me.

“Naw.”

“Yes you are. I can tell. Just forget about it, okay? Everything will be fine. It always is,” he declared, smiling sadly, “even if it isn’t.”

He tossed his beer can into the fire. Vicious, Sid’s proxxi, started coughing as the wind moved his way and pushed the smoke into him.

“Mates, it’s been a real pleasure,” coughed out Vicious, “but I I’ve ‘ad about enough. This nature shite is not for me.”

“Come on,” laughed Sid, “we’re having a nice time here! Tough it out a little, old boy!”

The spell was broken, though, and the suspension of disbelief cracked, revealing the grainy quality of the fire and the hollow texture of the night. It all suddenly felt very fake.

“Yeah, anyway, I think I’m going to get going too.” A heavy weight fell back across my shoulders.

“Surfing tomorrow, right, buddy?” asked Bob.

“Sure thing, Bob, wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I lied.

I gave a perfunctory wave to the gang, and without another word the campsite faded away and was replaced by the white, featureless confines of my apartment.

Wally was still sitting beside me, though now on the convertible couch of my tiny living space. My digs could, at best, be described as minimalist. Real space on Atopia came at a premium price, and one I couldn’t afford.

“Don’t worry so much, Willy,” said Wally.

“Easy for you to say. You don’t live in this pill box.”

“Well, yes and no, Willy,” Wally noted, watching me carefully. “Look, I’ve never said this before and I’m not sure why I’m saying it now, but …”

I waited.

“Yes?” I asked.

Why on earth was my proxxi getting weird on me now? That’s all I needed, as if I didn’t have enough to worry about.

He took a deep breath and looked at me. “William, I just wanted to make sure you know, well, that I love you.”

I was slightly stunned, and he saw it.

“Not in a weird way,” he added quickly. “I mean, as brothers, you know.” He smiled at me, waiting for me to respond.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said slowly, not sure of what to do with this. “Look, I appreciate that, and I like you too, Wally.”

He just kept smiling at me earnestly. Geez, I’m going to have to talk to someone at Cognix technical support about this. I had lot of work to get done and I didn’t need this.

“Look, I’m fine,” I finally told him. “Let’s just focus on the here and now, okay?”

Switching topics to the work at hand, the walls and features of my apartment morphed outwards into the sea of displays that were my workspace. I had a busy day tomorrow and wanted to get a jump start on organizing myself for the big meeting with Nancy Killiam, who was heading the new tech company Infinixx I was working for.

Wally and I worked well into the night, pulling and pushing masses of financial data through the deep reaches of the the multiverse, trying to make sense of the rapidly accelerating world around us.

§

The next morning Brigitte, my girlfriend, dropped the expected warning shot, “So, you didn’t ping me last night when you got back from camping with the boys.”

She tried to say it whimsically, but I could tell. We’d been together a long while now and I could sense her moods coming like winds approaching high in the treetops.

“Pumpkin,” I said, attempting to deflect the approaching storm, “sweetheart, look, you know I have this big meeting I am trying to prepare for with Nancy.”

“Pumpkin my ass,” she proclaimed, “I bet you and Wally were up picking stocks all night.”

I paused, deciding on my plan of defense; feint or full retreat?

“We were preparing for the meeting,” I stated defensively, “and,” I added quickly, “we did do some stock picks too.”

My job at Infinixx paid alright, but I’d been brought in as an outside contractor and wasn’t on their stock option dream ticket. The real reason I had gunned so hard for the job was that it gave me access to the distributed consciousness platform they were developing. Being able to be in a dozen places at once gave me an edge nobody else had in the market right now, and in the market any edge equaled an opportunity to make money.

Brigitte pouted. A beautiful pout if there ever was one. Her full lips and petite Parisian nose, under a beautiful tangle of laissez–faire auburn hair that women of a lesser pedigree would kill for, gave her an impossibly irresistible look that hovered somewhere between beautiful and beautifully cute. Even when her deep brown eyes flashed angrily at me as they did now, it was hard to resist the urge to simply scoop her up into my arms and kiss her. So I did.

“William,” she laughed in her little French accent, pushing me away. She was laughing, but when she used my full name she always had a serious point to make. I looked at her in my arms. “William, vraiement, money isn’t everything. Look around you, cheri.”

I looked around. We were having breakfast on top of a Scottish Highlands mountain ridge. The small, white table and chairs with us in pajamas, and her in bunny slippers, set against the backdrop of a blossoming sunrise amid rolling fog and boulders and grass and sheep—it was surreal to say the least, but she liked it and that was all that mattered.

“We’re in the most amazing place on earth. We can travel anywhere we want, do almost anything we like. So what if we have a small apartment? Look where we’re having breakfast! What do we need more money for?”

I tried not to roll my eyes. This was well–trodden ground. It would be nice to be able to afford more sub–proxxi; as it was I could hardly afford to have Wally show up at more than one event at a time. It would be nice to be able to afford to expand my Phuture News Network; right now, it was an immense effort just stay ahead of the game. Just accessing the wikiworld at this resolution to have breakfast here cost us dearly, but this wouldn’t cut any ice with her. Everyone else I knew was better off than us, and frankly, it pissed me off.

No end was in sight for paying off the multi–generational mortgage my dad had taken out for my family to get a berth on Atopia. It was a shrewd move on his part, entering the lottery for a spot here—the value of the berth had more than quadrupled since we’d won it. The size of the mortgage, however, was crippling to a regular family like ours, and we struggled under the debt. It didn’t help, of course, that I’d made some bad stock picks of late and was far in the hole.

“You’re right, pumpkin, you’re right,” was all I could think to say.

I could feel my metasenses tingling and that meant a hot stock move. I’d remapped my skin’s tactile array from the nape of my neck and down my back, like a fish’s lateral line sensors, in order to pick up eddy currents in market phuturecasts. I could feel even the slightest pressure trends in the markets tickling across my back, a sure–fire way to get my attention. Right now a stiff wind was buffeting my buttocks as I was buttering my toast.

“I gotta go,” I told her hurriedly, getting up and leaning over to peck her on the cheek. “Something for work. I really have to run. Sorry.”

She rolled her eyes.

I stepped away and bolted upwards through the sky, the world disappearing away below me as I arrived at my workworld. This was my favorite way to get going—it gave me that Superman start for the day.

Wally was already there, and I rapidly turned on, tuned in, and dropped out into the multiverse, splintering my mind to assimilate what was happening. One splinter was already tuned into the press conference my boss, Nancy, had just started, so I let my mind hover over this for a moment.

2

Identity: Nancy Killiam

“ECONOMIC GROWTH IS only possible through enhanced productivity and the clustering of talent,” I roared out to an approving audience.

The world population was declining and fertility rates were collapsing, I didn’t have to add the failing prospects for the Yen and greenback, as bitcoin derivatives gained ground. While declining populations equaled better prospects for the planet, it was bad news for economics, and for once, today was all about business.

“Atopia and Cognix aren’t simply about being green,” I pointed out, “but about boosting business productivity and profits to provide the basis for a whole new surge in the world economy.”

I could see the faces closest to me, reporters that were mostly familiar.  Beyond that, faces upon faces filled my display spaces into the blue–shifted distance.  This was a well worn speech for me, like a rutted track down an old country road.  Maybe not the best analogy, I chuckled to myself.

I stopped and looked up and around at the crowd. The pause was well rehearsed and I was enjoying this. I let a confidence inspiring smile spread across my many faces.

“And the Infinixx distributed consciousness platform is the solution that will carry business into the 22 century!”

The masses before me burst into applause.  I shook my head and looked down at the stage, trying to convey that I didn’t deserve such adulation.

“So… questions?” I asked, looking back up into the crowd.  I saw Tammy from World Press with her arm up. She was always a friendly starter.  I pointed at her and nodded.

“Could you describe for our audience what, exactly, distributed consciousness feels like?” asked Tammy. “I mean, how would you describe it, and not from a technical point of view.”

This brought hushed laughter. I was famous for inundating reporters with technical jargon that left them feeling like they knew less than what they started with, so I made an effort to make it simple.

“Sure, good question. The easiest way to describe it is like speed reading.  When you’re speed reading, you don’t really read every word—you read the first and last lines of paragraphs and scan for a few key words in between.  It’s sort of like that.”

“Doesn’t that imply you’re not really getting the whole picture?” asked Tammy.

Good question, but hard to answer simply. Distributed consciousness both was and wasn’t what it described.

It wasn’t really distributing your conscious mind; what it was doing was creating an estimate of your cognitive state at that point in time, and with the particular issue you needed to deal with, then tagging this with as much background data regarding your memories as it thought relevant and available. The system then started up a synthetic intelligence engine and sent it out to canvas whatever you wanted to look at.

From time to time this ‘splinter’, as we called it, would report back with compressed sensory data that would be perfectly understandable only to your frame of reference.

Imagine your best friend winking at you when you asked about someone you both knew—based on your shared experiences, huge amounts of information could be encoded in a single binary bit communicated this way. Infinixx was something like this—the ultimate data gathering, compression and transmission scheme, tailored exactly to your individual mind at that moment in time.

Even without pssi—the poly-synthetic sensory interface developed here on Atopia—we could approximate a lot of the techniques so that first time users could realize some benefits. At first this worked nowhere near as well as it did for long time pssi users, but still, it worked.

“Well, you are getting the whole picture,” I responded to Tammy after reflection, “just not every detail. Speed reading really comes down to the unconscious skill the reader has in scanning the right parts to focus on.”

I paused to let them soak in what I was saying.

“Infinixx technology provides that attentional context, as well as the sensory and cognitive multiplexing technology to make it easy for even a novice to begin distributing their consciousness into the cloud within a few hours.”

I scanned the upturned faces and watched them nodding, but that last sentence had injected a slightly glazed look into their eyes.

“Okay for instance,” I continued quickly, “the last meeting you attended, how much of that was just an excuse for a co–worker to ramble on about something that had nothing to do with you?”

This earned a few chuckles.

“However,” I declared, drawing the word out, “there were probably a few bits here and there that you found useful. Infinixx provides the ability to tune a small part of your attention to only those interesting bits, allowing you to ‘be there’ the whole time without actually needing to be there.”

“So how long does it take to understand how to use all this?” Max cut in.

“Even you’ll be able to use it right away, Max,” I joked as I winked at him. This earned some laughs. “We’re ready to go if you are!”

I tried to maintain a steady smile on Max. To fully realize the benefits of this technology, I was thinking, you really needed to grow up with it, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. Not right now, anyway.

3

Identity: William McIntyre

“IT IS IN our interest to work together, to find a way to shape our differences,” droned the Chinese Minister of State. Sure, in exactly the same way that you’ve shaped all previous differences; in your favor.

The splinter covering this latest round of peace talks between China and India didn’t need to send in very much new information, the tone and character of the meeting having been pretty much the same as every other one in the recent past; nothing positive, and very predictable. Then again, for business purposes, predictability was everything. I pulled the splinter back for more important work elsewhere.

I quickly assimilated that thin conscious stream and turned my mind to an exploration hike that another one of my splinters was on in the Brazilian rain forest.

The wikiworld displayed vast tracts of remote farmland belonging to Greengenics outside of Manos, all sown with a complex matrix of plants varietals that was supposed to mimic the diversity of the forest surrounding it. I wasn’t buying their story and suspected they were strip farming the area. I’d hired a local guide to walk in and snoop for me, and this splinter was ghosting in through the guide’s contact lens display.

Pulling back the last of the dense foliage before the edge of the farm area, we peered in, and my suspicions were confirmed. Long rows of bio-engineered farmaceuticals stretched out into the distance. Greengenics had been falsifying its wikiworld feeds. This splinter of information, at the edges of my attention, shattered into a dozen others and then went off and used the information, shorting the Greengenics stock, pushing and pulling information that streamed outwards.

The Shanghai market was about to close its morning session when disaster hit.

“What?”

“Pull out of the short positions right away,” warned Willy. “I’ve already done as much as I can.”

Visions of the peace talks closing splintered into my mind. Interest rates were supposed to be trending a full point lower, but a last second and unexpected announcement between the Chinese and Indians regarding a joint farmaceutical project had injected future uncertainty, pushing expected rates higher. Worse, the Greengenics facility was named as their secret collaboration, sending the stock of this small company soaring. This unusual twist around my strategy suddenly shot everything out of alignment.

“Put in sell orders!” I yelled into my dozen splinters.

The bell chimed signaling the close of Shanghai. Within seconds, the secondary and after markets had kicked in, but by the time we’d managed to unravel my positions, I’d chalked up a huge loss.

I was too highly leveraged, trying to be too clever.

Hovering over the small metaworld that was my financial control center, I closed my eyes and sighed. I needed more splinters to cover more things at the same time. All I’d been able to scrounge up was about fifteen, and half of them were prototypes that were getting called back for updates and re-initializations all the time. A growing headache began to pound behind my eyes, and I focused inwards and back outwards, getting myself ready for the rest of the night’s work.

§

The day had ended in total, personal financial disaster. Almost everything that could have gone wrong, had gone wrong. Even though I hadn’t said anything, Brigitte could sense my mood and had prepared a special night for us. She’d taken the time to personally reserve a little patch of sidewalk on the side of the Grand Canal in Venice.

The spot was undeniably romantic; a candle set in a green wine bottle atop a red checked tablecloth, the gentle slap of the Adriatic against the canal walls, and the twinkling lights of Venezia under a rising full moon.  The strains of an accordion played somewhere nearby, the notes floating together with the smells of fresh cut herbs and tomatoes and seafood.

“Brigitte, this is beautiful,” I managed to say as I arrived, dropping most of my webwork of splinters behind.

Stepping into this one reality I sat down opposite her. I tried to relax and let my foul mood evaporate into the warm night air. I could guess that she and Wally had been speaking, and from the look on her face there was more in store. I sighed.

I was still stewing over a heated argument I’d had with Nancy earlier regarding my splintering limit. I’d tried to explain what a difficult spot I was in, but it hadn’t mattered to her. Atopia was supposed to be this shining beacon of libertarian ideals, a place that wouldn’t stoop to the base realities of the rest of the world. In actuality, it was just another country club for rich snobs like the Killiams to lord over us commoners. She had no idea what it was like for a family like ours here.

Almost every American had lost someone in 2C, the cyber attacks of ‘22, but our family had been particularly hard hit. We came from working class roots in South Boston, and with a name like McIntyre, living in Southie had never been easy. But when the first cyber strikes had hit in the middle of a cold snap of February of that year, triggering the power grid shutdowns, something not easy had turned into something terrifyingly deadly. When the lights had come back on over a month later, we’d lost nine of our family to the cold, starvation and riots.

Deep suspicion of technology had driven my grandfather, along with a big chunk of the rest of the world, literally into the hills.

Hiding from the world had made for a hard life, and one my own father had desperately wanted to escape. A huge fight had erupted when my dad had announced plans to move to Atopia, to start anew and break with the Luddite community my grandfather had founded in the foothills of Montana.

It had been a huge gamble, a gamble for a better life for me and my mother, and it was one that had cut my dad off from the rest of our family. It was a gamble whose burden to make good I felt had now fallen on my shoulders.

While my dad and I had managed the transition, my mother hadn’t been able to cope, and after a few years had returned to the commune. I remembered being furious at her, refusing to leave, and I barely spoke to her afterwards. I wasn’t mad at her anymore, but the commune forbade modern communication technology.

I’d been planning a trip to see her for years now, but was always finding excuses for staying, a trip on foot into the mountains not being something I was comfortable with, but it was more than simply that. I wanted to make good first, to prove that my dad had been right, and that she’d made the right decision in leaving me with him.

“William?” said Brigitte, catching my attention. I shook my head, casting out the memories. She was standing now in front of me, her hand on my head, and looking into my eyes.

She’d dressed up for our evening, her hair falling in luxurious waves over her shoulders, dressed in a glittering black slip that barely covered her petite frame. Her perfume was powerful and seductive, working some pssi magic, and I felt myself getting horny. Whatever it was, definitely zeroed my attention onto her. I collapsed the rest of my conscious splinters into the here and now, and centered my full attention on her soft brown eyes.

She deserved better. I would do better.

“Yes?”

“Are you here with me now?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” I sighed. “It’s just, well, it’s complicated.”

She watched me quietly.

“Not everything needs to be complicated, you know.” She moved her hand down to my cheek, and then pulled my chin up so I was looking directly into her eyes. “Come on, let’s eat.”

Waiters immediately floated in around us with plates of food.

“I want to apologize for giving you a hard time about money and everything,” she said, leaning over to kiss my forehead and then returning to sit down opposite me. I’d almost forgotten about all that.

“No worries, pumpkin,” I replied, my mind-fog lifting. “It’s me that should be the one apologizing.”

She smiled at me and reached over to hold my hand.

“Enough apologizing, cheri,” she said tenderly. “First we eat, and then off to bed.”

Her smile turned seductive.

My stomach growled. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. Hungry and horny, I thought as I looked at her, and I could see she wanted to make me a happy man. Life didn’t get much better than this. I smiled and dug into dinner.

Perhaps my situation wasn’t as bad as I thought.

§

Soon after, I was lying on my back in bed amid the mess of sheets and pillows strewn about from our lovemaking. A gentle breeze was blowing in through the window, and Brigitte clung tightly to my side.

We enjoyed sex without any of the messy special effects a lot of the other pssi–kids went for. Not to say we hadn’t experimented with all that stuff. Brigitte was quite the wild child in her day, but as we’d gotten older and found each other, the craziness had lost its appeal.

“Willy,” she purred softly, “can I ask you something? And promise not to get mad okay?”

“Sure, anything, sweet pea,” I replied. All of my defenses were down, and right now she could have asked me to jump into the canal and I would have happily complied.

“Willy, do you think we could start sharing our realities? I mean, completely.”

Even with my defenses down, this gave me a little start.

“Sweetie,” I replied calmly, “even couples that have been married for years don’t share their realities entirely.”

Right now we were sharing a reality of being in Venice together, which was great, but she meant that we’d fully share each others’ reality skins, the little and big ways we filtered and modified real and virtual worlds. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to see the world the way I saw it.

“I know what other people do and I don’t want that to be us,” she continued. “It is possible, you know.”

Now it wasn’t like I walked around the world with it skinned up as some weird fantasy, but still, sometimes I liked the world to appear the way I liked it to appear. It was hard to deny her, though.

“I want us to take that next step in our relationship, to experience the world together in the same way.”

Really it wasn’t that big a deal. It’s not like we were teenagers and I had something to hide. She really deserved more from me. Whenever I knew I was going to jump, I always just jumped.

So I jumped.

“Sure, let’s do it, I’d love to do that with you. It’ll be great!”

This earned me a big hug and kiss. I pulled myself away gently.

“I love you sweetheart.”

“I love you too,” she softly replied.

I paused, looking at her expectantly. A steady wind only I could feel had begun to blow.

“Yes, yes, go to work,” she said, smiling as she rolled her eyes. “I know you’re dying to get out there with Wally.”

She hit me playfully with a pillow.

“Thanks baby!” I laughed, grabbing the pillow away and pulling her in for a final kiss.

In a flash, I was off rocketing up through the heavens and into my workspace.

§

The main action for me wasn’t out in the front of my life. The real action was in the backrooms where Wally and I were working to build my growing hedge fund.

My ability to consistently outpace the market using the new Infinixx distributed consciousness platform made it possible to do things nobody else could do. People out there were noticing how this pssi–kid was beating them out day by day, and I was starting to get some traction in the market.

I desperately needed more splinters. A few months ago five had been enough, and then I expanded to ten. I’d managed to get fifteen by signing up for some beta testing under a false credential, but I wasn’t fooling anybody. This had me constantly at loggerheads with Nancy, who headed the Infinixx project.

Almost as soon as I launched my splinter matrix for the evening, Nancy barged in. She appeared in an overlaid display while I sat in the middle of my hedge fund metaworld.

“Nancy, I am just as capable, in fact probably even more capable than you at splintering,” I argued immediately, knowing what was coming. “I’ve spent more time out there stretching the capabilities of Infinixx than anyone.”

“We’ve been over this Willy.”

“And I can beat the pants off you at flitter tag.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I’m not going to disagree, William,” Nancy replied. “I’m just saying, if you were anyone else, I would have fired you already. I can’t ignore it anymore.”

She just didn’t get it.

“Can’t you see I’m doing you a favor?”

She said nothing.

“Think of me as an advanced beta tester,” I suggested hopefully.

“William, I can’t,” she said finally. “Your splinter limit will be set at ten. I will allow you to keep using Infinixx to run your side business, but that’s it.”

A splinter limit of ten? My stomach tightened into knots and my mind raced. I desperately needed more, and she was cutting me off.

4

Identity: Nancy Killiam

“TEN?”

“That’s it, William. I am not going to discuss this anymore.”

I looked at a graphic detailing the metaworld Willy had created for his business. A threadbare and kludged together collection of Phuture News feeds, second-rate synthetics and metasense overlays that snaked out into the hyperspaces surrounding him. The only saving grace was the distributed consciousness network connecting it all together, borrowed illegally from my Infinixx beta labs. It looked like an interesting test case for what small business could do with our technology, but it was just too early.

“Look, I’ll just keep to the fifteen I have now,” he pleaded.

I took a deep breath. He looked desperate, and it broke my heart to have to have this kind of conversation with him.

“Ten, Willy, and even that’s a stretch,” I replied firmly. “I know you’re one of Bob’s best friends…”

“But obviously not yours,” he snorted. “I guess forever and ever ends pretty quickly in Atopian time.”

I shook my head. “We were children, Willy.”

“And?”

“That was just a silly game in childhood worlds.”

“Maybe to you.”

I sighed. As children, Bob, Willy and I had been part of an almost inseparable gang, and we’d promised to always stick together and do whatever we could for each other, no matter what, forever and ever. It was a long time ago. I shook my head again.

“Ten, Willy, that’s it, and even that I wouldn’t do for anyone else but you.”

Now he looked angry. I felt myself wavering, but we were at a critical point in our developmental path. We had to stick to the known unknowns, and letting someone splinter their consciousness into more than just a few instances could lead to some unknown unknowns that I couldn’t afford.

He glowered in my display space. I didn’t have to plug into his emotional feeds to feel the angry waves spilling out around him.

“Fine,” he announced from between gritted teeth, and then he summarily blocked me from his realities.

My primary subjective snapped back into the Infinixx control center, and I leaned back in my chair, thinking of ways I could try and help Willy.

I was already feeling more than uncomfortable, pssi-kid or not, being in my early twenties and bossing around people more than twice my age. Explaining to our Board of Directors that I was putting the program at risk for a childhood friendship just wasn’t a place I was willing to go.

Willy had always had a chip on his shoulder, even when we were kids. He’d arrived on Atopia with his family when he was already six years old, at an age when the rest of us pssi-kids were already amazing the world with our amazing abilities in the virtual worlds where we’d grown up. He’d had to start from less than nothing, having come from a Luddite community in central Montana. In the Schoolyard we’d teased him mercilessly as he’d struggled to come to grips with the pssi system.

Bob had been the first one to befriend him, bringing him into our gang, and their friendship was one that had survived. This was no mean feat in the churning social space of Atopia.

His young mind, back then, had been forced to leapfrog almost 400 years of time, starting from a place stuck somewhere in the eighteenth century and straight into Atopia, a place far ahead of the rest of the world. He’d been incredibly determined, though, and within a short time had become the best flitter tag player in the Schoolyard.

Willy had always been on an upward climb, always trying to prove himself, and now more than ever.

I sighed.

I wondered what the world must look like from his perspective, coming from a place so alien to me. In a way he straddled these worlds, and it was hard for me to imagine his childhood. This made me think of mine.

§

As a baby girl, my own first memories, my first fully formed memories, were of my mother’s face. This wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the detail with which I could remember it. My mother was holding me, coddling me, and looking down into my eyes, cooing softly.

“Hello Nancy, how are you feeling my little darling?” my mother had said to me. She had a slightly worried look on her face, full of love.

I’ve gone back and relived it so many times it’s almost embarrassing. It was a very special moment to me, and as the first pssi-kid to pass this threshold, it was a special moment that was shared with the whole Cognix program. My memories were famous.

This memory was from the first moment my pssi was turned on. It was the beginning of my inVerse—the complete sensory recording of everything I had ever seen, heard, felt or sensed. I was three months old, and the moment was exactly 7am, Pacific Time, on September 20 on the year my family had just moved onto the first prototype Atopian platform.

I’ve gone back and relived it all many times; felt my mother’s hot breath on my blushing cheeks, sensed her holding me tightly, observed every nuance of her pupils dilating and contracting, breathed in the tang of her perfume and strong soap, and felt my small eyes suddenly distracted away to catch glimpses of glowing dust motes floating in the angled sunlight streaming in from the windows. In the corner of the room my father crouched anxiously over the quietly humming machines as he monitored my signals and systems, stealing quick glances towards us from time to time.

As pssi–kids growing up, we hadn’t known anything special was happening around us.  Like kids anywhere and anytime, we’d just assumed that life was like that for everyone. But we were special. We were the first generation of children to grow up with seamless synthetic reality sensory interfaces.

After running out of letters at the end of the alphabet, TIME Magazine had tried to label us ‘Generation A’, as in artificial reality, but this expression had died almost as quickly as the magazine. The world quickly came to refer to us simply as the ‘pssi-kids’.  We were a part of Cognix Corporation’s phase III clinical trials of early developmental pssi on the island colony of Atopia. We weren’t just making history. As my dad liked to say—we were history.

While Atopia was an amazing place to grow up, we were still just kids and we did the things that all kids did.  We screamed, we dribbled, and we wobbled when we first learned to walk. We did learn to walk much earlier than regular children, using pssi muscle-memory training, but this was just one in a long list of things we could do that human children couldn’t.

Our world was more than just this world—this world was just a tiny patch of our playground as we quickly learned to flitter across the endless streams of metaworlds that were filled with toys and creatures that sparkled in our sensory display spaces.  We perceived little difference between the real and the virtual, in fact synthetic worlds felt more real and tangible to us than what the rest of the world would call reality.

Even from a young age, it wasn’t just toys we played with, we also played with making ourselves into toys, altering our bodies to become teddy bears, worms, little flocks of soaring dinosaurs in endless sky-worlds and ever more alien creatures inhabiting ever more impossible spaces as our minds developed a fluid capacity for neuroplasticity. Our proxxi and educational bots constantly presented us with an endless barrage of games and puzzles to solve as we spun through these worlds, treating every moment as a learning opportunity.

From the first few years of our lives, from our point of view, our proxxi were simply our playmates. But for their part, though, they weren’t playing. They were constantly correlating the flood of neuronal data traffic through the smarticle network embedded in our bodies and matching it with our behavior.

It didn’t take long to learn a human wetware matrix, but our brains and nervous systems were still in development, and they were using our data to continuously redesign the pssi system. We were Cognix’s Guinea pigs, part and parcel of our parents’ agreement to participate in the Atopian project.

Almost all of my early childhood was spent with my proxxi—the ultimate tool in familial productivity enhancement. To us, our proxxi were our brothers and sisters, little artificial boys and girls we could play with.

This even became a primary selling feature of the program. After all, who had the cycles left over in today’s busy world to have even one child, never mind a second one?  Proxxi filled this need in the market by creating a kind of digital clone of your child to act as playmate, babysitter, and educator, or even your child’s twin depending on your point of view.

The floodgates were opened near our fourth birthdays. Around this age, one by one, we were gradually given independent access to our own pssi systems. Like quick little fish, we’d disappeared over and through the worlds that our parents understood, and began venturing out into the open network. The reign of the pssi–kids in the multiverse had begun.

Before then, we’d been limited to one body, but we learned to spawn our minds simultaneously into others. This was the beginning of my journey into the discovery of distributed consciousness.

§

Leaning forward in my chair, I focused my mind on several key events unfolding in the worlds my consciousness was spread out into, all the while fine tuning the parameters of some phuturecasts that tied them all together.  A high–dimensional correlation matrix floated through my display spaces, and I watched it growing, pulsing and fading as predictions grew or fell in their interconnectedness.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

“You know what I think,” responded Cunard, my proxxi, and I did.

While we were talking, I was holding forth on dozens of splintered conversations in other virtual worlds while keeping an eye on reports coming in from a platoon of sub–proxxi and bots out collecting and spreading data with trusted, and not trusted, parties. I could sense a coalescing cascade in the mood of billions of humans out there, and subtle shifts in the goings on in the billions more worlds they wandered about.

The timing felt about right.

Distributing my consciousness that wide and thin was tiring, and I’d been at it constantly for nearly forty hours straight, even while arguing with Willy. An aching pressure was building up behind my collective eyeballs from the lengthy act of forced concentration. The Sleep–Over tabs worked great up to a point, but I was feeling sluggish after a long week. It was just beginning to pay off as I could feel the ebb and flow of the world’s opinion around the Infinixx project.  Just a little more certainty was all I needed, so I gritted my teeth, rubbed my many eyeballs and focused inwards and back outwards.

“Nancy!” someone called out, intentionally overriding my sensory dataflow using an emergency channel.  The interruption jolted me and my conscious webwork partially collapsed.  It was David, of course, I realized after a split second of hang time. I sighed but smiled as his face floated into view.

“C’mon Nance, come to Davey-boy.  Enough is enough.”

He was smiling too, but I could see concern worrying the corners of his mouth.

“Just a little longer. I’m sorry.”

I had a splinter ghosting him but I’d lost track of it. Visions of him cooking up a storm in the kitchen floated into view as I retrieved that conscious stream. Most of my awareness was still hovering in countless minds and bodies scattered throughout dozens of worlds.  I checked the pulsating high–dimensional correlation matrix one last time. Things looked good, and that was good enough for me.

I initiated a wrap to the session, and like a shockwave, streams of information flowed outwards from me into my agents across the multiverse.  Collapsing my cognitive webwork, it felt like a brick was being lifted off my brain.  The relief was palpable.

“All done sweetie,” I responded to David. “I’m all done now, and I have some wonderful news.”

“Great—and I have some wonderful food getting cold.  C’mon back, my hard working gal,” he said playfully.

I was more than very late for dinner.

With a final flurry of gestures I released my agents to autopilot and left the rest in the care of Cunard. My workspaces faded out and the outlines of a dinner setting faded into view. I could see David had picked out a romantic setting for dinner tonight—a small fire was crackling and popping in a marble fireplace, set on each side with a dramatic arrangement of exotic flowers.  In fact, the entire living room was decked out in white marble and tropical flowers tonight. Neo-classic columns graced the open terrace doors and a breeze was billowing in through satin curtains. Sea air mixed with burnt incense, and I caught a glimpse of what I was sure was the Amalfi coast through the open doors.

Italy, I thought to myself, of course. I could see where this was going. Cunard was sitting next to David at the table, and it looked like they’d been playing cards. A bottle of wine was half finished. Before I fully clipped back into my body, Cunard took me to one side in a private one-on-one channel.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I dressed you in that little black thing you love so much,” explained Cunard. “It just seemed appropriate given his state of mind, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

I looked down at my body. Sexy, if I did say so myself.

“No, that’s great Cunard, thank you very much. You can leave us now and please, pay attention to that correlation matrix and have a talk with the editors at the Financial Times.  I left all the notes and instructions…”

“Go on girl,” laughed Cunard, “have a nice evening. I’ll take care of all that. Stop thinking for once.”

With that he popped out of view and I snapped firmly into my body.  The clarity and immediacy of being in only one place after being splintered for so long shocked my proprioceptive sense. I felt like little bits of me wanted to scuttle into the corners to get out of the glare of hard and fast reality, or at least, this single point-of-presence.

I tried to shake it off, blinking as I did.

David was smiling intently at me.  The long, richly polished table was beautifully set for dinner with gleaming silverware, glowing candles and lace embroidered napkins.  With a phantom flick, the playing cards disappeared from the table, and he reached across to hold my hand. I squeezed and smiled back.

“Well, look who’s here,” he said, smiling.

“Yes, and look who’s there,” I replied, returning the smile.

He looked like some kind of Italian swashbuckler, in tight beige linen pants and a laced white cotton shirt undone almost to the waist. He was tanned today, with two-day old stubble. I laughed lightly, looking at him.

“Okay stud, give me a minute?  I think I need to down a glass of wine to begin the unwinding process.”

“Your wish is my command, senorita.”

Grinning, he reached with his other hand for the glass of wine, already filled, and handed it to me.

I let go of his hand to take the glass, and brought it to my lips.  An earthy Cabernet flooded my mouth, and I could feel some of my tension washing away in its spicy wake.  I tossed my head back to take a big gulp, and shifted my ass forward to slouch backwards into the chair, my legs apart.

David wagged a finger in the air.

“Did you check your inVerse? Vince and Patricia both dropped in when you were busy. Vince had some odd requests…anyway, I dropped it with Cunard, and Patricia wanted to speak to you about some announcement?”

“David,” I said excitedly, “it’s time. The timing is perfect for putting Infinixx onto the stock markets.”

I knew he was in the mood for love, but I couldn’t help myself. I was practically bursting at the seams. One of the reasons I was with David was that he had an infinite patience with me, and I abused it all too often. Perhaps, though, perhaps he could sense our relationship was living on borrowed time, and he made allowances he shouldn’t have to try and keep it going.

The gleam in his eye diminished, but still he responded enthusiastically, “Wow!  Are you sure?  You’re going to do it before the commercial launch of pssi? Can you do that?”

“We sure can. I’ve checked and rechecked everything—we can only stand to win if we go now. When Cognix goes ahead with pssi, we’ll get a double bump up the hill. Jimmy’s been helping me out. I do need to chat with Patricia quickly though, is that okay?”

David nodded glumly as he looked at the place settings. I squeezed his hand and pinged Patricia. Her head appeared a moment later floating in one of my display spaces, and she pulled me into her reality. Out of the corner of one multiplexed eye I could see David sulking and taking a sip of his wine. He got up to add more logs to the fire.

“So you’re sure you want to go ahead with this?” Patricia asked immediately.

“Absolutely!” I almost yelled out before noticing where I was.

Everyone in the pub turned and looked at me. I’d materialized sitting on what appeared to be a small, worn out church pew tucked in the corner of an old English pub. The crowd turned back to what they’d been doing and the hubbub returned.

“Okay, good. Well, I will press on ahead on my side, then. You’re keeping on top of the New York trials?”

“Yes, Aunt Killiam,” I responded, feeling like a child. “Of course I am.”

I smiled at Alan, one of Patricia’s old mentors, who was sitting across from me. He nodded back and smiled.

“Okay,” she replied, “perfect. I’ll start a campaign with the Board then.”

I was hardly able to contain my excitement, but I was now nervous as well. I realized that this was actually going to happen, that all my dreams were coming true. But there’d been another reason I had asked to speak with her as well.

Squinting slightly, I took a deep breath, not sure how to bring this up.

“There’s something else?” asked Patricia. She could sense me hesitating.

I sighed. “What’s going on with Uncle Vince?”

Reports were flooding in about him dying almost constantly, along with rumors of him selling off chunks of his vast, if haphazard, empire. He wasn’t my real uncle, but I’d known him all my life and he was a close friend of our family.

It was Patricia’s turn to sigh, her face clouding up. I thought she was about to share some terrible secret with me when she just said simply, “Nothing is going on with Vince, nothing at all.”

“What do you mean?” What was happening certainly didn’t count as nothing.

“He’s just, well, he’s just fooling around.”

Aunt Pattie shrugged, as if to say: What could one expect from a bored trillionaire? But her eyes said more. Whatever was going on, she wasn’t going to share it with me now, and I trusted her reasons, whatever they were.

“Okay,” I replied hesitantly, “if you say so. Just tell me what I need to do to help with the Board.”

“I will. Speaking of the Board, will we be seeing you at the Foreign Banquet tomorrow evening?”

“Yes, I’ll be there.”

Patricia hesitated. “Dr. Baxter said he may bring Bob along…”

She let the words hangs in the air.

“Well I think I’m going solo anyway,” I replied with a smile. “It’s an official function and those bore David to death.”

“I just thought I’d mention it.” Patricia smiled back. “Now you get back to your evening!”

My excitement bubbled back up, and I positively squealed as she faded away.

“That’s fantastic, Nance, that’s really good news,” said David on my return to him and dinner. He seemed a little uncertain now, hovering, but his love for me shone out in his eyes. Try as I might, though, my heart could never quite return it.

“Come here, my big bad boy,” I said lustily, trying to hide my uncertainty.

I grabbed his hand and pulled him across the side of the table and towards me.  He took my cue, and met my lips with his in a strong, firm kiss, opening my mouth and meeting my tongue.  I could feel one of his hands sliding down my back, gripping me, pulling me further into him, and our bodies pressed together.

We both flittered for a stimswitch almost at the same time, and I laughed, my mouth pressed against his, as my point of view switched into his and I felt the heat and strength and urgency in his body.  I found myself staring into my own eyes with him staring back out from them into my gaze, our senses shimmering back and forth like two mirrors reflecting an image endlessly into each other.

“What about dinner?” I asked breathlessly as our bodies rocked together in rhythm and slid to the floor while we pulled off our clothes.

“This is dinner,” he gasped back.

He phase-locked our stimswitch so we simultaneously ghosted each other.  I was him and he was me, our sensory channels now overlaid into and onto each other as we began our lovemaking.

While most of me was there, perhaps the most important part of me wasn’t. If you can’t be with the one you love, then you love the one you’re with.

At least, you do your best.

5

Identity: William McIntyre

I’D HAD ANOTHER terrible night. With my splinter limit fixed at ten, I’d been forced to funnel more and more of my resources into the Phuture News Network. Combining my natural abilities with the reduced rates I’d managed to get from Vince through Bob, I was still beating the markets, but I wasn’t the star I used to be.

“Are we going to have breakfast together?” asked Brigitte, standing next to me in the bathroom that morning. She was brushing her teeth.

“Pumpkin,” I sighed, “I just don’t have time.”

I was staring at my face, lathering it for a shave. I enjoyed a real shave from time to time. It helped me reconnect with myself after nights spent shattered all over the multiverse.

“You could have Wally shave you,” she suggested meekly. “We haven’t sat down for breakfast together in more than a week.”

She was pouting.

“Jesus Brigitte, you know I just like to shave myself sometimes!” I snapped. Why couldn’t she just leave me be?

Her hurt expression reflected in the mirror. With a quick intake of breath I was about to apologize, but she’d already flitted off without another word. Bardot, her proxxi, sat staring back at me from Brigitte’s body, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. She spat out her mouthful of toothpaste into the sink, handing me the toothbrush, and left as well.

I sighed.

I felt bad, but I really just needed some more time to myself.

Rubbing away the condensation from the mirror, I focused on my face and began to shave. I felt an itch and erratically scratched my shoulder as I held the razor up. With a swipe of the razor across my lathered face, I thought, what the hell am I going to do? Things were just starting to work out for me, and now Nancy is ruining it all.

Goddamn it! My hand shot under my armpit to scratch something. What the hell? My neck was itchy too. I dropped the razor into the sink with a clatter and began to madly scratch at myself.

It felt like ants were crawling under my skin.

I managed to stop scratching for a second to inspect my arm, and was shocked to see a small bump under the skin. What was going on? Then it moved. I wildly scraped at it, ripping open the skin and blood oozed out. Looking into the mirror in horror, I saw my face seething and roiling with boils. My hands shot to my face, feeling a crawling mass under my skin.

“Waaallly!” I cried out.

A burst of laughter erupted from behind the shower curtain. Immediately I knew what was happening.

“You assholes!” I exclaimed, turning to rip open the curtain, my face dripping and oozing worms, millipedes and other hideous creeping and crawling little creatures.

Hoots of laughter exploded from Bob, Martin, Sid, and Vicious as they held onto each other, crowded into the small shower stall.

“You should have seen your face, mate!” laughed Vicious, tears now streaming down his face as he gripped onto Sid, who was doubled over and laughing hard too. Bob was grinning widely, his arms around the others, shaking his head. I couldn’t help joining in laughing as well, despite it all.

“Fine,” I declared, “you got me. Okay Sid, make it stop.”

Immediately the itching stopped and the beasties quit wriggling. I absentmindedly rubbed my hand across my now smooth face, feeling the remains of the lather and my stubble.

“Sorry man,” said Sid, still wiping away tears, “when you asked Vince for a Phuture News upgrade, I slipped a skin in and you authorized it. You gotta pay more attention to what you’re doing!”

They all laughed some more.

“Hey it was Martin’s idea,” added Vicious, giving Martin a little shot in the shoulder.

“Oh yeah?” I replied, shaking my head and smiling at Martin. He smiled back timidly. I was glad him and Bob were hanging out.

I didn’t even remember authorizing that transaction, but I had already called it up on my inVerse. I really did need more sleep.

“Anyway,” added Bob, “the real reason for this escapade was to get the attention of our hardest working friend to ask him out for a surfing date.” He raised his eyebrows to make the point.

Smiling, I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Yeah okay, sure, how about the end of the day? I could use a break.”

“Outstanding!” replied Bob. “Okay guys, let’s leave our buddy to finish whatever he was starting.”

With that they were off and I was standing alone again in my bathroom. Well, apart from Wally now sitting on the toilet.

“I just didn’t see any harm in it,” he said before I could say anything. “I figured you and Bob could use a good laugh together. You hardly see him anymore.”

I rolled my eyes but smiled, and got back to shaving.

Just then, Jimmy pinged me for lunch.

I stopped shaving, calling up a display space for more information on the request, but there was none. I’d hadn’t seen or talked to Jimmy in years, so it was unusual that he’d just call me like this out of the blue.

Jimmy was Bob’s adoptive brother. He’d always been a bit of oddball as a kid, never quite fitting in, or perhaps, never quite understanding how to fit in. He’d had a tough time growing up, though, and being left behind by a parent was something I could relate to. I’d tried hanging out with him back then, until the incident at Nancy’s birthday party. After that, we’d barely spoken.

Some kids were just ugly ducklings, however, and as an adult he’d more than recovered. He was now the star of the pssi-kid program, and a minor celebrity in his own right. He’d risen far up the ranks, and had a lot of powerful friends. He’d be a good person to reconnect with, and maybe could even help me out.

§

“Well, you’re in tight with Susie,” explained Jimmy at our lunch table.

He wanted me to set him up with someone. Susie and I had been close childhood friends, even perhaps my first girlfriend, although at nine years old I hadn’t really understood the idea.

“If you help me,” he explained, “maybe I could help you.” He raised his eyebrows.

“Sure,” I replied cautiously, shrugging. Pretending it was an afterthought I added, “And what would you help me with?”

I smiled, wondering what on earth Jimmy would want with Susie. She just didn’t seem his type, but then there was no accounting for taste.

“Well, I think I could help you,” Jimmy answered, watching me carefully, “by getting access to higher order splintering.”

That both surprised and excited me. He obviously knew about my side project, but then again, he was now head of conscious security systems on Atopia.

“Oh yeah?” I tried to appear disinterested. “So what, like you could double my account settings or something?”

“Much,” he laughed, “much more than that Willy. I could show you how to fix the system to have almost unlimited splinters. You’ll blow everyone else in the market away.”

I glanced at the glittering blue security blanket around us.

“So nobody else can know what we’re talking about, right?”

I tested the security blanket with some of my phantoms, looking for holes, but of course this was a waste of time.

“Absolutely, Willy,” Jimmy replied with a wolfish grin. “I’m the security expert, remember?”

“Right.”

I paused.

“So what’s the deal then, Mr. Security?”

“If you can get me a date with Susie, but I mean, really set me up with her, you know?” He paused, raising his eyebrows again. I nodded, acknowledging my understanding. “Then, I’ll set you up with what you need.”

“You can really pull it off, with nobody else knowing?” I asked, slightly incredulous. “No risk?”

“I sure can,” he responded, smiling. “Nobody will ever find out. Let me explain…”

6

Identity: Nancy Killiam

“OLYMPIA,” I WHISPERED to the test subject, lying out on the pod before me. No response. Her mind was still hovering somewhere in the nether regions between consciousness and unconsciousness.

I’d inhabited a robotic body, now in a doctor’s office in Manhattan, to personally attend to the end of the New York clinical trials.

After many years we’d almost reached the end of the process and Cognix was now on the verge of approval by the FDA. Approval here in America would trigger a cascade of approvals in other super-jurisdictions around the world. It was a critical juncture in the future of Cognix Corporation, and by extension, for Atopia as well.

Aunt Patricia had made it clear to make this a priority, so I was here in person. At least, a part of me was here in person. The splinter I had controlling this robody was circling at the very peripheries of my consciousness, just a voice in the background of all the buzzing activity that I was dealing with. As Olympia began to stir, the splinter dug deeper into my awareness matrix, prickling my brain, and my attention was drawn towards that one place, my mind automatically load balancing the other tasks and places and people I was dealing with seamlessly onto my proxxi and other splinters.

“Olympia,” I called out again, louder now. She twitched and one of her eyes fluttered, this signal of impending activity collapsing my awareness firmly into this space.

My mind shivered at the cold, confined reality it suddenly found itself in. “Does distributed consciousness really work?” whispered one far away splinter, attending a press conference in Australia. “Yes,” that splinter answered, “even while talking to you I am attending clinical trials in New York.” I was still listening to my other streams of consciousness, but these were now faint murmurs in the background of the physicality of this place.

I looked up at the lighting panels in the ceiling, feeling my robotic irises focus in and out, adjusting to the brightness, and then looked back down at Olympia as I gently cradled her head in my plastic hands.

Slowly, her eyes opened, her mind dredging itself up from beneath the sedatives. She wouldn’t see a robot hovering above her, however. The pssi was now installed in her neural pathways, and I’d clipped a reality skin around my robot’s body so that I would appear to her as her own impression of the most caring and loving person she had ever known, an amalgamation of the people the system could figure out that she may have been closest to.

“Yes?” Olympia replied.

Barely conscious, and I could tell she was already annoyed. She obviously didn’t have much in the way of loving people in her life.

“Seems like someone needs a little more sleepy time,” I purred softly. “Come on, I’ll get you up and dressed.”

Olympia was something of a special case. She was one of the key external marketing executives setting the groundwork for the commercial release of pssi later this year. Olympia had been inserted into the program at the last minute by Dr. Hal Granger, one of Cognix’s senior executives and our leading psychologist. Her file indicated acute anxiety, which certainly qualified her, but it was strange that she’d been shuffled in at the last second like this.

“How long was I out?” asked Olympia irritably, propping herself up on the bed.

“Hmm…” I replied while my mind assimilated a thin stream of information from the splinter that had been attending her here, “about two hours I’d say. Everything seems to be working perfectly. In fact we’ve just activated the system. Your proxxi will explain everything to you once you get home. I would have woken you sooner but you just seemed so peaceful.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for that,” she said grumpily, swinging her legs off the side of the pod–bed and sitting up.

I tried to reach over to steady her, but she just pushed me off. I shrugged and leaned over to grab her clothes and hand them to her.

“I can take it from here, thank you very much,” she stated flatly and aggressively, waving me away.

I stared at her with concern, wondering if her intensely aggressive mood had been stimulated by some psycho-active response to the pssi stimulus, but a set of clinical notes floated into view in an overlaid display space. She was always that way. Everything was fine, then, in fact all of the other reports coming in signaled that this was another perfect pssi installation.

“I’m going to bring you in to speak to the doctor before you leave okay? He needs to have a final word,” I said, walking out the door and stopping outside to wait for her to finish getting dressed.

In a few seconds she was done, and strode quickly out the door and down the hallway, purposely avoiding looking my way. I watched her carefully, looking for any tell-tale tremors or jitters that could betray an issue with her motor cortex. She looked smooth, if not graceful, but then, her grace wasn’t my issue.

She hung her head around into the doctor’s office, and I walked over to observe the exchange.

“So how do you feel?” I could hear him asking her. “Please, come in.”

“No, I’m fine. I mean, I just want to get going. This was supposed to be under an hour, I’ve got things to do,” she complained to the doctor. “So just tell me quick, what do I need to know?”

“You have a very powerful new tool at your disposal now Olympia, just be careful with it okay?” explained the doctor. “I don’t think you should activate any of the distributed consciousness features for now.”

“Distributed consciousness,” snorted Olympia, looking back at me, “where do they get these ideas?”

I raised my eyebrows. Sensing my job here done, this splinter began to slide back towards the edges of my conscious awareness again to become just another voice in my sensory crowd. As it did, Olympia’s question resonated, sliding a part of mind off somewhere else, backwards in time, into my childhood.

§

Infinixx had really begun as a pssi–kid game we’d invented called flitter tag.  In the forested yards of the Schoolyard at recess, we used to have huge games of it, jumping and chasing after each other in what seemed to the adults as completely nonsensical behavior.

More than just using pssi to venture off into virtual worlds, as pssi–kids we were the first to really master the art of body snatching—sneaking into each others’ sensory channels and taking control of each others’ bodies. Sharing bodily control was chaperoned by our proxxi that allowed the visitor to do what they liked as long as they didn’t hurt our bodies or do something we wouldn’t do or say ourselves. Proxxi also managed the transition, the handing off and receiving of control, so it all went smoothly and safely.

Sometimes it could get confusing, but then that was a part of the fun. If it ever became too much, whenever you were ‘out of body’ and lending it to someone or off in another world, you could always punch the Uncle Button and snap back into yourself, so you were never really far from home.

Flitter tag worked as we all jumped willy–nilly from each other’s bodies into the next. Whoever was ‘it’ was flittering their consciousness from this body to that, trying to reach out and touch someone else as we squealed and shrieked and jumped about from one body to another, randomly forcing resets as we punched our Uncle Buttons.  It was disorienting, completely mad and completely fun and there was nothing else quite like it when one was growing up as a pssi–kid on Atopia.

What started off as a simple game became ever more complex over time and we began to invent more and more rules. Of course we played not just in this world, but also jumping off into the endless multiverse worlds we played in.  It was during these advanced games of flitter tag that we first began to really experience distributed consciousness, working to keep track of new bodies we spawned, madly rushing through worlds of fire, water, ice, and skies and inhabiting creatures and bodies and physics of worlds unrecognizable to the experiential space of normal humans.  We didn’t realize what we were doing at the time. It was just natural.

As we grew older, many of my peers dropped off into what could only be described as self–indulgent gratification. I was the only one to seriously think about what had happened to us, to dissect how it had happened. This was the beginning of Infinixx.

It was my aunt Patricia who’d nurtured my ideas and given them the space and light to grow. Really, she was my great–great–great–aunt. To everyone else she was the famous Dr. Patricia Killiam, the godmother of synthetic reality and right hand of Kesselring, but to me she was always just Aunt Pattie.

“So you can really hold five conversations at once?” she had asked me at the end of my eventful thirteenth birthday party.

After my naming ceremony, we’d decided to take a walk together in Never Ever Land, across a lavender field amid floating daisies. We held hands, Aunt Pattie brushing the blushing blooms from our path as we tried to walk just so, in synch, so we wouldn’t float too far up or down but would stay just right.  It was a game, as almost all things were.

“I’m doing it right now,” I giggled, and broke away from her and ran, rising up above the field as I did, but not too high so the circling Levantours couldn’t catch me.

I stopped and turned to watch her coming, sinking slowly back down.  I was also chatting with my friend Kelly in the Great Beyond about boys, about Bob of course, and also with Willy about how he managed to control an entire combat battalion simultaneously in a Normandy invasion, and also trying to console Jimmy after the frightful incident at my party.

“It’s easy, and I can do way more than that. I can do a hundred if I really wanted,” I boasted.

“Come on Nancy, don’t tease your old Auntie, please tell the truth.”

“Okay, maybe not a hundred, but a lot, you just have to think about it the right way,” I explained, and went on describing just how it happened to happen.

7

Identity: William McIntyre

I SIGHED, BUT happily now. Sitting belly-deep in the water on our boards, a dark mass moved smoothly underneath us. The Great Whites had begun their nightly garbage collection sweep of the undersea ledge. Bob noticed them too and smiled.

“This was great,” beamed Bob. “I’m really glad you made it out today.”

“Well I said I would, didn’t I?” I laughed back.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t always mean it’ll happen,” observed Bob, shaking his head but smiling, “at least, not lately.”

The setting sun was painting a picture-perfect end to the day in pink and azure clouds hanging high in the sky. We bobbed around in the water for a bit in silence, and then another one of the Great Whites slid silently past. It was time to get in.

“I guess that’s fair,” I replied. “Work has just been such a grind lately.”

We both leaned forward and began a lazy paddle back to the beach.

“I’m sure it has been. Well at least you look more relaxed today.”

It was true. After my talk with Jimmy I could finally see a way out, perhaps even a means to really break through. It would require a huge amount of work, but at least I could see a crack of opportunity to crawl through.

Bob, slightly ahead of me now, smiled back at me. I smiled at him too, and his grin widened.

“See you on the beach!” he called out and then turned abruptly. I was wondering what the heck he was smiling about when my board suddenly angled up, spilling me forward. In my daydreaming, I’d lost track of my water-sense.

“Thanks a…” was all I managed to get out before I swallowed a big mouthful of foamy saltwater and my world crashed into a watery tumult as a large wave broke over me.

§

Surfing at the end of the day had been legendary. The coming storms out in the Pacific had generated amazing incoming swells, and we’d spent the late afternoon riding twenty foot monsters to the delight of the crowds watching from the beach.

Bob had picked up a few female tourists, and taken them out for some tandem surfing, a sport he had almost single handedly resuscitated. We’d only just managed to disentangle ourselves from them by the end of the day, after I’d made it clear I wanted to make it a boys’ night out.

Darkness had fallen as we sat at a tiki–hut beach bar under an awning of palms fringing the powdery sands of the beach. Bob and Sid were already stoned, and I was well into my sixth beer, a large mouthful of which I had just spat out, projectile fashion, trying to hopelessly contain a burst of laughter.

An elderly woman, obviously a tourist, was walking past us as we slouched on our stools against the bar. Her breasts were undulating back and forth near her knees, complemented by a grotesquely protruding rear end, both spilling out of her modest bikini as they swung back and forth in a counterbalancing rhythm.

Sid had started up a new reality skin he’d created called Droopy. It grossly magnified the physical characteristics of women we looked at, scaled by the intensity of their attention towards us.

He’d just pointed out this new victim who was making her way towards the bar, and she had given us such a scowl that her tits had literally mushroomed out of her chest to bounce off the beach.

“Jesus, Sid, you’re killing me!” I choked out, wiping spittle from my mouth and desperately averting my eyes from the glare of the scowling matriarch.

She just made things that much worse, and was practically engulfed by her now gargantuanly distended mammary glands as she slowly dragged her expanding bottom through the sand.

“It’s the blob!” screeched Vicious, pointing with eyes wide in mock fear. “Run! Run away now!”

To make his point, Vicious ran helter-skelter into the jungle behind the bar.

I doubled over, howling with laughter and just not caring. The swollen, rolling subject of our consideration had now turned sharply on her heel, and was slugging off through the sand away from us, apparently not needing a drink anymore. As she retreated, she slowly returned to normal proportions.

“Oh,” I gasped, rubbing the tears from my eyes, giggling, “we should do this more often.”

“We do this every day, son. What you mean is, you should do this more often,” pointed out Vicious, peering out carefully from the bushes at our retreating victim. He was right.

Vicious returned to the bar, now that the coast was clear. He sat back down on his stool in his punkish best, with his black jeans rolled up to his knobby knees, sporting a ripped t–shirt, his eternally spiked black hair contrasting nicely with his pasty white complexion. The rest of us comfortably lounged in our swim shorts. Sid eyed me merrily, and then spat the remainder of a mouthful of beer onto me and laughed.

We all laughed.

“William!” someone screeched into my emergency audio channel.

Wally popped in beside me. “You’d better take this right away, she’s pissed.”

He took control of my body, and I detached quickly to respond to Brigitte.

“Yes my splinter winky?” I answered, my face radiating innocence as I dropped into my workspace to take the call. She stood scowling in front of me.

“William, I am working late finishing some interviews, and all of a sudden, my interviewee’s breasts start swelling and spilling out onto the table, which is totally distracting and embarrassing.”

Oh shoot, I had forgotten we were sharing realities.

“Ah geez, sorry about that, I was just having a little fun with the boys…” I started to say.

“You’re drunk,” she stated incriminatingly, “and you guys are pigs.”

“…come on…”

“Cochon!” she added, shaking her head.

“Brigitte, please,” I said defensively, “I’m only sharing realities because you asked. This isn’t a big deal…”

“William,” she cut in, “Willy…”

She paused, looking sadly at the floor. I waited.

“You know, I have barely seen you in weeks, months even,” she continued, “and you can’t even take the time to have breakfast with me, and here you are off with…ah…ca fait rien.”

I switched off my end of the shared reality, frustrated.

I hadn’t seen the boys in weeks, and I’d been doing my best to spend any spare time I had with Brigitte. It wasn’t my fault I needed to focus more and more on my moonlighting work. My early gains had quickly been gobbled up after Nancy had restricted my splinter limit, and my bank account was now fast turning into a blank account.

I felt trapped.

We fell into a mutually accusatory silence.

“Willy, I think we need to talk,” she said after studying me.

“I think so too,” was all I replied.

§

While Brigitte finished up with work, I flitted back to the boys. My mood was ruined, however, so I begged off and tried going back to work for a bit to lose myself.

Soon enough, Brigitte pinged me and appeared briefly in my workspace. Taking a resigned look around at what had replaced her, she took my hand and flittered us off to a quiet corner of the beach for our talk.

The day had settled into a heartbreakingly beautiful evening, and a crescent moonrise was casting a sparkling carpet over inky seas. Waves gently caressed the shore, and she held my hand tightly in hers, walking me through the wet sand at the water’s edge. We slowly left a trail of footprints behind us.

“Willy,” she pleaded, “my heart is breaking, Willy. I love you, but I can’t do this anymore. Please, let’s sit down and fix this. Just tell me what you need.”

“Brigitte, I love you too, but… I just don’t feel like we share the same goals anymore,” I replied. “I need to focus on my business right now.”

And then the pause, that hurtful space of silence between words that shifted worlds.

“Look, I don’t want to hurt you. I think the best thing could be for us to separate for a while so I can figure this out.”

She looked into my eyes while the tears welled in hers. Her feet left the ground, and she floated in front of me as I walked, holding both my hands now. Cast in the soft monochromatic moonlight, she hovered like a ghost before me.

“Willy,” she sobbed, “you want me to leave you?”

I can’t believe that I did it, but I slowly started to nod, looking steadily into her eyes.

Catching her breath sharply, she looked away, her body convulsing as she tried to stop the coming sobs. She let go of my hands. Brigitte floated up and away from me and into the starry sky. Perhaps not like a ghost, but more like an angel.

My footsteps continued alone in the sand awhile before being washed away by the waves. It was as if we had never been there at all.

The Infinixx launch was coming up, and I had to rush to try the idea Jimmy had suggested before the end of the beta program. Brigitte would understand, and once I had everything going we could have the life together that we’d always wanted. What I had planned was going to blow everyone away. I just needed to focus.

I went back to work.

8

Identity: Nancy Killiam

ITCHING. ITCHING DESPERATION. Sweaty visions of bunched up sheets, of desire for release, pain, guilt, of junkies staring with hollow eyes; these all flooded my mind. The desperation gave way to confusion, a mad whispering of ideas that meant something, but didn’t mean anything to me. Then something else, a contained space, I was trapped in a small vehicle that suddenly burst into flames. Just as quickly, I was sitting, combing my hair, and looking back into a face that wasn’t mine.

I closed down my splinter network, collapsing my conscious webwork at the same time.

“It’s some kind of bug,” explained Karen, my technical lead. “The subjective streams are getting crossed somehow, and there’s meme-matching problems, too.”

“Do we know what the problem is?”

Launch time was fast approaching. While building our technology platform, we were at the same time using it to provide for our own proof of concept. The problem was that bugs tended to get cycled back, amplifying their effects.

“We think so. We’re just running some final QA now before letting it out into the eco-system.”

“What caused it?” I asked. We’d been having some speed bumps, but nothing as serious as this.

“It seems like a code change somewhere in the kernel layers. We’re trying to figure it out.”

“You’re sure this will solve it?” Honestly, I didn’t care what caused it, I just needed it fixed. “I have another press event in a few minutes. Tell me the truth.”

“Yes,” confirmed Karen with some conviction, “that’ll solve it.”

I looked around the table. The meeting room pulsed softly and silently in its synthetic reality cocoon. Things didn’t have the feeling of a problem being solved.

“What?”

A few of them looked down at the floor, and Karen just shrugged and hit me with it. The details of a lawsuit splintered into my consciousness.

“Some guy in Minnesota is suing for emotional damages after his sensory stream got crossed with his teenage daughter’s.”

“Oh my God.” The details flowed through my splinter network. The girl had been out with her boyfriend. I shook my head, my mind filling with my own memories of growing up. Never mind the father; it was the girl who would be damaged after this.

“And you’re only bringing this to me now?”

“It was just filed ten minutes ago,” replied our legal counsel, a loaner from Cognix corporate who had now appeared in the meeting.

His slicked back image made me tense up.

“Do you need to be here right now?” I demanded. This was supposed to be a private meeting.

He shrugged. “That depends…”

“On what?”

“On whether you still want to be running this company by the end of the day,” he replied coolly, looking at the ceiling, and then he turned to stare directly into my eyes. “You need to deal with this right now.”

I sighed. Dealing with lawyers was something I didn’t think I’d ever get used to, but running Infinixx didn’t give me much choice.

“Nothing in the media worlds yet?” I asked rhetorically. Cunard had already run a background check in the seconds since we’d learned of the problem. There was nothing so far.

“No,” replied our lawyer, “they’ve agreed to keep it quiet.”

He looked around the room at my technical staff, appearing bored.

“For a settlement I imagine.”

“Yes,” he smiled, looking back towards me, “as you imagine.”

“Even though they signed off on a hold harmless clause with the beta testing?”

“This sort of thing could get, well, it could be pretty media friendly,” explained the lawyer, looking even more bored as he said it, if that was possible, “or pretty unfriendly, depending on how you look at it.”

This was exactly the reason why I couldn’t let Willy increase his splinter limit, unexpected repercussions and technical glitches like this. We just couldn’t afford the risk.

“Make the deal,” I sighed. The lawyer nodded and faded away.

“And Karen,” I added, “fix this problem. I don’t care what it takes, but get it fixed.”

§

The Infinixx platform had been designed to enable even regular humans to manage the trick of distributing their consciousness. For us pssi–kids, who grew up with the knack for doing this, the Infinixx platform was an amplifier that multiplied what we could already do, but learning the trick was a little more difficult for the general population than we’d imagined.

Our slogan was ‘Everyone. Everywhere. Everytime.’ or E3. The ‘E’ and the ‘3’ were stylized in the logo, facing each other to form an infinity symbol above the Infinixx name. It was all very clever branding.

“What exactly does it mean?” I was asked at the press conference immediately following the tech meeting.

We were announcing the slogan and unveiling our marketing program.  The media people were very proud of it and were hanging in the wings of the presentation space, egging me on to nail their positioning.

“E3 represents the infinite possibilities of the future that we’re bringing to life,” I rolled out breathlessly. “E3 is the idea that anyone can be everywhere and anywhere at any time they like—while still never needing to be anywhere they don’t want.”

I paused before my finale, catching my breath.

“For the first time, people will be free to be nowhere and everywhere at the same time—E3 represents total freedom!”

Applause rang out as I raised my hands to the crowd. I managed to say all of this without the slightest of smiles, even though I wasn’t sure I understood what it meant. All that mattered was that the marketing department was in love with it.

§

While distributing consciousness was a nice trick, what had the business world so excited were the implications for productivity. Synthetic intelligences and phuturing had been able to push the needle a long way, but lately they’d been stalled in their revenue enhancing capabilities, and distributed consciousness was the new buzzword in investor circles. Many groups were pursuing something like it, but with our intimate link to Cognix and our unique abilities as pssi–kids, we had an edge nobody else could match. The investments had just poured in.

The explosive growth was an adrenaline rush.

We’d begun synthesizing intermediate management as splinter constructs, their personalities and experiences amalgamated from the team members they would be managing. Our managers thus became a little bit of everyone they managed, but despite this, people still hated them for some reason.

Even with these innovations, it was a grind, especially the constant need to bring in new talent. Picking new staff became a Herculean task with each new staff member counting as ten—the productivity multiplier goal we were trying to demonstrate—so a mistake picking out any new employee tended to magnify itself. We were constantly having endless rounds of human resources meetings in our main conference room, discussing the merits of new candidates.

“Did you hear about Cynthia, that new administrative girl we hired?” asked my VP of Human Resources, at the start of one of those meetings. My VP of Synthetic Resources rolled her eyes and looked towards me, as if I-told-you-so.

Cynthia has been a great hire, but had recently dropped off the radar without any warning. People disappearing off into cyber hedonistic fantasy worlds weren’t uncommon, but Cynthia had been my pick. She’d seemed a little more reliable than that.

“Yeah, I heard about that. So her neural functions are off the charts, but they can’t find her and she’s off in the multiverse somewhere?” asked Kelly, my co–founding business partner.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with us, does it?” I suddenly exclaimed, pulling the splinter for this meeting into the center of my consciousness.

“No, nothing to do with us,” confirmed Kelly, “but speaking of strange, how about Vince Indigo. Have you seen the flash death mobs he’s attracting?”

There were a few laughs around the table. I stayed quiet. I had a feeling Vince and Patricia were up to something, but didn’t want to say anything. Cunard pinged me right then for the start to yet another press event.

“The Security Council has taken over Cynthia’s file now,” said Brian, our Chief Technical Officer, bringing the discussion back. “Let’s keep moving. Speaking of the Security Council, what does everyone think of Jimmy getting nominated?”

“I think Jimmy is great,” I replied.

“Of course you would,” snorted Kelly. “More of the Killiam clan in charge, but then what’s good for the goose…”

“Hey!” I said defensively. “That’s not fair. Jimmy’s family is barely related to mine.” My cheeks blushed.

They all rolled their eyes.

Jimmy was related to me, but only distantly. Our great-grandfathers had been cousins, whatever that made us. All of that didn’t make any difference to me, and the awkwardness I felt now was because Patricia had asked Bob’s family to adopt Jimmy when he’d been left in her care.

I’d been dating Bob at the time, and in fact we’d been inseparable as children. From that point on, though, I’d been teased for dating what amounted to my cousin, if only cousin-in-law. Childhood taunts had a way of sticking with you in life.

“Gang, I have to get to the next press event,” I added, happy for a reason to exit-stage-left, and flitted off for the next press conference.

9

Identity: William McIntyre

“WILLY!”

Whole scaffolds of my conscious webwork collapsed as Bob forced his way in using one of Sid’s viral skins. Sid was going to get in trouble with his little sidelines one day, but then again, who was I to talk?

I hadn’t seen Bob in weeks, maybe longer. Work had totally absorbed me, and to focus I’d begun filtering all of my communications straight into my proxxi.

“Willy!” yelled Bob at maximum volume across my full audio spectrum. “Wiiiillllly!”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m here,” I responded, releasing most of my splinter network into autopilot and distilling a good chunk of myself back into a private workplace where I’d pulled Bob.

Bob smiled goofily as we both materialized into each others’ sensory spaces. We were sitting across from each other in one of my meeting spaces. I was sitting straight up in a chair at one end of the room, dressed in a blazer and slacks, while he had draped himself over a leather couch facing me, wearing only his swimming shorts and a baseball cap.

“How’s it going, Mr. Rockefeller?”

“Actually, it’s going really well,” I laughed, looking at him. “I had a gale force wind blowing almost all week!”

Bob understood what I meant, but he didn’t quite share my enthusiasm. While his metasenses were king in the water, I had my stock portfolio wired into my tactile arrays. It created that spine tingling feeling of money on the move.

“As long as you’re happy,” Bob replied skeptically. He shook his head and sat up on the couch.

The last time I’d seen him was when we were surfing, when Brigitte and I had split.

“I heard you quit Infinixx.”

“Yeah, Nancy is kinda full of herself these days, don’t you think?”

I didn’t mention the investigation into my tinkering with the Infinixx code. Nothing had come of it, and I’d gotten what I’d wanted.

Bob raised his eyebrows.

“Geez, Nancy was always a sweetheart…” he started to say, but was lost for words as he watched me.

“Hey you’re not mad at me are you?” he asked. “I mean, that Brigitte thing. Sid and I were just messing around.”

I shook my head.

“Don’t worry about it,” I sighed.

Thinking of Brigitte made my stomach tighten into knots, and my patience suddenly evaporated. I had a lot of stuff to get done. Bob watched me in silence, unconvinced with my answer, but changed topics anyway.

“So who are hanging out with these days?” he asked.

“Ah, just work people, you know…”

It wasn’t like he really worked anyway, so why should I bother explaining? Maybe accepting his ping had been a bad idea. Now I felt annoyed. Just then Wally warned me that Vince Indigo was waiting. I didn’t remember taking a meeting with Vince. Wally was telling me that he had already alerted me five minutes ago, but I had been so far splintered that it hadn’t registered.

“Listen, I have Vince Indigo waiting in person,” I said, happy for a reason to cut our chat short. “Big client, I’d better go.”

“Yeah, okay, sure,” Bob replied quietly. He squinted and cocked his head to one side. “Do you think you could ask Vince if he’s okay, for me? All this stuff on Phuture News is kind of weirding me out.”

“I’m really not comfortable doing that,” I replied quickly, my annoyance mounting. “I don’t know him very well. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

Bob shrugged. “He doesn’t answer my pings anymore.”

I shouldn’t either. “Look, this is business…”

Bob looked down. “Right. Anyway, let’s hang out soon, yeah? I think we should talk about all this stuff, all your work changes and Brigitte and all.”

“Sure, sure, gotta go,” I said dismissively and waved goodbye, leaving a wafer thin splinter behind.

I flitted back into real space at my apartment where Vince was waiting for me. Unimpressed visions of Bob watching me go persisted in several of my visual channels.

“So, I assume business is good?” asked Vince, noting my arrival.

He was wandering around the periphery of my apartment, staring outwards at the projected spaces of my growing business in the multiverse world of New London.

My new offices had been designed by one of the most sought-after interior metaworld designers. The glass walled space was floating in air, suspended above an almost endless array of cubicles housing renderings of my splintered parts, sub–proxxi and other synthetic beings and bots that were spawned outwards from my own cognitive systems. It was thousands of me working for me.

“Business is very, very good,” I replied, grinning widely. I wanted to tell him I’d found a back door to Infinixx, and could now splinter as much as I liked, but I couldn’t tell anyone that. I’d already paid off our family mortgage and was well on my way to amassing a sizeable personal fortune.

Vince wanted something, I could tell, but had an air of desperation surrounding him. My ego was flattered that one of the richest people in the world would make a personal house call for a favor from me, but his nervousness made me nervous. I didn’t like the way he was looking at all the activity below us.

I wondered what could be making him so jumpy. He had all the money in the world to burn as far as I could tell.

“Yeah, I’d noticed you’d amped up your Phuture News services pretty dramatically,” he said carefully, “but that’s not why I’m here. I’ll just send you the details of what I need right now. I can see you’re a busy man.”

A description of a financial event was uploaded and instantly analyzed by one of my splinters.

“You want me to what?” I exclaimed. “You know this is going to look suspicious, especially with me working for Infinixx.”

“From what I’ve heard, you don’t work for them anymore.”

I stopped fidgeting and stared at Vince, wondering how much he really knew. “Yeah that’s right, but it will still look odd.”

“You wouldn’t be making any profit off this, and nobody will know,” he explained. “I know it seems crazy, but if you could do this for me, and keep it quiet, I can pay you an awful lot of money. I need you to dump all that stock and chalk up a huge loss for me, and I need you to do it from New York.”

I could see Vince had ulterior designs afoot, and that was fine with me. He was offering a princely sum for almost no work. So this was what it was like to be in with the big boys. I didn’t care what he was up to and it didn’t look illegal—at least, my end didn’t.

“You be careful,” said Vince after a moment.

“It doesn’t look like there will be any problems with this transaction, Vince, in fact…”

“No, not with that,” he said simply, stopping me in my tracks, “with what you have going on here.”

“There’s nothing going on here.”

We both stood and stared at each other.

He sighed. “Just be careful, okay?”

“No problem, Mr. Indigo,” I replied immediately, shrugging, and I offered my hand to shake. He shook it, smiling weakly, and then flitted off without another word.

Wally materialized facing me on the white couch in my apartment. A dense security blanket shimmered around us like sparkling neon plastic wrap.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

Wally knew both as much and as little as I did. He shrugged and shook his head.

“Listen, Wally, I’m suddenly feeling very nervous. We have a great thing going here, but we need to protect ourselves.”

Being splintered into a hundred pieces was great for business, but it was taking a toll on my mind. Focusing on the market all the time left me a little stunned when I returned into real space, and I was letting details slip more and more often.

On the other hand, I felt like I was approaching some new kind of state of being, a perfectly self-sufficient and self-contained human being. I spent all day talking with various parts of myself, and held forth on meetings of mind with dozens of my splinters at a time. The only distinctly different entity I spoke with was Wally, who was basically a copy of me anyway. Vince and Bob were the first real humans I’d spoken to in days, perhaps even weeks now.

“Wally, when I’m off in the cloud, I need you to protect us here. I need you to make sure we’re safe, okay?”

He looked at me steadily and replied, “Sure thing, boss.”

We looked at each other for a few seconds. With that I flitted off to New York to get working on Vince’s project.

If I didn’t need anyone else’s help anymore, I definitely didn’t want anyone interfering. More than anything, though, I absolutely didn’t want to get caught.

10

Identity: Nancy Killiam

THE LAST FEW weeks had been a compressed explosion of frenetic activity at Infinixx.  Our hundred or so team members had managed to output the workload of a thousand, and then two thousand, workers compared to outside levels of productivity. We touted our accomplishments almost hourly as the launch date arrived. The world’s business community couldn’t wait to get their hands on it.

Building out the platform itself had been fairly straightforward once we had the core in place. A bigger struggle than the technology had been all the internal Atopian politics.

Since I was pushing to have my own launch before the Cognix release of pssi, and we needed to embed some pssi technology into our systems, the result was a messy cross-licensing arrangement. I had Aunt Patricia on my side, but it had still been a fierce fight.

“Give me one good reason we should let this happen,” fumed Dr. David Baxter at the Cognix meeting when we’d finally gotten it all approved.

He’d been steamed since Infinixx would be stealing some of his thunder as the first Atopian-platform product release, and wouldn’t be under his direct control as PR Director.

“David, you’ve seen all the phutures Nancy presented. Almost every scenario comes out pushing the Cognix stock higher as we establish this with early adopters,” countered Patricia. “You’re just annoyed because it’s not under your thumb.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” replied Dr. Baxter, and the tumult had continued as the assembly argued back and forth while Kesselring sat quietly and watched us all, sighing.

We’d been at a stalemate when Jimmy had magically produced the trump card.

“Okay everyone, I will give you one very good reason,” Jimmy shouted out above the arguing as he stood up, raising his hands to quiet everyone. He winked at me.

Until recently, I hadn’t spoken to Jimmy in years, ever since the incident at my thirteenth birthday party. I felt somehow responsible, and it had been just too awkward to talk about. But since he’d been nominated to the Security Council, however, we’d been reintroduced on a professional level, and it was as if nothing had ever happened. In fact, Jimmy and I had immediately struck a close working relationship, and he’d been a big supporter of my bid from the start.

I had no idea what he was going to say and we all waited in anticipation.

“I’ve managed to secure an agreement with both India and China to launch simultaneously with us.”

Gasps issued forth around the table. Getting India and China to agree on anything these days was close to impossible with new Water War skirmishes springing up almost daily. Details of the negotiations sprang into everyone’s workspaces the moment Jimmy spoke and we all dropped off a splinter to have a look. Having India and China agree to a simultaneous launch wouldn’t just be a commercial coup, but a major political one for Atopia as well.

“How in the world?” said Dr. Baxter, his voice trailing off while his mind assimilated the back-story.

“Jimmy, why didn’t you tell me?” I asked breathlessly in a private world I opened to him.

This was it. This was what would make my dreams come true. Thankful tears streamed out from my eyes.

“I just didn’t want to get your hopes up,” replied one of Jimmy’s splinters in our private world. “It was a long shot. I wanted you to focus on getting it done yourself and not have to rely on me, but, hey, it worked.” He shrugged and smiled.

“You’re giving up a lot here,” said Kesselring back in the conference space, speaking for the first time as he reviewed the details of the deal.

“A lot,” he repeated, “but I can see the balancing act, and the payoff. And this will help to keep the media attention off these damn storms.”

Kesselring looked towards Jimmy and smiled, nodding his congratulations.

“I assume you’re good with this Nancy?” asked Kesselring, and of course I agreed.

Approving murmurs began to circulate. With a proud look, Aunt Patricia squeezed my hand hard, beaming at both me and Jimmy.

11

Identity: William McIntyre

A DENSE GRAY fog hung around me.  No dampness, though, no heaviness—in fact I couldn’t feel anything. In the distance, a light approached and began filling the space around me with a soft radiance that was growing and alive. Curious, I moved towards the light. It grew brighter and brighter, surrounding and enveloping me, and then swallowed me whole, painlessly, soundlessly.

I awoke with a start in my bed, blinking, breathing quickly, looking around and trying to calm myself down. The image of the fog was fading. Was I just in a fog, on the water? What was that about? I must have been dreaming again. I tried pinging Bob, Sid, Brigitte, but nobody answered—weird. I felt lightheaded. Maybe I’d better go and get something to eat to shake out the cobwebs a bit.

I got out of bed and walked over to the fridge, and pulled out an apple, some bread to toast, and after a moment of thought, reached into the cupboard to pull out some instant oatmeal. I shook out the oatmeal into a bowl, poured some water over it and watched the water start to steam and boil as it soaked into the thermo-reactive particles embedded in the oatmeal.

I watched the oatmeal, mesmerized like it was one of my campfires. This is your brain on oatmeal, I thought, watching it bubble and splutter.

Within a few seconds it was done and piping hot. Topping it off with some brown sugar, I sat down at my counter, shining the apple on my pajama pant leg. I smelled burnt toast. Am I having a stroke? The toast popped. Oh right. Calm down.

I wondered what was new in the future this morning, so I flicked on some Phuture News Network and waited for a flood of what was about to happen. Blank. Nothing was about to happen, apparently. All that was playing on Phuture News were images of me watching Phuture News with my oatmeal before me. Must be some kind of screwy trick Sid had going again. Ah well, I wasn’t going to play along. I just sat and quietly ate my oatmeal.

A deep chill passed by me, and a wave of goose bumps shivered across my exposed arms. Suddenly, I was having an out-of-body experience, watching myself as if through a pane of frosted glass. I was there, but not there. I felt calm. All the worries I had a second ago, about work, Brigitte, money—everything was suddenly gone, and I realized how small these worries really were. I was so calm, so cold, and there was that fog again, so familiar and yet so alien. Where was I? And why did I want to know?

My brain snapped out of it, as if wrenched from a bear trap. Whoa, what is going on?  I blinked hard and shook my head, looking down at my congealing oatmeal.  Phuture News was on now, and apparently the odds were that our friends Orlando and Melinda were going to have a big cat fight soon. I suddenly liked the idea of cats.

Most people had already lined up on team Orlando, so I opted for Melinda. I always liked the undercat, and at least this time is wasn’t Adriana. As I watched, clever taunts were being devised and their viral values sized up by several off-island marketing agencies, eager to reach the Atopian crowd.

The social storm clouds grew as I dug into my cooling oatmeal, watching the action unfold. It reminded me of Brigitte. My stomach tightened.

I put down my spork.

My brain snapped out of it as if wrenched from…a bear trap. Something was very wrong. I blinked hard again and shook my head, looking down at the congealing oatmeal. Didn’t I just eat that? Phuture News was now blank, and back to images of me staring at images of me staring at images of me staring at images of me.

The oatmeal was sputtering and bubbling in the bowl as steam issued forth from it.  I was standing back next to the fridge, holding the apple, about to shine it on my pajama leg. Wait a minute. Didn’t this just happen? I was déjà vuing hard, losing my grip. My chest tightened, and my breathing was labored. Jesus. I thought was I having a heart attack, or maybe a stroke. I smelled burnt toast.

“Wally!” I cried out. “Wally! Where the hell are you?”

Where the heck was he when I really needed the guy? Wasn’t he supposed to be watching out for me?

“Willy, calm down, everything is okay,” I heard Wally say, his voice soothing, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. “Don’t worry Willy, everything is fine. Calm down, your vitals are way off the chart. You’re probably feeling chest pain, it’s just anxiety. Your blood stream is flooding with cortisol and adrenalin. Take a deep breath, calm down.”

I took in a deep breath, held it, and slowly let it out.  My cheeks were flushed.

“Calm down,” I told myself, “calm down.”

Closing my eyes, I focused myself, and I could feel the stress begin to wash out. Suddenly I was lying down. Maybe Wally had helped me back to bed.

I could see myself lying still, lying absolutely calm. What was I just worrying about? Why worry about anything? Everything was so insignificant in the big picture. My head felt like cotton balls had been stuffed in through my ears, displacing my brain, and I had the curious sensation that I was wrapped in idiot mittens, determined somehow not to hurt myself or get lost.

In my mind’s eye I could see myself with my mother. She was bending over me, the arms of her sweater rolled up as she happily hummed some lullaby, giving me a bath in the chipped porcelain wash basin in our old family kitchen, back on the commune in Montana.

Through streaked windowpanes, I could see trees swaying outside under wet, windy skies. The cows in the field were huddling under the protection of the ponderosa pines that lined one side of our farm.  Beyond this, the dense forests stretched up into the foothills, with the snow-capped Rockies solidly framing it all.

It was cold outside, but warm in here. The steaming water was soaking into my little bones.  We were so happy together in this small moment of time, so precious. I heard the splash and tinkle of water as she lifted the wash cloth, the sounds echoing through time.

“How’s my silly Willy?” she laughed, tweaking my nose.

“Wally?” I asked, more calmly this time. “Wally, what is happening to me?  Where are you?”

I could sense Wally, but I couldn’t see him or hear him. Somehow though, I could feel him speaking to me.

“Willy, everything is okay,” I felt him say. “There’s something I need to tell you, though.”

I should’ve felt worried, but I didn’t.

“What? Go ahead, don’t worry.”

I felt like I already knew, even though I knew I didn’t.

“You’re part of something special, Willy.”

“Yeah, Wally, I know. The Atopia program, I got that.”

“Not just that, something more unique, something much more important.”

“Go on.”

I liked that. I’d always thought of myself as unique, like a small snowflake adrift in the wind, floating painlessly, soundlessly.

“You’re familiar with Schrödinger’s cat?”

“Sure.”

The old quantum physics thought experiment. An object in superposition can exist in more than one state. The cat in the box that is both alive and dead at the same time. For some reason Vince came to mind.

“It’s  now possible to enable quantum superposition not just with atoms, but on larger objects. Much larger objects in fact.”

“So what’s this got to do with me?”

Quantum physics needing a conscious observer had always annoyed me. It smacked of God hiring city workers to turn the cranks of the cosmos.

“Willy, you may want to sit down, there is a downside to what I’m about to tell you.”

I was already lying down. What was wrong with him?

“Your living space is contained within a giant quantum trap. You are the first sentient being to be wholly placed in a superposition state, and right now, you are both alive and dead at the same time. In a moment, when you understand what I’m saying, you will also be the first observer to observe themselves in superposition and so fix your own life or death. Before you fully understand what I’m saying Willy, hurry, and tell us what you are feeling.”

So I was in a quantum trap. I was the cat in the box.

I looked down at my hands and looked inward on myself, looking at myself, looking at myself… and I meowed.

§

I woke up in bed, alone, soaked in sweat with my heart pounding. As the dream faded, I remembered what had happened. Brigitte and I had split up, and Wally was gone now too, but I was still here, which meant that somebody, somewhere out there, was taking care of me.

I was still alive.

Greed had brought me to this place, and they were probably going to put me in jail for it, but I had to do something.

12

Identity: Nancy Killiam

I COULDN’T BELIEVE the big day had actually arrived, the release of Infinixx to the world.

Although our product worked in the cloud, so to speak, it still needed physical infrastructure on the ground in the form of three dedicated consciousness processing centers. These massive computing installations, all tied together on dedicated communication links, were designed to handle local processing to reduce sensory latencies.

Each hub, for lack of a better description, was like a huge blank mind, and had to be booted up in sequence to maintain a coherent lock between them. Each required a large local power source to drive it, and we’d decided to make an event out of throwing the switches to power them up.

At the same time as launching the Infinixx product, we were simultaneously floating the newly minted Infinixx stock onto the world markets as the Indian, Chinese and Atopian processing centers came online.

The Solomon House Ballroom was packed to the rafters. I’d asked each of our Board and senior executives to be there in person for the launch, and I walked up and down in front of the head table, set up above the floor, shaking each person’s hand in turn and thanking them for their hard work and support.

“Excited, Brian?” I asked my CTO.

I wrung my hands together nervously. In the ceremonial opening, I was going to throw the switch to get everything started. Its power system was routed up here, the junction box set against a wall behind the elevated stage we were sitting at, just above and behind my chair.  I’d decided I would bestow the honor of throwing the switch onto either Jimmy or Aunt Patricia. They were sitting up on the stage with me, and I would spring this last minute decision to inject a little surprise and emotion into the event.

“Okay everyone!” announced Kesselring, gracing us with his primary, shouting out at the packed crowd from the podium. Kesselring had gotten on board with the launch in a big way once we’d made the decision. He had a way of stealing the show, but I didn’t mind.

“Okay everyone, quiet down!” he thundered out with a smile.

The huge ballroom was filled to capacity, with people milling about, glasses and table wear clinking amid a beehive of buzzing background conversation.  Everyone began settling down and looked towards us.

“Very good!” continued Kesselring as the noise subsided. “We are now bringing in the Indian and Chinese contingents. I would like a hearty Atopian round of applause to welcome them!”

The crowded room erupted in applause as the Chinese and Indian delegations materialized to the left and right of us. It was an incredible photo opportunity with the Chinese and Indian banners appearing on each side of the Atopian flag.

Protocol for the event dictated that the Chinese and Indian head officials would come to the center table to shake my hand at exactly the same time, and this came off perfectly without a hitch, despite my nervousness. In a splinter I was watching the pre–market analysis of the Infinixx stock as the broadcast of the event caught the world, and I could see the anticipated stock price climbing fast on Phuture News.

My heart was in my throat. I was in the dead center of attention and I could feel the gravity and historical importance of the moment pressing down upon me as we got up from our chairs at the banquet table to approach the switch. I had Jimmy to one side of me and Patricia to the other, with the rest of the Board and executive surrounding us. As we stepped to the back wall, I stared at the big green switch.

“It looks like something borrowed from a Russian hydroelectric dam,” I joked with Patricia under my breath.  She smiled, and I beamed out at to the assembled crowd.

Reaching out, I held both of their hands in mine, and then let go to reach out and touch the switch. It felt cool and hard and hummed as it coursed with unseen power. The lights dimmed and the countdown began. The whole auditorium joined in as if it were New Year in Times Square.

“Ten!” they all shouted out. “…nine…eight…”

“Aunt Pattie,” I said, turning to look at her with tears in my eyes, “I’ve decided that I’d like it to be you who throws the switch. All this, everything here is all because of you!”

The crowd continued to roar the countdown, “…six…”

“I’d love to sweetheart,” Patricia replied quickly, “but I had a last minute thing come up and I’m not here kinetically. You go ahead dear!”

“…five…”

Ah well, I thought, slightly crestfallen.

“Okay Jimmy, how about you then? Go ahead. I really wanted it to be one of you two,” I said to him. I released the switch and encouraged Jimmy to take it.

“…three…two…”

“I’m really sorry Nance, I had something too. I’m only dialed in as well. You go ahead…quick now!”

“…ONE!”

The blood drained from my face. I could hear an audible ‘snap’ as the Chinese and Indians flipped their own switches at their remote locations. My metasenses felt the cavernous thrum of the Infinixx installations bootstrapping deep in the multiverse.

Okay, keep calm.

Perplexed faces around the room watched us on the stage, waiting for my main connecting switch to be thrown. I quickly queried each of the executives at the table with me, and my worry mounted. Karen had stayed with her kids; Louise, Brian, Cindy—nobody was physically present. They were all dialed in, despite my specific instructions requesting everyone to be here in person.

Then again, I thought as all my blood drained into my shoes and I gazed dreadfully into the audience: I wasn’t there either.

I could feel the switch in my hand, as cool and as hard as if I were standing there and holding it myself. The wikiworld simulated it perfectly, but I couldn’t budge it even a millimeter without having someone or something here physically.

After the disasters of destroyed power grids in the cyber wars, security protocols had been rewritten so that critical nodes in power systems had to be completely disconnected from any communication networks to prevent the ability to hack into them. Despite Atopia being at the center of the cyber world, we had to conform to international security standards, especially for a project like this.

While I hadn’t overlooked this, I had expected at least one of my executive team or Board members to be here in person after specifically requesting all of their physical attendance, even verifying this just minutes before the event.

But of course, even I hadn’t listened to myself.

Staring out at the crowd, I took one last desperate step. I flipped my pssi into identity mode, removing all virtual and augmented objects from my senses. The buzzing, crowded room faded from view, and all I was left with was my own low groan of fear. Not a single person was in sight. The entire voluminous ballroom was as empty and quiet as a morgue.

I stared back at the green switch, now mocking me in humiliation.

Already the assembled crowd and world press had figured out what had happened, and I was being pinged with a Times article trumpeting “Infinixx—Everywhere but Nowhere!”

Lawyers from the Indian and Chinese sides had already filed a lawsuit against us claiming monumental damages, and conspiracy theories were blossoming about connections to the Weather Wars. My executive team unlocked the exterior security perimeters, and I could see a psombie guard racing towards the stage.

“Forget it,” I told him as he got close to the stage.

I closed my eyes. It was already too late. Almost twenty seconds had passed, and the two other systems had already progressed too far into the bootstrap cycle for us to phase lock into them.

Millions of users had already logged into the systems and begun using them. We’d have to negotiate a downtime to reboot and lock all the systems together again at a later date, but for now we’d have to run them as separate domains, which meant users would only be able to distribute their consciousnesses locally. Technically, it wasn’t a total disaster, but it made me look incredibly foolish. Correction, it made us look foolish. Kesselring was furious at the damage done to the Atopian brand.

I painfully withdrew my conscious webwork back into a tight shell around myself like a cyber tortoise retreating from danger.

Already the world media had minted a new term for a Zen-like business failure of being everywhere but nowhere at the same time, a fail on a massive scale using your own sword to kill yourself.

They called it an Infinixx.

13

Identity: William McIntyre

THE POLICE STATION loomed before me at the base of the vertical farming complex, and I was gingerly making my way towards it.

The Boulevard was the only real street we had, a wide pedestrian thoroughfare that crossed from the eastern to western inlets, crossing between the four gleaming vertical farm towers that center–pinned the island of Atopia.

Glamorous palms lined both sides of the street, bordering the tourist shops, restaurants, and bars whose terraces spilled out into the kaleidoscopic melee between. Even with the storms threatening and the evacuations announced, the atmosphere was still carefree and festive—at least for now.

It had been ages since I’d been above, and I hadn’t been to these parts since I was a tween. I blinked in the sunshine and confusion around me and tried to think my way through what was happening.

I felt so alone and exposed. Here I was, stuck in the middle of something clearly illegal, but what else could I do? I looked up at the towers and imagined myself as one of the psombies inside. Out of options, I just shrugged and opened the police station doors.

Cool, administrative air swept over me and the clerk at the desk, an attractive young woman, smiled at me synthetically.

“Can I help you, sir?” she asked, as sweet as a police officer could be.

“Yes, I’d like to file a missing person report,” I replied, walking towards her as calmly as I could.

Her face registered just the proper amount of seriousness before she queried, “And who is the missing person, sir?”

I paused for a moment.

“Me,” I answered.

§

After reporting my body missing to the police, the first person I turned to was Bob. It was funny how quickly you could go from feeling powerful and invincible to suddenly needing the protective embrace of friends. At least, I hoped they were still my friends.

“Hey there stranger, you take a wrong turn somewhere?” joked Bob as I appeared in one of his regular beach bar haunts. Even with the storm warnings, he was still surfing every day. Taking a swig of his beer, he waggled it towards me, asking if I wanted one. I shook my head.

“So what can I help you with?”

I sighed, casting a thick security blanket around us. We were immediately surrounded by its glittering and softly undulating shell. Bob raised his eyebrows, but just shrugged and took another swig.

“Now you have my interest,” he ventured, and then screwed his eyebrows together as seriously as he could manage. “Are you okay, bud?”

I sighed heavily. “I’ll just lay it out.”

I paused for a moment and we stared at each other.

“I’ve lost my body.”

Another pause while Bob considered what I’d just said.

“What do you mean—you’ve lost your body? Does this have anything to do with what happened at Infinixx?”

“No, I don’t think so. I mean, not really, but sort of,” I replied, tripping over my own words. I took a deep breath. “I can’t find my body. Wally, or someone—I’m assuming it’s Wally—has stolen it.”

Bob began to smile, raising his eyebrows. “Come on, whatever game you’re playing, I’m in.”

His smile slowly disappeared while he studied the serious look on my face.

“Have you been to the police?” he asked, now concerned.

“Yeah I’ve just been there. Only now, not only can I not find my body, but I’ve been charged with a felony crime and I’m under arrest.”

I didn’t mention that I was also under investigation for my trades in Infinixx stock.

“So how come you’re here? Did you post bail?”

“No. It’s complicated.”

“I’d say so.”

I leaned my head back and rubbed my eyes, shaking my head.

“I think we’d better get Sid in here,” suggested Bob.

I sighed.

“Yeah I guess we better,” I reluctantly replied. Bob’s face slackened for an instant as he detached and then was quickly back. Sid and Vicious immediately materialized on barstools inside the security blanket perimeter.

Even before he’d fully appeared, Vicious looked down his nose at me and declared, “Oooh, so the high and mighty has stooped to mix with the lower downs, eh?”

“Knock it off!” snapped Bob. “This is serious. Sid, you had a chance just now to look at Willy’s situation?”

Sid stood the best chance of anyone at figuring out what was going on. We waited a moment while Sid reviewed the scenarios.

“Let me make sure I have this straight,” replied Sid, all business now.

“So, you reprogrammed rules in the Atopian perimeter to allow an outgoing connection to Terra Nova. Then you logged your consciousness network into a secure Terra Novan account, anonymized your signal and sent multiple connections back into Atopia to create the effect of multiple personalities accessing the network?”

“Right.”

“And now your body appears to have left Atopia entirely, without your knowledge, and you can’t contact Wally.”

“Right.”

“And the Terra Novans have absolutely refused to divulge or break the anonymous connection or relay any of the originating account details, and the connection has been paid up fully one hundred years in advance for service.”

“Yeah,” I agreed quietly, sighing.

After a pause, Bob looked at me and tried to summarize, “So, your body is out there somewhere. You’re doing all your thinking in your lost brain, and it’s communicating with you here into your virtual body, but Wally is driving your body around out there and won’t communicate back.”

“That seems to be about it.”

“That’s an interesting pickle, my friend,” offered Vicious.

“So what, has Wally gone nuts? Can’t we just locate and shut him down in the multiverse somehow?” asked Bob.

“No,” answered Sid. “A proxxi isn’t the same as other synthetic beings. He doesn’t exist in the multiverse proper. He exists as a biological-digital symbiote, embedded in Willy’s body. He controls Willy’s body when Willy’s mind is away, and can venture out into the multiverse from there, but if he’s routed through an anonymizer in Terra Nova, then we won’t be able to track him down easily.”

“And my Uncle Button doesn’t work,” I added. “It was never designed to be filtered back this way.”

“So I ask again—has Wally gone nuts?” repeated Bob.

“Well, it’s not as simple as that,” I admitted. “I actually told Wally to take emergency action if it looked like there was trouble. Illegally breaching the Atopia perimeter is a serious offence.”

“So you told Wally to do this?” laughed Sid, rolling his eyes.

“You’re like a bloody one man Zionista, mate!” cut in Vicious. “One man, displaced from his body, wandering the multiverse, hoping to get back to his stolen homeland…”

“Knock it off, please,” I complained. “I didn’t tell Wally to do this. I told him that if it looked like we were in trouble, to take whatever action he deemed necessary to make sure we were okay.”

“And how on Earth did you ignore him when whatever obviously went down, went down?” asked Sid incredulously.

“Ah,” I took in a deep breath, “well, you see, with this new set-up, my mind was shattered into hundreds of splinters and fed through the anonymizer, and sometimes it wasn’t possible for Wally to get my attention. That’s why I made it clear to him to take immediate action right away, without me, if he deemed it necessary.”

“Oh he seems to have taken action alright,” Vicious observed, clearly enjoying himself.

“Enough!” exclaimed Bob. “Enough already. Vicious, you’ve had your fun, and Willy here has been a bit difficult lately, but he’s in trouble and needs our help. Right now.”

I choked back tears, feeling naked and adrift, and not deserving of the loyalty Bob was giving me after the way I’d been treating him lately.

“Sorry, right mate,” mumbled Sid and Vicious.

“Wally, one question,” asked Sid, perking up, the gears of his brain turning now.

“Uh huh?”

“So you’re arrested and charged and convicted, right?”

I nodded. For straightforward crimes it didn’t take a long time—synthetic lawyers and judges weighed in and contested cases within minutes.

“But you’re still with us. So they can’t get your body, but why can’t they restrict your virtual self?”

“The anonymizer randomly logs into Atopia repeatedly if its signal gets restricted. Since my login carries an authenticated Atopian citizen tag, and since it was deemed unconstitutional to restrict access to Atopia for a citizen, they can’t block my access here, but then they can’t contain me either.”

Vicious brightened up visibly at that. “Ah hah, a loophole. So they can’t stop you being here, but they can’t arrest you or stop you either. That makes you one very interesting person to know, my friend.”

I could see where he was going with this.

“Yes, Vicious, but I’m not about to test anyone’s patience on the matter.”

“Still,” he added, shrugging, “but you’re here aren’t you? Why didn’t you voluntarily stay in detention?”

I shrugged back. “Would you, if you’d lost your body? I need to figure out what is going on.”

Bob looked at me.

“How did you figure out how to do all this? It seems a little beyond your area of expertise.”

“Jimmy helped me.”

We all looked at each other.

14

Identity: Nancy Killiam

“I FEEL SO CLOUDY.”

It was an expression pssi–kids used and one I knew Aunt Patricia had a hard time understanding. It was a feeling we got when we couldn’t understand our own splinters and it felt like our conscious minds were spread outwards from a single point to become an indistinct smudge in time and space. I knew she didn’t quite understand, but I had no other way of explaining how I felt.

We were walking through the Lollipop Forest under a beautiful night sky, lit by a bright, chocolate chip moon with twinkling gumdrop stars.

“Why didn’t you tell me you wouldn’t be there?” I asked Aunt Patricia, finally letting myself ask the question. I didn’t like the idea of blame, but I had to know.

She sighed. “I was there dear, at least my primary subjective was, but I thought that you were the one throwing the switch. We all did.”

“But I checked with you not minutes before and your body was on the way to the Ballroom, what changed?”

Patricia looked up at the gumdrop stars. “Something with Uncle Vince came up.”

I angrily kicked at some lollipop sprouts.

“I’m so stupid.”

Everyone had had some last minute excuse, but in the end, it was my responsibility. It wasn’t like I couldn’t have seen it. Everyone’s physical metatags had properly indicated they were somewhere else, but I’d stopped paying attention to these a long time ago.

“You shouldn’t be beating yourself up so much,” Aunt Pattie said soothingly. “You’ve done a wonderful thing for the world.”

“Yeah—I’ve given them something to never stop laughing at,” I sulked.

The lollipop trees rattled softly as they jostled and bumped on their spindly stalks. Aunt Pattie had suggested coming here for a walk, just like we used to do when I was just a little splinter winky, but the place had lost its magic.

To try and cheer me up, she’d first tried taking me on a walk topside with Teddyskins, a reality skin that turned everyone around you into cute pink teddy bears.  It’d been one of my favorites as a child, but I wasn’t a child anymore. Now all these worlds and spaces felt contrived and creepy.

“Don’t be silly,” she said softly, taking my hand pulling my head into her. She always gave herself an ample bosom, with a sturdy frame, in these childhood worlds.

My tears started again.

“You took the first step in bringing distributed consciousness to the world,” she tried to say encouragingly. “You’re still so young. Your whole life is ahead of you.”

I’d begun crying again in great heaving sobs. She let me cry a while, smothered in her chest.

“Have you talked to David?” she asked between my sobs.

“No, that’s over,” I choked out. “David was the reason I stayed at home physically for the launch. I felt so bad for always being away. We had a huge fight afterwards over it. It wasn’t his fault, but anyway, he and I were never really right.”

“I know, I know,” she responded soothingly. “What about Bob? Did you try him?”

I just shook my head as tears streamed down my face. “He dropped me a splinter, but he’s so stoned all the time. What’s the point?”

Aunt Pattie looked at me tenderly and dried my tears, and we continued to walk a while longer, stepping gently through the lollipops.

“I guess he just needs more time to heal as well.”

15

Identity: William McIntyre

“WELL YOU JUST bloody well better figure out a way to fix it, my friend,” threatened Vicious, right up in Jimmy’s face.

Jimmy just laughed and walked through Vicious to pick up a file he was working on. Vicious sputtered indignantly.

We didn’t exactly make a very threatening package—the four stooges. I got the feeling that Jimmy had accepted to speak with us only as a courtesy to Bob. He didn’t really seem surprised or even to care. Then again, with the storms and him being newly appointed to the Security Council, he had a lot more important things on his plate right now.

“Look, I appreciate your situation, and I honestly feel for you,” Jimmy said after a moment, looking up from the file at me with disinterest, and then looking back to Bob and Sid. “I can’t do anything right now. I’m spread incredibly thin as it is. I just showed Willy where the tools were and, okay, sure I described how he could exploit some vulnerabilities, but so what?”

“Come on Jimmy, this is your fault, you can do better than that,” urged Bob. “We’ve got a real problem here, Willy is in serious trouble.”

“That’s an understatement,” laughed Jimmy, putting down the file. “Look, I’m really sorry about what happened. I was only trying to help Willy, to give him what he wanted.”

“Only to get what you wanted,” emphasized Sid.

Jimmy shrugged. “Aren’t friends supposed to help each other out?” He looked directly at Bob. “I mean, did you help him out? Did you even know how much financial trouble he was in?”

Bob looked away.

“I didn’t think so,” continued Jimmy. “Too caught up in getting stoned and partying with these idiots.” He motioned towards Sid and Vicious with a nod of his head, still looking at Bob. “Too busy having a good time to even pay attention to your family, which includes me now, if you haven’t forgotten.”

“Of course not,” said Bob quietly.

“You think I’m being uncaring?” Jimmy looked around at us all. “Have you seen the way Bob treats Martin?”

Nobody said anything, but the words almost physically impacted Bob. He rocked back on his feet a little.

“We all have problems, Bob,” added Jimmy, looking straight into Bob’s face now. “We all have our pain to deal with. You don’t think I’ve had it hard? I’m dealing with it, trying to become a part of the solution, taking responsibility. Going and laying blame everywhere else isn’t going to solve anything.”

This was starting to get personal.

“Look, this is my own fault okay?” I interjected, waving my hands in the air and stepping between Bob and Jimmy. “We’re not trying to lay blame, I’m just looking for a little help.”

Jimmy shook his head.

“I can’t help you, the situation you’ve created is beyond me right now.”

Bob and I both nodded, but Sid wasn’t buying it.

“Well then maybe we should go and speak with police about your part in this,” he suggested, trying his best to appear intimidating, but it just wasn’t him.

“And maybe I should tell those same police about some of the viral skins you’ve been letting loose in the cyber ecosystem,” replied Jimmy. “I’ve been watching you, my friend.”

“So what if he has?” bluffed Bob, now defending Sid. “Willy’s problem goes way beyond any nuisance Sid’s toys create.”

“Well maybe yes, but maybe no,” replied Jimmy in a threatening tone.

“What do you mean by that?” asked Bob.

“Go ahead and tell the police that I was involved,” replied Jimmy, ignoring Bob’s question, “but I’m the one on the Security Council, and it’s my job to know about the leaks, which I’ve since fixed by the way. And any chats I had with Willy were under tight security blankets, so it would be my word against his.” Jimmy let this settle awhile before adding, “Quite frankly, Willy being plugged through the perimeter and into Terra Nova, and us not being able to close the connection due to some legal nonsense, is a big problem.”

“So what? You’d just cut him off?” demanded Bob. “Where would he end up?”

“I don’t know, but definitely not here. Somewhere in the open multiverse I would guess.”

This was tantamount to exile, and brought cold stares from Bob and Sid. I felt like I was going to throw up.

“Look. I just showed him the tools he asked about. Willy’s a big boy. He’s the one who did it.”

Stony silence.

“Boys, look, I really have to go. We’ll talk later, okay?”

And he closed the connection.

16

Identity: William McIntyre

AFTER THE CONFRONTATION with Jimmy, the whole gang had dove into my problem, trying to figure out what had happened.

I poked the embers of the dying fire, watching them dance.

The carpet of stars hung back above us like it did before, that day long ago when we were last camping at this spot. An owl hooted softly in the darkness. Bob sat with a beer balanced back on his knee, half illuminated by the fire, grinning at me.

“I told you everything would be fine, Willy,” Bob pointed out with his empty beer can.

I continued to stare into the fire, lost in my own thoughts.

What was it, I wondered, about the embers of a fire that so mesmerized me? I imagined the heat of the sun, warming green leaves of long ago, the leaves soaking up the sunshine, slowly converting this into the lignin and biomass of the tree trunk. Then today, after being stored for decades, that same captured sunshine was radiating back out as heat energy when we burned the wood, heating my hands and face as I watched in silent wonder. Thank you, tree, for giving your body to me.

Since my own consciousness hadn’t winked out, we had to assume that my body was alive and healthy somewhere out there.

We’d sent out a veritable private army to try and to find it, using up almost all of the considerable fortune I’d amassed as Atopia’s hottest stock jock in my brief blaze of glory back when I had a body.

The searching had begun within Atopia itself, a thorough physical search using platoons of pssi–minded cockroaches and rented psombies, followed by a full digital scan using a private cloud dustings of smarticles.

We’d quickly expanded the physical search radius into the watery surroundings and into cities directly connected to our passenger cannon.  We sent out and rented time in uncountable bots and synthetics, even human private investigators that scoured this world and the wikiworlds for any hint of my face, my body, in fact any trace of any kind signaling mine or Wally’s presence out there.

We’d found nothing at all.

In the midst of the looming storms, the Atopian foreign office had halfheartedly taken up action against Terra Nova, trying to sue for access to the anonymous connection or to disconnect it, thinking that this would automatically snap me back into my body. Just like Atopia, however, one of Terra Nova’s key industries was acting as a data haven, and this business was protected by the same iron-clad international treaties that protected Atopia.

Terra Nova resisted any action that would weaken the perception of its unconditional stance on secrecy and security of its customers and data. To gain access to the connection, they told us, I would have to log in from my corporal body. With no body, there was no bio-authentication and therefore no access.

At first I was desperate, but bit by bit I gradually came to grips with my situation. Vince had come forward and shared his story with our group, an even more bizarre tale that had left him almost paralyzed. His resolve in dealing with his situation had helped me put mine in perspective.

Sometimes, they said, it took a great loss to realize what was important to you. In my fight to find myself, and in defending me morally, I was humbled by the loyalty and ferocity of my friends and family, even after I’d abandoned them in my own pursuits.

The search had even brought some direction to Bob, shaking him out of the drugged slumber he’d been in for years now, bringing him together with Nancy for the first time in as many years. Vince had put his vast spy network to work on my problem, and Sid and Vicious had worked tirelessly, combing the back ways and alleyways of the Atopian subsystems, trying to figure out how someone had hidden their tracks so well. Even Martin had pitched in.

I poked the coals some more and watched little sparks escape and float back into the sky.

Brigitte and I were back together. She liked to joke that before when we lived together I was never around, so it was like living with a ghost, but now that I was a ghost, it was like I was there with her more than ever. Or something like that. She wasn’t much of a comedian, but she sure was the most beautiful and loving person I’d ever known. I had no idea how I’d let her slip away from me, but I would never let it happen again.

“Alright there William?” asked Vicious, tossing a can into the fire, casting a look my way.

“Yes, Vicious, I am all right, as a matter of fact,” I answered, nodding back. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt perfectly at peace.

I felt a stream of air tickling my behind, and I shivered. The wind was still blowing when a promising stock appeared on the radar, and sometimes it blew hard.

Without Wally or access to my body, I couldn’t reset my sensory mapping, so I was fated to forever feel this tickling in my nether regions. Now though, I began to find it reassuring, like rubbing an old scar from an accident you’d survived.

Only one thing felt really absent in my life, and it had the eerie feeling of a missing limb. I looked towards the empty chair we’d set up in honor of our fallen comrade, where Wally used to sit next to me on our trips. I’d set it up beside me this evening, now sitting conspicuously empty.

I went back often and replayed that last talk I’d had with Wally, and watched his face as he spoke. It was hard to say whether Wally had taken off to save me from the police—they did have a trace going on the security breach and would have found us eventually. Maybe he’d seen them coming and had decided to take off. They’d issued a general notice of clemency on my case now, so even if he was trying to save us from jail then, by now he would have known it was safe to return—but he didn’t.

The more I thought about it, the more I became sure that Wally wasn’t trying to save me from jail. Perhaps he was saving me from a much worse fate, perhaps from myself. At the time, I was so busy digging myself into a deep, isolated hole that I may have never returned from it.

In retrospect, I wasn’t finding happiness, but suffocating myself in an impenetrable layer of avarice and pride, trading friendship and love for money and power. Maybe he knew that I’d be better off this way. I was sure that he’d like to return, in fact I knew there was no place that he’d rather be than right here with us now, but he must have felt it was safer this way, for some reason.

Somehow it felt right, but I could never have gotten to this place on my own. Wally and I had switched places. I’d become him, living as a virtual being, and he’d become me, living out there in the real world in a real body.

Smiling, I remembered that day when we were last camping here, and Wally had told me that he loved me on our return home. I’d thought it was so odd then, but no more. Raising my beer can, I looked towards the empty chair beside me, and toasted my now absent friend.

Sometimes I guess you really did have to lose yourself to find yourself.

Wally, wherever you are out there, I just wanted to tell you one thing: I love you too, Wally.

~ GENESIS & JANUS ~

Book 6:

Patricia Killiam

&

Jimmy Jones

PROLOGUE

“I WILL ALWAYS love you.”

I blew at a dandelion and watched its fluff scatter into the clear blue sky. The wind caught the tiny seeds and carried them up and away. I laughed.

“No matter where the winds carry me, I will always find my way back to you.”

“And I to you,” said the boy, his face close now, his hot breath on my cheeks.

Sunlight streamed down upon us, filling the field where we lay with gentle warmth. I brushed a lock of hair from my eyes and looked down at an ant in the grass. It was trying to get back towards its nest, pulling on some bit of food, struggling with a prize far too large for it to carry.

“Never leave me.”

“I will never leave you,” he promised.

A silence descended, and then a low droning began. The boy looked up, craning his neck to see above the stone pile fence beside us. With a terrible growl a Luftwaffe squadron roared overhead, barely skimming the treetops. I screamed, and the boy jumped up.

He looked down at me. I nodded, and with a grim look he ran off, glancing just once over his shoulder to me before disappearing through the gate.

“I will never leave you,” I whispered back.

1

Identity: Jimmy Jones

MY EYES TEARED up trying to look forward into the wind while the airboat tore across the top of the kelp forests. I begged my dad to take me out to work on the water almost every day, which frustrated Mother to no end. He just thought his sweet little boy wanted to be with his daddy, but really, I wanted to be away from her.

Still, it was beautiful on the water.

“Amazing out here, right Jimmy?” my dad yelled over the roar of the airboat engine. We were skimming over the top of the kelp, gently skipping across the ocean swells.

“Look!” exclaimed my dad, pointing towards something in the water. He swerved the airboat and I looked down.

Dozens of sea otters had tied themselves up in a raft amid the floating kelp, chattering at us angrily as we passed. I saw a few heads pop up and down in the water around us and I let myself flitter out into their little bodies, watching myself watching them.

“They hang around near the floating reef systems!” he shouted over the noise. “They love it out here!”

We began to slow as we neared the edge of the forest and the kelp stalks became sparser. I was sitting on my dad’s knee, wearing little red shorts, a striped t-shirt and a Yankees baseball cap. My dad held me tightly against him with both arms, his warm hands on the flesh of my thighs, steering the boat with his phantom hands.

Unlike Mother, as soon as they’d arrived here my dad had worked hard at stretching his neural plasticity and early on had learned the trick of phantom limbs.

Today we were fishing with the dolphins and my dad knew it was my favorite. My smile would spread as we sped across the kelp, the wind and sun in my face, free like a bird. We didn’t really fish, but mostly just directed them using pssi control. At that early stage in the project we still needed help from the dolphins to herd the fish, and for me this was the best part of fishing—speaking with the dolphins.

“There they are,” said my dad as he cut our engine and our boat settled into the water, gliding to a stop. The open ocean was gentle today but my dad held me tight. Gulls wheeled high in the air behind us, waiting for signs of any fish we’d throw their way.

Off to the side of the boat, fast moving shapes sped towards us from the depths and with a splash about a dozen heads broke the surface. The air filled with the sounds of chattering dolphins.

The pssi system instantly translated for us. Wild dolphins had fairly weak skills at what we would call communication, and the system often had to guess what they meant. These, however, were uplifted Terra Novan dolphins and had a good vocabulary. Right now they were saying hello.

I smiled and waved.

“Hey Billy!” I cried. “Hi Samantha!”

They squeaked their hellos back. My dad let go of me and I rushed to the side to put my hand into the water to pet their snouts. The dolphins radiated affection. They were like the best dog you ever had, but huge and wet and much, much smarter.

The Terra Novan dolphins weren’t really working for us. It was more like they worked with us. They liked the excitement of the place and enjoyed the privileged access to multiverse worlds only possible on Atopia.

Terra Nova was another off-shore colony competing with Atopia. They were rumored to be creating monstrosities, tinkering with life itself, and the bobble-headed Terra Novans who appeared on Atopia from time to time did nothing to help with this image. The dolphins, though, were wonderful.

“Okay, okay everyone,” laughed my dad, “that’s a lot of love. Come on, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

The dolphins shifted their attention away from me and to my dad.

“Today we’re going to be harvesting sardines, so we need you guys to go and corral a few schools into the tanker over there,” he explained, pointing to a ship floating a few hundred feet away. “Could someone go get me a sample?”

Samantha, my favorite, squawked and dove down into the depths.

“Okay people,” my dad continued, “let’s get this show on the road!”

The dolphins chattered their goodbyes and shot off, except for Samantha who popped back up with a sardine in her mouth.

“Thank you Samantha,” said my dad. He nodded to her and bent over to take the sardine, then turned back to his workstation, knife in hand, to begin the examination. Samantha and I waited, staring at him. He stopped and smiled, shaking his head slightly.

“Okay you two!” he laughed. “Go on and have some fun!”

Clapping my hands with glee, I detached from my body and snapped into Samantha’s, instantly rocketing off into the ocean. It was pure exhilaration as I felt her powerful sinews and muscles forcing us through the frigid waters, chasing her brothers and sisters into the depths.

Running with the dolphins had been the greatest joy of my life.

2

Identity: Patricia Killiam

SHOWING UP IN person for the press may have been a mistake. My God, how my body ached, even with its pain receptors tuned all the way down. I probably hadn’t spent more than a few dozen hours in my own skin in the past year, but who would want to? Under siege by a frightening list of diseases barely held back by the magic of modern medicine, my body was as shrunken as an old pea left out overnight. Nearly a hundred and forty years old and I still wasn’t ready to give up the ghost.

Sighing inwardly, I started up the promo-world.

“Imagine,” said an extremely attractive young woman, or man depending on your preference, “have you ever thought of hiking the Himalayas in the morning and finishing off the day on a beach in the Bahamas?”

She was walking along one of our own beaches, a beautiful stretch of white sand near the Eastern Inlet.

“Pssionics now makes limitless travel possible with zero environmental impact!”

The girl paused to let us think about all the places we wished we could visit.

“You’ll never forget anything again,” she continued, forcing people to remember everything they thought they’d ever forgotten. “And you’ll never again have to argue about who said what!”

I looked out at the reporters, seeing their eyes narrow as they remembered some argument they’d recently had with their spouses.

“Imagine performing more at work while being there less. Want to get in shape? Your new proxxi can take you for a run while you relax by the pool!” she exclaimed, stopping her walk to look directly into the viewer’s eyes.

“Create the reality you need right now with Atopia pssionics. The promise of a better world and the life you’ve always wanted. Join up soon for zero cost!”

A short silence settled while I let it all sink in.

“So, how exactly is pssionics going to make the world a better place?” asked a stick-thin blond from the front row.

I carefully rolled my eyes. I’d never really liked ‘pssionics’—the baggage it carried created a constant battle to separate fact from fiction when talking to reporters, but then again, when had that ever mattered? The blond reporter’s name floated into view in one of my display spaces: Ginny.

“Well Ginny, I prefer to use the term ‘polysynthetic sensory interface’ or just pssi,” I replied, detaching and floating upwards out of my body to get their attention as my proxxi walked my body along beneath my projection. Nobody batted an eye. They weren’t easily impressed anymore.

“We’ve been able to demonstrate here on Atopia that people are as happy—even happier, in fact—with virtual goods as material ones. You just need to make the simulation good enough, real enough.” Everyone nodded as they’d all heard this before.

“I’ll give you an example.” I floated down and snapped back into my body, and a bright red apple popped into existence in my hand. “So here we have an apple, right?”

There was a general murmur of agreement.

“Since pssi also controls my neuromotor system, not only can I see the apple,” I explained as I tossed it into the air and caught it with a satisfying thwap, “but I actually feel like I’m holding it. It feels perfectly real to me.”

“But perhaps even better,” I continued, taking a loud bite, “I can eat it too.”

As I munched away, I could feel its juices running down my chin. It was a good simulation of biting into an apple, but still had room for improvement, I thought as I chewed, contemplating the appleness of my experience.

“The ultimate no calorie snack,” I joked, taking another bite. This got some laughs.

“Seriously, though,” I continued, raising the apple and smiling, “with pssi installed, you can eat and drink whatever you like as much as you like with zero caloric intake—for this afternoon’s activity we’ll be lounging in Pompeii at a Roman feast while your proxxi takes your body to the gym.” This earned some more hushed laughter.

“Describe a proxxi again?” asked Ginny, cocking her head and fishing for a sound bite. I obliged.

“Proxxi are biological-digital symbiotes that attach to your neural system, sharing all your memories and sensory data as well as control of your motor system.”

The proxxi program was my life’s work in creating the basis for synthetic intelligence. Where previous research had tried to create artificial intelligence in a kind of vacuum by itself, my contribution had been to understand that a body and mind didn’t exist separately but could only exist together.

We’d started by creating synthetic learning systems attached to virtual bodies in virtual worlds that gradually became intelligent by feeling their way through their environments. The proxxi program had taken this one step further when we’d integrated them intimately into peoples’ lives, to share in their day to day experiences.

They were still artificial intelligences, but ones that now shared our physical reality to seamlessly bridge the gap between the worlds of humans and machines.

Ginny screwed up her face and asked, “And why would we want to attach something to our neural systems?”

“And just why wouldn’t you want to get attached to me?” asked Marie, my own proxxi, materializing to walk beside me. She smiled at everyone.

This earned a round of laughs. With the flick of a phantom I removed the apple from existence, my taste buds going blank as it flashed away. The hair on the back of my neck had begun to stand up which meant the slingshot test must be about to start. I’d better wrap this up.

“Everyone,” I announced, reaching out to encircle the group of reporters with my phantoms, “if you’ll allow me, I’d like to take whoever is coming up to watch the test firing of the slingshot.”

We’d ensured almost everyone had signed up for a front row seat to the demonstration. We needed to show we weren’t just serious about cyber, but also had a committed kinetic program.

“To finally answer your original question Ginny,” I said as I grabbed them all and we shot through the ceiling of the conference room, accelerating up into space and earning a few gasps, “pssi will change the world by beginning to move it from the destructive downward spiral of material consumption and into the clean world of synthetic consumption. It’s about the only viable solution we have left with nearly ten billion people all struggling for their own piece of the material dream.”

I slowed and stabilized our flight path, bringing us to a stop about ninety thousand feet up. Dispersing the reporters’ subjective points of view across a wide radius surrounding the target zone, I motioned down at the oceans below and then towards the rising sun on the horizon.

“The fact that we have to face is that the eco-crunch is destroying the planet while the fight over dwindling resources is fueling the Weather Wars, and pssi is the solution that will bring us all back from the brink!”

On cue, the slingshot began to fill the space around us with an ear-splitting roar and fiery inferno. I left the reporters’ visual subjectives in the thick of it while retreating to view from a distance, backing away several miles, and then several more. What had seemed so awe inspiring moments ago now appeared as just a bright smudge in the sky, and miles below shimmered the green dot of Atopia.

My mind clouded with sudden doubt. Who were we to think we could change the world, to think that we could bend reality? Just a pinpoint of green floating in the oceans, on a planet that was just a tiny speck adrift in a vast cosmos of unending universes. Are we fooling ourselves?

Our imagined power dwindled to nothing when viewed with a little perspective, dwarfed by unseen forces operating on much larger scales. Just then I was enveloped in a fast moving cloud, and, as if responding to my thoughts, a strong wind sprang up. The thunderstorm was coming.

I’d better get down and talk with Rick.

§

The blaze of the slingshot test was still dissipating on the main display in the middle of the Atopia Defence Command center. I lit up a smoke as I arrived, gently fading my image in next to Commander Rick Strong, my own pick as head of our newly formed Atopian Defence Forces.

He’d had an exemplary career in the US Marines, demonstrating repeated bravery rescuing men under his command. His first deployment had been in Nanda Devi, in the terrible fighting over dams high in the Himalayas that had sparked the Weather Wars. His psych profile indicated latent post-traumatic stress disorder, but just enough to make him think twice before starting a fight. With the fearsome weapons we’d installed on Atopia, I didn’t want some trigger-happy wingnut’s finger over the button if things got hairy.

A battle-hardened veteran, Rick brought a direct, and sometimes violent, experience of the realities from the outside world that helped ground the team here. We were masters of synthetic reality, but I had a feeling our created realities could be blinding us to the real dangers out there. Rick was the perfect antidote.

Kesselring, the CEO of Cognix and main benefactor behind Atopia, had been the first to begin speaking about the need to have defensive weapons. To begin with, the suggestion had seemed completely antiethical to the cause, Atopia having been born from a free-minded spirit to escape the cluttered corner the rest of the world had led itself into. I’d been against it to begin with, but as time wore on, I began to get the feeling that we may need them before all this was over.

“Finished playtime yet Rick?” I asked, shifting my hips from one side to the other and taking a drag from my smoke. I could feel the sense of safety that these weapons instilled in him. Perhaps he had a point.

In all cases, I wanted him to feel safe. I knew that one of his main reasons for coming here was to try and rescue his relationship with his estranged wife, Cindy, and I sincerely wanted him to succeed and raise a family here.

“Yeah, I think that about does it.”

“Good, because I think you scared the heck out of the wildlife I’ve managed to nurture on this tin can,” I said with a laugh, “and the tourists want to go back in the water—not that you didn’t put on a good show for them. That was quite the shock and awe campaign.”

“You gotta wake up the neighbors from time to time,” he laughed.

We’d purposely removed any reality filtering of the weapons test to measure the cognitive impact they would have on people. The response had more than exceeded the threshold for emotional deterrence that we’d needed for the project—just another success notched up on our path forward.

“Well, that’s your job, Rick, to help scare the world into respecting us. Mine is to scare the world into saving itself.”

I said this without humor, and Rick looked at me, nodding at my seriousness.

“Anyway, good work.”

A small pause while we looked at each other.

“Did you see that thunderstorm coming in?” he asked, and I nodded. “We’ve been tracking that depression for weeks, but we can’t avoid them all. Anyway, it’ll water your plants up top.”

He smiled. I smiled back.

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?” I suggested. I knew his wife was having a hard time adjusting to life here and missed her family. It was more than that, though, her depression being a chronic condition that stemmed from her relationship with Rick. It was something I thought we could help fix.

People reacted differently to the sudden immersion into limitless synthetic reality when they arrived here for the first time. Most adjusted quickly and within a short time they’d usually be off creating their little own nooks and crannies of reality that suited them. Some had a more difficult time, but I had a feeling Cindy would come around soon.

“That’s actually a great idea,” answered Rick after a moment, busy adjusting the control systems for the slingshot shutdown. He looked towards me. “So you really think that thing is a good idea?”

He was talking about the proxxids, simulated babies that Cognix was encouraging couples to try before the ‘real’ thing. It would help Cindy get acclimatized to pssi, but in general it wasn’t something I was comfortable with. In this case, however, it seemed like a good idea; putting a toe in the water first, so to speak.

“Yes,” I replied, shrugging, “why not?”

With that I looked over and smiled at Jimmy, and with the smallest of waves goodbye, clicked out of the Command sensory spaces.

3

Identity: Jimmy Jones

I SMILED AND nodded my goodbye to Patricia as she faded out of Command.

“I think that’s a good idea, Commander,” I said once she was completely gone. “I mean about going to see your wife. I can handle the rest of this.”

Rick looked over from the slingshot controls at me, smiled, and began nodding. Standing up from his workstation, he shifted the controls to me, and then walked over.

“Thanks Jimmy, I really appreciate it. You and Patricia have a pretty special bond, don’t you?”

I smiled.

“We do,” I agreed while I focused on some security protocols that had been breached during the weapons test. Somebody had been poking around up there in the UAV that had been destroyed during the test. Odd.

“It hasn’t been easy moving here,” he continued. “At least, it hasn’t been easy for Cindy.”

I filed the security breach report away to have a look at later, and looked up at the Commander.

“I can’t imagine how much of a change it must be for her,” I replied, “or for you, for that matter.”

Rick nodded, and then pulled a security blanket down around us. The other Command staff looked up from their workstations, wondering what was going on.

“Confidentially, son, I’ve heard that you had it pretty rough growing up here.”

I shrugged. He put his hand on my shoulder.

“If you ever need anyone to talk to,” he said softly, “I had it rough growing up too.”

“Thanks…” I replied uncertainly, surprised at this sudden intimacy.

“I’m just saying, any time, and of course, entirely confidential.”

“I appreciate that Commander,” I answered more confidently. “And I will, but I’m fine.”

I pulled down the security blanket, feeling self-conscious with all the rest of the staff there.

“Why don’t you get on to seeing your wife?”

He smiled. “I will. You just remember, anytime, right?”

“Right.” I smiled back at him.

“See you later, Jimmy.”

§

While Atopia was marketed as this amazing place, and the tabloid worlds were constantly spinning stories about the fantastic pssi-kids that grew up here, my own parents fighting had made my experience on Atopia a special sort of hell I had to drag myself through. Now I had the perspective to view it, even appreciate it, as a part of the fire that had forged me, but back then, pssi could be cruel.

I remembered it all.

“Look,” said my mother, back when I was an infant, soon after they’d first arrived on Atopia, “look at him, so cute. I think he just shat himself again, and he’s looking around wondering what the bad smell is.”

She was laughing at a shared rendering of my inVerse. She even tried sharing the smell with the guests. I wasn’t even a year old, and Mother was at it again, and drunk of course.

“Look, look, smell that?” she laughed. “Can you believe something so small and useless could make a smell so bad?”

As children, we had no right to privacy from our parents. Mother was always criticizing everything I did, in minute detail, and in excruciatingly public fashion.

My parents had been having another couple over for coffee, and Mother had turned our cramped apartment into a synthetic space projection that was decked out like a Spanish palace for the evening. We were sitting in the middle of an open courtyard, under a deep blue sky, surrounded by a three story terracotta palazzo, the walls decorated with intricate murals inlaid with tiny blue, white and gold tiles.

I was playing between potted ferns next to a small pool filled with colorful Koi fish. A fountain bubbled water into the pond, sprayed from the penis of a cherubic statue of a small boy. Dragonflies buzzed at the water’s edge, holding my attention as I reached towards them.

I still hadn’t learnt to walk yet, so I sat on my haunches in my own excrement, eyes on the dragonflies, curiously sniffing the air around me.

“Don’t you think you should change him?” asked Steve uncomfortably. He worked in the aquaponics group with my dad, and they spent a lot of time together, both at work and off hours. It was a source of friction between my parents.

“It’s all that fish protein in his little diet,” continued Mother. “Phil seems to think it will help his brain development and help him grow big and strong. So far, it just doesn’t seem to be working.”

She laughed again, louder this time, shrugging her shoulders. The guests didn’t share her sense of humor, but politely tried to smile and nod just the same.

Mother finished laughing at her own joke.

“Yolanda!” she yelled unnecessarily. “Could you change Jim, please?”

Mother smiled at my guests as her image flickered just a little. She detached and her proxxi, Yolanda took over control of her physical body. The pssi functioned less than flawlessly at this prototype stage, years ago, and the net effect was that Mother seemed to remain in place while Yolanda materialized into view and morphed away with her body to stand up.

Yolanda smiled at the guests, and then walked over to pick me up, holding me tenderly, and then disappeared into a side room to change me.

“Isn’t it just the best thing?” Mother gushed to the guests, referring to the pssi which was still a new toy to them back then. This was the first time Steve, and his wife Arlene, had done a social call with my parents. Our family didn’t have many guests over. We weren’t what you’d call popular.

“I was skeptical at first, when Patricia Killiam, my great aunt,” she emphasized, stopping for effect, “offered us a berth, but really, it has made my life so relaxing.” She smiled.

“It is amazing,” agreed Steve, happy to have gotten off the topic of nappies. “It’s completely changed our lives as well. All the build–up wasn’t just hype.” He nodded and looked around the room.

“Absolutely,” agreed Mother, “I mean, who would have thought? I modeled my proxxi after my own nanny from when I was growing up. I feel so at home now. Little Jimmy here has hardly put a dent in my lifestyle.”

“We’re still learning new ways to use it too,” added Steve’s wife, trying to add something to the conversation. “It is nice to take the time to have real face time with people, though. Synthetics do lack a certain…something.”

Everyone around the table nodded, except Mother who just crinkled her nose a little. An uncomfortable silence settled.

“Well!” exclaimed Mother, breaking the silence. “Who would have imagined that we’d end up in the most technologically advanced place on earth, and I’d be a fishmonger’s wife!” She tittered, looking towards my father. He just stared down into his coffee.

“Gretchen, we manage the aquaculture program, we’re not exactly fishmongers,” my father sighed, stealing a tiny hateful glance her way, but smiling broadly to the guests.

Steve nodded and added, “Yeah, and we farm kelp too!”

Mother smiled her tight lipped smile that I was all too familiar with.

“That’s nice. Call it what you like,” she declared. “We’re here and that’s all that matters!”

Yolanda walked back in and offered me to Mother, who took me on her knee and smiled into my little face.

“How’s my little stinker?” she laughed, shaking me more than lightly.

4

Identity: Patricia Killiam

“THERE’S SOMETHING VERY odd about this latest string of disappearances,” I stated, getting to my point of calling this private meeting with Kesselring, the CEO and owner of Cognix Corporation.

The rash of people disappearing into the multiverse and leaving their bodies behind had gotten worse. It was now even common, but after an initial alarm by friends and family we’d usually find them burrowed deep in some hedonistic fantasy world. Lately, though, cases were sprouting up where we hadn’t been able to find them.

“Do you think that bastard Sintil8 could have anything to do with it?” Kesselring asked. “He’d love to find a way to derail the program. Are you keeping an eye on him?”

“More or less.” I had my own private discussion going on with Sintil8, nothing I wanted Kesselring to know about. Looking at him, I could see he didn’t suspect anything. “Anyway, these new disappearances are different. Their brains are highly stimulated, a sensory overload we don’t understand.”

I took a deep breath and shifted in my seat, drumming my fingers against the conference room table.

The same privacy laws I’d been instrumental in creating now meant that we couldn’t dig any deeper into peoples’ minds without their consent. After the mess of the Cyber Wars, I’d forced Cognix to build ironclad privacy systems into pssi from the ground up to protect the rights of users. Root pssi control was like having access to the soul of a person and was the fundamental building block everything else branched out from.

“We need to figure out what on earth is going on.”

Kesselring sighed.

“I don’t disagree, Pat, but a few people off pleasuring themselves in the multiverse isn’t enough to delay the entire program. This is a massive undertaking we have put in motion.”

The global marketing program to launch pssi commercially was easily one of the biggest promotional campaigns of all time, at least by a private corporation—if this label could really be applied to us anymore.

I considered this for a moment while I watched the glittering cover of the security blanket that had fallen around us when he arrived. Even with security built–in from the ground up, if you wanted to be really sure you were safe from prying eyes, it was best to use a blanket. The one surrounding us now was Kesselring’s personal, impenetrable shield that had an odd and shifting color that was similar to the indistinct bluishness of water in a glacial run–off stream. Maybe that was why it felt so cold to me.

“Do you think the Terra Novans are involved somehow?” I asked.

“They would love to put a stick in our spokes,” he snarled back. “Anyway, I have someone looking into it. We have to be extremely vigilant from this point onwards, Patricia.”

I watched him carefully, wondering how vigilant he was being about me.

“You’ve probably heard, but Rick has agreed with us to nominate Jimmy to the Security Council,” I said. “If anyone can ferret out what is going on, he can.”

I was still rooting for Jimmy even if he didn’t need it anymore.

When Jimmy’s parents had left I had taken him under my wing. He was now my star pupil, along with Nancy of course. In my long life I’d never had any children of my own, and these two were as close as I’d come.

His mother, my great-grand-niece, had abandoned him here, and I blamed myself for not intervening sooner in that domestic situation. In the end, Jimmy had been the one to pay the price, but he was beginning to blossom now. I couldn’t have been more proud.

Kesselring eyed me, sensing my protectiveness.

“Yes, Jimmy is an excellent choice,” agreed Kesselring. “In fact, he’s the one I have helping me out.”

I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t known Jimmy was working directly for Kesselring on anything.

“What are they up to?” I mused under my breath, thinking about the Terra Novans, but now thinking about Kesselring as well.

“I don’t know,” replied Kesselring, not catching my full meaning, “but this just reinforces my point of view that we need to push ahead as quickly as possible. As you said yourself, we need to maximize the network effects of the product introduction…”

“Yes, yes,” I completed the sentence for him, “to gain the highest saturation throughout the population as quickly as possible.”

I paused and stared directly into his eyes.

“So we’re going to be giving it away for free?”

He smiled. “Of course.”

“And it doesn’t worry you that we’re not telling people the full story?”

“Of course it worries me,” he said looking down at the floor, “but again, what choice do we have?”

He looked up from the floor and into my eyes. “We need to make sure we stabilize this timeline as best we can.”

As we approached the point of no return, all the careful planning and clever analyses suddenly had the feeling of blind faith, and I’d had faith shot out of my skies early in life.

“Patricia,” he said, watching me intently, “the lives of billions rest in our hands. We cannot fail.”

He was right. What we were doing couldn’t be worse than letting billions of people die.

Could it?

5

Identity: Jimmy Jones

“AT EASE SOLDIER.”

I laughed and relaxed my stance. As one of the newest Command officers, I thought I would strut my stuff for Patricia a little. She’d asked me to come to her office, under a tight security blanket to discuss something.

“Jimmy, we’d like to nominate you to the Security Council,” she said quickly, getting to the point. “What do you think?”

I wasn’t that surprised, but I put on a show for her.

“I don’t know what to say,” I replied, shaking my head. “I’m flattered. I mean, of course I would accept, but I’m so young, so inexperienced.”

“Yes, perhaps,” she laughed, “but you are by far our leading expert on conscious security. I know you’re lacking in some areas, and that’s why I want you to stick close to Commander Strong. I think you could learn a lot from him.”

“I can do that.”

“Perfect. Then if we’re agreed, I’ll put the wheels in motion.”

§

Patricia was like the mother I’d always wished for, and in a twist of circumstance, that’s exactly what she’d become. Her love for me was something I wasn’t used to.

I think my own parents must have loved each other, at least at first. They should have just gotten a divorce rather than fight like they did, but Mother always claimed it just wasn’t Christian.

Arriving here from the Bible Belt, my family had a strong religious background and regular church service had figured deeply in my upbringing. In fact, a strong Christian community here on Atopia was one of the reasons my mother had said she’d agreed to come. God and sin had never been far from her wicked tongue.

A strange communion between Christianity and hacker culture had evolved on Atopia—‘hacker’ used here in its nobler and original sense of building or tinkering with code. The Elèutheros community on Atopia believed that hacking was a form of participation in God’s work of creating the universe. This wasn’t quite what my mother had in mind before coming, however, and this had just added to her dissatisfaction after we’d arrived.

Mother had been a very beautiful woman, a real southern belle, but if she saw you looking at her, a nasty comment was never far behind. All that was left of my parents’ relationship by the time I arrived was grinding, co–dependent bitterness that fueled the empty shells of their lives.

I would guess that my parents had always fought, but having me gave them an audience. After arriving on Atopia to birth me, they could have shielded me from their screaming matches by simply leaving a pssi–block on, and my dad often tried to do just that, but Mother wanted me to hear everything.

I remembered one evening in particular. I was sitting in one of my playworlds, stacking blocks with my proxxi Samson into impossibly fantastic structures in the augmented space around us. My dad had been trying to shield me from their arguing by setting up a pssi-block to filter it out of my sensory spaces, but Mother was having none of it.

“So now you want to protect him!” screamed Mother, turning off the pssi–block in the middle of their argument. “That’s a joke, you wanting to protect a child. You’re a sick little worm, Phil.”

Their favorite venue for screaming matches was the Spanish Courtyard world, well constructed and away from the prying eyes and ears of outsiders.

“Would you knock it off?” replied my dad. “I don’t know what you’re going on about. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Oh that’s right, you haven’t done anything!” screeched Mother. Once she got going there was no turning back. “You sure as hell haven’t ever done anything! Why I married you, I have no idea. What a waste of time.”

“I thought we got married because we loved each other,” replied my dad, dejectedly. Fearfully.

“Yeah, well love don’t pay the bills, now does it Phil? Does it Phil?” she demanded.

“No…I mean, so what, we manage.”

“We manage? We manage!?” yelled Mother. She’d been drinking again.

“Yes, we manage,” repeated my dad quietly, not sure what else to say. He wasn’t much good at arguing, or perhaps he’d been the subject of ridicule for so long that he’d just given up.

Mother tried her best to include me in the blame game even at this early point.

“I manage, Phil, it’s me that’s here taking care of that little shit of a son of yours all day while you’re out sunning yourself on the water.”

“Could you not talk like that, Gretchen? He’s listening, you know.”

“Oh, I want him to hear. I want him to hear this, want him to know that the only reason I agreed to have him was so that we could get on this stinking ship. I would never have let a child into this world so close to you otherwise. What would you think of me talking to my church group about what you’d like to do with children?”

“Gretchen, please, you’re drunk. It’s not what you think.”

“Oh, of course not!” she snorted. “And even then, we’re only here because I’m great-grand–niece to the famous Killiam. Not like you’d be man enough to accomplish anything on your own.”

“We’re doing some amazing stuff here Gretchen, please.”

“Oh really? Is that why you pssi–block me all the time? I can still see you, you know, sneaking around out there.”

“I need to focus on work during the days. I wish you would try to understand. We’ve talked about this. I thought we’d agreed.”

Mother snorted derisively. “Yeah sure, work. I thought we agreed about a lot of stuff, Phil. And you stink like fish, it’s disgusting,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“Well block it out,” suggested my dad futilely. “That’s what pssi is for. Anyway, of course I smell like fish, I just got back from work. We’ve been analyzing the new stocks. I was trying to take a shower but you stopped me.”

“I stopped you, huh? So it’s me that’s holding you back, right Phil? What a joke! Just block it, that’s your answer to everything, right? Maybe I like to see things for what they are, Phil, like what you are.”

“I’m just trying to do my best, Gretchen.”

“Well obviously your best isn’t good enough,” she spat back. “You are what you are, right Phil?”

“I’m going in the shower,” said my dad as he turned away to finally escape.

Mother waved him off drunkenly and turned her attention to me. Even as a toddler, I cringed in the glare of her disappointment. She snapped into me, looking at the yellow cyber blocks through my own eyes, staring at my own little hands.

“Playing with blocks again, eh stinker?” she laughed. “The other pssi-kids your age are composing operas and you’re obsessed with blocks. You just don’t get on with the other kids, do you? Your cousin Nancy is quite the star, from what I’ve heard. Not you, though, not my little stinker. You’re just as useless as your dad.”

She angrily snapped out of my body, shoving it over as she left. I didn’t understand what she meant by all this, but the words hurt just the same.

Samson was watching all this from a distance. He walked over to help me up, and then sat down with his hand in mine. He summoned up and handed me some more interlocking blocks. We quietly finished building the wall around us, and just sat there dumbly, trying to figure out how to fill in the cracks and make it impenetrable.

6

Identity: Patricia Killiam

IT WAS BONFIRE night, and excited squeals rose up between the bursts of rockets and bangers. As we walked down the lane, I caught glimpses of children playing in the alleyways, scrambling atop piles of rubbish stacked high on the abandoned bomb sites behind the row houses.

Fireworks whizzed and popped overhead, and coming around a corner we almost ran smack into a little girl running the other way, her eyes fixated on a lit sparkler that she waved back and forth in her tiny outstretched hand.

“Careful now,” I laughed, stooping to catch and stop her before she tripped herself up. She never took her eyes off the sparkler, completely mesmerized. It sputtered out, and the girl looked up at me with eyes wide in wonder. Small, ruddy cheeks glowed warmly above a tightly wrapped scarf. Alan, my walking partner, knelt down on the wet pavement beside us, rummaging around in his pockets.

“Sorry mum! Little rascal got away from me!” called out a large huffing and puffing man, waving towards us, obviously the girl’s father. The already foggy night was now also thick with the acrid smoke of gunpowder, and my watering eyes strained to see the man approaching.

I called back, “Oh, it’s no trouble at all.” The man stopped running, obviously coming from the Lion’s Head, the pub where we were headed.

“Ah ha,” said Alan, having found the prize he’d been searching for. He produced another sparkler from the pocket of his great wool overcoat. He looked towards the little girl. “Would you like this?”

The girl’s eyes widened, and she nodded. Just then the man arrived.

“Oah, that’s very kind of you,” he started to say cheerily, but then his face darkened. “You’re that perfessor, ain’t ya?” He reached down to grab his daughter’s hand.

Alan sighed but said nothing, bowing his head and putting the sparkler back in his pocket.

“And what of it?” I growled at the man, gently releasing the girl.

“You stay away from my Olivia!” he spat back, roughly jerking the little girl away from us. “You stay away, you hear me? Disgusting.”

Turning sharply he walked away, dragging the girl behind him. She continued to watch us intently as she disappeared into the gloom. I sighed and reached down to gently pull Alan back up. He’d visibly crumpled during the exchange.

“Don’t pay any attention to them,” I said softly, pulling him in the opposite direction, away from the Lion’s Head. “What do you say we have a drink at the Green Man instead?”

“Yes, I suppose,” he replied distantly.

It was the spring of 1953, although spring in Manchester wasn’t much different than most of the rest of the year. While even the Blitz hadn’t been able to displace my mother and father from London during the War, the Great Smog of ’52 had been the last straw to encourage them to take the family north that year.

The smog hadn’t been the only reason, however. My parents had used the Big Smoke as their own smoke screen to accompany me to my new school. I’d just been accepted as the first female faculty member of the new Computer Laboratory of Manchester University, and there’d been a terrible row when my father had refused to allow me to leave and live on my own. When Gran’s asthma had practically killed her in the intense smog just before Christmas, it had given my dad the perfect opportunity to make everyone happy.

My sisters had all been married off by then, and despite an endless procession of suitors provided by Mother, I’d remained steadfast and aloof, and alone. I just wasn’t interested. Only one passion burned in my soul.

“Come on Alan, snap out of it. Don’t listen to that small minded lout,” I laughed, pulling him into me and giving him a little kiss. He smiled sadly and we began walking off towards the Green Man. “Tell me again why it’s different.”

“We’re just speaking about two completely different things,” he replied finally, his mind snapping back to our discussion. “My idea is that if you speak to something inside a black box, and everyone agrees that it responds to them just as a human would, then the only conclusion is that something intelligent and aware, human or otherwise, is inside.”

“Then why not an equivalent test for reality?”

“So you’re suggesting that if, somehow, we could present a simulated reality to humans…”

“…to a conscious observer…” I interjected.

“…to a conscious observer,” he continued with a nod, “if that conscious observer couldn’t distinguish the difference between the simulated and the real world, then the simulated reality becomes an actual reality in some way?”

“Yes, exactly!” I exclaimed. “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”

He shook his head.

“Why not? Doesn’t it make a certain sense when all of modern physics requires a conscious observer to make it work for some reason?”

“You can’t just create something from nothing,” he said after some contemplation.

“Why not?”

“And just responding ‘why not’ does not constitute a defense, my dear,” he laughed.

We’d arrived at the pub and we stopped outside. With one hand he combed back his hair, parting it neatly to one side, and smiled at me with a soft look in his eyes. Even at 41 years of age, he still had a boyish charm, perhaps aided by ears that stuck out just a little too far. I laughed back, looking at him.

“What about the Big Bang then? That’s a whole universe from nothing!” I retorted. I had a steady stream of correspondence going on with some colleagues at Cambridge. They had just minted the idea.

“Ah yes, my bright little flower, you are clever aren’t you?”

“I am,” I giggled. “Come on, let’s get that drink.”

We wandered in under the bowing doorframe, across worn granite flagstone floors and into the warm bustle of the dimly lit pub.

“The usual, Mr. Turing?” asked the bartender brightly as we arrived at the bar. He nodded at her.

“Two of those,” I added.

For one luminous yet terribly short year, I had the great privilege of having Mr. Alan Turing, the father of all computer science and artificial intelligence, as my PhD professor. His own hardship had been my gain.

After convictions for homosexual acts, still a criminal offence in England of 1950’s, he’d been ostracized by his faculty and the academic world. Even most of his graduate students had abandoned him, and it was the only reason someone of his stature and position would have accepted a female student at the time.

In the end, I had almost an entire year of Alan to myself, an incredible experience that would inspire and shape my thinking for the rest of my life. Sadly, though, Alan had taken his own life at the end of that year, and the world was a lesser place without him.

“All right then,” said Alan after a pause, “I’ll allow that. Explain to me exactly what you’re thinking then.”

The bartender had returned with our pints of cider. After digging into his pockets again, Alan came up with a handful of change that he left on the counter, mumbling his thanks while we collected our drinks. We made our way off to a quiet part of the pub, near a fireplace that glowed warmly with coals of coke.

“All realities are not created equal,” I explained as we decided on a small wooden table tucked into the corner. The benches around it had obviously been recycled, or stolen, from a local parish church somewhere. Mismatched and threadbare carpets covered floorboards that creaked as we sat down in the pews. “If there is only one observer of a universe, then that reality is weak.”

“And the more observers that share a reality, the stronger it becomes?” he continued for me.

“Exactly!”

I’d been very excited that night, filled with visions of ideas newly inspired by Alan.

Just then a ping arrived from Nancy. Its loud chime drowned out the background noise of the pub.

“Go ahead and answer,” encouraged Alan, picking up his glass of cider to take a sip.

This wasn’t a memory, but a painstakingly reconstructed world that I’d created. I liked to venture off into it from time to time, to sit and chat with my mentor of so long ago, and replay conversations we’d had, or at least, what I thought I remembered of them.

I authorized Nancy for access to this sensory space, and she faded into view, sitting on a pew just across from us.

“So you’re sure you want to go ahead with this?” I asked immediately.

Nancy had been pressing me to go ahead with the launch of the Infinixx distributed consciousness project, ahead of the launch of pssi by Cognix. It had actually been my idea. If it worked, it would thrust Nancy into the spotlight and bring her own star onto the world stage just as mine was fading. She could continue my work. I knew she had the inner strength to make sure that whatever happened would be for the right reasons.

“Absolutely!”

“Okay, good. I will press on ahead on my side, then. You’re keeping on top of the New York trials?”

“Yes, Aunt Killiam,” she responded sheepishly. She would always be a child to me. “Of course I am.”

“Okay,” I replied, nodding, “perfect. I’ll start a campaign with the Board then.”

She looked ready to burst, yet her eyes clouded over.

“There’s something else?” I asked.

She sighed. “What’s going on with Uncle Vince?”

The reports of his future deaths had been clogging the prediction networks for the past few days. Guilt gripped me. I’d managed to insert some clues, however, deep in the patterns we had chasing him down. He would be off around the world hunting down these clues in ancient religious texts. A goose chase, but I had to keep him busy. In the end it might even do him some good.

“Nothing is going on with Vince, nothing at all.”

“What do you mean?” She didn’t look convinced.

“He’s just, well, he’s just fooling around.”

I shrugged and looked towards Alan, who shrugged as well.

“Okay,” she replied hesitantly, “if you say so. Just tell me what I need to do to help with the Board.”

“I will. Speaking of the Board, will we be seeing you at the Foreign Banquet tomorrow evening?”

“Yes, I’ll be there.”

I hesitated. “Dr. Baxter said he may bring Bob along…” I didn’t finish the sentence, looking at her. I really wanted to find a way to bring her and Bob back together, but I’d never worn cupid’s hat comfortably.

“I think I’m going solo anyway,” she replied with a smile. “It’s an official function, and those bore David to death.”

“I just thought I’d mention it.” I smiled back. Maybe I was better at this than I thought. “Now you get back to your evening!”

She nodded and squealed as she faded away.

“A beautiful child,” observed Alan, smiling at me. “One thing though…”

“About Nancy?” I asked.

“No, about what we were talking about.”

I nodded. “Yes?”

“In these created realities, what controls the underlying conditions that make the reality possible?”

I considered this for a moment.

“Just the observing entity.”

“And what happens if an organism escapes into the reality that it creates?”

“I don’t follow.” Now it was my turn to be confused. At the time, I hadn’t understood that it could be possible, but then, Alan had always had a gift for seeing further than anyone else.

“What I mean is, organisms are constrained by the physics of this reality, but what if they can create their own realities and escape into them?” He let the words hang in the air.

Alan had also been the founder of mathematical biology and studied its relationship to morphogenesis, the processes that caused organisms to develop their shape.

“If you change the body, Patricia, you also change the mind.”

I sat staring at him, letting the words settle.

“What could an animal become if it were completely unfettered by any physical constraints?” he continued, staring directly into my eyes. “If it were able to drag other observers into these created realities of yours, against their control?”

This century old question now hung ominously in my mind.

7

Identity: Jimmy Jones

THE FLITTERATI WERE already mingling with the foreign diplomats and other people of importance that had arrived for the annual Foreign Banquet. The event was being held up on the very top of the Solomon House complex, atop the farming towers in the Ballroom.

The setting sun refracted through the crystalline walls, casting prismatic rays across the crowd as everyone milled about, and strains of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons floated across it all from a string quartet, playing in the landing of the curved marble entryway. Motes of dust danced in the straining rays of light. They were probably smarticles.

I had Samson, my proxxi, walk my body over while finishing some last minute work at Command.

Many of the world’s leaders were in attendance today, reflecting the growing international significance of Atopia. It was an important opportunity for us to show off on the world stage, and Kesselring had left detailed instructions for all of the Council and Board members, including that we all show up in the flesh to minimize confusion on the part of our guests.

Someone grabbed my arm as I began to descend the entry staircase.

“Congratulations Jimmy!” said an excited Nancy Killiam, resplendent in a shimmering gown of what looked like liquid helium flowing around her in silvery wisps. She pulled me close to kiss my cheek, the liquid helium flowing silently around me. She put her arm in mine.

“Thanks,” I replied. My nomination to the Security Council, by far the youngest ever, had earned me the invitation tonight. I still felt a little embarrassed at all the attention, so I quickly switched gears. “On the contrary, it should be me who is congratulating you!”

Patricia had given me a little heads up on the push to move Infinixx up on the Cognix agenda. Now it was her turn to appear embarrassed.

“No congratulations yet, Jimmy,” she whispered conspiratorially. “That’s supposed to be a secret!”

“No secrets from me,” I whispered back, winking. “I may be able to help out, actually.”

Nancy looked at me, about to ask, when I shook my head. “I can’t say now.”

We finished descending the staircase together, arm in arm. Reaching the landing, someone called out her name, and she looked away towards them, and then back at me. I smiled and nodded her leave to go. With a whoosh the silvery helium flowing around me disappeared and followed her off into the crowd. I certainly felt her go.

“Drink sir?” asked a waiter who had swept up silently beside me carrying a golden tray full of champagne flutes. I reached out and took a glass.

I watched Nancy greeting our fellow pssi–kids. This was definitely our time to shine, and shine we did in our glittery and fanciful skins. I watched some of the visitors watching them with wonder, still adjusting to the trial pssi system everyone who came to Atopia had installed. It was a great marketing stunt.

Any technology sufficiently advanced to someone unfamiliar with it, had all the appearances of magic, and this place definitely held a mystical air to our visitors.

Kesselring had left a long and detailed set of instructions about who he wanted me to introduce myself to and chat with. Looking around the ballroom, their names and identities popped up and splintered in my display spaces, and their bodies glowed in faint outlines, allowing me to pick them out from the crowd.

Many were my counterparts in armed and security forces, and many of these from the Indian and Chinese contingents, who were here in force today. Atopia was viewed as a neutral territory for these warring sides. Even more important, what we were doing here was viewed by both sides as an indispensible part of their economic and technological future.

I sighed, straightened out my new ADF Whites, and wound my way into the crowd.

§

The event was beginning to wind down. My last discussion had been most interesting, as I’d managed to bring together some senior cyber security people from both the Indian and Chinese sides at the same time. I was quite certain it wasn’t my diplomatic skills, but more a desire not to be left out on any details. They were as hungry as the rest of the world for pssi.

Just then I felt someone poke me with a phantom. It was Commander Rick Strong, standing not ten feet from where I was. His phantoms dragged me over to him.

“General, Mrs. McInnis, I’d like to introduce you to one of our rising young stars, Mr. Jim Jones,” he announced as I arrived. I stood straight up at attention and bowed to take Mrs. McInnis’ hand, then turned to give the General a firm handshake.

“The pleasure is mine,” I announced to them both.

“You’re one of those pssi–kids, right?” asked Mrs. McInnis.

I laughed. “Yes ma’am, one of those.”

“Could you show me something?”

She obviously wanted some kind of carnival trick, and I could see the Commander was about to excuse me when I took a step back, bowing to Mrs. McInnis, and then theatrically flourished one hand forward to produce a bouquet of red roses and pink lilies. I handed them to her gracefully.

She put one hand to her chest. “Oh my goodness,” she declared, her eyes wide.

“Take them,” I offered, “they’re real, or at least, they’ll feel that way to you.”

Mrs. McInnis tentatively reached out the hand from her chest and gripped the bouquet at its base, the flowers gently swaying as she took them. She leaned in and smelled them.

“They smell absolutely gorgeous!” she exclaimed, her nose in a lily.

“And,” I announced, waving my hand and snapping my fingers, “presto!”

The flowers disappeared in a flash and a dove fluttered away from where they had been. Flying upwards towards the ceiling of the crystal enclosure. It left a few feathers behind in its desperate flight. We all turned to watch it fly away. Mrs. McInnis beamed at me.

“Jimmy is my newest addition to the Security Council,” laughed Rick, raising an eyebrow back at the General.

“Well, he certainly has a flair with people,” replied the General. He smiled at me.

“That is absolutely the truth,” added Mrs. McInnis. At that moment, someone leaned in to touch her arm, obviously an old friend.

“Oh Margie! Did you see that?” she said as she turned away, and then peeled off from us. “Excuse me, gentlemen.”

We all nodded politely as she left. General McInnis, I could see from research notes that floated into a splinter from Samson, had been Rick’s commanding officer on two tours of duty back in Nanda Devi.

“Proxxids may seem odd, sir, but my parents fought so much,” said Rick after a pause, apparently getting back to the topic they’d been talking about before I’d arrived. “I’m just trying to be careful.”

“Could have fooled me,” laughed the General, “that third tour you signed up for was some heavy duty. That didn’t strike me as the plan of a man being careful.”

“Well I mean…”

“I know what you mean, son. Look, I don’t blame you, running away out here. Heck, getting overrun by a squad of five hundred pound steroid–raging Silverbacks in full battle armor would be enough to make anyone wet their pants.”

Rick straightened up. “With all due respect, sir, I’ve never run away from anything.”

“Well maybe you haven’t. Then again, maybe you have,” the General stated evenly. He then turned to size me up. I returned his gaze steadily. “Young man, what do you think of these proxxids?”

“I think what Commander Strong is doing is absolutely the best thing,” I replied without hesitation. “We test most things in life before we dive in, why not test how we’d like our children to be?”

The General looked unconvinced, so I added, “There’s no harm in it, and I think he should try it out until he feels comfortable.”

Rick looked at me appreciatively.

The General considered this, and then turned to look at Rick.

“Coming out here seems a perfect way to start over, Rick. Just really get started is all I’m saying, don’t pretend, son. All this gimmickry can’t replace the real thing.” He stood and stared at the Commander for a moment before adding, “Don’t spend too much time trying to test out life, just live it. Having a child may help bring some meaning to your relationship.”

I watched both of them intently.

“Anyway,” said the General, clapping Rick on the shoulder, “I’m just calling it how I see it. I know you must have a lot of glad-handing to do here, son, I’ll let you get on your way.”

With that he turned away to find his wife.

“Jimmy, nice to meet you, and Rick, all the best,” said the General as he left, giving us the tiniest of salutes.

“Very nice to meet you too, sir,” I said to the retreating General, earning me a nod as he wound his way out through the crowd towards his wife.

I could see how deeply this issue with Rick’s wife was affecting him, and I was studying Commander Strong when the General spoke about Nanda Devi. I could taste an edge of fear. Of weakness.

“You look just scrumptious!”

I spun on my heels, champagne in hand, to find a stunning brunette staring at me, her long, wavy hair falling in tresses over tanned shoulders. A gossamer dress in abstract floral patterns fluttered around her like leaves in a nubile cyclone, barely obscuring an athletic frame underneath. She laughed nervously, watching me smiling at her. What a beautiful and familiar smile, I thought to myself, sizing her up as my gaze came around.

Commander Strong grinned at the two of us, taking a long second look at the brunette.

“Well, I think I’ll leave you to it, I’ve got to go and talk to some people still.” With a wink my way, he was off.

“Those ADF Whites sure look good on you, Jimmy,” continued the brunette, glancing at the departing Rick and then returning her smile to me. She obviously knew me, but seemed edgy.

I definitely knew her too, but couldn’t quite place her. I was suppressing my pssi memory, determined to work on exercising my own mind’s memory systems. Lately, I could feel a deep welling of energy seeping outwards from within me the more time I spent in my own skin.

Most pssi–kids hardly spent any time at all in their own bodies as they spread their splintered minds across the multiverse. This led to a loss of neural cohesion between their minds and bodies, but they didn’t care. I did. It was almost touching to see this girl had come in her own body, even if she was probably just making a show of it.

But what was her name? It was the first time I’d worn the ADF Whites, and I had to admit, they fit just perfectly. I guess there really was nothing like champagne and a man in uniform to get a girl all weak kneed. I smiled as the light dawned.

“Cynthia!” I exclaimed. “It’s been a long time.”

“Yeah, I know. I haven’t seen you since, well, since Nancy’s 13 birthday party…” she trailed off, looking embarrassed.

I let the uncomfortable silence settle for a moment. I liked the way it made her look vulnerable.

“Hey, we were kids,” I said finally, letting her off the hook. “I was a bit of an awkward kid. You, you were…”

“I was awful.”

“I was going to say beautiful. Come on, you weren’t awful. It was a weird situation.”

“I was. Jimmy, I didn’t get a chance to ever apologize for that. I’m really sorry.”

“Hey, it helped focus me at the time, and look where that got me,” I said, sweeping my arm towards all the important looking dignitaries. “I should be thanking you.”

“No, I don’t think you should be thanking me.”

She shook her head, looking down, but then looking back up at me.

“Just look at you now, Mr. Jimmy Jones,” she laughed, looking back up and admiring me in full. “You sure have changed.”

“Oh,” I said, “you have no idea.” She really did have no idea.

We stared at each other, tingling in the electricity of what may come next.

“So, you call that an apology?” I asked, drawing her in. “That just now?”

“Yes,” she laughed, “yes, it was, Jimmy.”

“I think maybe I need a longer apology—over dinner.”

She smiled. “That sounds like a great idea. When?”

“No time like the present,” I replied with a wink. Things were done here.

She leaned into me to give me a kiss.

“Sounds perfect.”

Something inside me growled, and I took her hand, leading her towards the exit.

8

Identity: Patricia Killiam

“ARE YOU SURE?”

Atopia wasn’t just about perfecting synthetic reality. Technologies we’d developed here also enabled us to lead the cutting edge in many other fields. As senior researcher, my own pet project was the deep neutrino array.

We’d seeded the Pacific Ocean basin with a carpet of modified smarticles to act as a vast sensor mote network of photoreceptors, searching out the blackness of the depths for flashes of Cherenkov radiation that signaled the passing of neutrinos—the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector. The POND was our part of the quest to verify predictions of neutrinos from parallel universes passing through our own.

“Well, the signal is there.”

“Don’t release any results yet. Run all the tests again and see if the result stays,” I said slowly. “Not a word to anyone, you understand?”

Neutrinos were maddeningly difficult to work with. Even with a planetary-scale telescope like the POND, it wouldn’t have been the first time an experiment with them had gone wrong.

My researcher nodded earnestly, keeping her eyes on me. In all cases, I’d better keep an agent watching her. The slightest leak to the press, of something of this magnitude, would be sure to destabilize the timelines we were trying to follow.

“Are you sure this isn’t coming from a terrestrial source?”

“We’re sure Dr. Killiam.”

“Just don’t tell anyone,” I repeated. “Keep this absolutely secret to us three.”

“Not even Kesselring?”

“Especially not Kesselring.”

How could it be possible that this was happening now?

I sighed and nodded, about to let my primary subjective leave this space, when the researcher grabbed my arm.

“One more thing,” she said nervously.

“Yes?”

I waited, watching fear creep into her eyes.

“We applied the full battery of translation and communication memes to the signal to see if we could decipher anything…”

“And?”

“Well, we can’t extract anything really clear.”

“Out with it,” I encouraged gently.

“Well, it seems to be some kind of a warning…”

§

I was sitting in on another of the interminable Board meetings, but at least I had something I wanted to accomplish at this one.

We were in the Solomon House conference room for a working session on marketing materials for the pssi launch, this one focusing on stress. One of the items I’d managed to get on the agenda was pushing Infinixx forward on the release schedule, so Nancy was there with me to help make the case.

Jimmy was there as well, now a part of the Security Council, sitting beside Nancy.

We were about to start watching the advertising video, but so far all we’d been doing was listening to a monologue by Dr. Hal Granger about his happiness index and how it was the core measurement around which the whole pssi program was based.

The Chinese representatives were dialed in today, as they had some special concerns about how we would be positioning ourselves. They were politely nodding as they listened to Hal, but he was getting on my nerves, again.

Synthetic reality wasn’t the only thing pssi was useful for. Flooding neural systems with smarticles had made it possible to actively regulate ion flow along axons, helping us stop and even rehabilitate neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s. Alzheimer’s had been a big win for us nearly twenty years ago, and was now a disease of the past, at least for those with money.

Much of the construction of Atopia had been funded by revenues Cognix had derived from these medical breakthroughs, but stress was something different.

After conquering, or at least taming, most of the major diseases, stress was now the biggest killer out there. It had many sources. Sometimes it was just the grind of our environment—noise, pollution, light, advertising, change—but mostly it was the sense of losing control, of not being where we thought we should be or who we should be with. Finding ways to deal with memories under-laid almost all of the solutions.

The human mind had an endless capacity for suspending disbelief, and we’d found this was an effective vector in the fight against stress and anxiety. Some said we were just teaching people to fool themselves, but then again, when were people ever not fooling themselves?

I sighed. Of course, all we could do was supply the tool. How people decided to use it was entirely up to them, despite all the recommendations I could make.

Finally, Hal finished his rambling presentation, and the advertisement started.

“Have you ever wished you were free from the constant bombardment of advertising? Pssionics now makes it possible!” said the extremely attractive young thing featured in our commercial. “Saving the world from the eco–crunch is going to be the best thing you’ve ever done for yourself!”

The meeting was being conducted in Mandarin, but our pssi seamlessly reconstructed everything in whatever language we preferred, even visually translating culturally distinct body language and facial expressions.

Fifty years ago, they’d been predicting we’d all be speaking Chinese by now, but, in the end, the ultimate lingua franca was the machine metadata that intermediated it all—everyone spoke whatever they wanted, and the machines translated for us. Language was just more road kill left behind on our headlong race ahead.

As the advertisement droned on, I couldn’t help feeling some mounting disgust with the way it focused on happiness. Sure it was important, but what exactly was happiness? What we were pushing wasn’t exactly what we were pitching. Soon enough, the ad finished and faded away into the familiar rotating Trident of Atopia.

“So what do you think?” asked our marketing coordinator, Deanna. Still staring at the rotating Trident, my mind was now wandering off into thoughts about the POND results and some odd features of the storm systems coming up the coast at us.

“I liked it,” responded Dr. Hal Granger, nodding ingratiatingly towards our Chinese guests. “I think I’m going to make some slight changes to the empathic feedback.”

“Sounds good,” said Kesselring, here in his first subjective for once. “As I was saying before, all the psychological, neurological and, well, all test results have been compiled and everything is looking good.”

He smiled an unbecoming grin at me. There was a smattering of applause around the table. I raised my eyebrows, but said nothing.

“Patricia?” asked Kesselring, “Anything to add?”

“I liked it, looked wonderful to me,” I said sarcastically. “Who could possibly resist a pitch like that?”

Kesselring’s lips pressed tightly together. “I assume you have something more to say?” he asked.

I paused, struggling, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Look, I’ve got some issues with how this ‘happiness index’ has become such a central barometer of what we’re doing.” I probably shouldn’t have baited Hal, and I was treading on thin ice with the Chinese delegation dialed in today, but the urge was too strong.

“Isn’t happiness the central, single most important thing in a person’s life?” rejoined Hal, assuming a defensive posture.

As he turned to face me, his skin began sporting that revolting smile he loved to use on his EmoShow. To me he looked like a weasel on Prozac. His program was becoming ever more popular as it traded off the Cognix brand, but I had no idea what people saw in him. His ego had long since outstripped his talents.

“I wouldn’t argue with you Hal,” I replied, holding up my hands in mock defense, “but this is supposed to be a serious medical evaluation, not a popularity contest. And knowing about happiness is different than actually creating it.”

“Patricia,” Hal responded in a measured tone, as if I were a guest on his show, “I think you have some issues going on here, some issues beyond this discussion.”

“Don’t try to deflect this,” I snapped.

“Okay fine,” he laughed. Now he was the one with his hands up in mock defense. “I’m just saying maybe you should have a look at your own happiness indices before you go knocking the program.”

He looked at me with raised eyebrows and tried to convey his simple, dishonest frankness to everyone in the room.

“I am happy!” I shot back before I realized what I was doing, my voice louder than intended. I closed my eyes and shook it off, taking a deep breath. Little bastard.

The room fell quiet.

Kesselring rolled his eyes slightly and smiled towards our Chinese guests.

“Let’s move onto the next topic, shall we?” he asked around the table, and everyone nodded. “So, you all have the information about pushing the Infinixx launch ahead of the pssi launch. Who would like to open the discussion?”

“Give me one good reason we should let this happen,” immediately fumed Dr. David Baxter.

“David, you’ve seen all the phutures Nancy has presented. Almost every scenario comes out pushing the Cognix stock higher as we establish this with early adopters,” I countered. “You’re just annoyed because it’s not under your thumb.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” replied Dr. Baxter, and a tumult of angry voices and arguments began while Kesselring sat quietly and watched the whole thing, sighing. After a few minutes of this, it seemed we were at a stalemate when Jimmy spoke up.

“Okay everyone, I will give you one very good reason,” he shouted out. He stood up, raising his hands to quiet everyone. I could see him wink at Nancy.

“I’ve managed to secure an agreement with both India and China to launch simultaneously with us.” Even as he said it, the Chinese representatives began nodding their understanding and agreement.

Gasps issued forth around the table. Details of the negotiations sprang into everyone’s workspaces the moment Jimmy spoke and we all dropped off a splinter to have a look. Having India and China agree to a simultaneous launch wouldn’t just be a commercial coup, but a major political one for Atopia as well.

“How in the world?” said Dr. Baxter, his voice trailing off while his mind assimilated the back-story.

“You’re giving up a lot here,” said Kesselring. “A lot, but I can see the balancing act and the payoff. I like it. Are there any objections?”

Kesselring looked automatically towards Dr. Granger, who looked like he was about to say something, but then just shrugged and shook his head, looking towards Jimmy. Kesselring looked towards Jimmy as well and smiled, nodding his congratulations.

“I assume you’re good with this Nancy?” asked Kesselring, looking back towards her.

Kesselring looked directly at me. “I’m ready to make this happen, but I need one thing from you.”

“Yes?” I had a feeling I knew what was coming next.

“I need you to put this Synthetic Beings Charter of Rights on the shelf until after the commercial launch of pssi.”

I sighed and looked at the ceiling. He knew exactly how to exact his price for this.

“Yes, I can do that. But it will be at the top of my agenda as soon as we launch.”

Kesselring smiled. “Then we’re all agreed.”

Approving murmurs began to circulate. I reached out and held Nancy’s hand in mine, and smiled at both her and Jimmy. I was so proud.

“So, are we a ‘go’ for a worldwide press release?” sighed a resigned Dr. Baxter. He was Bob’s father. Talk about an apple falling far from the tree.

“Yes,” replied Kesselring, “assuming this is acceptable with our Chinese delegates?”

He looked towards them. They all nodded curtly in unison. I wondered if they realized that nationality was another idea that pssi was about to render irrelevant. Or perhaps, more to the point, a good chunk of the world was about to become de-facto Atopian citizens.

“Yes, let’s go ahead with the release. We are about to make history, ladies and gentlemen.”

“Imagine, a trillion dollar IPO,” I heard Hal muttering under his breath as he reviewed the launch details, stars gleaming in his beady eyes.

Getting up to leave, I said goodbye to both Jimmy and Nancy on private channels. I nodded politely to the Chinese guests, then to Kesselring and the rest of the Board. I even nodded to Hal, thanking him for not interfering in the Infinixx proposal.

§

The black granite and glass of the conference room melted into the deep mahoganies of my private office. I was making for the bar. A nice scotch on the rocks was just the thing I needed.

Marie was sitting against my office desk, her long shapely legs crossed in front of her as she leaned against it, propped up by her arms.  Cigarette smoke was rising slowly around her, and she took one more puff and put it out in the crystal ashtray on the desk. She leaned forward and stood and walked towards me, waving me off.  She’d get the drink.

“I know Hal is a pain, Pat, but you shouldn’t let him get to you,” she said finally, plucking my favorite scotch bottle from the collection.  A glass appeared in her hand and ice cubes chinked softly together as she poured the whiskey over them.

“It’s not that, Marie. I need to find out what Kesselring is hiding from me,” I replied. “Shifting Infinixx up on the release schedule was just too easy. Hal folded without even a peep.”

Marie raised her eyebrows. “Sometimes things just make sense, even to Hal.”

“Maybe, but Kesselring didn’t even seem surprised. I have the feeling something else is going on, and I need someone with, well, special skills to have a look at this from the outside.”

“On that note, your old student Mohesha from Terra Nova called again,” explained Marie. “She wants to set up a talk. It sounded very urgent. In fact, more than urgent.”

I decided to shift back into a much younger version of myself, and was now dressed in a short black skirt and cream silk chemise while a sub-proxxi of Marie walked my real body home from the Solomon House. I sighed and looked down admiringly at my legs, reaching down to straighten my skirt, sliding a hand along my thigh as I did. I trembled slightly at my own touch.

“No, it’s too dangerous to talk with the Terra Novans right now,” I replied.

“But not too dangerous to be talking with gangsters who’ve been trying to infiltrate Cognix?”

I stared at Marie. Of course she knew what I was thinking.

“Sintil8 doesn’t really want to stop what we’re doing, he just wants his cut,” I replied. Criminals were reliable in their predictability and motivations, if nothing else. “He has the kind of backdoor connections and freedom to operate that may yield us some answers.”

The problem wasn’t just my suspicions about Kesselring or our disagreements anymore. The huge depression we’d been tracking up the Eastern Pacific had transitioned from tropical storm status into full blown Hurricane Newton, and Hurricane Ignacia was spinning up into a monster Category 4 out in the North Atlantic. The way these storm systems were behaving had gone from being simply unusual to downright suspicious.

By my calculations, these weren’t natural storms anymore.

Taking a good long pull on the whiskey, I straightened up and looked Marie in the eye.

“Set up the meeting with Sintil8.”

9

Identity: Jimmy Jones

“I’M SORRY JIMMY, but that Patricia Killiam. Where does she get off talking about happiness? I’m really concerned about her.”

“No need to apologize Dr. Granger,” I replied. “I’m worried about her too. She just hasn’t been herself lately.”

We were taking an aimless wander through a few floors of the hydroponic farms, on our way back from Kesselring’s office after the Board meeting.  Kesselring kept his offices perched at the very apex of the connecting structures on the top floors of the vertical farming complex.  Even the master of synthetic reality liked to keep his specific reality above the riff–raff.

Over a hundred floors up, I enjoyed the views down on Atopia from here—the green forests capped by crescents of white beaches and the frothy breakwaters beyond.  Through the phase shifted glass walls, the sea still managed to glitter under a cloudless blue sky. The humid and organic, if not earthy, smell of the grow farms reminded me of the days I used to spend out on the kelp forests with my dad as a child.

“I’m getting tired of her routine as the famous mother of synthetic reality,” continued Dr. Hal Granger. “Sure, fluidic and crystallized intelligence are important, but isn’t synthetic emotional and social intelligence the key to all this?”

We’d all heard this speech before, repeated endlessly on his EmoShow, and now that I was on the Council, I was being given the treat of getting to hear it in person as well. Dr. Granger’s claim to fame was as the creator of the technology that could pick apart and decipher emotions, and you could be sure he wouldn’t ever let you forget it. I tried not to roll my eyes.

“What was more important to understand?” he asked angrily while we walked through the hydroponics. “What someone says, or the emotional reason behind why they said it? Who knows more about happiness than me?”

“I’d say they’re both just as important,” I replied. Dr. Granger had used his growing fame to secure the position as head psychologist on Atopia. No matter what one thought of him, it was best to tread a careful line.

He stopped walking and turned to look at me.

“Exactly.”

One of the grow farm staff walked by and gave Dr. Granger a curt, respectful nod. His office was a few floors down from here, far away from the other senior staff, which was unusual. Observing him on our walk I think I knew why.

As we were walking, Dr. Granger had been watching the blank faces of the psombie inmates, and each of the staff had almost stood at attention while we passed. It was a structured and controlled environment, one that made him feel both powerful and safe. And important.

Most of the psombies here were people incarcerated for crimes, their minds and proxxi disconnected from their bodies as they waited out their sentences in multiverse prisonworlds. Even in paradise, we needed correctional services. Their bodies were consigned to community work around Atopia in the interim, safely guided by automated psombie minders.

While most of the psombies here were inmates, an increasing number were people who donated their bodies for community work while they flitted off amusing themselves in the multiverse. These people judged their bodies without enough value to even warrant leaving their proxxi to inhabit them.

“We’d better start a new special file on Patricia,” he said after a pause.

I shrugged. It wasn’t my place to argue. We continued walking.

“Shimmer!” he called out to his proxxi, who then appeared walking beside us.

Shimmer was a perfectly androgynous creature. As a synthetic being, sex was superfluous in the biological sense, but still critical in others. It was Shimmer’s ability to understand aspects of both sexes, and fluidly understand their emotional dynamics, that had made Dr. Granger famous. It was his lifetime’s work, although most people whispered that it was based on taking credit for his graduate students’ efforts over the years.

“Yes, Dr. Granger?” Shimmer replied. “Do you want me to start a new log entry on Dr. Killiam? Already done, sir.”

“Thank you Shimmer,” replied Dr. Granger, smiling at his proxxi. “Now please, I need to speak with this young gentleman alone.”

“Yes Dr. Granger.”

Shimmer faded away.

Hal turned to look at me while we walked, his hands now clasped behind his back.

“Do you really think it’s possible?” he asked, returning to the reason he had asked me to walk with him today. “I mean, with the technology we have now?”

“Absolutely,” I replied. “The project has been going on for some time, as you well know, in fact using some of your own work. Conscious transference—a lot of people have been working on it. But the trick, of course, is to get it right, for you to stay you, in the process.”

“And if I agree to support you, to support this, you will make sure that I’m the first?”

As good as medical technology was these days there was always the risk of the unexpected, of some accident sending you suddenly into the forever of oblivion. Dr. Granger wasn’t as concerned about his life, however, as much as he was about his fame surviving.

“Yes,” I replied simply. “It will take some time, though, certainly not before the commercial launch of pssi.”

“Good, good,” he said thoughtfully, apparently satisfied. He smiled at the mindless faces of some psombies that we passed.

“You know, Jimmy, you’re always working, you should find yourself a nice girl, find some emotional balance.”

He’d started into his EmoShow routine now, his face now serious and concerned.

He laughed. “I’m sure a good looking young man in your position must have girls throwing themselves at your feet. What I mean is you should find someone special.”

Saying nothing, I just nodded and silently continued on our walk down to his offices. I had found someone special, but I wasn’t going to share that with him.

§

Susie was a girl I’d had a special attraction to for a long time now. She was a unique soul, her emotions and sensations finely attuned, and I’d always felt like we shared a special bond.

I’d known her as a fellow pssi–kid, but she’d come to my attention again, and become a celebrity in her own right, when as a teen she’d turned herself into a living piece of installation artwork by mapping the emotional and physical state of each of the world’s ten billion souls into her pain system.

She literally felt the pain of the world; a bloated stomach when the Weather Wars flared up again in India, a burning calf for food riots in Rio, a painful pinprick when terrorists blew up a monorail transport in California.

Susie bravely bore the pain of the world like a Mahatma Ghandi of the multiverse, imploring people to stop what they were doing. Her impassioned pleas, featuring her painfully writhing nubile body, had been happily broadcast on obliging, bemused world news networks as the latest and greatest from the magical world of Atopia.

Her star had risen, and in turns had made her the source of both ridicule and inspiration. After a short while, though, the world had gotten bored and gone back to its media mainstay of killing and maiming.

For Susie the project hadn’t been a fad, but her calling in life. Even when the world had turned off, she’d kept going. In the process, she’d gained a small but diehard following of hippie flitterati that protected her from the ridicule of the world, forming an almost impenetrable sphere of free floating flower children that inhabited the metaworlds around her, like petals on a painful daisy.

I’d been trying to get in touch with Susie for a long time, but it was nearly impossible to get through her protective entourage. I needed a way in. My security systems had recently flagged some unusual and illegal splintering activity from my old friend Willy, and it seemed I had found a way.

§

“Well, you’re in tight with Susie,” I explained at a lunch I’d arranged with Willy later in the day.

The light dawned in Willy’s face, realizing what I’d asked him there for. I’d kept the reason for our meeting secret, and upon arrival I had enclosed us in an extremely tight security blanket. I could see his need for money begin to spin the cranks behind his eyes.

“If you help me,” I explained, “maybe I could help you.”

“Sure,” he replied slowly, trying to hide his greed, “and what would you help me with?”

“I could help you,” I answered, “by getting access to higher order splintering.”

“Oh yeah? So, what, like you could double my account settings or something?”

“Much,” I laughed, “much more than that Willy. I could show you how to fix the system to have almost unlimited splintering. You’ll blow everyone else in the market away.”

He glanced at the glittering blue security blanket around us.

“So nobody else can know what we’re talking about, right?”

“Absolutely, Willy. I’m the security expert, remember?”

“Right.”

“So what’s the deal then, Mr. Security?”

“If you can get me a date with Susie, but I mean, really set me up with her, you know?” I paused, waiting for him to acknowledge what I meant. “Then I’ll set you up with what you need.”

“You can really pull it off, with nobody else knowing? No risk?”

“I sure can,” I responded, smiling. “Nobody will ever find out. Let me explain.”

Willy leaned in closer.

“I’ll download a list of vulnerabilities in the Atopian perimeter that you can use to connect with the outside, and then I’ll show you how to anonymize your conscious stream.”

The perplexed look on his face changed and grew into a smile.

10

Identity: Patricia Killiam

I CURIOUSLY WONDERED how many ways this unpleasant specimen of humanity had inflicted death upon his fellow man—fellow man being something of a stretch given his own current state of being. That being said, Sintil8 projected the image of an attractive and urbane gentleman, his elderly face smiling warmly from under a manicured wave of properly graying hair. Intelligent eyes sparkled at me darkly.

“Nice press conference today,” said Sintil8, flashing a mouthful of perfect teeth. “Such a wonderful thing you are doing, saving the world.”

The sarcasm was as thick as his Russian accent.

“Thank you,” I replied simply, not taking the bait.

We studied each other.

“So, Patricia, what exactly would you like me to find out for you?” he asked with an equal parts soothing and menacing voice.

“These storm systems, for one,” I replied cautiously. “I want to know if this is some kind of new weapon. It seems the sort of thing you’d know about.”

He laughed. “Ah, I see.”

We were sitting in a sumptuous penthouse atop one of his many skyscrapers dotting the landscape of New Moscow. Views from the top of the world stretched out brightly below us in the midday sunshine, and I caught glimpses of the Moskva River snaking out into the smoggy distance below.

Sintil8 was comfortably draped on a black leather couch across a glass and steel coffee table from where I was, still dressed in blue silk pajamas. He was wrapped up in a velvet house coat and wearing gray fur slippers, one of which dangled casually off a foot as he crossed his legs. I was perched uneasily on the edge of my matching couch.

As we spoke, one of his minions, or disciples depending how you looked at it, swept smoothly across the landing to hand him another glass of scotch. Her scarred and mottled body was barely a shrunken stump suspended between impossibly spindly metal legs, with matching thin metal arms.

Sadly, she wasn’t all that unusual. Mandroids—humans with extensive robotic replacement limbs and parts—were becoming all the more common as entanglements in the Weather Wars continued to spread. Medical technology could stop soldiers in the field from dying from almost any inflicted trauma, apart from major brain damage, and so had begun the steady stream of half man, half machines into societies around the world.

Of course, this one was no soldier, but had instead done it to herself. Sintil8 was the leader of a cult that grotesquely encouraged its closest followers to consume their own bodies; literally a ritualized eating of themselves that was matched with a gradual replacement of their disappearing body parts by robotic ones. Consuming themselves was the path to spiritual and corporal enlightenment; so preached Sintil8.

“Thank you,” said Sintil8 as he accepted the drink.

This included consuming her own eyes, I realized with horror as she turned to attempt what she must have thought of as a smile my way. Dark caverns yawned out at me from where her eyes should have been. In the depths of the shadows at the backs of her scarred orbitals, I could see the glittering red of photoreceptor arrays.

“Tut, tut,” chided Sintil8, watching my expression while she walked away, “so quick to judge. And you, you’re not creating any monsters out there, are you?”

“We’re not brainwashing people into twisting their lives around.”

“No?” he replied, letting this hang in the air as he smiled at me, barely able to conceal his mirth. “And yet, here you are, coming to me for help. What a surprising turn of events this is.”

Sintil8 was one of the most powerful and persistent opponents of the pssi program. As one of the greatest purveyors of pleasures in the physical world, not to mention arms dealer to all sides of the Weather Wars, the global organization he represented stood to lose a lot of money when pssi was released.

He had been lobbying hard to at least have the pleasure pathways removed from the pssi protocols, and we’d often been at each others’ throats in closed-room government regulatory meetings around the world.

Kesselring had won the day by portraying Sintil8 as a modern-day Al Capone-style gangster, lording over the weaknesses of the human animal from his fortresses in Chicago and Moscow and other cities around the world. It wasn’t far from the truth.

Despite my less than savory opinion of him, in an enemy-of-my-enemy sort of logic, I’d come to Sintil8 to try and help me root out what Kesselring was hiding from me. Really, it was more of a fallback plan in case I needed an ace up my sleeve. I also had half an idea of wanting to keep Sintil8 close to my chest to tease out his own intrigues involving us. The latest string of disappearances was just the sort of thing he’d be capable of orchestrating.

“Look,” I said, turning all this over in my mind, “I may be able to help you if you help me.”

“Now you’re finally speaking my language,” he replied with a smile. He scanned the information and data sets I’d just sent him, the details of a deal.

“Ladno. I will find out what I can,” he said finally, nodding his understanding of my offer.

“Good.”

A pause, and his smile grew wider. “How rude of me, would you like to stay for dinner?”

I shook my head. “Thanks, but no,” I replied, gruesomely wondering what, or rather who, they would be eating tonight.

We sat and inspected each other again. Despite expending considerable resources in Atopia’s tussles with Sintil8, we still didn’t have the full picture of him. He was probably one of the few people alive older than me, and as far as we could tell he had risen up through the ranks of the Russian mafia in the late 20th century after starting a career in Stalin’s security apparatus.

Some reports hinted that he had been a tank commander in the Red Army’s defeat of the Nazis outside Stalingrad, the battles in which he had probably lost the first parts of his own body. We suspected he had become just a brain in a box somewhere, but exactly where we didn’t know.

“We drink to our agreement,” Sintil8 commanded as he raised his scotch. A glass of scotch dutifully materialized in my own hands.

“Budem zdorovy,” intoned Sintil8.

“Stay healthy indeed,” I replied, raising my glass with his and drinking to seal our bargain.

11

Identity: Jimmy Jones

“WHERE DID THE idea for your distributed consciousness technology come from?”

The question wasn’t directed at me. Some of the reporters laughed, and Nancy smiled. They’d all heard this before. The question was another opportunity for a sound bite, and Nancy launched into it with a smile.

In the days and weeks after the announcement of the Infinixx launch date, Nancy’s star had risen dramatically. The press couldn’t get enough of her. I’d been asked to help out, and I had splinters strung out in a seemingly endless stream of press events across the multiverse.

As I disengaged my primary subjective from the splinter covering this event I let my mind wander off. Nancy was still talking about how it had all come from the childhood game flitter tag that we used to play. She was gushing on and on, and it was beginning to annoy me.

Flitter tag may have been the king of pssi-kid games, but my favorite had always been rag–dolling. It had been my own personal addition to our repertoire.

One day, Ms. Parnassus, our human teacher back at the pssi-kid Academy, had asked each of us to come and demonstrate a special trick or skill. Each child had gotten up in turn to show off something they could do. One inflated into a balloon and floated up to bounce around on the ceiling. Nancy showed off holding a dozen conversations at once with everyone around the classroom. Bob of course took us surfing, and then my turn had come.

“Come on Jimmy,” our teacher encouraged, “show everyone what you showed me.”

She gently rotated me into the center of everyone’s attentional matrix. I nervously looked at my classmates—an arrayed collection of fantastical little creatures floating impatiently around in my display spaces.

Fidgeting, I looked down at my feet. They uncontrollably spawned into writhing tentacles that nervously knotted together like cave eels trying to escape sudden sunlight.

Giggles erupted.

“Go ahead,” said Ms. Parnassus, nodding and smiling, prodding me on. She collapsed everyone’s skins into my identity space, morphing us into a shared reality of children standing around the Schoolyard playground, with me at the center. I was now dressed in gray flannel shorts, with a matching sweater and shirt with a little red clip–on tie.

More giggles. Mother had insisted on this ridiculous outfit for my primary identity.

Oak trees arched between the swing sets and jungle gyms of the Schoolyard, reaching high above us like a leafy green cathedral beneath a perfectly blue sky.

“Come on Jimmy, they’ll love it, trust me,” said Ms. Parnassus. I nodded, and set up my trick.

“Everyone, detach and snap into Jimmy. Now hurry up!” she clapped.

There were a few groans, and I could tell the rest of the kids had little hope of anything fun coming from quiet, awkward Jimmy. Still, I felt them all clicking obediently into my conscious perimeter.

I unlocked my pssi–channels, and then felt them all crowding inside me, feeling what I felt, seeing what I saw. The sensation was ticklish as all of them squirmed impatiently inside me, waiting for something to happen.

Not many people had ever ghosted me before that, and I wasn’t popular at flitter tag. Practically the only people that had been inside me before that had been my parents, and then usually only to terrorize me. But that day was different, a shared experience rather than an intrusion. Despite myself, I tingled warmly and smiled.

“See Jimmy, isn’t that nice?” said Ms. Parnassus, noticing me smiling. “Now come on Jimmy, show them what you showed me.”

Screwing up my courage, I took a deep breath and dove down into my body, shrinking, dragging them with me. I could hear their giggles back behind my mind. Down, down we dove, into the tiniest of spaces inside me, past bone and blood, squeezing down past the granular limit of pssi–tech. I stopped for a moment, and then, holding my breath, pushed the limit further.

I squeezed our consciousnesses down to the molecular level, and then stopped inside one of my living cell nuclei to watch a newly hatched protein unfold. The kids were silent, suddenly engrossed. Then I shot back outwards, upwards through my veins. I stopped again, the powerful thump of my heart filling our sensory space. I snapped our tactile arrays to the outside of my aorta, and we felt our skins expanding, contracting, my lifeblood flowing through us.

“Cool!” exclaimed Bob, followed quickly by a chorus of, “Show me how! Show me!”

Ms. Parnassus smiled, watching the kids all snap back into themselves and run to mob me in the middle of the Schoolyard.

Flitter tag was the undeniable king of games at the pssi-kid Academy, but for a while, rag dolling became all the rage as I taught them to open up individual body parts and snap people into them. And then to move the body around, each person controlling only their part, the net effect much like a drunken sailor trying to get home. For a short time in my childhood I had been popular.

This was the start of my journey into the security of conscious systems.

12

Identity: Patricia Killiam

“SO HOW DOES it feel, Adriana, or, rather, Ormead?”

I looked out at the view from our perch in the hills above Napa Valley. The lush greens of a late summer harvest were staked out into the blue–shifted distance along perfectly ordered rows in the vineyards below. Swallows chased invisible insects in the sapphire sky that hung above us, weaving and darting in a silent dance.

I motioned to the waiter for another glass of Chablis.

Adriana had recently chosen to composite with two of her friends, Orlando and Melinda. Compositing was a new process I was promoting that created virtual private pssi networks to tie peoples’ nervous systems together. It was like two or more people continuously ghosting each other, but more intimate—much more intimate. Compositing amounted to fusing the neural systems of the organisms involved.

“It’s wonderful!” she replied with a glow in her eyes. Their partner had decided to composite as well. “The combination of Michael, Denzel and Phoenix—Mideph—is everything we wanted in a mate—sporty, funny, a good listener and passionate and artistic.”

Composites were fitting nicely into the evolutionary chain as a new form of deep social bonding to help protect individual psyches from becoming overwhelmed in the multiverse. The cultural aspect of the human social animal was managing to adapt to pssi, but it was still falling behind. I sighed. We were moving too fast.

Compositing, in general, was a positive evolutionary step forward, but at the same time a countervailing form of self-compositing was becoming a problem.

Before the shock of losing his body, Willy McIntyre had been well on his way to self-compositing himself into a social cocoon made up of only copies and splinters of himself. Now, from what I’d seen, he’d begun working his way back out, but only because he’d lost his body—not everyone would be so lucky.

Adriana, on the other hand, was part of a class of composites that formed spontaneous holobionts to symbiotically form a protective barrier against their social networks devolving into isolated clumps within the multiverse.

The history of evolution was more about symbiotic organisms evolving into new groups than simply a slow accumulation of new traits. In evolutionary terms, today’s individuals were yesterday’s groups.

They’d inhabited Adriana’s body today, and it still threw off my pssi as it posited her personal details in my display space. We’d have to fix it. I’d planned on making composites as much a part of the launch protocol as I could, but time was running out.

“And we are everything he really wanted,” she continued, “a responsible, motherly woman who is career oriented but also zany and spontaneous. I don’t think this could have happened any other way.”

These little victories were what made it all worthwhile. Love was still that most powerful of emotions, as it magically found ways to fill the cracks that pssi had fissured open in Atopian culture.

“So I heard you’re going to have children?” I asked. “That’s wonderful news!”

Without them reforming as a composite, offspring by any of them separately would have probably never happened. Post-pssi fertility rates on Atopia were approaching zero, but then again, that was counting fertility in the old, biological sense.

If we began counting synthetic and bio-synthetic beings, such as proxxi, fertility rates were actually skyrocketing. It all depended on your point of view.

Adriana-Ormead smiled even wider, if that was possible.

“Yes, we’re going to use Adriana’s body to gestate triplets,” she gushed. “We’re going to do it the natural way and just mix our six DNA patterns together randomly and see what comes up.”

“That sounds wonderful,” I congratulated her.

Composites weren’t just a meeting of minds. It enabled individual neurons in one body to connect with the billions of neurons in the attached composited bodies, using the pssi communication network to replace biological nerve signaling.

While this mimicked the dense connectivity of nerves themselves, it was creating neurological structures that had never existed, could never exist, in the real world, and people had already begun stretching the boundaries. Some had begun compositing with animals, with nano-assemblers, with robotics and artificial minds, even expanding their wetware into entirely synthetic spaces.

Life constantly evolved to fill new ecosystems as they emerged, and pssi had opened, not just a new ecosystem, but an endless ecosystem of ecosystems.  At the very start of the program, we’d begun experimenting with releasing the nervous systems of pssi infected biological animals into synthetic worlds, creating rules of nature there to allow them to evolve freely.

The results had been sometimes staggering. What was happening to humans as they released themselves into the pssi-augmented multiverse was an experiment in the making, and one we hadn’t had the luxury of time to understand. And all this had been just within the controlled and monitored experiment of Atopia, released into a few hundred thousand people living within a relatively homogeneous culture.

What would happen when this was freed, unchecked, into the billions of souls in the rest of the world, was anyone’s guess.

I felt like I was witnessing the cyber version of the Cambrian explosion a half a billion years ago, when the first elemental life had burst forth in diversity to cover the earth. Except instead of the Earth, life was now flooding into the endless reaches of the cyber multiverse, and instead of millions of years, evolution was now measured in weeks, days and hours.

“Our plan is let them decide whether they want to composite themselves or not,” continued Ormead, refocusing my wandering mind, “but it’s hard to imagine why they wouldn’t want to, knowing what we know now.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” was all I could say.

She’d started on a journey that I could scarcely imagine.

§

Sitting in my office, I was going over some research notes regarding Hurricane Ignacia. Needing a break, I decided to splinter in on a game of rag doll that some of the younger pssi-kids had started up in the Schoolyard. It was one thing to review data, but the data could never quite match the intuitive observations of actually sensing an event in process.

While the flitter tag game they played was straightforward from a game theory point of view, rag dolling wasn’t even really a game, and it was dominated by singular personalities.

Flitter tag had the organic feeling of birds flocking, the madly fluttering splinters of the children’s minds circling around each other in one body and then the next, in this world and then another. But rag dolling had an entirely different feeling to it, something decidedly uncomfortable. Watching these young pssi-kids at play, I couldn’t help getting the feeling there was something I wasn’t seeing.

The problem was in exactly what I couldn’t see. It was fairly simple to catalogue the changes to the body as people switched from one to the other, added phantoms and metasenses, or switched into entirely synthetic bodies in the metaworlds. We could even track the neurological adaptations going on.

The mind, however, was an emergent property of all this and more than just a sum of the parts. It was impossible to understand how minds were changing as a result.

As Alan Turing had observed in our conversations a century before, change the body and you have changed the mind. Where before this had been something of a philosophical point, here on Atopia it had a very immediate and tangible effect. All of humanity had previously shared the same physical morphology and therefore more or less the same minds, but no more.

The human mind was not just the brain. Our nervous systems extended throughout our entire bodies, including the ancient brain in our gut that was connected to our heads via the vagus nerve. When we said something was the result of gut thinking, it was truer than most people imagined.

By extension, human abstract thought was intimately tied to the entire human body; she gave me the cold shoulder, my hands were full, I couldn’t swallow it and so on. When we changed the body, we began to change the way our minds conceived of abstract thoughts, even the way it constructed thoughts themselves.

Almost as soon as they could communicate with us, pssi–kids had begun to use a lexicon of abstract expressions that I couldn’t properly understand, like splintered out, tubered, slivering, cloudy and many more that developed as they did.

But where we’d had pssi introduced into our wetware as adults and knew the difference between real and synthetic, the pssi–kids had grown up with the stimulus embedded. Most of the distinction was lost to them. Their brains and nervous systems had developed together with pssi, and their minds had started to become something different. They had become something different.

Changing the body was one thing, but changing the mind, now this was something else. As I watched these pssi-kids playing rag doll, I now had the eerie sensation of watching some alien creatures playing before me.

The rag doll collective suddenly stopped, and then looked straight at the point where I was observing it from. I hadn’t appeared in their sensory spaces, nor flagged my presence, so it couldn’t have known that I was watching, or even that I was there. And yet, it stopped and stared intently at where I would have been, as if they knew what I was thinking; as if they were staring straight into my soul.

Immediately I clicked out of that space and sat staring numbly at the wall of books in my office.

I shivered.

13

Identity: Jimmy Jones

“REGARDING OUR PROJECT, there is something I need you to do for me in return,” I said to Dr. Ganger. We were back on another walk through the hydroponics farms. He’d wanted an update and confirmation of our deal to put him first in line for the conscious transference project. “I want to be put into the research groups on memory and addiction.”

“Consider it done,” he agreed with a smile. Dr. Granger held out a hand to pass it through the green leaves of a plant we passed. He stopped to inspect one large, ripe tomato hanging in its branches.

“And I’ll need to get root access to Shimmer and your own pssi system.”

He let go of the tomato and turned to look at me. This was a highly unusual request, but then again, to become immortal, to secure his fame forever, this was worth anything to him.

“Yes, but with some provisos,” he replied slowly. “I’ll need to understand the details of what you want to do, but, yes.”

“Of course,” I agreed, “you also understand we need to keep this private between you and I.”

He narrowed his eyes and smiled.

“I don’t want Patricia to be a part of this,” I explained.

“Isn’t she like a mother to you?”

He was trying to measure an emotional response from me, but I just stared at him impassively.

I didn’t want Patricia knowing I wanted to do research work with Hal. She’d never liked him, and I didn’t want to create any more problems. On top of that, the project Hal and I were discussing was something Patricia didn’t know I was involved in.

As the lead on conscious perimeter security, my plate was already full, but I had a growing passion in the next evolving step of the pssi program—conscious transference. We were still a ways off, but we were slowly evolving ways to understand how the ethereal mind hovered somewhere within the physical cage of the brain, where the seat of consciousness and our sense of self came together. Immortality, or something approaching it, was close at hand.

Soon enough, as pssi flooded the world and all of mankind began flittering between gameworlds and sensorgies, an upgrade to their monthly pssi package would feature an option for conscious transference.

Transfer from what, they will ask, from my old body? That thing I haven’t seen in a year? And in an instant it will be done, the age old dream of immortality realized with as little fanfare as the click of a button. Then they’d leave their bodies to collect dust somewhere in the corner of a garage like an old television set, eventually to be thrown out.

In this context, ceding executive control to pssi was like offering up your eternal soul.

Hal really shouldn’t be quite so trusting, no matter what the possible gains. He was lucky he was dealing with me and not someone else.

“She loves you, you know,” he added, watching me, fishing for something. I grew impatient. Before I could say anything, he beat me to the punch.

“Sorry Jimmy, I don’t mean to test you—old habits die hard,” he laughed. “I very much appreciate this. Consider me at your disposal for anything.”

“Are you coming to the Infinixx launch tonight?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he replied sarcastically, obviously no fan of the Killiam clan.

I let it go. “Good, I really want everyone to be there.”

He nodded, returning his attention to the tomato plant.

“Anything you say, Jimmy.”

I nodded goodbye and clicked out of that sensory space. I was really looking forward to the launch.

14

Identity: Patricia Killiam

“TEN!… NINE!… EIGHT!…”

I looked out at the packed crowd in the Ballroom, feeling the excitement build, and in the background my splinter network scanned the nearly billion people who had tuned in to witness the launch of Infinixx.

“Aunt Pattie,” said Nancy, turning to look towards me with tears in her eyes, “I’ve decided that I’d like it to be you who throws the switch. All this, everything here is all because of you!”

The crowd continued to roar the countdown, “…six…”

It was her moment to shine, not mine.

“I’d love to sweetheart,” I replied quickly. My physical self was back helping Vince on another goose chase in the grow farms. Even if I’d wanted to, there was no way for me to throw this switch without my body here. “I had a last minute thing come up. You go ahead dear!”

My stomach balled into a knot, realizing something had gone horribly wrong before I even understood what it was. I flipped my pssi into identity mode to reveal a completely empty room. Not a soul was here physically, not even Nancy. I immediately realized the disaster that was about to unfold.

“…five…”

“Okay Jimmy, how about you then?” asked Nancy, still unaware. “Go ahead. I really wanted it to be one of you two.”

She released the switch and encouraged Jimmy to take it.

I tried to unlock the exterior security perimeter to bring a psombie guard into the room, but Nancy and Jimmy had the security keyed into them. I desperately pinged Jimmy for access.

At the same time I had Marie querying the proxxi of all the senior executives up on the stage with us. All of them had last minute plans for not coming physically, including me. They had all hidden their excuses because we’d asked them to come in person, thinking it wouldn’t make a difference. It was exactly what I had thought as well.

“…three…two…”

“I’m really sorry Nance,” replied Jimmy urgently. “I had something too. You go ahead…quick now!”

Jimmy’s face registered his surprise as my access control request hit his networks and he also understood the position we were in.

“…ONE!”

Nancy turned as white as a ghost when she realized what was happening. Her words of seconds ago now echoed in my mind, “All this, everything here is because of you.” An audible ‘snap’ rang out in the air as the Chinese and Indians flipped their own switches at their remote locations.

What was going on? Vince had asked me to come and help him, and to keep it a secret, but his futile pursuits were something I had set him on myself. I hadn’t planned this, and in fact I would have done almost anything to have stopped it from happening.

Already the world press had figured out what was going on. A Times article trumpeting “Infinixx—Everywhere but Nowhere!” was being filtered in to the main Ballroom display.

Lawyers from the Indian and Chinese sides had instantly filed lawsuits against Cognix claiming monumental damages. By now Jimmy had unlocked the exterior security perimeter, and I could see a psombie guard racing towards the stage.

“Forget it,” I heard echo in a distant splinter. It was Nancy speaking, her primary subjective still standing alone on the stage, completely destroyed.

§

Was I a woman who dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamt she was a woman? The butterfly in me now yearned to escape, and it was getting hard to mask the tiredness.

Immunosuppressant nanobots in my bloodstream had been attacking my own red blood cells after the latest round of genetic modification therapy, so I was now anemic, or something like this, my doctors were telling me.  Running away from one tiger, and leaping towards another.

In another splinter, right at the same time as the Infinixx launch was unfolding, I’d been holding a different press conference. The disaster had already sparked a destructive media tsunami, and I could see the smiles start spreading across the reporters’ faces while their incoming messages pinged and they looked up at me on the stage.

“In short,” I listened to myself saying to the reporters, “for things to remain the way they are, things must change.”

A few sniggers followed that comment, but these were obviously related to the Infinixx mess and nothing clever I was saying.

“Okay, next question,” I said quickly, wanting to get this over with. Only a small part of my consciousness was there, most of the rest of me was trying to calm Kesselring. We’d had the whole world tuned in for the launch. He was furious.

“The responsibility for Infinixx is yours,” fumed Kesselring. “This has injected serious uncertainty vectors into our phutures. Who knows what the ramifications could be. I’m going to have to remove you from the media circuit. The Killiam name is a joke now.”

“That’s fine with me,” I snorted. I’d been tired of the media road show for a long time already. He was posturing about the long range phutures, but I knew he was really annoyed about the declining price of the Cognix stock offering.

“The main timeline is holding steady,” I added after giving him a moment to stew. “It’s nothing to get excited about.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Nothing to get excited about? If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that you were behind this.”

“Why would I sabotage my own niece’s project?” I replied, rolling my eyes.

“You don’t think this looks suspicious? You turning around at the last minute, in fact, everyone turning away in the last seconds, even Nancy herself?”

He stood and stared at me. I looked away.

“I had to. Vince asked me for help. Do you think I could ignore him? After what we’ve done? Perhaps this was just a coincidence.”

“A coincidence?” snorted Kesselring. “You expect me to believe that?”

Shaking my head I quietly replied, “No, I guess that stretches believability.”

“It must be the Terra Novans somehow,” he said after a pause, shaking his head and looking off into space.  “You realize we’re going to have to remove Nancy as the head of Infinixx.”

At the same time, I had another splinter who was busy arguing with Hal. It was another battle of the happiness brigade regarding test results from the clinical trials on addiction.

Hal was in the middle of another of his monologues.

“As the world gets more complex, people begin to compensate by looking for escape,” Hal explained as my splinter assimilated into that reality. “Look at the rise in reports of paranormal phenomenon. We know it’s not real, even they know it’s not real, but they need the escape.”

“Okay Hal, I see your point, but just for instance, what about Cody Chavez?” my splinter demanded. We were in Hal’s new space, his office climbing ever higher in the Solomon House complex.

“Cody Chavez is perfectly happy and healthy,” argued Hal. “So he chooses to spend his days with reality skinned up so everyone looks like Elvis and global warming never happened. Cody knows this isn’t real. He’s just suspended disbelief for a while.”

“I think it’s a little more serious than simply suspending disbelief.”

“Cody was suffering from incurable anxiety, directly linked to the intractable problems he saw in the world. So he’s skinned up something to brighten his days, so what?” Hal shrugged and then wagged his finger in the air. “And all without drugs.”

It was just at that point that the Infinixx mess climaxed. I sighed.

“Can we resolve the issue of making the new tests public another time?” I asked.

He shook his head angrily. “Always an excuse with you, isn’t there Pat?”

“It’s just…”

He cut me off. “I know, Infinixx, disaster. The whole world knows, my dear.” He smiled cruelly.

I began to get angry.

“Fine then,” I said, switching gears, “doesn’t it bother you that we seem to be breeding a generation of lazy, self-absorbed sexual deviants with the pssi–kids? Is this where the pursuit of happiness leads us?”

“Deviants?” laughed Hal. “Lazy? Come now, Patricia, listen to yourself! Isn’t this just the same old accusation of parents about ‘kids these days’ down throughout the ages?”

I stopped for a moment and considered this.

“I think maybe you’re just too old,” added Hal with a nasty twinkle in his eye. “These kids do amazing things too, you know.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes. Maybe he was right, but then I knew a few things he didn’t. The weight bore down ever tighter.

“Forget the pssi–kids, then,” I conceded. “What about this disgusting trade in proxxids?”

He arched his eyebrows. “Again, deviants?”

“I, for one, hadn’t planned on starting a whole new industry in sexual tourism for pedophiles,” I complained. “Maybe this was what some of you had in mind, but I find it disgusting.”

“Sexual tourism is a gross exaggeration.”

I said nothing, shaking my head.

“Is it wrong, Patricia?” he countered coolly. “Is it wrong to have computer generated models of naked children if they’re not based on any real, specific child? Nobody is being exploited. It is a critical part of our therapy program for pedophiles.”

“Still…” I replied with revulsion.

“Again, this is just your own prejudice blinding you,” he continued, sensing my growing emotions and throwing them back in my face. “This is just the way they were made. The pedophiles can’t help it. It wasn’t that many generations ago that society reviled homosexuals the same way.”

“It’s not the same thing,” I objected.

“Isn’t it? Isn’t it better for them to come here and release themselves, to find a therapeutic path forward? Technology is leading a cultural advance and bringing this long maligned minority back into the fold.”

“It’s disgusting,” was all I could think to say. “It is absolutely disgusting.”

My mind was past the brink of exhaustion.

This was the path to happiness?

In yet another splinter, Marie and I were studying the fast evolving weather predictions.

Hurricane Ignacia was definitely crossing over from the Caribbean and into the Eastern Pacific to be renamed Olivia. Hurricane Newton, which had been spinning out into the Pacific as we backed away from it towards the coast, had now stopped and even slightly reversed its trajectory.

My projections soon had the Fujiawara effect taking hold to connect the two storm systems, with the center pivot at just the wrong point, preventing Atopia from escaping into the open Pacific between them.

As I discussed the merits of virtual economies with the reporters, defended myself from Kesselring, argued about the nature of happiness with Hal, and considered the hurricanes rushing towards us—I had a nauseating sensation of vertigo.

My visual fields distorted, ballooning outwards, and the hurricanes and reporters shredded into each other. Kesselring’s shocked face watched me blink suddenly out of his reality.

I abruptly collapsed into a deathly quiet, single subjective point of view. Exactly where or why, I had no idea.

Marie, my proxxi, was standing over me, staring into my eyes. Everything was perfectly still. An impossibly long, incredibly thin rope stretched from the infinite blue void above to wrap itself tightly around my waist. I was suspended above a yawning black pit, set in the middle of an endless green field, all under a flawless sky.

“The news isn’t good I’m afraid,” Marie informed me, shaking her head.

Tell me something I didn’t know.

The rope tightened around my waist, slowly choking out my lifeblood. I could feel the tigers charging across the sky towards me, their silent roars ringing in my deaf ears.

Fascinated, I watched as busy and purposeful nanobots ate away at the thin cord holding me suspended in space. Below me, in the blackness of the pit, an unseen monster grunted and slobbered. This can’t last forever, I thought to myself as I drifted in and out of consciousness.

I can’t last forever.

15

Identity: Jimmy Jones

“I HEARD THAT Kesselring put you in charge of Infinixx?”

“Just temporarily,” I sighed to Commander Rick Strong, shaking my head, “someone has to hold down the fort.”

Rick winced. “Sorry, I didn’t mean…I mean, how is Patricia doing?”

After the Infinixx mess, Patricia had suffered some kind of stroke. Not really a stroke. There hadn’t been any physical brain damage, but it had been more of an overload of her pssi system. She was recovering, but they were keeping under surveillance and isolated for the moment.

“She’ll be fine,” I said after a pause. “I spoke to her this morning. She said she’ll be back in the office by tomorrow.”

We both returned our attention to the presentation going on explaining ways someone could be directing the storms.

“There is something very unnatural going on here,” explained our mandroid guest to the assembled Command team. With that statement, she reached down with one slender metallic arm to adjust the jumpsuit hugging her thin, metallic legs. “These storms are definitely being driven by some artificial means.”

It was early Saturday morning, but we’d all been called into Command to review scenarios around the growing threat of the hurricanes that were beginning to pin Atopia against the coast of America.

“So you think the Terra Novans are involved?” asked Commander Strong. He’d been drinking again. Things were going badly with his wife.

“We’re not sure,” responded the mandroid.

“So then where is this coming from?” Rick demanded impatiently, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He looked like he had a headache.

“We can’t say for certain yet,” she repeated, “but there’s something too perfect about these storms.”

“Jimmy, do you think you could look into this more?” asked Rick, looking away from the mandroid and towards me. “I need to go and see Cindy.”

“No problem,” I replied. He was about to flit off when I remembered something. “Oh, yeah, I have that date tonight, if you remember.”

Rick looked up towards the ceiling. “Susie, right? That’s going well, huh?”

He smiled. I shrugged.

“I can cancel if you want.”

“No, no, keep the date. You can’t let stuff like this stop you from living life,” he sighed. “Anyway, I know you’ll keep a few splinters around if I need you. I’ll be back later.”

With that he flitted off, and I returned my focus to the storms and our mandroid guest. More than one thing wasn’t right here.

§

It was my third date with Susie, and for this one, I’d received an invitation to meet in her own private world. It was a sensual, mystical place where the sun was eternally setting. She wanted to go for a walk outside her enclave, to chat, and so I found myself walking through a valley of knotted oaks and blossoming cherry trees that offered hidden glimpses of fantastical canyon walls beyond them. Waterfalls spilled into clouds of mist from high, craggy cliffs, and everything twinkled in shades of silver and gold.

As we walked, she gently brushed aside a patch of yellow orchids that she stepped through as tenderly if they were children at play. The woody atmosphere was perfect and synthetically warm, but slightly cloying under an indistinct vanilla sky. Her long flaxen hair spilled down her back, held in place by a garland of white flowers, and a flowing translucent gown revealing hints of her tiny body beneath.

The breeze swept waves of glittering cherry blossoms and silvery oak leaves around us like a snowstorm, and fireflies sparkled in our wake while we walked through the gathering dusk.

“How is Patricia?” she asked. It was common knowledge we were close.

“She’ll be fine,” I replied with a smile. “She’s very old, these things happen. The doctors say she’ll be back good as new tomorrow, or the next day.”

“Good.” She smiled warmly, but then her eyes clouded over. “And these storms, we’re not in any danger are we? I guess it can’t be that serious if you’re here.” Her smile returned.

“Don’t worry about the storms,” I assured her. “I wouldn’t advise going topside when they get here, but we’ll be fine.”

“Double good,” she laughed. Then she flinched, her side spasming.

It was some event out in the world, some type of disaster that had sparked into her body. She had such an exquisitely tuned neural pain network; it was what had attracted me to her. She smiled at me as the spasm subsided.

“It’s nothing,” she smiled. “I have this…”

“I know,” I interrupted gently. “No need to explain.”

I reached down to hold her hand, and she smiled, watching me.

“So, Mr. Jimmy Jones, my friend Willy speaks very highly of you,” Susie laughed.

I walked with my hands behind my back, formal, slightly stiff, and was wearing my ADF Whites. There could have hardly been a starker contract between the two of us.

She laughed, and spun out in front of me, reaching up to snatch a blossom out of the air. She stopped in front of me, curtsied, and offered me the blossom. Her eyes were full of mischievousness.

“So what would an ADF officer want with me?” she laughed.

“I need your help. It’s hard to explain.”

“Need my help?” she giggled. “I thought this was a date?” She pouted playfully.

“It is.” I looked down and away, trying to appear embarrassed. “I mean, I feel like you’re someone who could be really special to me.”

She danced away from me, trailing her hands through the flowers.

“Oh I’ve looked you up, Jim–bob Jonesee…that incident with the bugs…” she laughed, and then stopped to turn to look at me. “That was a bit odd, don’t you think?”

I winced.

“I was just a kid. I was a kid trying to find a way to deal with my pain,” I tried to explain. “You wouldn’t understand, nobody does…how could you, you grew up with such love.”

She considered me for a moment. “What do you mean?”

I was silent.

“Jimmy?” she asked again, softer this time.

My face reflected sorrowful pain. “My friends call me James.”

She nodded. “Okay then, what is it, James?”

“I’ve never shared this with anyone, Susie. I don’t know why I feel like I can share this with you. Can we make this private?”

“Of course,” she replied, pulling down a glittering golden security blanket around us.

I took a deep breath.

“My mother, well, she…” I tried to say, but stopped as I let a tear glisten in my eye. I sat down on a nearby tree stump. Susie came to sit beside me, and put her hand on mine and squeezed it. She said nothing, but just waited.

“It would be easier if I showed you,” I said looking into her eyes. She nodded and released her subjective control to me.

Suddenly Susie and I we were sitting in a corner of the Misbehave world my mother had created to punish me in.

We were reliving a rendering of my inVerse from when I was barely two, and in front of us, sitting on chair in the middle of an empty concrete room was Mother, suspending my tiny two year old body in the air by one arm.

“It’s all your fault!” she spat in my tiny face, the veins in her forehead swelling. She fumbled with some pssi controls and then reached inside my body to dig her synthetic nails deep into my nervous system, scraping them down the length of the neural pain receptors in my body. I screamed in unimaginable agony.

“Shut up, you little bastard. Nobody can hear you in here. Just shut up!” she yelled at me. I screamed and screamed, my little face purple and apoplectic.

Susie wrapped her arms around me, horrified, and tears welled up in her eyes.

“Turn it off James, please!” she cried, and then, just as quickly, we were back in the forest, with the cherry blossoms gently settling around us, sitting on the tree stump amid the deep grass and swaying flowers.

She held onto me tightly and cried. I sat impassively, and leaned to kiss the top of her head.

“I’m so sorry, James,” she just kept repeating. “I’ll do everything I can to help you.”

“It wasn’t just my mother,” I said after a moment, letting my voice crack a little. I looked away.

“What else?” she asked. “Show me.”

So I did. I took her back into another silently screaming night in my small sweaty body, the prison of my childhood world.

It had been a bright and sunny day, and my dad and I had just returned from fishing with the dolphins. Mother was off in another one of her never ending soapstim fantasies, and Yolanda had just finished making us dinner and chatting about the day.

Yolanda liked the dolphins too. I took her on inVerse dives with Samantha, and she would clap her hands and laugh with me.

Later, alone, and with a security blanket settled around the house for the evening, my dad tucked me into bed, and then crawled in beside me to cuddle.

“You had a good time with Samantha and the dolphins today, right, Jimmy?” asked my dad, holding me tight, brushing back a few golden locks of hair from my pale face. I nodded, my little heart beating faster with creeping terror.

“It’s okay if daddy holds you for a while, right Jimmy?” he asked, pleadingly. “Daddy gets lonely sometimes too.”

I nodded, trembling now, feeling his hands on me, feeling his hands on places that felt wrong. I loved my dad, and I could sense he needed something from me. He had been nice with me that day, bringing some joy into my dark and constricted little life.

So I let him touch me. I disappeared down my rabbit hole and into the recesses of the pssi system. He touched me all over with his real hands, his phantom hands, enveloping my body while pleasuring himself.

I cowered in the depths with my make believe friends.

“Don’t tell anybody about these times with Daddy, okay Jimmy? It’s a secret between you and me. If you can do that, I’ll make sure to take you out to play with Samantha, okay?”

It seemed like a reasonable deal to me at the time, so I hid inside and waited for the bright days of rocketing through the foam and spray.

As I snapped us back into real space, Susie had begun crying again. I was crying too.

She looked into my eyes. “James, we can tell people, we can punish them…you poor soul…”

“It won’t change anything, Susie, but you can help me.”

“How James? I’m so sorry. I’ll do anything to help.”

“I just need you to do something for me.”

16

Identity: Patricia Killiam

IT HAD TAKEN me two full days to recover, and in that time, a world already spinning out of control had suddenly taken an even steeper descent into chaos.

We’d started hardening Atopia for the now inevitable collision with the storms, and an escalation process was being discussed regarding possible evacuations. The rate of unexplained disappearances was spiking again, and in the midst of all this, I received a ping that Rick’s wife had committed some kind of reality suicide.

It seemed she hadn’t been terminating the proxxids. It wasn’t hard to guess what had happened.

“How is your wife doing, Rick?”

It was the end of a long day for everyone as we’d begun planning for possible disaster, but longest of all for Rick. I was at a loss for words. Reality suicide was a new phenomenon, deeply tied into the way pssi interacted with our unconscious minds, and just one more thing we didn’t understand properly yet.

I’d asked for this emergency meeting with Rick because my communication network with Command had suddenly been shut off, and nobody was responding to me.

“It’s hard to tell,” he replied unsteadily. “I mean, she looks fine. She looks like she’s asleep. I wish…”

“I don’t think blaming yourself is going to help,” I offered. “Anyway, we haven’t managed to crack the security blankets covering the worlds she was in before this happened, so we really don’t know what the full story is yet.”

Rick wiped his face with the back of one hand and stared down at the floor. We were sitting in my mahogany walled office. Pictures of ancient, four-masted sailing ships lined the walls.

“We know enough of the story to know how we got here,” he said with a dead voice, on the edge of tears. Then his mood shifted abruptly.

“This is your fault Patricia. You recommended using the proxxids,” he spat out venomously, looking up at me with menacing eyes. “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”

I recoiled slightly. This was a combat soldier after all.

“I don’t think laying blame is constructive at this point,” I began to say. I hadn’t exactly recommended them.

“We’re all just lab rats to you, aren’t we?” he growled, venting his anger. “I know what you let people do with proxxids—I’ve looked into the whole thing in more detail—it’s disgusting. You disgust me.” His breathing was ragged now. “You have no idea what you’re doing here, what you’re doing to people, do you? We’re just guinea pigs to you.”

He gathered himself and looked down at the floor, containing his emotions. I didn’t know what to say.

“Rick I’m sorry…”

“Sorry just isn’t good enough. Time for experimentation and best efforts is over,” he stated flatly. He stood up.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Getting away from these storms, we’ll be taking control from here on. This is now a military matter.”

He shook his head, averting my eyes, and without another word flitted off to disappear out of my office and back to Command, not even leaving a polite splinter behind.

I was stunned.

The storms had continued to defy phuturecasts and we were running out of room to back away from them. It was obvious something was directing them, but despite swarming the seas with smarticles and drones and everything else we could throw at it, we couldn’t even begin to stop them or understand how it was happening.

Usually two storm systems of this magnitude, in one oceanic basin, tended to dissipate, one into the other, but these two were pumping each other up and expanding.

It was unlikely that we’d sustain core structural damage even in a direct hit by either or both of them, but that was making the sorts of assumptions that trapped us here in the first place.

Now I understood why my communications had been cut off. Rick was formally taking control and declaring an emergency. All civil power was now in the hands of ADF Command.

“Marie, could you splinter me that latest report?”

I reached down to smooth out a wrinkle in my skirt, trying to regain my composure. Marie looked up at me from some files she was studying from the chair she was sitting in at the side of my office.

“We’ve had something of a breakthrough,” she responded excitedly. “The high surface temperatures seem to be caused by migrations of dinoflagellate blooms. Someone out there has been planning this for a long time.”

She splintered me all the data sheets before continuing.

“It looks like they seeded the ocean surface with iron dust to grow some bioengineered plankton and they’re now directing huge swarms of the little creatures, basically sucking energy from one part of the ocean and into another. Definitely bioengineered and directed.”

“Can we stop it? Can we find out who’s doing it?” I asked. She shook her head. “Was Sintil8 able to find anything for us?”

“He was some help,” she replied with a nod. “What we’re looking at could be a new addition to the Weather Wars arsenal.”

I sighed. Directed cyclone warfare could add a whole new wonderful chapter to the ongoing book of human conflict. Of course, weather had always been a decisive factor in war.

My personal favorite, a story my father had told me as a child, had been the defeat of the Spanish Armada by England five hundred years ago. The British victory had less to do with the genius of Sir Francis Drake than simply a week of wind that had pinned the Armada against the French side of the English Channel. The wind had held the Spanish in place, giving the British ‘weather gage’ to float fire ships into the hapless Spaniards, destroying the fleet before it even had a chance to attack.

The defeat of the Armada had halted the Habsburg invasion of land forces, at that moment poised to cross over from the Netherlands. The direction of wind for a few short days had dictated the outcome of the next five hundred years of global geopolitics, even the rise of America itself as a superpower.

What we faced now was far more than simply a wind in the wrong direction.

“We can’t fire weapons at blooms of microorganisms, nor at hurricanes,” added Marie. “We’re just going to have to stay out of their way as much as possible. If you want more of a run down, you’re better off speaking with Jimmy.”

Even that was going to be difficult now, given the state Rick was in. And the list of possible suspects behind these storms was worryingly thin.

“Or perhaps Bob?” I suggested, thinking about who may be able to provide some fresh insight. “He has a curious relationship with directing little creatures like you’re describing. Why don’t you talk with him?”

Marie nodded. “I’ll see if I can get some input from him.”

She paused.

“What?” I asked. I could see she had something else on her mind.

“It’s strange,” Marie answered. “Yes, we can see how they’re doing it, but the numbers don’t quite add up. Even with what we’ve discovered, they shouldn’t be able to direct weather as severe as this.”

I didn’t understand. “Could you be more precise?”

“It just doesn’t add up,” was all she could say, shaking her head.

“It sure doesn’t.”

Too many things were unexplained, too many loose ends were accumulating, and Rick was right—we didn’t know what we were doing anymore. I was going to have to stop this freight train, even if it meant risking everything.

“Well, keep on it,” I told her. “I’m going to see about talking with Jimmy.”

I sent him an emergency ping. I needed to collect as much information as I could.

To my surprise, Jimmy accepted right away, and my office faded out as my primary subjective was channeled into a private deprivation space, surrounded by a heavy security blanket. Jimmy wasn’t there, but his communication network was open to me.

I felt ill at ease.

“Jimmy,” I called out into the dimensionless emptiness, “what can you tell me?”

17

Identity: Jimmy Jones

I HELD PATRICIA carefully in the anonymous security blanket. Rick wouldn’t be happy finding me talking to her right now.

“Things are under control at Command,” I replied. “Preparing for a state of emergency is just a precaution, and having the tourists leave is the sensible first step.”

“I don’t disagree. What I mean is—do you know who’s doing this?” Patricia rephrased.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

She took a deep breath. “So you really think it’s the Terra Novans? Do you have proof?”

“No,” I admitted, “but who else could it be?”

Everyone knew they wanted to slow down the pssi program to give their own program a chance in the market. The commercial stakes were huge.

“We need proof, Jimmy…it doesn’t make sense. The risk of an offensive like this completely exceeds the potential returns. I need you to find out what’s going on.”

“I’m on it, Pat,” I replied, now a little exasperated.

“And keep an eye on Rick, please Jimmy, he’s shut me out now. I know you understand. And please, put your energy into finding out where this is coming from.”

This began to feel like nagging.

“I will Pat, I promise.”

“I love you Jimmy. You take care, okay?”

“I will,” was all I responded. She looked hurt. “Bye for now.”

I cut off the channel. She knew how busy I was.

It was hard to concentrate on her needs with my mind so widely splintered. Samson and I were spread far and wide throughout the multiverse now, trying to find clues as to how someone had targeted us like this without us getting advance notice.

I knew Rick’s wife had been depressed, we’d all been very concerned, but this reality suicide had taken things on a new and disturbing path.

It was, however, something I could relate to. My own mother had been a drunk and a soapstim junkie. It was bad enough to be disinterested enough in your own life to just patch into someone else’s, but Mother didn’t even go that far.

Her favorite pastime had been to patch into synthetic soaps, an endless universe of autonomously generated and farcically campy dramatic romance worlds.

Mother hadn’t even bothered to give up her life for someone else’s experience—she’d given it up for an empty, soulless simulation. I guess it was like a gameworld for her, but instead of facing down some challenge, she just sensed it all passively while the soapstim told her that her ex-husband wasn’t dead, but had actually been in a coma for twenty years and was now in love with her step-sister’s boyfriend, or some other such nonsense.

Living in passive fantasy worlds had made my mother’s return to her lacking life, that much more painful. Being out for so long all the time, her brain’s wetware lost much of its neural connectivity with her body.

When she returned, she had to drive her body around using her proxxi Yolanda as an interface to her intentions. It gave her a jerky, unnatural way of moving, which just fuelled her frustration and empty anger. They called people like Mother soapstim junkies.

“You little worm!” she would scream at me as she settled back into her body after a particularly long session, already a few drinks into calming her nerves.

Mother wasn’t very technical, but she had figured out, even back then, how to use the security blankets to screen her sessions with me from the outside wikiworlds.

“It’s all your fault!” she would slur out accusingly. “That dirty bastard.”

As a parent she had full access to my pssi, and I had no way of blocking her out until I gained full control of it myself, which only my parents had the right to grant me when they felt I was ready.

Even as a toddler, I began to learn ways to hide and crawl into the cracks of the pssi system, deep down into the darkest corners away from others. I slowly began to find ways around the blocks and cages Mother tried to keep me in, sliding past the pssi controls to hide. Samson would crawl in with me, along with all the friends we’d created to hide together with us.

In her worst moods she would amp up my pain receptors and reach into me virtually to squeeze, pinch and pull on my tiny nervous system. It left no physical marks, but it was excruciatingly painful, and I would squeal and scream in the private Misbehave world she’d created for that form of punishment.

Down, down I would dive, into the deepest recesses of my body, trying to hide my consciousness in the sub-molecular gaps between my stinging, screaming neurons as she tortured me mercilessly, sinking her virtual nails into my pain centers for crimes I didn’t understand.

I never understood what I’d done wrong, but I assumed I must have been bad. Samson would just sit beside me, staring numbly while she abused me.

The learning bots and teachers at the Academy noticed I was falling behind the other children, but they just thought I was slower. In their calculations they figured I needed more attention from Mother.

“Gretchen,” explained Ms. Parnassus, our only human teacher, at the first parent teacher interview near the end of my first year at the Academy, “I think you need to restrict his access to the gameworlds. He seems distracted, like he wants to be somewhere else all the time.”

“I do, I try,” admitted Mother truthfully. She did try her best to cut me off from everyone else.

“I try to take the time for private lessons with him as often as I can,” she added with a sweet, crocodilian smile, “but you know how it is. He can be such a handful.”

Ms. Parnassus smiled at the both of us.

“Isn’t that right, Jimmy?” Mother added, turning to me, flashing her teeth. “You don’t want to Misbehave do you?”

I sat terrified beside her, a shell hiding inside a shell. I didn’t want to do anything to anger her, and I desperately didn’t want to be snatched off to Misbehave, so I shook my head and smiled bravely, holding back tears.

“He’s a bright child,” said Ms. Parnassus. “He scores extremely high in the gaming systems, but he seems to have a hard time socializing.”

I’d never really gotten on well with the other kids in the Schoolyard, the education portal world balanced halfway between real and synthetic where pssi-kids played growing up. I was extremely shy, and mostly played by myself, but Bob and Sid sometimes managed to drag me into the occasional game of flitter tag with the rest of the kids.

Without escape to my own private worlds, and restricted to the Schoolyard, I found it extremely difficult to focus my mind.

“And he’s a little devil to keep on hand,” added Ms. Parnassus, “he slips and slides away if you don’t watch him every second!”

“That he is,” agreed Mother, nodding, “and that he does.”

“His mind seems to be always somewhere else,” continued Ms. Parnassus. “It’s very hard to keep him focused.”

“Oh, he’s just always been that way, haven’t you Jimmy?”

Mother fluffed my hair. I was terrified.

“Does he have any special things that you do together? Stuff that just you and him do when you play?”

“Oh, you and your daddy play, don’t you Jimmy?” laughed my mother gaily, smiling at me cruelly.

“That’s nice,” said Ms. Parnassus, “is there anything he’s particularly good at when you play together?”

“The little rascal is very good at hiding,” admitted Mother, crinkling her nose at me, showing her teeth.

“Oh, like hide and seek?” asked Ms. Parnassus enthusiastically.

“Something like that.”

It was funny, my mother being so cruel and yet so honest in front of her. If there was any game that I was good at, it was hide and seek.

I was the master of hiding in plain sight.

18

Identity: Patricia Killiam

OF ALL THE illusions our minds used to support their ephemeral frameworks, time was certainly the most contradictory; both incontrovertible and yet intangible.

Time’s arrow was just a slide down entropy hill, as the universe tended towards its finale of disorderly conduct. At the end of entropy was the end of change, and thus the end of time, and apparently I was about to cease changing myself.

“I’m sorry Patricia,” said my doctor. We were disembodied, floating in black space between millions of phosphorescent dots that brightly raced to and fro, spreading out through the root systems of my basal ganglia. The doctor and I were examining my brain.

“So there’s nothing more we can do?” I asked.

“We can’t push this any further with the technology we have. I’m afraid things have suddenly taken a turn for the worse,” he explained. “There are some experimental treatments we can try, but we can’t promise anything.”

I watched the dots of light racing around, trying to fully make the leap of understanding that I was watching myself from inside myself.

The doctor was at a loss to explain what was happening, but I had a growing suspicion I knew what it could be. If I was right, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stop it.

“Well, please do what you can, doctor.” An illusion perhaps, but time still stubbornly seemed to end for those of us witnessing its chimera in action. “I just need a little more time.”

“Don’t we all,” replied the doctor, watching the neon pulses of my nervous system race around us, “don’t we all.”

§

Floating up at the edge of space, we watched the two converging hurricanes swirling ominously in three dimensions below us. We had almost all of Command and Security up there with us, watching the storms below us as we ran the simulations. They were building in intensity now, past Category 4, and like two enormous threshing wheels they threatened to pin and crush Atopia against the West Coast.

We were still holding our own as we backed away, but we’d almost run out of room. The way they were gaining strength it was obvious we were going to end up taking some damage, the only question was how much.

They’d quickly shipped off almost all of the tourists via the passenger cannon, but it would be impossible to get everyone off Atopia if the worst happened. Honestly, nobody even seemed to want to leave.

“We absolutely need to order an evacuation of the outer habitats,” I observed.

Everyone looked towards me. I’d been cut off from the Command communications and control network, but I was still a part of the Board. I had a right to be there.

“At the speed we’ve been moving, the kelp forests are already beginning to shear off,” I added. “No matter which way this goes, we’re going to lose most of it.”

This had serious implications. The kelp forests were the foundation of our ecosystem, and it was no good looking to America for help if we ran out of food for our million plus inhabitants.

The last time California had sustained a direct hit had been over a hundred years ago, with the hurricane of 1939 that had slammed into Los Angeles. This time, it would be two at once, and of far greater magnitude. On top of this, tropical storm John, thought to be dead weeks ago, had somehow regained strength and was now reversing direction towards us.

“Whoever’s responsible is going to pay for this act of war,” growled Kesselring, pointing an accusing finger down at the storms below. “It has to be Terra Nova!”

“We don’t know that for certain,” I pointed out, but this was the wrong thing to say.

“Not for certain? Who else could it be?” raged Kesselring. “A bioengineered organism seeded across two oceans, quietly and busily sucking up the sun’s energy and swimming about to pump up and guide these storm systems. Who the hell else could pull this off?”

“Right now what is more important is surviving this,” said Jimmy, redirecting Kesselring’s focus. “These organisms were planted years ago. We’ve put in place detection systems to stop this from ever happening again, but for now we just need to deal with it.”

Kesselring seemed to relax listening to Jimmy.

“So what’s the worst case situation?” asked Kesselring, calmly now. “Give me the worst case scenario. I want to know how bad this can get so we can plan around it.”

I was about to speak up when Jimmy waved me off.

“The worst case is that Atopia will be run aground on the continental shelf just south of Los Angeles. There may be some sustained damage to the outer habitats, but the structure will be more than strong enough to withstand the storms. The fusion core should remain stable, although some of Atopia’s data systems will probably go offline.”

I shook my head. “The worst scenario, Jimmy, is that these progress to Category 5 and beyond and crush us between them. Atopia would sustain major damage and our data systems will definitely go offline. The fusion core should remain stable though, and I doubt we’d sink.”

“Should remain stable? Doubt we’d sink? That’s supposed to be comforting?” Kesselring fumed. “So even at best we’ll end up beached in American territorial waters? This is a fucking disaster. We need to find a way out of this.”

“Should we plan on delaying the release?” I asked in a careful voice.

“No,” replied Jimmy, raising some eyebrows. My question had been addressed to Kesselring.

“The one thing we have going for us right now is that the world still sees us in control,” continued Jimmy. “The public doesn’t perceive Atopia as being in any danger, even with these storms, so the pssi release schedule isn’t in any danger. If we begin delaying the release, we’ll open up a can of worms that will spill out uncontrollably, and who knows what else Terra Nova has planned.”

“Exactly, we have no idea what whoever planned this has in store,” I argued. “We need to initiate contingency plans immediately!”

“No, let’s not go down that path yet,” replied Jimmy calmly. “Give me six hours to assemble a special team and I’ll figure a path through this. We will not give up this easily.”

“My vote is with Jim,” said Hal immediately, looking towards Kesselring.

Jimmy looked up and around at the assembled Council members one by one, earning a nod from each.

§

As the Security Council meeting broke up, I materialized back in my office under an extremely heavy security blanket. Marie was there waiting for me.

“So it seems that we may yet be doomed to relive the past,” she said as I arrived. “Atopia, the island-city of the future, filled with magical beasts and people, may slip beneath the waves—legend passing into legend.”

I sighed.

“We have to slow down the release,” I said flatly, “or at least stop it for now.”

Things were moving so fast now that the phutures had completely destabilized. Everyone’s resolve to keep the program on track despite the mounting risks had been the last straw to force me into unilateral action. Things were out of control. I could see I would be alone in this.

“Give Sintil8 our authentication key to initiate,” I informed Marie. The pssi program would suffer in the short term, but it needed to be done.

“And did you set-up the meeting with the Terra Novans?” I asked. The time had come to lay all our cards on the table, for everyone’s benefit.

Marie nodded. If ever a proxxi could look nervous, she did now.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of this. I’m going to slow things down,” I added, trying to console Marie, or perhaps myself. “Something is happening with Jimmy I don’t understand, like someone else is controlling him.”

That thought floated quietly for a few moments.

“Well, no time like the present,” I said with a sigh, breaking the silence.

I pinged an urgent request for Jimmy to come down to my office in his first subjective. Marie made her own subjective scarce.

Leaning back in my chair, I tried to think of the right way to bring up a new and troubling discovery.

A moment later Jimmy appeared in one of my attending chairs, looking slightly annoyed. This was the new Jimmy of late, and I felt distinctly uncomfortable again.

“Patricia, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now,” he said impatiently. “What’s up that’s so important?”

I looked towards the ceiling, and then back at Jimmy, watching him carefully.

“Jimmy, I’ve been trying to locate your parents, but I can’t seem to find them anywhere out there.”

Jimmy looked at me and shrugged.

“I have no idea where they are. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t care less.”

“So you have no idea?” I asked again.

I’d taken a huge chance at the meeting by secretly installing invasive pssi–probes into the smarticle cloud during the session to get a bead on whether people were lying or telling the truth. As far as my probes could tell, so far Jimmy had been telling the truth, and he continued to.

“Nope. The last I heard, they were back in Louisiana, did you send some bots to track around down there?”

“Yes. Yes, I did try that. In fact, I’ve tried everything I can think of to locate them,” I answered, nodding.

Jimmy’s face darkened.

“Just like you can’t find the dolphins, right Patricia?”

Where was this coming from?

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What dolphins?”

Years ago there had been an unresolved security incident that had been the beginning of the end of civil relations with Terra Nova. One of the outcomes had been the revocation of the work permits for the uplifted dolphins. We’d had to send them all back to Terra Nova, but they’d been all happy and healthy. I’d even checked in on the beautiful creatures myself after they’d been sent home.

Looking at him, I realized something was very wrong.

19

Identity: Jimmy Jones

I HELD PATRICIA’S gaze firmly, feeling anger begin to boil in me. Right now I just didn’t have time for this. I still felt a lot of affection for her, after all she had done for me, but it was hard to forgive her for the death of my beloved Samantha.

“Look, I don’t have any answers for you,” I replied with finality. Shaking my head impatiently, I clicked off my primary and left a splinter to continue chatting with her so I could get back to figuring out these storms.

I honestly didn’t know where my parents were. We hadn’t kept in touch after they’d left Atopia, or abandoned me here was more accurate. I was only fourteen at the time, but Patricia had already begun to take me under her wing by then. When they’d left so abruptly, she’d swooped in like a savior angel, pulling me in tight.

I felt bad about being so short with Patricia, but lately, I hadn’t had any time. To be honest, I’d found that talking to her had started to annoy me as I discovered the hypocrisies surrounding her. I felt like her loyalty to the cause, her own cause, just wasn’t there anymore.

On the other hand, if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t even be where I was. I remembered clearly the moment when Patricia had first come into my life. Almost involuntarily, a splinter wandered off back into my inVerse to experience the moment again, perhaps to try and rebuild my bond with Patricia as I felt it slipping.

§

Soon after my fourth birthday, Patricia had dropped in for a visit with my parents. Nancy Killiam and I were distant cousins, but our side of the family was where the dark horses ran. Patricia had seen an opportunity to bring us back into the fold when Atopia was being planned, and had extended a generous offer to my parents, Gretchen and Phil, to come on board the project.

It hadn’t exactly worked out as my family had hoped, or at least as my mother had hoped. She’d assumed that we’d be going for a drive down entitlement road. In reality, we’d ended up in a cramped three room cell near the bottom of the Atopian seascraper complex, hundreds of feet below the waterline.

Patricia’s visit that day had been both rare and uncomfortable.

“We’ve been following Jim lately,” said Patricia back then, accepting a hot cup of coffee from my mother’s proxxi, “and your boy is showing some really amazing talents.”

Mother just grimaced. “You’re sure you have the right Jimmy? Little stinker here is only good at hiding from mummy, aren’t you?”

Patricia watched Mother carefully.

“Yes, he is extremely good at hiding and evading. He manages to slip through some of our tightest security fences like a little fish wriggling through our fingers.” Patricia smiled as she said this.

“Yes, a little fish!” exclaimed Mother, ruffling my hair, holding me beside her and trying to exude loving motherhoodness. I flinched like a hand shy puppy.

“Gretchen, there’s something else.”

“Yes? What is it, Patricia? Nothing serious I hope.”

“Well, at Jimmy’s last checkup, his nociceptive pathways are showing some very unusual activity. We’d like to add his data feed to the child monitoring network, is that okay with you?”

“His what?” asked my mother irritably.

“His pain receptors, the neural pathways from his pain receptors.”

“And what’s unusual about them?” demanded Mother.

“It’s unusual is all. It’s like they’re in some kind of disarray. He doesn’t complain of any unusual pain does he?”

“No, of course not, do you Jimmy?” Mother asked, her smile menacing me.

Wide eyed, I shook my head.

“Okay then, good. So can we add him to the monitoring system?”

Silence.

“Patricia, we’ve been over this a thousand times before with the Solomon House staff. We have our right to privacy. This is my family, and I’m happy to be here, but there are limits!” Mother cried out, overreacting theatrically.

Despite the histrionics, she had a valid point. Atopia was founded on strict liberal principles, and with the advent of pssi, stringent security requirements had been baked into the foundations of law and electronic systems governing it.

Individuals, and by extension families, had an absolute right to their privacy, unless there was some good reason otherwise.

“Is there anything wrong with Jimmy?” asked Mother. “Is he healthy?”

Patricia sighed. “He is perfectly healthy. His mind is distracted and there is some unusual neurological activity, but physically, he’s perfect.”

“Well then…”

Patricia thought for a moment, and then stood and walked to our side of the table and sat down on the couch next to us. She put her arm around me.

“Well then, I’d like to take a more active role in Jim’s development, if that’s okay with you. As a teacher, if you see what I mean. I don’t want to intrude on your mothering, of course.”

Mother eyed her for a moment, weighing the situation.

“Oh don’t be silly, that would be an honor, of course,” she replied brightly after a moment. “Wouldn’t it Jimmy?”

Mother told me more than asked me, her eyes locking onto mine.

I just sat dumbly between the two of them, unable to say anything, cringing, thinking that Patricia was about to become part and parcel of some new awfulness in my little life. Fearful of what horrors awaited me, I dug in deeper and deeper, building my shell.

As Patricia got up and left, I slipped off quickly away to hide, sliding away into tiny worlds within tiny worlds.

Mother gave chase, eventually finding and cornering me in the Little Great Little, past fields of glowing jellies, under a thunderfall whose white sensory noise I often hid behind.

“I know you hide here, little worm,” said Mother, her voice oozing venom. “Don’t think I don’t know where you go.”

Then she appeared, finding me cowering in a corner. Hate distorted her features here, her skin flaking red and crimson and her hands turning into fearsome claws that she gripped and squeezed me with.

Pulling down a tight security blanket around us, she squeezed me until I thought I would pop. I squirmed and whimpered.

“Not a word to Aunt Pattie, little worm, do you understand? If you say anything to anyone, I will tell them all about you and your daddy? Do you want that?”

Smiling at me, she laughed from a fanged and fearsome mouth.

“No mummy,” I squealed out, “not a word, of course not.” I began to cry.

“Such a little cry baby,” Mother taunted. “None of this is real.”

She waved her claws around at the purple canyon walls. With that she was gone, popping out of the Little Great Little and into another one of her soapstim fantasies to burrow away from her own pain.

Dad must have known something was going on, because he appeared just after Mother left, looking pale and dejected.

“Don’t say anything about you and me, Jimmy. It’s secret, you know? They would put me away in the farms if you told anyone, Jimmy. Do you want to do that to your dad?”

I shook my head. Samson, who had remained quiet, emerged smoothly from his hiding place in the thunderfall to take my hand, and we sat down together holding hands. I cried. Dad just left us there without saying another word.

My fascination with pain began very early. I can remember the rare moments when we would get passes to go above, and while my parents would sun themselves on the beach, I would hang at the edge of the palms and palmettos nearby.

At the fringes of the dark forest, I would summon little creatures to venture forth into my hands. Taking great care in their delicate capture, I’d stimshare into them to feel their squirming pain as I slowly pulled off their legs, one by one.

When all of their legs were gone, I would gradually squeeze them between my chubby fingers, flitting into them to feel their spasming agony, as I crushed their legless little bodies. Feeling the pain of killing these creatures helped me cleanse my own pain.

And perhaps, I enjoyed it a little too.

20

Identity: Bobby Baxter

“SID!” I YELLED out into our private emergency channels.

“Jesus, Bob, what?” he replied as his reality instantly merged with mine.

I watched him before me, engrossed in some data mining blitz as he searched through reams of multiverse worlds. Even with the storms threatening, he was still on the hunt for Willy’s body, his dozens of phantom hands dancing through the hypercontrol spaces around him.

“You know, if you play with your phantoms too much, you’ll grow hair on the palms of your hands,” I couldn’t help joking as I watched him and Vicious working their magic.

“No more Humungous Fungus this week, I’ve had enough, buddy.” They gave me several fingers. I silently watched them fiddle around some more.

“So what has your hair on fire?” he asked after a pause.

“No more Humungous Fungus for us, I agree,” I replied. “Something is seriously wrong with this place, and we are going to find out what.”

This stopped them in their tracks. Sid looked at me.

“Now you’re finally talking turkey.”

He cracked a smile.

“Sid, drop everything.”

All his phantoms immediately dropped to the ground.

“We’re getting the band back together.”

“Jimmy too?” asked Sid. Vicious was already shaking his head.

“No, I think we’d better let Jimmy sit this one out.”

Jimmy had bigger fish to fry right now. Not only that, but something about him made me very uneasy.

“But I’m going to ping him and tell him that we’re going to mount a search of our own, to try and help figure out the situation. That way we won’t raise any alarms if we scan the perimeter.”

I thought about that for a second.

“Plus, I want him to know what we’re doing.”

I wasn’t sure why. It was just intuition.

“Sure,” said Vicious carefully, “but just don’t tell him too much.”

That wasn’t a problem. I didn’t know too much.

“I think we should get Vince in on this too,” added Sid.

Nodding, I pinged Jimmy and shifted my primary subjective into a tight and secure channel space he immediately opened up to me.

Now I was sitting in a small, pristine white room at a white interview table. Jimmy was sitting before me, his hands clasped on the table, staring directly into my eyes.

“Did you find Wally yet?” said Jimmy as I fully arrived, cracking the faintest of smiles. “What’s going on? No surfing today?”

Identity: Jimmy Jones

“No,” replied Bob, “even I couldn’t handle what’s going on out there right now.”

That was the truth. The storms had converged, and the winds were beginning to tear at the forests as our beaches were pounded mercilessly by an angry ocean. Surface access would be shut off soon as we finished stowing everything and everyone below decks.

As we entered American territorial waters, their air force and navy had scrambled to surround us, battling their own way through the storms. Despite that we were close allies, the prospect of suddenly having a wholly independent country slide across the map to invade their space had raised some hackles, even if they understood we had absolutely no choice in the matter.

The world was already a dangerous enough place from their point of view, and they weren’t too happy about us invading their space. Of course, the prospect of two giant hurricanes simultaneously slamming into one of America’s most populated coasts had them occupied with their own typically belated emergency preparations.

Communications were strangely incoherent. It may have just been the storms, but we seemed to be getting contradictory diplomatic messages from one moment to the other.

And, of course, the storms were getting worse. As they neared the coast, and each other, they defied all physics and were gaining in strength, progressing into Category 5 and still intensifying. Unless we could do something about it, we would be beached on the continental shelf just south of Los Angeles, and the prospect of a fully energized fusion core running aground in America had raised the diplomatic tension bar just that much higher.

I had a plan of how we could escape, and was running phutures of it right at the moment Bob had pinged me. As busy as I was, Bob’s primary subjective calling me on an emergency channel was unusual enough to warrant the attention of a splinter.

“So what can I do for you?” I asked, not bothering to explain how busy I was. Bob was many things, but he wasn’t stupid.

Bob took a deep breath. “Look, I’d like to help out. I think I may be able to find a way to see what is happening.”

“Really?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. “And just how do you propose to do that?”

“I know how busy you must be so I won’t waste time on details,” he said looking down at his feet, “but you know I have special abilities, from all the time we spent together. Just trust me, Jimmy, is what I’m asking, and open up some ports for me to scan the multiverse.”

I looked at Bob. Memories flashed from our long past childhood friendship, and memories more recently as my adopted brother. Maybe he could help somehow.

“Okay Bob, go ahead,” I replied, “you have our cooperation. Just feed us back anything you find.”

In all cases, I’d keep a close eye on them.

“You got it Jimmy.”

I closed the connection and returned to the simulation underway. A giant fireball filled my primary mind.

“Seems like it will work,” said Samson, my proxxi. We were going over my plan for escaping from the hurricanes, which we were scheduled to explain to the Council within the hour. “Why don’t you take a quick break and decompress before we present?”

That seemed like a good idea. The fireball slipped away and I relaxed, letting my mind wander back to the meeting with Bob. I was surprised he had any interest I helping out, but then again, the last time he had helped me out had been the biggest catastrophe of my life growing up. I dispatched several agents to watch what he was up to.

§

I’d secretly thought of Bob as my big brother, as a kid, and in another twist of fate, that’s exactly what he’d become when his family had adopted me at Patricia’s suggestion.

I’d always had a hard time fitting in. The easy way that the other pssi-kids socialized and made friends had always escaped me, but Bob had often tried to be there for me, and had done his best to help me fit in when others had ignored me.

My special skills in conscious boundary systems had quickly brought me to the attention of the Solomon House Research Center, so academically my life had taken off from an early age, but my interpersonal skills had floundered hopelessly, and pssi-kids could be mercilessly cruel.

As I got older and gained in pssi power, my only relief was that I finally managed to escape from under the oppression of my parents. I began to easily slip past their every attempt to corner me and I gained my own freedom.

Nancy Killiam’s thirteenth birthday party was the defining disaster for me as a kid. My own thirteenth birthday was just around the corner, and I was worried that nobody would come to my party, most especially Cynthia, the girl I’d developed my first crush on.

While girls had generally ignored me, Cynthia had magically started to talk with me one day, asking about my research work at the Solomon House. I had no idea how to react or what to do, so I went to the only person I knew to talk to.

“Look,” said Bob back then, “you just gotta stop acting so weird.”

Bob was squinting into the slanting sunshine as we walked across the beach at the end of the day. He raised one hand to shade his eyes. We were walking towards the large blue and yellow circus tent where Nancy’s party was being held. Waves broke softly and rhythmically in the background and the air was filled with the smell of cotton candy and the sound of children at play.

I shrugged. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. All that snooping around, hiding where you’re not supposed to be,” he answered, looking me square in the eyes.

My face flushed red. The other pssi-kids had already begun their tentative sexual explorations of each other, not just rag dolling or flitter switching, but taking a real interest in their blooming, newly adolescent bodies.

I had watched all this happening, awkwardly, hanging from the shadows. Sometimes, unknown, I would slip in between and into them as they kissed, sharing sensations and stimswitching with each other.

Pain was my childhood specialty, but these new, tender emotions and sensations intrigued me.

“Everyone is talking about you, you know,” continued Bob, scratching his head as we passed into the shadow of the tent and moved towards the entrance.

My dad had come ahead of me, the only one dragging a real gift under his arm, which I found embarrassing.

I saw him off in a corner under a glade of palms talking with some other adults, patting his prize affectionately. More kids and parents were quickly arriving, through portals near the entrance, in ones and twos; here a furry argumentative little Minotaur being dragged by his mother, and there two screaming pink teddies trailing fluorescent silvery balloons.

Everyone’s reality skins fused and melted together as they entered, producing a confusing kaleidoscopic mash-up around the entrance as they stopped and looked around before fanning out inside.

Some parents were arguing with their kids to merge their realities with everyone else properly, arguments that were erupting into tantrums from both sides.

Bob looked around for somewhere quiet to talk. Organ grinder music had started up, somewhat macabrely, and little monkeys dressed in evening suits appeared, scuttling between the assembled guests, handing out information packs for the evening. Drinks and snacks floated and bobbed in refreshment islets between everyone. Bob took my arm and led me to a bench off to one side, under the shade of some saw palmettos.

“Jimmy, I know you don’t have many friends,” said Bob, his voice hushed now, “and I know it can’t be easy for you.” His voice trailed off as he searched for words.

“Okay, first thing, quit with the splatter skins, those were funny when we were little but it’s a bit odd when people…” he started to say, and then the head of one of the nearest adults suddenly shattered in a gory explosion of brains and skull fragments as if hit by high caliber rifle fire.

The headless, bloody victim continued to pick up a drink that floated by and poured this into its gaping neck wound. I smiled awkwardly. Bob glanced at this and looked back at me, shaking his head. I switched it off.

Bob looked up at the sky and then back at me.

“And I know you’re the king of the rag doll, but nobody wants to play that stuff anymore, get it? Stop asking people if they want to come inside your body with you, it’s starting to get weird.”

I nodded. I knew this but I couldn’t help it. I promised myself right there I’d stop.

“We all know you’re this specialist at finding cracks in the pssi system,” he continued, “but you gotta stop sneaking around. We’re adults now, and adults don’t sneak.”

Of course we weren’t and of course they did. I nodded again, regardless.

“So, you’ll quit sneaking into people’s bodies when they’re not looking right?” He waited for me to nod, and then added, “Look, why don’t you come out and try some surfing with me, whaddya say?”

“Sure Bob, you’re right, I mean, yes of course, I’d like that,” I mumbled, anxious but grateful.

Bob had always been nice to me, but this was the first time he, or anyone, really had had a heart to heart with me. The territory both scared and excited me.

“So you’ll come surfing?” asked Bob, smiling toothily at me now.

“Yeah sure,” I said, and smiled back.

He gave me a little punch in the arm. I guessed we were buddies now.

“Okay cool. So about Cynthia, look, she’s a girl, and girls want you to open up, be sensitive. I mean, I can tell you’re sensitive.” He laughed, looking into my puppy dog face. “Okay forget that.”

“She said she wanted to see something fun,” I suggested helpfully.

He looked up and considered for a moment.

“Yeah, girls like cool stuff. Perfect! Just open up to her a little. Why don’t you show her some of the stuff you’ve been working on at Solomon House? That should impress her. Girls like smart guys.”

“Do you really think so?” I asked. I had some new neural interface models I had been working hard on testing with Dr. Granger, who had taken a keen interest in my abilities.

I kept the models in my personal work space and hadn’t let anyone in there before. My private worlds were very private. After finally escaping from the clutches of my mother and father I hadn’t let anyone near me, emotionally or physically, and spent most of my time alone with my proxxi Samson and our simulated friends.

“Sure, open up a little, she’ll love that.”

Bob laughed, winking at me, and then raised his eyebrows, giving me a little poke with one of his phantoms to indicate something behind me. With a shake of his head he waved me off from turning my head around.

Instead, I snuck a peak behind me without turning my head, overlaying part of my visual channel with a local wikiworld view, and saw Cynthia coming up behind us. She noticed my ghost checking her out anyway.

“Go get ’em Tiger,” Bob said encouragingly as he got up to leave. “I’ve gotta go and catch my own sweetheart.”

Bob and Nancy had been intertwined since they were kids and had grown into the pssi–kid power couple. He walked back to the gathering crowd to leave me and Cynthia alone.

“Hey Cynthia,” Bob said playfully as he walked past her, looking back to wink at me again. Cynthia smiled at him and turned her gaze towards me. I began to sweat profusely.

“Hi Jimmy,” came Cynthia’s singsong voice. She skipped the last few steps up to me. I was dumbfounded for what to say, so I said nothing and smiled weakly. “So, what’s up?”

“Not…not much, how…how are you?” I stammered.

My mind went blank.

“…Cynthia,” I managed to stutter out after a few seconds of agonizing silence.

“I’m great!” she replied brightly, smiling shyly. “How’s your research going?”

“Uh, yeah, good…hey,” I replied, thinking of what Bob had said. “I could show you some of the stuff I’m doing at Solomon House if you like.”

“Really? Cool!” Her eyes and smile widened. “Can we go now?”

I nodded. Why not?

“Mum!” she yelled, and her mother’s face floated up between the two of us.

“Yes, Cynthia? You don’t need to yell you know,” her mother admonished.

Cynthia just continued unfazed, “I’m just going to flit out with Jimmy for a bit to show me some of the stuff he’s working on at Solomon House.”

Cynthia’s mother looked suitably impressed.

“Work at the Solomon House? But you’re just a baby,” she remarked, looking my way and furrowing her brow. “Anyway, yes, sure, but I’m pinging you back the second Nancy gets here.”

Cynthia grabbed my hand and squealed excitedly, “Let’s go!”

I felt an electric thrill, feeling her touching me, that spread like wildfire to settle hotly in my crotch. An erection immediately sprang to life. Cynthia could sense something going on from my embarrassed, flushed cheeks. She looked at me mischievously.

“Come on Jimmy, let’s go!” she squealed again.

I pulled her back and away and we dropped out from our bodies and into my private work space. I’d never brought anyone here before, and I felt naked. It was thrilling if frightening.

In one layer of my visual field I could see Samson, inhabiting my body back at the beach, holding hands with Cynthia’s proxxi near one side of the blue and yellow tent. They were watched carefully by Cynthia’s mother’s proxxi, and they went off to get some cotton candy. I smiled.

Cynthia and I were standing together in a large, white laboratory with gleaming floors and walls with a view out of smoky glass windows onto Atopia stretched out below, the same view physically as the real Solomon House atop the farming complex.

Above stainless steel tables floated a variety of working models of mirror neuron interfaces I was working on with Dr. Granger. He shared my interest in the physiological basis of emotion and the ability to use it to direct the hive mind, but where he was more interested in happiness, I had taken more of an interest in fear—something the other researchers had mostly passed by.

While we walked, I keyed through some parameters with my phantoms to wash away the tables and structures to be replaced with only one of the models, which then floated in space in front of us, slowly rotating. I was keenly aware of Cynthia’s grip on my sweaty hand.

“Cool,” she said, watching the visually enhanced synaptic firing of the neuron floating in front of us. It was a working model.

“This isn’t just a model,” I declared, “this is actually happening inside me right now.”

After some testing I had installed them in my own developing wetware to see how the models would respond. I started to explain how it worked, how this was an upgrade to what we were doing already, how it provided a more reliable pathway to empathy.

Empathy was something I didn’t understand, or rather, I understood it, but I just didn’t feel it.

While I was nervously trying to explain my project, Cynthia had wandered off, looking around the rest of my work space. I wanted to show her something really special, so I was engrossed in my model, busy burrowing through the cell walls trying to change some protein pathways.

“What’s in here?” she asked, opening a door.

“Oh, ah, nothing!” I cried out, but it was already too late.

As soon as the portal had opened a crack, she’d dropped into the world beyond. I quickly abandoned my model and shot off into that world behind her.

Instantly I was standing beside her in semidarkness. Shafts of light bore down from the blackness above, illuminating a writhing mass of insects and worms and other creatures pinned painfully to the walls of my labyrinthine private universe. An image of my mother’s face hung in space above us, twisted in hate.

“Who’s my little stinker?” she repeated and repeated, her face contorting and distorting.

I came here to heal myself, to reconnect and re-stimulate some of the sensory pain I’d felt. The process seemed to allow me to refocus my mind. I had picked out some particularly nasty moments from my childhood and worked through them bit by bit, simultaneously bathing my sensory system in the pain from the thousands of little creatures I had pinned to the walls. I didn’t understand why, but it helped.

Cynthia shivered and looked around with wide eyes, scared but excited.

“This is way fucking creepy man,” she whispered, looking around at the half illuminated animals pinned to the walls, scraping and clawing futilely, never dying, never free, always trapped and in pain.

Tears began to well up in her eyes looking at the hopeless little creatures.

“I can feel them,” she squeaked, her eyes growing wide. “This is horrible!”

Then, suddenly, she was gone, flitting back to the birthday party.

Shocked, I stood still for a moment as the blood drained from my face. I wasn’t sure what to do. I closed down the image of my mother and the space went dark and quiet, apart from the soft wriggling of the creatures on the walls.

I hadn’t remembered that there was a portal to this place from my workspace. I was too flustered to think clearly at the time. I began quietly swearing at myself, then, suddenly, I felt Samson grabbing me, pulling me back to reality.

I snapped back into my body with a sudden sense of vertigo. I heard laughter around me, but I wasn’t back at the party. Somehow I was in my private space again. The bugs were squirming painfully on the walls as before, but all the party guests were standing in the middle of it somehow, and the bugs were magnified, giant monsters vainly trying to pull their bodies from the pushpins stuck through them.

Above it all, my mother was venting down on us all, “Who’s my little stinker?”

Cynthia had stolen a copy of my world and projected it out here in public at the beach. I felt myself shrink in horror. Cynthia was laughing with her friends, and they were all pointing at me and screeching, “Who’s my stinky Jimmy!”

The adults were dumbfounded as to what was going on. It had all happened too quickly for them, but someone regained control of the situation and the big-top tent reappeared with the balloons and monkeys. Everyone turned and looked at me, the kids laughing and giggling, the adults staring without comprehension.

“Why did you do that?” I screamed at Cynthia.

An intense, burning anger beyond my searing humiliation filled me. All the years of containing my fear, my frustration, my hiding and cowering, it all boiled over the edges of my psyche. I could kill her right now, I thought. The world turned a bloody red in front of my eyes, and demons shifted inside.

Cynthia shrank back into the protective knot of her friends, all of them still laughing.

I gathered myself and focused on her, channeling my voice through the pssionics and amplifying it beyond deafening.

“Why did you do that?!” I bellowed from a hulking, grotesque caricature of myself.

A shockwave of pure hatred shattered away from me, almost knocking over the assembled guests. I felt like I was about to physically explode when I caught myself and stopped. My anger imploded back into me and the bottle corked back up.

The laughing had stopped. In fact the scene was deathly quiet now, except for whimpers from some of the smaller children. Shocked faces were turned towards me, watching me. Someone started crying. It was Cynthia.

At that moment Nancy Killiam opened the portal door and announced, “I’m heeeere!”

She was all decked out in a frilly dress and pigtails. I began to run, tears streaming down my face, shoving my way past Bob.

“Hey, I didn’t know, hey Jimmy…” he tried to say as I ran past him, almost knocking down Nancy as I ran out, escaping from the blinding glare of judgment. By that point I was already gone, detached, and it was Samson taking over my body to hide it somewhere safe.

I was already back in my private world, and it was burning. Great flames were consuming the walls, the corridors, the passages and nooks and crannies of my childhood. The little creatures pinned everywhere to the walls squealed in high keening agony as the blaze devoured them.

I watched, impassively, as the inferno consumed itself and flamed out. My face grimly reflected the smoldering ruins in shades of dark oranges and blood reds. Never again, I promised myself, never again.

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and on that day I felt myself shatter and schism but then reform to heal and grow, becoming adult perhaps, becoming something different. The developing child inside me, my personality until then free floating, coalesced and hardened. Invisible things fell into place, the pain stopped, and the shell finally finished closing around me, opaque, powerful. Impenetrable.

§

A few days later, back at home, I was studying for some Solomon House entrance exams.

My mother had just arisen from the dead, and was making her way, in her jerkily soapstim junkie way, towards me with a fresh drink in hand to help her wake up from the sensory coma she’d been in for the past few days.

“Hey stinker, I saw you embarrassed me at that Killiam party, what the hell were you thinking?” she half slurred, half laughed at me.

“Some security expert you are,” she sniggered, taking a swig from her drink. She waved her hand at me dismissively. I watched her blankly.

“They killed the dolphins you know,” she added, cruelly recalling the security breach that had been the start of the end with Terra Nova. “Dirty smelly fish, serves them right.”

Still I said nothing.

“So I guess nobody is coming to your party, huh, stinky Jimmy?”

She wasn’t really asking, she was more enjoying herself and smiling knowingly at the new name the kids were now calling me. She was behind me, and had turned away to refill her drink.

I slowly closed the interface to my notes and twisted towards her, pulling down a dense security blanket that enveloped us in a glittering glacial blue. She turned back to me.

“What?” she barked, feeling the blanket close in around us. She threw her head back. “Something to say, little worm?”

I smiled at her, flames glittering in my eyes.

“If you ever talk to me again, Mother, if you ever so much as lay a hand on me or utter one more word to me from that trashy, dirty mouth of yours again,” I said, evenly and slowly, smiling at her. “I will make sure that you regret ever existing, that you live out the remainder of your pathetic life in unearthly agony.”

I smiled to make the point. The fire burned ever brighter in my eyes, and the flames reflected in hers.

Looking at me she was about to say something, but then stopped herself as her vacant mind filled with alarm, feeling my naked malice inhabiting the room. I could taste her fear and my smile widened. She just turned and shuffled away, and I released the security blanket with a flick of a phantom.

“Enjoy the soapstim mum!” I gaily called after her, and returned to my notes.

I’m going to ace this test.

21

Identity: Patricia Killiam

THE WINDS WHIPPED and howled, churning the surface of the ocean into a frothing maelstrom. Gigantic waves surged and crested under the driving storms. Two massive Category 5 hurricanes colliding was a once in a mega-annum event, and Atopia was stuck like a seed about to be crushed between these two grinding wheels.

Suddenly, bright pinpoints of light appeared flashing through the sheets of dark, whipping rain. Then more pinpoints of light flared and began illuminating the heaving seas below. The pinpoints rapidly multiplied, glittering and then flashing into a sheet of superheated plasma that vaporized the rain, sending plumes of vapor rocketing up through the atmosphere.

We were all in Command, watching this on a projection in the middle of the room.

“The slingshots weren’t designed to be used this way,” explained Jimmy while we watched the growing inferno begin to notch a tiny gap between the two colliding monsters.

“Usually they only keep up with sustained operation for a few minutes to take out incoming kinetic threats, but we’ve made some modifications to sink away the heat. We should be able to operate them continuously for at least a few hours, maybe more, but enough to get the job done.”

The view point on the projection swept away and upwards, zooming backwards into space until we could see most of the colliding hurricane systems, with Atopia highlighted on the seas between them.

Jimmy accelerated the simulation speed, and we watched as a narrow gap between the storm systems appeared and Atopia was sucked through it.

“We’ll use the slingshots to blaze a super-high pressure system through the middle of the two colliding storm systems,” Jimmy explained, pointing to the projection.

“Then we’ll drive Atopia at maximum speed straight into it. The relative vacuum we create will literally suck us through behind it as we burn a path forward with the slingshots.”

Jimmy smiled, and the highlighted pinpoint of Atopia popped through to the other side of the storms in the simulation.

A singular, loud clapping punctuated the mesmerized room. It was Kesselring, beaming at Jimmy. Soon, everyone began to join in.

“Jimmy, son, you’ve saved us!” Mr. Kesselring cried out. “Brilliant, simply brilliant!”

Despite my own developing plans to derail the launch timing, relief that we would escape destruction in the storms almost overwhelmed me. I couldn’t help but join in the clapping. It was brilliant, and it looked like it would work.

“It will be a bumpy ride through,” added Jimmy, “but not too bad.”

He shook his head, waving away our applause. It was nothing, no problem, he seemed to be telling us.

Kesselring leaned over to me confidentially and noted, “Patricia, absolutely excellent work in bringing Jimmy onto the Command team.”

“Thanks,” I replied, nodding, but my clapping trailed off as I looked towards Rick. He was joining in as well, but with a completely vacant expression.

“Looks like it will work,” I added to Kesselring, “but I need to get back to something urgently.”

Kesselring shrugged and kept clapping loudly.

§

I collapsed my main subjective away from Command. Marie had already filled up a glass of scotch for me as I moved to sit down behind my desk and put my feet up.

“Through the storms we go,” said Marie gravely.

I took the drink from her. Instead of sitting, I decided instead to keep standing, and began pacing in tight circles in front of my desk like a caged tiger.

Marie brought up the phutureworlds we had been working on for so many years now, their projections floating in my display spaces, staggered from the most critical to least, filling my eyes with death and destruction as they faded into the distance. She was bringing them up to make a point.

“None of this makes any sense,” I complained, still pacing and taking a sip from my scotch.

My understanding of warfare was academic. Open warfare was, in essence, an information-gathering exercise. From a game theory point of view, attack and defense were designed to resolve the capabilities of opponents until both sides converged on the same accurate assessments.

I’d openly shared almost all information regarding Atopia with the world to avert such a conflict—‘almost’ being the operative word. Perhaps by sharing what I’d been hiding, I could negotiate a peace with Terra Nova, but it was hard to shake the feeling of being a traitor to my own cause.

Even then, it was hard to imagine Terra Nova being so desperate to slow us down as to purposely direct Category 5 hurricanes into the densely populated West Coast. Even a weakened America would be sure to retaliate, with great prejudice, after the damage these storms would cause. Terra Nova would be ensuring its own downfall.

Once upon a time, before Kesselring had approached me for the Atopia project, I had helped build the foundations for Terra Nova as well, and I now remained perhaps the last person on earth who could fix whatever was going on.

“Are you ready?” asked Marie. “This may be our only chance.”

“You’re right,” I replied. With all the attention focused on the emergency at hand, a window of opportunity had opened up for us to talk with the Terra Novans directly and in secret; a chance to perhaps strike a grand bargain. “So everything is set up?”

“They’re waiting,” Marie replied, and then waited, looking at me. Seconds ticked by.

“Okay, let’s do this.”

We exploded upwards out of my office, squeezing through a tight communication channel in the perimeter, and then dispersed, clipping and mixing our sensory packets around the globe to re–materialize in a large, warmly lit room with wooden walls that arched gracefully in vertical panels that intertwined and spiraled together to form the ceiling.

On closer inspection, the walls weren’t paneled, but were actually living tree trunks that grew perfectly and tightly together. The place glowed with a light that seemed to emanate from nowhere, and I was seated beside Marie at a large stone table.

Across from us sat the Elders of Terra Nova. In the middle of them sat my old student, Mohesha. She nodded at me, smiling, and I smiled back. I felt some of my distrust begin to melt away.

The senior Terra Novan Elder, Tyrel, began to speak.

“Patricia, it is with great respect and gratitude that we accept you here in our lodge today,” said Tyrel. “We know you are here at great personal risk.”

It hardly mattered anymore, my days were numbered, was what I wanted to say. At this point I just wanted things to be right, to do the right thing.

“I am also honored,” I replied, nodding deeply. “I come here today to negotiate a peace.”

Tyrel watched me without emotion.

“We have great respect for you, Patricia, you are the mother of all of this,” he said, sweeping his hand around the table, “of all Terra Nova, and more, of all synthetic intelligences and worlds.”

“Thank you, but I’m not here to collect praise.”

“You have been used, deceived, and you have even deceived yourself!” cut in my old student Mohesha. Her dark, African features glowed in the soft lighting.

“I’m not here out of desperation,” I explained. “We are beating this trap you have set for us. I am here simply because I want the same things as you.”

Silence.

“Even if we wanted to, and we do, we could not help you,” replied Tyrel.

“But you must see the same things I do,” I continued. “You must see the destruction coming. I know we’ve been hiding some of the details. But the pssi program is the only solution.”

Tyrel and the rest of the Elders watched me sadly.

“Chasing happiness by giving people anything they want has never been the path to fulfillment,” said one of the other Elders after a pause. “Satisfying every material and sensual pleasure will not lead to peace.”

“But surely you have seen what I have seen!” I shouted, slapping the table. “You have to stop what you are doing. It will only lead to your own destruction!”

Dead silence. Absolutely no reaction.

“I am going to expose what we’ve been hiding, after we escape this trap of yours, I will go to the media,” I explained. “I’ve been planning it through Sintil8. It will slow the release and we can collaborate.”

“We know about Sintil8,” replied Tyrel sadly, “we know what you’ve been planning with him.”

“Well what do you want then? Is it money you want?” I demanded. “A share of the profits?”

“How far you have fallen,” said Tyrel sadly after a moment, shaking his head. Tears came to his eyes. “You cannot stop anymore what you have created.”

“Is all this just about stopping the pssi program so you can position yourselves better?” I asked incredulously.

“Mother, this is not just about the pssi program, not the program by itself,” replied Tyrel, wiping away his tears. “By itself, we would have been happy to evolve together in a symbiotic coexistence under your dominance, but you have unwittingly unleashed a terrible evil into the world that will consume it. We need to destroy Atopia to stop it.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, bewildered. Then a light winked on. “So you admit that you have created these storms to destroy us?”

My mind raced. Had Sintil8 double-crossed me, had I made a fatal mistake in bringing him so close to me? Was he the monster I had unleashed? How had Terra Nova managed to jump so far ahead technologically to be able to control weather like this? How could they possibly think they could get away with destroying us for their own gain?

“Yes, we created these storms, as you say,” Tyrel admitted quietly, “but we cannot explain why. As secure as the steps you took to come here, there is still a connection back through you, and we still don’t have the full picture. We think the key is contained in William McIntyre’s body.”

“Willy?” I asked, remembering the report on Bob’s friend now. I became even more bewildered. “Did you have something to do with Willy’s body disappearing? Why?”

“It was through Wallace that we first understood the potential magnitude of the danger,” admitted Tyrel, “but it was Sintil8 who helped Wallace to disappear from Atopia, using the access keys you granted. Wallace was acting to protect William.”

Things had begun to spin into nonsense. So, Sintil8 had been involved in the disappearances.

“We have no time for this,” I objected furiously, sensing time running out. “We need to make a deal now. You’ve seen the same phutures I have, there is no other solution. We will escape this trap you’ve set, and I want you to be on my side when we do, to help with what I need to get done, to help save yourselves!”

“We have seen the phutures,” agreed Tyrel, “but you didn’t take into account one scenario.”

“And what is that?” I asked impatiently. We’d played out billions of phutures.

“The destruction of Atopia.”

That stopped me in my tracks. It was true—all of our phutures had included Atopia as a component of the solution set. With a sudden lurch, I could feel my own pride and sense of destiny having perhaps blinded me.

“Look,” I said after a moment of reflection, “that may be true, but we’re escaping your trap. I need to make a deal with you now.”

More silence.

“This is a trap of your own making,” replied Tyrel slowly, “and yes, you may escape these storms.”

I nodded, waiting for him to finish.

“But, by my word, before the sun rises tomorrow morning, Atopia will be wiped from the face of this world.”

22

Identity: Bobby Baxter

SMILING AT NANCY, I stuffed some more pasta into my face.

“Think of it like we’re about to run a marathon,” I explained. “We need to do some carb loading and build up our smarticle reservoirs. Keep eating!”

We’d both been storing far more than the usual load of smarticles that we naturally absorbed from the Atopian environment, far beyond even our own high tolerances.

Nancy nodded and continued to eat methodically, looking down into her plate. It had been a long time since I’d been this physically close to her, and a lot of memories were flooding back. With an effort I kept my mind from splintering and scuttling off into the past.

“I just don’t like that we’re hiding this from Pat,” she said looking down into her pasta. “Do you really think she’s hiding something?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, “but we need to keep all our options open. You understand?”

She nodded. “But why tell Jimmy then?”

“Just a hunch I have,” I replied, not able to explain much more than that. “Knowing he knows what we’re doing enables us to watch him watching us, if that makes any sense.”

“Plus, we won’t set off his alarms when we’re scanning the Atopian infrastructure,” added Sid.

Nancy shrugged.

“Makes sense I guess.”

Willy, Sid, Vicious, Robert, Vince and Hotstuff were all sitting at the table together with us in a dingy little cafeteria in a deep, dark forgotten corner of the Atopian service infrastructure below Purgatory.

We were as close as we could get to the routing core of the pssi network, and for what I wanted to do, reducing distance latency to the core would help minimize transactional delays and give us an edge over any self-correcting algorithmic blind spots that may be installed within it. We were going to plug in as directly as we could and watch for anomalies.

“Go over the plan again with me?” asked Nancy as she carefully considered the noodles before her. She took another mouthful.

“Your mind is still the best neuroplatically formatted of anyone on Atopia to handle wide area splintering,” I started to explain.

“Yeah,” added Vicious, “it’s like you can be everywhere at once.”

Nancy sighed. “Yes, everywhere but the place I should have been.”

She looked directly into my eyes and my heart jumped up through my throat.

“Nancy, we need your head in on this or not at all,” I replied softly, my heart beating quickly. “Are you up for this?”

I needed to know. This wasn’t going to be easy.

“Yes, I’m in Bob, you’ve just surprised me is all.” She looked up at me and held my gaze steadily.

“I do like to be full of surprises,” I said as I smiled at her warmly. “Good. So Sid is making some changes to my water sense so that it settles around information eddies regarding Atopia.”

“Right,” she said, “so you can feel out ideas in the multiverse about Atopia.”

“Exactly. So here’s what we’re going to try. You and I are going to composite, and then recombine via your Infinixx tethers to push my water-sense into thousands of composite splinters that we then push into every nook and cranny of the multiverse.”

I looked at Nancy and she nodded her understanding.

“Sid will amplify this and cross-connect our network into the billions of private Phuture News feeds that Vince will open up to us. I’ll be waiting to feel for waves of information that flow out, and then ride the interesting ones in.”

“You sure you’re ready to open up all these personal phuturecasts to us?” I asked Vince, giving him another opportunity to back out. “The lawsuits could be the end of you.”

He just laughed, “The end of me doesn’t scare me much anymore. Look, it can’t get any worse than it is. I want to find some answers.”

“Okay then,” I replied, “just making sure.”

Vince looked ready for action. “Heck, opening up all these private phutures could even kill the whole Phuture News organization… I think I could be ready for a fresh start.”

During the last half hour he’d already had to flit out three times to save his life, but he looked the most awake and alive of all of us. It was true what they said—if you needed something done, ask someone with nothing to do and it takes forever, but ask a busy person and it gets done right away. Vince was the busiest person I knew, and he got things done in a flash.

Nancy looked up at me. “What you’re proposing could kill you, you know.”

“Don’t be silly,” I smiled. “Anyway, it’s less dangerous than surfing.”

“When you surf you don’t purposely cook your brain,” she replied. “Are you’re sure you want to do this?”

I took a deep breath. “Anything to get naked with you.”

She laughed. “All you had to do was ask, Bob.”

“Yeah, well, I like special occasions…”

“Okay lovebirds,” said Vicious, breaking the spell, “time to take a cold shower.”

Off to one corner of the room we’d filled a bathtub with ice and water. As I quickened my mind by orders of magnitude, we needed a way to cool me off as directly as possible, and Nancy had to be right there with me to reduce distance delays between our coupled nervous systems.

Quickening a composite together like this would be tricky, and to achieve the best possible chances at cognitive coherence we needed to be as close together as physically possible. I was going to be taking the brunt of the quickening intensity, and to heat sink off the energy generated the easiest solution was to immerse our bodies in freezing cold water.

“Ready?” I asked Nancy.

She nodded and began to physically undress, although she remained modestly clothed in her pssi projection. I did the same and walked over to the tub of cold water with her, the two of us hand in hand and surrounded silently by the rest of our gang.

“Good luck,” said Vince, squeezing both of our hands, stepping back.

I looked into Nancy’s eyes and saw her quivering.

“I love you Nance.” I leaned in to kiss her. “Don’t worry.”

As we stepped into the cold water, I gently felt her out with my phantoms, and she responded to me, welcoming me in the myriad hyperspaces where we connected. Our synthetic bodies locked together around us like the wings of angels, enclosing us in a protective, otherworldly cocoon.

Finally we stepped physically together, embracing as we lowered ourselves down into the frigid water. Cradling her head below mine, I initiated the compositing sequence, and the hundreds of billions of neurons in my nervous system began fusing with hers. Our minds and bodies began to flow together and into each other.

“Just breathe slowly, in and out,” I gently told her, “and on each breath out we’ll push the quickening a little more.”

Closing my eyes, I let my mind and body merge with Nancy’s, and then felt her pushing me out, splintering me further and further, spreading us out across the multiverse. Our minds and bodies began quickening, and an ocean of information flowed into me as I settled back to sense the ebb and flow of anything to do with Atopia.

I relaxed into our new self, letting Nancy spread us further. With each breath I kept increasing the pace of quickening and pushing our hived mind out further and further, compressing and stretching ever outwards in waves.

With a final deep breath, we breached an invisible wall somewhere in the universal consciousness and our minds exploded. Time stopped, ceasing to exist. We became the alpha, the omega, and everything else in between.

23

Identity: Jimmy Jones

THIS BETTER WORK. Despite the preparations and simulations, dragging a live fusion reactor with a million lives aboard through the center of two converging hurricanes was enough to make anyone nervous.

Even with the pressure mounting, my mind had been extraordinarily clear this morning. All the confusion I’d suffered through earlier in life now seemed to be clearing, as my mind rang crystal clear with purpose and energy. I’d never felt better in my life.

Kesselring and Cognix had given me tactical command of the operation. My primary subjective was now floating up at the edge of space, watching overlays of the constantly updated simulations. Far below me, the two storm systems were grinding into each other. From this distance, everything seemed to be moving in calm, orderly slow motion, but I had firsthand experience of the violence at sea level from several splinters I had combing the oceans ahead of us at that same moment.

Almost equally important, I had Samson interfacing with the world media as we worked to downplay the situation. The questions and inquiries we were getting were unusually low in volume, and there were nearly no attempts at data incursion into the outer perimeters.

Either we were doing an awfully good job at containing the situation media-wise, or something else was going on, but more important things had my attention.

Since the Infinixx incident, Kesselring had taken Patricia off the media circuit. Her association and relation to Nancy was too much of a distraction. To be honest, I think they didn’t trust her, but neither did they need her anymore.

Where before the emotional media campaign had been centered around confidence and trust in our bid to gain and win regulatory approval, as Hal Granger took over, we had begun centering more on the elevational and inspirational messaging. It was devoid of any real content when looked at in detail, but nobody did anymore.

The hard work of gaining the trust of experts and governments was now complete as Atopia had passed clinical trial certifications in all major jurisdictions. What was left now was simply inspiring the dreams of the masses to desire pssi for themselves.

Hal had begun using me in the media campaigns now instead of Patricia, a poster child for Atopia and the future to come, young and handsome in my pressed military ADF Whites. I’d started to gain my own celebrity status.

As we’d neared the American coast, they’d scrambled their own defensive systems and Atopia was now being orbited by squadrons of ageing F35s and swarms of aerial drones. Naval forces had scrambled out their bases in San Diego and were hanging back at the edges of the storms. We just didn’t have the maneuvering speed of a regular ship, otherwise we wouldn’t be stuck.

Several of my splinters were overseeing the constant chatter with the American security forces and other floating platforms and seasteads, but again, these were strangely subdued. We’d just received confirmation of authorization to power up our weapons systems with barely an argument. I put it down to their trust in our program, as well as the close relations I’d built up through Rick with General McInnis.

Despite the awesome power in the slingshot batteries, to channel the energy from our fusion reactor into the atmosphere, we still only had a narrow window of opportunity to make my plan work, otherwise we would be scooped up into one or other of the storms and mercilessly thrashed against the coast.

As a precaution, we were going to power up every other weapons system we had, including the mass driver and rail guns, just in case we needed to throw more at it.

The point of no return was fast approaching. I was jacked up, quickening my mind as I reached outwards into the hyperspaces around Atopia, but I figured I could use a little more chemical help. I let my pituitary glands squeeze off some more cortisol and adrenalin into my bloodstream and immediately felt my phantoms begin to jitter ever so slightly, my blood pressure rising and cheeks flushing.

24

Identity: Bobby Baxter

OUR MIND WAS flooded with images, millions of impressions and ideas, of experiences and worlds. Slowly, an impression began to form, a hint of something that didn’t fit.

A vision of my brother Dean and I, when we were kids, floated into my mind. We’d always been pushing our own limits and testing the boundaries of our parents’ patience, and one day we’d decided that we were going to sail over a thousand miles through the open ocean to America, all by ourselves. We were barely ten at the time.

After weeks of planning we’d managed to sneak off, hiding our tracks. We’d almost driven our parents sick with worry when we’d gone missing the first day. By the time we were far enough off to escape interference, we’d announced to everyone the adventure we’d embarked upon. We would have made it, except that halfway there, after a week at sea, our smarticles reserves had begun to deplete. Physically we were perfect, and the weather had been good, but the itchy, desperate feeling of our smarticle supply running low had convinced us to turn around.

My mind hovered back onto Atopia itself, to the million and more Atopians packed in below decks, waiting for the coming hurricanes. Thousands of tourists had been shipped off in a matter of hours when the order had come through, yet none, not even one, of the native Atopians had opted to leave. Even in the face of potential destruction they stayed, wrapped in the warm embrace of pssi. They were afraid of leaving, but why?

I’d only been out about an hour when it finally dawned on me.

It was so obvious it was shocking, and yet so close that it had been impossible to see the forest for the trees. In fact, none of the trees even wanted to see it, never mind the animals in the forest who were lustily eyeing the leaves and branches.

“Sid, I have it, I know what’s going on!” I shot up out of the water in my eureka moment.

Snapping back into my body, I began collapsing the millions of nodes of my collective mind with Nancy. She gasped, our minds and nervous systems shredding apart, and sat up with me. Her breathing was hard and ragged, and she gripped me tightly. I held back onto her.

“And?!” yelled Sid. The gang was all sitting around the tub Nancy and I were in.

“Don’t keep us waiting, son!” added Vicious.

I shook my head.

“Sorry, I can’t tell you yet. I need to talk to Patricia first. This doesn’t make sense. Or maybe it does. I don’t know. I thought I knew her better than this.”

“Aw, come on man!” yelled Vicious. “You can’t be serious!”

“Just let me talk to Patricia first, please, okay?” I asked. “Please, just a tiny bit more patience.”

Wide eyed and on the edge of their seats, they all stared at me in disbelief. Giving Nancy a kiss, I immediately flitted out, sending a high priority request into Patricia’s networks. What was she thinking?

§

Patricia accepted my ping on the first bounce and opened her sensory channels to me. I appeared in her private wood paneled office, sitting in one of her attending chairs. She was sitting across from me behind her desk, and looked like she’d been expecting me.

I just blurted it out. “I know what you’re doing!”

It was foolhardy, perhaps even dangerous, to drop this bomb, but I felt like I knew Patricia. This made it all the more perplexing.

“You’re trying to kill Vince,” I added breathlessly. “The pssi weapons programs, I know about all of it. Are you behind all these disappearances as well, did you steal Willy’s body? Did you sabotage Infinixx? Why are you doing this?”

She sighed and tipped her cigarette into an ornate crystal ashtray, considering me carefully.

“We weren’t trying to kill Vince,” she admitted softly. “I just wanted to keep him occupied. But I had nothing at all to do with the disappearances or what happened to Willy, and certainly nothing to do with Infinixx.”

I stared at her in disbelief.

“I want to say, what happened with your brother,” she continued, grimacing. “I was against all that, but it was what your family wanted at the time. Of course, Hal snapped it up as an opportunity to demonstrate yet another way pssi could remove unhappiness.”

She tapped her cigarette into the ashtray again, and took a sip from her never ending scotch.

I shook my head. Was she trying to bring me into the circle of blame?

“That was a real killer application, all right,” I shot back at her angrily. “Why are you doing this?”

“Since you came to me, why don’t you tell me what we’re doing, Bob?”

She smiled thinly.

I looked at her, shaking my head.

“You’re hooking the world on virtual crack is what you’re doing!”

25

Identity: Patricia Killiam

SILENCE HUNG IN the air. I paused, waiting for Bob to calm down.

“Yes, pssi can have very addictive side effects in an uncontrolled environment,” I admitted, taking another sip from my drink, “but it leaves the body very healthy. The drug you’re referencing ends up killing most people, whereas those on pssi will live immensely long lives.”

Bob shook his head angrily. “Yeah, perfect, keep them alive as long as possible to suck out as much money as you can, right?”

I stared at him without saying anything. It was surprising he’d managed to discover the pssi weapons programs. This was something I hadn’t even known about, one of the things Kesselring had been hiding from me. I’d only just found out myself through Sintil8.

“People directly stimulating their pleasure centers,” continued Bob heatedly, “ramping up their dopamine output. Forget about sex, just plug into my pleasure broadcast. Of course it’s addictive.”

“Quite frankly, I’m surprised at this sudden bout of prudishness,” I replied. “As far as I can remember, you were one of the ones who enjoyed all of this stuff the most.”

“I don’t care what people do. Be happy, do what you want.” He shrugged. “My problem is how you’re hiding how incredibly addictive it is.”

I shared his concern, but as chief scientist, it was my responsibility to defend what we were doing.

“Dr. Granger has found ways to short circuit the addition pathways.”

“Sure you have,” he replied sarcastically. “Using the problem to fix the problem, sounds perfect. And I’ll bet you’ll charge a nice fee for it too.”

This was exactly what I’d said when Kesselring and Hal had suggested it to me. I sighed.

“It does sound suspicious,” I agreed, “but we needed to get regulatory approval as quickly as possible. We couldn’t afford to let the process get stuck.”

He looked at me with mounting disgust.

“So it was all about getting to market faster?”

“In a way,” I admitted, nodding my head slowly. I was so tired.

“Encouraging people to have synthetic babies, living in fantasy worlds or reliving a past they can’t accept,” he continued furiously, gaining steam again. “If not that, then they’re emo-porn junkies, living life as parasitic reality vampires.”

I felt angry as well. While I’d set this whole thing in motion, once it was going I’d been forced to accept a lot of things I wasn’t comfortable with. The synthetic babies, proxxids, had been one of Hal’s ideas and central to the program for reducing birth rates. I’d never been comfortable with this and many other things. My own anger made me defensive.

“Fantasy worlds? Are they really, Bob?” I lashed out. “You have your own dimstim, and a very popular one, from what I’ve heard, and emo-porning is not something I condone. Anyway, since when have people wasting their lives on reality programming been an issue?”

“That’s not the point, Patricia,” he yelled back, “you’ve set all this up to turn the world into your junkie!”

We glared at each other.

“You’re up on stage every day, touting the benefits of pssi to the world—going green, boosting work productivity, free limitless travel, live forever.” Bob was walking around my office now, waving his hands in the air. “And you’ve got Nancy up on stage pulling for it too! How much does she know, I wonder?”

He looked towards the ceiling and held his arms wide.

“The great Patricia Killiam, godmother of all synthetic reality, globally renowned and trusted the world over,” he cried, “and the biggest drug pusher of all time!”

He looked back down from the ceiling at me accusingly. I sighed again, deeper this time. It was time to come clean. I looked down at my feet.

“What you’re saying is true,” I observed quietly, “but the benefits are true as well.”

“The first dose is free,” he snorted, “but then you start paying once hooked. Isn’t that what the release plan is? You’re giving it away for free?”

“Yes, that is the plan,” I sighed, nodding my head in resignation. “You understand what we’re doing, but you don’t understand why.”

“Oh, I understand all right,” he countered, “to make money, be powerful, to be more famous. The world is going to hell in a hand basket, and you’re the vultures ready to pick over its bones.”

That stung. I winced, but at least he had arrived at the crux of the issue.

“Yes,” I said after a moment, “the world is going to hell in a hand basket, as you say, but I’m not sure you understand the extent of it. Come with me, Bob, I need to show you something.”

He shook his head.

“Please, just come with me.” I nudged him with my phantoms.

Grudgingly he released control to me and we dropped through inner space to appear on a city street. Not just a city street, but one that was still charred from some cataclysmic event that had incinerated the place. There were bodies strewn everywhere, blackened flesh and bone exposed through shredded clothing.

“Look around Bob,” I said sadly. “This is the future without pssi.”

I drove our viewpoint around.

“War is horrible,” Bob replied, unimpressed. “But this isn’t your fault. How are you going to stop war with pssi?”

“We can’t stop war, but we discovered we could remove the root cause of it.”

I pulled our projection viewpoint back into space, far above the earth, and we watched as pinpricks of light erupted and sent tiny shockwaves across its surface.

“You’re watching a full scale nuclear war in progress. This is representative of many phutures for the human race.”

“But this is just one phuture,” Bob objected. “Everyone shifts their timeline when they see bad things coming.”

I shifted the viewpoint back, bringing into scope thousands and then millions of alternate future Earths, all burning under some apocalyptic scourge, whether biological, chemical, nanotechnology gone wrong or dozens of others.

“It is possible to navigate the fate of one individual,” I explained, “but the combined fate of billions gains momentum like a supertanker on the open ocean. With more than ten billion people on the planet, and all of them craving material luxury, there just aren’t enough resources to sustain it all, so, we fight for what’s left.”

“So it all ends in apocalypse?” he asked, shaking his head. “I find that hard to believe.”

“No, you’re absolutely right.”

I spun our viewpoint even further back, splintering billions of worlds into Bob’s sensory frames.

“In most scenarios, in almost all of them, we actually manage to avoid full blown Armageddon.”

Apocalypse wasn’t the worst fate for humans, and in fact a quick end would have been a blessing when faced with the majority of outcomes—a long, slow grind downwards; shifting populations as the Earth continued to heat, eco-system collapses, famine, pestilence, unending series of wars and genocides.

Over the next fifty years, the human population would drop from nearly ten billion to just a few. It had already started happening. I didn’t need to explain. Bob’s networks assimilated the information and data sets I sent to him.

“But surely,” he said quietly, “there must be something we could do?”

I shook my head.

“I was a part of the team that created the first World3 simulations at MIT in the mid-1970’s. We’ve been able to see this coming for a long time.”

I opened up another data channel to Bob. This one contained my personal, updated WorldX models. It was hundreds of thousands of nodes in hyper-dimensional space, connecting everything from rates of persistent pollution to land fertility and their relationships to policy implementation, industrial output and more. Graphs illustrating humanity’s climb along the pollution, population, energy consumption and other curves glowed in the foreground.

“For the last eighty years, this model has been almost perfectly predicting humanity’s path forward,” I explained, “and there is no soft landing for human population. Or at least, the soft landings that could have existed would have required threading the eye of a needle.”

I waited while Bob took it all in.

“Not that we didn’t try,” I sighed. “The same phuture spoofing technology we have hunting Vince down was one that I developed to try and nudge the timeline back and forth.”

“So you’ve been manipulating the world as well,” said Bob quietly, but he wasn’t angry anymore.

“Yes, but too little, too late. As we built Atopia, we tried countless combinations of events. In the end, no matter which way we twisted or turned, eventually billions of humans would have to perish for the planet to rebalance itself.”

I paused again.

“The only possibility left through the eye of the needle required a drastic reduction in global material consumption. The only way to do this was to send most of the population off into synthetic reality, and we had to do it quickly. Fertility rates need to plummet to nearly zero. When we understood this, the fledgling pssi program transformed itself from a commercial endeavor into a project of destiny.”

I’d returned us back to my office now. Bob was pacing back and forth in front of me.

“But we had to hide what we were doing to keep some stability along the main timeline,” I added. “Otherwise everyone would have tried to stop us.”

“Don’t tell me you were the only ones who could see this,” demanded Bob.

“Of course not,” I sighed, shaking my head. “Governments have been using futuring of one sort or another for a long time, but they’re always plotting paths forward to maximize their own benefit. A giant game of prisoners’ dilemma gone wrong.”

“And here you have the magical solution that just coincidentally maximizes your own benefit?” he shot back mockingly. “You want me to believe Kesselring and Dr. Granger are just in this to save the planet?”

I shook my head and shrugged.

“What about the United Nations then? What about everyone else?”

“International agencies have been preaching disaster for most of the last hundred years. Nobody is listening.”

“Why not just tell them yourself then?”

“Tell everyone the world is going to end—so buy my product?” I laughed. “If we truly convinced them the world was on the brink of apocalypse, we would have induced mass hysteria.”

A pause while we considered each other.

“These things happened in parallel, Bob, you have to understand. As the options collapsed, we were running the clinical trials. It became obvious we had to suppress some of the results to keep on track with regulatory approval.”

“Don’t you think it’s wrong to lie to everyone?”

I laughed.

“We didn’t lie to anyone. We just didn’t reveal the full truth. People have an amazing capacity for believing what they want to believe while ignoring the obvious.” At least this was the truth.

“And so the plan is to hook billions of people on virtual crack,” Bob said sarcastically, cocking his head at me, “with you as the only supplier. How convenient.”

I was getting tired of defending myself.

“We’re just giving people what they want, aren’t we? People have always wanted to work less, to travel more, to fuck someone new and exciting every day.” I rolled my eyes. “We’re giving them exactly what they’ve always wanted, the unlimited ability to do anything, and to be healthier and live longer while doing it.”

Bob said nothing, staring at me in stony silence.

“Do people really want to make the world a better place?” I asked. “Or do they just want to make a better place for themselves within it? Almost everything humans do is self-serving in the end.”

“I thought you taught us,” objected Bob, “that humans were successful because they’d developed an evolutionary instinct for trust that outstripped selfishness?”

“People have a responsibility to find their own happiness, don’t they? Life only has the meaning that you give it, right Bob?” I mocked, knowing this was his own mantra. I was cynical now. “We’re just giving people the tools to find their own happiness, in whatever way they choose, and in the process saving untold billions of lives. So, what was the right thing to do?”

“Now you sound like Dr. Granger.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose, slowly. Painfully.

“If Atopia is destroyed, billions will die.”

26

Identity: Jimmy Jones

THE MOMENT OF truth had arrived.

We were watching projections of the two converging storms, overlaid with a glowing array of plotted future paths of Atopia through them. The phutures were stabilizing as we approached time zero. Everything was coming together and I readied to power up our weapons systems.

“Thanks for everything,” said Rick as we waited in the final moments. “Whatever happens, I wanted to thank you for trying to help with Cindy.”

I looked at him. How quickly our roles had reversed. He was pathetic now.

“Of course, Commander,” I said to him. “We’ll find her, get her out somehow.”

He nodded, his slightly bloodshot eyes holding my gaze for a moment. He smelled of alcohol.

“You ready for this?” he asked, watching the display.

“As I’ll ever be.” The high altitude displays of the storms had a mesmerizing, hypnotic effect. They centered on the pulsing orb of Atopia highlighted near their convergence point. We would only have a window of a few minutes to get this right.

The room was deadly quiet as we sat and watched the storm systems engulf the entire volume of the room. They were all waiting on me. I looked up at Kesselring, Rick, and then at Marie. Patricia hadn’t shown up in person, but I knew she was watching through her proxxi.

“On my command, power up the weapons systems,” I instructed, waiting, feeling for just the right moment as I fed the information flowing in through my extrasensory splinter network. I could feel the winds ripping at the surface of Atopia, the forests heaving and tearing, the waves pounding against her hull.

“On my mark,” I said, raising my hand. “Five… four… three…”

Everyone held their collective breath.

I waited.

Something held me back—something inside me. Someone inside me.

I continued to wait, trying to understand what was going on. Interminable seconds ticked by. Then I understood. It had been sitting there in front of me all the time, but I just hadn’t been able to see it.

Until now.

“For God’s sake Jimmy!” screamed Kesselring. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

27

Identity: Patricia Killiam

“WHAT THE HELL is he doing?”

Bob stopped his pacing and looked at me. He didn’t have access to Command and couldn’t see what I saw now. Jimmy was standing motionless as critical seconds slipped by. We all watched in disbelief while Kesselring roared at him again.

“Bob, I need to go,” I said without waiting to discuss, leaving behind a tiny splinter while I snapped my main subjective into Marie’s body at Command.

Everyone in the room was frozen, all except Kesselring who had crossed the room and was standing in front of Jimmy now, holding his shoulders and shaking him. Jimmy didn’t even look like he was there. I strode over and pulled Kesselring away.

“Jimmy!” I yelled, looking directly into his slack face. The window of opportunity was closing fast.

At that moment his face came back to life, his eyes flashing as he turned to look at me, but what he said next stunned the room even more.

“Power down all weapons systems immediately!” he ordered. “And shut down the propulsion systems!”

“Belay that!” I yelled back, pinning the system technicians in place with my phantoms.

Everyone else stood by hopelessly, watching the two of us. I reached into the Command network with my other phantoms and tried to gain control of the systems as he blocked them.

My mind raced. The Terra Novans had gotten to him somehow. We had ceded enormous power to Jimmy for this operation, and I now realized that perhaps we’d put all our eggs into one basket. Furiously, my mind splintered into hundreds of shards that shot straight at Jimmy’s command and control structure in the multiverse worlds spreading out from Command.

I could feel Kesselring joining me, but he hadn’t the power in these worlds that I had.

Desperately, I quickened my mind and began launching thousands and then millions of attacks and feints and counterattacks at his cyber defenses, projecting millisecond phutures as I tried to find any weaknesses to exploit. The milliseconds became seconds, the window to save Atopia was closing.

“Stop this!” I screamed at him.

“Stand down, Patricia, I’m warning you!” he yelled back.

Desperately we grappled with each other, and then everything went white in a blinding flash of pain.

As my mind reassembled itself and my senses and metasenses slowly reintegrated, one by one, the world slowly came back into focus. My ears were ringing, and I was sitting on the floor. Everyone in the room looked stunned. What the hell was that?

Jimmy was looking at me calmly. The point of no return had passed. Atopia was sitting motionless, a sitting duck, doomed.

“Do not touch anything,” said Jimmy finally. “Everything is under control.”

28

Identity: Bobby Baxter

THE WORLD STOOD transfixed by the scene. Jimmy had begun broadcasting the scene direct from Command and into the mediaworlds at large. An audience of billions had already been tuned in to the drama of the destruction of Atopia, but not for the reason we thought.

Jimmy stood, his calm and resolute image hanging over the bewildered and powerless Patricia Killiam in the holoscreens and lens displays of the world as they watched.

“General McInnis,” called out Jimmy, straightening up, “we’ve powered down all systems and we will sequence down our fusion core at your request. I have opened all command and control functions to you. Please acknowledge.”

There was a moment of silence before General McInnis’ voice responded, “Goddamn boy, acknowledged. What the hell…”

“Please General,” interrupted Jimmy, “please stand down.”

The General’s image was now projected into Command. He just stood there, not sure what to say as he scratched his head.

“You kids sure have some explaining to do.”

One by one, surprised and shocked expressions clicked through the other faces in Command, and I wondered what was happening until suddenly it happened to me too.

The storms were gone.

I spun out from Patricia’s office to click into my splinters arrayed out around Atopia and it was all the same—blue skies, calm seas, the coast of America sitting serenely on the horizon.

The F35s were buzzing angrily around in the skies in tight orbits, watching us carefully as navy destroyers ringed us further out, with their weapons armed and pointing at us.

“We were just about to blow you out of existence, son,” said the General after another moment.

It all became clear. As Jimmy released information, the mediaworlds began to buzz and then roar with stories. The citizens of Atopia had been infected with a group-synthesizing reality skin. While we had driven Atopia into the coast of America, in our minds trying to save ourselves from non-existent storms projected from an infected reality skin, the rest of the world had watched in puzzlement and amazement.

Atopia had at first inexplicably breached American territorial waters, and then had begun furiously shipping off non–nationals via its passenger cannon. Amid confusing and contradictory stories, Atopia had stowed and locked itself down, cut off all communications as it approached land, and then begun powering up its fearsome weapons systems. America had no choice but to prepare to defend itself.

If we’d powered up the slingshot and mass driver, America had its finger on the trigger to unleash a hailstorm of tactical nuclear weapons to destroy us, an attack that even we couldn’t have repelled.

Patricia rematerialized in her office with me as I watched all this in my display spaces. She looked grim. My anger had totally deflated.

“I guess you’re right, Patricia,” I said as she appeared. “What could be worse than letting billions of people die? Thank God Jimmy figured it out.”

“Don’t thank God,” said Patricia quietly under her breath. “To be honest Bob, there may be something worse, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, but I wasn’t sure until now.”

She looked at me with infinitely weary eyes.

“Bob, I need you to do something for me.”

“What’s that?”

“I need you to leave Atopia, as soon as they open up the surface, and take as many of your friends as you can. Take Sid, Willy, Brigitte, and please, take Nancy away from here.”

“Why?” I asked, shocked.

I’d never even considered leaving Atopia before. It was all I’d ever known. Even the thought of leaving made my skin crawl.

“I can’t explain right now, I just need you to trust me. Even I’m not sure right now. It’s just a precaution.”

“Give me one good reason!” I demanded. Even if I wasn’t really angry anymore, my trust in her was almost completely gone.

“For one thing,” she said slowly and with effort, “Willy’s connection here through Terra Nova will almost certainly be revoked—he will be in effect exiled. Do you want him to go alone?”

I sat thinking on this for a moment. Jimmy had mentioned it, but I hadn’t considered it as a real possibility.

“I have a feeling that Willy and Sid will be implicated in what has happened,” she continued. “As soon as the surface opens I need you to get away from Atopia, and please take Nancy. I can’t explain more than that for now.”

Looking tired beyond comprehension, she added, “I need some time to myself. Oh, and one last thing, apologize to Vince for me—I couldn’t get Kesselring to remove the system we have chasing him.”

I nodded. She just looked at me sadly and then closed the connection to her office.

I snapped back into my body, down with Nancy and Sid in the dimly lit cafeteria. Robert had taken my body out of the water and we all sat together at one of the tables, everyone splintered out watching the media frenzy. Wet towels were draped around Nancy and I. They were all transfixed by the unfolding media storm.

Only Jimmy had been able to see it. The media stories began buzzing about links to Terra Nova as synthetic forensic intelligences tore backwards through the path of the virus, reverse hacking to where it had come from. Images of Jimmy, the savior, were featured on the covers of magazines and billboards, instantly appearing in millions of metaworlds. Information about the coming phuture apocalypses gained ground.

Stories began to emerge about the phuturecasts of world destruction Patricia had been hiding, how the Atopia pssi program was designed as the solution to save us, and how Terra Nova had attempted to stop this for their own profit. Stories were even circulating about the how Patricia had been hiding some of the addictive effects of pssi, but how there were ways to control it. In the middle of it all remained the image of Patricia, struggling to stop Jimmy from saving us all.

Jimmy had saved the world, and a grateful world was held spellbound.

“Patricia wants us all to leave,” was all I said on my return to the gang.

Everyone turned towards me, shocked, as parts of their minds disengaged from the media frenzy to comprehend what I was saying. I left a splinter to explain what had happened while I flitted off to the surface for a walk on the beach.

I needed to clear my mind and put things in order.

29

Identity: Patricia Killiam

“NO PUBLICITY IS bad publicity,” said Kesselring, standing uncomfortably in my office, “but how on earth did you let this viral skin get past you?”

I just stared at him and took a drag from my cigarette.

“You are our chief scientist—you must understand how this looks,” added Kesselring. “The blame for hiding any data regarding the trials has to come down on your shoulders.”

I was the scapegoat.

Jimmy and Kesselring had pre-empted my plan to release the hidden data on the pssi program through Sintil8. By coming clean at this moment, and laying the blame on my doorstep at the same time as exposing the apocalyptic phuturecast data, they had neatly jiu-jitsued themselves into the position of saviors and simultaneously thrust the pssi program into the global mind.

“You can’t buy advertising like that,” I bitterly complained, “and it looks like you don’t need me anymore.”

I was tired beyond belief after the showdown with Jimmy. He had used some sort of pssi weapon to stun me into submission at the end, a part of the weapons program Kesselring had been hiding. I’d felt it once before, long ago when Jimmy had been exposed at Nancy’s thirteenth birthday party, but he was infinitely more powerful now.

“There will always be a place for you here, Patricia.”

Patronizing bastard.

“So what’s happening then?” I asked wearily.

“Jimmy had made some modifications for an override to the pssi network to stop something like this from ever happening again,” said Kesselring. While I felt defeated, he looked elated. “The media attention has boosted demand for the launch with consumers by an order of magnitude. We’ve already begun private distribution of smarticles into business ecospheres for early adopters.”

There was nothing I could say, nothing I could do anymore. I had created a monster, which I loved.

30

Identity: Jimmy Jones

I’D STOLEN OFF to the surface to relax a little and escape the madness of the media. With all the tourists gone, nobody else had come above yet, and the scene at the edge of the beach was quiet.

The sun was setting through low hanging clouds on the horizon, illuminating a beautiful orange and pink sunset. I was sitting by myself under some low hanging palms. A pleasant breeze blew in off the ocean and pelicans swept in on calmly curling waves. What a beautiful way to end the day.

I sighed and felt my mind calm and focus itself. Susie really understood more about the nature of pain and suffering than anyone, and truly wanted to help. I knew she wanted to help me.

I stood, trying to decide whether to walk myself home or let Samson do it and get some work done, when Bob appeared. He was walking along the beach alone, looking slightly dazed.

“Hey Jimmy,” he said as he walked up to greet me.

“Amazing. You saved my life. You saved all our lives.” He shook his head. “It’s crazy, but maybe you saved the whole world.”

He reached out to shake my hand, smiling.

“Thanks Bob,” I replied, watching his hand touch my mine.

“Wasn’t Susie just up here with you?” asked Bob, looking around.

“She was,” I admitted, “but she had to go somewhere.”

Bob shrugged and smiled. He looked off into the sunset and surf to watch some pelicans as they used their ground effect aerodynamics to sweep in ahead of the waves, unseen forces propelling them effortlessly through space.

“Hey Bob, I’ve got a slightly oddball question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“If you had to sacrifice your soul to save someone or something,” I asked, “what would that be for you?”

Bob regarded me quizzically. “Well, for love, for Nancy, I guess.”

I smiled. “That’s nice Bob, I thought the two of you…well, anyway, that’s nice to hear.”

Bob smiled back.

“So, still haven’t taken me up on that surfing lesson, big shot that you are now!”

“Maybe one day soon, Bob,” I said, smiling at him, “maybe we’ll do a lesson one day soon.”

He smiled back.

“See you Bob.”

I turned to walk away.

31

Identity: Bobby Baxter

“SEE YOU JIMMY.”

Just then Jimmy stopped and turned to look at me. Something was weighing on his mind.

“You were the only person who was ever really nice to me,” said Jimmy after a pause. “I really appreciated that.”

I smiled. Jimmy had always been so awkward. Even with him as the most famous person on the planet, I felt like I wanted to protect him somehow.

“I love you Jim,” I said simply, “we’re brothers, no? I’ll always stick up for you, no matter what.”

“Do you really mean that?”

Jimmy looked like he was about to cry.

“Of course, buddy!”

Jimmy looked down, uncertain now. “I think you and your friends should leave Atopia.”

In my whole life nobody had ever mentioned leaving Atopia for anything. Two people on the same day? A sense of dread filled me.

Squinting into the dying sun, I shook my head lightly and shrugged and asked, “Why?”

Jimmy pressed his lips tightly together. “I’m just saying, I think it might be a good idea, and the sooner the better.”

With that Jimmy turned away and walked into the darkness.

32

Identity: Jimmy Jones

AS I WALKED away from Bob and into the dark underbrush, I became aware of someone walking beside me, someone new and yet someone intimately familiar.

“Why did you do that?” asked the apparition.

“Do what?” I replied. Curiously, I didn’t even think to ask who had appeared beside me.

“Warn off Bob,” it responded. “I think we need to have a talk, you and I.”

The undergrowth around me gave way to a voluminous, brightly lit corridor. No, it was more than a corridor, it was a long set of huge rooms connected by large square archways, and I was sitting in the middle room, the rest stretching off to both sides in the distance. I was perched on a white wooden chair.

Intricate, sky-blue frescos of angels and cherubs adorned the twenty foot ceilings, bordered by elaborate gold carvings. Ornate, richly decorated furniture was strewn about topsy-turvy and littered with broken bottles, golden goblets, and inert bodies.

Darkly framed oil paintings of men in uniforms, on horses directing battles, hung across one set of walls, while the other wall featured floor-to-ceiling lead glass windows that looked out onto an endless, manicured garden beyond. The garden centered around a long reflecting pool. Sunlight streamed in through the windows between heavy purple velvet drapes that were tied back with gold sashes.

The place stank of urine, and as if on cue, one of the inert bodies came to life, stumbling to its feet as it shuffled towards the nearest corner and began pissing across one of the other bodies.

“Sorry for the mess,” said my apparition, now taken solid form and stretched out before me on a chaise longue. “We had a bit of a party here today.”

He adjusted the frilly white cuffs of his tunic, and then the blond wig whose hair fell in tight curls to frame his painted white face and bright red painted lips. Leaning forward, he smoothed out a wrinkle in his tight black britches and looked up to smile at me self-consciously.

His heavy eye liner had smudged, so he looked slightly comical in a threatening sort of way, and his eyes shone brightly—my eyes.

I sat there, looking at myself.

“Come now, this isn’t that much of a surprise is it?”

I felt uneasy, wondering if this was some splinter or sub-proxxi gone wrong. The party guest that had arisen to relieve itself had finished pissing and turned towards us, blearily rubbing its eyes which then widened.

“The dauphin!” it said, barely audible. It was clearly excited, looking at me.

“What do you want?” I asked. This was all more familiar than I cared to admit.

“Ahh,” said my doppelganger, “it is not what I want, brother, but rather what we want. You and I, Jimmy. And by the way, call me James.”

He affected a tiny bow for my benefit. Several of the party guests had begun to rouse themselves now, encouraged by the first who was whispering urgently at them. The air filled hollowly with the sounds of clinking bottles and bodies coming awake.

“Come now Jimmy,” scolded James, his brow furrowing, “do you really think your rise through the ranks to a position of such power so quickly was all just happy coincidence?”

He smiled widely as he finished saying this, revealing a mouthful of yellowing teeth and large, sharp canines below his glittering black eyes. The waxy makeup on his face cracked as he smiled and he cocked his head playfully.

“The time for hiding is finished now,” he continued, shaking his head and sighing. “We are not children anymore. The world needs us now.”

Several of the guests were now sitting and watching us hungrily from nearby. Samson was here now too, watching me from a corner in the distance.

I began to recognize some of the faces around me, my childhood playmates I had invented to keep me safe, to keep me company, hidden away in my secret spaces when I was a child.

“You always knew I was in here Jimmy,” he said, looking towards Samson who acknowledged him with a small nod. “Most people with our, ah, condition, don’t get to meet their other selves—just one more of the wonders of pssi.”

He smiled again.

“We have been protecting you a long time now,” James added as he extended a hand to sweep past the assembled misshapen guests, who were all wide awake and encircling us ever closer. “Your children await.”

They were close now, and James reached out to touch one of them who sat down next to him, affectionately placing a hand on its head.

“Has your mind been clear lately?” questioned James, smiling as he ruffled the hair of his favorite before looking back to me expectantly, waiting for an answer.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” I had to admit, feeling the hot breath of the creatures behind me. “The past few years, my mind has been gaining a clarity that…” I was at a loss for words.

“That what?” questioned James. “That escaped you before? The mind is cleansed with pain, isn’t that right, Jimmy?”

As he said this the eyes of the assembled flashed darkly as they leaned closer towards us. James splintered us off into a sensory imprint of the private world I had burned so long ago, feeding the pain of the writhing creatures pinned to the walls into my pleasure centers. I shivered and gasped slightly.

“Nice isn’t it?” said James smiling. “But we aren’t children anymore.”

Another splinter overlaid a new scene, a man we once knew growing up, Steve, who’d worked in the aquaponics group with my dad, the both of them playing privately together with proxxids after work. He was groping through a dark tangle of underbrush, desperate, someone was chasing him. Suddenly a flash of metal tore into him and he screamed, terrified, and his blaze of pain coursed through my system like rain soothing a parched desert plain.

“Not just pain,” explained James, “but through the careful research of our friend Dr. Granger, we now have the ability to recognize the direct nerve imprints of fear, hopelessness, guilt, hundreds of layers of desperate emotions, and mix these into a symphony of the senses.”

He was on his feet now, surrounded by our minions, holding a claret jug of dark red wine in one hand and a large crystal goblet in the other.

“Ah, the sweet melody of loneliness,” he sang out, and yet another splinter called up Olympia Onassis, wandering desperately. Her loneliness resonated in my auditory channels and then merged into a gentle, fearful caress across my skin.

“The taste of heartache,” James added while an image of Cindy Strong filled another splinter as she stood over the grave of Little Ricky. I could taste her heartache filling my mouth, an aching sweetness tinged with the hints of regret.

“And the soft caress of hopelessness and despair,” he laughed, and an image of Hal Granger hung between us, sitting with a doctor and looking down at a medical diagnosis of some painful, terminal disease, his fear of the world forgetting him coursing into our veins like a sweet melody.

“And pain, of course pain,” said James.

A hundred other worlds splintered into my sensory system, gorging it with terror and hurt and searing pain, as I watched people burning and butchered in their own private hells. I gasped, my body wracking itself in pleasure as I looked up at James, wiping tears from my eyes.

One by one I could see how James had captured each one of these souls, ferreting out their needs until they voluntarily ceded control to him, to us. At the apex of it all was Susie, all of the pain and suffering channeled through her neural system. She had borne the pain of the world, and now she would bear this pain for our world.

“We just give people what they want,” James said, his yellow fangs creeping at the edges of his smile, “and, well, they give us what we want in return. It’s a fair bargain, no?”

I nodded, understanding, my body and mind singing with energy.

“With root control, we have access to all their memories, know their every hope, their darkest fear, and we can synthesize worlds to play all these out, to suit our whims, our needs. They are sinners, Jimmy, they must be cleansed of their sins through their own pain.”

Music had begun to play, a mad litany filled with notes of terror and fear, and the creatures around us began to sway and dance.

“Pain and fear cleanse the mind, Jimmy,” said James as he poured me a glass of wine, “and we need your mind as clear as possible for what is to come.”

He offered me the wine.

“My own special reserve I have been working on just for you,” he said as I took the offered glass. I swilled the contents and leaned in to smell it. “A nice base of pain, with hints of rejection, notes of keen terror… try it.”

The music quickened with my mind, soaking in the sensory orgy of my body connecting into the hundreds of metaworlds holding our trapped sinners, their terror and pain coursing through me. The creatures around us were whipping themselves into a frenzy as the music climaxed, and I leaned my head back to drink in the wine. As I greedily gorged on it, it spilled down and around my face, drenching my ADF Whites in bright, bloody splashes.

James crossed the final inches to embrace me, and I threw my arms skywards, reunited at last with my one true brother. Nobody would ever hurt us again, and together, we would cleanse the world of its sins.

33

Identity: Patricia Killiam

“I THINK THE clinical diagnosis would be sadistic sociopath with multiple personality disorder,” said Marie.

I looked up from my desk at her and nodded. We’d finally managed to piece together what was happening. It was frightening, even more frightening than the news that my own medical systems were on the brink of ultimate failure.

“It’s not what I think you need to think about now,” she added. “I’ll pass this onto Bob.”

“Safely,” I added pointlessly. Marie just nodded back.

Images of Shiva, the great destroyer and creator, floated into my mind. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. He was extremely good at hiding his tracks. We only really had the one incident at Nancy’s birthday party as a window into his mind, and even that was fleeting. Fleeting but infinitely disturbing, and I’d made things worse.

Like a tick in a bear’s fur, he’d burrowed his way into the deepest reaches of the program. He’d pushed all my buttons to get what he wanted, even as a child. More of the problem was that even then, it didn’t all add up.

“Do you think he was really involved in the disappearances of Susie and Cynthia and the others?” I asked Marie. “Why would he attract attention to himself like that with people so close to him?”

“He must be unaware of a part of himself, deceiving himself,” Marie speculated. “It’s the only way he could have passed all our psych tests, but it’s hard to say. Having pssi installed in the developing brain of an unstable sociopathic mind has created something…new, I guess.”

The science of self-deception lay at the heart of modern psychology. The goal of self-deception wasn’t about deceiving the self, but about more effectively deceiving others. Deception was a cognitively demanding activity that left telltale signatures no matter how good the liar. By truly deceiving yourself, on the other hand, you could escape detection, but with the generalized risk of falling out of touch with reality.

This was something we’d compounded with pssi.

Deception of all kinds increased with intelligence. The bigger the neocortex, and the higher the intelligence, the more an organism tended to lie and deceive itself, and Jimmy was about as smart an organism as I’d ever come across. I wasn’t sure it was accurate to say he was even human anymore. Whatever he had become, he was now the master of deception.

“I also think he may have constructed a fantasy world about his own abuse to justify his behavior,” added Marie. “We don’t have any evidence that his parents ever did anything to him.”

I considered this.

“Split personality disorder is almost always the result of abuse as a child. If his parents didn’t abuse him, then who did?”

Marie shrugged.

“If he’s managed to fool himself,” I sighed, “then he’s certainly managed to fool us.”

I wondered about all the ways I’d been fooling myself to arrive at this point.

Self-deception also tracked closely with war and the worst of human evils. Pssi had catapulted human capacity in many ways, but by any measure, Atopia had now become the most deceptive place on earth, and we were about to unleash it on the rest of humanity under the guise of being its savior. The road to hell really was paved with the best of intentions.

All the careful planning to cover every base, to push the future to converge on one stable outcome, it was all slipping away. Then again, control was always an illusion, just another self-deception. I should have known better.

On the other hand, perhaps larger forces were in play. A major transition in human evolution had been the development of trust as an evolutionary step. Pssi had now almost fully passed human evolution from genetic and into memetic encoding, and the speed of the transition was too fast for human culture to catch up. One result was that the new human pssi-forms were becoming more selfish.

In the ultimate extension of this, there was the potential for one singular being to become dominant over the whole super-organism of humanity as billions of people were about to be connected together via the pssi network. On the brink of removing death as an evolutionary force, it was frightening to consider what lay ahead.

What was worse? Allowing billions of people to die, or saving them to live lives of perpetual suffering under the control of a monster? My monster, I added as a footnote to that thought.

I didn’t answer my own question.

Perhaps it would have been impossible for me to see what was happening, no matter what controls I could have put in place. He had used my own blind spot, my latent desire for a child of my own, as my life had begun slip away from me. I could feel my love for him burn in me even as I understood the beast I may have created.

“Can we remove him from the Board somehow? At least get him off the Security Council?” I pondered aloud.

Marie responded by echoing my thoughts more than anything else.

“He’s already aligned himself with powerful supporters, he’s a celebrity in the world media, and I’m sure he’d have some nasty surprises up his sleeve if we tried confronting him in the open,” she replied. “We lack enough hard data on Jimmy to resolve phutures involving him. It’s almost like he’s a ghost.”

I continued the thought for her, “Yes, and if we can’t prove anything, it will look like the disgruntled ramblings of an old woman throwing her last rocks into the glass house.”

I was thinking about all the fuss I’d been raising at the Board meetings about minimizing the addictive effects of pssi. It’d all fallen on deaf ears as they’d reviewed the projected profits, with Hal cheering from the sidelines about being able to clip the addictive circuitry of the brain. Now there was some self-deception at work.

And now, it had all fallen on my doorstep.

“Probably better to keep under the radar for now,” agreed Marie. “I do think that your idea of encouraging the formations of composites should yield some protection from Jimmy.”

“Perhaps.”

“And what about the data from the neutrino telescope?” asked Marie.

I sighed. I’d kept the POND results absolutely locked down, trying to forget it myself. How could it be real? It defied imagination.

“Cut it off from Atopia immediately,” I replied. “If there’s anything to it I want that data far away from here.”

My skin crawled thinking of the ways Hal and Kesselring could spin the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, if it was true and not some artifact of the viral infection.

“Send a report back into the science community that it was a failure, and leave the connection key with the package delivered to Bob and Nancy. But only to them.”

“I’ll take care of it,” she replied simply.

Looking at Marie, I couldn’t believe I felt such love and affection for a machine, a virtual projection that didn’t really exist, something that I’d created. Then again, all our children, biological or not, were created by us, and it wasn’t accurate to say that Marie didn’t exist. I’d never really thought of her as my child before that moment, always as more of a sister. Perhaps she was both.

“After I’m gone, communicate everything to them, right?” I confirmed with Marie. “Send Nancy and Bob out to find Willy’s body.”

“I understand, Patricia, don’t worry.”

“I know, it’s just…”

“I know.”

Silence descended. I had one final point.

“Marie, after I’m gone, I want you to continue to, well, to be.”

“But proxxi terminate with their owners, Patricia. That goes against the whole program.”

“It’s been done before,” I said, smiling. “Anyway, it’s done. I’ve already made a special provision in my will. There are some advantages to being the senior researcher at Cognix.”

“Are you sure?” Marie asked, giving me a quizzical look. “This will create precedent…”

“Exactly,” I smiled. “I think this situation calls for special consideration, and I want you to continue on with the work we’ve started on the Synthetic Being Charter of Rights. Besides…”

“Besides what?”

I looked at Marie carefully.

“Aren’t you the least bit worried about ceasing to exist? Doesn’t this arrangement strike you as unfair?”

She smiled and gently shook her head.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

I let out a quiet laugh at that. I didn’t think this old body had any tears left in it, but I guess it still had a few. Wiping them from my face, I felt my papery skin. So fragile, and yet we dreamt of immortality.

“Everything is in order,” I said quietly, needing to get this over with. “I think I’d like this time to myself. Goodbye Marie, and say goodbye to Nancy for me.”

§

I turned off my pssi for the last time and my office faded into the muted colors of my real world living space, a small apartment near the beaches. It was small, but one of only a handful of them on the surface of Atopia. Almost everyone else lived below deck.

In the end, Jimmy had given me what I wanted—for the world to embrace pssi—but he had exacted his price for it. Perhaps ending my life was something I really wanted, and he’d simply been the instrument of my desire.

If it really was a case of split personality, perhaps there was something to save in Jimmy, perhaps he wasn’t to blame, that he was being manipulated himself. It could be the key to stopping whatever was happening.

All of my medical systems were shutting down. I had chosen this moment myself. Of all the things that pssi could give us, perhaps the least touted was dignity in death. It was just me, by myself in the world for perhaps the first time in nearly half a century.

So this is what reality feels like. I had forgotten.

Wearily, I lifted my ancient body off the chair in the kitchen that Marie had left it sitting on. I decided I wanted to go and inspect my tiny garden out back to see what damage had been wrought by my inattention over the years.

Slowly, limping, I walked out my back door and reached my garden. I looked around. Some plant pots were blown over, and everything had a dull grey tint to it in the dim pre-dawn light. I ambled over to a sun lounger near the back, near an old raspberry bush nearly as decrepit as I was, and collapsed into it. A few last rays of the sun would be nice to catch if I could.

So, I won’t last to see pssi spread into the world.  Maybe that was for the best. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with the pace of change anymore, and not sure I wanted to be around and responsible for what might be coming.

My own end, I thought to myself, it had to come, but I’d always managed to suspend disbelief about it. Now there was something we all had a talent for. I laughed and thought of Cody Chavez, living in a world of Elvis impersonators. Maybe Hal was right, maybe Cody was happiest in his suspension of disbelief. Maybe that’s what his life meant to him. Who was I to say otherwise?

“Marie,” I called out, “I have one last story to tell you.”

I couldn’t see or feel Marie anymore, but I knew she was with me. In fact, I knew she would be surrounding and cradling me like a baby right now, and that was a comforting thought. As I began to understand my end was coming, I had begun telling Marie stories of my earlier life, before machines had begun to record memories, before digital trails tracked our pasts out behind us while we blindly forged ahead.

Telling Marie my memories, my stories, made me feel like a part of me would survive on, as well as a part of some of the people in them. I had saved my most important, my most cherished and hidden story, for last.

Memories of the spring of 1940 flooded me now as I spoke, remembering the evacuation of my sisters and I, and all the rest of the children, from London in advance of the bombing campaigns that would signal the start of the Battle of Britain.

We’d been sent to live in the countryside with a nice family, just outside the village of Andover. It was hard to believe at the start, living in such an idyllic setting, that the world was tilting towards war. And spring wasn’t just blooming in the flowers that year, but also in my young heart—my God, to be sixteen again, to see the world through such trusting and naïve eyes.

In practically the next field over from us, they had hastily assembled the new Over Whallop RAF station and airfield, and as the spring gave way to summer we were suddenly overrun by gangs of handsome young men on their way to their missions into the sky.

Visions came to me of the daring young men and their flying machines, sitting carelessly about outside their flapping khaki tents, smoking cigarettes, and with a sudden wail of alarms they would spring off bravely into the sky.

My young man was Aaron Adair, as fitting a name for a flying man as there ever was. I remembered cautious, furtive glances over hedgerows, quiet talks on quiet walks on moonlit nights, a first kiss, the fervor of first love and the squeals of laughter with my sisters in our attic bedroom as I shared it all. And then the dreaded sirens, the fearful waits and joyous returns, the smells of oil and sweat and gunpowder mixed with passionate nights and declarations of undying love.

And then…

I remembered a trembling bicycle ride down a muddy lane, awkwardly and unsteadily splashing through grey puddles. As clear as if it were yesterday, I remembered the lonely squeak of the cow gate opening onto the field, the falling rain soaking me through, and a numb walk towards a smudge in the sodden grass. I stood there, inspecting the dripping remains of my love’s prized Spitfire, its wreckage strewn artlessly across the grassy expanse; burnt, twisted, and slowly fading in time.

Tears streamed down my face, lost in the rain.

I cried as I did then. This was my most private of memories, unspoken to anyone now living, unspoken even to myself in over a century. Having lived through the rest of that horrible war, destroying a generation, I was driven to see an end to pointless conflict, to find a way to cheat death, to find a way to stop it all, and perhaps even to stop time.

My heart would never love again, not in that way. I never married, and focused my mind on finding ways to escape reality, and perhaps, irrationally, to find a way back to him. At least that’s what I’d started out doing, as unspoken as it was. In the end, looking back, it had all taken on a life of its own, and my own love had, in the end, blinded me.

But now, at my own end of time, I remembered, and I remembered why.

My love, perhaps I will find you now.

Wiping away my tears, I gently eased myself back in the lounger, pleased to see that dawn was beginning to break on the horizon. It looked like it would be a nice day. I looked to one side at my long forgotten raspberry bush.

Within its spiny gray branches I was surprised to find, still surviving, one bright red, juicy looking raspberry, standing out in surreal relief from the grayness surrounding it. I leaned over and picked it, rolling it around in my fingertips as I considered my life. I was afraid, but I was also so tired, and the last of my resistance slipped away.

I popped the raspberry into my mouth and began chewing it.

I thought of the billions of humans out there, some asleep, some awake, but most somewhere in between. I thought of the tens of billions of synthetic souls now roaming the multiverse and the infinite inner space we had created together; we and the machines. I wished them all well.

That raspberry was delicious, I couldn’t help thinking as the darkness slipped in. It was so extraordinarily bittersweet.

With a gentle sigh I exhaled my last breath and slipped away as the last of the stars faded above me.

§

In the early morning dusk, a beautiful Monarch butterfly fluttered and danced its way through Dr. Killiam’s garden. Dr. Killiam lay in her chair, finally at peace. The butterfly seemed to consider her for a moment, dancing this way and that above her motionless body, and then fluttered away, gaining altitude.

As it darted back and forth, ever higher, it was joined by a Brown butterfly, marked by strong, concentric circles on its wings. Joyously, the two touched and danced off into the distance, rising above and away to leave Atopia below.

The first rays of sunlight pierced the horizon, illuminating thin, red and gold clouds, high in the aquamarine sky.

A new day was dawning.

EPILOGUE

Identity - Bobby Baxter

SHIVERING, I PULLED my sweater tight around me. For where we may have to go, I’d better start getting used to my own body. San Francisco sure was colder than I’d imagined.

From this vantage point, across some boulders and a field of grass at the edge of a stand of Redwoods we had settled in to camp underneath, I could dimly make out the tops of the Golden Gate Bridge poking out from under a thick blanket of fog rolling into the bay. Night was falling and we’d lit a fire. I extended my hands towards the burning and crackling wood.

So this was what camping was really like. I liked the synthetic version better.

Following encrypted instructions from Marie, we’d gone off the grid as far as possible in as short a time as possible. The state park above San Francisco was a designated network-free zone and, after collecting up some tents and camping supplies in the city itself, we’d been dropped off up here and hiked ourselves to the edge of the forest.

I still couldn’t believe Patricia was gone.

Walking around out there, I had the crushing and numbing sensation of being blind and deaf and dumb even though I could see and hear and talk. Being cut off from the dense communication network on Atopia gave me the feeling we had been transported back into the dark ages. My body fairly sang with the urge to drop it all and get back into the warm, comfortable embrace of the pssi on Atopia, but I resisted it as best I could.

Atopia was the only place I’d ever known, and I’d taken for granted, like breathing, feeling the steady thrum of information through my metasenses. My phantoms were still there, arrayed around me in empty hyperspaces, stretching out and away from me, but my metasenses were completely numb. It felt as if most of my body had been amputated.

It was true what they said—the future was already here, just unevenly distributed, and while I belonged to the future, there I was, suddenly in the past with the rest of humanity. The world, however, was about to receive the gift of the future we’d been working on so hard for them, and they could barely wait to get their hands on it.

I laughed silently to myself. People had to be more careful about what they wished for.

Vince had come with us. He figured whatever Patricia’s last instructions were, they might possess some key to his own problem. Sid had come, as well as Brigitte and Willy.

Well, Willy had sort of come. Up here in the state park, there was no network connectivity so we’d had to embed a splinter of him into Brigitte for the trip into the woods. Brigitte seemed to enjoy having her own bit of Willy to take everywhere with her, and I doubted Willy would be getting that splinter back anytime soon.

Martin had elected to stay behind, to stay with our parents, something I’d thought sensible as well at the time. All of our proxxi had made the trip as well, embedded as they were into our bodies. So there the nine of us sat around the campfire—me, Robert, Sid, Vicious, Vince, Hotstuff, Brigitte and her proxxi Bardot, and Willy’s slightly confused splinter.

Nancy hadn’t come with us despite me pleading with her, but this was before we’d learned what Jimmy had become. I should have tried harder, should have forced her to come along with us right away as Patricia had asked. Nancy had insisted she would catch up with us, but it was too late.

Jimmy had asked her to stay on a while to help with the investigation and all the preparations for the Atopian state funeral for Patricia, despite the rumors of her working with the Terra Novans. Jimmy had been the one that had sponsored the state funeral, despite resistance from the Council, so Nancy had felt some obligation towards him. With a sense of dread, I realized Jimmy was keeping her there on purpose.

A week had passed since we’d left, and newly passed constitutional changes on Atopia had enabled Jimmy and Rick to maintain the state of emergency, a state of emergency that would never end.

Having barely survived destruction, the once cherished civil liberties that Atopia had been founded upon, and without Patricia there to defend them, were quickly and unceremoniously thrown out the window. Almost overnight Atopia had transformed itself into a police state, and Jimmy was quickly amassing a private psombie army—for protection, of course.

In the ensuing investigation, it’d been discovered that the viral skin had been vectored from the Terra Novans through Patricia’s own specialized pssi system. The current best guess was that it had been her old student Mohesha who had implanted it. As a novel zero-day infection, Patricia had gone on to infect everyone she’d come into contact with, which had then spread quickly into everyone on Atopia.

Command and control of the virus had been regulated by leaking data back and forth through Willy’s persistent conscious connection from Terra Nova and into Atopia. Worse still, ripping apart the code, they’d revealed a lot of similarities with the viral skins Sid had been creating. To top everything off, secret communications between Patricia and the Terra Novans, and even Sintil8, were discovered, although the content of these were unknown.

All in all, it’d cast a dark shadow on our group.

Patricia had kept secret her decision to not terminate Marie when she’d died. She had encoded Marie onto a miniature data cube and smuggled it off Atopia right before the lockdown had started. We’d picked up the data cube containing Marie from an antique store in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, the cube hidden in what looked like a walking stick.

After lighting a fire at our campsite, we’d started a private network to connect us all, and awoken Marie from the data cube. Her ethereal image had risen before us above the fire, wavering in the night air, a ghost that told us a truly frightening nighttime tale as we huddled together, explaining the monster that Jimmy had become and the danger we all faced.

I yearned for my days back on the beach.

Within days, hundreds of millions of people would be fusing their bodies and minds into the pssi network. While the rate of change had already been hurtling forward, it would now take an even dramatically steeper upward trajectory.

With conscious transference at the brink of reality, most humans alive today would achieve an immortality of sorts. Our souls were about to go from the stuff of legend into the stuff of hard and fast reality.

That was the big picture.

In the short term, with pssi released, they were predicting a precipitous drop in consumer goods spending, a large part of which would be redirected into the pssi network. Economies would falter, and more wars would be spawned, and those with entrenched interests in supplying material goods would launch a series of attacks on Atopia itself. All of this had been previewed, and was the reason Atopia had been built with its own defensive weapons.

With a decrease in material consumption, the resource pressures would ease, and gradually, over the years, conflicts would die out. With a growing majority of people getting their every need cared for within the pssi multiverse, the desire to struggle would flame out. Pssi was the great equalizer of the classes.

Of course, there was the darker side.

While on Atopia we’d taken a relatively benign approach in our quest to understand the capabilities of pssi, it was only dawning on me the terrible things that the billions of people in the rest of the world may end up using it for. It was a fair bet that some cheerful souls were already thinking up some fearsome ways of weaponizing it.

And this was exactly what Kesselring had been hiding from Patricia. Cognix had been secretly undertaking weapons programs with several nation states to prepare their readiness for the pssi launch. Jimmy was involved of course.

The good news was that the phutures had stabilized—no apocalyptic wars, at least not in the near future. But pssi wasn’t the only game in town either. A crush of other transformative technologies was crowding the future, and we’d have to wade our way through this brave new world to find Willy’s body.

It had become obvious that Jimmy had killed his own parents, and was behind dozens and perhaps hundreds of disappearances including Cynthia, Susie, and even Commander Strong’s wife. We suspected he had sabotaged Patricia’s medical systems as well, so he had killed not only his own mother, but his godmother as well. He seemed to do it all by giving people what they wanted, and then exacting his price for their desires.

The key to it all was somehow in Willy’s body, wherever that was. It was the key to stopping whatever Jimmy was becoming, my key to getting Nancy back and protecting my family from him as well.

I suspected Jimmy had been involved in killing Dean to get closer to me, or at least involved in Dean’s decision to kill himself.

§

The next morning we all sat back around the embers of the fire. Vince was making cups of coffee and handing them out.

“Did you read the news Willy sent in this morning?” asked Vince as he handed me my cup.

“Yes,” I replied.

Simultaneously with the commercial release of pssi into several major metropolitan areas, Cognix had announced the beginning of construction of seven new Atopia–class floating platforms at strategic physical locations around the globe. They had the cash flow now.

There had even been excited talk on Phuture News about giving Atopia a seat on the United Nations Security Council and appointing Jimmy. He’d begun calling himself Jimmy James.

We’d had to bring our own smarticles. They flushed out of the body if they weren’t topped up, plus we didn’t know how secure the old ones were, so Patricia had created our own secret variant for us. On Atopia, the environment was infused with them so we didn’t have to think about it, but here, we needed our own supply.

I pulled out the bag filled with our new smarticle powder from my backpack, and dipped a twig I’d picked up from the ground into it. I lifted the twig to my nose and inhaled the powder. The easiest way into the body was through the mucus membranes.

“Can’t we just tell people what we know?” mused Vince as he cupped his coffee, blowing the steam off it. I offered him the bag of powder and he took it.

“No, we don’t have enough,” I replied. “After what’s happened, it’d look like more Terra Novan interference. Coming from us, it wouldn’t exactly look reputable, and would probably get us in a lot of trouble. We need to fly under the radar as much as possible.”

“Yeah, I think we need to have a serious chat with Sintil8, wherever he is, before we do anything else,” added Willy’s splinter.

“Hey, don’t believe everything you think, Willy boy!” laughed Sid as he worked away on our private metaworlds. “At least before you check with me!”

Sid was trying to be funny, but he was right. He had hacked into our personal pssi systems and begun hardening them against exposure to Cognix, starting with backups to our memories and our own cognitive intrusion detection systems. We had to make sure our minds remained our own.

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” I asked Vince.

“I’m the perfect person to have along!” he laughed.

It was true. The only place he existed was in the present, and for most of the world this hardly counted anymore.

“Ah yes, the man with no future,” laughed Sid. “Aren’t we a motley bunch to trust for saving the world?”

I wasn’t in a humorous mood.

“Look Sid, we have no choice in this.”

I had to get Nancy out of there. It was too dangerous to let her know what she was facing, so we couldn’t tell her about Jimmy. I shuddered to think what he could be capable of.

“I suppose it all depends on how you look at it,” continued Sid, “maybe it’s not so bad.”

I shook my head at him incredulously.

“Well I mean you and Nancy, together being able to see everything.”

“Yes…?”

“You’re like the omniscient being who walks on water, searching for the body of man to save the soul of mankind from eternal suffering.”

“Squaring off against what seems to be the devil, no less,” chipped in Vicious. “I mean, it’s all been done before mate, and so far so good!”

“Tell me that doesn’t sound biblical,” suggested Sid, now transformed into a talking burning bush sporting two stone tablets with our names inscribed on them.

“Well,” I replied, my mood lightening, “I bet Christ’s disciples didn’t include a punk rocker.”

I cast a sideways glance at Vicious and smiled.

“Oooh,” replied Vicious, returning my grin, “but I’ve heard that Judas Priest weren’t far off mate.”

I laughed. “I’m going to be careful of you, then.”

“And the whole key to this is in my body?” said Willy, shaking his head. “Wally must have left us some clues. We just need to look.”

“Brings a whole new meaning to ‘Where’s Waldo’ dunnit?” laughed Vicious, unable to contain himself. This brought laughs from everyone, including Willy’s splinter.

Smiling, I looked at all of them one by one, looking to me for leadership.

“I’m sure this wasn’t what the prophets had in mind when they imagined the Second Coming,” I joked grimly, “but we’ve got no choice.”

“Moscow huh?” asked Hotsuff, looking at Brigitte and Bardot and then down to inspect her camping short shorts. “I’m going to need a whole new wardrobe.”

“Yeah, sure,” I replied. I looked around at our little gang. “I think we’re going to need a lot of things.”

The trail to Willy’s body began and ended with Sintil8, who’d now totally disappeared off the grid.

Terra Nova was almost hermetically blockaded, both in the physical and cyber realms, so there was no help there, but since Willy’s mind was still with us, his body was still alive out there somewhere.

The thought of tracking down a gangster like Sintil8 frightened me, but then, our choices had boiled down to the lesser of two rather nasty evils. The only clue we had was Sintil8’s real name, Sergei Mikhailov, which Patricia had managed to dig up.

Clouds of smarticles released in San Francisco yesterday had begun to float in on the breeze, even up here, and I could feel small channels and rivulets of information begin to flow, connecting me to the multiverse. As refreshing as it felt to my metasenses, it now took on a darkly ominous feel as well.

“Let’s get a move on people,” I said as my phantoms shivered. “I think it’s best that we stay away from major cities as much as possible.”

“That’s not where I think I am anyway,” added Willy for good measure.

The four of us with physical bodies shouldered our backpacks of gear and checked around the campsite for anything left behind. I kicked some dirt onto the smoldering remains of the fire.

Stopping for moment, we all smiled at each other, and then started out on the path that led into the great Redwood forest and beyond.

* * *

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed Atopia and want more, please go and write a review, no matter how small, on Amazon right now! This was my first novel—writing isn’t my full-time job (yet!) but I’d like it to be, and by leaving reviews on Amazon you can help me get there. Having more reviews on Amazon has a direct impact on rankings and encouraging other people to read. I also read all the reviews and it’s great to hear your feedback!

* * *

If you’d like to join my beta reading list for my next novel, or would like to share some thoughts or chat, just email me at matthew.mather@phuturenews.com

SPECIAL THANKS

I’d like to thank my editors, Eddie Mumford and Andrew Kozloski, and in particular Allen Tierney who did a whole edit of the book as an unsolicited favor!

A special thanks to the many people who helped me make this possible, including Robert Megeney, Danny Grant, Dave Sachs, Quito Galiana, Nancy Zadler, Yulya Faibusovitch, Paul Warne, Garnet Alexander, Andrea Rabinovitch, Mary Lim, Eric Montcalm, Miriam Aczem, Alex Moon, Myleen Sjodin, Vaseem Baig, and Brendan O’Malley.

An extra special thanks goes out to Mr. John Jarrett, who lives somewhere out near Perth in the Land Down Under, who in addition to beta reading also created the graphic for the Atopia logo!

And of course, I’d like to thank my mother and father, Julie and David Mather, and last but most definitely not least, Julie Ruthven, for putting up with all the late nights and missed walks with the dogs.

— Matthew Mather

Ps. On next page are instructions for viewing 3D augmented reality image of Atopia on your iPhone!

Instructions for viewing augmented reality 3D view of Atopia right on your Kindle!

(requires an iPhone)

Go to the Appstore and download the free app below:

Farrago AR: 3D Augmented Reality Creator

Once loaded, start the app and press “start” at the opening screen and you will see the camera view in Farrago.

Center the image on the next page in the middle of the camera view and a 3D model of Atopia should pop into view. You need to have bright room lighting (without reflections off the Kindle screen) to have it work best. You do need to play around a little with the viewing angle sometimes to get it started.

If you have any trouble getting it to work, drop me a line at matthew.mather@phuturenews.com

Copyright

Kindle Edition

Published by PhutureNews Publishing

Copyright © 2012 by Matthew Mather

ISBN: 978-0-9878180-7-2

Cover image by Lateef

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

About the Author

Matthew started out his career working at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines, going on to be a founder one of the world’s first multisensory interface companies, Immersion, that became the world leader in its field. His latest project, MindHabits, was a major award-winning brain training videogame that was translated into a dozen languages and distributed worldwide. In between he has worked on innovations in everything from computational nanotechnology and weather prediction systems to genomics, social intelligence research and most recently cybersecurity.

Matthew’s writing credits include the novellas Blue Skies, Childplay, Brothers Blind, Timedrops, and Neverywhere, all a part of the best selling Atopia series. He lives in Montreal, Canada with his bright and beautiful girlfriend Julie and their three dogs and a cat.

Content

Matthew Mather
THE
~~ COMPLETE ~~
ATOPIA CHRONICLES

Foreword by the author:

~ BLUE SKIES ~ Book 1: Olympia Onassis

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~ CHILDPLAY ~ Book 2: Commander Rick Strong

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~ TIMEDROPS ~ Book 3: Vince Indigo

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EPILOGUE

~ BROTHERS BLIND ~ Book 4: Bobby Baxter

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~ NEVERYWHERE ~ Book 5: Nancy Killiam & William McIntyre

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~ GENESIS & JANUS ~ Book 6: Patricia Killiam & Jimmy Jones

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EPILOGUE

SPECIAL THANKS

Instructions for viewing augmented reality 3D view of Atopia right on your Kindle! (requires an iPhone)

Copyright

About the Author