The Dystopia Chronicles

1

A dozen arched doorways lined each side of the great hall, each twenty feet high and topped with sparkling colored glass. Bright light streamed in. Between the doorways, gold-veined marble columns rose from polished floors to a ceiling frescoed with cherubic angels. An image of God hung over the middle of the room, reaching down to the world below.

It was a virtual projection, one of Jimmy Scadden’s private worlds, and it was the first time Nancy Killiam had seen it with her own eyes. She’d heard rumors, but getting into this space had been difficult. You had to be invited. Nancy wasn’t, but she’d infiltrated the virtual sensory channels of someone who was.

She was spying from a front-row-center seat.

“Join me if you believe in everlasting peace,” Jimmy thundered from a pulpit in front of her, shining in his white military uniform. “Join with me, and you shall never grow old, you shall never die.”

It was a psombie recruitment session.

Row upon row of young men and women sat at attention, all of them attending the meeting virtually through pssi—the Atopian poly-synthetic sensory interface. Their eyes and minds were focused on Jimmy. In exchange for unlimited and unfettered access to the Atopian synthetic reality multiverse, Jimmy was bargaining for use of their physical bodies in the real world, disconnecting their minds with a body-lease contract, turning themselves into psombies.

What was he up to? Nancy squirmed to stay hidden behind the consciousness of the observer in whom she was hiding. A part of her wanted to burst out and announce to Jimmy that she’d discovered him, but she’d never been good at confrontation, and what Jimmy was doing wasn’t illegal. She couldn’t go running back to the Cognix Corporation boardroom or Atopian Council, screaming like a child. Aunt Patricia would have known what to do, but she was dead. She’s gone. You need to figure this out for yourself.

Patricia Killiam’s passing hadn’t just opened up a yawning gap in the fabric of Nancy’s life: having one of the founders of Atopia die had opened a vacuum in the power structure of what’d become one of the most potent forces shaping the world—the release of pssi technology. Nancy stared at Jimmy on stage. Patricia had been a central figure in his life as well, but her death didn’t seem to be affecting him. At least, not in the ways that made sense to Nancy.

“I have chosen each of you personally”—Jimmy nodded to his audience—“to be my representatives in your communities. You are the chosen ones.” He paused and smiled. “If, of course, you choose me.”

The crowd shifted in their seats. They were here. They’d already made up their minds.

Nancy had known Jimmy her whole life, grown up together with him in the pssi-kid program on Atopia, part of the first generation of children born with limitless virtual reality built into their minds. But this man up on stage wasn’t the quiet and efficient Jimmy with whom she’d grown up, the shy boy who had hidden in the labs of the Atopian research centers almost as much as she had.

Jimmy opened his arms to the crowd. “Let me be the one that saves you—saves you from a life of drudgery, from a life of pain, from uncertainty. I can free you from all of this, to a world where your every desire is fulfilled.”

With these words the doors to the great hall flew open, revealing dreamscapes beyond. Nancy could only guess what the rest of the assembled glimpsed. Jimmy was using open access to their memories to project fantasy worlds, a combination of where each attendee had felt safest, and of what they always wanted to be. All Nancy saw was her Aunt Patricia, staring back at her from the grave.

“Give me your bodies,” Jimmy roared, “and in return I offer immortality.”

The reality skin of the hall merged with the fusing realities of the attendees, each of them greeted by a splintered copy of Jimmy who whisked them into their fantasy lands. Nancy released the sensory channels of the person she was ghosting, letting her primary presence settle behind her office desk. Mahogany paneling appeared in her visual sensory frames. Bookcases lined the walls behind her copper-studded leather attending chairs, the Persian carpets underfoot lit softly by green-glass lamps that glowed on the walls.

Cunard, Nancy’s digital symbiote—her proxxi—was sitting in one of the chairs. “We should gather more information before we say anything to anyone.”

Nancy smiled. Cunard, her protector and counselor, more now than ever before, and never any less of a perfectionist. Then again, he was just a reflection of herself. She nodded, agreeing with him. “Good work on getting me into that meeting.”

“What he’s doing might not be strictly illegal, but it’s certainly suspicious, and it’s been hidden from the Atopian Council.”

“Or at least hidden from us.” Nancy wasn’t sure where the fault lines in the newly evolving Atopian power structure were falling. It might just be that she wasn’t on a need-to-know list. She felt like she was drowning, unable to get a firm grasp on anything to hold her up. She needed help. “What I need you to focus on is finding Bob and Sid.”

“And Vince,” added Cunard.

“Yes, and Vince,” Nancy agreed. She wasn’t sure that they were all together, but they all rushed off just after the fiasco with the altered-reality skin and simulated storms that nearly brought the destruction of Atopia. Terra Nova, a competing off-shore colony in the Atlantic Ocean, admitted to implanting the reality-skin, forcing a closure of the Atopian borders just after Bob and Sid had left with Vince. “Do you think they’re trying to find Willy’s body?”

“Yes, but something else is going on. Why would they have cut off contact?”

Nancy could see Bob running off to help his friend Willy—with Sid, as usual, in tow—but it was odd that Vince went with them. Never mind that he was three times their age and the famous trillionaire founder of PhutureNews, but Nancy had never seen Vince Indigo rush off to do anything in all the years she’d known him when she was growing up. Why now?

“Bob did beg you to go with him,” Cunard reminded her. “I don’t need to tell you, but his anger is always just under the surface. Hard to say what losing Patricia did to him.”

Nancy took a deep breath. Was Bob angry at her? She’d only just caught a glimpse of the old Bob before he left, the one she’d known and loved all those years before his brother had killed himself. For years, Bob had cut himself off behind a veil of drugs, filtering his life through the pain of losing his brother. Nancy rubbed her eyes. I was supposed to be with him, he’d begged me to come, but how could I just take off and leave Patricia’s dream in the hands of Kesselring and Jimmy when she died?

Almost as soon as Bob had left Atopia on the passenger cannon, Nancy lost all connections with him, with everyone in his group. They’d completely disappeared off the grid, which was no easy feat.

They had to be hiding on purpose.

But why? Where was he?

2

“Life is suffering,” said a disembodied voice.

The words floated to Bob through a steaming jungle, and he followed them into a clearing where he found a herd of massive, dorsal-finned creatures. Halfway through mouthfuls of fern and bush, they swung their heads to observe him.

“The cessation of suffering is attainable…”

Bob looked into the sky, and then down at his hands; four fingers webbed with translucent green skin. The landscape, the animals, the vegetation—it was alien.

“Bob,” said another voice, more familiar this time. Bob looked up to find his proxxi Robert standing to the side of the clearing. The animals began lumbering off, crashing through the forest. “Time to get up, Bob.”

His proxxi smiled, offering a cup of coffee, and the jungle behind him shimmered. Replacing it were the familiar outlines of Bob’s bedroom in his family’s habitat on Atopia. Bob shook his head. He didn’t need to be babied. Reaching into the reality skin around him, he ripped it down. Sloping wooden beams appeared, the now-familiar ceiling of the farmhouse bedroom in which he spent the last few weeks sleeping. On a high shelf above the door, long-forgotten trunks stood collecting dust, and for the hundredth time he wondered what was in them. Perhaps today he’d have a look.

This end of the farmhouse was turn-of-the-21st-century: wooden-framed construction with soft mineral walls—gypsum calcium sulfate sandwiched between paper—fastened together with formed-metal nails and screws. Primitive was the word that came into Bob’s mind. The wilderness of reality outside of Atopia was reinforcing the sensation that he’d been cast out of paradise.

On Atopia, his floating island home just off the coast of California, even physical reality was clean, shining, every detail accounted for. The forests up top were perfectly manicured. The corridors below were always polished and shining. Before leaving—before being asked to leave—he had only experienced the rest of the world through wikiworld simulations. Now he was out in the wild, with illicit smarticles embedded in his nervous system, and the limited bandwidth forced him into the dirt and grime and specificity of being in only one place at a time. To say it was a new experience was an understatement.

And the constant barrage of hate media didn’t help.

When he took off from Atopia right after the incident, and then immediately dropped off the grid, the conspiracy nuts were in hot pursuit of Bob and Sid and Vince. It wasn’t just the nutjobs, though. The longer their gang remained hidden and off the radar, the more the mainstream mediaworlds were latching onto the conspiracy theories. People wanted answers.

So did Bob.

Propping himself onto one elbow, he rubbed his eyes. “What was that about?”

His proxxi appeared on a floral-print chaise in front of the fireplace in the small room. “What?”

“The jungle with the dinosaurs.”

“Dinosaurs?”

Connectivity was limited in rural Montana. Bob had a few dozen splinters—synthetic intelligence bots modeled after his own cognition systems—hunting down leads as they searched through the virtual and real worlds for any sign of his friend Willy’s body. Synthesizing all the information they collected in real-time was impossible through the tiny data pipes they had access to, so his splinters were integrating into his meta-cognition systems while he slept.

It made for strange dreaming.

“You were standing in a jungle with me,” Bob continued, sitting upright in bed. “Was it a gameworld? A past construct…?”

Robert shook his head. “You must have been dreaming.”

Bob stretched and felt through the extra-sensory network of smarticles dusted around the peripheries of the farm. Nothing—no danger, no incursions, not yet.

The dream was fading, the giant creatures sliding into mind-fog.

Robert began feeding Bob a summary of the night’s searches. The most significant news was that the Comet Catcher mission had launched from orbit the night before and in two months would be shepherding the Wormwood comet into Earth orbit. Bob scanned the top level of Robert’s reports, but there were no new answers, no resolutions. It was going to be another day of waiting. Bob detached his visual point-of-view to see where everyone else was, leaving a fresh splinter to finish chatting with Robert.

Snapping out of his body, his viewpoint rose up toward the ceiling while he flipped his visual system to scan for warm bodies. A housebot appeared through the bedroom door with Bob’s clothes for the day. The walls faded and through the transparence the red-outlined images of his friends downstairs in the kitchen appeared, their voices rising into his consciousness as he flitted down to them.

“Sidney Horowitz?” laughed Vince as Bob’s virtual presence announced itself, pinging everyone’s networks while he sat his projection down at the head of the breakfast table. Sid and Vince were sitting at the table arguing about something. Willy’s virtual avatar and Brigitte sat across from them, holding hands.

Sid nodded at Bob, acknowledging his arrival, before turning back to Vince. “What’s the big deal? It’s not like it was secret.”

“Horowitz the mastermind scientist!” Vince thumped the table and shook his head. “I just always imagined your surname… ah, never mind. It doesn’t have a bad ring to it, on second thought.”

The main living area, attached to the front of the aging farmhouse, was more of the type of thing Bob was used to on Atopia—lignin-based bio-thermoplastics curving smoothly into an oval dome thirty feet high and fifty feet across, climate controlled as phase-shifting particles in the membrane shell regulated heat and molecular flow across its boundary. Sparrows were nesting at its apex, darting around.

“Want some breakfast?” asked Deanna, busy cooking at the stove. She was an old friend of Vince’s, from way back. “I mean, when your body gets down here.” She was still getting used to the way the Atopians flitted around their conscious points-of-view. “And since we have all the masterminds at the table now, could you explain to me what happened to Willy’s body again?”

Bob nodded, and an angular-armed bot on top of the refrigerator opened itself and handed a packet of gro-bacon to Deanna. Communal eating was just one more in a list of things Bob was getting used to. He glanced at Sid, expecting him to answer Deanna, but Sid was already lost to the world again—optimizing the geothermal regulator under the farm, rearranging the drone scheduling, doing a systems analysis of the mixture of crops in the surrounding fields. Like a chameleon he melted into his surroundings; he’d already added cowboy boots to his usual repertoire of ragged jeans and t-shirts. Bob wished he could lose himself so easily.

“It was my fault,” Willy’s avatar offered, glancing at Brigitte. “I was trying to make money by splintering my mind into hundreds of pieces, trying to be everywhere at once in the stock markets.” He looked at the table. “What I was doing was illegal, at least at the time, so I tried to hide it by rerouting my conscious stream through an anonymous connection on Terra Nova.”

Deanna turned to Willy from her cooking and crinkled her nose. “But how did that lead to losing yourself, or I mean, your body?”

Willy forced a grin. “At a certain point I was so widely splintered that I lost track of home base, so to speak, and that’s when my proxxi took off with my body.”

Deanna frowned. “He stole it? I thought your proxxi friends were there to protect you.” She glanced at the table of proxxi—Hotstuff, Robert, Vicious, and Bardot—sitting around an identical table in a virtual projection next to the gang.

“That,” Bob interjected, “is exactly the mystery. We think he was protecting Willy, but we don’t know from what.”

“From myself,” Willy muttered, and Brigitte squeezed his virtual hand.

“And you have family in the Commune?” Deanna asked. “That’s why you want to get in there?”

Willy nodded. “Yeah, my mother. If I hadn’t been so stupid, none of us would be here…”

Bob shook his head. “That’s not true, Willy, there’s bigger things going on.”

“And this has to do with that virus that infected the virtual reality systems on Atopia, those fake storms that nearly wrecked the place?”

Vince held up a hand. “Sorry, Deanna, as I said before, we can’t say more. And we really appreciate your help.”

She arched her eyebrows and returned to the stove. “All those things they’re saying about you in the mediaworlds, you could stop all that just by coming out—”

Vince cut her off. “We just need to get into the Commune.”

Shrugging and smiling, Deanna scooped the bacon and eggs onto a plate.

Bob took a deep breath. Nearly six weeks of waiting, a month and a half of letting the dust settle, and this was where they were—still waiting for approval to enter the Commune. Vince thought it best if they all stayed together. The Commune’s agents liked things to move slowly during their process. Bob shook his head. “This is such a waste of time.” He looked at Willy and Brigitte. “I mean we need to get searching, do something. Not just sit here.”

Sid looked up, dragging his attention away from his virtual workspaces. “Hey, calm down, we’re all a little itchy from switching to the new smarticles, your body is going into withdrawal—”

“What the hell are you doing optimizing the farm’s geothermal pumps?” With his phantom hands, Bob stood up and grabbed Sid’s virtual workspaces and pulled them into primary reality for everyone to see. “Shouldn’t you be trying to find Willy’s body?”

“Hey!” Sid grabbed his workspaces back and filed them away. “I am searching for Willy, but there’s only so much I can do.”

Vince reached out and tried to get Bob to sit back down. “Patience, young man, patience. We have a plan, we’ll stick to the plan.”

Bob shook him off. “And who put you in charge?” Spinning a splinter of his mind into the fields around the farm, he checked a tripped motion sensor, but it was just a stray buffalo calf.

“In charge?” Vince laughed. “Are you kidding? Anyway, isn’t all this what Patricia wanted?”

The poly-synthetic sensory interface—pssi—product release by Cognix had worked as planned. Over a billion users had joined in the first six weeks since its release, but, like many start-ups, operational demands caught up and slowed it down. More important was that it had started to work in its world-saving ambitions. Just two months from release and there’d been no new flare-ups in the Weather Wars, and projected birth rate indicators seemed to be dropping.

“Then why the heck did she send us out here?” Bob shot back. The release of pssi was having the effect that Patricia had created the entire Atopian project for—to push humankind on a new path away from material consumption and into a new world of virtual consumption—but was Jimmy still the threat to the program that she’d imagined?

Bob’s body, inhabited by his proxxi, finally came walking down the stairs, but Bob decided to keep his own point-of-view fixed in his virtual self. As Bob’s body seated itself at the table, Deanna walked over and dropped the plate of fried eggs and toast in front of it, and Robert, Bob’s proxxi, started using Bob’s body to eat it.

“I’m done waiting.” Bob fidgeted and spun his viewpoint out around the farm again, but then in the corner of one eye he saw his body’s hand pick up a strip of bacon. “Hey, none of that!” His body was getting fat from all this sitting around, and bacon wasn’t going to help.

His proxxi, Robert, looked at Bob from his own eyes and smiled. “No need to yell.” He diverted the bacon onto the floor for Deanna’s ever-watchful dog.

“Sometimes, I don’t know why I put up with you,” Bob fumed at his proxxi. It was intended to be rhetorical.

“Ever wonder if I think the same thing?” his proxxi replied without skipping a beat.

Because you have no choice, Bob thought but didn’t say.

“I think we’re all getting a little stir crazy.” Deanna wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “The bots need some help loading lumber, and I need to scan a package in town. How about coming in with me?”

“Sure,” mumbled Bob. “I’ll flit in when you’re on your way.”

Deanna rolled her eyes. “I meant you in your body, Bob.”

3

The pickup truck bounced its way along the gravel road under a clear Montana sky. Bob rolled down his window to get some air, letting his viewpoint escape and spin out above the fields.

Golden fields of summer oats, ready for harvest, swayed in the breeze. Between them, the green shoots of the secondary harvests rose up through their ranks with the winter wheat. Thickets of sunflowers dotted the landscape, alongside clumps of sugar beets in leafy-green patches, barley, and more. The traditional dry land farming of the area had turned wetter and warmer in past years, while much of the southernmost plains had returned to the dustbowl of more than a hundred years earlier.

Swarms of ornithopter beebots hovered between the swaying wheat and oats, while crawlers and mulebots scoured the ground. The robotic harvesting ecosystem was powered by both the sun and waste organic matter that the crawlers brought back to the hives where it was combusted for energy. The harvest was in full swing, but it wasn’t really farming anymore—at least, not like it used to be.

When Bob came outside, Deanna was kneeling, picking up a handful of earth and staring at the horizon. “I often wonder what my daddy would have thought of all this,” she said.

A generation ago, a strain of genetically modified crops—which grew sulphuric acid in their stems at the end of the seasonal cycle—had been experimented with to eliminate tillage. The trials were abandoned, but not before the gene jumped into the wild, burning away a swath of America before it was stopped. With traditional farming already on its last legs, a Defense-sponsored program to root out the damage and replant the Great Plains with semi-wild perennial crops began, using robotic drones to tend and harvest the multicrop.

“Did your family own the place a long time?” Bob asked as they drove into town. Not everything was in the databases.

“A few generations of farmers. But it’s not like when I grew up here. Nobody left, not the old ones, anyway.”

Perennials and robotics had saved the heartland, reducing emissions and erosion, but it had also eliminated the need for humans. Most of the center of America, away from the coasts, became deserted, with herds of reintroduced buffalo again roaming the skeletons of ghost towns strewn across the plains. Food production slid under control of the newly formed Defense Agricultural Division. The Great Plains had become a drone-infested wilderness, and DAD was now feeding the country.

“So were you and Vince, well, were you ever…” Bob struggled to find the right words. He’d been itching to ask since they got here, but he was trying to resist his constant urges to pry. Everything about coming out here—hiding, staying quiet, confined to one place and one small group of people—ran against the grain of Bob’s character.

Deanna laughed. “Yes, we were. A long, long time ago. I met him when my family sent me to MIT to study robotic harvesting, to try to keep up.” She sighed. “And look where that got us.”

DAD had been created at the outbreak of the Weather Wars, when maintaining the food supply became a critical national security function—but it also had a darker purpose. The tens of millions of drones used in food production could be repurposed in the event of an attack, from inside or out. As their pickup truck rumbled its way along the gravel road into town, Sid was covering them, hacking into the sensor systems of the thousands of drones that were recording the truck’s passage, erasing the image of Bob sitting next to Deanna.

“When did you last see Vince?”

She laughed. “Before three weeks ago—when you all arrived—I hadn’t seen or heard from him in more than thirty years.”

“And you just took us in when he showed up on your doorstep?” Bob shook his head. He liked Vince, but the man had a way of taking people for granted that rubbed Bob the wrong way.

Deanna turned to look at Bob. “Vince isn’t so bad, you know. Sure, he can be conceited, loves to talk more than get things done—”

“Superior, controlling,” Bob continued for her.

“Someone’s in a bad mood,” laughed Deanna. “Yeah, all those things, and wouldn’t you be if you were him?” She shook her head. “But you know, he’s also incredibly clever, and no matter how shallow he can be sometimes, you’ll never find a more dedicated friend. He’s not used to dealing with real people.”

Now Bob laughed. “That’s a problem for everyone from Atopia.”

“That’s better.” Deanna smiled. “And you know what?”

The truck bounced on a rock in the road, knocking Bob into the air. He steadied himself. “What?”

“Ten years after Vince and I last spoke, twenty years ago now—just after PhutureNews started to take off—I received a message from the land registry people that someone bought the deed to my family’s farm.”

“What do you mean?” Bob had assumed she owned the place.

“When things went bad here, my family lost it after working the land for nearly a hundred years. But someone bought it and put it back into my name.” Tears welled in Deanna’s eyes. “I never found out who, but I know. That man looks after his own. Taking you in and hiding you was the least I could do.”

Bob looked away. He had to admit, Vince was dedicated. He’d spent a fortune already, and he never wavered. Bob turned back and smiled at Deanna. “He is a good guy, sorry, you’re right.”

Bob released his primary presence again to skim out above the fields. Coming up on the edge of town, they passed abandoned gas stations and grain silos and minimarts. Derelict farmhouses dotted the landscape. Further in the distance, larger, aggressive-looking new developments hugged the foothills. These were massive, a tribute to the new materialism version 2.0 that the explosion of the robotic ecosystem had brought to America. This area of Montana, along the eastern edge of the Rockies stretching up from Yellowstone, was one of the few areas of the interior of America experiencing an influx of new residents, but they weren’t here for the farming.

The reason was below, the magmatic upwelling that brought abundant geothermal power.

It was also the reason the Commune was here.

“It’ll just take me a minute to authenticate this package.” Deanna hopped out of the truck. “Why don’t you follow the bots to the lumber yard? I’ll be there in a sec.”

Bob sent a splinter to find out what a “lumber yard” meant. Thousands of references opened and he began assimilating the data. He eased down the lever that opened the aging pickup’s door, marveling at the mechanics of it. As he jumped out, the robotic carriers clambered out of the bed of the pickup, bouncing the truck up and down on its suspension.

Deanna watched him, amused. “Just follow the bots. They know where they’re going.” She closed her door.

Embarrassed, Bob closed down the lumber splinter. “Sure.”

The quad-bots, nearly as old and dented as the pickup, waited for a cargo transport to pass on the road before running in their awkwardly graceful trot toward a large building down the other side of the street. With a wave to Deanna, Bob burrowed his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and followed them.

It was nearing midday on Monday, and work crews from the surrounding area were stopping in for lunch in the town center. The wide sidewalks, built in an earlier and more optimistic time, felt empty. Trucks and cars competed with robots, legged carriers, and VTOL turbofans for parking spots along the side of the road. Bob scanned the faces he passed, sending splinters to hack and tap into the cameras and sensors nearby to search for anything that might be threatening. Just to be on the safe side, he initiated the identity-theft algorithm from Sid that morphed his ID from one person to the next as he passed them.

At the intersection he stopped and looked up at the traffic signals, the colored lights like ancient semaphores. A knot of workers emptied from a bar at the corner behind him. Bob couldn’t help staring at them, forgetting that he was staring from his physical body and not through an invisible ghost in the wikiworld.

“What you looking at, kid?” said one of the workers, the metal elbow of a robotic prosthetic limb poking through the ripped flannel of his shirt. He took a step forward, wobbling back and forth. Both of his legs had to be mechanical as well.

“Sorry.” Bob looked down and kept walking.

Many of the people here were mandroids of one form or another, Weather War veterans with wrecked bodies replaced by robotics. As ever, rural communities were providing more than their fair share of fodder for the Wars. Bob shook his head, a faraway splinter scanning the scorched earth around the city.

Something triggered an alarm.

Tensing, Bob flooded his body with smarticles, quickening his nervous system, the world slowing down as his mind sped up. Spinning, he shot backwards a few steps, reaching out to grab a young girl just as she tripped and fell out into the street. A transport growled past just inches from them.

The girl gasped.

More threat alarms triggered. Someone grabbed a weapon in the bar behind him. The emotional constructs of the workers nearby spiked into aggression, and a police camera focused on him. The attentional structure of the whole area zeroed in on Bob.

Reacting without thinking, Bob launched a protective wall into the surrounding digital infrastructure, throwing up one hand with a dozen phantoms that he spun around himself and the girl. Doors and windows rolled closed and locked, and the cars and transports passing in the street skidded to a halt. Overhead, turbofans were redirected away from the area. Screeching white noise filled the audio inputs of people nearby, doubling them over in pain, while he scrubbed the local data and video feeds, firewalling off this section of the wikiworld.

“Stop! Stop!” Deanna yelled, running up the sidewalk behind him. “He’s with me.”

Still crouching, Bob looked around. He watched Deanna running toward him in slow motion. The person in the bar with the weapon was kicking down the door Bob just locked. Bob scooped the girl into his arms, getting ready to bolt, and then Deanna was there. She leaned close and held him back.

“It’s okay, let her go,” Deanna whispered into his ear.

With a crash, the door to the bar shattered open and a man appeared holding a shotgun. The gang of workers had disengaged from the white noise attack. They realized where it had come from, and their emotive aggression constructs spiked into directed anger focused on Bob.

“It’s okay, Phil, this is just a mistake!” yelled Deanna, holding a hand up at the man with the shotgun. She repeated to Bob, “Let her go, it’s okay.”

The girl was breathing in quick panicked gasps in Bob’s arms. He released her, and with a cry she pushed him aside and ran toward the man with the shotgun, collapsing into his chest.

“You’re that Baxter kid in the news,” said one of the workers, pointing at Bob. They might be in the country, but they were still connected. Even out here, he couldn’t escape the negative media. “We don’t want no smart-asses around here.”

Smart-asses. He meant people using Atopian smarticles. As pssi had spread, so had the pssi-kids. Celebrities in some circles, pssi-kids’ ability to infer thoughts, to seem like they were everywhere at once, was as unnerving as it was amazing.

“What are you doing mixing with them, Deanna?” asked the man with the shotgun.

“That’s my business.” Deanna picked Bob up. “You mind your own.” She whispered again in his ear. “Release everything, right now.”

Trusting more than understanding, Bob unlocked the windows and doors in the area. Close by and into the distance, their mechanisms clicked and snapped through the silence. The engines of cars and transports in the streets started up again.

Above the hum, Bob heard the man with the shotgun. “You get him out of here.”

“Not exactly the way to keep a low profile,” Deanna joked as they bumped their way back along the dirt road to the farm. “People aren’t used to pssi-kids in rural Montana.”

Bob sulked in the seat beside her. Reality had a different edge here, rough and wild, and wasn’t something Bob could mold the way he was used to. Even a cursory probe of the social cloud showed that almost nobody in Cut Bank was using pssi yet, even as the rest of the outside world had rushed to adopt it in the past weeks. Deanna was nearly the only one in the city even wearing lens displays.

“They’re afraid of what they don’t understand,” added Deanna when Bob didn’t respond. “All they have to go on are the lies spread in the mediaworlds about you.”

“I saved that girl’s life.”

A phuturecast sweep had tripped Bob’s alarms and predicted her stumbling over a dropped package onto the road, falling right into the path of an oncoming transport.

“I know that and you know that, but they didn’t see it. They just saw you running and grabbing her.” Deanna sighed. “That was her father with the gun. I know you know that now, but still, you should’ve looked a bit deeper yourself.”

He’d been too quick in assessing and reacting to the threat. He’d failed to parse that the man grabbing the gun was the father of the girl he was rescuing. He could have defused the situation, but instead he made it worse. He made it more dangerous.

“You want to try?” asked Deanna after another mile of silence, nodding at the wheel. Montana was one of the few states where it was still legal to manually drive—in the rest of the country only automated driving was allowed on public roads.

That got Bob’s attention, and his mind collapsed inward from the cloud of splinters following the truck. “Yeah, maybe I could get my proxxi to learn it…”

“I mean do you want to try it?”

Bob shifted in his seat. “Ah, maybe.” But he wasn’t sure. He spun back out into his splinters.

After another mile of silence slid by, Deanna smiled and looked at Bob. “One moment you can be like gods, and the next, babes in the woods.”

Coming up on the farm, she parked the truck next to the old barn out back. Its graying clapboard sagged under the weight of time. Part of its roof had fallen in. The timbers were rotten.

“Endless reality brings an end to morality, that’s what the doomsdayers are saying about Atopia,” Deanna said as they climbed out of the truck. The robot carriers in the back started unloading the lumber.

“Nothing is endless.” Bob’s main subjective, still flying around the fields, brought itself back to the conversation. “If it was endless reality, nothing would mean anything, and that’s not true.”

“It’s not?” Deanna smiled. She was teasing him.

“I’m here for Willy, my friends, and because Patricia asked me.”

“But you didn’t want to be here, did you?”

Bob looked down. The only place he wanted to be—where he burned to be—was next to Nancy, back on Atopia, but his friends needed him here. “That’s a hard question.”

Deanna paused and waited for him to look up. “But here you are.”

It was time for Deanna to get to work. They walked around the back of the barn and she unlatched its door, swinging it wide open. Something pinged her incoming circuits. Bob waited.

Holding onto the barn door, Deanna smiled. “Looks like one good turn does deserve another.”

“What happened?”

“The Commune granted Vince and Brigitte entry.” Deanna disappeared into the darkness of the barn.

Bob reviewed the message from the Commune’s Reverend that Deanna sent him. “They won’t let me and Sid in? Just Brigitte and Vince?” He tried to make sense of it. If this was in response to Bob saving that girl in town, then why wasn’t he invited?

A gust of air and dust and hay rocketed out from the barn. Bob squinted and staggered back. The sleek outlines of Deanna’s electric jet hovered into view, the setting sun glinting off its polished curves.

“No idea,” said Deanna, on comms now. The turbofan’s engine ratcheted up several decibels as it rose. “But looks like somebody’s watching out for you.” Her jet jumped up into the sky, receding to a tiny dot before disappearing on its way into New York.

Deanna was a two-sleeper—a tweeper—dosing up on a cocktail of melatonin and synthetics to sleep twice a day on her three-and-a-half hour commute into and out of New York on her personal electric turbofan each morning and night. The tweeper movement claimed it was natural to sleep twice a day and that this was the way humans used to sleep. The way they went about it wasn’t natural, though, tweaking their nervous systems with drugs and electronics.

It made no sense to Bob. Why didn’t she just flit into work, using a virtual projection? But this was just one in a long list of things on the “outside” that made no sense. It seemed wasteful, but then all the energy for her back-and-forth trips was sucked up from the ground, from the geothermal generators, and Bob certainly had no standing to complain about anything seeming unnatural.

Bob stared at the spot where Deanna’s jet had disappeared into the sky.

A thin line of light hung on the horizon, the remains of the setting sun disappearing as stars began spreading across the sky. Willy had always heard how nice it was to walk in the countryside, that reality was different than flitting in and experiencing it in the wikiworld. Confined in his virtual self now, he was afraid he’d never get to find out. He let his point-of-view spin out around the perimeters, shifting into infrared. In the plains in the far distance, a herd of buffalo scattered at the noise of a passing drone.

Willy was taking an opportunity for some personal time with Brigitte before she went into the Commune. With pssi installed in Brigitte’s neural pathways, even if Willy was only a virtual presence here, to Brigitte he still looked and felt as real as if he was there physically. Still, he was a lucky man that she didn’t make a big deal of it. They held hands as they walked down a path leading away from the farmhouse.

“Do you really believe all that stuff Patricia told us about Jimmy?” Brigitte asked. “About him taking over Atopia? That he stole Commander Strong’s wife’s mind?” She paused. “Do you think he killed Patricia?”

Willy didn’t hesitate. “She’s dead, isn’t she? Isn’t that enough evidence?”

“Maybe it was natural…”

“Nothing about Atopia is natural. People like her don’t die anymore.” Willy sighed. “Do you really think it was just coincidence?”

“No, I guess I don’t.” Brigitte carefully stepped between glowing sugar beet leaves. Genes from bioluminescent houseplants, a novelty fifty years before, had jumped into the wild a long time ago. Now patches of the outdoors, grasses and plants and even some trees, glowed as brightly as the stars over their heads. “It’s very brave of everyone to come out here.”

Willy kicked his foot along the ground. “They’re here because of me, because of my mess.”

“That’s not true.”

“I think it’s better if my body stays lost. Something worse might happen if we find it.”

“Willy, stop that.”

Holding hands, they looked up at the faint smudge of the comet being brought into Earth orbit. It was being billed as the spectacle of the millennium. Where Atopia was trying to help the world flee into inner virtual spaces, supporters of the Comet Catcher mission were dreaming of humanity jumping outward. Either way was an escape from the crush and clutter that plagued Earth.

“I do know that I’m not the only reason Bob is here,” Willy said after a pause. “He likes to please people. It’s his only fault, if that could be one.” He considered his statement for a second. “That plus his temper.”

“I know why Bob’s upset.” Brigitte stopped to pick one of the glowing leaves at their feet. “I know what it means to be afraid for someone you love.” She looked into Willy’s eyes. “He’s worried about Nancy.”

Willy squeezed her hand. “It’s not just that. You only know Bob as the stoner surfer, but back when we grew up together, he was the star of the Academy. He was Patricia’s favorite. He was a couple with Nancy since they were kids.”

“Was it what happened to his brother?”

Willy nodded. “To us it seems a long time ago, but to him… When Martin committed suicide, Bob blamed himself. Something happened he never told us about. He’s angry at himself, angry at the world, and he hid it under drugs, pushing Nancy away, pushing us all away.”

They continued in silence, walking to sit underneath an oak tree on a hill overlooking the farmhouse.

“I wish we could talk to Nancy,” Brigitte said, breaking the low hum of the drones circling in the fields. “Tell her what’s going on.”

Willy shook his head. “Any message we send her might be intercepted by Jimmy. It would just make things worse—for her and for us.”

Nodding, Brigitte considered. “I bet she’s figured out a lot more than you think already.”

Willy looked at Brigitte “Have you seen her on the mediaworld presentations? Up on stage, holding hands with Jimmy? Doesn’t seem like she’s caught on that something is wrong with him.”

Brigitte raised an eyebrow. Of course she’d been watching the mediaworlds. “You think you guys are the only smart ones?”

Over dinner, Bob, Sid, and Vince had come up with a plan. Sid made contact with a hacking community in the New York underground who might have leads to finding Willy’s body. Now invited, Vince and Brigitte would go to the Commune the next morning, while Sid and Bob would move on directly to New York, hopping a ride in Deanna’s turbofan.

“Nancy’s not the one I’m really worried about.” Willy dug his heels into the earth. “That anger inside of Bob, I’m not sure what he’d do if anything happened to her.”

4

The bipedal buggy lumbered its way up the soggy mountain trail with Brigitte and Vince crammed together in its tight passenger compartment. The path wasn’t maintained, the terrain rough and nearly impassible, but then that was the point—the Commune didn’t like visitors.

This is a wild goose chase, thought Vince as he swayed back and forth. The Commune—where Willy’s mother lived—was the only connection Willy had on the outside. This was the most obvious place to look. Whoever stole Willy’s body, they’d be a million miles from here by now. Ten billion people on the planet, and Vince had already spent a fortune combing it for any sign of Willy.

But then again, this wasn’t Vince’s first goose chase.

At least the future death threats—the unending series of possible future fatalities that plagued him in the past months—had nearly stopped. The imagined futures that pinned him down on Atopia were dissipating the further removed he was from that world. Hotstuff, and the international espionage network she’d set up, had been working hard at containing the future threats. Their efforts paid off. His futures were already becoming part of his past.

On Atopia, the plan to go out and find Willy’s body had seemed crucial. Vince craved the excitement of an adventure. But out here, in the light of day, strapped to the back of a robotic crawler as it rocked between the pine trees, with virtual projections of Willy and Hotstuff riding shotgun, it all felt… well… ridiculous.

Willy’s virtual projection tapped him on the shoulder. “Bob’s dad left a beacon for him yesterday.”

“I thought Sid terminated all communications.” Vince turned to Willy. “Aren’t we hiding?”

“His dad’s getting desperate. He left an encrypted packet attached to a data beacon in the open multiverse,” Willy explained. “Bob retrieved a copy yesterday.”

“And?” There had to be a reason Willy was bringing this up now.

“Bob opened it. His dad was begging him to come back to Atopia, telling him that they would get all the charges cleared.”

In an overlaid display, Vince watched a mediaworld broadcast on the continuing Bob-and-Sid-and-Vince conspiracy: “Why did Sidney Horowitz disappear from Atopia after the attack? We’ve all heard a lot of theories, but the fact that he and Robert Baxter are friends with Vincent Indigo makes it seem all the more suspicious…” Vince cut off the broadcast. He’d heard it a million times already. The newsworlds were predicting more terrorism against Atopia, and every story featured a connection to himself or Sid or even Bob.

Worse was Willy’s predicament, and losing his body was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Before the attack against Atopia, a warrant had been issued for Willy’s arrest for breaching Atopian border security. After the attack, and with Willy’s body missing and his virtual presence having fled, the warrant was stepped up to an international one with Interpol getting involved. He was a hunted man.

Terrorists were blamed for the rise in the number of disappearances of pssi-connected users, but this didn’t seem to be deterring the public from flocking to it. The media didn’t specify who the terrorists were, just that their aim was to slow down the spread of Atopia’s product release. The implication was always that Sid and Bob were tied to Terra Nova. That Willy’s body counted as one of the “disappeared” didn’t detract the media from lumping him in with the Terra Novan conspiracy theories.

“And Jimmy and Nancy were hanging over his dad’s shoulder during the whole message,” Brigitte added. “Jimmy was saying that he’d take care of everything, that he and Nancy were worried sick.”

“She sure doesn’t look worried on stage,” Vince said, regretting it even as it came out. Nancy might look happy in the press events and promotion holograms that were promoting Atopia, but who really knew what was going on in the background, what she might have been forced into doing?

But then again, that was exactly the point: who really knew?

Hotstuff frowned at him. “She’s been trying to get in touch with us, but Bob blocks her. Of course she’s worried. She’s thinking the worst.”

And the worst could be very bad.

Vince nodded, but his mind was already elsewhere, gathering the last incoming data before their connections were cut off. The trees thinned as they reached the plateau. In a clearing before them a network of dusty dirt roads stretched into buildings and farmhouses that undulated into the distance. Storm clouds gathered over snowy peaks, while cows huddled for protection under ponderosa pines that lined the edges of the farms and forests.

Vince instructed the walker where to stop. “This is it,” he announced. Comms would be cut off soon. Inside the event horizon of the Commune, there were no wikiworld feeds, no data streams at all. In a few minutes, he’d need to shut off his feeds from the PhutureNews for the first time in thirty years.

“Don’t be so nervous, boss.” Hotstuff was done up in safari gear for the trip. “I’ve got it covered. We’ll wait for you here.”

With flare-ups in the Weather Wars subsiding, the mediaworlds were filling up their empty slots with an unending stream of reports of new apocalyptic cults, and the Commune was the granddaddy of them all. For the first time they caught a glimpse of the shimmering halo that hung in the sky over the Commune. Drones hovered around its perimeter. One skimmed in front of them, its angular curves black and menacing. Behind, almost invisible, floated the aerial plankton, tiny bots that floated on the breeze, their nano-scale rotors keeping them in place. They formed a shell a few dozen feet thick, stretching ten miles around the circumference of the Commune and a mile above it, acting as a giant, electrically-connected Faraday cage that shielded the Commune from any outside electromagnetics and confounded visual and audio signals, as well.

Nearing the outermost road, the walker stopped and squatted.

“I guess this is where we say goodbye,” said Vince to Hotstuff as he unhooked himself from the seat and clambered down, stopping to lend a hand to Brigitte.

Not only would comms be shut down, but so would the smarticle networks in their bodies. They’d been pinged with warnings to turn them off the last hundred yards as they approached the perimeter. This meant Hotstuff and Willy couldn’t make the trip. The walker stood up and turned around, making its way back the way they came. Brigitte and Willy began their goodbyes, and Vince turned away.

The Commune was mute on the topic of how they were supposed to get there. Their only instructions were to meet the robotic walker at a specified longitude and latitude along a mountain road. Vince squinted into the distance and then up at the gathering storm clouds. “Maybe the rest of the way on foot?”

“Don’t think so.” Brigitte pointed to a trail of dust rising on one of the roads coming out from the town center.

It was a horse and cart.

Vince shook his head. “You can’t be serious.”

The storm clouds churned over the mountaintops, obscuring them, as the buggy and horse neared. There was one driver, dressed in black with a large matching hat. The rolling clouds hit the Commune’s perimeter, skidding across its surface to form a dome high in the sky before breaking. The man on the cart motioned to them, urging them toward him.

Brigitte and Vince walked forward. The aerial plankton opened a path in the perimeter wall, and they continued at a jog, running to meet the driver and cart on the other side.

A young man, his cheeks ruddy, pulled up the horses. “Wooooah.”

They all stared at each other.

“Come on, don’t just stand there.” The young man waved at the clouds and coming rain. “We’ll be soaked in a minute.”

Vince stepped forward. “And you are…?”

The young man laughed, holding the reins in one hand while he tipped his hat with the other. “Zephyr.” He said it like they should already know him. “Zephyr McIntyre. Didn’t he mention me?”

Vince and Brigitte exchanged glances.

“Willy McIntyre’s cousin, Zephyr. You’re his friends, right?”

5

Jimmy scadden leaned back in his chair. “You have a responsibility.”

Nancy looked out the glass window-walls of the Cognix boardroom. Beyond the glittering blue security blanket, a thousand feet below, the leafy green canopy of the Atopian top-side forests swayed in the breeze. Waves caressed the white sand beaches. A paradise, but one in which she was coming to realize she was trapped.

“To who, you?” she replied, turning to face her captor.

“Yes, to me.” Jimmy looked around the conference room at Rick Strong, Commander of the Atopian Defense Forces, and Herman Kesselring, the main shareholder and CEO of Cognix Corporation. Dr. Granger sat at a corner of the table, almost behind Jimmy. “To me, to all of us here, to the entire human race.”

How easily the words rolled off his tongue. She remembered the awkward Jimmy Scadden of their shared childhood, the one that could barely get a word out. In his struggle to connect, whatever stumbling words he’d managed had at least been honest.

But no more.

“I want—no, I need—to go out and find Bob,” Nancy insisted. Had Jimmy noticed her infiltrating one of his meetings? She still hadn’t told anyone else what she’d found out.

“What we want to do, and we need to do, these are sometimes two different things.” Jimmy looked at Commander Strong. “Isn’t that right?”

“I agree,” said the Commander. “It’s too dangerous outside Atopia, especially now.”

Jimmy held no direct authority at Board level, but official positions didn’t mean much anymore. Nancy wondered again what power Jimmy held over the Board. Perhaps it was the same power that he held over her.

Fear.

“Too dangerous?” Nancy questioned. “For who?”

Jimmy smiled. “For you.”

Just two words, and yet so many ways to interpret them.

“It wouldn’t look right if you went out and searched for Bob yourself. A bit of a conflict of interest, no?”

Finally, a glimmer of truth.

“I don’t need to remind you that he’s stolen sensitive Atopian intellectual property,” continued Jimmy. “And aiding fugitives.”

“Marie is not your property nor Atopia’s,” replied Nancy. “She was Patricia’s proxxi, her property to do with as she liked. And neither Sid nor Bob or even Vince is a fugitive, despite what the mediaworlds say.”

“Our agents report Patricia’s data in Baxter’s possession,” Jimmy replied. “We have no proof that she gave it to him. He stole it. Of all people, why wouldn’t she have given it to you? Why did he run off and hide? Have you asked yourself these questions?”

Nancy nodded. Of course she had. This was a losing battle. “Can we just continue with the situational report?”

“As you wish.” Jimmy nodded at Kesselring, who in turn gave a nod to Commander Strong.

Commander Strong glanced at Nancy, and then took control. The primary perspective of the meeting swept into a synthetic space projection.

“As soon as we opened the Atopian multiverse, we had skirmishes erupting between nation-states and corporation-states in virtual spaces that tracked back to assets in the physical world.” The Commander began detailing worlds that spun through the attendees’ meta-cognition systems, memories, and impressions implanted at required and desired detail in the minds of the observers.

Atopia’s fight with Terra Nova was polarizing the world, and this fracturing was limiting the spread of pssi in some jurisdictions. There was some commercial success penetrating spaces controlled by India and Russia, but most of Africa was out of their sphere of influence. None of this worried Commander Strong, but Kesselring wasn’t happy.

The release of pssi into the general population was generating unexpected chaos. Most of it was due to things her Aunt Patricia had restricted when she was in charge, but had been included in the release after her departure: emo-porning and uncontrolled neural fusioning were at the top of the list of problems. The macroeconomic models were proceeding on plan, but the social chaos on specific levels hadn’t been anticipated.

Nancy stayed quiet while Commander Strong finished his threat report on ownership graphs of corporations controlled by synthetic beings, then a report on a Terra Novan virtual world applying for United Nations sovereign status, but stopped him as he began talking about the disappearances.

“Why has there been no special investigation?” Nancy asked. It was almost beyond disbelief.

The biggest problem in the roll-out was customer support, helping people find their way out of virtual worlds they got lost in. Thousands of them were never found, disappeared into the pssi multiverse, their bodies still perfectly healthy, but their minds lost in some inaccessible corner of a virtual world.

“Over a billion people have plugged into pssi in the past two months,” Kesselring objected. “Less than one in a hundred thousand is reported as ‘disappeared,’ as you call it, and from what I’ve heard, almost all are recovered after a few days. We can’t—”

“Have a few people off pleasuring themselves in the multiverse stop what we’re doing?” Nancy completed his sentence for him. “How long are you going to stick to that line? From my numbers, the problem is accelerating at an exponential pace.” She turned to Commander Strong. “Don’t you see any connection between this and what happened to your wife?”

The Commander returned her gaze, but she could see his mind was elsewhere. He spent most of his free time in virtual spaces with reruns of his proxxid children. His wife, Cindy, was still in a vegetative state, trapped inside her own mind. Even in meetings like this, he kept a reality skin of a 1940s-era wikiworld pegged around him that reminded him of her.

Jimmy pulled on everyone, bending their attentional matrices back to him. “This is a matter for local law enforcement to investigate, isn’t it?” He frowned at Nancy. “And why are you researching this?”

Nancy frowned back at him. “Because it’s important.”

“What’s important to resolve at this meeting is the Synthetic Beings Charter of Rights that you’ve been championing. It would destabilize the entire economic structure we’ve worked to build.”

Nancy had known this was coming. “Even you must admit that glasscutters and hackers terminating our AIs are becoming a problem; we need clearer laws to deal with this.”

“In civil law, yes.” Kesselring joined the discussion, thumping his hand on the table. “But not international criminal law. What are you trying to do?”

Nancy was alone in this. It was Patricia’s most treasured legacy, and one she promised to try and protect. “When birthing a new AI, there needs to be some international framework for responsibility. As it is—”

“There is a framework, and it’s called copyright,” Jimmy interrupted.

“I am not going to support a retraction of the Synthetic Beings Charter of Rights.”

“SyBCoR is dead in the water, at least as it stands now.” Kesselring looked out the window. “You need to be practical.”

Nancy laughed. “Practical?”

“Or at least pragmatic.” Kesselring looked at her. “Push us, and we can push you.”

Nancy stopped laughing. “What does that mean?”

“Don’t force us to issue an arrest warrant for Baxter,” Kesselring replied. “This could escalate into a national security issue for our partners if we let them know how much information is now in his hands. We have more important things to worry about, no?”

So it’s come to threats and blackmail. Nancy looked out the window at the white sand beaches, then at the distant stripe of America’s coastline on the horizon. Where was Bob, why wouldn’t he respond to her messages? Just weeks after Aunt Patricia’s death, and Nancy felt like she was failing her, but what choice did she have?

Nancy sighed. “Fine. You have my vote to retract SyBCoR, at least for now.”

6

Bob stared at the Great Seawall of New York at the edge of Battery Park. It was the first time he’d seen it with his naked, natural eyes. If this place wasn’t still the financial capital of the world, they would have given up and moved Manhattan by now. Much of the island was now below sea level, the city guarded by an immense system of dikes and seawalls. Money was holding back the sea, but time was a thief and eventually would steal it all.

“We need to wait a little bit longer.” Sid slapped Bob on the back. “The glasscutters need to verify us in person.”

That morning, Deanna had smuggled them into Manhattan on her private turbofan. Her DAD credentials gave her automated passage through the NYC passport controls. In the meantime, Sid had sent digital copies of himself and Bob to random locations all over the world, leaving forensic breadcrumbs that should be enough to cover their tracks for as long as they needed to stay in one place.

Despite the soggy weather, the Battery was still half-full of tourists, and Bob and Sid wound their way through them. Sid’s identity-theft algorithm was stealing the credentials of people they passed, briefly pasting them as their own into the wikiworld feeds. It was hacking the audio and visual feeds in the area, replacing their images with the image of someone nearby, then hopping to someone else as they moved.

They were ghosts in the crowd.

They had come to meet, in person, some members of a glasscutter guild that said it had leads on where Willy’s body might be. Waiting at Battery Park was part of the vetting process. The glasscutters wanted to verify Sid and Bob in person, sample their DNA using a remote sniffer, to make sure they were who they said they were. Bob couldn’t argue with their diligence.

The twilight at the end of the day was gray as the lights of the city lit up the sky, the concrete and metal and glass of the city the same color as the sky and the sea, all of it indistinct from the other in a precipitation that was neither rain nor mist, but something shifting in between.

“So this is New York,” Sid laughed, staring into the gray mist. “Been here a million times, but never in the flesh. Can’t say I like it better like this. I should go visit Uncle Avi just to see the look on his face—”

Bob grabbed Sid’s arm.

“I know, I know, we can’t talk to anyone.” Grinning, Sid brushed off Bob’s hand.

Bob shook his head. “You know who you’ve always reminded me of?”

“Why do I feel like I don’t want to know?”

“Jimmy.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.” Bob smiled. “You guys are two peas in a pod. It’s why I talked to him way back then.”

Sid smiled. “So I remind you of a psychopath?”

“Not the psychopath part, but the hidden nerd, thinking you’re better than everyone else.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I mean that in the best possible way.” Bob put an arm around Sid, pushing him forward. “Come on, keep moving.”

Images of Jimmy hung everywhere around them—on billboards and floating holograms at street corners—part of the ubiquitous advertising campaign for the product launch of Atopian pssi. Beside him in many of the advertisements was Nancy.

Bob didn’t overlay a reality filter to erase the images. Filtering reality here felt dangerous. Instead he augmented it, overloading his senses, searching for threats, always on the hair trigger. Fifty feet in the air a self-propelled NYPD gun platform hovered past, and tiny ornithopter drones buzzed through crowds like insects.

A news overlay announced that Atopia had withdrawn support for SyBCoR, led by Nancy.

Sid glanced at Bob, seeing the same news report. “What the hell’s going on?”

Bob studied the background of the report. There was little detail, apart from an admission that SyBCoR would undermine the financial structure of the modern world. But there was no way Nancy would’ve withdrawn support for that without some intense pressure being applied to her.

Seeing Nancy’s face hovering above him, worrying about what was happening to her—it felt like a spike was being driven into Bob’s head. He escaped by letting a splinter sweep above the bay, sailing over the top of the Statue of Liberty. She was ringed by her own skirt of concrete to keep out the rising waters. Spinning further out to sea, he turned his point-of-view to look back at the twinkling city under the setting sun, extending his view as wide as he could. The AEC—American East Coast—was now over a hundred million people in an unending metropolis that stretched from Boston to Washington.

At the start of the twenty-first century, there’d been only thirty nations of the world’s three hundred with declining populations, but now only thirty had ones that were increasing. The humanscape, like the seas and land, was stagnating. Many of the big cities of over a hundred million—Guangzhou, Mumbai, Sao Paulo—had gone feral, their ground levels given over to street gangs. The rich lived in their padded penthouses, part spas and part life-support systems, living out unending twilights in endlessly aging bodies. They said the meek would inherit the Earth, but nobody said anything about the state it would be in when it was time for the handover.

“Really?” Sid said, interrupting Bob’s thoughts. “Jimmy? I remind you of Jimmy?”

Bob pulled his main perspective back into his body. “Not happy with that, huh?”

“No, I mean—”

“What I really meant was, you both value intelligence and knowledge above everything else. I think that whatever we find out here, maybe we could use that to tweak Jimmy somehow. Get inside his head.”

Sid walked in silence for a few moments. “Oooh, I see what’s going on.” He turned to face Bob, walking backward. “You want to save Jimmy. You don’t think he’s as bad as Patricia says he is.”

“I don’t know.” Bob wagged his head back and forth. “Maybe, I just don’t see him doing all this stuff. He’s changed somehow.”

“People change…”

“I know. But come on, nobody ever thinks they’re really a bad person. They always think they’re doing whatever they’re doing for some good reason. So what’s his reason?”

“Cause he’s gone bat shit?”

“I’m serious. Ever think that Jimmy is just mad at the world?” But was he just projecting his own feelings onto Jimmy?

Sid considered this. “Still doesn’t give you the right to do whatever you want.”

“Yeah, but it gives you a reason. If he thinks he was abused by his parents, hard to blame him…”

Sid shook his head and laughed. “You’d love a leech if I gave you a sob story about it.” He grabbed Bob and pulled him forward. “Move faster, the identity theft algorithm works better with constant motion.”

Bob watched the names and details of the people that walked by him pop up into splinters, each one briefly pasting the identity onto Bob. Mr. Brooks, brushing by Bob on his right, had just left his wife and was on his way to his mistress. Peter Lucasis, standing a few feet behind Bob, was probably thinking that he should have never let his girlfriend convince him into getting a cat. All of this was derived from data that was either publicly available or hacked from databases on the fly.

New York was refreshing in one sense—Bob’s metasenses felt full again.

Already half of New Yorkers had started using pssi, and Bob let his secondary subjective spin through the mishmash of childish reality skins they were sporting, flimsy virtual realities he could poke a hole through with his phantoms. The more people that shared a reality, the stronger that reality became, but here they were all stuck in their own. Most of them hadn’t bothered to change their conscious security settings, and he heard their meta-cognition systems chattering around him like an angry beehive.

Worse were the non-augmented humans. They weren’t pssi-aware, but there were enough smarticles floating in the air of New York already that some suffused into their bodies, passively interacting with the environment. They weren’t supposed to be active, but Sid’s systems could tap into them, sense their nerve impulses to paint a picture of their unprotected minds.

Bob sensed that the man next to him was about to ask him to take a picture. The words hadn’t yet formed in his mouth, and he hadn’t even really decided yet, not consciously. But the nerve impulses that preceded his decision making were already there. It was fractions of a second perhaps, but the decision had already been made, and the man wasn’t even aware of it yet.

Bob was. Bob waited.

Fractions of a second stretched out in time as Bob quickened his nervous systems in a short burst. “Want me to frame a picture for you?”

The man turned, surprised. “Yeah. Please. Ah, Steve Barker, 06913564.”

Bob had already stolen Steve’s unique social marker to use as his own identity for the next seconds, but Steve didn’t know that. Bob made a show of entering the USM by typing into the air with one hand. Sid stopped and turned to watch from a few paces away. Gathering up his daughter and wife, Steve took a step toward the Sea Wall. Bob stepped back and smiled, framing some stills from the wikiworld and sending them into the man’s social cloud.

“Thank you,” said Steve’s wife, and with a nod and a smile, they continued on their way.

The man hadn’t even been aware of the request he was about to make, even though it was preordained by his own chemical nerve signals. It was more than phuturing, more than making statistical predictions based on past events. It was a foregone conclusion, a decision already made before Steve consciously knew it. Was he really making a choice? Did he have a choice? Or was it all an illusion, just preprogrammed? Was all the world just a stage for a play already written?

The wind pushed a break in the clouds, revealing the faint twinkle of some brave stars trying to shine down on Gotham.

“Do you ever wonder why?”

Bob snapped his attention back into his body. Near to him was a man, sitting on a park bench, in a gray raincoat with a hydrophobic shell. The falling mist of rain danced away from him in a veil as the man looked toward the bay. That’s odd. No hits popped up in Bob’s identity algorithms. “Why what?”

The man looked into Bob’s eyes, smiling. “A hundred billion stars in this Milky Way galaxy, and a hundred billion more galaxies just like it. Life fills every available crack in this Solar System, and most stars have planets—many of them similar to Earth.”

“And yet?” Bob was still trying to get an identity.

“And yet not a peep from anyone out there. Do you ever wonder why?”

Except for the POND data, thought Bob, remembering the mysterious signal from a supposedly extraterrestrial source that Patricia had detected with her Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector. She’d instructed them to keep quiet about it, but perhaps Bob should release the news. It might even pull society from its downward spiral if the world realized that someone else was out there. But first they needed to decode the data. That’s what Patricia asked them to do. What was inside the message might be as important as the message itself.

Bob shook his head, feeling the weight bearing down. He was the wrong person for this job.

The man was still smiling at Bob. “No? You never wonder? You look like you do.”

Bob sensed that something had gone terribly wrong. In his mind the Sea Wall before them opened up and the irresistible force of the black ocean beyond came rushing through, swallowing them and everything in its path, sweeping the world away. The vision pulled the breath out of him and he had to lean on the bench the man was sitting on.

The man reached out to steady him. “Sometimes, to look out there, we need to look inside.”

The man looked familiar, but Bob’s internal systems were sure he’d never seen the stranger’s face before. Bob sent splinters shooting out into the multiverse, looking for a recognition point, for any identity associated with his strange visitor. Still nothing. Bob regained his balance and tried to string out the conversation to buy time. “I don’t think about it much.”

The man retreated and smiled. “You should.”

Bob’s identity-theft splinters, able to slice through most security blankets in the outside world like butter, were still coming up blank. He felt a phantom pulling his attention away. He turned to find Sid’s skewed grin.

“We can go. We’ve been vetted.”

“By who?”

Sid pulled up the lapels on his jacket against the rain. “I don’t know. They kept their distance and asked me specifically not to scan for them.”

Bob flicked his chin toward his shoulder. “Who’s that guy?”

“What guy?” Sid craned his neck to scan the crowd.

Bob turned, but the man on the bench was gone. He rewound his inVerse to replay the conversation, but it was blank as well. There was nothing in his meta-cognition systems or external memories that recorded the event, nothing but what was in his own head. Bob closed his eyes. Had he imagined it?

Sid sensed Bob searching through his systems. “I think you need to get some sleep.” He put an arm on Bob’s shoulder. “Let’s get back to Deanna’s apartment.”

7

Rain hammered down on the tin roof of the church vestry.

Vince watched the Reverend prepare tea on a side table, a tiny kettle whistling atop a heating pad. The Reverend stooped to fetch a set of china cups and pot from a shelf. Vince looked around. He’d imagined something rougher, something more oppressive—creaking doors, dim rooms, an agonized Jesus hanging from a cross—but the interior was sparse and neat. A water-driven radiator rose up from the wooden floor, filling the space with hissing heat. They hadn’t outrun the storm. Soaked, splattered in mud, Vince and Brigitte sat awkwardly in front of the Reverend’s desk. Zephyr went next door for dry clothes and blankets.

So this is what it feels like to be in the middle of a black hole. The sound of the multiverse silence was deafening to Vince’s metasenses. No data feeds, no messages, no information other than what his own mind and body could provide. No Van Eck radiation could get through the shield over the Commune; comms jamming, image jamming, even externally-stored memory jamming of those going in and out. The inside of the Commune was an informational black hole, protected by the American Family Values faction of the Democrats, a neo-wild project of human preservation.

Entering the Commune was passing into another world in more ways than one.

The Reverend smiled at them. “Sorry about the rain.” The kettle pinged, and he picked it up and filled the teapot. “Zephyr is… well, the boy was late.”

“So you’re Willy’s grandfather?” Brigitte turned to face the Reverend. “He told me so much about you.”

“Is that right?” The Reverend wasn’t asking, wasn’t telling. He picked up the teapot and two cups and placed them on the large desk before them.

Vince heard the tick-tock of a clock in the hallway outside. The wall behind the desk was filled with books, and Vince squinted to read what was written on the spines: several Bibles, Chaucer, Jung, Nag Hammadi, Blavatsky. A painting of a crystal mountain in a desert hung on the side wall. “Don’t you want to know why we’re here?” Vince asked.

“You said…” The Reverend paused, leaning against his desk. “You said you were Willy’s friends and wanted to speak with his mother.”

“Yes, but—”

“Then that’s what you’re here for.”

“Is she here?” Brigitte glanced over her shoulder at the door.

“She is.” The Reverend stood up straight. “I’m going to see where on Earth our Zephyr is with those clothes.” Walking toward the door he motioned at the teapot. “Serve yourselves. And don’t try activating your smarticle networks.” He left the door ajar.

Vince leaned forward for the teapot. “Don’t they find it even slightly ironic to be driving horses and carts under a vast nano-bot radiation shield?” He felt some warmth seeping into his hands. “Old man McIntyre must be over a hundred—tell me he’s not using the latest in gene modification—”

“I can hear you, Mr. Indigo.” The Reverend was in the doorway. “These should about do.” He tossed a pile of clothes into Vince’s lap. Walking forward, he unfolded a blanket that he brought around Brigitte’s shoulders. She shivered and gripped it around herself, silently mouthing thank you.

The Reverend continued back behind his desk, passing a hand over its center as he sat down. A three-dimensional hologram sprang up over its center, an image of the bipedal transport Vince and Brigitte used on their way up, now threading its way down the mountain trail in the rain.

“We Neo-Luddites aren’t against technology. What we are against is the replacement of humans by technology.” The Reverend waved his hand, and charts and graphs spread out to fill the room. “DAD now has two robots for every human, and ten times that many if you count synthetic intelligences. We’re becoming a very small ruling minority, Mr. Indigo.”

Vince did his research before coming. “Weren’t Luddites the ‘machine destroyers’?”

“Machine destroyers, yes.” The Reverend turned the phrase around in his mouth. “But that is not what we do. I think you misunderstand us, Mr. Indigo. We offer our youth an opportunity to connect with nature, work with their hands, and delve into the depths of their humanity before…”

The Reverend went silent.

“Before what?” Brigitte asked after a respectful pause.

The Reverend rocked back in his chair. “Forgive my caution. The Commune has enemies, and this business with my grandson William has inspired new ones.”

“Father, you know Willy is innocent.”

Vince and Brigitte turned to the doorway to see a middle-aged woman with clear gray eyes smiling at them.

Brigitte jumped up. “You must be Willy’s mother!” The woman nodded. In two steps Brigitte was taking her hand, leaning in to kiss her cheek. “It’s a pleasure.”

Willy’s mother accepted the kiss but kept her distance. “Likewise, I’m sure.”

The Reverend stood and stared at Vince. “So you wanted to speak with Elspeth?”

“Is it possible to talk with her in private…?” Vince asked.

The Reverend gestured to the room. “This is as private as you’ll be allowed, I’m afraid.”

A sense of absurdity overcame Vince—how to tell a mother that her son was gone, but not gone? “We have some disturbing news, and we were hoping you might be able to help us.” He looked into Elspeth’s eyes. “Willy’s missing—or, er, his body is missing.”

Elspeth’s brow wrinkled. “What do you mean?”

“A few months ago…” Vince began but then stopped. A few months ago he’d been living in endless virtual worlds while running from future death threats. How was he going to explain their world to Willy’s Neo-Luddite mother?

“Perhaps I could try?” suggested Brigitte.

At a loss, Vince nodded.

“Willy is fine,” Brigitte started to say, “so you don’t need to worry, but we—”

“I know,” Elpeth said.

Vince cocked his head. “You know what?”

Elspeth looked at the Reverend. He met her gaze and nodded. “That he’s fine,” she replied.

Vince frowned. “And how do you know that?”

“Because he was just here.”

8

The tip of the Great Pyramid, covered in electrum, hovered in the sky under the hot eye of god. Guardians lined the leafy promenade leading up to the pyramid’s entrance. Its base on four sides was surrounded by lush gardens and temples. A priest walked beside Bob as they made their way up the promenade toward the pyramid. “Intelligence is that which creates attachment,” the priest said. His face was hidden.

Bob looked up at the Sphinx. It smiled down benevolently, the smooth curve of its nose glistening in the midday sun. “Isn’t it the self that creates attachment?”

The priest nodded. “And it is the self that arises from intelligence.”

Bob fought the dream. He tried to launch himself into flight to soar above the pyramids and into the desert beyond, but he felt like he was caught in molasses. His feet kept moving along the marble walkway, locked in step with the priest’s. Thoughts curled around his mind like sand swirling on the desert wind.

They reached the base of the pyramid and began up the steps to its entrance. The guards parted before them. “It is only through the destruction of the self that peace can be realized,” the priest said as they reached the top of the stairway.

With a final glance at the blue sky, Bob ducked his head and followed the priest into the dark tunnel. He had to hunch over and shuffle to get through.

Bob hated small spaces, ever since he had gotten stuck in the passenger cannon access tunnel on Atopia as a child, searching for ways to access the upper levels directly from their habitat. It took hours for rescuers to get him out. Even with his mind able to soar free into synthetic worlds, he’d known that his body was trapped, that the perceived freedom was an illusion.

Between sputtering oil torches, the tunnel was pitch black, leading them down and down. He could only see the shifting shape of the priest ahead. The tunnel eventually opened up into a room that was filled with more guards, and another tunnel led upward from that, larger this time, with a wooden walkway and ropes hanging along its side.

The oppressive weight of millions of tons of stone hung above them, squeezing Bob’s mind. “So that peace can be brought to what?” he asked. “To the self?” That didn’t make any sense. If the self was destroyed, to what were they bringing peace?

The main chamber opened up before them, and the priest urged him into the room. It was the heart of the Great Pyramid. More priests, their heads bowed, were arrayed around a large stone sarcophagus. Its lid was off, set to one side. Colorful hieroglyphs danced on the walls around them in the flickering torchlight. Bob’s pssi instantly translated them, and the stories splintered into his mind—stories of Isis and her husband Osiris, his body quartered and dragged to the four corners, and then his return to life and his betrayal by his brother Seth.

The priests began chanting. A light grew out of a crystal structure within the sarcophagus, rising up to form a shape that hung in space. The shape solidified into a creature that hovered above the assembled. Sobek, the crocodile god, stared at Bob with fiery eyes and said, “It looks like Willy’s proxxi is running from us.”

The god’s face morphed into a green version of Sid.

The priests continued to chant.

“Maybe it’s not his proxxi who stole his body,” Bob replied.

The confines of the sarcophagus chamber melted into the concrete grays of New York City. Self-driving cars swept by on wet streets. There were no street lights or signals, just a never-ending stream of traffic that melted together at junctions and around corners. Sid had left Deanna’s apartment while Bob was asleep, and a splinter, in the middle of a conversation, was integrating into Bob’s consciousness as he awoke.

The dreams were becoming more intense.

Sid noticed the arrival of Bob’s primary self. “Are you okay?” he asked. “You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine,” Bob replied. He didn’t want to talk about the dreams. “Just waking up. Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You needed the rest.” Sid smiled. “Besides, you’ve never been on time for anything in your life. Why so surprised?”

Vince was with them virtually. He’d climbed outside the Commune’s perimeter to tell them the news that Willy’s body had preceded them there. A projection of Vince’s virtual self lounged on a chair, sitting beside Willy and Sid. In the background, multibots were busy setting up the tables and chairs of Herald Square for the day. The square’s cover peeled back like a blooming flower as the sun broke through the clouds overhead. The rain finally stopped.

Sid returned to the discussion while Bob assimilated the backstory. “If Willy’s proxxi didn’t steal his body, then the question is who, or what, did? And why?” He stretched and rubbed his eyes.

“To gain access to the Commune?” Vince suggested. “It’s almost impossible to get in there.”

“Hold on.” Bob slipped his brain into the conversation. “Why couldn’t it have been proxxi?” Nothing suggested it wasn’t Willy’s proxxi who was still guarding Willy’s body.

Sid shrugged. “How would he have kept the smarticle network operating in Willy’s body while he was in the Commune?” Because all outgoing communications would have been cut off from Willy’s mind, was Sid’s point. Sid looked at Willy. “Did you have any gaps in your conscious stream?”

“None at all,” Willy replied.

It was only when Willy’s body left the Commune that access had been granted to Vince and Brigitte. Was it coincidence, or was the Commune part of whatever was happening?

Bob looked around. People walking by kept their distance. They mostly kept outside the information security blanket that glittered in the augmented wikiworld around them. But it wasn’t just the security blanket. Vince’s phuturing network was also altering their trajectories without them realizing it, keeping them looking away.

Bob and Sid were effectively invisible to people on the street just because nobody bothered to look at them.

Sid’s identity-thieving algorithm was active, of course, and Bob’s own credentials were constantly shifting, through Rocky, and then Susanna, Bill, Quentin, all of it layered in a time-cloaking algorithm he and Sid had created as kids.

And almost all of the passing people were already on pssi.

A girl approached, walking her dog, and Bob accepted her open reality share, fusing his perception into a bubble-gum-inspired teddy-bear world. The multibots finishing arranging the chairs sprouted lavender fur. Everyone on the street looked happy behind vacant smiles. The girl had virtually fused her frontal lobes with her dog, and they were chatting about what park they wanted to visit.

A woman in a suit brushed past the girl, and Bob shifted into her reality skin. A sleek minimalist world slid into his sensory frames, and a brass-and-glass metropolis rose up out of the teddy-bear world of the girl. The multibots, busy parking themselves under the bright red star of Macy’s along the sidewalk bordering the square, shed their lavender fur and became menacing in black.

New Yorkers were early adopters of new technologies, but this might be the last gadget they’d ever install. Bob could already sense psombies passing by on the streets—people whose bodies were under control of someone else while the owners amused themselves in virtual worlds—or parts of composites that fused their neural systems together into collectives.

The pace of cultural change was gaining speed.

Vince rocked back in his chair. “I think this might be a waste of time. Whoever stole Willy’s body doesn’t want to be found. We should be getting in touch with Terra Nova directly. For God’s sake, they’re still funneling the communication link into his body.”

Bob nodded. Getting in touch with Terra Nova was the next logical step. Ever since the attack on Atopia, though, Terra Nova had been blockaded in the physical and cyber realms. Secure communication from this side of the world was difficult, so they needed to get physically closer. “Way ahead of you,” said Sid, uploading the details. Deanna had already arranged transit for them on the New York passenger cannon, to Lagos in Africa.

“What about Sintil8?” Willy asked. His image flickered.

Terra Nova linked the connection between Willy’s mind—in his lost body—and Willy’s virtual presence here, and they were having trouble maintaining the connection. Bob worried that it might wink out altogether, exiling Willy into the outer reaches of the multiverse.

Vince smiled. “Leave the gangsters to me.” His future-altering espionage and counter-espionage network had tentacles reaching into the underworld. “I think it’s time we switched gears. I’ll be in New York the day after tomorrow. There’s not much more I can do in the Commune.”

“Perfect.” Sid fiddled with his phantoms, uploading data into Vince’s networks. “After we pick up some more bootleg smarticles, tonight Bob and I are going to Hell.”

9

In the blue daytime sky, Wormwood was just visible to the naked eye. The comet’s dust-and-ion tails separated as it neared the sun, turning it into a tiny feathery “v” in the sky. Vince glanced at Zephyr, his chaperone on the hike past the perimeter of the Commune.

They had walked out on foot, two miles each way for some fresh air. Vince had needed to get outside of the Commune’s perimeter to get communication uplink, to talk with Sid and Bob back in New York. No comms in or out from under the radiation shield. A splinter of Vince’s mind was still lounging on a chair in Herald Square, chatting with Willy and Sid, but his main subjective was back at the edge of the Commune with Zephyr, staring into the sky at the comet.

Vince shielded his eyes from the sun with one hand. “Quite the sight, huh?”

Zephyr nodded, his mouth open, staring up. “Grandpa says people are bringing it here on purpose, that it’s one of the signs.”

Vince rolled his eyes. Sign of what? That people on Earth were doing bat-shit-nuts things like building Communes? But as crazy as what they were doing was, a part of him was fascinated. Below the surface of the Commune was a network of tunnels built into the bedrock of the mountains. The Commune wasn’t just an alternate-Amish experiment—it was a fortress for the end of times. He respected their dedication. More than that, these were genuinely nice people. That was a rare thing in this world.

And he had to admit, he felt safe inside the Commune’s perimeter.

When Vince shared that Willy wasn’t running Willy’s body anymore, the Reverend helped Vince track down what Willy’s body had been doing inside the Commune. After talking to the town librarian, they discovered that Willy’s body had been reading old manuscripts, ancient copies of Gnostic texts that detailed the Apocalypse. Hoarding ancient texts like this was the sort of thing the Commune was famous for, the prototype for hundreds of copycat doomsday cults that were sprouting up around the world.

“Do you really buy into all that stuff?” Vince asked, still staring at the comet.

“And ye will know the truth, and it shall make you free,” Zephyr replied. It was early morning, and the grass underfoot was stiff with the frost of the night before. He turned to face Vince. “Do you know what apocalypse means?”

A drone buzzed past them, darting back and forth to capture motes of spent aerial-plankton that fell like snow, collecting them to return to the recycling center. The rising sun lit up the face of the mountain behind the Commune village in the distance.

Vince shrugged. “Death? Destruction? The end of days?”

“No.” Zephyr looked down from the heavens. “Apocalypse is a Greek word, and it literally means ‘lifting of the veil.’ ”

“So something is about to be revealed?” Vince didn’t mean to edge his words with sarcasm, but they rolled out that way.

“You might not think much of me, Mr. Indigo, but some of the world’s most respected people have joined the Communes.”

“Sorry, Zeph, I didn’t mean it like that.” Vince was well aware of the weekly roll call of new “Communistas”—mediums, celebrities, actors, retired politicians, famous scientists. There wasn’t just one Commune. This one was the largest, but there were dozens around the world.

“Many come to escape, as you did to Atopia. But on Atopia you try to cover the real world—reality skins, virtual worlds, limitless sensory stimulation. The Communes have been trying to cut through that, to see things more clearly.”

They’d re-entered the perimeter now, and Vince’s virtual reality systems and communications cut off again. He stared at the grass at his feet while he walked, dewdrops from the thawing frost glistening in the slanting sunshine. Going back outside the perimeter and reactivating his body’s smarticle network felt like sliding a comfortable sheath around his senses, a plastic version of reality.

Now he felt… what?

More alive?

“Make no mistake, Mr. Indigo.” Zephyr clenched his jaw and looked into the sky at the comet. “The War in Heaven has begun.”

10

“Holy shit, Sid, what the hell did you do?”

Bob felt like he was dropping into the bowels of the underworld as the elevator sank into the depths. Visions of Cerberus slavering over the entrance to the spirit lands raised a spine of fur on the nape of Bob’s feline neck.

“Hell,” Sid giggled, “is exactly right.”

While New York “above ground” had stayed more or less the same for the past century, New York below was something else. It’d become an endless network of tunnels burrowing below the same bedrock that supported the crumbling skyscrapers reaching into the sky above. Day and night, city-block-long automated earthworm diggers churned through the foundations of Manhattan, burrowing it out.

Hollowing below was cheaper than building above.

Their elevator had arrived just seconds before—a sleek white egg propelled through the pneumatic tube system that fed the Purgatory Entertainment District, deep beneath the streets of Midtown.

“No chaperones allowed,” Sid warned. Bio-synthetics, like proxxi, were banned underground after a spate of psombie intrusions. Sid and Bob turned off the connections to their proxxi. You had to be yourself when entering Purgatory.

“We need to fit in,” Sid said as the elevator dropped. “If we go to Hell looking straight we’ll stand out like sore thumbs. We have to blend in. Consider this camouflage.”

Bob blinked and tried to focus. “What do you mean, fit in?”

Sid’s usual skin of a battered jacket, ripped jeans, and sarcasm had been replaced with a muscular-looking werewolf. Bob reached up to scratch his head but discovered a paw smoothing down the fur over his long ears.

It was his paw.

Sid patted Bob’s head. “I slipped some synthetic-K into your pssi channels and dressed us up for the party.”

The plastic walls of the elevator egg shimmered before Bob’s eyes. The last thing he remembered was closing off some details with Robert, knowing that he’d have to turn his proxxi off, and then everything went sideways. Sid must have slipped the K into his meta-cognition systems. It wasn’t a real drug, more like a virus Sid had infected his networks with. “Turn it off, Sid. This isn’t the time for one of your pranks.”

The elevator slowed.

“You need to loosen up.” Sid’s fanged mouth affected his lopsided grin. “Have a laugh with me, just for a few minutes? When we make the connection, I’ll turn it off and firewall a private meeting space.”

The egg rotated open.

The yolk of Bob’s mind slid out ahead of them, assaulted by the onslaught of the Purgatory entranceway. Pounding music poured out from a maelstrom flecked with distant lightning storms as it sucked the contents of the lobby into the spinning entrance portal.

A zoopharm of creatures thronged the waiting area. Some were in humanoid forms, but many were in fantastical shapes as old school met new in a trendy retro mash-up. Time-shifting faeries spun golden trails of temporal pixie dust in tight curls, while goblins danced aloft with fiery dragons sporting necklaces of shimmering sensory mirrors. In one corner a mass of snakes circled a dancing clutch of witches, and in the other a gang of neon pink babies shared a joint.

Everywhere Bob’s sensory spaces glittered and sparkled.

Hundreds waited in the shared pre-party space, and catching a glimpse of a stoned satyr passed out in the corner, Bob realized that for many this was as far as they went.

An uplifted gorilla in body armor poised as bouncer on the metal gangway spanning from the lobby into the black hole at the center of the entrance. Names floated in pssi-space in front of the Grilla, and with a huge paw it pecked them off. The individuals selected, up and down the hallway, sparkled in highlights before being sucked off into the center of the vortex.

“Follow me.” Sid grabbed one of Bob’s paws. Walking through the crowd, Sid released a weapon of mass seduction that cast a spell of sexual attraction, morphing their skins into objects of desire for everyone they passed based on analyses of likes and dislikes distilled from social cloud data.

Bob watched his mind follow its process, the step-by-step rationalization of the decision to enjoy the drugs for a few more minutes. What was the harm? It’d been a long time since he and Sid even had a minute to enjoy themselves. Just like the old days. The synthetic-K was settling in nicely. Maybe he could give this just a few more minutes.

Walking up the causeway to the Grilla, Sid announced himself. The Grilla’s fur bristled, its nostrils flaring. It was aroused—was it female? Bob could only guess what it saw as they arrived.

“Yeah sure,” the Grilla rumbled. Sid made a deal. “Go to Hell, boys.”

In an instant they were sucked through the eye of the spinning storm of Purgatory and into Hell.

In reality, such as it was, Hell was a moldy and silent room packed with people. With pssi, though, it pulsed alive in an orgy of sensory stimulation as Hell’s professional sense-shifting artists warped the partygoers’ realities together with the customized sensory landscapes of the bar.

Each person’s sound environment was based on their own musical preferences, merged with the beats and themes spun out from the sense jockeys hovering above the dance floors. Right now they were threading out a high beat-per-minute techno that was fusing into Bob’s new wave break beats to birth a syncopated, bass-heavy sound that was just perfect for his wandering mind.

Passing some immortal Goths on the dance floor, the music Bob heard shifted from drum-and-bass-inspired hardcore into industrial coldwave, and then his tunes morphed into freeform happy hardcore as they stopped to watch some pssi-boys and pssi-girls breaking it down in displays of neuroplastic gymnastics on the dance floor.

Sid collected drinks from a bartender and poured one of them into a bowl. Bob lapped it up while Sid surveyed the masses of bodies undulating before him like a raptor hovering above a kill. “Not bad, huh?”

Bob was already licking the bottom of his empty bowl. “Give me the key to unlock this synthetic-K.” He shook his head. “This is too much.”

Sid’s fangs showed at the edges of his smile. “Ask me one more time and I’ll unlock it.”

The pulsing sensorgy around them thrummed through Bob’s senses. He couldn’t argue that he wasn’t enjoying it. Just five more minutes. He shrugged. “So who are we meeting?”

“They’re going to find us.” Sid motioned toward some couches in the middle of the dance floor. “Why don’t we chill over there?”

Bob began wobbling over. The sense jockey started spinning more down-tempo themes, complete with fluorescent visual traces and a hypnotic aromatic scent that vibrated through the atmosphere. Bob looked back as he walked, watching his feet leave a phosphorescent trail across the floor. Weaving dancers flashed stuttering optical tracks and strobing fireballs against a black night sky.

He let his mind slide down the rabbit hole.

“Hey, boys,” came a voice amid the jumbled colors, “how you doing?”

Bob shook his head. From the melee crowding his visual systems, the image of a young woman distilled itself—or rather, the image of a large pink cat woman.

“My name’s Sibeal,” she purred. Her tail flicked back and forth, touching Sid.

Bob was collapsed on the couch, swimming in a sensory overload. “Turn off the synthetic-K, Sid, this is too much…”

“That might be her,” Sid said on a private channel. “Give me a minute.”

Bob shook his head. We have to stay together, he meant to say, but Sid disappeared into the crowd.

The sensory overlay of the couches gave the impression that dozens of hands were caressing him, and Bob shivered as he felt it kick in. He pulled his legs up onto the couch in a semi-fetal position.

He could wait a minute.

The pssi-boys and pssi-girls in front of him were putting on a great show, spinning and gyrating as their bodies morphed with the beat of the music. One of them transitioned from two arms to four arms to six and then into a humanoid-millipede form that wormed around a spinning dance move. The dynamics and physics of this multi-legged body shifted perfectly as he morphed from one form to another. The dancer’s real body appeared underneath the pssi overlay as the music stuttered, doing its best to mimic the synthetic body’s motion that the kid was controlling.

The music stopped and the space filled with a pink mist of ionized vanilla. Bob frowned. Where was Sid? He was pretty sure it had been more than “a minute”. The caressing hands of the couch slackened, and applause filled the room.

In the fog Bob saw a familiar shape, standing out of place, but he couldn’t focus his mind.

The general announcement channel sounded in Bob’s auditory channels. “Let’s hear it for SJ Sanjeeve!”

The applause grew louder.

Who was that? The shape became more distinct.

“And now what you’ve all been waiting for, Atopia’s own Kid Psssssssi–cho!”

A cheer went up through the crowd, and the room dropped into blackness.

“That’s Jimmy,” Bob said aloud, ripping himself up from the couch’s embrace. Or was it? Bob’s mind had congealed under the influence of the drugs.

The pink mist faded into a red-orange grayness, and a sub-audio vibration shook Bob’s flesh. The ground transmogrified itself into a rippling lake with tenuous wisps of vapor clinging to its surface. As the dancers around Bob shuffled their feet, they sent out waves like they were walking on water. A few of them laughed and began kicking up splashes at each other.

The fog lifted and craggy terra cotta mountains appeared ringing the distant horizon beneath a burnt orange, star-speckled sky. The bone-shaking vibrations of the music mounted in urgency. Through the dissipating fog, the rings of Saturn appeared suspended in the sky, stretching impossibly far up above the dance floor that was perched precariously on its edge. A methane storm cloud was rolling quickly across the horizon, roiling across the mountain ridges as it descended on the crowd.

The dance hall had been patched into the sensor-mote network on Titan, at Kraken Mare near its north pole.

Bob reached out into the familiar hyperspaces that connected him with Sid, but he felt nothing. He tried pinging Robert for help, but realized his proxxi channels were locked down. He sloshed through the methane lake, squinting into the crowd.

The audio wound itself into a keening shriek, and the first globs of methane rain started falling onto the crowd, splashing into the lake, sending vapor shooting upward. On cue, the music dropped into a planet-shaking bass rhythm that sent waves through the lake, toppling boulders down the mountainsides in the distance. The crowd went crazy, bursting into dance, jamming all of Bob’s sensory channels.

Where was Sid?

“No use trying to get any outgoing, mate.” The man in front of Sid slapped the smooth bedrock wall to make his point. “No signals get through this.” He reached a hand out. “Shaky.”

Sid clicked off the synthetic-K coursing through his pssi. The world came into focus. Who was this guy? He studied the close-cropped gray stubble atop the little man’s head and reached out to take his hand. No data on him appeared in Sid’s displays, no future prediction models, no nerve conduction potentials he could tap into to figure out what was coming. “ ‘Shaky?’ ” Sid asked. “You mean like ‘shaky hands?’ ”

The man pumped Sid’s hand, smiling and crinkling his nose. “No, mate, my name is Shaky.”

The guy next to Shaky put out his hand too. “Bunky.”

Sid let go of Shaky’s hand and shook Bunky’s. “Sid.”

The girl Sid had made contact with in the main hall, Sibeal, strode into the communal bathroom. “We need to go now!” She shifted out of her reality skin into worn cargo pants, a black tank top, and a grim expression.

A second ago the bathroom had been filled with partygoers, but they’d all exited as if on cue.

Shaky and Bunky’s smiles had disappeared as well.

They were the only ones there.

One instant was all it took for Sid’s world to change. It took just fractions of a second to realize it was a trap, but it was fractions too late. Sid unleashed a barrage of jamming across all radio frequencies, sending splinters out to hack into the digital infrastructure around him. He logged into the bathroom taps, the hand dryer, the sensory transponders above the sinks, the advertising hologram hanging behind Sibeal, but it was no use.

They had him cold. Flooding his gray matter with smarticles, he quickened, dropping to the floor as Bunky and Shaky reached for him.

There was no way into the open multiverse.

He tried contacting Bob, tried to find a path out to send out emergency beacons, to deactivate Bob’s synthetic-K. Sid jumped sideways and bounced off a wall around his attackers. The world slowed down. He twisted and spun. The path to the entrance in front of him cleared. He just needed one… more… step… and then the entrance filled with the hulking shape of the Grilla.

It grabbed him like a rag doll.

Held by the Grilla, the music around Sid transformed into a deep animal growl, his mind filling with images of steaming jungles, splashing blood, and twitching flesh. Sid tried hacking into their smarticle networks, but they were battle-hardened.

Sibeal pulled a shiny black sack out of her backpack. Lifting her arms high she pulled it over Sid’s head. He squirmed without effect. Its fabric was laced with metal wires. A Faraday blanket that stopped electromagnetics. The Grilla pulled the sack around him, and Sid felt his connections to the outside world cut off. A black hole opened in the wall of the bathroom, and the Grilla stepped into it, dragging Sid along.

11

Vince looked at the night sky. A thick carpet of stars hung like a bowl atop the mountaintops ringing the Commune; the bright smudge of the comet was just disappearing behind a peak. Zephyr drove him and Elspeth and Brigitte out past the perimeter again, this time for Elspeth to talk to Willy.

A few weeks had marked the first time Elspeth had seen her son in the fifteen years since she had to leave him on Atopia. Back then, she’d been overcome with fear, unable to stay, but it was a decision that haunted her. Meeting Willy, holding and kissing and hugging him, had been an incredibly emotional reunion. But now Vince and Brigitte were telling her that it hadn’t been Willy at all. It was incomprehensible that the person she’d met and shared tears with just days before had been an impostor, and worse, a thief who had stolen her son’s body.

Vince was caught up in her shock, shaken out of his emotional slumber. So he made a simple suggestion—why not just come outside the perimeter and meet the “real” Willy in his virtual presence?

He hadn’t anticipated the Reverend’s swift acceptance of the idea, given their strict stance against synthetic reality technology, but then again, it was his daughter. What were rules if not things to be bent?

Zephyr sat in the cart stoically. Vince could only imagine how all of this was reinforcing Zephyr’s ideas of the wickedness of the outside world. Three trips to the perimeter in one day was about as much as the kid could take. He wasn’t used to this much contact with the outside world, but it was on the Reverend’s strict orders. Vince was taking a walk while Brigitte and Elspeth sat on a blanket in the wet grass under the stars.

Brigitte dropped a packet of smarticle powder into a canteen of water, swirling it around, and handed it to Elspeth. “Drink it,” Vince heard Brigitte whisper to Elspeth. “Don’t worry, I’ll guide you.”

What Vince was feeling didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t one thing or the other, nothing he could put his finger on. It was a combination of things, a perspective that brought the elements of his mind together to create an image that looked familiar—a nagging sensation that one thing fit into another, a square peg that should be a round one if he could just hold it the right way.

He tried to dismiss the feeling, telling himself it was just his mind making patterns from noise, but the more he read into the old religious texts of the Commune, the stronger the feeling became, the stronger the images burned into his mind of creatures with six wings, eyes inside and out, of the eleven-headed Buddha he’d seen in a Chenrezig monastery with dozens of arms.

But it couldn’t be possible.

He pushed it into the back of his mind and focused on assimilating his waiting splinters. “Himalayas overtaking Greenland as second-largest reserve of frozen water after Antarctica,” went one phuture broadcast, with temperatures in Europe projected to plummet as the Gulf Stream continued to slow.

Part of the mystery around how Willy’s body had made it inside the Commune was that the smarticle network inside it should have shut down, and communication in and out should have been impossible. But, somehow, someone had kept the technology working, hiding it from the Commune’s sensors. The Reverend said he had no idea how. Vince believed him.

At least one important mystery had been solved.

Vince queried Elspeth about things she talked about with Willy’s imposter, intimate details that whomever was inhabiting Willy’s body shared with her. Outside the perimeter, Vince uploaded and correlated the information with Willy. Everything matched, down to the last detail. The only entity that would have that level of correct information about Willy had to be his proxxi, Wally—without a doubt, it was Willy’s proxxi that stole his body.

Vince felt a new presence bloom into being in the local multiverse. Elspeth. She sat beside Brigitte, now lit by a glowing pssi-halo, her newly-minted metatags hanging in overlaid display spaces around her. The smarticles had infused into her neural system. She was pssi-aware.

“Just relax, breath slowly,” Brigitte instructed, holding her hand.

Elspeth’s eyes darted back and forth. Her white-knuckled hands gripped the blanket as her perceptions grew sharper and deeper, the informational flow of the multiverse connecting into her sensory systems for the first time. “I’m okay,” she replied. “Could you get Willy?”

She didn’t need to ask.

“Hey, Mom.” Willy appeared from behind a copse of trees nearby. His virtual image glowed alongside a patch of bioluminescent kale.

“Willy?” Tears sprang into Elspeth’s eyes. “My baby, what have they done to you?” Forgetting the illusion, she sprang up and ran to her son, embracing him.

Vince looked away, hiding his own tears. He looked at Zephyr, sitting on the wagon, watching the whole strange scene. Zephyr couldn’t see Willy, he couldn’t even hear the words Elspeth was speaking to Willy in the pssi audio channel, but he watched her jump up and run toward the trees, crying and embracing thin air.

Zephyr didn’t bat an eye, his stoic expression speaking volumes—the outside world was just strange.

Vince returned his attention to the phuture splinter competing for his attention: Newlandia’s application to the UN as the first sovereign virtual nation looked like it was going to happen, while civil rights protests raged in San Francisco from a continued ban on mind uploading research. “Immortality is God’s domain,” complained the Christian Democrats of America.

A whirring began in the sky and Vince spun his point-of-view into the space above them, zooming in to track Deanna’s electric turbofan. It was time for them to get to New York.

“I’m not coming.” It was Brigitte, a virtual splinter of her standing beside him in a private communication space, while her body remained sitting on the blanket with Willy and Elspeth. “My place is here, at least for now.”

Vince was going to argue, but then looked at Willy and his mother, Elspeth, gripping Brigitte’s hands.

“Let me talk to Sid and Bob.” Vince started up a virtual meeting space, pinging Sid and Bob, but there was no response. He knew they were at an underground club in New York meeting the glasscutters. He pinged again. Still nothing. Why weren’t they answering? Then the realization: He’d let Bob and Sid go by themselves to a rave club in New York. I knew I shouldn’t have left those two alone.

He had to make a decision. His gut said no, splitting up even more was a bad idea, but looking at Elspeth gripping Brigitte’s hand swayed his emotions back. It might be useful to have someone inside the Commune, and it seemed like the right thing to do. For them, at least.

The turbofan growled, leaves and grass blowing past them as it hovered. Vince sent instructions for it to land next to him. He looked into Brigitte’s eyes. “Okay, but you stay in regular contact?”

She nodded.

With a final blast, the turbofan settled into the grass. Brigitte’s virtual presence retreated into her body and she waved at Vince. He smiled back, then looked toward Zephyr. “You take care of them.”

Zephyr nodded, tipping his hat. He didn’t ask any questions.

Gripping the rungs of the turbofan’s access ladder, Vince wondered if he was making a mistake. Grumbling, he swung himself into the cushioned front seat and reached around to strap in the webbing. The clear plastic cockpit enclosure closed and the turbofan began cycling up again, roaring underneath him. With a final wave he bid Brigitte goodbye. The turbofan lurched into the sky and Vince settled into the harness, letting his alpha and theta waves settle his brain for a short sleep on the way into Manhattan.

12

The methane storm on Titan raged, the world a thrashing kaleidoscope before Bob’s senses, but he felt something more troubling than Sid’s sudden disappearance: other pssi-kids from Atopia were in Hell, and they were searching. The fabric of the local multiverse bent under their psychic weight as Bob sensed them scraping against his identity-theft algorithms. They might be good enough for the world out here, but pssi-kids would make short work of ripping through the thin veil Sid built to hide them.

Bob had to get out of Hell, and soon.

The music roared around and inside Bob. He steadied himself, trying to inhibit the drug coursing through his digital neurons, cursing that he’d let Sid rope him into it. How could I be so stupid?

Even before the thought I need to escape had fully formed, he left his body behind, jacking his primary subjective past the security systems and into the Purgatory entranceway. He stopped and looked around—the Grilla was gone, and there was no sign of Sid.

While his mind searched for channels out into the open multiverse, his body quickened, flooding itself with smarticles, darting through the dancers back to the physical entrance of Hell. Across the full sensory spectrum of Hell a sharp keening began, a knife that cut through the assembled meta-cognition systems.

Bob sensed it coming.

He threw up walls, started splitting his personalities, splintering himself to hide in every corner he could find.

And then it happened.

Time stopped.

Bob’s mind filled with white noise. His sensory channels mushroomed, sliding out of control, squeezing together, blending into each other. The pressure built, vibrating, shaking, and just as the needles began piercing, he heard the screams of the thousands of people in Hell, their minds shredding around him.

Bob threw off one layer after another of his meta-cognition framework like throwing up a stack of bullet-proof vests to stop incoming machine gun fire. He retreated backward in time, and then sideways into any confined information space that wasn’t burning. Like bubbles of paint, parts of his mind started exploding in wet pops. He gathered himself inward. What little remained kept probing for escape routes. Finally he slid up the network of the pneumatic tubes and outward to the surface.

Below him, the screaming had stopped, but so had the collective awareness.

As Bob’s body raced out of the maze of tunnels, everywhere sagging bodies stared out from blank eyes. Bob spread his identity metatags onto everyone he passed, jacking into their bodies, starting them running in random directions to hide his escape. He began spinning alternate realities, layering and fusing them into the sensory systems of the others, the pssi-kids, slippery eels that slid through the data systems of Purgatory.

Retreating through one world and then another, he found himself running through a burnt and barren landscape with the stakes of tree stumps stabbed into its smoking earth. Ash was falling from a ravaged sky.

“We know you’re here,” hissed the Hunter, a neural fusion of a gang of pssi-kids he’d known growing up, Daxter and Axel and Gunner. Now they weren’t kids anymore. It seemed they were working for Jimmy, and they were hunting for him.

Bob tried to focus, the world swimming before his eyes. He kneeled down behind a tree stump and began dialing up all the worlds connected to the battle gameworld. One thought remained in the stunted awareness he had left: Get to the passenger cannon. In the real world, a thin slice of his digital awareness skimmed through the wet streets of New York, dragging his physical body behind it like a rag doll on a string.

13

The twenty-four leaders are returning, said Zephyr. Lightning crackled across the sky behind him. What do you think happened to Willy? asked Vince. He was possessed by a demon, replied Zephyr. Don’t you believe in demons, Mr. Indigo?

A jolt woke Vince up.

“It’s just the refueling drone.” Hotstuff was riding shotgun beside him in the turbofan.

Through the canopy, in the soft glow of the instrumentation lights, Vince watched a drone’s articulated arms pull out the main battery pack of their turbofan and replace it with a fresh one. The hop from Montana to New York required an in-air battery drop. The American government didn’t use the African space power grid and couldn’t refuel via microwave burst in flight like most of the rest of the world.

Vince shook his head and closed his eyes.

The drone held the turbofan like an insect in its legs. The night sky slid by above. Finished, the drone disengaged with a jolt, and the whir of the turbofan ratcheted up a notch. It started climbing back to cruising altitude.

A garbled message from Bob popped up on Vince’s messaging systems: “Where’s Sid? I can’t find Sid.” Vince latched onto Bob’s message stream, but it was cut off in an eruption of network traffic. Vince’s phutures slid sideways. The mediaworlds erupted: A terrorist attack in the Purgatory Entertainment District, Atopian splinter group responsible. Authorities hunting for suspects.

The refueling drone cut through the air above them.

Vince shot up in his harness. “What the hell?”

“Don’t know, boss.” Hotstuff dispatched agents into the New York networks. “Some kind of pssi-weapon was unleashed in central New York, right on top of Bob and Sid’s last known location.”

Vince’s phuturing network was still set in high avoidance mode. Nothing major should have been able penetrate the protective web surrounding him and his friends, not without some advance notice. “How did this get past us?”

Hotstuff grabbed Vince’s primary presence and dragged it into their war room. She spun out a series of scenarios, graphing their interconnectedness. “Being in Commune’s black hole generated discontinuities in our future timeline.”

Another jolt.

The drone was re-attaching itself. In a secondary display space Vince frowned, watching the drone’s insect-legs wrapping themselves around the turbofan.

Hotstuff looked at him, her eyes growing wide. “Vince, watch out…”

And then she was gone.

Vince’s main point-of-presence snapped from the war room back into his body in the pod of the turbofan. The only sound was the rush of the air past the canopy and the whine of the engine.

The stars slid by overhead.

“Mr. Vincent Damon Indigo,” announced a voice over the comms channel of the turbofan. “I am Special Agent Sheila Connors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You are under arrest for breach of future confidentiality.”

14

Three gees of acceleration squeezed Bob into the aerogel of the passenger cannon pod seat, then five gees, then briefly six as it angled up from its subterranean launch tube. His pod launched into free space with a thudding concussion, the air ionizing around it in a blistering tunnel as it bored through the lower atmosphere. His body popped out of the foam seat in the shift to near-zero gravity, the sheen of ionization sputtering out as the pod gained altitude, clearing the densest layers of air on its ballistic flight path across the Atlantic on its way to Lagos.

Escaping New York had been a game of capture the flag, with his body and physical brain as the prize. He started by ducking it into the aging subway system, then a VTOL pick-up and drop-off to the other side of town and quick succession of self-driving taxi exchanges and sprints up and down building staircases while he scattered decoys in his wake. Bob used the predictive policing models of the city to figure out where patrolling drones would be. It was a lot like the games of flitter tag he used to play with the other pssi-kids on Atopia, but this time with life-threatening stakes.

In the twenty minutes it took him to reach and clear the passenger cannon security checkpoints, the NYPD joined the chase. With only seconds to spare, his pod was in the last batch of launches—even in this ultra-modern metropolis, it took time to lock a city down.

Bits and pieces of his mind reassembled themselves at random—secure back-ups of memories and ideas floating back into his brain on the thin data stream. The capsule gained altitude into space. Bob’s cognitive frameworks were still fighting off the shimmer of the drug Sid had infected him with. He created a virtual world, shielded beneath an onion skin of encryption, to have a talk with the reassembling bits of his intellect.

Alone, was the first thought that mushroomed into his mind, you’re alone.

Turning inside himself, in a panic he checked the data cube Patricia entrusted him with. It was still there, embedded in the center of his mind. The world he created solidified in his visual channels. A hexagonal chamber appeared with a copy of himself seated against each of six yellow walls. The data cube sat in the middle of the room, a faceted ruby that glittered darkly.

“Should we tell her?” the main part of his mind asked. “Is that what I really look like?” He stared at the copies of himself staring back at him, blue eyes beneath blond dreadlocks tied back in a ponytail.

“It’s too dangerous,” replied his cautious self. “You just want an excuse to talk to her.”

“An excuse?” roared his emotional self, a vein popping out in his neck. “You call this an excuse?”

“I agree, we should wait,” said his lazy side.

His emotional self shook its head. “You’re the reason we’re in this mess. Taking drugs? Idiot. The same reason that Martin—”

“Hey, stop that.” Bob’s inspirational side held up his hands. “This is a mess, but it’s not our fault. We’re out here trying to help. We’ll get out of this, but we need to plan for the worst. So we should tell her.”

His cautious side remained adamant. “Patricia said no connections to Atopia under any circumstance.”

“Sid’s gone and we can’t find Vince. What difference does it make? This is all gone to hell already.” His emotional side clenched his jaw. “Make the connection.”

“Let’s take a minute and think.” The main part of his mind considered what the rest of him was saying. “Who set this off? ”

“Does it matter? We need to get everything we know to Nancy.” The face of his emotional facet turned beet red.

His cautious side took a deep breath. “I guess you’re right…”

All the parts of his mind were coming to the same conclusion.

“We’ll make contact in the place nobody else knows about.”

They all nodded. They all knew what he was thinking.

15

Vince leaned back and stretched his neck. “You really shouldn’t switch off my Phuture News feeds.” It was all that was keeping them safe, he didn’t add.

Special Agent Sheila Connors was busy with her remote team. They were firewalling Vince off from the world. She grunted, “You and your friends have been busy.”

Connors shared a mediaworld about the terrorist attack in New York. It was filled with images of Robert Baxter emerging from the pneumatic tube system. “A few thousand disappeared, plus six billion future infractions. Half the world is on the hunt for you and your gang.”

Vince watched the news report, still working in the background to release his agents into autopilot. Each new security blanket Agent Connors created restricted his outward paths. He only had a few minutes, perhaps seconds.

“Our gang?” Vince snorted. “We had nothing to do with that.”

“You’re sure?” Agent Connors’ tech team continued to jam up the communications channels around them. “So you didn’t hack into the phutures of ten billion people?”

Vince paused. He didn’t like to lie. “That was for a good reason—”

“And you’re not operating an international espionage ring, modifying the future on a massive scale?”

Vince shrugged. “Like I said—”

“There’s always a good reason with people like you.”

Vince smiled. People like you. Coming from Atopia, Vince felt like an intruder, but it wasn’t because of the technology. He felt like an intruder when he watched people, walked by them in the streets, watched them living their little lives. Once he’d been like them, before the wealth, the fame.

Now he was different. He felt… what? Sorry for them?

Down below he watched the lights of Atlanta slide by, twenty million of those little people living their futile lives. Maybe she’s right, he thought, looking out the window. Maybe I am just a rich asshole. “I’m not going to argue, but you really shouldn’t turn off my Phuture News feeds,” he repeated.

Agent Connors raised her eyebrows. “Or what?” She was using a version of pssi, and in an overlaid display Vince watched her phantoms cycling through their security controls. Mr. Indigo was hers now, and she clicked off the control of his proxxi.

Vince felt the last of his connections close down. He could still see, but he felt blind.

In the Commune, he had been cut off from his future feeds, but his proxxi Hotstuff was working in the background. And the Commune was a data dark spot. There had been some measure of safety—the dangers Vince couldn’t see couldn’t see him either. But now Hotstuff was shut down, and out here, in full view of the world, it wouldn’t be long until whatever was hunting him would catch up. Watching the last of the lights of Atlanta disappear, he realized they must be on their way to Cuba. Almost the whole southern half had become a gulag for the Alliance.

At least it would be warmer than Siberia.

He didn’t need to see fighter drones approaching, didn’t need to hear Agent Connors’ attempts to argue that they weren’t carrying a deadly virus. He didn’t need to watch the flames and roar of the attack, the desperate attempts to fight back. He didn’t need to see it, because even without his future feeds, he knew it was coming.

16

The gray seas of the English Channel rolled beneath clouds that hung above it like stains against the sky. The chalk cliffs of the Dorset coast stretched into the foggy distance, and Durdle Door, an oval hole burrowed through the cliffs by the ocean and time, stood above the beaches like a doorway to another world. Smooth rocks, with heads full of seaweed, lay about in jumbles in the tidal pools. In the middle of them, a small boy in swimming trunks, with awkward legs sticking out at angles, was waiting.

“Bob,” said a little girl, approaching cautiously. “Is that you?”

The boy nodded.

She dropped her bright orange pail and began running to him.

The boy stood, waving a tiny fishing net in the air. “I figured you would see me here,” he said. “And before you ask, I feel fine.” The first thing out of her mouth was always, how are you feeling? So Bob pre-empted.

It was one of their childhood worlds, where Bob and Nancy came as kids to hunt through rocks, to swim, and explore—a special place that was theirs alone. It was Bob’s safest place, even if storm clouds filled it now. Nancy ran to hug him. They sat down facing each other on the wet-seaweed rocks, up to their ankles in tidal-pool seawater.

“What happened in New York?” Nancy asked.

Bob rocked back a little. It wasn’t like her to just jump straight into it. “I don’t know what happened.” Bob saw the explosion of mediaworlds linking him to the attack. He was monitoring the chatter of network traffic searching for him. He’d attached his identity to hundreds of metatags of people leaving the city. It would take time for them to sift through it, hopefully enough for him to get away. “I had nothing to do with it.”

Lightning lit up storm clouds in the distance.

“Why have you been hiding from me, Bob? Why are you running?”

A peal of thunder rolled across them.

“I’m not running.” He shook his head. “I mean, I wasn’t running. It was Patricia who asked me to leave. She sent us out to find Willy’s body.”

Nancy frowned. “She sent you to find Willy’s body?”

“I don’t know why.” That wasn’t entirely true. “There’s something in Willy’s body, something to do with Jimmy she needed us to find out.” Looking down, he picked a periwinkle off the rock and inspected it. The tiny creature retreated into its shell. “It’s not safe. She made me promise to take you with us, but I failed, I left you behind.”

More lightning, and the hollow crackle following it came quicker, louder.

Nancy grabbed both of Bob’s hands. “Jimmy’s assembling his own private psombie army in cities all over the world. I’ve seen it. Is that what you’re trying to stop?”

What should he tell her? He wanted to tell her everything, how much he loved her, how much of a danger Jimmy was. But what made sense? More than just their lives were at stake. Say nothing, and you might lose her. Say everything, and you might lose her. What was the right thing to do?

“Be careful of Jimmy, he’s not what he seems.”

Nancy shivered. “I know. I don’t trust him, or Kesselring, they’re playing power games—”

“He killed Patricia.” Bob squeezed her hands. “And his own parents. It’s not just politics. Something else is going on.”

A bolt of lightning ripped the sky apart behind them, accompanied by a deafening boom.

Nancy stood and pulled Bob to get up. “Let’s get inside.” Rain started falling. She motioned toward a yellow cabana on the beach.

Bob looked into the pool of water at his feet, the surface rippling in colliding circles as raindrops hit it. A crab scuttled by. Bob felt sluggish, his mind drifting. “I need to go.” He handed Nancy the periwinkle, embedding within it the encrypted data that Patricia had left him. It was a risk—it meant the data was returning into the Atopian ecosystem—but Nancy needed to know.

She took it, and leaned in to kiss his cheek. Bob turned and kissed her, then started shutting down the tunnel to the world, but he was weak. It took nearly all of his energy just to hand the data beacon to Nancy.

The crab he’d seen at his feet inched up on top of the seaweed covered rock next to him. It raised itself up on its hind legs, spreading its arms to the sky. Lightning thundered again, and tendrils of electrostatic discharge snaked across the sky to illuminate the white cliffs.

The crab looked at Bob, its mouthparts gnashing. “You’ll make a nice bounty, my friend.”

Bob’s mind was swimming. He logged into his bio-stats. Something was wrong. He’d been physically poisoned somehow.

Snapping his primary subjective out of the sea-world, he popped his viewpoint back into the passenger pod. The milky film of the atmosphere hung over the curve of the Earth, while steely pinpoints of stars hung above.

Nausea overcame him. He retched.

His vitals were way off, his heart racing. A low rumble began. It was the retrorockets of the pod firing. They shouldn’t be firing now, somewhere a hundred miles in space over the middle of the Atlantic. The pod was being diverted. Data pipes into the multiverse were shutting down, and, fighting to remain conscious, he made another copy of the data he’d given to Nancy and sent it out in a sealed beacon.

If Sid was still out there somewhere, he might find it.

Blackness descended.

17

“I haven’t had any contact with Bob,” Nancy lied.

Jimmy was sitting in a chair behind a huge desk, facing away from her. They were in the palace of his elaborately maintained private universe. He stared down the length of a long reflecting pool which divided his manicured gardens, stretching to the horizon. Ornate moldings, gilt in gold, framed frescoes of angels in the ceilings. Thick velvet curtains draped lead-glass windows. “Did he tell you anything?” Jimmy turned to look at her.

“I told you I haven’t talked to him since he left.” She shifted in her chair. “I’d tell you if I did.”

Jimmy smiled. “I’m just finding out whose side you’re on.” He looked at the ceiling. “Of course you understand it would be treason if you had contact.”

“Treason?”

“And hid the contact, I mean.”

Nancy felt her cheeks flush, but in this projected space her face remained stone-still. “I don’t believe ‘treason’ is an offense described in the Atopian constitution.”

“You know what I mean. Anyway, enough, I was just asking.” His smile grew wider. He turned to Dr. Granger. “Please continue with the summary of operations.”

Dr. Granger was sitting in an attending chair with a pile of reports in his lap. He smiled at Nancy and then began unpacking his presentation. Charts and graphs started filling the shared display spaces above Jimmy’s desk.

“Happiness indices are at all-time highs in places where pssi has spread through the population,” began Dr. Granger. “Crime is dropping, and business productivity and profits are skyrocketing at companies that have adopted the pssi-suite. A complete success.” Dr. Granger stopped and looked at Nancy. “The Infinixx distributed consciousness app is the most downloaded sensory interface.”

This was Nancy’s own creation. She took a deep breath. “I still disagree—”

“The Board’s decision is final,” interrupted Jimmy, staring into his gardens.

Nancy hung her head. Instead of forcing new users to create their own memetic structures, using their own memories, they’d instead adopted a cookie-cutter approach. They were pre-formatting people’s expanding minds. It made it easier to access their thoughts, but the public didn’t seem to mind. Or even notice. They just wanted the endless reality.

Jimmy argued for a backdoor to combat viral reality skins, like the one that nearly destroyed Atopia. Nancy was able to hold him back in the general release, but in each jurisdiction there were secret deals going on, allowing governments to peer into the minds of the population. If people had nothing to hide, then they had nothing to fear, went the line of reasoning that Jimmy kept putting forward. And everywhere that pssi was released, the people were happier than ever—happy, but living in dreamworlds.

“The subsea computing facilities are on track,” continued Dr. Granger, and began detailing the self-replicating data warehouses being constructed under sea floors, using seawater for cooling and powered by geothermal generators. It was a vast computing organism growing into the crust of the Earth to make virtual space for the billions of personal universes being created within the pssi multiverse.

“Any progress on the legal front?” asked Jimmy halfway through Dr. Granger’s run-down on the computing facilities.

More graphics spun into their shared spaces. Anti-trust suits were being brought under control, and key patent litigations against Terra Nova continuing.

“And what happened to Patricia Killiam’s personal research projects. The POND, for instance?”

Dr. Granger shrugged. “She terminated that before she passed.”

Jimmy turned to the two of them. “I was talking to Nancy.”

Nancy’s attention was elsewhere. “Pardon? The POND?”

“The Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector,” Jimmy said. “Don’t tell me you don’t know of it.”

Of course Nancy had heard of it. “But I don’t see how that has any—”

“Everything has relevance, Ms. Killiam. Your aunt shut that project down just before she passed, and the data from it is missing. I’d bet that Baxter took it, and I’d like to know why. He’s a prime suspect in the New York attack, and we need to know what’s going on.”

Jimmy paused. “His terrorist actions were designed to halt the spread of pssi, to incite fear in the consumer population.” Over a thousand people’s minds had been wiped out in the New York attack, a thousand people now vegetative psombies. “He’s continuing your Aunt Patricia’s campaign against us.”

Nancy could sense she was on thin ice. “I don’t believe she was working against us.” And the attack in New York wasn’t what was slowing down the release. Half of the billion new users of pssi were displaying signs of tech-induced schizophrenia, and even the AI-run tech support channels weren’t enough to sort out all the problems.

Jimmy rocked his head back and stared at the ceiling. “Then who was she working against?”

Nancy stopped herself from saying, you. “I don’t know, Jim, you know more than me.”

Jimmy looked at her, squinting, and then slowly returned his gaze to the reflecting pool.