The Atopia Chronicles

1 Identity: Vince Indigo

In the thin air at the edge of space, I could feel more than hear the steady beat of the UAV’s massive propeller dragging me onward toward my death.

I’d been able to see this moment coming for a long time. The tight compartment I was in had never been meant to fit a human. I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the cold metal pressing against me through the thin pressure suit of the improvised life support system I’d rigged up.

I shouldn’t have tried to escape.

Alarms signaling the start of the slingshot weapon’s test fire rang out across the multiverse spectrum. They would have canceled the test if they knew I was hidden up here in this thing, but in my desperate bid to erase my tracks, I’d cut myself off entirely from the communications networks—concealing what I was doing, and even why I was doing it.

It was a gamble that hadn’t paid off, as the UAV’s control system signaled the start of a system malfunction that I always knew was coming. It lurched sickeningly off to the left, cutting and sliding through empty space, turning inexorably back toward my doom.

In the near distance, the boom of the slingshot began, thundering as it demonstrated its fearsome power to the world. My heart was racing, my breathing ragged and shallow. For days, weeks even, I had been able to see this exact moment arriving, yet here I was, unable to prevent it.

The awful growl of the slingshot grew and began rattling the delicate cage of the UAV’s body. The cold metal pressing against me warmed, and then turned hot as the acrid stench of molten plastic burned into my lungs. I gagged, shrinking up into myself, terrified.

Engulfed in roaring flames, the UAV pitched over, its metal and plastic skin coming apart in great fiery gobs as it disintegrated, offering me up into the emptiness—spinning, falling, and burning as my wings fell away. In my last instants of life, I caught a distant glimpse of Atopia, a cool green speck between the flames, her siren song calling me back toward the endless seas below.

2

The last dregs of the night drained sleeplessly away, and despite the world’s best efforts, my life filled with yet another new day. More dreams of death—but then, they weren’t just dreams.

Or were they?

I felt nauseated.

It was still early morning. From beneath the sheets, I could just glimpse the dawning sky regaining its composure as the roar and flame of the slingshot test began to die down. Dread filled me as I watched stiletto-tipped, fishnet-clad legs stalking toward me from the living area.

The lights flipped on as Hotstuff tore the sheets off me.

“Aw, come on!” I whimpered, weakly fumbling for the covers.

Hotstuff was done up in a bad-schoolgirl outfit today, complete with a checked miniskirt and a starched men’s dress shirt. The shirt was knotted at the bottom to expose her belly ring, and unbuttoned far enough to reveal hints of something naughty underneath. She knew I was depressed and was doing her part to keep me alert and in the game.

What I didn’t immediately notice was the riding crop in her hand.

“Ouch!”

She giggled and wound back up to smack me again.

“Hey!” I screeched, grabbing some sheets to protect myself and jumping out of bed to chase her across the room.

She squealed, running away from me, and my bedroom morphed into the battle room we’d created to track my looming future death threats. Hotstuff had already transitioned into wearing tight-fitting army fatigues. She menaced me with the riding crop as I stood, rubbing my stubble with one hand and defending myself with the other.

Spinning my point-of-view into Hotstuff’s, I took a look at myself. Disheveled and still cowering from the riding crop, I looked ridiculous. I straightened up and dropped the sheets. With all the gene therapy, I looked barely forty, though we both knew it wouldn’t be long before I was twice that. A thick shock of graying hair still hung playfully, if listlessly, over the bleary eyes that stared back at me. I clicked back into my own point-of-view.

“Two things before we get started, sir,” announced Hotstuff, snapping smartly to attention and giving me a salute with her riding crop. “Commander Strong’s proxxi asked for some flowers for his wife—which I provided from our private gardens—and Bob just pinged you to go surfing.” She raised her eyebrows.

“Patch Bob through,” I replied groggily. Sensing Hotstuff hesitating, I added, “Now, Hotstuff!”

Bob immediately materialized before me, holding his yellow longboard, smirking. He looked stoned already.

What a great kid; it was just too bad.

“So… surfing today?” asked Bob lazily. Sizing up Hotstuff’s outfit, he grinned.

Yep, he’s high. “Sorry, Bob. Can’t make it. Something’s popped up.”

“Popped up, huh?” he laughed, looking at Hotstuff again. He’d begun projecting some nicely curling waves into my display spaces. “Come on, dude! It’s going to be monster out there today!”

“I really can’t.”

Jealously, I watched the waves. My nerves were frazzled, and I hadn’t been out surfing in weeks.

“What could you possibly have to do? I thought you were, like, the richest guy in the world?”

“I wish I could.… ”

I looked pleadingly toward Hotstuff. She rolled her eyes and wagged the riding crop at me.

“It’s your life, mister,” she scolded, sensing I was going to do what I wanted anyway. “I suppose an hour couldn’t hurt. We don’t have anything imminent I can’t handle. But only one hour, right? After that it could get dangerous.”

I was already halfway out the door, getting my wetsuit, by the time she finished the sentence. Bob gave me a goofy thumbs-up before flitting away to rejoin his body in the hunt for killer waves. I’d catch up with him in a minute.

Bob and I sat on our boards and waited for a decent set of waves just inside the edge of the kelp forest near the Western Inlet, not far from my habitat.

Atopian kelp, the base of our ecological chain, had been bioengineered to grow inverted, with its holdfast becoming a gas-filled bladder floating on the surface and the kelp blades spreading hundreds of feet down into the depths. It sprouted outward at a fantastic rate like a watery mangrove, beginning near the edge of the underwater extremity of Atopia and stretching from there to about two miles out across the water.

From here I could just see my personal habitat bobbing in the distance. My wealth afforded me the luxury of my own private living space, a household attached to one of the passenger cannon supports, sprouting up out of the water and into the sunshine. Most of the million-plus inhabitants lived below decks in the seascrapers stretching into the depths. Atopia was the ultimate in dense, urban planning.

I’d been one of the earliest converts to the Atopia marketing program, pulling up stakes from my wandering existence around the Bay Area to move onto the original Atopian platform nearly thirty years ago. Of course, some of my closest friends were founders of the Atopian program, so it hadn’t really surprised anyone.

America just wasn’t what it used to be anymore, with constant cyberattacks pushing it into an insular downward spiral and the Midwest returning to the dustbowl of more than a hundred years earlier. No good end was in sight, and entanglements in the Weather Wars were squeezing the last drops of blood from a country already gone dry.

For me, the kicker had been the surfing. Floating free in the Pacific, Atopia was exposed to huge, open-ocean swells. When they caught just right, these would break and curl into pipes that broke for miles as they swept around its perfectly circular edge. Atopia was a magnet for the best surfers in the world, but it was hard for them to compete with residents who used pssi. Outsiders thought that with pssi we were cheating the gods, but really the gods were jealous.

These days, those gods seemed to be having a particular issue with me.

Bob was waiting for the ultimate wave, and while I’d managed to catch one good one, I didn’t have his attuned water-sense and was having a hard time relaxing into it. Time was pressing down heavily.

“Bob!” I yelled out across the water, interrupting a conversation I could see he was having with his brother-of-sorts, Martin. “I need to get going!”

“Already?”

“Yeah, I need to get back to that thing. Hotstuff is on my back. ”

My promised hour wasn’t up, yet Hotstuff was flooding me with things we needed to get done. It was impossible to enjoy the surfing, perhaps even dangerous.

I’d better get on with it.

“I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do,” declared Bob. “Anyway, ping me if you change your mind.”

With a wave good-bye I flitted off back to my habitat, leaving Hotstuff to guide my body home.

3

I checked out some news Bob sent me as I returned to the top deck of my habitat. There’d been a rash of UFO sightings in the Midwest the night before, and he knew I was a paranormal fan-boy. On this day, though, more important things were on the agenda.

I strode back and forth like a caged animal, my mind racing, and then made my decision. I looked out toward the breaking waves. There was really no option.

“Ready for business?” Hotstuff was waiting for me on a stool at the deck bar, drinking a latte and going over the morning’s news, tapping her high heels against the polished blue-marble floor. Behind her, my carefully curated collection of some of the world’s rarest whiskeys and cognacs sparkled in the midmorning sunshine. It was about the time I’d usually be waking up, but I’d already been up since dawn.

“Do we have to?” I asked uselessly. A little taste of that Aberlour would be nice.

“Some kind of action is required,” Hotstuff observed. “Even inaction is an action. Perhaps the only kind of action you seem to enjoy lately.” She raised her eyebrows in disdain while she scanned the European financial reports.

“Summon the Council.” I sighed, scratching my stubble.

Portals to my homeworld opened up off the deck, and I walked into our main conference room, shifting my attire into a navy sport coat with a stiff-collared white shirt. Hotstuff strode in behind me, her tidy chignon and crisp suit radiating efficiency and purpose.

One by one, my councilors materialized around the long cherry-wood conference table that glistened under the bioluminescent ceiling. About half of them appeared dull-eyed, having just woken to patch in from whatever time zone they were in for this surprise meeting. The other half weren’t human, but our trusted synthetics, and they appeared bright and cheerful, their smiles following me around the room toward the head of the table.

Then again, perhaps I had them mixed up. Maybe the dull-eyed ones were my synthetics. I had a hard time telling the difference anymore.

These weren’t just your run-of-the-mill women and sims, but, like Hotstuff, more like a twelve-year-old boy’s fantasy. They posed casually around the room as if a fashion shoot could be announced at any instant, with the long conference table springing into action as a catwalk.

My calling a sudden meeting like this was unusual, to say the least, and they watched me cautiously. Information packets were dispersed, appearing on the table in front of them as I sat down.

“No need for pleasantries.” This wasn’t a social call. “Look at your instructions. We’re going to be liquidating everything.”

A pause while they assimilated the data downloads.

“Questions?”

“No questions regarding the details, sir,” chimed one of them, Alessandria. “But it may help to understand your motivation. Some of the assets you are seeking to liquidate, are, um, well, they’re not what you want people to know you’re in a hurry to sell.”

My motivation, now that was a good question.

There were only two things I really knew. First, that I had no idea what I was trying to escape from, just that, whatever it was, it was trying to kill me. And second, just sharing the idea that something was trying to hunt me down made my situation even more dangerous. To minimize risk, I had to pretend nothing was happening.

“No reason,” I replied as casually as I could. “Just the whim of a bored trillionaire. I don’t want to raise suspicion, so keep this on the down-low, right?”

Perhaps that was the wrong choice of words.

“On the down-low?” Roxanne, my resource manager for the Asia Pacific region raised her eyebrows. “You want me to just dump all the yachts, the islands, the racetracks…?”

“Yes.”

At this I felt a twinge of remorse. The baubles of Indigo Entertainment, my latest and ill-fated attempt at a new foray into the business world, still held some sparkle in my eye.

While I could lay claim to being super-wealthy, I had to admit I couldn’t say the same about being super-intelligent. My success in the business world was more about luck, and luck was hard to replicate. My original luck, the good fortune that had made me my fortune, had been helped along by my friend and long-time mentor, Patricia Killiam, and a team of incredibly smart people. It had also been born from a single-minded obsession with the future, or perhaps, just one future in particular.

“Don’t go out and just dump it,” explained Hotstuff. “Don’t attract attention. Be subtle. Go out there and do what we pay you for. Anyway, most of the Indigo Entertainment stuff is a waste of time.” Hotstuff looked toward me. “I don’t think we’ll need to explain ourselves very much.”

Roxanne considered this, shifting around in her chair. “I may have someone who could be interested.”

The paranoia set in. Perhaps these assets were what whoever was messing with me wanted. Is Roxanne in on the fix? I looked carefully at her. Hotstuff sensed what I was thinking and headed me off before I could say anything.

“Very good,” Hotstuff replied to Roxanne. “If there are no more questions, please everyone, get to work.”

Nobody objected, and, one by one, just as they’d appeared, my councilors faded from the conference room.

When they’d all gone, Hotstuff looked at me sympathetically. “You’re going to need to trust your team,” she said slowly. After a pause she added, “And you’re going to need to trust me.”

Visions of Kurt Gödel, the famous Austrian mathematician, sprang to mind. Suffering from deep paranoia, he’d only accepted food prepared by his wife to eat. When she fell ill one day and was sent to hospital, he refused to eat food given to him by anyone else. He died of starvation just shortly before his wife had returned.

“I just hope nothing happens to you,” I replied. “I’m not sure I could starve myself.”

While proxxi had full access to our memories and sensory systems and could usually guess what we were thinking, they couldn’t read our minds. Not yet, anyway.

Hotstuff gave me a funny look.

I shrugged. It wasn’t worth explaining.

4

I was up at sunrise the next day as well, my sleep again filled with nightmares, but nightmares that were spilling from dreamland into reality. The darkness was smearing into light, unconsciousness into consciousness, dream life into waking life, all becoming barely distinguishable from each other. Hotstuff was waiting patiently in our war room while I dragged myself into the bathroom for a shower to wake up.

I stared into the depths of my bloodshot eyes in the mirror. Condensation from the hot shower fogged my image while I inspected the angry blood vessels ringing my irises.

“Can we take a short surf break again this morning?” I asked Hotstuff, reaching into a drawer below the sink to get my eye drops.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she replied, shouting over the noise of the shower. “We have a lot to do. It’s getting more dangerous.”

I sighed, unscrewing the bottle cap and holding it between my teeth. Leaning back, I pulled back the lid of my left eye and deposited a drop into it. Rubbing that eye, I switched to the other.

“Come on,” I grunted from between clenched teeth, holding the bottle cap in place as I lined up the dropper above my right eye. “A half an hour out on the.… ”

I gagged. The bottle cap had popped like a cork from between my teeth to lodge itself into my windpipe. My body convulsed as I tried to pull air into my lungs. Hotstuff was immediately beside me and already alerting the emergency services. Panic exploded in my veins. I clawed at the bathroom walls, doubling over onto the floor, my chest heaving.…

“See what I mean?”

I was standing back at the sink, staring into my bloodshot eyes, but Hotstuff was there with me, holding out her hand to take the bottle cap.

That was close.

I’d barely escaped that event, less than five seconds away in the future on an alternate timeline. I handed Hotstuff the cap and then, after a split second of contemplation, handed over the whole bottle. My eyes weren’t that bloodshot.

“I guess surfing can wait.”

Whatever it was that was hunting me down, it had infected the very personal and immediate realities surrounding me.

“Forget the shower,” I added. “Let’s just get to work.”

While my physical body remained in the shower, and Hotstuff controlled it to clean me up, my point-of-view switched into a virtual body. From my perspective, the bathroom immediately morphed into my battle room. Hotstuff splintered a hyperdimensional graphic into my display spaces that plotted several thousand alternate future-worlds of my life. Many of the lifelines terminated abruptly, and therein laid the problem with going surfing—I had to save my own life today, and not once, but many dozens of times over.

The day before, there had been over a hundred ways I could have died in the millions of future simulations that we had running for me as we tried to pick a safe path forward for my primary lifeline. My plan of trying to escape in the UAV, the one that was destroyed in the slingshot test the morning before, was one future that I’d barely avoided.

I picked out and watched one of the day’s more gruesomely predicted terminations. It played in a three-dimensional projection that hung in the middle of the room before me, starting with me being cut in half, then being burned to a crisp in some freak accident outside the passenger cannon. I watched with a morbid curiosity. My planned trip on the passenger cannon was definitely off the list of things to do.

The problem had originally surfaced some months ago, and it was accelerating at a worrying pace.

One morning, Hotstuff had mentioned to me that there was a high probability of my being killed in a scheduled stratospheric HALO jump. My future prediction system that morning had calculated that due to inclement weather and the likelihood of my skydiving partner being intoxicated the evening before thanks to a probable incident with his wife, there was a very large chance of an accident occurring. No problem, I’d happily announced over my morning coffee, just cancel the jump.

A few days later, I received another prediction informing me that there were a half a dozen likely scenarios involving my death. It was a fairly simple task to engineer a path through them all, but from that point, the solution to my “non-death” had started to become increasingly complicated. On top of it, I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening—the solution sets became unstable unless I kept it to myself.

So I found myself running around Atopia, asking people to do odd jobs for me, and flittering off to the four corners of the multiverse on inane assignments just to keep myself alive. Things began spinning out of control like a surreal joke, the punchline far out of reach.

We managed to rout the incoming threats the day before by sending out bots and synthetics—and in critical cases, myself personally—to nudge the advancing future timeline of my world this way or that.

Lately, however, some of the future death events were beginning to creep into the hours and minutes just ahead. What started out a few months ago as the odd warning of some low-probability events to be carefully avoided had progressed into a constant stream of events that signaled my impending death. We had no idea how or why it was happening.

“Most of the bases are covered for today,” Hotstuff explained, summoning up a probability scatter grid that sprouted outward from some critical nexus points. “There are just a few events that you need to handle personally, starting with this one in New York.”

She pointed to the nexus closest to me, and the future reality of that event spun out around us. I nodded, trying to take it in.

Someone with lesser resources than I had would’ve just died, without fanfare, and that would have been that. In my unique position as owner of Phuture News, and with my almost limitless finances, however, I could literally see the future coming and dodge and weave my way through it. Anyone else edging up on seventy might have accepted their mortality with a little more grace, but here on Atopia, I was still a spring chicken. I wasn’t ready to accept a trip on the ultimate voyage just yet.

Sensing my mind wandering, Hotstuff decided to summon up another gruesome termination. She growled playfully, swatting at me with her riding crop while I watched myself being liquefied in the bio-sludge facilities. I felt like I was being stalked by the army of darkness with Betty Boop as my sidekick.

How many ways can a person die?

Her tactic was successful, however, and I refocused on the New York project.

“You just need to steal a pack of cigarettes,” she explained while I watched the simulation play through.

“Sounds good,” I sighed. “Time to get ready for work.”

Sitting on the rooftop deck of my habitat, I took one longing look toward the breaking surf and then grumpily got up from my chair to begin the day’s activity list to keep me alive. How exactly stealing a pack of cigarettes from some woman in New York would help me out was impossible to understand, but there it was.

Resisting the almost uncontrollable urge to procrastinate, I heard myself say, “Okay, Hotstuff, let’s get this show on the road.”

The deck of my habitat faded away to reveal the grimy walls of a convenience store in New York. My consciousness had been implanted into a robotic surrogate that Hotstuff had set into position. The pristine lines of Atopia disappeared from my sensory frames, and even through the thin sensory input, the overpowering odor and seediness of the place hit me like a wave of virtual sewage.

I felt dirty, despite being remote from the robotic body, and had to fight back an urge to go and wash myself. I’d had a very bad time in New York as a young man, and memories of it still haunted me. This was the first time I’d gone back in forty years.

The target in question was yelling at the cashier behind the counter in front of me. In fact, she looked like she was about to hit him.

“Lady!” I shouted above her, raising my spindly metal arms in the cashier’s defense. “Lady, take it easy!”

She didn’t notice me as she fumbled around in her purse, entirely engrossed in whatever it was she was trying to do. Her face registered disgust, and she looked like she was having a worse day than even I was.

Eventually, after more theatrics, she negotiated her purchase. I hung back and followed her out the door, but at a distance.

She stopped outside to light up, standing under a wobbly holographic advertisement. After a few moments, I saw my chance. I moved, taking her by surprise, and pinned her against the wall. Terrified, she froze, and I fumbled at her, trying to grab the pack of cigarettes. Quickly, I pried it out of her hands.

“Get off me!” she screamed.

Jumping back with my prize in hand, I felt like I wanted to apologize, and I stared for a moment into her green eyes. She looked like someone standing on the edge of a cliff. Explaining myself wasn’t an option, however, and instead I melted backward into the pedestrian flow, leaving her there, shaking. It seemed absurd, but stealing this pack of cigarettes would collapse a whole stream of dangerous alternate futures for me.

5

Time—Einstein famously said that it was purely an illusion, just a construct of the conscious mind. A nice idea, but try having this conversation with someone who sensed theirs ending. Time was something we all desperately wanted more of when it ran short, yet we wasted it frivolously when we thought we had enough.

I was in a bad mood after a long day of saving my own life dozens of times. Midnight was rolling around, and I’d just finished with the last of it. The air was calm and a full moon was out as I sat out on the top deck of my habitat, watching glittering waves swell over the kelp. I leaned back in my chair and considered my problem for a moment.

I could use a walk to clear my mind.

“Hotstuff, could you drop me into Retiro Park, near the Crystal Palace?”

The surging ocean and the outlines of my deck faded from view, replaced with afternoon sunshine and the greens and golds of Madrid’s Buen Retiro Park. I was standing on a gravel path beside the Crystal Palace as requested. It was one of my favorite places to take a walk when I was having a hard time with something.

I looked down at my hands, admiring their apparent solidity, and took a moment to gaze around the park. It never ceased to amaze me how well this technology worked. I could smell grass that was being noisily cut by a mower in the distance. A woman pushing a baby carriage passed by and glanced at me, smiling. I heard the gravel crunching under the carriage wheels and the soft burble of the baby inside.

Most people took the wikiworld—the collected audiovisual and sensor inputs of all people and networks and cameras spanning the world—for granted. But for those of us who had slaved away to make it a reality, it still evoked a certain sense of awe.

I took a deep breath, straightened up, and began walking down the path.

The wikiworld was great, but the thing that had made me really famous was the future—literally.

Science was, at its root, just a hodgepodge of rules for predicting the future. How to achieve the same sort of success science had in the physical domain, and replicate this to predict daily human life, had seemed beyond grasping, until I lit upon a place to start.

Slumbering one morning, my great idea came to me suddenly, as great ideas tended to do, and that idea was celebrity gossip. As social animals, gossip was something humans couldn’t do without.

A student of history, I’d noticed that as civilizations advanced, they tended to become more and more interested in the tiny details of famous peoples’ lives. The Romans were the great innovators, but it was modern America that had really taken it to new heights.

When you started with any new technology, you needed to establish a foothold, a niche you could call your own, and I’d been struggling to find a niche for synthetic future world predictions, or phuturing—a term I had coined. A “phuture” was an alternate future reality that sprouted off from the present moment of time. The future, with an “f,” was the actual, single future that you ended up sliding along your timeline into; but the future was only one of many possible phutures.

Weather forecasting and stock markets were well covered with established brands and pundits, but this wasn’t the kind of future I had been interested in. I wanted to know the future of individual people, on the most detailed possible levels.

A problem with making predictions, especially the ones involving people, was that as soon as they knew about a prediction, they would tend to confound it, and the more people that knew, the more confounding these effects became. My insight was that celebrities acted as a foil to this. Even when they were presented with a prediction concerning them, most enjoyed the attention enough that they would go along with whatever the prediction was.

We soon began to make a name for ourselves by scooping major news outlets to break stories that hadn’t even happened yet, beating entertainment and gossip media to the punch by featuring the celebrity headlines of the future before they even happened.

Celebrity gossip set the sails of the Phuture News Network to become a commercial success, and we gradually expanded our predictive systems to encompass nearly every aspect of daily life. Advertising revenue had skyrocketed as we began selling ad space for things we could predict people would want tomorrow, but it was nothing compared to the money people were willing to pay for the service itself. Almost overnight, we became one of the world’s most valuable companies, rising to the top of the tech industry in earnings and sales.

Kicking gravel down the path, I sent up a cloud of dust and overlaid a visual phuturecast onto it. I watched it as it was carried away by the wind, flowing into its future self as it dissipated and eventually disappeared.

On Atopia, we’d taken Phuture News to the next level and begun constructing perfect, sensory realistic phutureworlds. Some scientists began claiming that these weren’t just predictions, but portals into alternate parallel universes further forward along our timeline, and had started to use this as the technical definition of a “phuture.”

Not quite what I’d had in mind when I began the whole enterprise into divining tomorrow’s cocktail-dress-du-jour, but in all cases, people had begun to live ever more progressively in the worlds of tomorrow.

While the personalized future predictions we generated for people were private to them, as the owner of Phuture News, I built in one proviso: I could confidentially gain access to any and all phutures generated in order to build my own personal, and highly detailed, phutureworlds.

It had been fascinating to tie everything together, to peer into the collective future of the world. At least, it had been fascinating to begin with, until I could see far enough forward. Then it became depressing.

In all cases, it turned out that the biggest killer app of the future was the future itself, and sitting atop the greatest computing installation the world had ever known, I became the only person on the planet who could literally see into the world of tomorrow.

With great powers, they said, came strange responsibilities, and therein was the problem—for while I could see the future, it seemed that the future now refused to see me.

At least, it refused to see me in it.

Hotstuff had already snuggled my body comfortably into bed as I collapsed my subjective away from Retiro Park and back home. I sighed and pulled the sheets closer around me. It was time to get some sleep.

I had a feeling I’d need it.

6

“A great evil will consume you all!” The man’s filthy, mottled face barely restrained a threatened apoplectic fit as he balanced precariously atop an upturned four-gallon paint can.

Wheezing asthmatically, his eyes rolled up toward the damp skies before returning to earth to hunt through the crowd. His gaze swung around to lock onto me and I stared back. Trembling slightly, his already distended pupils widened as he peered at me.

“A great evil is already consuming you, sir,” he whispered, directly addressing me as I passed. And then he screeched to the crowd, pointing at me, “A GREAT EVIL is upon us!”

Shivering, I looked away, but nobody paid much attention.

I was off on another one of my walks to try and clear my mind, this time through Hyde Park in London, and I was just passing Speakers’ Corner near Marble Arch. The steady thrum of the automated passenger traffic hummed in the background while the electric crackle of London’s city center hung just past the peripheries of my senses.

It was morning for me, but already well past midday here, halfway around the world from Atopia. The usual collection of crackpots and doomsayers had already installed themselves for the afternoon tourist crowds. I usually enjoyed standing and watching, listening to the passionate ramblings of the desperate men and women on their soapboxes, exhorting us to save ourselves. But today it felt wrong, or perhaps worse, it felt right.

Hunching over, I kept my eyes to the ground and wound my way through the crowd, making my escape into the sanctuary of the park.

Even here in my virtual presence, I had to keep up my guard, a point-of-presence being a potential point of entry into my networks. I had a whole sentry system of future-selves walking through the park in the immediate future ahead of me.

Threading my way through the periphery of the crowd, my splintered ghosts walked seconds and minutes ahead of me, testing the informational flow through this path and that, dropping data honey pots here and there to pick up straggling invaders, testing for the safest narrow corridor into my future. Salvation for me was threading the eye of a needle, and without being able to see a clear future, it felt as if my hands were tied behind my back or my limbs amputated.

Taking some slow, deep breaths, I tried to relax.

The sun was bravely fighting its way through the wet skies, and small collections of people had begun to install themselves on the low-slung green-and-white striped loungers scattered across the grassy expanse at this end of the park. I was heading directly toward the constabulary near the eastern end of the Serpentine. On my rambles through Hyde Park, I always ran a historical skin so that I could enjoy the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and I could see its roof gleaming past a copse of trees in the distance.

I’d developed a thing for Crystal Palaces.

Right at that moment, however, that same reality overlay was projecting the Tyburn gallows next to a gaggle of old ladies who’d slumped into their loungers in the middle of the field. An execution was in progress, or at least a hanging. The ashen corpse of Oliver Cromwell spun slowly in the breeze, much to the delight of the crowd collected for the spectacle that had ushered London into 1661.

“Old Crommie is dancing the Tyburn jig!” leered the ghost of a sharp-jawed woman in sodden rags.

No matter which way I turned, death seemed to surround me. Quickly I cropped the reality skin into a narrow window of time around the present and 1851, and the crowd and execution dropped away.

Visions of the trail around the Serpentine pond floated into my consciousness as my splinters walked ahead of me. I collapsed my probable paths to head toward Kensington Road and the entrance of the Crystal Palace and the cool of the ancient oaks that stood there, quietly marking their own way through time.

Patricia Killiam had asked to speak with me today. Walking across the edge of the park, I summoned a splinter into a media feed of her in another of her endless string of press conferences, and an image of the live event popped into my mind. She’d been an early supporter of much of the deep technology behind the Phuture News Network and was one of my oldest and dearest friends.

In an overlaid visual display, a reporter was just asking her a question. “Isn’t the world population stable now, even declining? Shouldn’t that help calm the resource shortages?”

“The core problem isn’t population,” explained Patricia, “but that everyone wants to live lives of material luxury. Supporting ten billion middle-class citizens on planet Earth was never going to work, and the only solution is to create a simulated reality that is good enough to satisfy our material cravings.”

It was probably the millionth time that Patricia had gone through this.

“And why is this proxxi thing such a key part of all this?” asked the same reporter.

“Your proxxi controls a dynamic image of your neural wetware so it can control your physical body when you’re away,” she continued. “This enables you to seamlessly drop off into any virtual space, any time you like—even in the middle of a conversation, since your proxxi can finish it for you. It’s like an airbag for your body and mind, except that this airbag can act as your official representative.”

The crowd nodded. They loved this stuff.

“If you don’t want to go to that meeting or work cocktail tonight,” she finished, “just send your proxxi! Why not? It’s your life!”

This earned a big round of applause.

As the press conference split up, Patricia’s main point-of-presence shifted into my reality, and she materialized walking in step beside me in the park. Her eyes watched me all the way through her transition. I could almost feel her weariness.

“So what’s all this on Phuture News about you dying today?”

Now I understood why she’d wanted to chat in person. I tensed up.

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, old friend,” I replied, shaking my head and smiling.

She raised her eyebrows. “At least you seem to have a sense of humor about it.”

Phuture News had begun publishing stories about the death of its founder. The mounting density of my termination events had pushed my death into reality for everyone living in the world of tomorrow.

“I wanted to check up on you in person,” she continued, “to see if you needed anything.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m just fooling around.”

A lie, but I had no choice. In my situation, admitting anyone into the circle of trust was extremely dangerous. Expanding the network of people who knew what was happening would spread the probability matrices, and I needed razor-sharp phutures to effectively head off my threats.

She watched me curiously, almost sadly. “Playing? You sure? This seems a funny way to have a laugh.”

“Don’t worry,” I reassured her.

She cocked her eyebrows at me.

“Really, don’t worry,” I repeated. “And thanks for taking the time to drop in.”

By now we’d reached the edge of the Serpentine. It was filled with small blue paddleboats being driven around by enthusiastic tourists. Views of Kensington Palace crept over the weeping willows in the distance, and despite the brave advances of the sun, a light rain had begun to fall again.

“Is there anything I can help with?” she asked. “You can trust me, Vince. Tell me what’s happening.… ”

The walls of my future squeezed ever tighter around me.

“Everything’s fine,” I reiterated. “And I do trust you, Pat. I just still have a hard time believing you work for Kesselring now.”

Kesselring had tried to engineer a hostile takeover of Phuture News many years ago, back when it was barely a start-up, with plans to strip it down and profiteer from the future. He’d used some aggressive and illegal tactics to try and get what he wanted. Patricia had been on our board back then, and we’d fought off Kesselring together.

“A necessary evil,” replied Patricia. She looked into the distance. “You promise to ping me if you need anything. I mean it, if you need anything.… ”

“I will.”

She stared at me silently. We’d known each other a long time.

“I promise, I will,” I laughed. “Now go on, I know how busy you are.”

Patricia nodded and smiled.

“You take care, Vince.”

With that, she faded away to leave me alone to finish my walk, or at least, alone with my crowd of future-selves arrayed around me.

“It does seem to be getting worse, though,” I said to myself glumly after she was gone. I was covering up the issue of my increasingly probable death as some kind of prank. Most people didn’t seem to think it was very funny. Neither did I.

I scuffed my foot in the dirt again as I passed in front of the Crystal Palace. Looking up, I watched some leaves falling from the trees in the distance, wondering if they felt any regret as they came to rest against the earth.

7

“Are you sure that’s right?”

I laughed and pulled the girl closer. “Everything is right when I’m with you.”

She wriggled away, giggling. “Quit it. Is that the right time?”

I looked up at the curved clock face. “Yeah, I think so, nearly eight.”

“Come on then, we’re going to be late!”

She pulled me along, and I looked up from the clock at the high vaulted ceiling of New York’s Grand Central Station. This place always inspired a sense of awe in me, or, if not exactly awe, then a deep feeling of history. I felt a certain sense of nostalgia for all the human stories that had passed through this place, or, like me, were dragged through.

Looking up and around as we wound our way through the hustle and bustle across the white marble floors, my eyes came to rest on the news display at one end. She was looking at it as well.

“Carrier groups set to high alert,” read the rolling display. “NSA warnings of cyberattacks.”

She let go of me and stared at the news display, then looked back at me. Her blue eyes shone, twinkling in the station’s lighting. She was so beautiful.

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

I looked briefly up at the news before looking back into her eyes.

“These things always blow over,” I reassured her.

“Seriously, Vince, you’re the expert. You’re sure, right?” She stood stock still, looking into my face.

“Yes, I’m sure. If we don’t take this one, they’ll probably cancel everything later.”

A huge snowstorm was descending on New York and Boston. We had to hurry if we were going to make it on time to catch the last train out.

She shrugged. “Okay.”

We began running again, hand in hand, and soon we were on the Metronorth, cuddled up together for the ride to New Haven to visit her parents, the soft ka-chunk-ka-chunk of the tracks lulling us into a peaceful slumber as the miles rolled away.

What seemed like moments later, I awoke with a start, my heart racing. Somebody was yelling. Sitting upright, I looked out the window into a swirling whiteout.

Then the screams and the terrible squeal of metal tearing and gnashing into itself as the train car pitched back and forth. I jammed my feet into the seat into front of me, bracing myself for what was to come, holding onto the girl who clutched desperately back onto me.

The world exploded.

Sucking in air, I sat bolt upright in bed, looking around, but she was gone. I hadn’t died in that reality, but then, that one was in the past, now an unchangeable part of my timeline. I didn’t die in the train crash, but she had—Sophie, the love of my young life, back when I was an engineering student at MIT. I calmed my breathing, telling myself that everything was all right, but even now, over forty years later, I knew that it wasn’t—that it never would be.

It was a perpetually recurring dream, dulled only slightly with time, of the day when I’d lost her. I’d promised her there was nothing to worry about, and it had cost her life. I’d been in the middle of my master’s degree at the MIT Media Lab, an expert in the cyber realm, with Patricia Killiam as my thesis professor. I’d been studying the use of predictive systems in social networks, a pursuit that became a passion after the accident. If I’d just been able to see the future a little more clearly, been able to know a little more, I could have saved her. That’s what I could never forgive myself for.

I wiped the sweat off my forehead, rubbing my eyes. Why had she returned to my dreams now? I sighed. It must be the baby shower I was going to later in the day. Family events always made me think of her and a life I’d lost so long ago, a life I’d filled with senseless fluff but was now defending with everything I had.

Perhaps it’s not worth it. Why am I even trying?

I could save my own life, but the future of the world? I knew the future, and it wasn’t something I wished I did know. It was something I’d been doing my best to forget.

I laid down in bed, put my heart back away, and closed my eyes.

8

Wasn’t a baby shower supposed to come before a baby was born?

I’d just materialized in the entertainment metaworld that Commander Strong had created for his family’s coming out party. Well, his sort-of family. Rick waved at me and I smiled and waved back, watching him hand his new simulated baby back to his wife.

Despite being a big believer in Patricia’s synthetic reality program, I couldn’t help feeling that these “proxxid” babies were creepy, and I’d been hearing dark rumors hinting at the things that Dr. Granger had been using them for.

I would have avoided coming entirely, but this event had sprung up on my threat radar today. Convincing Rick that this proxxid, and having many more besides, was a good idea would somehow collapse a whole subset of threat vectors coming my way.

I didn’t like the idea of being so disingenuous, and I’d argued and tried to plan other contingencies all night with Hotstuff, but the alternatives were a lot more dangerous. After a little reflection, it didn’t seem like too much of a bad thing, and the happy couple looked like they were enjoying it.

“Congrats, Rick!” I exclaimed as the commander neared, extending my hand. He shook it firmly, looking a little sheepish, and motioned toward the bar.

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

“No problem at all.”

We’d reached the bar. “So what’ll it be?” he asked.

I surveyed the bottles. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

Now wasn’t the time for a drink. It would have only been a synthetic drink, so I could choose to feel intoxicated or not, but the real issue was the interpersonal engagement. Taking a drink would necessitate having a chat, and I was uncomfortable about having to lie to my friend.

I shrugged weakly.

“You sure?” he asked, giving himself a generous dose of whiskey in a tumbler.

“I’m kind of busy.… ” I struggled with what came next. Rick fidgeted in front of me, taking a gulp from his drink, smiling awkwardly.

“This thing, it’s just a little game,” he laughed, misinterpreting my discomfort. Knocking back another big swig from his drink he shook his head, looking toward his wife holding their proxxid. “I’m just doing it to keep her happy, you know how it is.”

The time had come.

“No, no, this is the best thing,” I said enthusiastically. “You need to do this. It’s the way of the future!” I slapped him on the back to emphasize the point.

He snorted and took another drink, his face brightening.

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

“You really think so?”

“I do my friend.” I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. I felt terrible. I had to get out of there as quickly as possible if I wasn’t going to blow it. “I have to get going, though. Sorry. Give Cindy a kiss for me, okay?”

“I will.” He nodded, smiling.

I hesitated. I shouldn’t do this. I should just come clean, see if maybe he could help me.

“Go on,” laughed Rick. “Get going!”

Nodding good-bye, I decided to say nothing and faded away from the sensory space of his party.

I needed a break to think, so I decided on yet another walk in one of my private spaces. I materialized on a dusty path next to the Crystal Mountain in the middle of the Sahara Desert in Egypt, near the border of Libya.

This place held a mystical, almost magnetic, attraction to me, a massive single quartzite crystal that rose up hundreds of feet out of the barren limestone landscape surrounding it. I’d recently installed my own private sensor network here, in secret, as the open wikiworld version lacked the resolution to really experience it, to enjoy the nuances and stark beauty of the place. It allowed me a place to wander truly alone, to enjoy some peace for short stretches in my newly frightening personal reality.

Night was falling, spreading its inky carpet across the sky to reveal the cathedral of stars that shone only in the deepest of deserts. The perpetual Sirocco wind whistled softly, carrying with it the sand that over the eons had etched the limestone bedrock into fantastical forms that sprang up out of the desert floor like mysterious blooms, lending the lifeless place an interior life of its own.

Massive sand dunes sat hunched in the distance, slowly sailing their lonely courses across the bare bedrock, their hulks propelled by the same unrelenting wind that shaped this place. As they moved, they swallowed everything in their paths, but just as inevitably as they consumed, they would eventually surrender as they moved on. You just had to stand still long enough, exist long enough, to be released.

I stepped slowly between the ghostly sandstone figures that towered above me, frozen in time in their mad dance together. The Crystal Mountain glowed in an ethereal purple above it all, its interior lit by a million tiny points of starlight.

It was strange not being able to see my future hanging in front of me. I mean, I could see my phutures, sense the nearness of their realities spreading out ahead of me, but now they all terminated abruptly. The fingers of time I’d carefully nurtured over the years had been painfully amputated.

Where before the future had flowed straight ahead of me, like a train running to known destinations, now all its tracks ahead ended in flames. A suffocating fire enveloped me, the future choking the lifeblood out of my present. I felt trapped in the moment.

“Hotstuff, could you pop in for a sec?”

She obediently materialized walking next to me. In sharp contrast to the dreamlike landscape I had lost myself in, her vitality and energy sizzled into this space. She was looking extremely sharp in tight striped riding pants, boots, and a high-necked red jacket. Her long blond hair fell in waves down her back and across her shoulders.

Some people liked to create some sort of alter ego as their proxxi, which was fine for them. I preferred to have an attractive woman as my personal assistant. Plus, I liked the idea of a woman driving my body around when I wasn’t in it.

I felt better with Hotstuff near, but I was still nervously fidgeting my phantoms’ limbs.

“Stop that,” she commanded.

She stopped walking, looking up to consider one of the limestone figures.

“Stop it,” she repeated softly.

“Stop what?”

I’d begun a nervous drumbeat with the phantom limb that controlled my future social connectivity.

“Stop playing with your phantoms,” laughed Hotstuff, continuing to walk on. “You’re going to grow hair on them. Seriously, stop it. You’re jiggling your phutures back and forth, muddying up your timeline. Stay focused.”

I stopped and relaxed my phantoms, releasing them back to her. We’d reached a natural stone archway at the end of the limestone menagerie, on an outcropping above a steep drop to the plateau below. Sitting down together on the edge of the cliff, we looked down at the sand dunes spreading out into the distance, disappearing into the gathering gloom.

“Do you think someone is phuture-spoofing me?”

Phuture-spoofing was growing into a major business as hacking spilled into the worlds of tomorrow and phuture crackers began engineering their own timelines.

“Boss, we’ve been over this a hundred times, and I don’t see how someone could be phuture-spoofing you,” Hotstuff replied. “In all cases, I’ve had specialized agents rooting through the Phuture News system and sniffers floating at choke points throughout the open multiverse with nothing suspicious to report. To manage it on this scale, they’d need almost the same computing infrastructure as the Phuture News Network itself.”

Which would be impossible to hide, she didn’t need to add.

“So summarize the situation?” I leaned back and looked up at the stars.

“The good news is that we’ve made some progress,” she said brightly. “We’ve plotted a path to extricate your physical body from Atopia, giving us a much larger playing field to work with.”

“That sounds good,” I replied. “So what’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is that the system is predicting about seven thousand possible outcomes for your, ah, demise in the next few days.”

“So that’s it, I’m dead?” The stars shone like steely pins, puncturing the night sky around me.

“Don’t be so defeatist. You only have a dozen things to get done personally today, so we can head this thing off. Tomorrow is another day. Just focus, be in the moment.”

“That’s what you said yesterday,” I complained.

I was being petulant. It was the last redoubt of the rich and aimless when faced with hard work. After I’d gotten over the initial shock of almost dying day after day, I’d found the urge to beg off and go surfing almost irresistible, and it was annoying me that I had to save my own life. This was the sort of stuff I was supposed to pay people for. Secretly, though, I was beginning to settle into it, even enjoying some of the new activity forced onto me, but I wouldn’t ever admit it.

Hotstuff gave me a sidelong glance and raised one eyebrow. “Hey tough guy, it’s your life. The probability is only nine in ten you’ll kick the celestial bucket today if you wing it. Go ahead, go surfing.”

I nodded, digging my fingers into the sand.

“You know, boss, this may not be an entirely bad thing.… ”

That stopped me in my tracks.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” I almost spat the words out, nearly deciding to point out that proxxies terminated when their owners did, but held my tongue.

Hotstuff took a moment to choose her words. “I mean, before, well.… ”

“What?”

“Before, you were kind of aimless—you’d lost any interest in the future.”

“You think this is better?”

“At least you’re up in the mornings.”

I snorted. “Yeah, to live another day, to fight to stay alive.”

She let me consider what I’d just said. “See what I mean?”

I sighed. I was frustrated, but not as scared anymore. As perverse at it sounded, maybe she was right. I was certainly savoring the little moments of time that I could get to myself.

“Whatever. Anyway, it’s getting better, right?”

“We’re managing the best we can.”

“The best that you can, huh?” I replied dejectedly, looking up at my task list for the day as it appeared in one of my display spaces. Something popped out. “So I need to short Cognix stock?”

“Nobody will know it’s you. Look, I’m setting up defensive perimeters,” explained Hotstuff, “and we’ll drop some intelligent agents into them to look for any cross-phuture scripting. We’ll figure this out, boss, don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry?” Is she serious?

“I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I think we’re starting to see a pattern, hidden deep in the probability matrices that connect together whatever is chasing you. A pattern in the future, but one that points somewhere far in the past.”

Finally, some progress.

“Can you explain a little more?”

“It would be easier to show you.”

9

Dappled sunlight streamed down through the jungle canopy high above, illuminating the hard-packed earth below. It cast a patchwork of light and dark that stitched together scenes of smoke rising from cooking fires, laughing children darting between thatched huts, and women sitting and gossiping together as they stripped the white skins off sweet potatoes, carefully wrapping each one in banana leaves and depositing them into a stone-lined pit.

The men were hunting today, chasing pigs that escaped from neighboring villages in the thunderstorms of the night before. Monkeys barked through the underbrush, their catcalls joining the symphonies of songbirds whose feathers lit up the steaming forest like splashes of flickering paint against a knotted green canvas.

Picking up a smooth stone sitting on the earth, I casually ducked my head as a dart snipped past, barely missing me. One of the children cried out to my right. A mother picked the child up by his arm and spanked him. He’d been playing with his father’s blowgun, not knowing what he was doing, probably imitating his dad. Even as I inhabited someone else, whatever was hunting me down was trying to kill this body as well.

The mother looked toward me and shrugged, apologizing. I smiled back, returning my attention to the witch doctor. Dodging death was nothing new anymore.

“In da roond,” explained the tribal elder, speaking in variant of Tok Pisin, an English pidgin that was the lingua franca of the Papua New Guinea highlands.

The two most linguistically diverse places left on Earth were also the most culturally and technologically polarized: this place, barely out of the Stone Age, and New York City, the bustling megalopolis tipping the world into the twenty-second century. Each retained over a thousand languages, but where almost all in New York were machine translatable, and thus part of the new global lingua franca, almost none of the New Guinea languages were. I was struggling to understand what this elder was struggling just as hard to explain to me.

“Round, like, like in a circle?” I stuttered in my best attempt at native Yupno, the tribe here. Speaking through this body was difficult.

A giant tree frog watched me lazily from its perch in the branches nearby. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a frog in the wild. Of course, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in the wild either.

To get to this remote and rugged place, we’d had a portable communication base station dropped in, and then we convinced a nun running a nearby mission to persuade one of the villagers to drink a glass of water laden with smarticles, allowing my subjective to enter and control his body through the communication link.

It was the only way I could speak with this particular elder, the Yupno witch doctor and keeper of holy secrets. The smarticles hadn’t fully suffused into this body, so I felt numb and disconnected, and they would be soon flushed out, so I had to hurry.

The witch doctor shrugged and smiled, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. His eyes sparkled at me. I smiled back, my pssi filtering his body language into a form that made sense to me. My gaze shifted to a break in the jungle that revealed the glacier-capped mountain ranges beyond stretching upward into the bright sky. He was trying to explain his perception of the shape of time, or rather, its lack of shape.

“Here and now,” “back in the twenties,” “going forward”… the modern world was fixated on spatial metaphors for time, the idea of the past being behind us and the future ahead. Not the Yupno, though. In this remote valley, time seemed to have no linear form to its inhabitants.

To them, it flowed uphill, backward, in forms and in shapes. They laughed at our conception of its forward flow. This Stone Age culture directly experienced something Einstein had only glimpsed through his equations.

The pattern Hotstuff detected had led us here, and she was sitting on a log across the cooking fire from the elder and me, fetchingly dressed in safari shorts with her hair done up in a long single braid that she was playing with, twirling between her fingers. Of course, since she was simply an augmented reality projection in the pssi system, I was the only one who could see her.

“He means time runs forward and backward, but not like a stream—more like currents in a lake,” she suggested. “No, like a reservoir, that’s more what he means.”

“Like a reservoir?” I asked the elder.

He nodded. With long arms, he reached up and circled his hands around slowly, finally coming to rest, ending at me. The Yupno had a way of pointing toward doorways when speaking about time, a curiosity I was beginning to understand.

Inhabiting the body of this tribal member, I was trying to see if time felt any different for me. It didn’t, but something felt odd.

Amazingly, the elders hadn’t batted an eye at the idea of one of their own being magically inhabited by an alien spirit, nor the idea that I was conversing with an invisible ghost, Hotstuff, in their midst. It seemed perfectly natural to them.

The witch doctor pointed to where Hotstuff was sitting, almost as if he could see her.

“The spirit name?” he asked.

Hotstuff raised her eyebrows.

“Hotstuff,” I replied, shrugging at her.

“HOT stuff,” he repeated, “hot STUFF?”

I nodded, and his smiled widened.

“And your name?” I asked—I hadn’t thought to inquire before.

He pointed to his chest. “Nicky,” he said proudly, and then added, “Nicky Nixons.”

I laughed—Nicky Nixons the witch doctor.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Nicky Nixons. My name,” I said, pointing to myself, “is Vince Indigo.”

“Yes, in—dee—go… ,” he replied, nodding sagely, as if he’d always known.

“This is all very touching,” interjected Hotstuff, “but we have to get going. We’re out of time here.”

She splintered some upcoming death events into my display spaces, one of them a bio-electronic Ebola-based retrovirus that ended with my internal organs liquefying while I brushed my teeth the following morning. She firewalled off the data tunnel from the jungle we were sitting in, just in case.

“It’s getting dangerous just being here.”

I nodded. “Okay, let’s get me going,” I replied. “But you stay awhile, see what you can learn from him.”

It was time to get to work again. The sensory frames of the jungle and Nicky Nixons quickly faded away to reveal the confines of a small, sparse apartment somewhere in the lower levels of the Atopian seascraper complex. In augmented space, an endless array of workspace cubicles radiated outward in the New London financial metaworld. The cubicles were busily occupied by thousands of copies of Willy McIntyre, one of my surfer friend Bob’s best friends and my newly appointed stock trader.

“So I assume business is good?” I asked Willy, sensing the arrival of his primary subjective.

Hotstuff was feeding me a report on Willy’s activities, and I could see that these weren’t just bots and synthetics he had working—these were full-blown splinters, hundreds of them. I didn’t care what he was up to. I just needed to get in and out.

Time was, as ever, against me.

“Business is very, very good,” replied Willy, now standing beside me, watching me watching his financial army at work below.

He looked like the cat that had eaten the canary: about to burst with some secret. In the report from Hotstuff, I could see that Willy had fully paid off the multi-generational mortgage for his family. He was well on his way to amassing a sizeable fortune, but I didn’t have the time or energy to talk.

Death was calling.

“I noticed you amped up your Phuture News services,” I said carefully, “but that’s not why I’m here. I’m sending the details of what I need, right now.”

I uploaded the transaction into one of his splinters.

“You want me to what?!” he exclaimed. “You know this is going to look suspicious, especially with me working for Infinixx.”

“From what I’ve heard, you don’t work for them anymore.”

Willy stopped fidgeting and stared at me. “Sure, but it’ll still look odd.”

“I know it seems crazy, but if you could do this for me, and keep it quiet, I can pay you an awful lot of money. I need you to dump all that stock and chalk up a huge loss, and I need you to do it from New York.”

I looked at his face. He was aware of the way I was watching him.

“And be careful,” I said after a moment, feeling he was in over his head.

“It doesn’t look like there will be any problems with this transaction—”

“Not with that,” I interrupted. He wasn’t catching my meaning. “I mean with whatever you have going on here.”

“There’s nothing going on here.”

We stared at each other.

I needed to get going. “Just be careful, okay?”

He hesitated, but then smiled. “No problem, Mr. Indigo.”

This kid was going to get himself in trouble. He offered his hand and I shook it, but my mind was already elsewhere.

I quickly flitted off to the roof of the Cognix towers.

10

A deep, haunting wail reverberated through the morning air, carrying me upward, beyond the highest of the Himalayan peaks, but also inward and backward, deep into my mother’s womb. A million deaths surrounded me, all threaded outward from my moment of creation, a cosmic embryo of existence secured by the thin timeline threading through it all that kept me alive.

My body was drenched in sweat under the hot sun that beat down from the Columbian sky. Making my way across the Plaza de Bolivar, I wiped the sweat off the nape of my neck with a T-shirt I’d pulled out of my backpack. Tourists stood around in small groups, looking at the grand framed-portico walls, perspiring together under the same sun that was baking me.

Pigeons scattered at my feet, but I had to keep moving. A small security contingent was shadowing me from a distance, but I was trying to stay incognito. Out of the corner of my eye, a Coca-Cola sign called out from under the shade of an awning, and I shifted my path toward it and the small convenience shop beneath it at the corner of the plaza.

“Hola!” I announced as I entered, feeling the relief of air-conditioning sweeping over me. I slid open the door to a refrigerator at the side of the register, pulling out a can of soda, and, parched, opened it and began gulping it down. The shopkeeper appeared from the back, just as I was about finished with it.

“Señor!” he exclaimed with eyes wide, staring at me.

“What?”

I put the can down. Was he that upset I didn’t pay for it first?

Reaching into my pockets, I felt energized and awake. I fumbled around excitedly for some pesos. A small group of people had appeared in the shop, staring at me, which I knew could only mean one thing.

My heart banged in my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I looked at the shopkeeper, who stared in horror at the can of soda in my hand. My vision began to swim as I made for the door, my knees giving way in a euphoric rush. At the edges of my senses, I could hear applause. I waved to my fans as blackness descended.

The dungchen horns sounded again, their low, baleful moans awakening my mind from its semilucid dream state. I blinked and looked out the window of the room I’d been sleeping in. The rising sun was announcing the start of a new day, though Lhasa was still enveloped in shade as the sun fought its way over the towering peaks surrounding the valley.

Still half-asleep, I let my mind wander back to the death event in Columbia we’d just averted. They’d been smuggling narcotics in the soda cans, and I would have unwittingly downed one before anyone could warn me off. We shifted the path of my walk later in the day through Bogota, away from the Plaza de Bolivar entirely, just in case.

The FDMs were a troubling development. The same way that people would mob around an accident on a street corner to gawk, with future prediction technology and the wikiworld, people could now flit to nearly any spot on the planet to witness accidents taking place. They called them FDMs—flash death mobs.

With so many predicted future deaths, I’d now attracted my own FDM fan club, and my future deaths became celebrations, with people flitting in to witness the endless sequences of clever deaths that I would narrowly avert. They figured this was a future installation art project of some kind, and I couldn’t afford to tell the world the truth, so I was just rolling with it.

The patterns Hotstuff had detected had led us to Lhasa, to study the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text dedicated to experiences that lay between life and death. It was maddeningly difficult to understand since most of it was coded in ancient symbols. We’d gone there to participate in the Monk Debates, to talk directly with those who really understood it.

A familiar tapping echoed through the slightly ajar wooden door of the shared room I was sleeping in. I was inhabiting the body of a Buddhist monk from the Sera Monastery on the outskirts of Lhasa. In return for borrowing his corporal form, I’d offered the monk a chance for some truly out-of-body meditation sessions using the pssi network, something they didn’t normally have access to here.

Smarticles were an internationally controlled substance. My transport of them outside of Atopia, and especially with what I was doing here, was highly illegal.

“Don’t even try it,” I warned Hotstuff.

She stood pouting in the doorway, done up in a French maid outfit, but, of course, still with her riding crop in hand. I pulled the bed sheets off before she could get to me. I stood and pulled my maroon dhonka robe around me.

Weeks had passed, and I was still here, but barely. The day before there’d been fifty thousand ways I could have died in the millions of phutures we were tracking, and I’d had to fight off two sequences in real time and real space—an incredibly close call.

While we’d slowed down the contagion, we hadn’t been able to stop it spreading. We tried simulations of locking my body in a vault, but this made things worse. The death events piled up, making even the slightest of exposures of my body to the outside disastrously threatening, eventually ending in some kind of terrorist strike against my hiding place.

Hundreds of thousands of bots and synthetics were running around doing large and small things to sweep the death events back, but I was still the key to many of them. This was going to be a big day. We would be fighting death off more fiercely than ever.

“So what’s the bad news?” I sighed.

The rest of the sleeping mats in my room were empty, the other monks apparently much earlier risers than me, but then again, they were real Buddhist monks. I stretched, yawning, and rubbed my neck, expecting the worst. I needed to get some hot tea into this body before the morning meditation session.

“Good news!” exclaimed Madame Hotstuff, snapping the riding crop across my ass, urging me awake. She swished the air in front of her with the crop, ending by pointing toward the door. We began to walk. “The threats are receding, or at least, they’ve stabilized.”

“Really?”

My constricted future eased ever so slightly. Finally.

We walked out the door and into the hallway, passing a group of monks busily on their way somewhere. Hotstuff sashayed her way past them in her stilettos and knee-high stockings, smiling at them.

“Really,” she stated, looking back at me and stopping to lean against the rough-hewn rock wall of the corridor. “It looks like the new ring fencing of a perimeter around your phutures has begun to pay off. That, combined with this new meditation and awareness stuff.”

“So what was it then?” If we’d found a way to contain it, then there must be a path to the root source, some forensic process we could use to follow it backward.

Hotstuff lowered the riding crop. “Vince, honey, remember what Nicky Nixons said, what Yongdzin, your Buddhist master, is saying. You need to stop thinking in deterministic terms. Live in the moment.”

“Right. Live in the moment, effortless action.”

“Exactly.”

“Hotstuff… Hotstuff… ,” I intoned solemnly, pressing my monk’s hands together in a prayer while we walked.

“I wish you’d chosen a different word for your mantra than my name.”

I opened my eyes and winked at her. “Works for me.”

She rolled her eyes. “The patterns are solidifying. Whoever did this left a trail of Easter eggs, we think leading to a back door.”

“Remind me to thank him personally.” I was eager to have a look at today’s agenda.

We arrived in the cafeteria, if one could call it that, in the center of Sera Jey. I grabbed a cup of tea and sat down with Hotstuff at a wooden table in the corner. A list of activities floated into view over the bench.

“Not so bad for today, mister, not as bad as yesterday.”

By now, we’d built up an espionage, and counterespionage, network that outstripped any but the wealthiest of corporations and nation-states, all with the specific directive of bending the future timeline to my will to keep me alive. We funneled all the money we could from Phuture News and had sold off all my assets to fund the program.

One particular item floated up through the threat matrices.

“So there’s no way around it?” In the long list of things I’d had to do, this one hit closest to home. I was struggling with it.

“Sorry, boss. You’d better take care of it before the morning meditation.”

I felt terrible about sabotaging the launch of the Infinixx distributed consciousness project, but there wasn’t any way around it. A Triad gangster network in Hong Kong would have used it to pinpoint some of my other activities, and disabling the launch was a key vector in keeping my lifeline intact.

I shrugged. Progress is progress. I’d better stick with the program. Using a communication phantom, I punched up Patricia’s networks, requesting an urgent, private meeting with her primary subjective.

A large Chenrezig statue, the Buddha of Compassion, sat at the head of the long chamber I was in. Its dozens of arms stretched out around it like star fire, its many faces gazing down at me benevolently. Its array of outstretched arms seemed eerily like phantom pssi limbs made visible in real-space. Unnerved, I turned my gaze to the window and the majestic peaks around us.

The plains surrounding Lhasa were filled with permanent, makeshift encampments of international troops that stood as a buffer between the Chinese and Indian bases lining the opposite sides of the valley. The Americans were there as part of the UN mission, as were NATO forces, but the largest contingent was the African Union.

Many thought hope for the future could be found in Africa—where the engine of a new economic powerhouse was already growling, and the last place left on Earth that still had a growing population. Lagos, the capital of the African Union, was closely linked with Terra Nova, the offshore colony in the South Atlantic. Terra Nova had their own synthetic reality product that was set to compete with pssi.

“You want me to what?” asked Patricia, materializing in the seat across from me.

I pulled my gaze back from looking out the window. A glittering security blanket settled around us with her arrival. Patricia paused for a moment while the blanket sealed.

“Do you have everything you need? What’s this about?”

She’d helped me smuggle the smarticles out of Atopia, even helped me create my covert communications network, and all without even asking what it was for. Thank God for old friends.

“I’m fine,” I replied quietly. “I don’t need any more materials, but I do need you to come help me, right now, in your physical form.” This sounded odd even before it came out, especially coming from the slight frame of my monk, diminutive in front of this world-famous scientist. “I can’t say more, except that it’s critical and needs to be kept secret.”

Patricia eyed me. “You realize the launch of Infinixx is less than an hour away?”

“I’m not saying you can’t go. Go virtually. Isn’t that what your whole project is about? What’s the difference?”

This was weird, but I’d gotten over my squeamishness about these sorts of requests.

She hesitated.

“You said I could rely on you if I ever needed anything, right?”

“Yes, I suppose.… ”

“So I’m asking.”

She sighed. “Okay.”

“Perfect,” I replied, sensing this mission accomplished. “I appreciate it, Pat.”

An awkward silence descended.

“So what’s going on with these storm systems?” I asked casually, changing the topic. I was curious to see if Patricia had anything more to say than what I got through the mediaworlds. I’d been so caught up in my own disasters that I’d hardly paid attention to the storm systems that were threatening Atopia. With a little more breathing space, I’d started to let my mind assimilate more of what was happening on the outside.

These storms were the big news.

“We don’t know,” she replied, shrugging, “but they’re definitely not natural.”

Not natural? I hadn’t heard that before.

“Something is going on, and we’re not sure what.”

No kidding, I thought to myself.

11

Finally, after longer than I could remember, I was really enjoying my walk through Buen Retiro Park in Madrid. Summer was turning fully towards fall, and the leaves were starting to come off the trees, creating a beautiful golden carpet underfoot. A perfectly faultless blue sky hung overhead.

In my mind’s eye, I saw myself stepping gracefully to the side as a helicopter crashed down from the heavens, nearly crushing me on a walk through Stanley Park in Vancouver the next day. In another splinter, I watched a car swerve, bouncing into my beach buggy as I turned into a parking lot in Malibu a few days later. The car clipped the surfboard I’d tied to the back of the beach buggy, sending it spinning around. I ducked just before the board would have knocked my head off.

It was all effortless action, like a ballet with death.

We’d found a solution to my problem. Since we’d stabilized them a few weeks back when I was in Tibet, the density of death events had quickly fallen. There were still nearly twenty thousand future fatalities we had to avoid to maintain my healthy timeline, but what had been terrifying a few weeks ago was now just a walk in the park.

Literally.

I strode purposefully as I walked around Retiro Park, on each step picking out another yellow leaf underfoot to grind into the gravel, imagining them to be tiny harbingers of doom I was snuffing out. Looking up from my work, I found myself standing in front of the Crystal Palace.

Down the path a little way, a woman leaned over to pick up one of the leaves and began laughing then crying, completely oblivious to everyone around her. Not wanting to disturb her, I shifted my walk onto another trail. I glanced back over my shoulder, but she was already gone.

She’d looked awfully familiar.

To protect myself, I’d developed a kind of temporal immune system, stretching out into the alternate universes connected to me. An army of killer-tomorrow-bots spun through the probabilistic spaces surrounding me, neutralizing threats, clotting dangerous portals and pathways both into the future and through the past. This immune system had become a part of me, a part of my living body, a highly attuned death sense that allowed me to thread my way through even the most dangerous of situations.

For once, the conspiracy theorists were right. Some of the tabloid worlds had begun publishing stories about a shadowy force that had been detected, pushing and pulling the future prediction networks. The shadowy force they were referring to was me, but there was something else out there too—the thing that was trying to hunt me down. But now I was hunting it as well.

The hurricanes threatening to destroy Atopia had more of my attention. In my situation, it was impossible to ignore the possibility that the storms were aimed at me, a final attempt to destroy my power base after attempting to trap me there. The idea just didn’t stick, though, and while the storms looked like they would damage Atopia, they were no real threat to me.

I turned my face up to feel the morning sunshine. Where my life before had been sliding into apathy, the past few months had led me on a spiritual journey into an almost mystical place. Decoding the hidden pattern had helped us navigate the most stable path through my future, and it was leading us further and further back. There was a hidden truth I was just beginning to glimpse, buried somewhere in humankind’s history.

The solution to my problem was simply to carry on. I was still engaged in a desperate struggle against death, but it had become more like a dance, with effortless action guiding me through. I’d reached a heightened state of being that I would never have been able to achieve any other way.

In the struggle to save myself, I’d been reborn.

As this timeline wore on, people began filtering out the predictions of my death as the attempts of another bored trillionaire at getting attention. The world, at large, was erasing me from their networks as phuture spam, and even the FDMs had gotten bored. The man with no future, who existed only in the moment, was invisible to a world fixated on anywhere but where they actually were.

On my end, I’d come to grips with my situation. My death had become a local solution to the universe that, with the massive resources at my disposal, I’d brought under control in a tight but stable spiral.

The irony just made it that much richer.

I was trapped by my future prediction systems, my own creation, unable to even tell people what was happening. Even more ironic was that I didn’t really even know if it all was true. It was possible that I was just running around every day, doing it all for no reason.

But then, this was life.

I smiled at that thought.

The existentialists did say that life was all about pulling the victory of meaning from the jaws of senseless absurdity, and in that I’d discovered a purpose I’d struggled to find before. That purpose was finding out who was doing this to me, and why, and the trail was leading back to core of Atopia.