Complete Atopia Chronicles

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?”

20 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.