The 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. “No matter where the winds carry me, I will always find my way back to you.”

“And I you,” said the boy, his face close now, his hot breath on my cheeks.

Sunlight streamed down on us in the field where we lay. I brushed a lock of hair from my eyes and looked down at an ant in the grass 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, 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.

1 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

My eyes teared up, straining 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. Dad was touched that his sweet little boy wanted to be with him, but really, I just 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 engine. “Look!”

He swerved the airboat and pointed toward something in the water.

Dozens of sea otters had arranged themselves into a raft in the floating kelp, chattering angrily as we passed. A few heads popped 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. They love it out here!”

We slowed as we neared the edge of the forest and the kelp stalks became sparser. I was sitting on my dad’s knee, and he 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 on Atopia my dad had worked hard at stretching his neural plasticity. Early on, he learned the trick of phantom limbs, something my mother never really figured out.

That day, we were fishing with the dolphins, which my dad knew was my favorite. My smile spread as we sped across the kelp, the wind and sun in my face, free as a bird. We didn’t really fish, but mostly directed the dolphins using pssi control, and they did the fish tending. At that early stage in the project, we still needed their help to herd the fish, and for me this was the best part of fishing—speaking with the dolphins.

“There they are.” My dad cut the engine.

Our boat settled into the water, gliding to a stop. The open ocean was gentle, but my dad held me tight. Gulls wheeled high in the air behind us, waiting for signs of any fish we might throw their way.

Off to the side of the boat, fast-moving shapes sped toward us from the depths. With a terrific splash, about a dozen heads broke the surface and the air filled with the sound of dolphins squeaking.

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.

And they were saying hello.

I smiled and waved. “Hey, Billy! Hi, Samantha!”

They squeaked their hellos back. Dad let go of me, and I rushed to the side and put my hand in the water to pet their snouts. They were like the best dog you ever had, but huge and wet and much, much smarter.

The Terra Novan dolphins weren’t exactly working for us. It was more like they worked with us. They liked the excitement of Atopia and enjoyed privileged access to multiverse worlds only possible here.

My dad laughed. “That’s a lot of love. Come on, we have a lot of work to do.”

The dolphins shifted their attention toward him.

“Today we’re 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.

“All right,” my dad continued, clapping his hands, “let’s get this show on the road!”

The dolphins chattered their good-byes and shot off, except for Samantha, who popped back up with a sardine in her mouth.

“Thank you, Sam.” My dad nodded to her, bending over to take the sardine, and 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. “Okay, you two!” he laughed. “Go on and have some fun!”

I detached from my body and snapped into Samantha’s, instantly rocketing off into the ocean, feeling her powerful muscles forcing us through the frigid waters, chasing her brothers and sisters into the depths.

2 Identity: Patricia Killiam

Showing up in person for the press was a mistake.

My God, how my body ached, even with its pain receptors tuned all the way down. I 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 140 years old, but I still wasn’t ready to give up the ghost.

Sighing inwardly, I nodded at Olympia, our media rep in New York, indicating it was time to start up the promo-world for the reporters. The event was being held on Atopia, but the reports were from New York, so we had Olympia running the show. She was attending remotely, and I’d expected to see a static-image display of her avatar in my display-space, but instead, she appeared as a perfectly rendered pssi-projection.

I didn’t know Olympia had our pssi installed in her nervous system. When did that happen?

The promo-world expanded to engulf our senses, and an attractive young woman appeared, walking along a beautiful stretch of Atopian beachfront near the Eastern Inlet. “Imagine,” she said, “have you ever thought of hiking the Himalayas in the morning and finishing off the day on a beach in the Bahamas?”

I’d watched this advertisement a million times. While it played, I disengaged and opened a private communications channel with Antonia, the senior partner at Olympia’s company and an old, dear friend.

“Thank you so much for this new contract,” Antonia said the moment I opened the channel.

“You don’t need to thank me, your firm is simply the best qualified.” I paused. “How is your father?”

“He’s well. He was asking about you last night.” She smiled warmly. “And how are you feeling? Is the new gene therapy working?”

“I’m feeling great,” I lied and left it at that.

Antonia looked at me and seemed about to say something, but then stopped herself.

“Did your father decide whether he’s coming?” I’d invited him to attend the big launch. He’d helped me in founding the pssi program but had left after disagreements with Kesselring.

She looked away and shook her head. “I’m sorry, but… I’ll try talking to him.”

“Please do.”

Antonia looked back at me. “I will, I promise.”

The ad finished playing, and with a nod I closed the communications channel to Antonia and returned my attention to the reporters.

“So how exactly is pssionics going to make the world a better place?” asked a stick-thin blond, Ginny, from the front row.

I carefully rolled my eyes. I’d never liked the term “pssionics”—the baggage it carried created a constant battle to separate fact from fiction when talking to reporters.

Then again, when has that ever mattered?

“Well, Ginny, I prefer to use the term ‘polysynthetic sensory interface,’ or just pssi.” I detached and floated upward out of my body to get their attention, but nobody batted an eye, so I left my proxxi, Marie, to finish the presentation for me.

The proxxi program represented 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 people’s lives, to share in their day-to-day experiences. They were still artificial intelligences, but now they shared our physical reality to seamlessly bridge the gap between the worlds of humans and machines.

Marie kept talking with the reporters, and I’d retreated to watch from the back of the room when the hair on the back of my neck stood up. The slingshot test must be about to start. I had to wrap this up, so I transitioned back into control of my body.

“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 answer Ginny’s original question,” 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.”

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 toward the sun rising on the horizon.

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

On cue, the slingshot began to fill the space around us with a growing 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 doubt.

Can I really bend reality to my desire?

Atopia was 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.

Am I fooling myself?

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.

Leaving a splinter to manage saying good-bye to the reporters, I disengaged and pinged Commander Strong. The blaze of the slingshot test was still dissipating on the main display in the middle of the command center as I arrived. I lit up a smoke, gently inserting my presence next to Rick. He was my own pick as head of our newly formed Atopian Defense Forces.

During an exemplary career in the US Marines, Strong had demonstrated repeated bravery by rescuing men under his command. His first deployment had been in Nanda Devi in the terrible fighting over Himalayan dams that had sparked the Weather Wars. Though his psych profile indicated latent post-traumatic stress disorder, it was only 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.

Kesselring, the CEO of Cognix and main benefactor behind Atopia, had been the first to begin speaking about the need to have defensive weapons. Initially, the suggestion seemed completely antithetical to the libertarian ideals Atopia was founded upon. I’d been against it at first, but as time wore on, I could see what Kesselring was thinking.

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.

“Finished playtime yet, Rick?” I asked, shifting my hips and taking a drag from my smoke. Rick did like his toys.

I wanted him to feel safe. I knew that one of his main reasons for coming here was to rescue his relationship with his estranged wife, Cindy. I sincerely wanted him to succeed and raise a family here, especially after the hard time he’d had growing up. During the interview process we’d gotten to know each other quite well.

“Yeah, I think that about does it.”

“Good, because you scared the heck out of what wildlife I’ve managed to nurture on this tin can,” I said. “And the tourists want to go back in the water—not that you didn’t put on a good show. 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.

“That’s your job, Rick, to help scare the world into respecting us. Mine is to help scare it into saving itself. Good work.”

“Did you see that thunderstorm coming in?” he asked. 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.

His wife was having a hard time adjusting to life here. People reacted differently to sudden immersion in limitless synthetic reality when they arrived on Atopia for the first time. Most adjusted quickly, in a short order creating their own little nooks and crannies of reality that suited them, but some had a more difficult time.

Yet it wasn’t just that.

At the core of it, Cindy’s chronic depression stemmed from the nature of her relationship with Rick. It was something I thought we could help fix.

“Actually, that would be great. You wouldn’t mind?” he answered, busy adjusting the control systems for the slingshot shutdown. He looked toward me. “So you really think that whole sim kid thing might be a good idea?”

He was talking about the proxxids, simulated babies that Cognix encouraged couples to try before the “real” thing. It might help Cindy get acclimatized to pssi, but in general it wasn’t something I was comfortable with.

“Yes,” I replied slowly, “if you’re careful.”

Rick looked satisfied with my answer. “Maybe I’ll speak to her then. I’ll see you later.”

With a nod to Jimmy, I clicked out of the Command sensory spaces.

3 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

“I think that’s a good idea, Commander,” I said once Patricia had faded from view. “I mean about going to see your wife. I can handle this.”

Rick glanced up at me from the slingshot controls. “Thanks.” Standing up from his workstation, he walked over as he shifted his command authorizations to me. “You have a pretty special bond with Dr. Killiam, don’t you?”

I smiled. “We do.”

An alert signaled that some security protocols had been breached during the weapons test. Somebody was poking around up there and had destroyed the drone.

“It hasn’t been easy moving here,” he continued. “At least, it hasn’t been easy for Cindy.”

I filed the breach report and made a note to look into it later.

“It’s a huge change for her,” I replied. “And for you, for that matter.”

Rick nodded, pulling a security blanket down around us. The other Command staff glanced up from their workstations, curious.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “I heard that you had it rough growing up here.”

I didn’t say anything.

“If you ever need anyone to talk to, I had a bit of a tough time as a kid, too.”

“Thanks… ,” I replied, surprised at his sudden intimacy.

“I’m just saying, any time… and, of course, entirely confidentially.”

“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. “You just remember, any time, right?”

“Right.”

A pause while I smiled at him, but it was difficult to sense what was going on inside his head. I decided to let it go.

“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 experience on Atopia was a special sort of hell I had to drag myself through. As an adult, 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.

And, of course, I remembered it all. For pssi-kids, not remembering wasn’t an option.

“Look at him, isn’t that cute?” said my mother, back when I was an infant, just after my parents had arrived on Atopia. “He just shat himself again, and he’s looking around wondering what smells so bad.”

She was laughing at a shared rendering of my inVerse, even sharing the smell with the guests. I was ten months old, and Mother was at it again. Drunk, of course.

“Smell that?” she laughed. “Can you believe something so small could make such a terrible smell?”

My parents had 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-faced 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. Dragonflies buzzed at the water’s edge, holding my attention as I reached toward them. I still hadn’t learned 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,” said Mother. “Phil thinks it’ll help his brain development, grow him big and strong, but it doesn’t seem to be working.” She laughed again, louder this time, shrugging her shoulders. The guests politely tried to smile.

“Yolanda!” she yelled. “Change Jim, please?”

Mother smiled at the guests as her image flickered. She detached while her proxxi, Yolanda, took over control of her physical body. The pssi functioned somewhat less than flawlessly at that prototype stage back then, and the net effect was that a ghost of 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 walked over to pick me up. She cradled me as she scurried me aside to change my diaper.

“Isn’t it just the best thing?” my mother gushed, referring to the pssi, still a new toy to them. This was the first time Steve and his wife, Arlene, had paid 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’s made my life so relaxing.” She smiled drunkenly.

“It is amazing,” Steve agreed, happy to have gotten off the topic of diapers. “All the build-up wasn’t just hype.” He looked around the room for confirmation.

“Absolutely.” My mother nodded. “I mean, who would have thought? I modeled my proxxi after my own nanny, and little Jimmy has hardly put a dent in my lifestyle.”

“We’re still learning new ways to use it,” added Steve’s wife. “It is nice to have real face-time with people, though. Synthetics do lack a certain… something.”

Everyone around the table nodded except my mother, who crinkled her nose a little.

No one around the table quite knew where to take the conversation next.

“Well!” exclaimed my mother, never one to let an awkward moment derail her. “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 toward my father.

He stared down into his coffee. “We manage the aquaculture program—we’re not exactly fishmongers.” He stole a tiny hateful glance her way but smiled to the guests.

Steve raised his cup of coffee. “And we farm kelp, too!”

Mother pinched her face in a tight-lipped smile that I was all too familiar with. “That’s nice. Call it what you like. We’re here, and that’s all that matters!”

Yolanda walked back over offered me back to my 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 the reason I’d requested this private meeting with Kesselring.

The rash of people disappearing into the multiverse and leaving their bodies behind had gotten worse, even common. After an initial alarm by friends and family, we’d usually find them burrowed deep in some hedonistic cyber-fantasy world, but lately cases were sprouting up in which they were nowhere to be found.

“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 discussions with Sintil8, but nothing I wanted Kesselring to know about. “But these disappearances are different. Their brains are highly stimulated, a sensory overload of some sort.”

I took a deep breath and shifted in my seat.

The strict privacy laws—that I’d created—now meant I couldn’t dig any deeper into people’s minds without their consent. 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. It was the fundamental building block from which everything else branched.

“We need to figure out what’s going on.”

Kesselring sighed.

“I don’t disagree, but a few people off pleasuring themselves in the multiverse isn’t enough to delay the entire program. This is a massive undertaking we’ve put in motion.”

The global marketing push to launch pssi commercially was easily the biggest promotional campaign of all time, at least by a private corporation—if this label could be applied to us anymore.

I watched the glittering cover of the security blanket that had fallen around us when he arrived. Even with security incorporated 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. It had an odd and shifting color that was similar to the indistinct bluishness of water in a glacial runoff stream. Maybe that was why it felt so cold.

“Do you think the Terra Novans are involved?” I asked. “It’s still possible this is Sintil8 together with the Cartels, or even some fragmented group from Allied Command.”

Kesselring eyed me. “I have someone looking into it. We need to be extremely vigilant from this point.”

I watched him, wondering how vigilant he was being about me. “You’ve probably heard, but Rick 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 left Atopia, I’d taken him under my wing. His mother, my great-grandniece, had abandoned him here, and I blamed myself for not intervening sooner in that ugly domestic situation. Ultimately, Jimmy had been the one to pay the price, but he was beginning to blossom. He was my star pupil, along with Nancy, of course. In my long life, I never had any children of my own, and these two were as close as I’d come.

I couldn’t have been more proud.

Kesselring eyed me, sensing my protectiveness. “Jimmy’s an excellent choice. He’s the one I have helping me out.”

I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t known Jimmy was working directly for him.

“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,” he replied, not catching my full meaning, “but this just proves my point 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—”

I completed the sentence for him, “To gain the highest saturation throughout the population as quickly as possible. I know.” I stared into his eyes. “So we’re going to be giving it away for free?”

He smiled. “Of course.”

“And it doesn’t worry you we’re not telling people the full story?”

“It worries me,” he said, looking down at the floor, “but again, what choice do we have?” He raised his head and met my gaze. “We need to make sure we stabilize this timeline the best we can.”

As we approached the point of no return, all the careful planning and clever analyses had the feeling of blind faith, and I’d had faith shot out of my skies early in life.

“Patricia,” he said, watching me, “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 Scadden

“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.

“We’d like to nominate you to the Security Council,” she said, getting to the point. “What do you think?”

I wasn’t really surprised, but I put on a show for her. “I’m flattered. I mean, of course I would accept, but I’m so young, so inexperienced.”

“Perhaps young, but you’re 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 can learn a lot from him.”

“Me too.”

“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. But they should have just gotten a divorce rather than fight like they did. Mother always insisted it wouldn’t be Christian.

Coming from the Deep South, my family had a strong religious background, and regular church service figured deeply in my upbringing. In fact, a strong Christian community on Atopia was one of the reasons my mother said she’d agreed to come, and God and sin were never far from her wicked tongue.

A strange communion between Christianity and hacker culture had evolved on Atopia—“hacker” used 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 she’d arrived, however, and this had just added to her eventual dissatisfaction of the place.

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, mostly especially for my father. All that was left of my parents’ relationship by the time I arrived was a grinding, codependent bitterness that fueled the empty shells of their lives.

I’d 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 my mother wanted me to hear everything.

One evening in particular, I was sitting in one of my playworlds, stacking blocks with my proxxi, Samson, into fantastic structures in augmented pssi-space. Despite my dad’s attempt to filter out their latest argument with a pssi-block, Mother was having none of it.

“So now you want to protect him!” she screamed, 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?” my dad said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t done anything.”

“Oh, that’s right, you haven’t done anything!” she screeched. 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,” my dad replied, dejectedly. Fearfully.

“Love don’t pay the bills, now does it, Phil? Does it?”

“No… I mean, so what? We manage.”

“We manage?” Mother yelled “We manage?” She’d been drinking again.

“Yes, we manage,” insisted my dad, 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 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? He’ll remember everything, you know.”

“Oh, I want him to hear. I want him to hear everything, want him to know that the only reason I agreed to have him was so that we could get on this stinking ship. Otherwise, I would never have let a child into this world so close to you. Maybe I should tell my church group what you’d like to do with children?”

“Gretchen, please, you’re drunk. It’s not what you think.”

“We’re only here because I’m the great-grandniece to the famous Killiam. Not like you’d be man enough to accomplish anything on your own.”

“We’re doing amazing things.… ”

“Amazing? Really? Is that why you pssi-block me all day? I can still see you, you know, sneaking around out there.”

“I need to focus on work during the days. I thought we’d agreed.”

My mother snorted. “I thought we agreed about a lot of stuff, Phil. And you stink like fish, it’s disgusting.” She wrinkled her nose.

“Block it out then. That’s what pssi is for. Anyway, I was trying to take a shower, but you stopped me.”

“I stopped you? So it’s me that’s holding you back? What a joke! Just block it, that’s your answer? Maybe I like to see things for what they are, like what you are.”

“I’m trying to do my best.”

“Your best isn’t good enough,” she spat back. “You are what you are, right, Phil?”

My dad shook his head, looking down at the floor. “I’m getting in the shower.” He turned away to escape.

Mother waved him off drunkenly, turning her attention to me. Even as a toddler, I cringed in the glare of her disappointment. She detached from her body and snapped into mine. She sat looking at the yellow cyber-blocks through my own eyes, staring at my 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. From what I’ve heard, your cousin Nancy is quite the star. Not you, though, not my little stinker.”

She angrily snapped out of my body, giving it a shove as she left and knocking me over. “You’re just as useless as your dad.”

At the time, I didn’t understand what she meant, but I could hear the hate in her voice.

Samson watched all this from a distance. When she lost interest, he walked and 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 sat for a while inside the structure we created, 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 bursts of rockets and bangers. Walking down the lane, I caught glimpses of children playing in the alleyways, scrambling atop piles of rubbish stacked high in the abandoned bombsites behind the row houses.

Fireworks whizzed and popped overhead, and, coming around a corner, we almost smacked into a little girl running the other way, her eyes fixed 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 man huffing and puffing up behind her, waving at us, obviously the girl’s father. The foggy night was thick with the acrid smoke of gunpowder, and my watering eyes strained to see the man approaching.

I called out to him. “Oh, it’s no trouble at all.” The man stopped running and walked the last few paces. He was obviously coming from the Lion’s Head, the pub where we were headed.

“Ahh,” said Alan, having found the prize he’d been searching for. He produced another sparkler from the pocket of his wool overcoat. He looked at the little girl. “Would you like this?”

The girl’s eyes grew 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, releasing the girl.

“You stay away from my Olivia!” He roughly jerked 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, craning her neck as she disappeared into the gloom.

I sighed, reaching down to 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 in Manchester, spring was much the same as the rest of the year—cold and raining. 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 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 gave Father 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 steadfastly alone. I just wasn’t interested. Only one passion burned in my soul.

“Snap out of it, Alan. Don’t listen to that small-minded lout.” I laughed, pulling him into me and giving him a little kiss. He smiled, and we began walking off toward the Green Man. “Tell me again why it’s different.”

“We’re just speaking about two completely different things,” he replied after a pause, his mind coming 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?”

“Exactly! 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 stopped outside. With one hand, he combed back his hair, parting it neatly to one side, and smiled at me. Even at forty years of age, he still had a boyish charm, perhaps aided by ears that stuck out just a little too far.

I laughed, looking at him.

“What about the Big Bang then? That’s a whole universe from nothing!” I had a steady stream of correspondence going on with some colleagues at Cambridge who’d 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 inside under the bowing doorframe, across worn granite flagstone floors, and were enveloped by the warm bustle of the dimly lit pub.

“The usual, Mr. Turing?” asked the bartender as we arrived at the bar. He nodded at her.

“Two, please,” 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 offense in 1950s England, his faculty and the academic world had ostracized him, and most of his graduate students had abandoned him. 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, Alan took his own life less than a year later, and the world has been 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.”

The bartender returned with our pints of cider. 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 to a quiet part of the pub near the fireplace, which 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!”

Just then a ping arrived from Nancy. Its loud chime drowned out the background noise of the pub.

“Go ahead and answer,” Alan encouraged, picking up his glass of cider and taking 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 a simulation of my mentor of so long ago—replay conversations we’d had, or at least, what I thought I remembered of them—but the simulation was a pale reminder of what the man had been.

I authorized Nancy for access to this sensory space, and she resolved into view, sitting on a pew across from us.

“So you’re sure you want to go ahead with this?” I asked her.

Nancy was pressing me to release the Infinixx project ahead of the pssi launch. It had originally been my idea—something that 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 after I was gone, and I knew she had the inner strength to make sure that whatever happened, it would be for the right reasons.

“Absolutely!”

“Good. I’ll press on ahead on my side then. You’re keeping on top of the New York trials?”

“Yes, Aunt Patty,” she responded sheepishly. She would always be a child to me. “Of course I am.”

“Perfect. I’ll start a campaign with the board.”

She looked ready to burst, yet her eyes clouded over.

“There’s something else?”

She sighed. “What’s going on with Uncle Vince?”

Reports of his future deaths had been clogging the prediction networks. My guilt was overwhelming—Vince was one of my oldest friends. I’d managed to insert some clues, however, deep in the patterns we had chasing him. He was off around the world, hunting them down, and over time it would subside. A goose chase, but I had to keep him busy, and 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 fooling around.” I shrugged and looked toward Alan.

“Okay… if you say so.” She paused, but let it go. “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?”

“I’ll be there.”

I hesitated. “Dr. Baxter said he might bring Bob along.… ”

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,” she replied with a smile. “It’s an official function, and those bore David to death.”

“I just thought I’d mention it.” Maybe I was better at this than I thought. “Now get back to your evening!”

She nodded excitedly as she faded away.

“A beautiful child,” Alan observed, smiling at me. “One thing though.… ”

“About Nancy?”

“No, about what we were talking about.”

I waited. “Yes?”

“In these created realities you speak of, 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 a reality that it creates?”

At the time, I hadn’t understood that it could be possible, but Alan 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 paused to let the question sink in. Alan had also been the founder of mathematical biology and studied its relationship to morphogenesis, the processes that caused organisms to develop their shapes. “If you change the body, Patricia, you also change the mind.”

I sat staring at him, saying nothing.

“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 will?”

This century-old question now hung in my mind.

7 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

The flitterati were already mingling with the foreign diplomats and other people of importance that had arrived at the annual Foreign Banquet. The event was being held on the very apex 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. 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.

Those are probably smarticles.

I had Samson, my proxxi, walk my body over while I finished some last-minute work at Command, and reaching the entrance, I took back control.

Many of the world’s leaders were in attendance at the banquet, reflecting the growing international significance of Atopia. It was an important opportunity for us to show off on the world stage, and Kesselring had 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 descended the entry staircase.

“Congratulations, Jimmy!” said an excited Nancy Killiam, resplendent in a shimmering gown of what looked like liquid helium that flowed around her in silvery wisps. She pulled me close to kiss my cheek, the helium pouring silently around us, and put her arm in mine.

“Thanks!” My nomination to the Security Council, by far the youngest ever, earned me the invitation tonight. I liked the attention. “But on the contrary, it should be me who is congratulating you!”

Patricia had given me a 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. “And I may be able to help.” 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 her name, and she looked away toward them and then back at me. I smiled and nodded her leave to go. With a whoosh, the silvery wisps of her gown disappeared and followed her into the crowd.

I certainly felt her go.

“Drink, sir?” a waiter asked, sweeping up beside me with a golden tray full of champagne flutes. I nodded and took a glass, watching Nancy greet our fellow pssi-kids.

This was definitely our time to shine, and shine we did in our glittery and fanciful skins. I observed some of the guests watching them with wonder. The visitors were still adjusting to the trial pssi system that everyone who came to Atopia had installed. It was a great marketing stunt.

Any technology that was sufficiently advanced seemed like magic to someone unfamiliar, and this place still held a mystical air to the rest of the world.

Kesselring downloaded to Samson a long list of people he wanted me to introduce myself to. Looking around the ballroom, their names and identities popped up in my display spaces, allowing me to pick them out from the crowd.

Many were my counterparts in the armed and security forces, and several of these were from the Indian and Chinese contingents. Atopia was viewed as a neutral territory for these warring sides. Even more important, Atopia was seen—by both sides—as an indispensible part of their economic and technological future.

I sighed, straightening out my new ADF Whites, and wove my way into the crowd.

The event was winding down. In my last discussion, I brought together some senior cyber-espionage officials from both the Indian and Chinese sides at the same time. I was quite certain it wasn’t my diplomatic skills at work so much as everyone’s desire not to be left out. They were hungry for pssi.

I was thinking about leaving when someone poked me with a phantom. It was Commander Strong, standing not ten feet from me. 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 Scadden,” he announced as I arrived. I stood straight up at attention, taking Mrs. McInnis’ hand, and then turned to give the general a firm handshake.

“The pleasure is mine.”

Mrs. McInnis took me in. “You’re one of those pssi-kids, right?”

I laughed. “Yes ma’am, one of those.”

“Could you show me something?”

She obviously wanted some kind of carnival trick. The commander was about to excuse me when I took a step back, bowed to Mrs. McInnis, and then theatrically flourished one hand forward to produce a bouquet of red and pink lilies. I handed them to her.

“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 and gripped the bouquet at its base. The flowers swayed, and she leaned in and smelled them.

“They smell absolutely lovely!” 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’d been, startling Mrs. McInnis. It flew up toward the ceiling of the crystal enclosure, leaving a few feathers behind in its desperate flight. We all turned to watch it go.

Mrs. McInnis beamed at me.

“Jimmy is my newest addition to the Security Council,” laughed Rick, raising an eyebrow.

The general smiled at me. “He certainly has a gift with people.”

“That’s 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?” said Mrs. McInnis as she turned to the new arrival, who peeled her away 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.

“Synthetic babies may seem odd, sir, but my parents fought so much,” said Rick after a pause. They must have been talking about his proxxids. “I’m just trying to be careful.”

“Could have fooled me,” laughed the general. “That third tour you signed up for was heavy duty. Didn’t strike me as the plan of a man being careful.”

“What I mean is—”

“I know what you mean, son, and 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.”

“Maybe you haven’t, but then again, maybe you have.” The general turned to size me up, and I returned his gaze. “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, so why not test how we’d like our children to be?”

The general looked unconvinced.

“There’s no harm in it,” I added, “and I think he should try it out until he feels comfortable.”

The general considered this, and turned back to Rick. “Coming out here seems a perfect way to start over, Rick. Just really get started is all I’m saying, and don’t pretend, son. All this gimmickry can’t replace the real thing.”

Rick straightened up but said nothing.

“Anyway,” continued the general, slapping him 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. I’ll let you get to it.”

He turned to locate his wife.

“Jimmy, nice to meet you, and Rick, all the best,” he said, giving us the tiniest of salutes.

“Very nice to meet you, too, sir,” I said to his retreating figure, earning me a nod as he wound his way through the crowd.

I could see how deeply the issue with Rick’s wife was affecting him, and I had been studying him when the general spoke about Nanda Devi.

“You look just scrumptious!”

Spinning on my heels, champagne in hand, I found a stunning brunette staring at me, her long hair falling in tresses over tanned shoulders. A gossamer dress in abstract floral patterns fluttered around her, barely obscuring an athletic frame underneath. She laughed nervously, watching me smiling at her.

What a lovely—and familiar—smile.

Commander Strong grinned at the two of us, taking a long second look at the brunette.

“I think I’ll leave you to it.” With a wink my way, he was off.

“Those ADF Whites sure look good on you, Jimmy,” said the brunette, glancing at the departing Rick before returning her smile to me. She 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. The more time I spent in my own skin, the more I felt a deep welling of energy seeping outward from within.

Most pssi-kids hardly spent any time at all in their own bodies as they spread their splintered minds ever wider across the multiverse, leading to a loss of neural cohesion between their minds and bodies.

They didn’t care, but 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’s her name?

I smiled as the light dawned.

“Cynthia! It’s been a long time.”

“Since Nancy’s thirteenth birthday party.… ” Her voice trailed off, embarrassed.

I liked the way it made her look vulnerable.

“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, and I never got a chance to apologize for that. I’m really sorry.”

“Hey, it helped focus me at the time, and look where that got me.” I swept my arm toward all the important-looking dignitaries. “I should be thanking you.”

“I don’t think you should be thanking me.” She frowned, but then the smile returned. “Look at you now, Mr. Jim Scadden. You sure have changed.”

“Oh,” I said, “you have no idea.”

We stood looking at each other, the air electric with anticipation.

“So you call that an apology?” I asked, drawing her in. “That just now?”

She laughed. “My attempt, anyway.”

“I think maybe I need something more substantial, perhaps over dinner.”

“That sounds like a great idea. When?”

“No time like the present,” I said with a wink. Things were done here.

She paused before giving me her answer. “Sure, why not?”

Something inside me growled, and I took her hand, leading her toward the exit.

Life was coming full circle.

8 Identity: Patricia Killiam

I was sitting 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 at 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. He sat 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 on which the whole pssi program was based. 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.

The Chinese representatives were dialed-in today. They were nodding politely 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 to 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 Atopia’s construction had been funded by revenues Cognix had derived from these medical breakthroughs.

Stress, however, was something different.

After conquering, or at least taming, most of the major diseases, stress had become the biggest killer in the rich world. 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 was the foundation of almost all of the solutions.

The human mind had a nearly 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.

But 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 man 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 language they wanted, and the machines translated for us, so nobody needed to learn more than one anymore.

The study of languages was just more roadkill left behind on our headlong race ahead.

As the advertisement droned on, I couldn’t help feeling mounting disgust with the way it focused on happiness. Sure, it’s important, but what exactly is happiness? What we were pushing wasn’t exactly what we were pitching.

Soon enough, the ad finished and faded away into the familiar rotating symbol of Atopia, the pyramid and sphere.

“So what do you think?” our marketing coordinator asked.

Still staring at the rotating logo, my mind had wandered into thinking some odd features of the storm systems coming up the coast toward us.

“I liked it,” Dr. Granger responded, nodding ingratiatingly toward our Chinese guests. “I think I’m going to make some slight changes to the empathic feedback.”

“Sounds good,” said Kesselring, here in his primary-subjective for once. “As I was saying before, all the psychological, neurological, and, well, all test results have been compiled. Everything looks good for launch.”

He smiled an unbecoming grin at me. I raised my eyebrows but said nothing, and everyone around the table clapped. Everyone but me.

“Patricia?” Kesselring looked at me. “Anything to add?”

“I liked it, looked wonderful. Who could possibly resist a pitch like that?”

Kesselring’s lips pressed together. “You have something to say?”

I paused, struggling, but I couldn’t help myself. “How has this ‘happiness index’ become such a central barometer?”

I was treading on thin ice with the Chinese delegation here, but the urge was too strong.

“Isn’t happiness the central, single most important thing in a person’s life?” Hal turned to me, assuming a defensive posture. His reality-skin began sporting the revolting smile he loved to use on his EmoShow. He looked like a weasel on Prozac.

“I wouldn’t argue with you.” I held 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.”

“Of course not,” he laughed. Now he was the one with his hands up. “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, trying to convey his simple, dishonest frankness to everyone in the room.

“I am perfectly happy!” I snapped before I realized what I was doing. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath. Little bastard.

The room fell quiet.

Kesselring smiled toward our Chinese guests. “Let’s move onto the next topic, shall we?”

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,” Dr. Baxter immediately fumed.

“You’ve seen all the phutures Nancy presented. Every scenario pushes the Cognix stock higher with early adopters,” I countered. “You’re only annoyed because it’s not under your thumb.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” Baxter said peevishly, and loud arguing began around the table.

“Everyone, I will give you one very good reason,” Jimmy shouted, standing up and raising his hands. He winked at Nancy. “I’ve managed to secure an agreement with both India and China to launch simultaneously with us.”

Pandemonium broke loose for a few minutes while we reviewed the details.

“How in the world…?” Dr. Baxter’s voice trailed off.

“You’re giving up a lot here,” said Kesselring finally. “But the payoff is worth it, and it’ll keep the media’s attention off those damn storms.”

Kesselring’s eyes shifted toward Dr. Granger, who appeared about to say something, but then shook his head, staring at Jimmy. Kesselring looked toward Jimmy as well and smiled, nodding his congratulations. Then Kesselring turned to me. “I’m ready to make this happen, but I need one thing from you.”

“Yes?” 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. “I can do that. But it will be at the top of my agenda as soon as we launch.”

Kesselring smiled. “Then we’re agreed.”

Approving murmurs began to circulate. I reached out and held Nancy’s hand in mine, smiling. I was so proud.

“So are we a go for a worldwide press release?” asked 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?”

They 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.

“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.

The black granite and glass of the conference room melted into the deep mahoganies of my private office. I made for the bar.

A nice scotch on the rocks was just the thing I needed.

Marie was sitting against my office desk, her legs crossed in front of her as she leaned against it, propped up by her arms. Cigarette smoke rose slowly around her, and she took one more puff before stubbing it out in the crystal ashtray on the desk. She leaned forward, standing and waving me off. She’d get the drink.

“I know Hal is a pain, but you shouldn’t let him get to you,” she said as she plucked my favorite 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. I need to find out what Kesselring is hiding. Shifting Infinixx up on the release schedule was too easy. Granger folded without even a peep.”

Marie raised her eyebrows. “Sometimes things just make sense, even to him.”

“Maybe, but I have the feeling something else is going on. We need someone with, ah, special skills to have a look at this from the outside.”

Marie nodded. She knew who I was talking about. She decided to switch topics. “Your old student, Mohesha, from Terra Nova called again. It sounded very urgent.”

I shifted my pssi-body into a much younger version of myself and was now dressed in a black skirt and cream silk top while a sub-proxxi of Marie walked my real body home from the Solomon House. I looked down admiringly at my legs, sighing, and reached down to straighten my skirt, sliding a hand along my thigh as I did.

“It’s too dangerous to talk with the Terra Novans right now.”

“But not too dangerous to be talking with gangsters like Sintil8?”

“He doesn’t really want to stop what we’re doing, he just wants his cut.” Criminals were reliably predictable in their motivations, if nothing else. “He has the kind of backdoor connections and freedom to operate that may yield some answers.”

The problem wasn’t just my suspicions about Kesselring.

The huge depression we’d been tracking up the Eastern Pacific had transitioned from tropical-storm status and into full-blown Hurricane Newton, with Hurricane Ignacia 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 and to being downright suspicious.

By my calculations, these weren’t natural storms anymore.

Taking a good, long drink, I straightened up and looked Marie in the eye.

“Set the meeting with Sintil8.”

9 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

“I’m sorry, Jimmy, but that Patricia Killiam. Where does she get off talking about the nature of happiness? I’m really concerned about her.”

“No need to apologize, Dr. Granger,” I replied. “I’m worried about her, too. She 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—green forests edged by crescents of white beaches and the frothy breakwaters beyond. Through the phase-shifted glass walls, the sea glittered 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 as a child out on the kelp forests with my dad.

“I’m getting tired of her routine as the famous mother of synthetic reality,” continued Dr. Granger. “Sure, fluidic and crystallized intelligence are essential, but isn’t synthetic emotional and social intelligence even more important?”

We’d all heard this speech before, repeated endlessly on his EmoShow, and now that I was on the Council, I had the treat of hearing 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’s more important to understand?” he asked angrily as we walked through the hydroponics. “What someone said, or the reason they said it? Who knows more about happiness than I do?”

“I’d say they’re both equally important,” I replied. Dr. Granger had used his growing fame to secure the position as head psychologist on Atopia, and 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. Dr. Granger’s 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 walked, he 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 and amused themselves in the multiverse. These people judged their bodies to be without enough value to even warrant leaving their proxxi to inhabit them. They’d effectively given up their physical selves.

“We’d better start a new special file on Patricia,” he said after a pause.

It wasn’t my place to argue. We continued walking.

“Shimmer!” he called out to his proxxi, who materialized pacing 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 genders 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. “A new log entry on Dr. Killiam? It’s already done, sir.”

“Thank you, Shimmer,” replied Dr. Granger, smiling at his proxxi. “Now please, I need to speak with this young gentleman privately.”

“Yes, Dr. Granger.” Shimmer faded away.

Dr. Granger looked sideways at me while clasping his hands behind his back as we continued to walk.

“Do you really think it’s possible?” he asked, returning to our discussion. “I mean, with the technology we have now?”

“I do. The project has been going on for some time, as you well know, 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’ll make sure I’m the first?”

As good as medical technology was, there was always the risk of the unexpected, of some accident sending you, suddenly and irretrievably, into the forever of oblivion. Dr. Granger wasn’t as concerned about his actual life, however, as much as he was about the immortality of his fame.

“Yes,” I replied simply. “It will take some time, though certainly not before the commercial launch of pssi.”

“Good, good,” he said, apparently satisfied. He smiled at the mindless faces of a group of 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 serious and concerned. “I’m sure a good-looking young man in your position must have girls throwing themselves at your feet. But you should find someone special.”

Saying nothing, I nodded and we continued on our walk down to his offices.

I’d already found someone special, but I wasn’t going to share that with him.

For a long time, I’d had my eye on Susie. She was a special 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—and become a celebrity—as a teen when 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 world’s pain; a bloated stomach when the Weather Wars flared up 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 Gandhi of the multiverse, imploring people to change their ways. 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 turn, made her an object 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, however, 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 die-hard following of hippie flitterati that protected her from the harsh mockery of the world she reflected, forming an almost impenetrable sphere of free-floating flower children that inhabited the metaworlds around her, like petals on a suffering daisy.

I’d been trying to reach Susie for some time, but it was difficult to get through her protective entourage. I needed a way in. My security systems had recently flagged some unusual and illegal splintering activity from an old friend.

It seemed I had found a way.

“You’re in tight with Susie,” I explained at a lunch with Willy McIntyre.

The light dawned in Willy’s face, realizing why I’d asked to meet with him.

I’d kept the reason for our meeting secret, and upon arrival, I’d enclosed us in an extremely tight security blanket.

His needs began to spin the cranks behind his eyes.

“If you help me,” I suggested, “maybe I could help you.”

“Sure,” he replied slowly, trying to hide his greed. “And what do you think you might help me with?”

“I could help you,” I answered, “by getting access to higher-order splintering.”

“Oh yeah? So what, you could double my account settings or something?”

“Much, much more than that,” I laughed. “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. “Nobody else knows what we’re talking about, right?”

“Absolutely, Willy. I’m the security expert, remember?”

10 Identity: Patricia Killiam

I 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 state of being. That 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.” He flashed 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, refusing to rise to the bait.

We studied each other.

“So, Patricia, what exactly would you like me to find out for you?” he asked, his voice equal parts soothing and menacing.

“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. “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 across from me on a black leather couch, still dressed in blue silk pajamas, wrapped in a velvet house coat, and wearing gray fur slippers, one of which dangled casually off a foot as he crossed his legs. I 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-human, half-machine patchwork people into societies around the world.

Of course, this one was no soldier; she had done it to herself. Sintil8 was the leader of a grotesque cult that encouraged its closest followers to consume their own bodies, a literal 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.

The woman serving us was so devoted to this ideal that she had consumed her own eyes, I realized with horror as she turned to cast my way what she must have thought of as a smile. 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,” Sintil8 chided, watching my expression as she walked away, “so quick to judge. And you, you’re not creating any monsters, are you?”

I said nothing.

“No?” he replied, letting this hang in the air as he smiled at me, not bothering to conceal how much he was enjoying this. “And yet, here you are, coming to me for help. What a surprising turn of events this is.”

Sintil8 was perhaps the most powerful and persistent opponent 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’d been lobbying hard to have the brain’s pleasure pathways removed from our pssi protocols, and we’d often been at each other’s throats in closed-room government regulatory meetings around the world. Kesselring had finally 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, Moscow, and other cities around the world.

It wasn’t far from the truth.

Despite my suspicions and less than savory opinion of him, using an enemy-of-my-enemy sort of logic, I’d come to Sintil8 to try and help me root out what Kesselring was hiding. Really, it was more of a fallback plan in case I needed an ace up my sleeve, and also to see if I could find out what he was up to. The latest string of disappearances was 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 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.

“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 was afraid to find out what, or rather who, they would be eating tonight.

We sat and stared at each other. Despite expending considerable resources in Atopia’s tussles with Sintil8, we still didn’t have the full picture of the man. He was probably one of the few people alive older than me, and as far as we could tell, he’d risen up through the ranks of the Russian mafia in the late twentieth century after starting his career in Stalin’s security apparatus.

Some reports hinted that he’d been a tank commander in the Red Army’s defeat of the Nazis outside Leningrad, the battles in which he’d probably lost the first bits of his own body. We suspected he was 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. An identical glass dutifully materialized in my own hands. “Budem zdorovy,” he intoned.

“Stay healthy indeed,” I replied, raising my glass with his, drinking to seal our bargain.

11 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

In the days and weeks after the announcement of the Infinixx launch date, Nancy’s profile in the Atopian community had increased 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.

“Where did the idea for your distributed consciousness technology come from?” asked a reporter in one event I was canvassing.

The question wasn’t directed at me. Nancy smiled beside me and began explaining 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 up and demonstrate a special trick or skill. Each child had risen in turn to show off something they could do. One inflated into a balloon, floating up to bounce around on the ceiling. Nancy showed off by holding a dozen conversations at once, with everyone around the classroom. Bob, of course, took us surfing.

Then came my turn.

“Come on, Jimmy,” our teacher had 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 a shirt with a little red clip-on tie.

More giggles. Mother 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, gathering my courage, and set up my trick.

“Everyone, detach and snap into Jimmy. Now hurry up!” she clapped.

There were a few groans. The rest of the kids had little hope of anything fun coming from quiet, awkward Jimmy Scadden. Still, I sensed them all clicking obediently into my conscious perimeter.

Unlocking my pssi-channels, I felt them crowding inside me, feeling what I felt, seeing what I saw. The sensation was ticklish as they squirmed impatiently, 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 up to then 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.

“Isn’t that nice?” said Ms. Parnassus, noticing me smiling. “Now show them what you showed me.”

Taking a deep breath, I 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 past the granular limit of pssi-tech. I stopped for a moment, and then, holding my breath, pushed the limit further.

I squeezed our group of consciousness down to the molecular level, finally stopping inside one of my living cell nuclei to watch a newly hatched protein unfold. The kids became silent, engrossed. Then I shot back outward and upward through my veins and 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. Moving the body around, each person controlled only their part, with the net effect being much like a drunken sailor trying to get home.

It 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, weaving and darting in a silent dance, chased invisible insects in a sapphire sky.

I motioned to the waiter for another glass of Chardonnay.

Adriana was one of my test study participants who 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 that tied people’s nervous systems together. It was like two or more people continuously ghosting each other, but 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 partners 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 took a deep breath.

We were moving too quickly.

Whereas compositing in general was a positive evolutionary step forward, an opposite 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 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 new 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.

Adriana and two of her girlfriends today were collectively inhabiting Adriana’s body, and it still threw off my pssi because it posited her personal details in my display space. We have to fix that. 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, magically finding ways to fill the cracks that pssi had fissured open in Atopian culture.

“So I heard you’re going to have children? 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 biosynthetic 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.”

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.

As new ecosystems emerged, life constantly evolved to fill them, 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 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-billion years ago, when the first elemental life had burst forth in diversity to cover the earth. Except instead of 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, hours.

“Our plan is to 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’d set in motion, but to a destination I could scarcely imagine anymore.

Sitting in my office, I was going over some research notes regarding Hurricane Ignacia. It was mind numbing. 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 the kids 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, a murmuration, 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 what exactly I couldn’t see.

It was fairly simple to catalog 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 Dr. Turing had observed in our conversations a century before, change the body and you change the mind.

Where before this had been 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 mind.

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 mind conceived of abstract thoughts, even the way it constructed thoughts themselves.

Almost as soon as they could communicate with us, pssi-kids began to use a lexicon of abstract expressions that we couldn’t properly understand, such as splintered-out, tubered, slivering, cloudy, and many more that developed as they did. But where we’d introduced pssi 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 alien creatures before me.

The rag doll collective stopped and looked straight at the point from where I was observing it. 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.

Quickly, I clicked out and into the safe space of my office.

I shivered.

13 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

“Regarding our project, there is something I need you to do for me in return,” I said to Dr. Granger.

We were back on another walk through the hydroponic 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 nearby. He stopped to inspect one large, ripe tomato hanging in from its vines.

“And I’ll need to get root access to Shimmer,” I added, “and your own pssi system.”

He let go of the tomato and turned to look at me. I could see the doubt turning behind his eyes, but then again, to become immortal, to secure his fame forever.…

“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, just between you and me.”

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 merely stared at him.

Patricia had never liked Granger, and I didn’t want to create any more problems by making it public that I was working with him. As the lead on conscious perimeter security, I had a growing passion in the next evolving step of the pssi program: consciousness transference. We were still a ways off, but we were 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 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. They’ll 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.

Granger 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,” he added, watching me, fishing.

I flashed with irritation, but before I could say anything, he beat me to the punch.

“Sorry. I don’t mean to test you—old habits die hard,” he laughed. “I very much appreciate working with you. 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 rolled his eyes, obviously no fan of the Killiam clan.

“Good.”

He nodded, returning his attention to the tomato plant. “Anything you say, Jimmy.”

14 Identity: Patricia Killiam

“TEN!.. NINE!.. EIGHT!..”

Looking out at the packed crowd in the ballroom, I felt the excitement of the crowd rising. In the background, my splinter network scanned the billion-plus people who’d tuned in to witness the launch of Infinixx.

“Aunt Patty,” said Nancy, turning to look toward me with tears in her eyes, “I’ve decided that I’d like you to throw the switch. Everything here is all because of you!”

The crowd continued to roar the countdown. “SEVEN!… SIX!… ”

It was her moment to shine, not mine.

“I’d love to, sweetheart.” But my physical self was back helping Vince on a wild-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. “But I had a last minute thing come up, and I’m not here kinetically. You go ahead, dear!”

I kept my voice light, but my stomach flipped, realizing something was horribly wrong before I even understood what it was. Switching my pssi into identity mode revealed a completely empty ballroom. Not a soul was here physically, not even Nancy. A disaster was about to unfold, and I shot out a mass of splinters to try and avert it.

“FIVE!… FOUR!… ”

“Jimmy, how about you then?” asked Nancy, still unaware. I was desperately trying to come up with a solution before telling her. “Go ahead. I really wanted it to be one of you two.”

She released the switch and encouraged Jimmy to take it.

I couldn’t find a way to reroute the power so I could bypass the switch. I tried unlocking the exterior security perimeter to let someone in, but Nancy and Jimmy had the security keyed into them. I pinged Jimmy for access.

At the same time, Marie queried the proxxi of all the senior executives up on the stage with us. Every one of them also had last-minute reasons for not coming physically. None had thought it would make a difference.

Exactly what I’d thought as well.

“THREE!… TWO!… ”

“I’m sorry, Nance, I had something, too. I’m only dialed-in,” replied Jimmy. “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. Her words now echoed in my mind, “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’s going on?

By now, Jimmy had unlocked the exterior security perimeter, and I could see a psombie guard racing toward the stage.

“Forget it,” I heard echo in a distant splinter. It was Nancy speaking, her primary subjective still standing alone on the stage, utterly destroyed.

Was I a woman who dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamt she was a woman?

The butterfly in me yearned to escape.

My doctors were telling me the immunosuppressant nanobots in my bloodstream were attacking my own red blood cells after the latest round of genetic modification therapy, so I was now anemic, or something to that effect.

Running away from one tiger and leaping toward another.

In another splinter, right at the same time as the Infinixx launch was imploding, I’d been holding a different press conference. The disaster sparked an immediate and destructive media tsunami. Smiles started spreading across the reporters’ faces, their incoming messages pinging, and they looked up at me on the stage.

“In short,” I listened to myself saying, “for things to remain the way they are, things must change.”

A few sniggers followed that comment, obviously related to the Infinixx mess and not something clever I’d said.

“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.”

Staring at the floor, I declined to comment. 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 Cognix stock.

“The main timeline is holding steady,” I added after a pause. “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.”

“That I sabotaged my own niece’s project?”

“You don’t think this looks suspicious? Not showing up in person at the last minute, everyone showing up in their virtual selves in the last seconds, even Nancy?”

He glared 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 to him? Perhaps this was just a coincidence.”

“A coincidence?” snorted Kesselring. “You expect me to believe that?”

Again I stayed silent.

“It must be the Terra Novans,” he said finally, 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 busy arguing with Hal—another battle of the happiness brigade—about new test results from the clinical trials on addiction.

“People compensate for a complex world 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.”

It was just at that point that the Infinixx mess climaxed.

“Can we resolve the issue of making the new tests public another time?”

He shook his head. “Always an excuse with you, isn’t there Pat?”

“It’s just—”

He cut me off. “I know, the Infinixx disaster. The whole world knows, my dear.”

My patience was already thin. “Doesn’t it bother you that we’re breeding a generation of lazy, self-absorbed sexual deviants with the pssi-kids? Is this the pursuit of happiness?”

“Deviants?” laughed Hal. “Lazy? Come now, Patricia, listen to yourself—and you’re the head of the pssi-kid program!”

I stopped for a moment and considered this.

“I think you’re just too old,” he added with a nasty twinkle in his eye. “These kids do some amazing things, you know that.”

Maybe he was right, but then I knew a few things he didn’t.

“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 that was what some of you had in mind, but I find it disgusting.”

“Sexual tourism is a gross exaggeration.”

I said nothing.

“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’s a critical part of our therapy program for pedophiles.”

“Still.… ”

“Your prejudice is blinding you,” he continued, throwing my emotions back in my face. “This is just the way they were made. The pedophiles can’t help it. It wasn’t that long 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, to find a therapeutic path forward? Technology is leading a cultural advance, bringing this long-maligned minority back into the fold.”

“It’s disgusting. It is absolutely disgusting.”

My mind was past the brink of exhaustion. This is the path to happiness?

Hurricane Ignacia was definitely crossing over from the Caribbean and into the Eastern Pacific, to be renamed Olivia. Hurricane Newton, which was spinning out into the Pacific as we backed away from it toward the coast, had stopped and even reversed its trajectory.

My projections soon had the Fujiwhara effect taking hold, connecting the two storm systems with their center-pivot at just the wrong point, preventing Atopia from escaping into the open ocean between them.

As my splinters simultaneously 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 toward us—I felt the nauseating sensation of vertigo.

My visual fields distorted, ballooning outward, and the hurricanes and reporters shredded into each other. Kesselring’s shocked face watched me blink out of his reality.

Abruptly, I 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.

Marie shook her head. “I’m afraid the news isn’t good.”

The rope tightened around my waist, choking off my lifeblood. I could feel the tigers charging across the sky toward me, their silent roars ringing in my deaf ears. Fascinated, I watched as nanobots busily 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 Scadden

“I heard that Kesselring put you in charge of Infinixx?”

“Only temporarily,” I noted. “Someone has to hold down the fort.”

Commander Strong winced. “How is Patricia doing?”

After the Infinixx mess, Patricia had suffered some kind of stroke. Not really a stroke—there was no physical brain damage—more of an overload of her pssi system. She was recovering under observation and isolated for the moment.

“She’ll be fine,” I replied 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.

“There is something very unnatural going on here,” explained our mandroid guest to the assembled Command team. She reached down with one slender metallic arm to adjust the jumpsuit hugging her metallic legs. “These storms are definitely being driven artificially.”

It was early Saturday morning, and we were in Command to review scenarios around the growing threat of the hurricanes that were pinning Atopia against the western coast of America.

“Do you think the Terra Novans are involved?” asked Commander Strong.

He smelled of alcohol. Things were going badly with his wife again.

“We’re not sure,” the mandroid responded.

“Do you know where this is coming from?” Strong demanded impatiently, rubbing the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes.

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

“Jimmy, do you think you could look into this further?” The commander asked, looking away from the mandroid. “I need to go see Cindy.”

“No problem.” He was about to flit off when I remembered something. “Oh, wait. I have that date tonight, remember?”

Rick exhaled. “Susie, right? So that’s going well then?”

I shrugged. He looked like he had a terrible headache.

“I can cancel if you want.”

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

With that, he flitted off, and I returned my focus to the storms and our mandroid guest. More than one thing wasn’t right here.

Tonight was my third date with Susie, and for this one, I’d received an invitation to meet in her own private world—a sensual, mystical place where the sun was eternally setting. She wanted to go for a walk outside her enclave, to chat, and I found myself strolling 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 stepped through a patch of yellow orchids as tenderly as if they had been children at play. The woody atmosphere was perfectly synthetically warm under an indistinct vanilla sky.

Her long, flaxen hair spilled down her back, held in place by a garland of white flowers above a flowing translucent gown. The breeze swept waves of glittering cherry blossoms and silvery oak leaves around us like a snowstorm, and fireflies sparkled in our wake as we walked through the perpetually gathering dusk.

“How’s Patricia?” she asked. It was common knowledge we were close.

“She’ll be fine. The doctors say she’ll be back tomorrow or the next day.”

“Good.” She smiled warmly, but it soon vanished in a cloud of worry. “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, a ray of sunshine.

“Don’t worry about the storms,” I reassured her. “I wouldn’t advise going topside when they get here, but we’ll be fine.”

“Double good,” she laughed, then flinched, her side going into spasm.

It was an event out in the world, some disaster that had triggered her nervous system. She had such an exquisitely tuned neural pain network—it was what attracted me to her.

I waited, and in a few moments the spasm subsided.

“It’s nothing, I have this—”

“I know,” I interrupted. “No need to explain.”

I reached down to hold her hand and she smiled.

“So, Mr. Jimmy Scadden, my friend Willy speaks very highly of you.”

I was wearing my ADF Whites and walking stiffly, a stark contrast to her flower-child projection. She spun in front of me, reaching up to snatch a blossom out of the air, and then stopped to curtsy, offering me the blossom.

“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.

“I looked you up, Mr. Jimmy.” She laughed, but then stopped and looked at me seriously. “That incident with the bugs, that was a bit odd, don’t you think?”

I winced. “I was just a kid, finding a way to deal with my pain,” I tried to explain. “You wouldn’t understand. How could you? You grew up with such love.”

She considered me for a moment. “What do you mean, Jimmy?”

I said nothing and sat down on a tree stump.

“Jimmy?” she asked again, more softly this time.

I cued my facial projection to reflect soulful pain. “My friends call me James.”

She nodded. “Okay then, what is it, James?”

“I’ve never shared this with anyone, and I don’t know why I feel like I can share it with you. Can we make this private?”

“Of course.”

I pulled a glittering golden security blanket around us and took a deep breath.

“My mother, she… ,” I said unsteadily, but stopped as I let a tear glisten in my eye.

Susie sat beside me. She put her hand on mine and squeezed it, waiting.

I looked into her eyes. “It would be easier if I showed you.”

She nodded and released her subjective control to me.

In an instant, 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 a 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!” Mother spat in my tiny face, the veins in her forehead swelling.

She fumbled with the 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 agony.

“Shut up, you little bastard. Nobody can hear you in here. Just shut up!” she yelled. I screamed, and screamed, my little face contorted purple in agony.

Susie wrapped her arms around me, horrified, tears welling up in her eyes. “Turn it off, James, please!”

And then, just as quickly, we were back in the forest with the cherry blossoms settling around us, sitting on the tree stump amid the deep grass and swaying flowers.

Susie held me tightly and cried. “I’m so sorry, James. I’ll do anything to help.”

I sat impassively, leaning to kiss the top of her head.

“It wasn’t just my mother,” I said after a moment, letting my voice crack a little.

“What do you mean?”

I looked away.

“Show me.”

Nodding, I grabbed her primary subjective and took us back into another silently screaming night in my small sweaty body, the prison of my childhood world. My dad and I had just returned from fishing with the dolphins, and Mother was off in another one of her never-ending soapstim fantasies. 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?” he asked, holding me tightly and 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, right, Jimmy?” he asked pleadingly. “Daddy gets lonely sometimes, too.”

I nodded, trembling, feeling his hands on me, his hands on places that felt wrong. I loved my dad, and I could sense he needed something from me. He’d been nice with me that day, bringing some joy into my dark and constricted little life.

So I let him touch me while I disappeared down my rabbit hole 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. It’s a secret. If you can do that, I’ll make sure to take you out to play with Samantha, okay?”

And so I hid inside and waited for the bright days of rocketing through the foam and spray.

I snapped us back into real-space where Susie was crying again. I was, too.

She looked into my eyes. “We can tell people, we can punish them. You poor soul.… ”

“That won’t change anything.”

She kissed me between her tears.

“But you can help me.”

“How, James? I’ll do anything to help.”

“I just need you to do something for me.”

16 Identity: Patricia Killiam

It took two full days for me to recover, and in that time a world already spinning out of control had taken a steep descent into chaos.

We were hardening Atopia for a now-inevitable collision with the storms and discussing the possibility of a full-scale evacuation. The rate of unexplained disappearances was spiking, 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 actually been terminating the proxxids. It wasn’t hard to guess what had happened. Reality suicide was a new phenomenon, tied deeply into the way pssi interacted with our unconscious minds.

“I’m so sorry, Rick. Has there been any change?”

I’d requested this emergency meeting with Rick because my Command communication network had been shut off. No one on the Council 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. “We cracked the security blankets covering the worlds she was in before this happened, but we don’t know the full story yet.”

Rick wiped his face with the back of one hand, staring 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. Then his mood shifted. “This is your fault. You recommended using the proxxids.” He looked at me with dark eyes. “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”

I recoiled. This was a combat soldier after all.

“I don’t think laying blame is constructive at this point.” I didn’t exactly recommend the proxxids.

“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—it’s disgusting. You disgust me.” His breathing was ragged. “You have no idea what you’re doing to people, do you?

“Rick, I’m sorry.… ”

“Sorry isn’t good enough. The time for experimentation and best efforts is over.” He stood up.

“What does that mean?”

“Getting away from these storms. We’re taking control from here on. This is now a military matter.” He shook his head, avoiding my eyes, and flitted away without another word, disappearing from my office and back to Command. He didn’t even leave a polite splinter behind.

I was stunned.

The storms continued to defy phuturecasting, and we were running out of room to back away from them. It was obvious something was directing their development, but despite all our efforts—swarming the sea with smarticles, launching countless surveillance drones, and everything and anything else we could think to throw at the problem—we couldn’t even begin to stop the storms or understand what exactly was happening.

Usually, two storm systems of this magnitude in one oceanic basin tended to dissipate, one into the other, but these two were actually 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, declaring martial law, and putting all civil power in the hands of ADF Command.

“Marie, could you send me the latest reports?”

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.

“We’ve had something of a breakthrough,” she responded. “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 sets before continuing. “Someone seeded the ocean surface with iron dust to grow bioengineered plankton, and they’re now directing huge swarms of the tiny creatures, sucking energy from one part of the ocean and into another.”

“Can we stop it? Can we find out who’s doing it?”

She shook her head. “We can see what’s happening, but nothing more than that so far.”

“Was Sintil8 able to find anything?”

“He was some help,” she replied with a nod. “What we’re looking at could be a new addition to the Weather Wars arsenal.”

Directed cyclone warfare would add a whole new chapter to the ongoing book of human conflict, but, of course, weather had always been a decisive factor in war.

Five hundred years before, the British victory over the Spanish Armada had less to do with the genius of Sir Francis Drake and more to do with a week of wind that pinned the Armada against the French side of the English Channel. The wind had held the Spanish in place, giving the British the opportunity 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 a Habsburg land invasion by forces at that moment poised to cross over from the Netherlands. The direction of wind, for a few short days, dictated the outcome of the next five hundred years of global geopolitics, even the rise of America as a superpower. What we faced now was far more than simply a breeze blowing 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 detail, you’re better off speaking with Jimmy.”

That was going to be difficult, given the state Rick was in.

“Or perhaps Bob?” I suggested, considering our possibilities for fresh insight. My Command communications were cut off, but there were a lot of other people who might be able to provide some additional input. “He has a lot of experience directing little creatures like you’re describing. Why don’t you talk with him?”

Marie nodded, but then paused.

“What?”

“It’s strange,” she replied. “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 remained unexplained, too many loose ends were accumulating, and Rick was right—we didn’t know what we were doing. I was going to have to stop this freight train, even if it meant risking everything.

“I’m going to try talking with Jimmy.”

I sent him an emergency ping on a personal channel, outside of the Command network. To my surprise, Jimmy accepted immediately, and my office faded away as my primary subjective was channeled into a private deprivation space surrounded by a heavy security blanket. His communication network was open to me, but Jimmy’s primary presence wasn’t there.

“Jimmy,” I called nervously into the void, “what can you tell me?”

17 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

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 said. “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?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” The list of possible suspects was thin.

She took a deep breath. “You really think it’s the Terra Novans? 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 product a chance in the market. The commercial stakes were huge.

“We need proof. 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,” I replied, a little exasperated.

“And keep an eye on Rick—he’s shut me out.”

This was beginning to feel like nagging. “I will, Patricia, I promise.”

“I love you, Jimmy. You take care, okay?”

“I will,” was all I said. 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, trying to figure out how someone had managed to target Atopia like this without us getting advance notice.

Patricia was right in one thing—we had to keep an eye on Rick. Despite declaring himself in charge, he wasn’t much use anymore. I knew Rick’s wife had been depressed. We’d all been 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 was a hopeless soapstim junkie in addition to being a drunk. It was bad enough to be disinterested enough in your own life to patch into someone else’s, but Mother didn’t even go that far. Her favorite pastime had been patching 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. It was like a gameworld for her, but instead of facing down some challenge, she just sensed it passively while the soapstim told her that “her” ex-husband wasn’t dead, but had been in a coma for twenty years and was now in love with her stepsister’s boyfriend, or some other nonsense.

Living in passive fantasy worlds made for a painful reinstatement when she returned to her real life. Being out for so long all the time, her brain’s wetware lost much of its neural connectivity with her physical self, so when she came back, 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 only fueled her constant frustration.

“You little worm!” she would scream at me as she settled back into her body after a long session, already a few drinks into calming her nerves. Mother wasn’t very technical, but she was an expert in using security blankets to screen her sessions with me from the outside world.

“It’s all your fault!” she would slur. “That dirty bastard.”

As a parent, she had full access to my pssi, and I had no way of blocking her out until I was granted full control of it myself. In her worst moods, she would amp up my pain receptors and reach into my nervous system virtually to squeeze, pinch, and pull on it. It left no physical marks, but it was excruciatingly painful, and I’d squeal and scream in the private Misbehave world she’d created for this special form of punishment. Even as a toddler, I began to learn ways to hide and crawl into the cracks of the pssi system, deep into the darkest corners, away from anyone else. I slowly found 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.

Down, down I would dive, into the deepest recesses of my body, trying to hide my consciousness in the submolecular gaps between my stinging, screaming neurons while she tortured me, 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 had noticed I was falling behind the other children, but they just thought I was slower. In their well-intentioned naïveté, they figured I needed more parental attention.

“Gretchen,” explained Ms. Parnassus during the initial parent-teacher interview that occurred at the end of my first year at the academy, “I think you need to restrict his access to the gameworlds. He’s distracted, like he wants to be somewhere else all the time.”

“I do try,” admitted Mother truthfully. She did do her best to cut me off from everyone.

“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 reassuringly at us both.

“Isn’t that right, Jimmy?” my 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. 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 has a hard time socializing.”

I never got on well with the other kids in the Schoolyard, the education-portal balanced halfway between the real and synthetic worlds where young pssi-kids played. Extremely shy, I mostly played by myself, though 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 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,” Mother agreed, nodding, “and that he does.”

“His mind is always somewhere else,” Ms. Parnassus continued. “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 he do when you play?”

“Oh, you and your daddy play, don’t you, Jimmy?” laughed my mother, 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.” Mother crinkled her nose at me, showing her teeth.

“Like hide-and-seek?”

“Something like that.”

In her lies, my mother was being honest. 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 the most contradictory: both incontrovertible and yet intangible. Time’s arrow was just a slide down entropy hill as the universe tended toward 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, too.

“I’m sorry, Patricia,” said my doctor. We were disembodied, floating in black space between millions of phosphorescent dots that raced to and fro, spreading out through the root systems of my basal ganglia.

The doctor and I were examining my brain.

“There’s nothing more we can do?”

“Not with the technology we have. I’m afraid things have taken a turn for the worse,” he explained. “There are some experimental treatments, but I can’t promise anything.”

Watching the dancing dots of light, I tried 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.

“Please do what you can, doctor.” An illusion perhaps, but time still stubbornly seemed to end for those of us witnessing it in action. “I just need a little more time.”

“Don’t we all,” the doctor replied, watching the neon pulses of my nervous system race around us. “Don’t we all.”

Floating up at the edge of space, the two converging hurricanes swirled ominously in three dimensions below us. We had almost all of Command and Security watching the storms as we ran the simulations. They were building in intensity past Category 4, and like two enormous threshing wheels, they threatened to pin and crush Atopia against the coastline.

The way they were gaining strength, it was obvious we were going to end up taking some damage—the only question now was, how much? All the tourists had already been shipped off via the passenger cannon, but it would be impossible to get everyone off Atopia if the worst happened.

Strangely, none of the Atopians wanted to leave.

“We need to order an evacuation of the outer habitats,” I observed.

Everyone looked at me. Cut off from the Command, perhaps, but I was still a member of the Cognix Board of Directors. I had a right to be there.

“Moving at this speed, the kelp forests are already shearing 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 turning to America for help if we ran out of food for our million-plus inhabitants wasn’t an option.

The last time California had sustained a direct hit was over a hundred years ago, when the hurricane of 1939 had slammed into Los Angeles. This time, it would be two at once, and at a far greater magnitude. On top of this, tropical storm John, thought to be dead weeks ago, had somehow regained strength and was reversing direction toward us.

“Whoever’s responsible is going to pay for this act of war,” Kesselring growled, 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 sucking up the sun’s energy and swimming about to pump up and guide these storm systems. Who else could pull this off?”

“What’s more important right now is surviving,” said Jimmy, redirecting Kesselring’s focus. “We have detection systems to stop this from happening again, but right now we need to focus.”

As Jimmy spoke, Kesselring relaxed. “What’s the worst-case scenario?”

I was about to speak up, but Jimmy waved me off.

“Worst case is we’ll be run aground on the continental shelf, just south of Los Angeles. Major damage to the outer habitats, but the main structure is more than strong enough to withstand the storms.”

I shook my head. “The worst scenario is that these progress past Category 5 and crush us. No matter what, our data systems will go offline. The fusion core should remain stable, though, and I doubt we’d sink.”

“Should remain stable? Doubt we’ll sink?” Kesselring fumed. “So best case, we end up beached in American territorial waters?”

“Should we plan on delaying the release?” I asked carefully.

“No,” replied Jimmy, raising some eyebrows.

My question had been addressed to Kesselring.

“The world still sees us as in control,” Jimmy continued. “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, 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 delay!”

“Let’s not go down that path yet,” Jimmy said calmly. “Give me six hours to assemble a special team. I can figure a path through this.”

“My vote is with Jim,” Granger chimed in, looking toward Kesselring.

Jimmy made eye contact with each of the assembled Council members one by one, earning a nod from each. The final nod he received was from Kesselring himself.

As the Security Council meeting broke up, I materialized back in my office under an extremely heavy security blanket. Marie was waiting for me.

“So it seems 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 rubbed my temples. “We need to slow things down.”

Our phutures had 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 had to act alone.

“Give Sintil8 our authentication key to initiate,” I instructed 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?” The time had come to lay all our cards on the table, for everyone’s benefit.

Marie nodded. If a proxxi could look nervous, she did now.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of this,” I assured her. “I need to talk with Jimmy.”

I pinged an urgent request for him to come down to my office in his first subjective and Marie disappeared. Leaning back in my chair, I tried to think of the right way to broach a new and troubling discovery that Marie had dug up.

A moment later, Jimmy appeared in one of my attending chairs, looking annoyed. This was a new Jimmy, all hard edges, and again I felt uncomfortable.

“I’ve got a lot on my plate right now,” he said. “What’s so important?”

I looked toward the ceiling, and then back at Jimmy, observing him carefully. “I’ve been trying to locate your parents, but I can’t find them anywhere out there.”

“I have no idea where they are. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t care less.”

“No idea?”

I’d taken a huge chance at the meeting, secretly installing invasive pssi-probes into the smarticle cloud during the session to find out if the people I worked with were being honest. As far as my probes could tell, Jimmy was telling the truth.

“The last I heard, they were back in Louisiana. Did you send some bots down there?”

“Yes. I’ve tried everything I can think of to locate them.”

Jimmy’s face darkened. “Just like you can’t find the dolphins, right, Patricia?”

Where did that come from?

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What dolphins?”

Years ago, there’d been an unresolved security incident that had proved the beginning of the end of civil relations with Terra Nova. One of the outcomes had been the revocation of the work permits for our uplifted dolphin friends. We’d had to send them all back to Terra Nova, but they’d all been happy and healthy. I’d even checked in on the beautiful creatures myself on a trip to Terra Nova a few years back.

Looking at Jimmy’s furious expression, I realized something was very wrong.

19 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

I held Patricia’s gaze firmly, feeling anger boil inside me.

I don’t have time for this.

“I don’t know where my parents are,” I replied with finality.

We hadn’t kept in touch after they’d left Atopia, or, more accurately, after they’d abandoned me. 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 now, but lately she’d started to annoy me as I discovered her various hypocrisies. Her loyalty to the cause, her own cause, had become as thin as any pssi illusion.

On the other hand, if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be where I was now.

I remembered 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 to rebuild my bond with Patricia even 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 saw an opportunity to bring us back into the fold when Atopia was being planned and had extended a generous offer to my parents to join the project.

It hadn’t exactly worked out as my family had hoped, or at least as my mother had hoped. She thought we were going for a drive down Entitlement Road. The cramped, three-room cell near the bottom of the Atopian seascraper complex, hundreds of feet below the waterline, didn’t live up to her expectations.

Patricia’s visit that day was both rare and uncomfortable.

“We’ve been following Jim,” she said, accepting a hot cup of coffee from my mother’s proxxi. “He’s showing some amazing talents.”

Mother grimaced. “You sure you have the right Jimmy? Little stinker here is only good at hiding from Mommy, aren’t you?”

Patricia watched my mother carefully, then smiled. “He is very good at hiding and evading. He manages to slip through some of our tightest security fences, like a little fish wriggling through our fingers.”

“Yes, a little fish!” my mother exclaimed, holding me close and trying to exude maternal warmth. I flinched like a hand-shy puppy.

“But there’s something else.”

“Nothing serious I hope.”

“At Jimmy’s last checkup, his nociceptive pathways were showing some very unusual activity. We’d like to add his data feed to the child-monitoring network. Would that be all right?”

“His what pathways?”

“His nociceptive pathways, the neural network of his pain receptors.”

“And what’s unusual?”

“It’s just unusual, like they’re in some kind of disarray. He doesn’t complain of any unusual pain does he?”

“Of course not, do you, Jimmy?” Her smile was menacing.

Wide-eyed, I shook my head.

“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,” Mother declared theatrically. “I’m happy to be here, but there are limits!”

Despite the histrionics, she had a valid point. Patricia herself had baked strict privacy controls and rules into the foundations of the laws and systems governing the pssi system. Individuals and families had an absolute right to their privacy, unless there was some good reason otherwise.

“Is there anything wrong with Jimmy?” my mother asked. “Is he healthy?”

Patricia sighed. “He’s perfectly healthy. His mind seems distracted, and there’s 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. She sat down on the couch next to us and put an arm around me, looking up at my mother. “Could I take a more active role in Jim’s development? As a teacher, if you see what I mean. I don’t want to intrude on your mothering, of course.”

Mother eyed her, weighing the situation. “That would be an honor, of course,” she replied after a moment. “Wouldn’t it, Jimmy?”

It was less a question than a statement.

I sat dumbly between the two of them, unable to say anything, cringing, sure that Patricia was about to become part and parcel of some new awfulness in my small life. Fearful of the horrors awaiting me, I dug in deeper and deeper, building my shell.

As they bid each other good-bye, I got up and slipped away to hide away from my mother, sliding into tiny worlds within tiny worlds for refuge. Mother quickly gave chase, however, eventually 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,” she said, her voice oozing venom. “Don’t think I don’t know where you go.”

Hate distorted her features here, her skin flaking red and crimson, and her hands turned into fearsome claws that she gripped and scratched me with. Pulling a tight security blanket around us, she squeezed me until I thought I would pop.

I squirmed and whimpered.

“Not a word to Aunt Patty, little worm, do you understand? If you say anything to anyone, I’ll tell them all about you and your daddy. Do you want that?”

Smiling at me, she laughed from a fanged and fearsome mouth.

“No, Mommy,” I squealed, “not a word, of course not.”

I began to cry.

“Such a little crybaby.” Mother waved her claws around at the purple canyon walls. “None of this is real.”

And then 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 turn your dad into a psombie?”

I shook my head. “Of course not, Daddy. I won’t tell anyone.”

Samson, who’d remained quiet, emerged from his hiding place under the thunderfall, and we sat down together, holding hands. Dad left us there without saying another word.

My fascination with pain began very early. Sometimes, we won the topside lottery for passes to go above. I vividly remembered those days, those rare moments when we could enjoy the air above-decks. 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 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 spasms of agony as I crushed their legless little bodies.

Feeling their agony 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 is it?” he replied as his reality merged with mine.

I watched Sid working, 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 hyper-control spaces around him.

“If you play with your phantoms too much, you’ll grow hair on them,” 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 watched them fiddle around some more.

“So what has your hair on fire?” Sid finally asked.

“I need your help to infiltrate the Cognix networks.”

That stopped them in their tracks. Sid looked at me and cracked a smile, all his phantoms dropping to the ground.

“Let’s get the band back together,” I continued.

“Jimmy, too?” Sid asked. Vicious was vigorously shaking his head behind him.

“I think we’ll let Jimmy sit this one out.” Jimmy had bigger fish to fry, and something about him made me very uneasy. “But I’m going to ping him and tell him we’re doing our own storm research. That way we won’t raise any alarms if we scan the perimeter.” I thought about this for a second. “And I want him to know what we’re doing.”

“Sure,” said Vicious, “just don’t tell him too much.”

That wasn’t a problem. I didn’t know anything.

“I think we should get Vince in on this, too,” added Sid.

Nodding, I pinged Jimmy, shifting my primary subjective into a tight and secure channel that he opened up to me. My perspective shifted into a small, pristine white room, where I found myself seated at a white interview table. Jimmy had his hands clasped on the table and was staring directly into my eyes.

“Did you find Wally yet?” He cracked the faintest of smiles. “What’s going on? No surfing today?”

21 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

“No,” replied Bob, “even I couldn’t handle what’s going on out there right now.”

The storms had converged. Winds were tearing at the forests while an angry ocean pounded the beaches mercilessly. Surface access would be shut off soon as we finished stowing everything and everyone below decks.

Incredibly, the storms were getting worse. As they neared the coast, and each other, they defied all physics and gained in strength, progressing past Category 5 into something terrifyingly unknown.

We’d already entered American territorial waters, and their air force and navy was scrambling to surround us, battling their own way through the storms. Atopia and the US were close allies, but the prospect of having a wholly independent country slide across the map and run aground in California had raised some hackles, even if they understood we had no choice. The fact that Atopia contained a fully energized fusion core raised the diplomatic tension bar just that much higher.

Of course, the anticipation of two giant hurricanes simultaneously slamming into one of America’s most populated coasts had them already preoccupied. 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 next.

Despite it all, I had a plan for our escape and had been 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.

“I think I can help find out who’s doing this.”

“Really?” I raised my eyebrows. “And just how do you propose to do that?”

“I know how busy you are, so I won’t waste time on details.” Bob looked down at his feet, “From all the time we spent together, you know I have special abilities. Just trust me and open up some ports for me to scan the multiverse.”

I looked at Bob. Memories from our long-past childhood friendship flashed to mind. There was nothing to lose. “Go ahead, but feed us back anything you find.”

In any case, I’d keep a close eye on him. I dispatched several agents to watch his movements. “You got it, Jimmy.”

I closed the connection, returning to the escape simulation. A giant fireball filled my primary mind.

“Looks like it’ll work,” said Samson. We were scheduled to present our plan to the Council within the hour. “Why don’t you take a quick break, decompress before the meeting?”

That seemed like a good idea. Samson could handle it from here.

The fireball slipped away and I relaxed, letting my mind wander back to Bob’s offer. I was surprised he had any interest in helping out, but then again, the last time he’d helped me out had been the biggest catastrophe of my childhood.

As a kid, I’d secretly thought of Bob as my big brother, and in another twist of fate, that’s what he’d become when his family had adopted me at Patricia’s suggestion.

I always had a hard time fitting in. The easy way the other pssi-kids socialized and made friends always elluded me. Bob was the only one who’d tried to be there for me, doing his best to help me when the others ignored me.

My special pssi skills had brought me to the attention of the Solomon House Research Center at a young age. Academically, my life had taken off early, but my interpersonal skills had foundered hopelessly.

As I got older and gained in pssi power, I finally managed to escape from the oppression of my parents. I learned to slip past their every attempt to corner me, and as I blossomed into a teenager, I was finally beginning to taste my own freedom—but Nancy Killiam’s thirteenth birthday party was the disaster that defined the rest of my life.

My own thirteenth birthday had been just around the corner. I was worried that nobody would come to my party, most especially Cynthia, the girl I’d developed my first crush on.

While girls my age generally ignored me, one day Cynthia had magically taken an interest in me, 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.”

He squinted into the slanting sunshine and raised one hand to shade his eyes. We were walking across the beach toward the circus tent where Nancy’s party was being held. Waves broke softly in the background, and the air was filled with the smell of cotton candy and the sounds 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 looked 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 watched it all happening, awkwardly, hanging in the shadows. Sometimes, unknown to them, 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 emotions and sensations intrigued me.

“Everyone’s talking about you, you know,” Bob continued, scratching his head as we passed into the shadow of the tent and moved toward 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 standing off to the side under a glade of palms talking with some other adults, patting his prize affectionately.

More kids and parents were quickly arriving in ones and twos through portals near the entrance: here a furry, argumentative little minotaur being dragged by his mother, and there two screaming pink teddies trailing fluorescent 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 started up, 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. Bob took my arm and led me to a bench off to one side, under the shade of some saw palmettos.

“I know you don’t have many friends,” said Bob in a hushed voice, “and I know it can’t be easy for you.” He paused, searching for words. “First thing, quit with the splatter skins, those were funny when we were kids, but it’s a bit odd when—”

The head of one of the nearest adults shattered in a gory explosion of brains and skull fragments, as if hit by high-caliber rifle fire. The headless, bloody victim casually picked up a drink that floated by, pouring this into his gaping neck wound.

Bob glanced at this and looked back at me, shaking his head reproachfully.

I smiled awkwardly and switched it off.

“I know you’re the king of the rag doll, but nobody wants to play that anymore, get it? And stop asking people if they want to come inside your body with you, it’s starting to get weird.”

I nodded. I knew these things, but I couldn’t help it. I promised myself, right there, that 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.

“You’ll quit sneaking into people’s bodies when they’re not looking?” He waited for me to nod, and then added, “Why don’t you come 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, but this was the first time he, or anyone, had a heart-to-heart with me. It was both scary and exciting.

“So you’ll come surfing?” Bob smiled toothily.

I grinned back. “I will.”

He gave me a little punch in the arm—we were buddies now, I guess.

“So about Cynthia… she’s a girl, and girls want you to open up, be sensitive.” He laughed, looking into my puppy-dog face. “Okay, you already have the sensitive part down.”

“She said she wanted to see something fun,” I suggested helpfully.

He considered this. “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.”

“You really think so?”

I had some new neural interface models I was testing with Dr. Granger. He’d taken a keen interest in my abilities. I kept the models in my personal workspace and hadn’t let anyone in there before.

My private worlds were very private.

After learning ways of keeping my mother and father out of my special worlds, I didn’t really let anyone near me, emotionally or physically, and I spent most of my time alone with my proxxi Samson and our simulated friends.

“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 stopped me from looking around. Instead, I snuck a peek 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 catch my own sweetheart.”

Bob and Nancy had been intertwined almost since birth and had grown into the pssi-kid power couple. He walked back to the gathering crowd, leaving Cynthia and me alone.

“Hey, Cynthia,” said Bob as he walked past her, looking back to wink at me again. Cynthia smiled at him and turned her gaze toward me. I began to sweat profusely.

“Hi Jimmy, what’s up?” came Cynthia’s singsong voice. She skipped the last few steps up to me.

“Not… much, how… how are you?” I stammered, my mind going blank. After a few seconds of agonizing silence, I cried out, “Cynthia!”

“I’m great!” she replied brightly, smiling shyly. “How’s your research going?”

“Uh, yeah, good.… ” I thought 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?

“Mom!” 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 continued unfazed. “I’m going to flit out with Jimmy for a bit. He’s going 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. “Sure, go ahead, but I’m pinging you back the second Nancy gets here.”

Cynthia grabbed my hand and squealed, “Let’s go!”

Feeling her hand on mine sparked an electric shock that spread like wildfire through my body, settling hotly in my crotch. An erection immediately sprang to life. Cynthia sensed something going on from my embarrassed, flushed cheeks. She looked at me mischievously.

“Come on, Jimmy, let’s go!”

I pulled her back and away, and we dropped out from our bodies and into my private workspace. I’d never brought anyone there before and I felt naked.

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 as they went off to get some cotton candy. I smiled.

Cynthia and I were standing together in a white laboratory with gleaming floors and walls. We looked out at a view through smoky windows onto Atopia below, the same view as from the real Solomon House atop the farming complex.

Above stainless steel tables floated a variety of working models of mirror neuron interfaces that Dr. Granger and I were studying. He shared my interest in the physiological bases 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, replacing them with my current project. A model of the neuron appeared, looking like some kind of deep-sea monster, slowly rotating and floating in space in front of us.

I was keenly aware of Cynthia’s grip on my sweaty hand.

“Cool,” she said, watching my model light up, demonstrating a visually enhanced synaptic firing sequence. It was a working prototype.

“This isn’t just a model,” I explained. “This is actually happening inside me right now!”

After some testing, I’d installed them in my own developing wetware to see how they would respond. I started explaining how it worked, the way this enhanced mirror neuron provided a more reliable pathway to empathy. Empathy was something I was working on. I didn’t understand it, or rather, I understood it, but I just didn’t feel it. This model was my path forward.

As I explained the details, Cynthia wandered off, exploring the rest of my workspace. I wanted to show her something really special, and engrossed myself in my model, 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 opened a crack, she dropped into the world beyond. I’d never let anyone in here, so I’d been lax with the security protocols of the worlds it was connected to. I quickly abandoned my model and shot off into that world after her.

Instantly, I was standing beside her in semidarkness. Shafts of light bore down from blackness above, illuminating a writhing mass of insects and worms and other creatures that were 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 over and over again, her face contorting and distorting.

I came here to heal myself, to reconnect and re-stimulate some of the sensory pain I’d felt as a child. The process seemed to allow me to refocus my mind. I would pick out some particularly nasty memories and then work 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 so creepy,” she whispered, staring at the half-illuminated animals scraping and clawing futilely, never dying, never free, always trapped and in pain.

Looking at the hopeless little creatures, tears welled up in her eyes. “I can feel them,” she squeaked, her emotional networks starting to connect into this world’s. “This is horrible!”

Then, she was gone, flitting back to the birthday party.

Shocked, I stood still, the blood draining 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. At the time, I was too flustered to think clearly. I began quietly swearing at myself, but then I felt Samson grabbing me, pulling me back to reality.

I snapped back into my body with a sudden sense of vertigo. There was laughter, but I wasn’t back at the party. Somehow, I was in my private space again. The bugs were squirming on the walls as before, but now all the party guests were standing in the middle of it, 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, “Who’s my little stinker?”

Cynthia had stolen a copy of my world and projected it out here in public. I shrank in horror. All the kids were laughing, with Cynthia in the middle, pointing at me and screeching, “Who’s my stinky Jimmy!”

The adults were dumbfounded as to what was going on. It 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. The world turned a bloody red in front of my eyes, and demons shifted somewhere deep inside me.

Cynthia shrank back into the protective knot of her friends, all of them still laughing.

Gathering myself, I focused on her, channeling my voice through the pssionics and amplifying it beyond deafening.

“Why did you do that?!” I bellowed, my body growing into a grotesque, monstrous caricature.

A shockwave of pure hatred burst from me, almost knocking over the assembled guests. I felt as if I were about to physically explode when I caught myself and stopped. My anger imploded back into me, and the bottle corked back up.

The laughter stopped. In fact, it was deathly quiet, except for whimpers from some of the smaller children. Shocked faces turned toward me, watching me warily.

Someone started crying.

It was Cynthia.

At that moment, Nancy Killiam opened the portal door and announced, “I’m heeeere!”

I began to run, tears streaming down my face, shoving my way past Bob.

“Jimmy, hey Jimmy… ,” he tried to say as I ran past him, almost knocking down Nancy.

I ran and ran, trying to escape the blinding glare of their 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 and rooms and corridors, all the nooks and crannies of my childhood. The countless little creatures trapped there squealed in a high, keening agony as the blaze devoured them.

I watched impassively as the inferno consumed itself and flamed out.

Never again, I promised myself, never again.

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. On that day, I felt myself shatter and schism. But then I began to reform, to heal and grow, becoming an adult perhaps, but certainly 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, and powerful.

Impenetrable.

A few days later, I was studying for the Solomon House entrance exams at home.

My mother had just arisen from the dead—quite literally from being dead in one of her soap-stims—and was making her way clumsily toward me. She had a fresh drink in hand.

“Hey, stinker, I saw you embarrassed yourself 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.

I watched her blankly.

“They killed the dolphins you know,” she added, cruelly recalling a major security breach that had been the start of the end with Terra Nova. “Dirty, smelly fish, serves them right.”

Still I said nothing.

“I guess nobody is coming to your party, huh, stinky Jimmy?”

She was right. No one was coming to my upcoming birthday party, not anymore.

Mother was behind me, turning away to refill her drink. I slowly closed the interface to my notes and twisted around to face her, pulling down a dense security blanket that enveloped us in a glittering glacial blue.

She turned back to me. “What?” she barked. “Something to say, little worm?”

“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,” I said, slowly and evenly, “I will make sure that you regret your very existence.”

I smiled to make the point, opening up her pssi channels and filling her emotional inputs with pure hatred. She stared at me, about to say something, but then stopped herself. Terrified, she turned and shuffled away, and I released the security blanket with a flick of a phantom.

“Enjoy the soapstim, Mom!” I called gaily after her and returned to my notes.

I’m going to ace this test.

22 Identity: Patricia Killiam

The winds whipped and howled, churning the surface of the ocean into a frothing maelstrom. Gigantic waves surged and crested, propelled by the driving storms. The collision of two Category 5 hurricanes was a once in a mega-annum event, and Atopia was a seed about to be crushed between these two grinding wheels.

And then, bright pinpoints of light appeared, flashing through the sheets of dark, whipping rain. More pinpoints flared through the downpour and began illuminating the heaving seas. They multiplied, glittering and flashing into a sheet of superheated plasma that vaporized the rain, sending plumes of mist 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,” Jimmy explained as we watched the growing inferno begin to notch a tiny gap between the colliding storms. “Usually, they’re only used in 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—long enough to get the job done.”

The viewpoint on the projection swept away and upward, zooming backward 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. Then we’ll drive Atopia at maximum speed straight into it. The relative vacuum we create will literally suck us through as we burn a path forward with the slingshots.”

Jimmy smiled as the highlighted pinpoint of Atopia popped through to the other side of the storms in the simulation.

A singular, loud clapping punctuated the room. It was Kesselring, beaming at Jimmy, and everyone joined in.

“You’ve saved us!” Kesselring cried out. “Brilliant, simply brilliant!”

Relief that we would escape destruction in the storms almost overwhelmed me. I couldn’t help but join in the applause. It was ingenious, and it looked like it would work.

“It will be a bumpy ride through,” added Jimmy, “but not too bad.” He waved away our applause.

Kesselring leaned over to me confidentially. “Excellent work in bringing Jimmy onto the Command team.”

“Thanks,” I replied, nodding, but my clapping trailed off as I spied Rick standing off to the side, his expression vacant. “Looks like it will work,” I agreed, “but if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to something.”

I collapsed my primary subjective away from Command. Marie had already poured me a scotch, and I sat down behind my desk and put my feet up.

“Through the storms we go,” said Marie gravely.

I took the drink from her and stood. Unconsciously I began pacing back and forth.

Marie brought up the phutureworlds we’d 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. She was bringing them up to make a point.

“None of this makes any sense,” I complained, taking a sip from my drink.

My view of warfare was fairly 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 assessments.

I’d openly shared almost all information regarding Atopia to avert such a conflict—“almost” being the operative word. Perhaps by sharing what we were hiding, I could negotiate a peace with Terra Nova, but it was hard to shake the feeling that I was a traitor to my own cause.

Even then, I couldn’t imagine Terra Nova being so desperate that they would purposely direct powerful hurricanes onto the densely populated West Coast. Even a weakened America would be sure to retaliate, violently, after the damage these storms would cause. Terra Nova was ensuring its own destruction.

Once upon a time, when we’d just started Atopia, I’d helped lay the foundations for Terra Nova as well. I was perhaps the only person on Earth who could fix whatever was happening.

“Are you ready?” Marie asked. “This may be our only chance.”

With all the attention focused on the emergency at hand, a window of opportunity had opened for us to talk with the Terra Novans directly and in secret—a chance to strike a grand bargain. “Everything is set up?”

“They’re waiting,” Marie replied. Seconds ticked by.

“Very good. Initiate.”

We exploded upward out of my office, squeezing through a tight communication channel in the Atopian perimeter, and then dispersed, clipping and mixing our sensory packets around the globe. We rematerialized in a large, warmly lit room with wooden walls that arched in vertical panels to intertwine and spiral together to form the ceiling.

On closer inspection, the walls weren’t paneled, but were living tree trunks growing tightly together, and the place glowed with a light that seemed to emanate from nowhere. I was seated beside Marie at a large stone table.

Across from us sat the Elders of Terra Nova. In the middle of them was my old student, Mohesha. She nodded at me, smiling, and I smiled back. My distrust began to melt away.

The senior Terra Novan Elder, Tyrel, began speaking, “It is with gratitude that we accept you in our council today. We know this is a great personal risk.”

It hardly mattered anymore. My days are numbered was what I wanted to say. I just wanted things to be right, to do the right thing.

“I also am honored.” I nodded deeply. “I come here today to negotiate a peace.”

Without emotion, Tyrel watched me. “We have great respect for you, 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—”

“You’ve been used, Patricia—deceived. You’ve even deceived yourself!” interrupted Mohesha. Her dark features glowed in the soft lighting.

“I’m not here out of desperation,” I said firmly, ignoring her. “We’re beating this storm trap. 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.

“You must see the destruction coming,” I continued. “You 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 salvation,” 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.

“After Atopia escapes, I’m going to the media, to tell them what I’ve been hiding,” I explained. “I’ve already started it through Sintil8. It will slow the release and we can collaborate.”

“We know about Sintil8,” said Tyrel. “We know what you’ve been planning with him.”

“What do you want then? Is it money, a share of the profits?”

“How far you have fallen,” Tyrel stated sadly. Tears came to his eyes. “You can no longer stop what you have created.”

“Is all this just about stopping the pssi program so you can position yourselves better?” I asked incredulously.

“This is not about the pssi program.” Tyrel wiped away his tears. “By itself, we would have been happy to evolve together, in a symbiotic coexistence under your dominance, but you’ve unleashed an unspeakable evil into the world. We must destroy Atopia to stop it.”

“What are you talking about?” Then a light winked on. “So you admit to creating these storms?”

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’d unleashed? How had Terra Nova managed to jump so technologically far ahead to control weather like this?

And how do they think they can get away with it?

“Yes, we created these storms, as you say,” Tyrel admitted, “but I cannot say more, and even if I could, we don’t have the full picture. We believe the key to what is happening is contained in William McIntyre’s body.”

“Willy?” I asked, remembering the report on Bob’s friend. I became even more confused. “Did you have something to do with Willy’s body disappearing? Why?”

“It was through his proxxi Wallace that we first understood the potential magnitude of the danger,” admitted Tyrel, “but it was Sintil8 who helped Wallace disappear from Atopia using the access keys you granted. Wallace was acting to protect William.”

Things were spinning into nonsense. All I understood was that Sintil8 was involved in the disappearances.

“We have no time for this,” I objected. “We need to make a deal now. You’ve seen the same phutures I have, there is no other solution. If you don’t stop this, you’ll be destroyed!”

“We’ve seen the phutures,” agreed Tyrel, “but you didn’t take into account one scenario.”

“And what is that?” We’d played out billions of phutures.

“The destruction of Atopia.”

That stopped me in my tracks. It was true—all of our phutures included Atopia as a component of the solution set.

“This is a trap of your own making,” explained Tyrel, “and yes, you may escape these storms.… ”

My head spun. Had my pride blinded me?

“But, regardless, before the sun rises tomorrow morning, Atopia will be wiped from the face of this world.”

23 Identity: Bobby Baxter

Smiling at Nancy, I stuffed more pasta into my mouth.

“Think of it like getting ready to run a marathon,” I explained. “We need to do some carb-loading, to help build up our smarticle reservoirs. Keep eating!”

We’d both been storing much more than our usual load of smarticles from the Atopian environment, from smarticles floating in the the air we breathed to smarticles embedded in the food we ate, 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 memories were flooding back. The way she looked at me, she was feeling it too. With some effort, I kept my mind from splintering and scuttling off into the past.

“I don’t like that we’re hiding from Patricia,” she said, looking down into her pasta. “Do you really think she’s up to something?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, “but we need to keep an open mind, keep a low profile.”

She nodded, then frowned. “Why tell Jimmy then?”

“Just a hunch.” I wasn’t able to explain much more than that. “Knowing that he knows what we’re doing allows us to watch him watching us, if that makes any sense.”

“And we won’t set off his alarms when we’re scanning the Atopian infrastructure,” added Sid.

Nancy shrugged. “Sure.”

Willy, Sid, Vicious, Robert, Vince, and Hotstuff were all sitting at a table with us in a dingy little cafeteria in a deep, forgotten corner of the Atopian service infrastructure below Purgatory, the entertainment district.

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, giving us an edge over any self-correcting algorithmic blind spots that might be installed in it. We were going to plug in, as directly as we could, and watch for anomalies to emerge.

“Go over the plan again with me?” Nancy carefully considered her noodles before taking another mouthful.

“You have the most neuroplastically flexible mind for handling wide-area splintering,” I started to explain.

“It’s like you can be everywhere at once,” added Vicious.

Nancy sighed. “Everywhere but the place I should have been.”

She looked directly into my eyes. My heart leapt, pounding.

“We need your head in this completely, or not at all,” I replied softly. “Are you sure you’re up for it?” It wasn’t going to be easy.

“I’m in, Bobby, you’ve just surprised me, is all.” She held my gaze steadily.

I smiled. “I like to be full of surprises.” Back to business. “Sid is making some changes to my water-sense so it settles around information eddies—”

“So you can sense waves of information about Atopia?”

“Exactly. You and I are going to composite, then recombine via your Infinixx tethers to push my water-sense into thousands of composite splinters. We’ll push these into every nook and cranny of the multiverse.”

“Then I’ll amplify and cross-connect your network into the billions of private Phuture News feeds that Vince will open up to us,” continued Sid. “And Bob will wait for interesting waves of information and then follow them in.”

“You sure about opening the personal phuturecasts to us?” I asked Vince, giving him another opportunity to back out. “If it leaks, it’ll be the end of Phuture News.”

Vince laughed grimly. “My situation can’t get any worse than it is. I want some answers.”

During the last half hour, Vince had already had to flit out three times to save his own life, but he appeared the most awake and alive of all of us.

Nancy looked at me. “What we’re doing could kill you.”

“I doubt it.” I smiled. “Anyway, it’s less dangerous than surfing.”

“When you surf, you don’t purposely cook your brain. Are you sure?”

I took a deep breath. “Anything to get naked with you.”

She laughed. “All you had to do was ask.”

“Yeah, well, I like special occasions.… ”

“Okay, lovebirds,” laughed Vicious, “time to take a cold shower. We gotta get this show on the road.”

Quickening a composite like this was tricky, and for the best possible chances at cognitive coherence, we needed to be as close together as physically possible. Nancy had to be right there with me to reduce distance delays between our coupled nervous systems, but I was going to be taking the brunt of the quickening intensity, and we needed to disperse the energy generated. Off to one corner of the room, we’d filled a large tub with ice and water—even with all the technology at our disposal, it was still the simplest and most direct way to heat-sink energy away from a body.

I glanced at Nancy nervously. “Ready?”

She nodded and began to undress, although she remained modestly clothed in her pssi-projection. I did the same, and we walked over to the tub of cold water, holding hands, surrounded silently by the rest of our gang.

“Good luck,” said Vince, leaning in to give us both hugs.

I looked into Nancy’s eyes. She was quivering.

“I love you, Nance. Don’t worry, I got this.”

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 virtually fusing with hers. Our minds began to flow together.

“Just breathe slowly, in and out,” I told her, “and on each breath out, we’ll push the quickening a little more.”

Closing my eyes, I let my consciousness merge with Nancy’s, then felt her pushing me out, splintering me further and further, spreading us 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 diffuse us out. With each breath, I kept increasing the pace of quickening, pushing our hived mind faster and further, stretching ever outward. With a final deep breath, we breached an invisible wall somewhere in the universal consciousness.

Time stopped, ceasing to exist.

We became the alpha, the omega, and everything else in between.

24 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

This had better work.

Dragging a live fusion reactor with a million lives aboard through the center of two converging hurricanes was enough to make anyone nervous.

But even with the pressure mounting, my mind was extraordinarily clear. It rang crisply with purpose and energy.

I’d never felt better in my life.

Kesselring 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 storms were grinding into each other. From this distance, everything looked like it was moving in calm, orderly slow motion, but the violence at sea level was astounding. Already, most of Atopia’s forests had been destroyed.

I was using Samson as my primary media interface as we worked to downplay the situation. The questions and inquiries we were getting were unusually low in volume, but I didn’t have the time to investigate. 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 removed Patricia from the media circuit. Her association with Nancy was too much of a distraction. I don’t think Kesselring trusted her anymore, but then again, he didn’t need her anymore either.

The original emotion-driven media campaign had been centered on confidence and trust in our bid to win regulatory approval. The hard work of gaining the trust of experts and governments was now complete—Atopia had passed clinical trial certifications in all major jurisdictions.

What was left was to simply inspire in the masses a desire pssi for themselves. Dr. Granger had taken over the media messaging, and we began delivering more elevating pitches. It was devoid of any real content when looked at in detail, but nobody did that anymore. Dr. Granger started using me—young and handsome in my crisp ADF Whites—in the media campaigns instead of Patricia, a poster child for Atopia and the future to come.

I was becoming a celebrity.

Celebrity or not, the Americans were screaming at us to stay away from shallow coastal waters. As we entered their territorial waters, they’d scrambled to muster their defensive systems. Squadrons of aging F-35s and swarms of aerial drones now circled Atopia. From their base in San Diego, US naval forces had surrounded us and were hanging back at the edges of the storms. We didn’t have the maneuvering speed of a regular ship; if we had, we wouldn’t have been 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 from the American military to power-up our weapons systems. There was 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, we only had a narrow window of opportunity execute my plan. If we slipped by even a few seconds, we could be scooped up into one or the 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 already jacked up, quickening my mind as I reached outward into the hyperspaces around Atopia, but I needed to be at the top of my game. I let my adrenal 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.

25 Identity: Bobby Baxter

Our minds flooded with millions of impressions and ideas, experiences and worlds. Slowly, a thought began to build, a hint of something that didn’t fit.

A vision of my brother Dean and me from when we were kids floated into my mind. We’d always been pushing our limits, 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 secret planning, we snuck off, hiding our tracks. We almost drove our parents sick with worry when they discovered us missing. We would have made it, except that halfway there, after a week at sea, our smarticle reserves had begun to deplete. Physically we were perfectly healthy, 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 over the minds of the million Atopians packed belowdecks awaiting the fast-approaching hurricanes. Thousands of tourists shipped off in a matter of hours when the evacuation order came, yet nearly none of the native Atopians had opted to leave. Even in the face of death they stayed, wrapped in the warm embrace of pssi.

They were afraid, but not of death, and the thought began to more fully form itself.

It was so obvious that it was shocking, and yet so close that it was impossible to see the forest for the trees. More to the point: none of the trees wanted to see the forest.

I shot up out of the water. “Sid, I know what’s going on!”

Snapping back into my body, I began collapsing the millions of nodes of my collective mind with Nancy. Pulling her out of the water with me, she gasped as our nervous systems tore apart, her breath hard and ragged. She gripped me tightly.

“And?!” yelled Sid. The gang was still sitting around the tub.

“Come on, out with it,” Vicious urged.

I put out a hand. “I need to talk to Patricia first. It doesn’t make sense. Or maybe it does. I thought I knew her better.”

Wide-eyed, they 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, immediately opening her sensory channels to me. I appeared in her private wood-paneled office, sitting in one of her attending chairs. She sat across from me behind her desk, looking as if she’d been expecting me.

I just blurted it out. “I know what you’re doing!” It was foolhardy, perhaps even dangerous, to drop a bomb like this, 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? Did you steal Willy’s body? Sabotage Infinixx? Why are you doing this?”

She sighed and tipped her cigarette into a crystal ashtray. “I had nothing to do with Willy, or the disappearances,” she said. “And certainly nothing to do with what happened to Infinixx.”

“So you’re denying it?” I had evidence of what she’d been up to. “You’re not trying to kill Vince?”

Finishing her cigarette, she butted it out and took a deep breath. “Not trying to kill Vince, no. Just keeping him occupied.”

I stared at her in disbelief.

“I do want to say,” she continued, “what happened with your brother, I was against that, but it was what your family wanted at the time, what you wanted at the time.” Now she took a sip from her never-ending scotch. “Of course, Granger snapped it up as yet another way pssi could remove unhappiness.”

“That was a real killer application, all right,” I shot back. “Why are you doing this?”

She smiled thinly. “Since you came to me, why don’t you tell me what this is?”

“What this is?” I gaped. “Hooking the world on virtual crack, that’s what this is!”

26 Identity: Patricia Killiam

Silence hung in the air as I waited for Bob to calm down.

“You’re right. Pssi can be very addictive in an uncontrolled environment,” I admitted, taking another sip from my drink. “But it leaves the body very healthy—pssi users will live immensely long lives.”

“Keeping them alive to suck out as much money as possible, right?”

It was surprising that he had managed to discover the pssi weapons programs. I hadn’t even known about it until recently, one of the things Kesselring was hiding from me. I’d only just found out through Sintil8.

Bob gestured angrily. “People directly stimulating their pleasure centers, ramping up their dopamine output, plugging themselves into pleasure broadcasts. Of course it’s addictive.”

“Quite frankly, I’m surprised at your sudden prudishness,” I replied. “As far as I can remember, you made the most of all that yourself.”

“That’s not the issue. The problem is that you’re hiding how addictive it is.”

“Granger found ways to short circuit the addiction pathways—”

“Sure you have,” he sneered. “I bet that’ll work great, and I’ll bet you’ll charge a nice fee for it.”

I sighed. “I know how it must seem, but we needed to get regulatory approval as quickly as possible. We couldn’t afford to let the process get bogged down.”

“So it was all about getting to market faster?”

I nodded my head slowly. “Basically, yes.”

“Encouraging people to have synthetic babies, living in fantasy worlds,” he continued furiously, gaining steam. “If not that, then they’re emo-porners or soapstim junkies, living lives as parasitic reality vampires. Anything to get them hooked on your virtual dope?”

Bob wasn’t the only one who was upset. I was angry, too. While I was responsible for setting this thing in motion, once it got going, I’d been forced to accept a lot of things I wasn’t comfortable with. The synthetic babies, the proxxids, had been one of Granger’s ideas, central to the program for reducing birth rates. While that original idea was good, what they ended up allowing people to use the proxxids for was disgusting. I’d never been comfortable with this, or many other things.

My own anger made me defensive.

“Fantasy worlds? Are they really, Bob?” I lashed out. “You have your own dimstim—a very popular one—and emo-porning is not something I condone. Anyway, since when has people wasting their lives on reality programming been an issue?”

“That’s not the point. You’ve set all this up to turn the entire world into your junkie!” His eyes burned into me. “You’re up on stage every day, touting the benefits of pssi—going green, boosting work productivity, free and limitless travel, living forever—and you’ve got Nancy out there hyping it, too! How much does she know, I wonder?”

He held his arms wide. “The great Patricia Killiam, godmother of all synthetic reality, globally renowned and trusted… In the end, nothing but a drug pusher.”

He glared at me.

“What you’re saying is true,” I observed quietly, “but the benefits are real as well.”

“The first dose is free, but then you start paying. Isn’t that the plan? You’re giving it away for free for the first few months?”

“That is the plan,” I admitted, nodding my head in resignation. “You might understand what we’re doing, but you don’t understand why.”

“Oh, I understand,” he countered. “Money, power—the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and you’re the vultures picking over its bones.”

I let his statement sit for a few seconds. “The world is going to hell in a handbasket, as you say, but I’m not sure you understand the extent of it. Come with me, I need to show you something.”

He scowled.

“Please.” I nudged him with my phantoms.

Grudgingly, he released control to me, and I pulled us 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. Bodies were strewn everywhere, blackened flesh and bone exposed through shredded clothing.

“Look around,” I said. “This is the future without pssi.”

He was unimpressed. Daily images of the horrors of the Weather Wars had desensitized everyone. “So you plan to stop war with pssi?”

“We can’t stop it directly, but we might be able to remove the root cause.”

I pulled our projection viewpoint into space, far above the Earth, and we watched as small bursts 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.”

I shifted the viewpoint back, bringing into scope thousands, and then millions, of alternate future Earths, all burning under some apocalyptic scourge.

“It’s possible to navigate the fate of one individual,” I explained, “but the combined fate of billions gains momentum like a supertanker, and at a certain point you can’t stop it anymore. 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 over what’s left.”

“So it all ends in apocalypse?” He frowned. “I find that hard to believe.”

“No, you’re absolutely right.”

I spun our viewpoint even further back, splintering billions of future worlds into Bob’s sensory frames. “In most scenarios, in almost all of them, we manage to avoid full-blown Armageddon.”

But apocalypse wasn’t the worst fate for humanity. A quick end would be a blessing when faced with the majority of outcomes—a slow, downward grind over decades—shifting populations as the earth continued to heat, ecosystems collapsing, famine, pestilence, and an unending series of wars and genocides.

Over the next fifty years, the human population was going to drop from ten billion to just a few. It had already started to happen, the world population was already dropping fast; the Weather Wars were just the beginning. Billions of people were going to suffer and die horribly.

Bob’s networks assimilated the data sets I sent to him. “But surely,” he said quietly, “there must be something we could do?”

I shook my head. “I was part of the team that created the first Club of Rome simulations in the mid-1970s. We’ve been able to see this coming for a long time.

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 trying to manipulate the world?” said Bob, but he wasn’t angry anymore.

“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 perish in order for the planet to rebalance itself. There is no soft landing for the human population. Or at least, the soft landings that existed would have required threading the eye of a needle.”

I paused.

“The only way to avoid this fate required a massive and drastic reduction in global material consumption. We needed to send most of the world’s population off into synthetic reality, almost like a virtual coma, so that their material consumption in the ‘real’ world would drop to nearly zero. And we had to do it quickly. Fertility rates need to plummet. When we understood this, the fledgling pssi program transformed itself from simply a commercial endeavor into a project of destiny.”

I’d returned us back to my office now. Bob sat back in the chair, stunned.

“But we had to hide what we were doing to keep 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.”

“Of course not,” I sighed. “Governments have been using futuring, of one sort or another, for a long time, but they use it to plot paths forward that 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? You want me to believe that Kesselring and Granger are just in this to save the planet?”

“Sometimes deals need to be made for the common good.”

“What about the UN?”

“International agencies have been preaching disaster for the last hundred years. Nobody’s listening.”

A pause while we considered each other.

“These things happened in parallel, Bob, you have to understand. As our alternate possible phutures collapsed, we were running the clinical trials. It became obvious we would need to suppress some of the results on addiction to keep on track with regulatory approval.”

“Don’t you think it’s wrong to lie to everyone?”

I laughed. The sound was sharp and bitter. “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.”

“So the plan is to hook billions of people on pssi, with you as the only supplier.”

I was 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, have everything, and to be healthier and live longer while doing it.”

Bob stared 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 we developed an evolutionary instinct for trust that outstripped our 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 snapped, knowing this was his own personal mantra. “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. You tell me, what was the right thing to do?”

“Now you sound like Dr. Granger.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose, slowly. I was getting a headache. “If Atopia is destroyed, and the release of pssi stopped, billions will die.”

27 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

The moment of truth had arrived.

In the middle of ADF Command, we were watching projections of the 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. I could smell the booze from here. “Of course, Commander. We’ll find her, get her out somehow.”

He nodded, his bloodshot eyes on mine for a moment. “You ready for this?”

“I am.”

The high-altitude displays had a hypnotic effect. They centered on the pulsing orb of Atopia, highlighted near the convergence point of the storms. We only had a window of a few minutes to get it right.

The room went deathly quiet as the image of the storm systems engulfed us. 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, enable 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, her forests heaving and tearing, the waves pounding against her hull.

“On my mark.” I raised my hand. “Five… four… three.… ”

Everyone held a collective breath.

I waited.

Something held me back—something inside me.

Someone inside me.

I hesitated, trying to understand what was going on. Interminable seconds ticked by. Then—I understood. It was sitting there in front of me, all the time, but I hadn’t been able to see it.

Until now.

“For God’s sake, Jimmy!” screamed Kesselring. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

28 Identity: Patricia Killiam

“What is he doing?”

Bob stopped pacing and looked at me. He didn’t have access to Command and couldn’t see what I saw now. Jimmy stood motionless as critical seconds slipped by. We all watched in disbelief while Kesselring roared at him in panic.

“Bob, I need to go,” I said without further explanation, leaving behind a thin splinter while I snapped my main subjective into Marie’s body at Command.

Everyone there was frozen, all except for Kesselring. He’d crossed the room and was standing in front of Jimmy, holding his shoulders and shaking him. Jimmy didn’t even look like he was there.

I strode over and pulled Kesselring away. The window of opportunity was closing quickly.

“Jimmy!” I yelled. At that moment, his face came back to life, and his eyes flashed as he turned to look at me.

What he said next stunned us even more.

“Power down all weapons immediately!” he ordered. “And shut down the propulsion systems!”

“Belay that!” I yelled, at the same time disabling the technicians’ authorizations.

Reaching into the Command network with my phantoms, I tried to gain control of the systems as he blocked them from me. My mind raced. Somehow, the Terra Novans had gotten to him. We’d given enormous power to Jimmy for this operation, putting all our eggs in one basket.

So this was their plan.

Furiously, my mind splintered into hundreds of shards, shooting them into Jimmy’s command-and-control structures in the multiverse worlds that spread out from Command.

Kesselring tried helping me, but he hadn’t the power in these worlds that I had.

Desperately, I quickened my mind, launching thousands, and then millions, of attacks and feints and counterattacks at his cyber-defenses, projecting millisecond phutures as I tried to find a weakness to exploit.

The milliseconds became seconds, the window to saving Atopia 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, the world came back into focus. My ears were ringing, and I was sitting on the floor. Everyone in the room was stunned.

What the hell was that?

Jimmy looked at me calmly.

The point of no return had passed. Atopia was sitting defenseless amid the storms. We would be destroyed.

“Do not touch anything,” said Jimmy finally. “Everything is under control.”

29 Identity: Bobby Baxter

The world stood transfixed by the scene.

I was still sitting in Patricia’s office, but Jimmy had begun broadcasting the events from Command live and direct into the world’s media channels for everyone to see. An audience of billions was tuned-in to witness the destruction of Atopia, but not in the way we’d expected.

Jimmy stood tall, his image hanging over a bewildered and powerless Patricia Killiam on countless holoscreens and lens displays throughout the world.

“General McInnis,” he called out, “we’ve powered down all systems, and we will sequence down our fusion core at your request. I’ve opened all command-and-control functions to you. Please acknowledge.”

A moment of silence before General McInnis’ voice responded, “Goddamn boy, acknowledged. What the hell?”

“Please, General. Please stand down.”

The general’s image appeared in Command. He stood there, looking around at everyone is disbelief. “You kids sure have some explaining to do.”

One by one, surprised and shocked expressions clicked through the faces in Command. And then it dawned on me, too.

The storms were gone.

I spun out from Patricia’s office, clicking into my splinters arrayed out around Atopia. They all saw the same thing—blue skies, calm seas, and the coast of America sitting serenely on the horizon. The American drones were buzzing angrily in the skies, watching us carefully as Navy destroyers ringed us further out, their weapons armed and pointing at us.

“We were just about to blow Atopia back into the Stone Age,” said the general.

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.

We’d driven Atopia into the coast of America, trying to save ourselves from nonexistent storms projected from an infected reality skin while the rest of the world had watched in puzzlement and amazement.

Atopia had, at first, inexplicably breached American territorial waters, and then began furiously shipping off non-nationals via its passenger cannon. Amid confusing and contradictory reports, Atopia stowed and locked itself down, cut off all communications, and started 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, General McInnis had his finger on the trigger to unleash a hailstorm of tactical nuclear weapons to destroy us, an attack that even our automated systems couldn’t have repelled.

Patricia rematerialized in her office with me. She looked grim.

My anger had deflated, I was stunned. “Thank God, Jimmy figured it out.”

“Don’t thank God,” said Patricia quietly. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about, but I wasn’t sure until now.” She looked at me with weary eyes. “I need you to do something for me.”

I waited.

“I need you to leave Atopia as soon as they open up the surface, and take Sid, Willy, Brigitte, and please take Nancy away from here.”

“Why?” What could she possibly need us to leave for? I’d never even considered leaving Atopia before, except for that one time I’d gone sailing with my brother. It was all I’d ever known. Even the thought of leaving made my skin crawl.

“I can’t explain right now, but I need you to trust me.”

Even if I wasn’t angry anymore, my trust in her was almost completely gone. “Give me one good reason.… ”

“For one thing,” she said with effort, “Willy’s connection here through Terra Nova will almost certainly be revoked now that Jimmy has instituted martial law. He’ll be exiled. Do you want him to go alone?”

Jimmy had mentioned it, but I hadn’t considered it a real possibility.

“I have a feeling that both 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.”

Patricia looked tired beyond comprehension.

“Please take Nancy from here,” she added. “And apologize to Vince for me—I couldn’t get Kesselring to remove the system we have chasing him.”

I nodded.

She looked down, her hands shaking, and then closed the connection to her office.

Snapping back into my body, I found myself sitting with Nancy and Sid and the rest of our gang in the dimly lit cafeteria. Robert had taken my body out of the water, and while we sat together, everyone was splintered-out, watching the frenzy in the mediaworlds. They were transfixed by the unfolding media storm.

Only Jimmy had been able to see it. Images of him, the savior, were featured on the covers of magazines and billboards, instantly appearing in millions of metaworlds. Synthetic forensic intelligences tore backward through the path of the reality-virus, reverse hacking toward its origin, and the media began buzzing about Terra Nova unleashing the virus to destroy Atopia.

Stories began to emerge about the futures of world destruction that Patricia had been hiding, how the Atopian pssi program was designed as the solution to save us, and how Terra Nova had attempted to stop it for their own profit. Information about the coming phuture apocalypse gained ground.

There were even reports about Patricia hiding some of the addictive effects of pssi and how there were ways to control them. Smiling images of Dr. Hal Granger began appearing, explaining how he’d short-circuited the addiction pathways to ensure there was no danger anymore.

The image of Patricia struggling to force Jimmy to carry out the launch remained in the center of it all. Jimmy had managed to save the world, and his grateful audience was spellbound.

“Patricia wants us all to leave,” was all I said upon my return to the gang.

Everyone turned toward me in shock as parts of their minds disengaged from the media frenzy to better comprehend what I was saying. I left a splinter to explain what had happened while I flitted off to the surface to see what the damage had been to our habitat, to see if there was anything I could do, and more importantly, to put my own thoughts in order.

30 Identity: Patricia Killiam

“They say no publicity is bad publicity,” laughed Kesselring, standing uncomfortably in my office, “but how on Earth did you let that viral skin get past you?”

I stared at him and took a drag from my cigarette.

“You’re our chief scientist,” he continued. “You must understand how this looks. The blame for hiding any clinical trial data has to come down on your shoulders.”

So I’m the scapegoat.

Jimmy and Kesselring had preempted my plan to release the hidden addiction data. By coming clean right at the moment when Jimmy had solved the storm mystery, and laying the blame on my doorstep at the same time as exposing the apocalyptic phuturecast data, they’d neatly jiu-jitsued themselves into the position of liberator while simultaneously thrusting the pssi program into the global mind.

Of course, they had to sacrifice me in the process.

“You can’t buy advertising like that,” I replied, the words sour in my mouth. “Looks like you don’t need me anymore.”

I was tired beyond belief after the showdown with Jimmy. He’d used some sort of pssi-weapon to stun me into submission, a part of the weapons program Kesselring had been hiding. I’d felt it once before, long ago when Jimmy was 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.

“What’s happening then?” I asked wearily.

“Jimmy added an override to the pssi network to stop something like this from ever happening again.”

While I felt defeated, he looked elated.

“The media attention has boosted demand for the launch. We’ve already begun private distribution of smarticles into some business ecospheres.”

There was nothing I could say, nothing I could do anymore. Kesselring was doomed, but there was no way I could help him. I finally understood what the Terra Novans were trying to stop, but now it was too late.

I’ve created a monster I love.

31 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

I’d stolen off to the surface to relax a little, to try to escape the madness of the world media. Surface access had only just been reopened, and with all the tourists gone, nobody else had come above yet. The beach was quiet.

The sun was setting through low-hanging clouds on the horizon, lighting them up in glowing oranges and pinks. I sat by myself under some squat palms. A pleasant breeze blew in off the ocean, and pelicans swept in on curling waves. I sighed, feeling my mind calm and focus itself. Susie understood more about the nature of pain and suffering than anyone, even me, and she was truly helping me. I’d never felt better.

What a beautiful way to end the day.

After I’d been staring at the waves for a few minutes, Bob appeared from the forest to my left, his projection walking along the beach, alone, deep in thought. He nearly went right past before he spotted me and stopped.

“Jimmy. Unbelievable. You saved us—maybe you saved the whole world.”

Bob reached out to shake my hand, and I took his in mine and held it.

“Wasn’t Susie just up here with you?” he asked, looking around.

“She was, but she had to go somewhere.”

Bob smiled. He looked into the sunset, watching a few pelicans as they used their ground-effect aerodynamics to sweep in ahead of the waves, unseen forces propelling them effortlessly through space.

“Bob, I’ve got a slightly oddball question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“If you had to sacrifice your soul to save someone or something, what would that be for you?”

Bob looked at me quizzically. “Well, for love—for Nancy, I guess.”

“That’s what I thought… well, anyway, that’s nice to hear.”

“Still going to take me up on that surfing lesson, big shot that you are now?”

“Sure, maybe we’ll do a lesson soon.” I let go of his hand. “See you later.”

32 Identity: Bobby Baxter

“See you later, Jimmy.”

I stood fixed, still feeling the warmth of Jimmy’s hand as I watched him step away, but he stopped and turned to look at me. Something was weighing on his mind.

“You were the only person who was ever nice to me,” he said after a pause. “I really appreciated that.”

“I love you, Jim,” I said simply. “We’re brothers, aren’t we? I’ll always stick up for you, no matter what.”

“You really mean that?” Jimmy looked like he was about to cry.

“Of course.”

He looked uncertain. “I think you and your friends should leave Atopia.”

In my whole life nobody had ever mentioned leaving Atopia for anything. Now two people on the same day? A sense of dread filled me.

“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, he turned away and walked into the darkness.

33 Identity: Jimmy Scadden

As I walked away from Bob and into the dark underbrush, I became aware of someone walking beside me, someone new, but someone at the same time intimately familiar.

“Why did you do that?” the apparition asked.

“Do what?” I didn’t even think to ask who had appeared beside me.

“Why did you warn 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, 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 with 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 that were bordered by elaborate gold carvings. Ornate, richly decorated furniture was strewn about topsy-turvy, and everywhere was littered with broken bottles, golden goblets, and inert bodies.

Dark-framed oil paintings of uniformed men on horseback directing battles hung across one set of walls; the other featured floor-to-ceiling leaded-glass windows that looked out onto an endless manicured garden beyond. The garden was situated around a long reflecting pool. Sunlight streamed in through the windows from between heavy purple velvet drapes tied back with gold sashes.

The place stank of urine, and, as if on cue, one of the slumberers came to life, stumbled to his feet, and shuffled to the nearest corner,, where he began pissing over one of his fellow revelers. “Sorry for the mess,” said my apparition, now in solid form, as he stretched out before me on a chaise lounge. “We had a bit of a party here today.”

He adjusted the frilly white cuffs of his tunic and then his blond wig, which fell in tight curls to frame his white-painted 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 eyeliner had smudged, making him look comical in a threatening sort of way, and his eyes shone brightly—my eyes.

“Come now, this isn’t that much of a surprise is it?”

I felt uneasy. Was this some splinter or sub-proxxi gone wrong? The party guest finished pissing and turned toward us, blearily rubbing his eyes, which then widened.

“The dauphin!” he said, barely audibly. He 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 guests began to rouse themselves, encouraged by the first, who was whispering at them urgently. The air filled with the sounds of quiet sounds of clinking bottles and shifting bodies.

“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 a happy coincidence?”

He smiled widely, 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,” he continued, shaking his head and sighing. “We are not children, not anymore. The world needs us now.”

Several of the guests were sitting and watching us hungrily from nearby. Samson was here now, watching me from a corner in the distance. I began to recognize some of the faces around me, the 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 toward 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.”

James smiled again. “We’ve been protecting you for a long time now.” He extended a hand to sweep past the assembled, misshapen guests. They were all wide awake and encircling us ever closer. “Your children await you.”

They were near now, and James reached out to touch one of them who had 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.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” I had to admit, feeling the hot breath of the creatures behind me. “Over the past few years, my mind has been gaining a certain clarity that.… ”

“That what? 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, and they leaned in even closer.

James splintered us off into a sensory imprint of the private world that I’d burned so long ago, after Nancy’s birthday party. He was feeding the pain of the writhing creatures pinned to the walls—my pleasure centers.

I shivered and gasped.

“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. He’d worked in the aquaponics group with my dad. An image flickered through my memory of him playing privately with proxxids together with my dad after work.

In the world James had splintered me into, Steve was desperately groping through a dark tangle of underbrush. Someone was chasing him. Suddenly a flash of metal tore into him, and he screamed, terrified, as his attacker stabbed him again and again. 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 can recognize the direct nerve imprints of fear, hopelessness, guilt—hundreds of layers of desperate emotions—and mix these into a symphony of sorrow.”

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 another splinter called up Olympia Onassis, wandering desperately. Her loneliness resonated through my auditory channels, merging into a gentle, fearful caress across my skin.

“The taste of heartache,” James added, and an image of Cindy Strong filled another splinter as she stood over the grave of Little Ricky. I could taste her misery filling my mouth, an aching sweetness tinged with hints of regret.

“And the soft caress of hopelessness and despair,” he laughed. Dr. Granger hung in a metaworld 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 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 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 and darkest fear, and we can synthesize worlds to play all these out, to suit our whims, our needs.”

Music played, and the creatures around us began to sway and dance, slowly working themselves into a frenzy. The music quickened with my mind, and I soaked in the sensation of my body connecting into the hundreds of metaworlds holding our trapped subjects, their terror coursing through me. James offered me a glass of wine, and I took it, in my excitement splashing my ADF Whites with bright, bloody splotches.

“Pain and fear cleanse the mind, Jimmy,” said James, taking back the empty glass, “and we need your mind as clear as possible for what is to come.”

34 Identity: Patricia Killiam

“I think the clinical diagnosis would be sadistic sociopath with dissociative identity disorder,” said Marie.

I looked up from my desk at her and nodded. We’d managed to piece together what was happening, and it was terrifying.

“It’s not what I think you need to think about now,” she added. “I’ll pass this onto Bob.”

Images of Shiva, the great destroyer and creator, floated into my mind. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Jimmy was good at hiding his tracks. We had only 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 responsible for the disappearances of Susie and Cynthia?” I asked Marie. It was obvious now that he was behind what had happened to Cindy Strong and Olympia Onassis, but in those cases he had a strategic goal. In most of the other disappearances, we didn’t understand what there was to gain. “Why would he attract attention to himself like that? With people so close to him?”

“Perhaps he’s unaware of the other parts of 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.”

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 by others, but with the risk of falling out of touch with reality yourself—this was something we’d compounded with pssi.

The bigger the neocortex and the higher the intelligence, the more an organism tended to lie to itself and others, and Jimmy was 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’d become, he was now the master of deception.

“We don’t have any evidence that his parents ever did anything to him. Just rumors that seem to originate with him,” said Marie. “I think he constructed a fantasy world about his own abuse to justify his behavior.”

“Dissociative personality disorder is almost always the result of abuse as a child. If his parents didn’t abuse him, then who did?”

Marie stared at me and shook her head.

“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.

In my decades of research developing synthetic intelligence, I’d developed statistical models of past human civilizations that had revealed a strong correlation between the self-deceptive characteristics of a people and the worst atrocities that group would commit. Pssi had heightened human capacity in many ways, but it had increased the ability to fool ourselves the most—and we were about to unleash it on humanity under the guise of 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.

Which is worse? Allowing billions of people to die, or saving them to live lives of perpetual suffering under the control of a monster?

My monster.

Perhaps it would have been impossible for me to see what was happening, no matter what controls I put in place. He had used my own blind spot, my latent desire for a child, as my life began to slip away from me. I could feel my love for him burn in me, even as I understood the beast I may have created.

I wanted to believe there was something to save.

“Can we remove him from the board somehow? At least get him off the Security Council?” I pondered aloud.

Marie said what I was already thinking. “He’s already aligned himself with powerful supporters. And he’s become a celebrity in the world media. I’m sure he’d have some nasty surprises up his sleeve if we tried confronting him in the open.”

I continued the thought for her, “And if we can’t prove anything, it will look like the disgruntled ramblings of a disgraced old woman throwing her last rocks into the glass house.”

“Probably better to keep under the radar for now,” agreed Marie. “Encouraging the formation of composites should yield some protection from Jimmy.”

“Perhaps.”

“What about the data from the neutrino telescope?”

I’d kept the POND results absolutely locked down, trying to forget them myself. Could it be real?

“Ship that data off from Atopia immediately,” I replied. “If there’s anything to it, I want it away from here.”

If it was true, and not some artifact of the viral infection, my skin crawled thinking of the ways Granger and Kesselring could spin the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, or whatever it was that this signal from a parallel universe was coming from.

“Send a report back into the science community, say 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, don’t worry.”

Looking at Marie, I couldn’t believe I felt such affection for a machine, a virtual projection that didn’t really exist.

Then again, all our children, biological or not, were created by us, and it wasn’t quite 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. But I had created her. Perhaps she was both.

“You’ll communicate everything to them, right? Send Nancy and Bob out to find Willy’s body.”

“Yes, Patricia.… ”

“It’s just.… ”

“I know.”

Silence descended. My body’s systems were on the brink of failure, something I’d been able to see coming for some time.

“Marie, after I’m gone, I want you to continue to, well, to be.”

“But proxxies terminate with their owners. That goes against the whole program.”

“It’s been managed before,” I replied, 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? 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. 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.

“Everything is in order,” I said quietly. “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 modest apartment near the beaches. It was small, but one of only a handful on the surface of Atopia.

In the end, Jimmy gave me what I’d thought I wanted—for the world to embrace pssi—but he had exacted his price for it. It was clear he’d sabotaged my medical systems. But perhaps leaving this world was a wish I hadn’t been able to admit to myself, and he’d simply been the instrument of my desire.

It was time for me to go.

Of all the things that pssi could give us, perhaps the least touted was dignity in death. It was just me, by myself, for perhaps the first time in nearly half a century.

So this is what reality feels like.

I’d forgotten.

Wearily, I lifted my ancient body off the chair that Marie had left it sitting on. I wanted one last look at my tiny garden out back, that little plot of life.

Slowly, limping, I made my way to its neglected grounds. I looked around. Some pots were blown over and everything had a dull gray tint to it in the dim pre-dawn light. I shuffled over to a sun lounger in the back near an old raspberry bush that was nearly as decrepit as I was.

So I won’t last to see pssi spread into the world.

It was probably 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’d always managed to suspend disbelief about it.

Now there was something we all had a talent for.

“Marie,” I called out, “I have one last story to tell you.”

I couldn’t see or feel her 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’d started telling Marie stories of my earlier life, from before the machines had begun to capture our memories and preserve the digital trails of our lives as we blindly forged ahead.

Telling Marie my stories made me feel like a part of me would live 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.

Tears streamed down my face as I told Marie my most private of memories, unspoken to anyone now living, unspoken even to myself in over a century, of young love gone wrong. It was the story of why I’d never married, of a young airman who’d died in my arms so long ago.

Instead of life and family, I’d focused my mind on finding ways to escape reality, to escape what had happened to me. At least that’s what I’d started out doing, as unspoken as it was. In the end, my escape had taken on a life of its own, and my love had, in the end, blinded me.

But now, at my own end of time, I remembered, and I remembered why.

My love, will I find you now?

Wiping away my tears, I was pleased to see that dawn was beginning to break on the horizon. It’s going to be a nice day. Glancing sideways, I inspected my long-forgotten raspberry bush.

Within its spiny gray branches I was surprised to find, still surviving, one lush red raspberry, standing out in surreal relief from the grayness surrounding it. I leaned over and picked it, rolling it around gently in my fingertips.

I was afraid of letting go, but I was also so tired, and the last of my resistance slipped away. I popped the raspberry into my mouth.

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.

In the early morning glow, a monarch butterfly fluttered and danced its way through the garden where Dr. Killiam lay, 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 with 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 pilled my sweater tight around me. San Francisco sure was colder than I’d imagined.

From the vantage point of our camp, across some boulders and a field of grass at the edge of a stand of redwoods, I could dimly make out the top 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 toward the burning and crackling wood.

So this is what camping is really like. I liked the synthetic version better.

Following encrypted instructions from Marie, we’d gone off the grid as far as possible as quickly as we could manage. The state park above San Francisco was a designated network-free zone, and after collecting up some tents and camping supplies in the city, we’d been dropped off up here. We hiked ourselves to the edge of the forest.

I still couldn’t believe Patricia was gone.

Walking around out here, I had the crushing sensation of being blind and deaf and dumb. Being cut off from the dense communication network on Atopia gave me the feeling we’d been transported back into the Dark Ages. My body 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. I’d taken for granted feeling the steady thrum of information through my metasenses, as easily as I’d assumed my own breath. 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. I belonged to that future, yet here I was with the rest of humanity. The world, however, was about change, and people could hardly wait. I laughed to myself. They really ought to be more careful what they wished for.

Vince had come with us. He figured whatever Patricia’s last instructions were, they might offer some key to his problem. Sid had also come, as well as Brigitte and Willy.

Well, Willy sort of came.

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. She seemed to enjoy having her own bit of Willy to take everywhere with her, and I doubted he would be getting that splinter back anytime soon.

Martin had elected to stay behind with our parents. All of our proxxi had made the trip as well, embedded as they were in our bodies. So there the nine of us sitting 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 my pleading, but this was before we’d learned what Jimmy had become. Jimmy had asked her to stay on a while to help with the investigation and preparations for Patricia’s Atopian state funeral, which he had managed to pull off despite the rumors of her working with the Terra Novans. I suppose her gratitude for this kindness in the wake of the scandal left Nancy with some sense of obligation toward him.

She’d insisted she would catch up with us, but it was too late now. A week had gone by since we’d left, and newly passed constitutional changes on Atopia had enabled Jimmy and Rick to maintain its state of emergency, a state of emergency that would never end.

Having barely survived destruction, Atopia’s once-cherished civil liberties—which Patricia was no longer there to defend—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.

In the ensuing investigation, it had been discovered that the viral skin had been vectored from the Terra Novans through Patricia’s own specialized pssi system. The best guess was that her old student Mohesha had implanted it. Patricia had gone on to infect everyone she’d come into contact with, and it had then spread quickly into everyone on Atopia. Of course, nearly everyone in our group was implicated in one way or another.

Patricia had encoded Marie onto a miniature data cube and had it smuggled off Atopia right before the lockdown of Jimmy’s new police state. We’d picked up the data cube, hidden in what looked like a walking stick, from an antique store in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

After lighting a fire at our campsite, we’d started up a private network to connect us all and awoken Marie. Her ethereal image had risen before us above the fire, wavering in the night air, a ghost that told 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 lazy days back on the beach.

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. No matter what, Willy was our friend, and we had to help him, and somehow it also contained a secret about Jimmy—and this secret was the reason it has disappeared.

The next morning, we sat back around the embers of the fire that we’d resurrected from the night before, grimly sipping mugs of gritty coffee that Vince had made.

“Did you read the news Willy sent in this morning?” he asked as he handed me a cup.

“I did.”

Simultaneously with the commercial release of pssi into major metropolitan areas, Cognix had revealed the existence of seven new Atopian-class floating platforms at strategic physical locations around the globe. They must have been under construction for some time. There was was talk Phuture News about giving Atopia a seat on the United Nations Security Council—they wanted to appoint Jimmy.

Along with the coffee, Vince was handing out some sticky buns and granola bars for breakfast. We didn’t just need to eat, though. Without a steady supply of smarticles in the air around us, we needed to replenish our bodies’ supplies. Smarticles flushed out of the body if they weren’t topped up, and we didn’t know how secure the old ones were, so Patricia had created her own secret variant for us.

Pulling out the container filled with our new smarticle powder from my backpack, I dipped my finger into it, lifted it to my nose and inhaled—an easy 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. “After what’s happened, it would look like more Terra Novan interference. Plus, coming from us, it wouldn’t exactly look reputable. We need to fly under the radar.”

“Aren’t we a motley bunch to trust for saving the world?” laughed Sid.

I wasn’t in the mood to joke.

“But I suppose it all depends on how you look at it,” Sid continued. “Maybe it’s not so bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“So, you and Nancy together being able to see everything, and you can pull those tricks with water.… ”

“So?”

Sid grinned. “Don’t you get it? You’re like some kind of omniscient being who walks on water, trying to save mankind from suffering a monster.”

“I mean, it’s all been done before, mate,” chipped in Vicious, “and so far so good!”

“Tell me that doesn’t sound biblical.” Sid smirked and transformed himself into a talking burning bush, sporting two stone tablets with our names inscribed on them.

I snorted. “Very funny.”

“And the key to all this is in my body?” said Willy. “Wally must have left us some clues. We just need to look.”

The trail to Willy’s body began and ended with Sintil8, who had, like us, disappeared off the grid. 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 dug up for us.

Clouds of Cognix smarticles released in San Francisco the day before began 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 an ominous feel as well.

“Let’s get a move on, people,” I said as my phantoms shivered. “I think we should 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. I checked around the campsite for anything left behind and kicked some dirt onto the smoldering remains of the fire. Then, sharing nervous grins, we started out on the path that led into the great redwood forest and beyond.