The Dystopia Chronicles

1

“Where am I?” Sid was still stuffed in the black sack, his connections to the outside world cut off. After being dragged out of the bar, he’d been thrown over the shoulder of the Grilla. In stops and starts he was carried, pushed, and dragged down one tunnel after another, deep into the bowels of New York.

They’d stopped for a few minutes. It seemed like this was the destination. Sid used inertials to track every inch of the path down. By his calculations they were three hundred and sixty-two feet under Third Avenue and Forty-Second Street. He knew exactly where he was. Sid’s question wasn’t about spatial coordinates—he just wanted to know what they’d say before he crushed them.

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Sid recognized the voice as Bunky’s, one of his kidnappers from the bathroom.

In an overlay some scant details appeared as his internal pssi displayed what it had so far: British birth origin, Somerset accent, blood vessels on the surface of facial skin indicating probable history of alcoholism. In another situation it seemed like someone he’d enjoy meeting. Sid played along. “Bad news, please.”

The Grilla dumped him onto a chair, ripping the cover off him in a motion that nearly flayed the skin off his arms.

“A martyr, I like that,” Bunky said. “The bad news, my friend, is that you’re completely fucked.”

Sid blinked and looked around. His sensory system gathered information at the same time as his extrasensory one did the same, hacking into any networks nearby. He was in a large cavern, roughly hewn from black bedrock. Naked fluorescent bulbs dotted wet-streaked walls. Gaping holes led outward. The cavern was filled with a shanty town of tin roofs and lopsided structures that filled the floor and climbed the walls. Halfway up one side of the walls, at the mouth of one of the tunnels, Sid was seated on a terrace, surrounded by his captors.

“Now the good news.” Shaky, his other kidnapper, smiled at Sid. “You’re in a pub. The White Horse. I mean if you’ve got to be fucked, might as well be in a pub, right?” He cackled at his own joke.

Sid’s internal systems were piecing things together. Both Bunky and Shaky were at Battery Park when he walked around there with Bob. His inVerse plotted their paths from recordings, mapping their paths backward in the recorded wikiworld.

A serving bot dropped a pint of beer in front of Sid. “Yeah, I know I’m in a pub.” He picked it up and took a swig.

One of the first things he hacked into, in the seconds since they removed the cloak, was the food and drink system of the establishment they were in. Sid had ordered a beer. In fact, several beers. More plunked down in front of Shaky and Bunky. They roared with laughter.

Shaky slapped Sid on the back. “You’re all right, mate!”

On the opposite wall of the cavern, directly ahead of Sid, two tunnel openings yawned open, like two giant eyes staring at him. Mesh netting held back loose rock near the entrances, while white tubes wormed their way around the mouths. Metal ribs lined the tunnels, flanked by fat packets of cabling that snaked into the distance and disappeared into the darkness. Clunking up through each of the tunnels were large construction mechanoids.

Bunky saw Sid looking at them. “No need to worry, just our better halves come to get us for work.”

Sid wasn’t worried. He was trying to crack into them. A construction mechanoid on the rampage would give these assholes something to think about.

“Afraid we can’t hack into those,” said Vicious, Sid’s proxxi. Only Sid could see and hear Vicious. Between them they were spinning out a range of escape scenarios—flooding the tunnels with water by opening a sewage drain, carbon monoxide poisoning from jamming exhausts, a blinding flash of floodlights followed by a power failure. A combination of these might give Sid just enough time.

Sibeal, the girl from the bar, sat down on a bench next to him. “Before you do anything you might regret, let’s have a chat.” She grabbed one of his phantom hands in synthetic space. “And no, I don’t want a beer.”

Sid readied his attack vectors. “So what’s this about, then?” It didn’t matter. Whatever the reason, he was about to unleash a very unpleasant learning experience on them.

This was a den of phrackers, ‘cutters, and underminers. Sid knew their kind. He was their kind. The underminers were really just construction workers, tied to whatever local mob affiliates they had to be, but the ‘cutters and phrackers mostly worked for the Asian gambling syndicates. They knocked out corporate AIs, shifted the future timeline to try and shift odds, struggling against the future regulators who were fighting a losing battle to make sure the future is what it was supposed to be.

Sibeal rolled her eyes, and in an overlaid display Sid was surprised to see a knot of phantom limbs spread out from her, uncoiling into the hyperspaces where he was readying his assault. One by one, his strings of control were cut.

“We’re friends,” she replied. Sibeal wrapped the cut strings around him, tying up his virtual hands. She smiled. “In fact, we’re fans.”

“That’s right, mate,” said Bunky, raising his beer.

Sid glanced at his proxxi. Vicious shrugged. There was nothing he could do, but this didn’t seem threatening either. Sid turned to Sibeal. “If we’re friends, then why the kidnapping routine?”

Sibeal shrugged in pssi-space. “There wasn’t time to explain. We had to get out of there. Your friend unloaded a massive synthetic charge in that bar.”

Who were they talking about? “My friend?”

Sibeal opened a channel and shared her mediaworld reports. “Over a thousand people lost their minds, Bob was right in the middle.”

“If we hadn’t gotten you out of there…” Shaky made small explosion gestures with his fingers, as if his mind was blowing. “You should choose your friends more carefully.”

Sid assimilated the mediaworlds and frowned. “There’s no way Bob had anything to do with this. I was with him the whole time.” Not the whole time. They must have snatched him too. “Where is he?”

“We thought you might know.” Sibeal watched for Sid’s reaction. “He’s gone off grid. There’s one heck of a bounty attached to him.” She paused. “And you, too, for that matter.”

In augmented space, Sid’s proxxi nodded. So that was what all this was about—bounty hunters. He could guess what they wanted. His friends. “I can’t help you.”

“If you help us, maybe we can help you.” Sibeal spun a new information packet into Sid’s networks—a data beacon. “We found something your friend left behind. Want to have a look?”

He was on dangerous ground here. They had kidnapped him, yet claimed to be friends, then admitted they were bounty hunters. Nothing in the logical chain made him think he should trust them, and yet his gut told him he could. He was the one that had contacted them in the first place, and he needed as much information as he could get. He could let this roll. Whatever happened, he was confident he could outsmart them if it came down to it, but it might be useful to give the impression that he was in it for the money as well. He nodded. “But we split any commission?”

Sibeal glanced at Bunky and Shaky and they both nodded. “Sure,” she replied.

In the background their networks began handshaking the reputational matrix of the deal. Sid hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He was tracking the hundreds of identity tags that Bob left behind in his escape, multiplying these by the thousands of exit points and the dense transport network.

Bob could be almost anywhere in the world by now.

2

The priest watched the young man in the next cell. So young, and yet he couldn’t ignore the signs. He looked out through the rusted bars of his own cell, shuffling his feet along the stone floors, looking for just the right angle. Yes, there it was, hanging in the blue sky, its tails spreading as it grew. There was not much time.

The young man groaned.

“Water?” asked the priest.

The heat inside the mud walls was oppressive under the relentless midday sun. The young man’s eyes fluttered then opened. His breathing was heavy and ragged. His lips were cracked. “Yes, water, please,” whispered the young man.

Reaching under the folds of his thobe, the priest produced a leather bladder. He extended his wiry arm between the bars of their adjoining cells.

Still coming to his senses, Bob blinked. His meta-cognition systems were coming back online, but his neural load of smarticles was low. How long had he been out? He didn’t know, but he needed a refill. He didn’t have enough in his system to reach out to the satellite networks: he had no GPS or tracking information. Bob’s eyes darted around the room, collecting information.

His internal systems were busy mapping his immediate environment.

The man in the cell next to him smiled, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth, and he held up a leather pouch. Water sloshed within it. Bob studied the man: faded keffiyeh headdress, deeply creased face of battered leather, watery eyes laced with cataracts.

Bob’s pssi posited an origin for the man: Bedouin.

It was near zero humidity and over a hundred and thirty degrees. He had to be in the Sahara somewhere. It was within the range of the launch energy of the passenger cannon pod when he’d blacked out.

Taking the bladder from the Bedouin, Bob mumbled, “Thank you.”

He lifted himself up on one elbow and drank. He’d never been this dehydrated before. His biostats were all over the place. Heat stroke was setting in. Just raising himself up brought a wave of nausea.

“Slowly,” urged the Bedouin, his palms up. “Drink slowly.”

Bob looked at the bladder of water, then the dusty floor. The Weather Wars had wreaked havoc on this corner of the world. There were rivers of water in the sky just as there were rivers of water in the ground, and weather tech was enabling rich countries to divert all of it. He took another swig from the bladder.

His proxxi, Robert, was still locked out, and Bob flexed his phantoms into the empty hyperspaces around him. Barely anything for them to hold onto, just the faint chatter of a cellular voice network at the edges of his senses. He let loose a splinter to see if it could burrow through, but its cognitive strength, like his own, was thin at best.

“ ‘Where am I?’ ” the Bedouin said. “ ‘Who am I?’ ” He smiled. “Yes, very good questions.”

He seemed able to hear what Bob was thinking. Who was this old man? Or was he asking Bob to think about his own identity? He was certain he was in northern Africa, but then again, as the old man’s face swam in his visual fields, whether this was “reality” was another question. His body might still be in the passenger pod, while his awareness secreted away in a virtual world.

The aches and pains felt real enough, but how to verify that he was in base reality—the identity world? The only sure-fire way would be to kill himself—if his awareness snapped into another time and place, back in his body, then this world and space wasn’t real. But if nothingness came afterward, then the world he was in, or rather had been in, was real—and there was no possibility of return. And of course, he didn’t really know if nothingness came after death, either.

It wasn’t an experiment he wanted to try quite yet.

Reaching inside his core with a phantom, he punched his Uncle Button, the hardwired fail-safe built into the deepest layer of the pssi operating system that snapped your consciousness back into your own body.

Nothing changed.

This must be it, then. Best to leave that final escape route for another day.

Taking another swig from the leather bladder, Bob leaned higher against the wall of his cell, feeling the straw embedded in the mud bricks prickling his back. He leaned over and inspected a wound on the side of his leg. Whoever snatched him had cut out his subcutaneous patch of smarticle reserves.

He had been in this area of the world once before, on a family holiday. His father hired a guide to take a sensor-scanner out into the Western Desert between Egypt and Libya. Some of the earliest Christian churches, from the first century, were in the ancient oasis towns that dotted the basins of the Sahara. There wasn’t much detail in this area in the standard wikiworld, and hiring a guide to physically visit with the sensor enabled his family to flit in and “be there” from Atopia. The trip had been a gift from his father to his mother. She was a devout member of the Atopian Christian society, the Eleutherous.

Bob messed the whole trip up by missing the outings, and if he did make them, by heaping scorn on the idea of religion and poking holes in any stories the guide told. He ended the whole project by jamming the sensor with his dimstim traffic. It was an accident, but his mother had been quietly crushed by his thoughtlessness.

Thinking of his family, his stomach knotted.

He always found a way to mess things up. Barely two days after leaving the security of Deanna’s place, and already everything had fallen apart. Why had Patricia put this on him, trusted him?

Then he remembered that he gave Nancy a copy of Patricia’s data cube. Now he wanted to take it back. Maybe she hadn’t found it yet.

“Life is suffering, young man,” said the old man, watching him.

Bob looked at him. Life is suffering. “What do you mean?” He handed the water pouch back, letting his hand touch the old man’s, just enough for a few smarticles to transfer from Bob’s skin.

“It is obvious you are suffering.” The old man tucked the pouch back in his thobe.

With a sweep of his phantoms across virtual workspace controls, Bob logged into the dusting of smarticles on the man’s skin. Measuring skin potential was an old method of lie detection.

“I’m stuck in a jail, shouldn’t I be suffering?”

“But suffering isn’t necessary.”

It was working. Bob was getting a baseline measurement of the man’s skin tension. He switched tracks. “How did I get here? Were you here when I arrived?”

The old man looked up, opening the palm of his hand to the ceiling. “You dropped from the sky in a flaming chariot, as it was prophesied.”

Bob groaned internally. Not another doomsdayer. “How did I get in the cell? Who put me here?”

Nodding, the old man narrowed his eyes. “Four men, one of them old Toothface.”

His skin potential remained steady. He was telling the truth. Bob studied his face. “Are you with them?”

“No.”

No reaction. Nothing that Bob could infer from the man’s body language or facial markers or skin potential indicated he was lying. Bob relaxed slightly.

“And where are we?”

“Near Siwah, the town is several miles away. Just the four men are here, and us.”

Bob decided the old man was telling the truth. “And why are you here?”

The old man laughed. “For seeking the truth.”

Without an outside connection, Bob had to rely on his internal wikiworld maps. He did a quick flyover of the models of the maps and terrain he had, but there wasn’t much resolution. He stood on his bunk and pressed his face against the metal bars of the window. Looking back and forth through the window, he reconstructed as much of a three-dimensional map of the area as he could, trying to correlate this with his internal maps.

He needed more information.

Bob looked around the sandy floor, searching, and there, in a corner, he saw a scarab beetle. Walking over he picked it up, blowing the dust off it, lifting it up to his mouth.

The old man watched, his eyes growing wide.

Spitting on the beetle, Bob gently began rubbing it. The old man frowned as he watched Bob massage the insect. Slowly, over several minutes, some of the smarticles in his saliva worked their way into the creature and suffused into its nervous system. Bob made a connection, opening up a sensory space that morphed into the beetle’s. Looking up, he could see his own grotesquely large face peering down, could feel the beetle’s terror. Calm down, he told it as he took control of its motor neurons, I’m a friend.

Bob’s body put the beetle back on the ground, and his mind began scuttling off in it.

3

In the recesses of the shelves behind the bar, Vince watched cockroaches dart between dirt-encrusted bottles, their antennae waving in the darkness as they waited. He could only imagine what it must be like upstairs. “Could we get a room?” he asked, wishing he hadn’t.

The bartender leered at them. “I could get you a fresh one.”

“Yeah, that would be…” For a second Vince thought he was offering a clean room, until the jab in his ribs from Agent Connors. Ah, he meant a fresh girl. “No, this one’s fine.” He turned, winking at Agent Connors, taking in the scowl on her mud-and-blood splattered face. “Just the room.”

There were a few regulars sitting at the bar, eyes staring straight ahead, their thoughts not on the future but the past. Vince wished he was one of them.

Two days ago they crash landed in the bayous of Louisiana. Spinning on impact, Vince’s turbofan bounced off Agent Connor’s aircraft, lessening the blow. Within seconds Vince extricated himself, amazed to be alive, and was running off through knee-deep water when his conscience hit him. He returned to pull the unconscious Agent Connors out of her cockpit, then splinted her broken leg before she came around. Slogging through the muck, he managed to find a small patch of dry ground.

For two days they struggled to stay alive out there. Once Connors regained consciousness, she made attempts to get in touch with her support teams, but they weren’t responsive. This area of Louisiana was on the fringe of government control. Vince didn’t stop her trying. He figured whatever the charges were, he was better off fighting them in court than fighting off whatever was in the swamp.

Connors tried to establish her control over the situation, but Vince had tossed her weapons into the swamp when she was unconscious. Vince didn’t like guns. That turned out to be a bad idea. Their arrival brought scavengers of all kinds—garbage drones, swamp people, animals. While the machines and humans gave them a wide berth as Connors hurled verbal threats at them, the alligators weren’t as easily dissuaded. Neither were the cottonmouths, deadly poisonous snakes that crawled everywhere.

Even with all that, the biggest problem became water. The standard-issue med kits in the turbofans didn’t contain water purification tablets, and drinking the raw bayou water would bring on diarrhea or worse. As the day waned on the second night, battered and thirsty, with hope of rescue evaporating and the gators getting braver, Connors gave in. Vince managed to flag down some good old boys out hunting, and they’d hitched a ride into New Orleans.

The bartender in front of Vince curled his lip. “No rooms available, mister.”

Vince frowned—the hologram outside said vacancy, as well as the online feed. “But your—”

“Did I stutter?”

New Orleans had been abandoned for a generation, at least officially. Doubly doomed, it was sinking while the oceans were rising, battered by wave after wave of monster hurricanes. Ninety percent of what used to be the city was below sea level, swamped, the old levees having long given up. Without the finances of New York to hold back the oceans, what remained of New Orleans had long gone feral.

Vince was about to argue when he felt another jab. Agent Connors flicked her chin toward the media hologram floating behind the bar. Vince looked up to stare into his own eyes. An image of his face was floating in the middle of the broadcast. “The former founder of Phuture News, Vince Indigo, indicted in federal courts today on conspiracy charges, is reported dead in a crash—”

The bartender glanced at the hologram. “Like I said, no rooms. Don’t want my place wrecked in a raid.”

“—New Orleans has been quarantined by DAD in a reported viral outbreak—”

“Should just throw you to them,” growled a man hunched over his beer beside them. Black goggles covered most of his face, a sharp metal spike protruding from one eye. His leather vest was open to the waist, revealing skin laced in red welts of scars.

“Mind your tongue, Sledge,” barked the bartender. “We don’t give anyone up to the farmers, but that”—the bartender looked Vince square in the eyes—“don’t mean I want you here.” He rubbed stubble atop his head, then reached under the bar and threw something at Vince. “Now get out.”

Vince recoiled, half expecting a grenade, but it was a first aid kit. “Thanks,” he mumbled. He followed Agent Connors to the door. She was limping on her broken leg—well secured in a fast-cast—but their infected wounds were more of a problem.

Exiting the swinging saloon doors of the bar, they were hit by a wave of sweetly-putrid humidity and an explosion of noise—Bourbon Street. Officially New Orleans might have been abandoned, but unofficially, it was a backwater playground. The surrounding ten-block area was one of the few that remained above the high tide line, the swollen Mississippi swallowing the rest. Masses of revelers thronged the street, thousands of matchsticks rubbing shoulder-to-shoulder in the powder keg of the ancient Latin Quarter. Pounding music poured out from the sense-shifting doorways of bars and nightclubs.

“I think we should just drop her and run,” said Hotstuff, materializing beside them in a halter top and shorts.

It was a thought Vince had wrestled with more than once, but whatever was chasing him was hunting Agent Connors now as well. When she tried to radio in, her credentials were revoked. She had no response at all. The enemy of your enemy could be a friend, and right now, after losing track of Bob and Sid, Vince needed all the friends he could get—and besides, he was confident he could ditch her pretty quick the moment he didn’t need her.

“I’m going to remind you again that you’re still my prisoner,” Agent Connors said. A hulking mandroid, more machine than human, stumbled into her and she swore, shoving it away. Turning, it laughed, reeking of alcohol, and spun back into the crowd.

“And maybe I should tell this crowd that you’re FBI.”

Drones hovered overhead, hawking the newest synthetic drugs, skinshops, and real-human-meat kebabs—delicacies left over from body mod surgeries. Human-animal chimeras—of course Grillas, but also frog-faced thugs and reptilian conmen—hung in doorways between the mechanoids and humanoids. Flashes of New Orleans’ past forced themselves into Vince’s sensory frames, reality skins that were being pumped out as hard and fast from the bars almost as furiously as the music, and all of it drenched in alternating stench-waves of sweat and urine.

Pain shot through Vince’s back. “Can we stop for a minute? Get a drink?”

Agent Connors nodded. She didn’t look any better than Vince felt.

That being said, Vince felt as comfortable here as Agent Connors was uncomfortable. Louisiana was where his family originated. He smiled. The world still needs lawless places. He always liked a good party. Even if the world burned down around this place, people would still be coming here to celebrate, and to hide. The world needed criminals just as much as it needed heroes—and anyway, the difference between a criminal and a hero was more often a matter of timing than moral compass.

At least, he hoped it was.

4

“Silicon gone wrong, ‘bad glass,’ get it?” Sibeal was trying to explain why her group was called the glasscutters. “We hunt down bad glass, errant digital organisms.” She looked at the ceiling. “But I wouldn’t call them criminals. Really they’re just misguided pieces of code.”

The White Horse was bustling at the end of a busy day for the undergrounders. The main bar, of curving polished mahogany, was packed two deep with people ordering pints, their arms high, waving at the bartender. The plush carpeting underfoot smoothed the hubbub of voices, and overhead lighting reflected from polished brass banisters and the mirror-lined walls.

Sid was running background simulations of escape routes, creating ever-more-elaborate systems and models of the networks around him. “Whatever works for you,” he replied to Sibeal, shrugging. Most of his attention was on a simulation where he was uncorking beer kegs to hide a dramatic escape. It’d become more of a game than a serious undertaking, and Sibeal was forcing him to maintain his primary presence with her. Really, he was sulking.

“Doesn’t matter what name you attach to a thing,” rumbled the Grilla, sitting across from Sibeal. It lifted a tankard of beer as big as Sid’s midsection to its lips. “If it’s done badly, it’s responsible.”

Sid looked at him. “So if a lion eats an antelope, we should book it for murder?”

The Grilla slammed its drink down. “Want to start into the Africa jokes?”

Sid almost fell out of his chair. The Grilla’s nostrils flared, and anger seemed to swell it double in size. “No… I didn’t mean…”

The Grilla’s hackles eased down. It turned to Sibeal. “Still need me?”

She shook her head, and the Grilla gulped down the remains of its beer and stormed off.

Sid eased back to the table. “Testy.”

Sibeal watched the retreating Grilla. “That’s Furball, by the way. He’s cuddly when you get to know him.” She looked back at Sid. “Only his friends call him Furball. Best for you to stick to his name—Zoraster.”

“Zoraster? Seriously?”

Sibeal nodded. “So is it a deal?”

She wanted Sid to get Willy to talk to her. Sibeal’s glasscutter guild had tracking information on Willy’s body—there was a huge bounty—and she was offering to share it if he’d introduce her to Willy, get his primary subjective down for a chat. This was the reason the glasscutters had initially contacted Sid. She figured that if she could talk to Willy directly, she might be able to figure out where his body was.

Sid doubted it, but didn’t see it doing any harm. Despite the massive resources they exhausted, the only thing Sid and his friends had managed to confirm was that it was Willy’s proxxi that stole his body. Hearing that the glasscutters had a lead was the first real bright spot.

Sid wasn’t even sure what the mission was anymore. Bob had disappeared, was maybe captured, maybe worse, and the same for Vince. Sid had a very thin list of options. Throwing in with bounty hunters seemed morally questionable, but then Sid based decisions on what made sense to get to the objective, and not on the shifting sands of morality. And he didn’t have other options. Something was better than nothing. “Sure,” he replied. “I’ll get Willy down here.”

“And I want to see what’s in that data beacon, just me, strictly private,” Sibeal added.

Sid and Vicious were having trouble unpacking the data beacon Bob left for them. Bob had been careful, wrapping it in layers of shared-memetic encryption only Sid could decode, and it was taking a long time to unwrap. And why would he share whatever he found with her? At the very least, this was more leverage he could use later. He picked his beer up. “I don’t think so—”

Two giant metal hands crashed through the walls of the bar, ripping through brick and mortar, tearing a hole. Sid and Sibeal barely flinched. Bunky’s face appeared in the gaping ruin. “This here’s a workingman’s pub, none of this fancy-dancy stuff…”

The reality skin Sibeal and Sid were sharing slipped away like paint dropped in water. The rusting corrugated tin roof of the real White Horse appeared over them. Bunky was standing on one of the hands of his construction mechanoid, back from work. Shaky, of course, was next to him, and smiling just as goofily.

A serving bot slapped two beers down in front of Bunky and Shaky, and they roared in laughter. Beers from Sid had become something of a ritual. “I do like this guy,” Shaky said to Bunky. They picked up their pints, and Sibeal walked over to greet them.

Sid leaned back and looked around the cavern floor from his view from the White Horse two stories up. He noticed there was an Eleutherous meeting hall to one side, and more Grillas had arrived, working on the diggers and constructors in the pits below.

Before being abducted by one, he’d never seen a Grilla up close and personal before.

Animal-human chimeras, bred for combat in the Weather Wars, Grillas were yet another ill-considered ambition with unintended consequences. Animal-human chimeras had been around for a long time, starting with pigs grown with human organs for transplants. It was only a short step for some researchers, less averse to chimeric tinkering, to experiment with human voice boxes and frontal lobes in male silverbacks.

The world had been in a moral uproar until the first reports of the raging silverback battalions, in full battle armor, ripping their opposition to pieces in Weather War battles high in the Himalayas. After that, the moral tide turned into a debate about sending “our boys” into battle against them. Almost overnight, all sides had their own Grilla units.

Even unaided by an exoskeleton, a combat Grilla could dead lift two tons, scale forty-foot walls, and if all other weapons systems failed, rely on a fearsome set of fangs. They were famous for having bad tempers, but then again, if you sprang into existence to discover that your Creators were human assholes, you’d be pissed off, too.

In this high-speed-evolution world, after a few years robotics became cheaper than Grillas, especially when the larger costs—urban ghettos filled with creatures returned from the wars, half-accorded rights and civil unrest, long-term health and safety issues—became obvious. They’d now been banned from urban centers, an entire generation of a doomed race, and relegated to places like this.

But cost was only half the story.

The human mimicry of synthetics and bots was one thing, but looking into a Grilla’s eyes, you couldn’t help but feel like you were peering into your own soul—and humans reserved a special hatred for things that reminded them of themselves.

5

“Just be careful of him,” said one of the men.

Must be the one the old man called Toothface.

Cranial gene-mod therapy tended to induce hyperdontia when done badly. The man’s head was grotesquely mushroomed on one side and a second and third set of teeth had grown in over his first. He wiped drool from his mouth with the back of one hand. Making it worse, he had a shabby reality filter fixed over top of it all, a transparent overlay showing off the large brain that had grown inside the shell of his expanded skull.

Then again, part of what Bob was seeing might be an artifact of the sensory mapping.

He was struggling to make sense of the scarab beetle’s neural pathways, trying to wrest control of its six legs from the still-skittish owner. The beetle tried to scurry back under the door, but Bob held it firm, edging it forward.

Bob had a splinter working to correlate the view from the thousands of lens in its compound eye into something understandable to his own visual cortex, but the experience was unnerving. The image of the men in the room ballooned, as if he was looking into a carnival mirror, slowly coming into focus but then distorting again, the men glowing in the infrared-shifted spectrum of the insect’s vision.

“When is…” one of the other men said. His lips kept moving but the audio feed slipped into garbled static. Bob tunneled down into the tibiae of the beetle, the thin cuticle ear drum located on its front legs. Instead of trying to interpret nerve packets at the end of the trachea, it might be better to go straight to the timpani. It worked, and the sound information normalized. “…so will be here the day after tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Toothface replied. “The kid’s neural load is bleeding out fast. The priest is dangerous, he knows—”

The priest, Bob thought, looking at the old man in the cell beside his. So the old man was a priest.

The terrified beetle managed to override Bob for a second and shifted under the doorway, garbling the sound again. Bob steadied it, sending soothing impressions into its primitive awareness, trying to match his brain’s gamma frequency waves to those of the insect’s optic lobes.

Not for the first time, Bob wished he had his proxxi there to help him. Robert was still locked out. Something happened in the event under New York that warped his pssi interface.

“—just stay out of that room,” continued Toothface’s voice after a second or two. “Keep him isolated. Is that clear?”

The other men nodded. Bob noticed a clutch of keys on one of their belts. Toothface sat down at a wooden table in the middle of the room while one of the men went to fill a kettle from the well outside.

“The forty-year war is nearing its end,” said the Bedouin to Bob. “They’re getting desperate.”

Bob held the beetle steady, shifting his primary awareness back into his body. He’d ghosted into insects before, but beetles had undergone an explosion of radial evolution that resulted in a bewildering array of sensory systems. He had never inhabited a scarab beetle before, but he was getting the hang of it.

“The Weather Wars, you mean?” Bob replied to the Bedouin.

Depending on what you defined as the starting point, the Weather Wars had been going on about that long. But how would capturing Bob have anything to do with that long-drawn-out conflict? Bob looked at the old priest more carefully. They said he was dangerous. How?

The priest shrugged. “Attach what names you like.”

There were no digital or network systems in here, no listening devices, so nobody could hear them. This was more to protect them than me, thought Bob. No way for him to escape digitally. Everything about this place was as primitive as possible, including the physical locks. He had to get those keys.

“The star with two tails is rising in the morning sky again,” the Bedouin added. “Gog and Magog are unshackled.”

Bob stared at him. The main danger this guy seemed to be was to himself. He played along. “So this is it, then, the end of the world?” In an overlaid display, his insect-mind watched the men in the other room pouring tea.

“Not the end, a rebirth.” The Bedouin looked out his window at the sky. “But yes, it will be the end of this world.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

The Bedouin sat down on his cot. “I am not excited, not afraid, but embracing, accepting.” He took a deep breath. “The world must be cleansed. Our suffering must be brought to an end.”

Despite his disdain, a part of Bob could understand what the priest meant. He’d been sheltered on Atopia, but much of the world was a horrible place, plagued by war, disaster, famine. The pattern was repeating. After enslaving the natural world, humans were now enslaving the endless virtual worlds and creatures they were creating. It wasn’t something Bob thought about much, protected and isolated on Atopia, but coming out into the world was changing his perspective.

The men in the next room laughed, and Bob sharpened his awareness in the beetle.

“No more dirty desert after this,” Toothface said. “With the money we get for this kid.”

“If he’s so dangerous, maybe we should just cut him up into pieces,” laughed one of the men, pulling a cruelly curved knife from his belt. “Just to be sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”

Toothface liked that and slapped the table, all of them joining in laughter. “Maybe we should,” he said gruffly, and the laughing stopped.

Letting the beetle slip back under the doorway, Bob looked at the priest through the bars of the jail. “Is there anything bigger than a beetle I could get my hands on out here?”

6

The man in front of Vince held onto the bars of the balcony railing as if they were the bars of a cell. “Buddy, you got some smarties? Just a little,” he begged, “just a taste.”

Not a man, realized Vince, staring into the desperate face, but a boy, emaciated with that same hollow look all junkies shared. “Sorry—”

“Please, I know you have some, I can sense them.” The boy reached through the bars and grabbed Vince’s arm.

“Hey!” Vince pulled away, and the boy jumped back, rubbing the fingers he’d touched Vince with into the back of his neck. He’d swiped a few of Vince’s smarticles onto his fingers, and was rubbing them into the spot closest to his pleasure centers, trying to eke out a tiny jolt of endorphins in a fantasy world.

“Should just give the kid what he wants.” Agent Connors yawned.

Smarticles, the tiny neuro-reactive engines that powered commercial pssi, were a controlled substance internationally. In the big cities, Cognix was giving it away for free, hooking a populace that would pay for it later. This place, however, was outside any legal-licensed jurisdiction, which meant having real smarticles was illegal—though that didn’t mean everyone wasn’t copying them.

And they definitely weren’t free.

“Not going to happen,” Vince replied.

Money wasn’t the problem. Sid had created their own private smarticle stash for their gang, to shield them from prying eyes. Vince swallowed his in a time-release capsule that had attached itself to the inside of his small intestine. He didn’t want them getting around. They could be used to track him.

“So what’s our next step?” Vince asked Connors.

Two bloodied and ragged people leaning on each other blended perfectly into the melee of Bourbon Street, lending them a cloak of invisibility, but everywhere they went for a room, they were turned away. Of course the bars were open twenty-four hours, so they still had somewhere to go.

“We wait.” Agent Connors settled herself into a corner beside Vince.

Vince leaned back and closed his eyes. She might not have any connections here, but he did. He sent out some bots to test the local underground. Hotstuff was feeding him threat reports, his mind cycling through images and situational reports.

He watched a pack of pickpockets, a gang of neurally-fused teenagers that were circling through the crowd, prowling. Even in the short time they’d been there, Vince had watched a breathtaking progression of trending memes moving through the crowd, evolving hourly, new forms morphing from old; an influx of new machines, neural formations, virtual worlds, reality skins.

True mind-uploading was beyond current technology. Research into it was banned in many places—mostly on moral and legal grounds, and on religious ones in America—but the distinction was blurring. The meta-cognition frameworks of most “people” were outweighing their meat brains. The logic behind the original bans, clear just years and months ago, was becoming irrelevant as pssi permeated the population.

When the turbofan went down, he’d assumed he was going to die. They were too high, it was too fast, they had no protection from his networks. The survivability matrix was nil. In the flames and noise he’d closed his eyes, waiting.

And then nothing.

When he regained consciousness, it was quiet, just the sound of bullfrogs groaning in the darkness. He was soaked, twisted together in the metal and plastic wreck. He didn’t feel anything. Relaxing into what he assumed was his coming death, he closed one eye, looking at the stars in the sky, then opened it and closed the other. Two working eyes. Pausing, he tried wiggling his toes—and no spinal cord injury. Gingerly pulling himself out from the wreck, he’d checked his body for gaping bodily wounds. None of those either.

Amazing.

On closer inspection, he found some wounds to one leg, a cut clear across his face, but nothing major. Just seconds before he’d been at peace with death, and now, it was like he was reborn. He expected he would be horrified, in shock, after a traumatic accident where he was injured, almost killed, but it was quite the opposite. Vince had been overjoyed, ecstatic, hopping around in the swamp examining the mangled turbofan, marveling at it. He cheated death once again, and this time by himself.

Vince opened his eyes and looked at Agent Connors. She was asleep.

“She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

Vince looked up to see Hotstuff, her eyebrows arched as she stared at him.

“Huh?”

“Whatever.” Hotstuff was streaming him summaries of the threat reports. It wasn’t much—they didn’t have much network access—but then again, there wasn’t anything to report either. It seemed that cutting him off from Phuture News had also separated Vince from whatever was chasing him.

“Any questions?” asked Hotstuff.

“Um, no, this looks…” but Hotstuff signed off and faded away without letting Vince finish his sentence. He frowned.

“I think your proxxi is jealous.”

Vince turned to see Agent Connors smiling at him, her eyes half open. He forgot that he had opened his pssi channels to her and she was able to see his proxxi. He had wanted to be sure that she had the same situational data he had. They were in a dangerous spot.

“Of you?” snorted Vince, shaking his head and returning his attention to the nearly empty threat reports.

“The second we get out of here, make no mistake, you’re going to jail,” continued Agent Connors. “So don’t get any ideas.”

Vince looked at her. “Me? Ideas?”

Agent Connors rolled her eyes before closing them again.

Hotstuff popped back into his visual frame, sitting across the table from him. “There’s someone coming,” she whispered.

Before Vince could ask, Hotstuff sent him the report. An Ascetic was walking toward them. So his feelers had found something. Vince spun a viewpoint outside, watching the crowd of partygoers part like the Red Sea around the advancing figure—a stump of flesh suspended between six spindly metal legs, gliding spider-like across the ground.

Vince kicked Agent Connor’s leg under the table, and she jolted awake. He spun the information packets on this Ascetic into her networks.

“Mr. Indigo, I presume,” the Ascetic hissed directly into his head. It wasn’t speaking. It had no mouth. It closed the last few feet of distance by lifting itself up on its hind legs to bring its head even with their balcony.

“Yes.” What was he supposed to say? There wasn’t any use running.

“I have someone who wants to meet you,” continued the Ascetic, the naked slab of its body hanging in space in front of them. Skin was grafted across its face, pulled taut; no eyes, no ears, no mouth. “Someone you’ve been wanting to meet.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” whispered Agent Connors.

The Ascetic turned its body toward her, revealing a large, square cross emblazoned on its flesh. “I am deaf, but I hear all, I am blind, but I see all. Ms. Connors, do you see?”

Sheila’s face went pale. “What do you want?”

“It is not what I want,” hissed the Ascetic, just a voice in their heads. “But what you want.”

7

“We don’t hunt people.” Sibeal looked up, considering her statement. “Or, we don’t hunt humans. You’re our first.”

Willy’s primitive avatar flickered. As the Alliance—America and Atopia and its allies—blockaded data pathways to Terra Nova, there wasn’t enough clean bandwidth getting through for him to project something more sophisticated. It was becoming obvious they were planning some new action against Terra Nova, but the mediaworlds, and even Phuture News, remained quiet.

“You’re not hunting me,” said Willy’s avatar after a pause. “Just my body.”

Sibeal nodded. “Not really even your body—we’re hunting your proxxi, Wally, who’s stolen your body.”

Even Sid stopped for a moment to contemplate just how weird this situation was. He’d convinced Willy to come down and talk to the glasscutters, but his signal was getting weak. Even if the signal from Willy’s body was being routed through Terra Nova, his virtual presence wasn’t allowed inside it, and transmissions from Terra Nova weren’t allowed outside in Allied space anymore. His awareness was being squeezed into the thin cracks of the multiverse in between.

Willy’s avatar remained static for a few seconds, and just when Sid thought the connection had been lost—“I’m not sure Wally is responsible,” came the audio stream from the avatar, but its lips didn’t move. “He might be doing what I asked, or what he thought I asked.”

Sid had filled everyone in, about Willy telling his proxxi to keep them safe, no matter what, when he was running his illegal business.

“So you’re saying it wasn’t him?” echoed ReVurb, the phracker—phuture cracker—Sibeal invited to be part of her team.

Sid didn’t trust phrackers. Even if they weren’t telling the truth, they could engineer the future so what they were telling you became true. They were slippery. Only a small part of a phracker was in the present. Most of them hung around in expensively maintained alternate future realities that spun outward from the present moment in time. The other parts of them sat in the past, winding through post-factual worlds that could have happened if different decisions were made.

“I’m sure it’s my proxxi that stole my body,” Willy replied. “But I’m saying he’s not responsible.”

“Because you set him on this course?”

After an even longer pause, Willy’s avatar nodded. Sibeal and ReVurb had been interrogating Willy for a good hour already.

“So me and Willy have held up our end of the bargain.” Sid stretched his phantom limbs. “How about you show us what you know?”

Sibeal looked at ReVurb, who nodded, and data packets were sent into Sid and Willy’s networks. Sibeal pulled their primary subjectives into a view of the American east coast from a hundred miles up, overlaying the names of cities and districts.

“Each of these,” Sibeal explained, pointing toward red dots that appeared one by one, “are suspected points of entry by Willy’s body into the AEC infrastructure.”

“Suspected?” Sid frowned. “But I thought you had something concrete—”

With a stuttering breath, ReVurb pulled himself into the present. “He’s invisible in the zero timeframe, we can only derive his appearance by second-order artifacts in the positive and negative—”

“I get it,” interrupted Sid, assimilating the data they’d sent him. They couldn’t observe Willy’s body directly in any data feeds, only a derivative of him in the past and future, like the wake of an invisible boat. Even so, Sid should have been able to see it.

“There’s some very strong glass at work here,” added Sibeal, “like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”

A light bulb went off in Sid’s head. “And the only reason you saw any of this was because Willy came into the underground.”

“Right, we have our own sensor networks.” Sibeal pointed at the city centers of New York, Philadelphia, Washington, then spun the globe to indicate other points of contact in London, Paris, and Istanbul with the trail fading in southern Asia. “This is as much as we have.”

“So where am I now?” Willy asked. “Do we have an end—”

His avatar flickered and then dimmed. Sid swore and dove into his workspace, trying to route alternate connections for Willy’s mind. In fits and starts, the avatar began to reappear.

“I’m doing everything I can,” Sid said to Willy in a private space. With Bob gone, Sid felt responsible for Willy. It had become a personal point of pride to outsmart the Alliance filters, to keep the data coming so Willy could stay with them, but his pride was melting into fear for his friend. Sid didn’t have a lot of friends.

“I know,” Willy replied. “I’d better send you some information Vince sent me—”

Sid nodded, sensing some data packets arriving, and just then Willy’s avatar completely disappeared.

Before Sid could give chase, ReVurb blocked his exits into the data pipes out of the underground. “Don’t bother, it’s hopeless.”

“We do have some news—would you like the good or bad first?” Sibeal said after they let Sid work in futile silence for a few seconds.

“Why do people keep asking me that?” Sid didn’t wait for an answer. He was still working in the background, but he knew Willy wasn’t coming back. He’d had enough with the bad news. “Okay, good news this time.”

“It seems Mr. Indigo survived the crash. We’ve located him in New Orleans.” ReVurb smiled. “At least, that’s what they’re going to announce in the news tomorrow.”

Vince was the granddaddy of the phrackers, although he was on the other side of a line that was increasingly thin. Now he was indicted, he’d practically joined their ranks. Probably something Vince, in his position, should have seen coming. In all cases, ReVurb seemed to be happy about it.

Sid waited. “And the bad?”

“The Ascetics have taken him.”

Well at least he’s not dead, and then quickly on the heels of that thought, but he might wish he was if they couldn’t get to him soon. “Anything new on Bob?”

Everyone there—Sibeal, ReVurb, Bunky—shook their heads.

Sid’s proxxi pinged him, dragging his point-of-view into a workspace world. “What’s so important?” Sid grumbled. Vicious opened up a display. Before his avatar disappeared, Willy sent them some documents that Vince had forwarded him.

Willy’s proxxi had been reading religious texts at the Commune. Vicious did a statistical analysis on the texts and one line stood out, something scrawled in the margins, a line Vicious couldn’t find any contextual links to: “The beginning of man, where time stops in a thousand tongues.” What the hell did that mean?

8

Molehills became mountains, at least from the point of view of the beetle Bob struggled to keep control of. The blanket of stars of the deep Sahara, thick enough for even an insect to imagine it could reach up and touch, hung above him in the sky. Moonrise was coming. He had to hurry.

Two legs forward, two legs back, two other legs forward, first two legs back. Just keep the rhythm, Bob kept telling himself. He couldn’t see it yet, but even without a three-dimensional overlay map, the beetle’s keen sense of smell was homing them in to the garbage pile.

Come on, you love this smelly stuff, Bob urged to the beetle’s small mind. But the beetle knew: here there were predators.

The beetle topped a tiny crest of sand, each grain the size of a boulder, and the town’s garbage dump came into view. It was pitch black, but in the insect’s infrared-shifted vision the garbage glowed with heat against the cold desert floor. Within the glow, something shifted, something brighter, and then another.

The rats were feeding.

The beetle’s legs backpedaled, quivering, but Bob pushed it forward.

Bob’s smarticle count was low, and keeping a communication link at nearly a half a mile was pushing his limits. Soon he would be empty. Already he felt the symptoms of withdrawal—his tweaking neurons, the buzzing itch on his insides that couldn’t be scratched.

I’m sorry, Bob wanted to tell the beetle, I need help. I need you to sacrifice yourself for me. He wanted to explain how this was the only way. But how to explain that to a creature, any creature, that their time must come to an end so that yours could continue, that there was some other good that required their death.

But there was no time for that. Bob pushed and pushed, ignoring the keening terror in the mind he was sharing. The looming pile grew larger, and then one of the warm red patches stopped, the saucers of its eyes turning toward Bob-beetle. In an instant it was over, the rat darting in and snatching the beetle from the desert floor, the beetle’s fear for an instant eclipsing the brightest of stars overhead.

And then nothing.

Bob’s telepresent link went blank, but he waited, maintaining the connection to the smarticles in the beetle’s body, which was becoming a part of the rat’s. The transfer was incomplete, but an image began forming. Mammals were much closer to home, much simpler to inhabit. Bob-rat now looked up from the garbage pile, tasting the remains of beetle shell in the back of his mouth.

Rubbing his eyes, Bob withdrew his primary subjective back into the jail cell and looked around. In amplified low-light he surveyed the walls, watched the priest sleeping in the cot in the cell next to him, and listened carefully to the snoring of one of the men in the front. Nothing had changed, so he slipped his consciousness back into the rat.

The smarticle density was too low for Bob to control the rat’s nervous system entirely, so he had to be selective. He tweaked the rat’s keen sense of smell. There’s something delicious in that structure up the road, was the message Bob implanted. The rat froze, its head swiveling to the horizon, and then it was off, scurrying toward the jail.

9

“So how do you like jail?” asked Vince, taking a gulp from his beer. He wasn’t too concerned about the Ascetics. They were criminals, if ones built around a quasi-religious cult centered on self-denial. He understood criminals, and it was always just about the money—it was never personal. Anyway, he was the one that contacted them. More distressing was his inability to see the future since Agent Connors’ team took away his Phuture News access. The lack of control was an itch he couldn’t scratch.

Connors leaned over the railing of their room’s wrought-iron balcony, inspecting the exterior wall. The noise of Bourbon Street echoed from several stories below, while the whine of electric VTOLs spun through the black skies. She leaned back in and turned around. “Is that supposed to be clever?”

“I mean,” Vince mumbled, “just wondering if you’re having any insight into what it feels like yourself.” He smiled. “It’s just a question.” Flopping down onto one of the two beds, Vince placed his beer on the center console and began playing with the room’s controls, but nothing activated. He frowned and gave up. “No matter how much the world changes, you know what stays the same?”

Sighing, Connors bowed her head. “What?”

“Beds!” said Vince, slapping the one he was on. “All this technology, all this change, and beds are pretty much the same thing as five hundred years ago, I’d bet.”

Connors leaned out over the railing again. “You’re like a seventy-year-old kid, you know that?”

Vince frowned and then smiled. “I’d bet a million dollars I know what you’re thinking.”

“A million dollars is about what you spend on a pair of shoes, isn’t it?”

“You know what I mean.” He took a sip of his beer. “You’re thinking, with one good leap I could just make it over to that next balcony.” He took another sip. “There’s no need to look out there. Hotstuff mapped the walls, exterior features, interior corridors.”

It was about a thirty-foot vertical drop onto concrete. Connors sighed. “But you don’t want to escape?”

“Not question of want, we’re in their territory. I’ve gone through thousands of scenarios, and the best one is to sit tight. We can negotiate our way out.”

She turned to him. “You know what I think?”

He sat up and smiled. “What?”

“I think you want to be here.”

“Want to be here? If I don’t get out of here, I could lose a couple of hundred-billion dollars.” With the charges filed against him, he could stand to lose more than just Phuture News. He could end up in jail. A real jail, where he wouldn’t be able to escape into simulated reality. A confined concrete cell. No future, no movement, no control—the thought made Vince ill. He put his beer down.

Connors laughed. “I’m sure you can tie up the courts for years. I bet you have cash squirreled away all over the place. Characters like you always have escape routes planned.”

That was pretty accurate, Vince had to admit. He nodded and picked up his beer again. Hotstuff, sitting in the corner, raised her eyebrows. Vince slouched into the silk pillows, inspecting the gold-flecked wallpaper and brass lighting fixtures above his head.

Connors gave up on the outside. Leaning on the balcony railing, she turned to Vince. “So you said I had it wrong?”

“Yeah.”

“How so?”

“We were trying to do the right thing when I breached all those future confidences.” Vince sensed that doing the right thing was what drove Connors forward.

“And what was this thing?”

“We found out that Cognix was hiding some test results on pssi.”

“I heard about that. So that was you guys who forced it out?”

Vince shrugged. “Didn’t quite work out like that, but we pushed the issue.”

“Interesting.” Connors considered this. “And you don’t think your friend Robert Baxter had anything to do with the attack in New York?”

“No way.” Vince shook his head vigorously. “He’s a good kid. Can be a bit of a flake…”

Connors smiled. “And this coming from you?”

Vince smiled back. Finally, a sense of humor. “Bob’s one bright kid.”

“Not just a kid, a pssi-kid,” corrected Connors. “It’s hard to know what they might be capable of. They’re…” She paused, searching for the right words.

“Not human?” Vince offered. “That’s not true. They’re just like us, but slightly more advanced. People 2.0.”

“If you say so.” Connors pressed her hands together at her chin. It was her thinking pose. “And you know Baxter this well how?”

“From surfing together.”

Connors’ head sagged and she snorted. “Surfing together. Wow.”

Vince sat upright in the bed. “You can tell a lot about a person from surfing with them. Board meetings, we’d call them, sitting in the swells and chatting. Bob has a lot of friends. That says something about someone.”

“Sure. A lot of criminals have a lot of friends.”

“Funny.” He put his beer down. “I’m being serious. The way someone lets other people get up on the waves, helps out if there’s a problem. He’s a straight shooter, nice guy, whatever you want to call it, but he didn’t unleash some weapon that hurt people. Of that I’m sure. His worst crime is being a little nosy.”

Connors paused. “I heard he’s a drug addict.”

Vince stared at her. “And did you also hear his twin brother killed himself?”

“Yeah, I did…”

“So give the kid a break.”

Connors pushed herself off the railing and came into the room. She sat down on the bed opposite Vince. “And what about Sidney Horowitz. Do you think he had anything to do with that reality virus that nearly wrecked Atopia?”

Vince didn’t answer as quickly this time. “Naw. Sid likes to think of himself as a rebel, likes to play pranks, even get up to some mischief, but he’s a good kid, too. A bit of a loner, but a good kid.”

“Forensics said his digital fingerprints were all over that thing.”

“Maybe, but it wasn’t Sid that unleashed it.”

“You sound awfully sure.” Connors narrowed her eyes. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Vince finished off a last gulp from his beer. He put the empty bottle down. “What do you mean?”

“Makes you look awfully suspicious to jump off Atopia right after someone sabotaged it, then go and hide. If you guys had nothing to do with it, what are you doing out here?”

Sighing, Vince picked up a pillow and fluffed it, then stuck it behind his back and leaned against the headboard. “I’m not sure how much I should tell you.” Patricia had given them strict instructions to keep this to themselves. If nothing else, Vince liked sticking to a plan.

Agent Connors pointed toward the locked door. “We should be working together to find a way out of this. I know you have more information than you’re telling me.”

“Work together?” Vince threw his hands in the air. “Find a way out of this? We are only in this because of you.” He swung his legs off the bed to face her. “And I should help you for what, so you can drag me to jail? I saved your life.”

Connors didn’t flinch or back away. “Someone’s got a quick temper.”

“You come out of nowhere, try and snatch me out of the sky. You know nothing about me—”

Agent Connors held one finger up in Vince’s face. “Oh, I know you.”

“You know me?” He looked at the ceiling and then back at her. “Why don’t you tell me, then?”

“I know you stole Phuture News away from your business partner when you started up.”

Vince stared at Connors. “You know nothing about that.” He took a deep breath. “Want me to describe you?”

Connors shrugged.

“Let me see,” began Vince. “Workaholic, never married”—one hand shot up—“wait, married to the academy. That’s you.” He rocked back a little. “I bet your dad was a cop.”

Connors’ face remained impassive.

“Yeah, that’s it. Trying to live up to Daddy, always needing to prove yourself. That’s why you tried to snatch me out of the sky. All this drama. You need to prove yourself.”

“Not bad,” said Connors quietly. “But I know you, too.”

“Oh yeah? Try me.”

“Just another rich asshole who thinks he’s above everyone else.”

10

“For the money, of course,” replied Bunky.

Sid volunteered to help Shaky and Bunky repair one of the construction mechanoids. Melodies of a Lynyrd Skynyrd song echoed from a hundred years in the past. The music filled the virtual worlds Sid was building for the simulations. He had never heard the song before—a tribute from another time to an Alabama homeworld—but it was growing on him. Bunky picked it.

“I mean, it’s not just the money,” Shaky added, “it’s our jobs, like, you know what I mean, mate?”

They were trying to explain to Sid why they’d kidnapped him. On Atopia, money had never really been a motivator. It was just something that existed, in the background, secondary to the grand experiment that was Atopia. With unlimited access to synthetic reality, who needed money to buy things? You could just spawn as much of anything you liked, at any time, and perfect health was an unspoken part of the deal. On the outside, however, all these things he had for free on Atopia—the smarticles, unlimited multiverse access, skins—cost money.

“It wasn’t really about kidnapping you, mind you.” Bunky clapped Sid on the shoulder. “We were just securing you. The money was supposed to come from the bounty for catching Willy’s proxxi.”

Sid was discovering the extent of the obsession with money and material luxury that filled the collective conscience outside Atopia. “Yeah, I got that.”

He was building virtual-world models of the rotator cuff joint of Bunky’s construction mechanoid, trying to fix a broken seal. Bunky and Shaky were riding along with him, in toy-balloon avatars attached to his consciousness as he spun through his virtual worlds. Sid looked up to see Bunky-balloon smile, a big grin with one front tooth broken in half.

“Do you not get your tooth fixed because of the money?” Sid asked.

Health care was the other fixation. Elective gene modifications could double life expectancy for the rich, but even basic health wasn’t always guaranteed for the poor. Atopia’s pssi technology was being applied across the systemic injustice like a numbing salve to treat a mortal wound.

Sid wasn’t philosophical by nature—that was Bob’s domain—but it was hard not to ponder the more time he spent out here. He understood that the basics of economics had moved from products to services, and were now moving to trading information for the purpose of self-advantage in the purest form of the idea. What exactly the “self” referred to was the new problem. The definition of a “person” was losing coherence in the face of synthetic intelligences, neural fusioning, and the expanding cloud of information that made up a person.

Shaky-balloon roared out laughing at Sid’s question. “Ha, no mate, Bunky here is deathly afraid of anyone drilling into that thick slab of a skull!”

Bunky-balloon glowed red. Sid smiled.

“Almost done,” Sid said, shifting attention away from Bunky. “Can you see the array?”

Sid tried splintering the solution sets to Bunky and Shaky, but their external meta-cognition frameworks were childlike. Instead he began flipping through a series of images, showing each option visually.

Bunky and Shaky nodded as one. “Yeah, sort of,” they both replied. If Sid didn’t know better, he would have suspected they were neurally fused, but he knew they were just best friends.

The simulations were set in motion, and Sid spun the most likely scenario, a hollowed-out view of a giant robotic arm rotating in a three-dimensional space around Shaky and Bunky’s perspectives. Sid chuckled. They weren’t the sharpest cheeses in the drawer, but they had no problem understanding complex geometries.

“What’s it like, like?” Bunky asked.

Sid was deep into modifying his virtual-world model. “What’s what like?” It was the first time he’d gotten to work on repairing a complex robot first hand.

“Being a pssi-kid—isn’t it kind of freaky, like? Is it true you don’t see any difference between the real world and virtual worlds?”

Sid paused. If you’d asked him that question a few weeks ago, he’d have agreed. His virtual worlds were as real as the reality he experienced on Atopia. But reality on Atopia wasn’t the same as out here. “Yes and no,” he replied as he fiddled with his model. “It’s not easy to explain.” An infinite number of alternate universes, and pssi as the backdoor to crossing the threshold—on Atopia it made sense, but here, the dream was fading.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Bunky said after a pause. “You’re like a bloody god to these glasscutters.”

Sid smiled. “Could have fooled me.”

“Naw, he’s right,” said Bunky. “Sibeal practically squealed when you contacted her. She’s got some serious fan girl going on.”

Sid ignored the praise, spinning the newest simulation into the hyperspace around their points-of-view. “So what do you think?”

Shaky-balloon frowned. “Not bad, but…” With a jittery phantom limb—he wasn’t good at adapting his nervous system in virtual spaces—Shaky grabbed the projection and squeezed, popping them back into real space. Sid, Bunky, and Shaky were standing next to each other on a gantry above the construction mechanoid’s shoulder.

“…I like things I can touch with my own two hands.” He banged the rotator cuff joint of the mechanoid with a hammer and laughed. “If you see what I mean.”

“And I”—Sid spread a dozen of his phantom limbs around his body like wings—“like things I can touch with my own twelve.”

Bunky laughed, and Shaky bent down to the mechanoid and began banging away, hammering at the joint.

“After all my simulation work, really?” Sid shook his head as he watched. He turned to Bunky. “So you two are Midtown miners?”

Bunky nodded. “New York central branch of the worldwide Urban Miners Association. We staked out Midtown years back, prospecting seams of urban ore under the streets.”

“And that makes you money?” Sid asked, trying to get into the flow of their thinking.

Bunky smiled. “Amazing amount of comatose stock down here—obsolete infrastructure, buried pipes, cabling, old landfill. We piece together old maps, way back to the 1850s all the way into mid-twenty-first century, mapping the city underground, and then dig it out, sometimes with city planning permission—”

“—but most of the time without!” laughed Shaky, kneeling beside them with a crowbar jammed into the mechanoid’s shoulder.

“Did you know”—Bunky paused, his eyes narrowing—“that a bin of electronics waste is a hundred times richer in precious metals than the finest wild ores dug from virgin soil?”

“Didn’t know that.”

Shaky stood up, satisfied with his work. “But the best is in the gutter.”

“This one’s mind’s always in the gutter,” Bunky joked, slapping Shaky on the back.

The arm of the construction mechanoid swung up and down. Whatever Shaky had done, it worked.

“What I’m talking about,” continued Shaky, “is street sludge. We filter it from the sewers. Platinum group metals—palladium, rhodium—plus gold, silver from medications, industrial effluent, better than the highest grade—”

Bunky elbowed him. “Enough, he knows, this is the great all-knowing Sidney Horowitz.” He winked at Sid. “Time for us to get to work, mate.”

Without warning, the construction mechanoid’s digger-hand swung in and scooped Sid up. Of course Sid’s proxxi, Vicious, saw it coming, and angled his body to sit into the hand at just the right instant, recognizing this as a “friendly.” At the same time, Bunky and Shaky were hoisted into the riding compartments of their respective mechanoids, and with a low whine the other digger bots and worms in the pit whirred into life.

Bunky looked over his shoulder at Sid. “We’re off to see what your friend Willy’s body was up to in the underground.”

Sid nodded. Willy’s body had been pinpointed stopping at specific locations. The underminers were going to see what it’d found so interesting.

In a few crunching strides, they were off down the tunnel leading from the repair pit. The smaller digger bots and worms followed behind. Where Sid’s neural system had plastically adapted to control his phantom limbs, Bunky and Shaky had trained theirs, through years of hard work, to be neurally adapted into their diggers and mechanoids, like learning to play a piano. Their tools and bots were as much a part of their bodies as their hands. Sid watched them disappear around a curve in the tunnel.

“Don’t even think about it.”

Spinning on his heels, Sid turned. The Grilla, Zoraster, emerged out of the blackness of one of the service tunnels to his left. Sid hadn’t even known he was there. In augmented space, a glittering security blanket sparkled around Zoraster. It was hiding his digital signature in the local wikiworld. In real space, the beast seemed to appear silently from nowhere.

Sid felt a noose around his phantoms in pssi-space, choking them back. Zoraster was pinning them. Sid had started sliding into the cracks of the digital infrastructure in the tunnels, looking for ways up and out. It was habit.

“There’s a reason you’re not getting access to outside networks,” said the Grilla, tightening the virtual noose it threw around Sid. “Want to guess why?” The Grilla dropped twenty feet from the service tunnel to the pit floor, effortlessly, without a sound, its hulk looming over Sid. “I don’t trust you.”

“I’ve told you everything I know.” Sid backed up a few steps. “I even got Willy down here to talk with you.”

“You might think you’re making friends, that you’ve got these underminers and ‘cutters wrapped around your little finger,” Zoraster rumbled, “but trouble follows you and your friends.”

“But I told you—”

The Grilla shoved Sid back against the cold stone wall. “Save the sad story. Your friend Bob disappearing, you left all alone, your friend Indigo tracked to the Ascetics, goddamn gangster freaks.” Sid could feel the Grilla’s heat, his breathing like the bellows of a locomotive. “You’re good at sneaking around, Horowitz. You know what Grillas are good at?”

Sid trembled. Where he’d been able to easily anticipate what Bunky and Shaky would say, even Sibeal and ReVurb, he had no idea what this Grilla would do. He shook his head.

The Grilla turned and stalked away, jumping and swinging up the pit wall. “Killing,” Sid heard it growl as it disappeared into the blackness. “That’s what we were built for. Killing.”

11

He had no choice. Bob had to kill the man in order to escape.

He’d run through hundreds of simulations after bringing the rat back into the jailhouse and sneaking it up to the man’s chair, using its little hands to slip free the keychain. With his low smarticle count, maintaining control over the rat was draining.

Bob was exhausted.

He slipped some of the rat’s smarticles into the guard by getting it to lick his hand. The guard was asleep, but his theta and alpha waves frequencies were shortening, his sleep lightening. Bob tried his best to push the man’s mind back down, but his circadian cycle was completing its daily loop, the Earth’s spin pulling this place back toward sunshine. The animal was awakening within. Daylight was coming, and there was only a half-hour gap between shift changes.

Bob had to hurry. They were coming for him. Who “they” were he didn’t know, or at least didn’t know who they were working for, but the likelihood of his situation improving was dwindling as quickly as his smarticle reserves.

The guard was asleep against the door, and there was no way to ensure getting out without risking his raising an alarm—except to kill him. In Bob’s weakened state, knocking him unconscious would be unreliable and noisy, as would trying to slip into his mind and take control.

He slipped into the rat’s consciousness. Pull, little friend, pull, he urged. The rat dug its incisors into the fraying rope, dragging the keychain under the wooden door. Its body strained, and then pulled free and started toward Bob, the keys jangling as they skidded across the stone floor.

Pulling his awareness out of the rat, Bob got up from his cot and looked around the room. The priest was awake, sitting rigidly upright, his eyes luminous saucers in the reflected moonlight. Bob reached down between the bars of his cell and the rat backed up onto his hand, bringing the keys. Setting the rat on his shoulder, Bob reached around the bars and slid the key into lock, then creaked open the door to his cell. Barefoot, he padded across the cold flagstones, his heart thumping in his chest.

Fear, that predator that lurked in the back of the mind, was shaping Bob’s mindscape, morphing his dreams of the future, coloring the ghosts of his past—fear for himself, fear for Nancy and his family, fear of the unknown. He wanted to curl into a ball and retreat into one of his fantasy worlds, but he couldn’t. They were counting on him, even if they didn’t know it. He couldn’t fail. Not again.

His throat parched, his tongue sandpaper, he opened the door to the front office and peered through. Combining the rat’s visual input, staring from his shoulder, with his own, he built a low-light and infrared model of the room. The man’s janbiya, a curved dagger, sagged on one side of his sash. Everything was still where it should be. Everything was set.

Could he kill a man? He didn’t want to, but really, he just had to plan it. Outside the window, a thin light was dusting the horizon. The man stirred.

Bob let go.

He released his body into a pre-programmed routine, his quickened nervous system sliding the door open, stealing silently across the floor. In an instant his hand grabbed the man’s knife, unsheathed it, and then just as quickly drove it through the man’s jugular, slicing it into the back of his neck between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. Bob severed the man’s spinal cord in one motion.

The man’s body jerked, and blood sprayed Bob’s face, spurting out on each heartbeat. The man’s eyes opened wide, just inches from Bob’s, the man’s mind surfacing from a dream world for one final moment. Inadvertently Bob connected into some of the smarticles the rat had transferred into the man. It wasn’t much of a connection, but enough to sense the void of the unknown opening below the man’s mind, the fear swallowing him, falling, falling.

Bob snapped back into his own mind and stared into the man’s dead eyes.

“Come,” hissed the priest, behind him, and then in the open doorway. “We must hurry. They will be here soon.”

Bob was frozen, immobile. He couldn’t move. This man had been in the way to Bob’s freedom, to the safety of his loved ones. Bob hadn’t had a choice, had he? He needed to sacrifice this man for the greater good, and it wasn’t as if his captor was innocent.

Nobody was.

Bob inhaled the sweat-smell of a body whose mind was gone, but whose biological systems were still toiling through their final, futile metabolic processes. He’d killed a million times in his gameworlds, felt hot blood splash across his face, but this was different.

“Come!” urged the priest, now outside the doorway.

Bob regained control of his body, pushing himself off the guard. Reaching down he grabbed the man’s water canteen, and then stumbled out the door into the cool night air. The sun was coloring the horizon, the stars washing from the sky.

12

It was a night of fitful sleep.

Vince gave up while it was still dark. A nice hot shower would help get his brain cycling. He quietly stole into the bathroom, then turned on the water and stepped into the stall. He closed his eyes and let the water pound against his sore body. He could have stood in the shower forever, letting his mind wander. He was the one that had reached out to the local gangsters, but since they’d been sequestered in this room, he had no idea what was going on. He assumed they’d just want some money, but maybe he assumed wrong. Taking a deep breath, he pushed the temperature selector to its coldest setting and exhaled. The icy water blasted against him, and he gritted his teeth and counted to thirty. If that didn’t wake him up, nothing would.

After his shower, Vince went onto the balcony to watch the sunrise over the waterlogged metropolis, the ruined buildings of the city rising like ghosts through a blood-orange fog that burned off as the sun gained in the sky. The hours passed. Connors sat on her bed, and Vince on his, in silence through most of the muggy day, listening to the sounds of catcalling and drunken arguments outside as Bourbon Street came back to life.

It was a lot of time to think.

“You’re wrong,” said Vince finally as night began to fall again.

Connors had her eyes closed. “About what?”

“I haven’t cared about money in a long time.”

She laughed. “Probably because you have more than you can spend in a hundred lifetimes.”

“You know what I mean,” muttered Vince. His entire empire was probably being expropriated as they spoke. “The reason why I’m here, to answer your question of yesterday, is to help a friend.”

“There’s always a reason.” Sitting up in her bed she turned to him. “You committed crimes, Vince, you stole the future information of billions of people, made it public.” Pressing her face into her palms she asked, “So what was so important, seeing as you want to get it out? Why did you do it?”

Vince paused. He pulled a pillow into his lap. “Do you know what it’s like to see the future, to see everything in the future, when the only thing you want is in the past?”

“Regret, you mean regret.” Connors rubbed her face. “I know regret.”

He swung his legs off the bed and turned to sit and face her. “So if you know so much about me, where was I born?”

“Boston.”

“Brothers and sisters?”

Connors cocked her head to one side. “None. A spoiled only child.”

Vince smiled. “My favorite baseball team?” Not everything was in the databases.

“Yankees.”

He had to hand it to her that this answer wasn’t obvious. Vince looked at the floor. “What was my mother’s nickname for me?”

“Indy.”

Perhaps obvious, but this was from before the days that machines recorded every breath a person took. It was time to get the rubber to the road. Vince’s eyes narrowed. “Why did I fake my own deaths?”

“Everyone said it was a game,” replied Connors, but before Vince could pounce she added, “but I don’t think so. I don’t think those were fakes, I think someone was trying to kill you.”

“If you thought someone was trying to kill me, why were you hunting me?”

“Because you broke the law.”

“Then why did you shut off my Phuture News feed if you knew it might be dangerous?”

“Because I wasn’t sure.”

Vince shook his head but smiled. A risk taker. “And now you are?”

“More than I used to be.” Connors swung her feet off her bed and turned to face Vince. “You said I don’t know anything about the situation. What situation? Maybe I could help.”

Vince’s network ran through a dozen short-term simulations. A bit of truth couldn’t hurt. “My friend, Willy McIntyre, had his body stolen.”

“I heard about that. So that was why you were at the Commune?” The mediaworlds were only too aware that Willy’s grandfather was the Reverend.

“Yeah,” Vince replied, knowing it was only half the truth. Could he trust her with what they’d found out about Jimmy Scadden? It would only endanger her life.

Connors didn’t look convinced. “So why did these Ascetics come for us? What is it they think you’re looking for?”

Vince looked away. He didn’t want to tell her that he’d contacted them “I don’t know.”

“Uh-huh.” She rubbed one eye. “Okay, then, what can you tell me about these Ascetics?”

How to explain the Ascetics? A global Russian-origin mafia running illegal body-mod shops, synthetic drugs, emo-porn, and prostitution in all its ever-expanding forms. They controlled the darknets, private worlds unreachable from regulated spaces. “They’re like the Hell’s Angels of the cyber world—”

“I’m not stupid. I mean, what can you tell me about this chapter? Who are we facing?”

A tough question. The Ascetics weren’t something you could just query. Initiation required sacrifice, a ritualized destruction of the physical, cleansing body and mind through modification into an ascetic form. The basis of darknets was anonymized content and access, so the Ascetics anonymized themselves in the physical realms as well, removing—arms, legs, faces—identity.

“This one is heavily tied into Vodoun,” said Vince.

Connors frowned. “Voodoo,” he added, “that’s what they call it here, from Vodoun in West Africa, hoodoo in other places.”

Hotstuff was feeding Vince updated situational reports every few minutes. She pinged him an alert: they were coming. He made a deal.

Getting up off the bed, Vince got up and faced the door. “This sect controls the Spice Routes, the darknet data pipes that transit illegal…” He paused, reconsidering his words. “…or rather, morally challenging goods and services.”

“Morally challenging?”

Vince looked at her and smiled. “Columbus was a slave trader, and you have a holiday for him.” He tensed. It was almost here.

Connors frowned. “Why are you standing there?”

“I said I would go if they promised no harm to you,” he replied quickly. “They know you’re FBI, it’s all out in the open, but I still have some pull, some hidden—”

Before he could finish, the door crashed open and an Ascetic slid through, a silvery web of thousands of legs shimmering beneath a tattooed black torso and white-painted skull.

“It’s time, Mr. Indigo,” reverberated its voice in their heads.

“For what?” grunted Vince, forcing back its intrusions into his mind.

The Ascetic’s body undulated across the floor, its mass of shimmering legs winding into the center of the room while its torso twisted between Vince and Connors. Black peacock feathers sprouted out of its back. Its blank face looked at them, laughing silently. “Time to find what you’ve been looking for.”

13

This was just what he had been looking for.

Bob relaxed into the sun lounger. Sighing with contentment, he brought the ice-cold mojito back to his lips. Dappled sunlight fell across him through the canopy of palms overhead, and a cool breeze blew in over the ocean. He studied the droplets of condensation forming on the sides of the glass, the shredded mint leaves pinned under the ice cubes, and then took another sip.

“Would you like another drink?” Nancy asked. She was standing beside him in a yellow wrap-around, the shadows of her bikini just visible beneath.

“No thanks, sweetheart.”

Nancy’s shadow swept past him. He raised one hand to touch her, but she was gone.

“There is always another,” said a voice of gravel, the words clattering through the air.

Bob sat up and took off his sunglasses, squinting into the brightness.

“And another, and another.” Someone sat on a chair nearby, obscured by the shade of a bush. His face was dark. Bob couldn’t make him out.

Bob holding up one hand to shield his eyes from the sun. “What?”

The owner of the voice pointed skyward. “The star is falling from heaven to destroy a third of all things.”

Bob put his drink down and looked up, rubbing his eyes. Something was in the sky—the comet—its tails spreading outward from the sun, the tip nearly touching it now. “That’s no star. The Comet Catcher mission is bringing it into orbit.”

“This world ends, and another begins.” The man behind the voice retreated further into the shadows. “Don’t you want an end to this suffering?”

“What suffering?”

“What suffering?” The man laughed. “What suffering indeed.”

Bob’s mind filled with a dozen, then a hundred, then a thousand images of burned earth, slaughtered animals, smoking landscapes, dead seas. “Would you stop?”

“Smoke has engulfed the world once more.” The man leaned forward. “The Dajjal had returned, Gog and Magog arisen—there is only you who remains.”

Bob’s vision swam. Only me who remains. “Stop talking! Please stop talking…”

The man leaned into the light. It was the priest. The greens and blues of the ocean patio drained into the endless seas of sand that surrounded them. Bob found himself staring into the priest’s face, into his creased wrinkles and dark eyes.

“Can we focus on practical things?” complained Bob. “I’m getting tired of—” He stumbled, sending a cascade of sand down the face of the dune whose ridge they were laboring along. Ahead, wave upon wave of sand disappeared into the distance, starkly lit by monochromatic moonlight.

“I wasn’t saying anything.” The priest turned and began walking again, his footsteps sure and measured. “You were muttering nonsense. I just asked if you were all right.” The rags hanging around the priest’s withered frame flapped back and forth with each step.

“You were just talking to me.” Bob staggered forward. “I was trying to relax, and you were talking. Why won’t you just let me be?”

Nearly a day ago, in the early morning twilight of their escape, they put several miles of trackless desert behind them before the alarm was raised. The priest led the way, to a secret oasis, he’d said, somewhere hidden.

Somewhere safe.

“You hide in the worlds in your head,” murmured the priest. “For this small suffering”—he motioned at the sand around them—“you throw this world away for another.”

Bob’s skin was blistered. Even in the cool night air it was burning. When they escaped, the morning sun had climbed and climbed into the sky, and he had no protection. He’d heard that a Bedouin could walk for a hundred miles through the open desert, but hearing about a thing was different than experiencing this scorching hell. He could almost feel the frail bubble of his immune system failing as he tracked the ultraviolet-radiation damage to his skin cells, commandeered his autonomous nervous system to retain moisture, watched his neurological signals scatter as he dehydrated. And so he retreated into the private worlds in his head, leaving his body in low-power autopilot to follow the priest.

“Why do you care?” Bob followed the priest footstep by footstep. “All you talk about is the end of the world.”

After escaping, he’d fed the rat to a Nubian vulture. He watched it tear the shrieking creature apart and gulp it in down in pink lumps. He had no choice. He needed information. By flitting into the vulture’s mind as the rat’s precious smarticles transferred into it, he got a sense of the magnetic fields in the area. Bob sent the vulture aloft to map out the terrain to the south.

Of course Toothface chased them, sending out drones into the sky and sandbots to climb through the dunes. Using the vulture, soaring high in the sky, Bob weaved between the searchers. The priest was a master at finding hollows, places to hide, disappearing as if he weren’t even there. They walked, ran, and scrambled to hide all day under the relentless sun.

All the water was long gone. Bob closed up the pores in his skin to keep every molecule of water he could in his body. This acted to heat his core more, raising his central body temperature. His body and brain were frying and on the verge of total neurological failure when the setting sun finally brought relief.

The priest didn’t even turn as he spoke, his words carried to Bob on the sirocco, the never-ending wind that blew through the deep desert. “What’s your idea of Nirvana?”

Bob whispered from between cracked lips, “Heaven?”

“Perhaps. It literally means extinction, like a candle being snuffed out.”

Bob wasn’t sure what was worse, the heat, the priest’s mouth, or the wind—none of them ever stopped. The wind was a biting aerial sandpaper that wore down the skin and stung the eyes, filling them with grit and gunk. When he closed his eyes, Bob saw the face of the man he killed, the life draining away, felt the way his hand had stuck to the dagger, glued there by the man’s blood.

“Have you seen the signs?” asked the priest.

Bob groaned. He shouldn’t have followed the priest. They were heading due south—that much he could infer from the position of the stars in the sky—but his internal data systems were failing. Soon he’d have to rely on his meat-mind, and he was worried about what was left in it.

The priest walked on, gliding across the sand as Bob trudged behind.

“Soon all will be revealed—the apocalypse—one thing changing into another, the world spinning into a vortex…”

“You mean the singularity?” It was a popular topic with the doomsdayers.

“The singularity, the apocalypse, the revealing, all different names of the same thing,” replied the priest. “Vishnu, the destroyer, and Shiva, the rebuilder, different faces of the same reality—all avatars of the same being.”

Bob was beyond exhausted. “How much further to the oasis?” Maybe he could pinpoint his location.

“It is not the destination that is important,” answered the priest, “but the journey.”

Bob stopped, leaning over, his head spinning. “I’m grateful and all”—he looked up at the priest—“but could you please stop with the metaphysics lessons?”

The priest stopped in his tracks, balanced on the knife edge of the dune whose ridge top snaked before them into the distance. “This is a fine line we are treading.” He motioned toward the inky blackness to their left and right where the dune slid into the depths. “On both sides the abyss. You are from Atopia, yes?”

This old Bedouin nomad probably heard that from Toothface. Bob nodded, expecting more religious nonsense.

“Jimmy Scadden must be stopped.”

Despite the heat, the hair prickled on Bob’s arms. “Wha… what?”

“I am not some old fool.” The priest stood up straight. His body seemed to tower over Bob. “I live in this world too. I am, like you, a prisoner trying to break free.” His eyes glowed in moonlight. “And I know things you do not.”

“What do you know about Jimmy?” Bob took a few deep lungfuls of air. Had he miscalculated this old guy? “Tell me about Jimmy,” he managed to gasp out between labored breaths.

“All in good time.” The priest leaned over and put a hand on Bob’s shoulder.

Bob felt a soothing calm.

Turning, the priest continued. “We have a long journey.”

“How much—”

“It is not the destination,” interrupted the priest, “but—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, the journey.”

The horizon to his left was beginning to lighten, and their pace quickened as the flaming sword of the sun began to rise again.

14

Flames from fires atop abandoned buildings reflected in the dark waters as Vince raced across the submerged streets. Pregnant clouds hung overhead, threatening rain, and tendrils of smoke crawled between the abandoned buildings, the smell acrid like burned flesh. Vince gulped huge mouthfuls of air, his eyes tearing up as he stared straight ahead and gripped the frame of the battered aluminum airboat.

“Indigo,” shouted the small man driving the boat, and Vince looked away from the murky waterscape rushing toward them. “Your name, yeah?”

“My family used to farm it down here, generations ago.” The small man wasn’t an Ascetic. Vince guessed he was a worker on the sludge farms, making extra on the side driving taxi boats at night.

The man nodded. “Oh, I know.”

The noise of the engine, just inches behind Vince’s head, was deafening. Did he hear that right? “What do you mean, you know?” he yelled back.

“I know you from here.”

“I’m not from here, I’m from Boston,” shouted Vince over the roar of the airboat.

Shaking his head the man looked out into the darkness. “Oh no, you from here, otherwise, we wouldn’t be goin’ where we goin’.”

Vince paused. “And where is that?” In the background, Hotstuff was plotting possible paths and destinations, gathering as much information as she could.

The man smiled up at him, his gold teeth glinting. “The fires of Saint John been burning bright every night since solstice this year.” The whites of his eyes seemed disconnected from his face. “Tonight is a big night, big honor, boss. You be in the brule zin, the kanzo, you be a hounsi ‘fore the night is out.” He started cackling and slapped his knee with his free hand. “Or not, or not. We going to pon-shar-train.”

Reaching down between his legs, the man pulled up a bottle and took a swig from it, then offered it to Vince.

“No thanks,” mumbled Vince, but the man held the bottle up. “NO THANKS!” he yelled this time.

The man shrugged and took another drink himself, muttering in a language Vince’s automated translators couldn’t decipher.

“Pontchartrain,” Hotstuff said, sitting in front of Vince, the rushing wind ruffling her virtual hair. She spun a local map of the area into a display space, collapsing the probability spaces. “He means Lake Pontchartrain and the Saint John ceremonies—”

“I know,” said Vince. He remembered the ghost stories his grandmother used to tell him of the old country where she grew up, a parish not far from where they were now. Half-remembered, these childhood memories ballooned into cartoonish dimensions of ogres and demons that inhabited the swamps.

Thousands of people gathered on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain each year to celebrate old Saint John. Whether he was the same John of Patmos as John the Baptist was disputed, but here it didn’t matter—here they were one and the same. Spinning through the networks nearby, Vince saw they were gathering there today, a giant party was assembling. More than parties, though, these were ceremonial gatherings—voodoo gatherings, and Saint John’s was the most important.

Voodoo. Vince reconsidered and leaned close to the man. “What’s that you’re drinking?”

“A trompe,” the man replied, picking up the bottle and offering it to Vince.

“Vince, I don’t think you should…” Hotstuff started to say, but Vince grabbed it and took a drink.

Warm and sweet at first taste, a trompe seared into Vince’s gullet, a warm fire spreading from his neck to his stomach. He took another big gulp, and then another, coughing, waiting for the alcohol to steady his nerves.

“Bokor gonna get you, you keep drinking that,” laughed the man, taking the bottle back.

“The Saint John fires are…” Hotstuff started a detailed situational report, but Vince was only half-listening.

All his life, Vince had been running from the past; the past of his family, the past of his own life, even the suffocating past of the world. He escaped into the future, became the master of it as a way to run and run, but now he was being dragged back to his roots, back to the past he tried so hard to erase.

How had he ended up here? With his phantom hands he pulled up a workspace, dragging his point-of-view into a recording of his inVerse from the crash landing. His own recollection was fuzzy, the noise and confusion, loss of oxygen when the hull of the turbofan had been breached. But there, he saw himself taking control, programming a controlled landing near New Orleans. It wasn’t just coincidence—part of him wanted to be here, going back to the beginning when he thought his end was coming.

“Vince!” Hotstuff yelled, tugging his mind out of the fog.

Shaking away the inVerse recording, she grabbed his viewpoint and spun it above the airboat. Vince watched himself, white knuckled, gripping onto his seat frame. Soaring higher, ahead he saw a massive bonfire rising up out of the water, surrounded by an undulating mass of people.

The fires of Saint John were burning bright, and they were almost there.

15

Cruel fire burned in the sky.

There was nowhere to escape, not even virtual worlds. Bob’s smarticle reserves were gone. It was just him, in his own head, for one of the first times in his life—and more than anything, he desperately wanted to get out.

That inner voice. Sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, Bob would become aware of the words he was listening to, that no one else could hear; telling him, guiding him—judging him. Not his proxxi, not the clipped memetic static that flowed into his meta-cognition systems. It was now the voice of his mother: “Stay out of the sun, Bob, you know you need to stay out of the sun…”

He looked at his arms and laughed. “I can’t, I can’t get out.” New blisters formed under the old in his peeling red skin. He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his head in an attempt to stave off heat exhaustion, but now his body broiled, his flesh cooked under the flames from above.

“Keep moving,” urged the priest, ever ahead, dragging him along. “It is not far now.”

Bob laughed.

They were being hunted, but the hunter wasn’t Toothface anymore. Fear was stalking Bob now, the fear of death, the knowledge of that ultimate predator that kept his feet moving beyond exhaustion, gnawing him away from the inside out until all that remained was a shell. He didn’t believe the priest, but then the choice came down to moving or dying.

He kept moving.

One step after another. His tongue swelled in his mouth, his brain felt like it was bursting against his skull. Each step took concentration and effort as his legs cramped up. He wanted to lie down. To sleep. Just focus. One step, and then another, and another.

“Look!” The priest pointed over the top of the next dune, then he disappeared.

On all fours, Bob scrambled to the top of the ridge, and then, kneeling in the sand, began laughing again. This time it was for joy. In the distance he saw a wall of sand and rock, and before him a trail that led down. Oases in the open Sahara were massive depressions, descending hundreds of feet below sea level into the desert floor where the water table, even here, still flowed in places. A mile or two away stood a small knot of palms, a patch of cool green in the blinding sand.

Water—there had to be water.

His pain gained some meaning, and Bob dragged himself to his feet, stumbling through the sand. The copse of trees remained stubbornly distant. Is it a mirage? But gradually, step by step, the palms grew. Then he was among them. The priest called to him, beckoned him to a well. Bob staggered over and dragged a bucket up out of its depths, splashing water onto his face, laughing and drinking.

“Slowly,” the priest instructed, standing above Bob. “Do not drink too much, too fast.”

Nodding, Bob sank down against the mud and stone side of the well. We can rest here, he thought, we are safe. Then something twinged. Something wasn’t right.

“You feel it,” said the priest, not asking. “Free your mind, let go…”

One of Toothface’s sandbots was approaching. Bob saw it in his mind’s eye, the mechanical cockroach cresting one dune and then another, tracking its way toward them. It didn’t know they were here, it was scouting, but soon it would know.

How did he see it? Bob blinked and looked at the priest. The smarticle count in his body was zero, he had no internal computing resources or extra-sensory networks active.

The priest nodded. “Use me, release your mind.”

Too tired to question it, Bob relaxed into the stone wall of the well, closing his eyes. The image of the sandbot became more vivid. It wasn’t far now. He sensed its internal networks and signaling systems. Worming his mind into the sandbot, he flexed, feeling it shudder.

“Do not destroy it,” said the priest, “divert it, send a signal that we are not here. We become invisible.”

Nodding, Bob logged into its memory core, adding a false sensor reading. The sandbot turned, satisfied it had swept the area, and crawled off in another direction.

“Good, very good,” the priest commended.

Bob took another drink from the bucket he still held in his hands.

The priest stood over Bob. “We can rest until nightfall, but you must eat. We need you stronger.”

Closing his eyes, Bob scanned the area. Date palms, but these had been scavenged by insects. Perhaps he could eat palm shoots? He took another sip from the bucket. Opening his eyes, he watched a scarab beetle scurry under a pile of palm leaves.

“Yes,” said the priest, “you must eat.”

The beetle emerged from under the palm leaves and stopped, and another joined it. Slowly they began moving toward Bob and the priest. More joined them, a procession that crawled up to and onto Bob. Lying inert, he looked at them, and then picked one up, held it near his mouth, and licked it. Then he popped it into his mouth and bit down, tasting the bitter flesh squirt between his teeth.

Bob opened his mouth and the beetles began crawling in.

He feasted.

16

The space around Vince buzzed with insects, both natural and artificial. Quick, syncopated beats of metal drums filled the air, rising and falling in rhythm with a mass of dancers. The houngans—male voodoo priests—dressed in garish costumes of red and green, sang above the drums, leading prayers. In the center, a massive bonfire. An effigy of Saint John was burning, his flames leaping into the sky.

A patch of soggy ground rose up out of the waters and the airboat, its engine cut, slid silently aground. Lake Pontchartrain didn’t really exist anymore, it was just another part of the Mississippi delta, but the past drew people to this patch of swamp, St. John’s Bayou, that was once a part of Pontchartrain’s shoreline.

Drones circled in the darkness, and pontoon boats filled with revelers dotted the waters between floating fires. From the jumble of music and hoots of laughter echoing, not everyone was here to get religion. This was a big party for all comers. Or perhaps the party was the religion.

“Mr. Indigo, this way.” An old woman was waiting for them, standing at the edge of the water with a Grilla hunched ominously behind her. She beckoned to Vince.

A mambo, a voodoo priestess, thought Vince, looking at her flowing white robe. She seemed genuine in her enthusiasm. Vince took another pull from the a trompe bottle, feeling its fire in his throat. He walked to the front of the boat and took her offered hand.

“Why am I here?” asked Vince as he jumped down, landing ankle-deep in mud. In the background, Hotstuff was keeping their guard up, searching for threats.

“It is the night of kanzo, Mr. Indigo.” The mambo’s eyes sparkled in the firelight. “When the loa pick the tribe.”

Vince stepped forward out of the muck onto slightly more solid ground. He knew what the loa were—voodoo spirits, but not deities, more like intermediaries to God.

“This is your journey,” she added, leading him into dancers that swayed back and forth with the drum beat.

The crowd parted, revealing a knot of young men, their eyes seeing but not seeing, faces painted white, deep in a trance-like state. The priestesses, their white robes flowing, circled the men, chanting. In augmented space, the reality skins of the assembled fused into a phantasmagoria of monsters and demons that swayed above the dancers. Vince’s vision blurred. He thought he saw a lougaroo, the crocodile werewolf of Louisiana-swamp legend, appear and then disappear though the crowd.

Vince looked into the fire that towered before him. The flames of Saint John. It was John who was supposed to have spoken to God in a cave on Patmos—one of the Greek islands—where he’d written down Revelations and the Apocalypse was described.

“We need to get out of here,” hissed Hotstuff in Vince’s head. He turned an eye inward. “I think she wants you to go through the houngan ceremony…”

One of the boys near Vince convulsed, then stood up straight. The mambos near him shrieked and parted to create an opening. Through the opening Vince saw a bed of red-hot coals spread from the base of the fire along a line that led to a fiery portal. A black cauldron sat at the end closest to him, filled with a bubbling liquid.

The rhythm of the drums gained in urgency. The boy staggered toward the cauldron.

“You see,” said the old priestess, again by his side. “The loa taking possession, the spirit will protect him.”

Did they want him to witness their rituals? The Ascetics here were intimately tied into the local religion. He had no choice, nowhere to run, his fear matched by his fascination. Vince watched a pattern of stars emerge from the fire.

The boy stood at the rim of the cauldron. The drums built their way into a crescendo. Without warning, the boy leaned over and plunged both arms into the boiling oil.

Hotstuff cringed. “That oil is nearly six hundred degrees, there’s no way his biological systems could—”

But Vince wasn’t listening anymore. The collage of stars from the fire took shape, arranging itself into a diamond-weave of gold. The lougaroo appeared in the crowd again, its crocodile face leered at him, but then fear flashed in its eyes as a hulking figure divided the crowd in front of Vince.

Pulling his arms from the boiling oil, the boy held them aloft, undamaged, and the crowd erupted in cheers. The drums were furious, their beat disappearing into a cacophony of noise. Behind the fire, its image undulating in waves of heat, Vince saw a bull being led by its nose ring, standing knee deep in water.

The boy took a tentative step forward onto the red hot coals, and then stood on them, leaning forward and walking toward the fiery portal. On the other side of the fire, a spider-legged Ascetic mounted the bull, a blade flashing in its robotic limb. It reached down and ripped the blade across the bull’s neck. Blood poured out and the bull dropped to its knees.

Vince looked back from the fire. The hulking figure loomed over him, the star pattern burning in its forehead, a flaming sword in one of its hands.

“Don’t resist,” whispered the priestess in his ear.

“Vince!” Hotstuff yelled. She tried to take control of his body, to move him away to safety, or to override his sensory systems, but it was no use.

The dark figure reached and grabbed Vince. He didn’t flinch. Down, down, the figure reached, blackness enveloping Vince, and then the figure went inside, disappearing into Vince’s body.

The priestess’s eyes grew wide. “Papa Ogoun!” she hissed, staring at Vince, backing away from him.

Vince felt a presence inhabiting his body. His mind flashed forward in time, and he watched himself walking across the coals, his body traversing through the fiery portal in the fire and emerging unscathed on the other side. Then his mind flashed backward, into a jungle where great green beasts stood between towering ferns.

“Vince!” screamed Hotstuff. “I don’t know what—”

He plunged his arms into the boiling oil. He didn’t remember walking to the cauldron, but he felt no fear. The boiling oil felt as cool as a mountain stream, and the fires of Saint John beckoned him, the carpet of hot coals an oasis of tranquility he wanted to swim in.

And then the screaming began.

Bright flashes and orange fireballs erupted in Vince’s peripheral vision. The spirit in him retreated. Looking down, he was standing barefoot in the coals. He looked up. The rising heat distorted the image of a military mechanoid that stalked toward the gathering from the darkness. Overhead, bursts of fire as aerial drones exploded.

Vince’s defensive networks came back online, and in augmented space a three-dimensional situational report blossomed into his awareness.

“Nice to see you’re back,” Hotstuff gasped.

She threw up defensive shields in the informational spaces around them, hacking into the control systems of the attacking drones. Allied forces were attacking. A ragtag of opposition was surging in from the outlying swamps and New Orleans itself, but they were overmatched. A small blip at the center of the display was the location of Vince’s body, dead in the middle of an angry swarm of attacking drones.

“We need to get moving. Vince, can you hand me back kinesthetic control?”

Blinking, Vince nodded, his mind reaching into itself to reconnect with his motor control neurons.

The knot of attacking drones intensified in the situational display. “I don’t think there’s a way out of this.” Hotstuff attempted to surrender. “They’re not accepting any comms…”

Vince felt oddly calm. Looking up into the sky, a shape moved and grew. A giant eagle—no, a drone, its wings sweeping like a bird’s—swooped over the fire. Its talons extended and latched onto Vince, snatching him away into the night as a thundering explosion enveloped the fires of Saint John.

17

A massive quartzite crystal rose hundreds of feet out of the limestone landscape surrounding it, and Bob and the priest stopped in its shadow to rest. Over the aeons, the wind had etched the limestone bedrock beneath the sands into fantastical forms that sprang from the desert floor like alien sea creatures. Dunes sat hunched upon this bedrock, stretching into the distance as they slowly sailed their lonely courses, their hulks propelled by the same unrelenting wind that shaped this place.

“The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness began long ago,” said the priest. Bob was half-listening. “The White Rider has appeared once more. Your Jimmy Scadden.”

Bob nodded, too weak to argue. So now Jimmy is the Anti-Christ. But not everything out of the priest’s mouth was nonsense. He was more connected to the world than Bob realized. He knew a lot about Atopia. More important, though, the priest had access to a synthetic reality technology that he was letting Bob channel. Bob had never experienced the Terra Novan systems, not first hand, and this had to be some variant. There was more to this priest than met the eye.

And without him, Bob would already be dead.

“We can’t head into Egypt,” Bob whispered between cracked lips.

Egypt was the only one of the African countries that wasn’t a part of the African Union. It was officially neutral, but fell more under the umbrella of the Alliance, and therefore more under Atopia’s sway.

The priest leaned against the wall of crystal and stared into it. “There are a series of oases leading into Egypt, it is the easiest—”

“I can’t go that way,” Bob croaked. “Is there a way toward central Africa?”

“There is a way, but you’d die if you went yourself.”

Venturing into Egypt, in Bob’s current state with this bounty on his head, was as good as giving up. There had to be more like Toothface out there. He was hunted now. He needed to get into friendly territory—it was his only chance—but he couldn’t expect the priest to risk his own life. Bob needed to get into the African Union and get in touch with Mohesha, Patricia’s old friend on Terra Nova. She knew he was coming. She could help.

Or should he just give up? This was way beyond anything he ever imagined. He didn’t know what the right thing to do was anymore. But then the angry voice in his head, You can’t fail again.

“Just tell me the way.”

18

Sid put his pint down. “The Devil and God got into a big fight over that.”

“Over what? Responsibility?” Sibeal snorted.

Sid wagged a finger at her. “What I’m saying is that God giving free will to humans is what got the Devil so upset.” He smiled. “Or at least, that’s the story.”

They were arguing at a table in the White Horse Pub deep under Midtown. A half-finished burger sat in front of Sid beside three empty pint glasses. Leaking runoff from new construction rained down onto the corrugated metal roof, and all levels of the pit and cave walls were abuzz with the chatter and clatter of machinery. The pub smelled of stale beer and mech-grease.

Sid found himself using his reality skins less and enjoying the grittiness of the “real” world the more he stayed underground. He reached out with a phantom limb to tweak the serving bot for another beer. A bit more than a week, and he was already a part of the scenery, just another regular. Of course, Zoraster was never far, the Grilla shadowing him wherever he went.

Sibeal wasn’t one to be interested in theories without some practical application. “So you’re saying that if something is pre-programmed, then it’s not responsible?”

“If you had no choice, would you feel responsible?” Sid replied.

“I think responsibility and accountability are different. No matter what, if you do something, you’re accountable.” Sibeal took a deep breath. “So who won?”

A serving bot placed another beer in front of Sid. “Who won what?”

Most of Sid’s attention was splintered into an array of workspaces where he worked with his proxxi on cracking the data beacon Bob left behind. Sibeal constantly pestered Sid about the beacon, so Sid had made a deal: if she granted him access to outside data pipes, he’d give her a view into what was inside the data beacon. This outside access was promised despite the objections of Zoraster, who felt a better option might be to simply bury Sid at the end of a service tunnel and be done with it.

“This fight between God and the Devil,” Sibeal said.

Sid picked up his beer and frowned. “You know, I don’t know.” He took a sip. “I guess it’s a constant battle.”

“And do you think we have free will?”

Sid took another sip. “I think there’s a more important question.”

“And what’s that?” Sibeal was working with Sid to crack the beacon, so, like Sid, only half of her attention was at the table.

Sid smiled. “Do you feel like you have free will?”

“Come on.” Sibeal shook her head. “Are you being stupid on purpose? Of course I’m making choices.”

“Then that’s all that matters.”

In a splinter he always had tracking the Grilla, Sid saw Zoraster growl and shake his head. He was eavesdropping, shadowing Sid, sitting in a corner of the pub out of sight. Sid smiled and ordered him a beer—he knew a conversation like this would set the big monkey off. A second and a half later, a serving bot slapped it down in front of Zoraster. He grabbed it and sucked half of it down, glaring at Sid.

Sibeal poked him. She found a match for one of the beacon’s encryption keys. Sid nodded at her, impressed, and accepted the key. It was good work. “So you and your glasscutter friends hunt machine intelligences—do you think they have free will? Like you think you do?”

“Are you asking if I feel guilty for hunting them down?”

Sid took a sidelong glance at his proxxi, Vicious, who was working beside him in their virtual workspaces. “Yeah, I guess I am. It’s one thing to hunt a person—they have rights, due process—but a synthetic intelligence? Terminated at whim…?”

“So we’re the bad guys?” She withdrew her splinters from their shared workspaces. “These are virtual worlds with virtual beings, Sid. And if I have no free will, as you say, then how could I feel guilty? Want to talk morality?”

Sid watched a pattern emerge from the virtual workspaces they shared. He threw his primary presence in to take a closer look.

“Nothing to say?” Sibeal demanded.

“Forget it, I was just messing around.” In the virtual workspace, one encryption key was fitting into another, the chain enclosing Bob’s data beacon opening up.

“This is such a load of horseshit!” roared a voice that stopped both Sibeal and Sid in their tracks. It was Zoraster, lumbering up from his table to confront them. “You two, dancing around each other like teenagers in heat.”

Sibeal frowned at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking—”

“Your little crush is putting us all in danger,” he growled, pushing aside two tables. “We should have turned this worm in for a reward days ago. Now the heat’s on, the feds are breathing down our necks. We already got what we needed, why are we waiting?”

Sibeal stood to face the Grilla. While she stood just a foot shorter than him, he was four times wider at the shoulders. “Don’t you want to find the truth? If what Sid is telling us is true…”

Sid told them everything he knew, what Patricia Killiam told them about Jimmy Scadden, stealing peoples’ minds, corrupting the pssi program from the inside out. He didn’t have proof, though.

“The truth?” Zoraster grabbed Sid by the back of his neck. “The truth is that we have no idea what’s inside that data beacon, and you’re granting him outside access to share it. You know the kind of trouble this could get us all in?”

Sid squirmed to get out of Zoraster’s grip. “It’s a risk for me, too. I have no idea what Bob put in that beacon. I’m being totally open with you, and the second we open that thing, either you’ll see I’m lying or you’ll get your proof.”

Zoraster picked Sid up off the ground as if he were a toy. “You’re making your responsibilities ours.”

“Put him down!” Sibeal yelled.

“And here you are,” Zoraster continued, ignoring Sibeal, “chatting about free will and responsibility—a slippery fish with a silvery tongue. In the real world, you do something wrong, and you’re responsible. It’s that simple. Time to own up, fly boy.”

Sid dangled in the air, staring into Zoraster’s face. “But what is the ‘real world?’ ”

“This”—Zoraster banged the pub tabletop, knocking over the empty glasses—“is the real world, my friend. Screw it. Enough is enough.” He turned, Sid flying through the air on the end of his arm.

“I don’t think so,” Sid whispered.

Zoraster snarled. “What did you…”

The outlines of the pub and pit walls shimmered.

“…say?…”

The world around them reformed, and Sid and Sibeal were standing on the floor of a repair pit, several tunnels down from the main den. Now Zoraster was the one suspended in the air, twenty feet up in the tight grip of a construction mechanoid.

“What the…?” He squirmed, then roared, the sound echoing down the tunnels.

Sid laughed. “Really? You expect me to be here for a week and not crack into everything? Overpower your synthetic immune systems, hijack your realities? You might think you’ve been watching me.” Sid smiled. “But I’ve been the one watching you.”

“Let… me… down!” Zoraster flexed, straining in the grip of the mechanoid. Its metal fingers shuddered, but did not give.

“Calm down, you big monkey.”

Sibeal’s eyes grew wide. “You really shouldn’t call him a—”

Sid put one hand up. “We’ve cracked the data beacon. Who wants to see what’s inside?”

At that, Zoraster quit wriggling.

“Outside access first,” Sid reminded Sibeal.

“Don’t do it,” Zoraster growled, but it was too late.

“Your security blankets are bullet proof, right? Both outgoing and ingoing?” Sid asked Sibeal. There might be something nasty inside.

Sibeal nodded.

Dangling the unopened data beacon in a private virtual world, Sid reached out to grab the exit key from Sibeal. In an instant he was out, spinning a part of his consciousness—chaperoned by a splinter of Sibeal—to soar above New York while he reconnected his meta-cognitions systems with his outside search agents. At the same time, Sibeal opened the data beacon, spreading its contents across the walls of a secured space.

“My God,” she whispered.

Sid left a good chunk of his attention matrix with her. From what he saw, most of what Bob put in the beacon was data from Patricia Killiam that Sid had already seen. At least this would confirm his story, hopefully calm the Grilla down. He watched Sibeal as she absorbed details of Jimmy Scadden’s probable exploits on Atopia; killing his own mother, killing Patricia Killiam, trapping the wife of Atopia Defense Force’s Commander, Rick Strong, in a simulated reality suicide.

“What’s in there?” Zoraster grunted. He wasn’t plugged into the data stream.

Sibeal looked at Sid. He shrugged, why not. Something tugged at Sid’s awareness, and a mediaworld broadcast opened up around him: mushrooming explosions, a wave of attack drones descending onto a submerged city. “Why didn’t you tell me?” New Orleans had been attacked.

“Nothing we could do.” Zoraster relaxed as he assimilated the stories about Jimmy. “Could you let me down from here?”

The mechanoid’s hand opened up, dropping Zoraster to the floor of the pit.

They hadn’t found Vince yet, Sid saw as he scanned the media reports, so maybe he escaped. Or maybe they captured him. Or maybe he was dead. Nothing in his networks gave any indication of where Bob might be. As the number-one suspect in the Manhattan attack, a manhunt was underway by nearly every police agency on the planet, but so far, it seemed nobody had any ideas.

Sibeal grabbed Sid. “What the hell is this?”

Sid was busy dropping agents into the Louisiana networks and digging into the New York passenger cannon logs. “What?”

“This Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector data.”

The POND? Sid had heard of it. It was one of Patricia Killiam’s pet projects. “It’s a planetary scale neutrino detector that Dr. Killiam embedded on the floor of the ocean—”

“I know what the POND is,” interrupted Sibeal. She grabbed Sid’s primary subjective and dropped a stream of data into it. “But what is this?”

Sid’s mind did a double-take. He redirected part of himself to see what Sibeal was freaking out over. The POND had detected something in the neutrino flow it was monitoring—a message or transmission. He tried to understand the script of physics that came next, but it appeared the message emerged from another universe, or, at any rate, not from a terrestrial source.

“Aliens?” Sid mumbled, trying to get his head around it. Bob never told him anything about this.

From the logs, Patricia terminated the POND project right after the message was received. While the translation systems weren’t able to decode the content, a contextual pattern had emerged. It wasn’t just a message—it appeared it was a warning, and one directed specifically at Atopia.

“I’ve never seen this before,” said Sid. “I’m as surprised as you are.”

Sibeal began running her own translation memes through it. “Can this be real?”

For once, even Zoraster was silent.

The back of Sid’s mind tickled, and he reflexively shoved away whatever it was, trying to focus on the POND data. Then it tickled again. He swiveled his attention outward. In an instant, he began shutting down his external networks and cutting off the agents he’d instantiated in Louisiana. He closed down the world with the data beacon in it.

Sibeal turned to him. “Why’d you do that?”

“Something in that data beacon we just opened, it’s alerted Atopia.”

A composite of pssi-kids, ones that Sid grew up with on Atopia, just turned their attention his way. He’d sensed them in the bar the night of the attack in Hell. Bob had warned him about the danger of exposing the private data on Jimmy Scadden. It was what had gotten Patricia killed, and why they had to escape from Atopia.

But Sid hadn’t appreciated just how dangerous it could be.

“Something got out,” Sid said. “The second that data on Jimmy was decrypted…”

Now that the can of worms had been opened, he suspected the whole Midtown den was in danger. There was no telling what Jimmy might do to anyone who knew his secrets.

He was afraid they were about to find out.

19

High over the Gulf of Guinea, the coast of Africa a thin line on the horizon, a drone began dispersing decoys, dropping them toward the distant speck of the Terra Nova platform. The viewpoint dropped down, following the warheads as they spiraled in, and then the inferno of the Terra Novan slingshots began to fill the air with superheated plasma. The simulation halted, and the shared reality space of the meeting morphed into streams of financial data and mortality statistics that ballooned into the attendees’ meta-cognition frameworks.

It was a joint planning meeting between Atopian and Allied staff, held in virtual space. The meeting’s presentations spawned into alternate realities that stretched forward and backward in time. The simulations grabbed each attendee’s consciousness as needed to explain what needed to be understood. Questions were raised and answered in private meeting spaces that popped in and out of existence.

The senior staff of Allied Command was present with their senior staff. Their black-and-red uniforms composed a full two-thirds of the circular conference table in the meeting world created for the event, with the other third made up of the Atopian representatives. Jimmy Scadden presided over the whole thing, conspicuously outfitted in his military whites.

Nancy Killiam excused herself, pulling her consciousness into the identity space of the conference room. Taking a deep breath, she leaned forward and put her elbows onto the polished mahogany table. She buried her face into her hands, rubbing her temples with the heels of her hands.

Jimmy noticed her retreating. “Is everything all right?” He began calling the meeting to the last point, dragging the focal point of everyone’s mind back to him.

Nancy stared at him, wondering how much he knew. Bob had been in a passenger cannon pod, arcing high over the Atlantic, when he reached out to her. He’d dropped her a data beacon before he’d cut off contact, but she hadn’t told anyone.

“If you have any more information, now would be the time.” Jimmy smiled.

“No,” Nancy replied coolly, “I have nothing new.”

This was mostly true. She hadn’t decoded the beacon. It was too risky. For now.

One by one, the meeting participants inhabited the bodies sitting around the table. In the background, around the peripheries of the room, the merged realties of the simulation worlds continued to evolve, like a shifting veil of rain.

“We all have personal relationships with Vincent Indigo, Robert Baxter, Sidney Horowitz, but this is how traitors work,” Jimmy added. He knew she was thinking about Bob. “They use you, your history together—”

This was both dangerous and patronizing. She shifted the latest tracking reports into the meeting’s informational spaces. “Thank you, Mr. Scadden, but I’d point out that it was you who had the last contact with Robert Baxter before he left Atopia, in fact suggesting that he leave, if I remember.”

Everyone was at the table now, and they were listening to his exchange with Nancy.

Jimmy blinked. “Yes, but—”

“Robert Baxter and I were friends,” she continued, “but he is a part of your family.”

Jimmy turned to the rest of the meeting. “I’m quite sure everyone knows where I stand.”

“I think that it is quite clear where everyone stands,” said Commander Zheng, head of Allied Command, looking at Jimmy. “Except you.”

The Alliance had grown increasingly aware of the disproportionate influence Atopia was wielding as pssi spread into their consumer populations. While it had sided with the Alliance, in the past Atopia had never formally joined.

“You know my condition for joining the Alliance,” Jimmy replied. He brought a series of Terra Nova attack simulations to the center of the meeting space.

The Atopian council had done its best to downplay the near-disaster of the Terra Novan reality skin, to limit the damage to its brand and upcoming product release. In this they’d almost succeeded too well. Nobody on the outside believed Atopia had been in mortal danger. The impression was that it had all been a kind of extravagant corporate espionage between these two competitors as they rushed to release their products.

The Alliance had been willing to go along with blockading Terra Nova in the physical and cyber realms, but Jimmy was pushing for an all-out kinetic attack with full Allied support. The varied conflicts of the Weather Wars were finally subsiding, and an attack against Terra Nova would constitute an act of war against the African Union.

Jimmy looked around the table and smiled. “The Great Peace is almost upon us, ladies and gentlemen. Terra Nova is all that stands in your way.” He turned to Zheng. “It is your choice.”

The Alliance needed Atopia. Very little would stand in its way of dominance if Atopia joined them, but if it switched sides, or went its own way…

Zheng stared at him, his jaw set for a long moment. Then he nodded.

20

The man with the ax paused, waiting for the screaming to stop. The earth was muddy from a rain shower, but the fast-moving clouds overhead cleared a patch of blue sky and the sun just managed to shine into the grassy courtyard between the farmhouse and barn. With a whimper, the screaming abated. Satisfied, the man balanced a log on the chopping block, squared his feet and swung his ax back—but then paused again.

A line of birch trees shimmered against the backdrop of the dark forest that rolled up into foothills of the Ural Mountains, and someone appeared. A man, of slight frame and tentative step, peering toward the farm. Hesitating, the newcomer hung back.

The broad-shouldered man raised his ax in salute. “Mr. Indigo! This way!”

He motioned toward a patio set against the back of the farmhouse. Then he returned his focus to the log—still balanced on the chopping block—and swung back his ax again, looping it around to neatly split the wood in two. The ax stuck into the chopping block, and the man left it there, pausing to wipe the sweat from his brow with the back of one arm. He pulled his dangling suspenders up around his shoulders and walked up to the patio.

Vince continued walking toward the farmhouse. It was a synthetic space construct. Just an instant before he had been walking through the Louisiana swamp that the eagle-drone—that rescued him—had deposited him into. Someone dragged his primary subjective into this world. So he continued walking to see what they wanted.

He checked back with Hotstuff.

“All good here,” she replied to his query. In an overlaid display he watched her continue to slog through the swamp with his body. “Somebody’s hacked your subjective channels. I could try to get it back—”

“No,” said Vince, still walking toward the farmhouse. “It’s fine.” The man ahead of him was motioning again, inviting him to come and sit on the patio. There were no metatags, no background data feeds on either this world or the man, but Vince could guess.

“So,” said the man loudly as Vince neared. “You’ve been wanting to see me.” The man laughed. “In a manner of speaking.”

The thick Russian accent was surprising. No automated translation, but the man wasn’t a native English speaker. This just confirmed Vince’s suspicions. “Wanting to see you might be an exaggeration, but yes, I’ve been looking for you.” Vince reconsidered his statement. “Someone asked me to look for you.”

The man on the patio nodded. “Dear Patricia Killiam, a victim of her own creation. A certain tragic poetry, nyet?”

The screaming began again, a soul-tearing screech from the barn, and Vince stopped on the stairs leading onto the patio.

“Pay no attention to that,” said his host with a wave of one hand.

An image materialized in Vince’s display space of a man bound and gagged. He was naked, his body laced in welts and old scars, but his face was obscured with black goggles, a large spike protruding from one eye. Vince frowned. “That’s—”

“—Sledge,” continued the broad-shouldered man. “Yes, the one you met when you first arrived.” Sledge began screaming again, some unseen agent twisting his body in agony. “He was the one who contacted the Federals, led them to the Saint John ceremony. Led them to you, in fact. We’re just teaching him a small lesson in loyalty.”

The image of Sledge faded, but the screaming remained. Vince braced himself and continued up the stairs to the patio. The man stood and extended one hand. “How rude of me. My name is Mikhail.”

Vince shook his hand. What were the rules of conduct when meeting a notorious gangster? Probably erring on the side of caution was advised. Vince scanned reports from Hotstuff on Mikhail: rose up through the ranks of the Russian mafia in the late twentieth century after starting a career in Stalin’s security apparatus. Some even hinted that he’d been a tank commander in the Red Army’s defeat of the Nazis outside Leningrad, the battles in which he’d probably lost the first parts of his own body. The best guess was that he was now just a brain in a box somewhere, but exactly where, nobody knew. He was one of the oldest people alive—if the term could really be applied to him anymore.

“Some call me Sintil8, but I think we can dispense with facades, Mr. Indigo.” He let go of Vince’s hand and motioned for him to sit down opposite him at a rough-hewn wooden table. “And before you ask, Connors is safe. We are directing your proxxi to her location now.”

Vince surveyed the area. His threat assessment systems had no information. Vince was reduced to using his meat-mind, and he strained, his inner voice looping through warnings. Looking behind him, nobody was visible, nothing apart from the trees and mountains behind the dirt trail that led out of the farm. Then again, he was only seeing—only sensing—what Mikhail wanted, allowed, him to see. There was no getting around the fact that he was entirely at the gangster’s mercy. Vince half-shrugged and took a seat.

“Drink?” asked Mikhail, and without waiting for an answer summoned someone inside. “Aberlour is your favorite, yes?”

A mandroid, this one a stump of flesh suspended on two thin metal legs with matching arms, appeared with a bottle of scotch and two tumblers, setting them down between the two men. It made to leave but Mikhail raised an arm.

“Susan,” said Mikhail to the mandroid, “I’d like to introduce you to Mr. Vincent Indigo.” He paused, smiling. “But I think you might have already met on Atopia.”

The mandroid—Susan—turned to Vince, attempting a smile with the scarred remains of her mouth. Red photoreceptors glittered in the back of her empty eye sockets. “A pleasure, Mr. Indigo,” she said, her voice a rasping electronic signal that entered Vince’s consciousness from behind.

Vince squinted, staring back into her skull-face. Yes, Commander Strong introduced him to this mandroid when they were working on deciphering the storms threatening Atopia three months ago. He reached out to shake her hand, feeling cool metal. She turned, releasing his hand, and disappeared back into the farmhouse.

Mikhail poured the scotch into the tumblers, watching Vince. “So you are searching for William McIntyre’s body, yes?” he asked, handing one of the glasses over. Raising his own, he nodded, cheers, and took a drink.

Vince stared at Mikhail. He’d imagined tracking down Sintil8 and sending an agent to gather information from a distance. This was much more intimate. He didn’t think dissimilating would help. It was time to lay the cards on the table. “Yes,” he replied.

Mikhail raised his glass again and drank. “Good.”

Vince considered the drink in his hand. If Mikhail wanted to kill him, he’d had ample opportunity, and anyway, he reminded himself, this was a synthetic projection. He took a sip. It tasted like Aberlour. Vince settled into the chair. “Did you help Willy’s proxxi steal his body? Smuggle it out of Atopia?”

Mikhail pursed his lips. “Yes.”

“How did you get it out without leaving a trace?”

“Susan was there, with others, of course.” Mikhail smiled. “And the Spice Routes—the darknets—even Atopians needed their secrets.”

Vince nodded and took another drink. At last, some progress. “Okay, so then why?”

“Because he discovered something very useful to me.”

Vince studied Mikhail’s face. He’d been one of the most powerful opponents of Atopia from the very start, lobbying to have access to the brain’s pleasure pathways removed from its protocols. As one of the greatest purveyors of pleasures in the physical world, and arms dealer to all sides of the Weather Wars, the organizations he worked with stood to lose a lot of money when Atopia launched itself into the world.

“You mean Jimmy Scadden stealing people’s minds in the pssi system?” Vince asked. “Were you hoping to use that to stop its release?”

“Perhaps.” Mikhail cocked his head to one side. “But there was more to it than that.”

Vince took another sip from his scotch. “And what was that?”

Mikhail nodded. “Why Jimmy committed these acts.”

“And why did he?”

“That is something we are going to find out together, Mr. Indigo.” Mikhail sat back in his chair with his drink.

“Together?”

“I don’t think we’ll find Willy’s body otherwise. Not in time, anyway.”

“For what?” Vince asked, and then it struck him. “Wait, you don’t know where Willy’s body is?”

Mikhail shook his head.

Now things were making some sense. Bob had the information from Patricia. Mikhail needed them, needed their help to get what he wanted. “Okay, I get it.”

“Good.”

“So now we’re working together, what is it that Willy’s proxxi has that is so important?” Vince didn’t really expect him to answer, but wanted to see what he’d say.

“Mr. McIntyre’s body holds the key to something I have been searching for a very”—Mikhail looked skyward—“very long time. When I was a young man, I fought against the Nazis.”

As Mikhail spoke, he uploaded data packets into Vince’s meta-cognition systems. It was better to show than to tell. Images of burning villages flashed into Vince’s display spaces, place names and dates flooding his short-term memory. The playback switched to a bleak wooden shack, of bodies stacked one atop the other.

“I was captured, interred in one of their POW camps, and did what I had to in order to survive.”

Vince watched an image of an emaciated young man, missing an arm, walking through a pack of SS officers. They were smoking and chatting, laughing, oblivious to the intruder in their midst as he lifted cigarettes and packs of chocolates from their pockets.

“But they soon learned of my…” Mikhail paused. “Let’s say, special skills.”

An image filled Vince’s mind of the same young man, strapped to a wooden board, his head pinned back and probes inserted and clipped to him, the room filled with oscilloscopes and electronic devices.

“In weakness, I turned on my own. I became a part of the evil.”

Now the young man was wearing an SS uniform, his cold eyes watching a stream of people being ushered into gas chambers.

“The Nazis were obsessed with the occult. Aryan is a Sanskrit word—Iran literally means ‘land of the Aryan.’ Did you know that?” Mikhail arched his eyebrows.

Vince shook his head.

“Hitler’s prized possession was an ancient Buddhist statue from the Indus Valley, carved from a meteorite. He claimed it contained the ultimate power over reality and death, the fountain of everlasting youth.”

Vince saw an image of the statue, enshrined on an oak table in the middle of the Berghof.

“That didn’t work out too well,” Vince muttered.

Mikhail ignored him. “It was the real reason he started the Nazi space program and planned moon bases—to search for more of it—for the exotic crystals it contained. Some secret societies called it Vril, but there have been many names.”

“Why are you showing me all of this?” asked Vince.

“I know that you’ve studied the ancient manuscripts.” Mikhail sat up and leaned into the table, looking straight into Vince’s eyes. “Whomever understands this message shall never die. Does this sound familiar, Mr. Indigo?”

Vince nodded.

“The Gospel of Saint Thomas.” Mikhail went on: “When you make two into one, when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and when you make male and female into a single one, when you make eyes in place of an eye, and hands in place of a hand, then you will enter.” Mikhail paused. “…the last word is untranslatable. These texts were dug up in Nag Hammadi at the end of 1945. I was part of a team that found them.”

“Can you get to the point?”

“Connect the dots,” replied Mikhail. “Have you ever heard of the Voynich manuscript?”

The Voynich manuscript. Vince had heard of it, but didn’t know what it was. He instructed Hotstuff to search their internal data files.

“But you have seen the Buddhist statues, the ones with many heads and hands.”

Vince nodded. Like the ones he’d seen in the Chenrezig monastery.

Mikhail leaned back from the table. “Your Mr. Jimmy Scadden is not just a madman, but I think influenced by something I’ve seen before. Willy’s body contains the key to unlocking the secret.”

Vince just stared at him. “What secret?”

“Toward the end of the Second World War, I fought with the Afrikaan units with the Rommel, the Desert Fox. Our units were destroyed by the Allies, but I escaped capture. I met someone out there.”

An alert wailed in Vince’s audio channels. Mikhail scowled, summoning a graphic that hovered over the table.

“It seems our friends aren’t done yet.” An image of drones skimming the Louisiana bayous spun into the space between the tables. “We need to cut this short and send you back to Connors.” He stood up.

Vince held out one hand. “Wait. Who did you meet?”

Mikhail stared at Vince. “I think you just met one at Pontchartrain.” Mikhail began deconstructing the world they were in, the mountains and forests collapsing to an interior point of space. “There are those that walk among us that are not of us.” He uploaded a document to Vince as he vanished. “The Nag Hammadi texts weren’t all that I found.”

21

There are no atheists in foxholes. Picking up a fistful of hot sand, Bob watched it pour through his fingers, just like the grains of life felt like they were being sucked from him and into the scorching air. He squinted into the sun. There are no atheists stranded alone in the middle of Sahara, either.

Then again, he wasn’t alone.

“The mind creates suffering as a natural product of complex processes.” The priest was always walking ahead of him, leading the way. “Nothing can really be said to be ‘I’ or ‘me,’ we are all one.” He fixed Bob with his black eyes. “You need to get up.”

This suffering isn’t shared, Bob wanted to scream as he pulled himself back to his feet. But the priest had to be hurting as well, and Bob was the one who had insisted they come this way, out into the deep desert. Even a Bedouin had to feel this heat. It wasn’t just the heat. With zero humidity, every molecule of water on the inside of his body wanted to get outside. Bob desperately wanted to rest, to dig his way into the cool sand beneath the surface, to bury himself. Please make this wind stop. It was eating into his skin like a blowtorch.

“We need to keep moving,” the priest insisted.

So far they had connected with two oases, stopping at each to fill their canteens and themselves with as much water as they could. And to eat, but Bob tried to forget this. He steeled himself and plodded off behind the priest. Each breath felt like it was burning his lungs, as if the oxygen within it were on fire. They were nearing the top of a sand dune, hundreds of feet high, and on each footstep he would crunch through the stiff top layer of sand, his foot sinking underneath.

Toothface was still hunting them. From time to time a drone would appear in the immense blue sky, or a swarm of hunting beebots would buzz at the peripheries of his consciousness. Each time, the priest would hide them in the folds of the desertscape.

“How much farther?” He’d been out of water for a day.

“Not much more now.” The priest returned a few steps to support Bob, pulling him up to the top of the ridge.

Bob laughed, and would have cried if any tears were left in him. He’d hoped to see another gaping hole into the bowels of the Earth, dark cliffs guarding a hidden sanctuary of palms. But all that greeted them on the other side was an endless sea of white dunes, riding all the way to the horizon.

“Come.” The priest held Bob’s hand. “Follow my voice.” He led the way down. “There are many kinds of intelligence, just as there are many kinds of suffering. It seems a hopeless, endless cycle, but one that can be broken…”

Bob closed his eyes and tried to follow, but his legs buckled, spilling him down the side of the dune. In his mind he tried to get up, but his body remained still, his face to the sun, his eyes closed.

The priest knelt beside him in the sand, his hand on Bob’s shoulder. “We are close. Not much further now.”

But Bob couldn’t will his body to move.

Bob had never really contemplated death before. On Atopia, it seemed like something that happened to other people, in some remote parts of the world, like catching malaria. How did I arrive here? There was the story, and then the story of how the story was told in his head, and then there was the story of the parts that were left out. Why had Patricia asked him to do this?

Opening his eyes, he saw the comet hanging in the sky next to the sun. I’m not afraid, I’m just so tired. And then the voice again in his head, the anger, telling him not to give up, to get up. He pushed himself up on one elbow.

The priest loomed over him, blotting out the sun.

Bob’s mind circled around and around. I must exist in other universes. So my echo will live on. It doesn’t matter. Suffering is worse than just letting go. Oblivion is peace. His body slumped back into the sand.

“Don’t give up yet.” The priest was close, his breath on Bob’s cheek. “Open yourself to me, there is still hope.”

Bob closed his eyes and took a deep breath, feeling the mind of the priest near. Open to me, the priest asked again, and Bob released, feeling the spirit of the priest flow into him.

“In the oceans, when you were surfing, do you remember?”

“Yes,” Bob replied, his mind floating.

“Your little friends, the plankton, you summoned them to support you if there was danger.”

Bob remembered. Those bright days on Atopia seemed endless. Carefree days he spent surfing with his friends, but he was always careful. He always kept a bloom of plankton nearby that he could summon up out of the depths, millions of tiny creatures that could, together, support his body if he was sucked into the depths.

“Call to them,” urged the priest.

Bob felt his mind spreading, his consciousness skimming the tops of the sand dunes. He tried calling out for help, but there was no response.

The priest was cradling him in his arms. “Let go and call again.”

Bob’s mind sank further, seeping into the desert floor. And then a tiny reflection, a small chirp in the vastness of mindspace, followed by another. And then a roar.

“You see? They come, they hear you.”

Bob opened his eyes. He saw only the burning eyes of the priest nested deep in the creases of his face. Bob’s mind was thundering now, but around them it was quiet, just the hiss of the sand in the wind.

The priest smiled. “Wait.”

Something fluttered in Bob’s peripheral vision. He turned his head. An insect circled and then dropped, landing on his arm. It stared at him, its antennae waving, it wings flexing. It was tan, with long legs, and looked like a grasshopper. A desert locust. It continued to stare at Bob, bending its hind legs to preen its wings. Bob turned to see another locust land on the sand next to him, and then another. Soon a cloud of them were buzzing around him and the priest.

Over the tops of the dunes, a murmur grew into a roar, and as the swarm descended upon them, Bob felt the relief of the sun finally dimming. His initial revulsion was replaced by joy at the sweet coolness of the insects’ wings on his skin. The swarm enveloped Bob, tens of thousands of them digging beneath him. At their urging, he rose up out of the sands on a writhing mass. Up, up, they pushed him, the swarm rising with his body, and then became airborne, carrying Bob’s body into the sky, westwards, toward the beating heart of central Africa.

22

Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks swayed in the breeze, and a woman, leaning over a crashed drone, looked up. Insects were buzzing, swarming, in the muggy late afternoon heat. Looking around again, the woman rolled up her sleeves and gripped a wrench between her teeth. She ducked her head into the access hatch of the drone.

At the edge of the water nearby, Vince peered around the trunk of an oak. He was caked in mud, soaked, after pulling himself through the bayou. “Connors?” he called out.

The woman’s head shot back out of the access hatch, and she grabbed the wrench from her teeth, brandishing it as a weapon as she turned. She squinted. “Vince?”

Nodding, Vince hobbled out of the water and started across the grass. The drone Connors was working on had crashed next to an old barn. A rusted propane tank sat beside it, its green paint peeling as if it were a slow-motion chameleon blending into the forest.

Vince stopped and tried to shake off some of the mud. “Yeah, it’s me.”

Hotstuff was walking beside him, her virtual projection as pristine as Vince was filthy. She rolled her eyes. “See, I told you we should have gone around.”

“I wanted to find her,” Vince replied in a hushed voice. “Why don’t you make yourself scarce, see if you can log into that drone?” He pointed at the wrecked mess Connors was working on. It must have been damaged in the attack.

“Sure thing, boss.” Hotstuff sashayed up across the grass and faded from view.

“I’m still plugged into your proxxi channels.” Connors shook her head. “I can hear you talking.” She turned from squatting on the turbofan air intake and hopped down to ground level. “So what happened to you?”

If she was happy to see him, Vince had a hard time seeing it. He plucked a piece of mud from his cheek. “Had to wrestle a ‘gator or two back there coming through the swamp—”

“I mean when they took you? Where did they take you?”

“Some voodoo ceremony.”

Connors smiled. “And did they stick any pins in you?”

Vince smiled back. So she was glad to see him. “Naw, they left that for you.” He paused. “I met Sintil8.”

Of course Connors knew who this was, but she surprised Vince by turning around to return to the drone. He closed the last few feet and leaned against the airframe. “Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?”

Connors had half of her body inside the access hatch. “Pass me the knife.” She reached out one arm. “And no, I’m not going to ask, not unless you tell me the truth.”

Vince spotted a blade with tape wrapped around it. He handed it to her. “I’m telling you the truth. He wanted to know what we were doing here.”

“Uh-huh.” Connors grabbed the knife and leaned further into the drone casing. “Mikhail Butorin doesn’t just talk to anyone. Why the hell would he want to talk to you?”

“Aren’t you happy I made it out?”

“I don’t think it’s any coincidence.”

“What? That you’re happy?”

Even from inside the cowling Vince could hear her snort. “No, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that you made it out, or that you magically found me here.” She pulled herself from the access hatch and stared at Vince. “I’m getting the feeling that I’m a pawn in something”—she shook the blade at Vince—“and I don’t like it.”

They stared at each other.

“I’ve already told you what this is about. Trying to find my friend Willy’s body.”

“And why would Mikhail have any interest in that?”

“Because…” Vince took a deep breath, wondering how much he should tell her. “Because Willy’s proxxi found out something about Jimmy Scadden, maybe enough to derail the entire Atopian program.”

Connors’ eyes narrowed. “And what was it that this proxxi found out?”

“We don’t know, that’s why we’re searching for him.” He looked at the drone. “What are you planning on doing with that?”

Tapping her knife against the aluminum shell, Connors stared at Vince. “You expect me to believe that we just crash-landed next to New Orleans, and you randomly met with Butorin who just happened to be looking for the same thing you are?”

Vince shrugged. “Okay, it was me who contacted him. I thought he might be able to help us.”

Connors smiled. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?” She uploaded some schematics into Hotstuff. A three-dimensional model of the drone appeared floating in space between them. “This one is Alliance military hardware; I’ve got all the tech-specs. Should be able to rewire it for manual control, get us out of here.”

“Need some help?” Vince asked. Hotstuff was already helping Connors on the software side.

She grabbed a wrench and shook her head. “My brothers and I used to rebuild these all the time when we were kids.” Turning, she stuck her head back into the access panel. “Why don’t you go and see about some shelter in that barn.” She pointed with the arm that wasn’t in the access hatch. “Get cleaned up. There’s some water purification tabs I scrounged, some food.”

A light rain started falling, and it looked like worse was on the way. Shelter was a good idea. Vince started up a private comm network with her while he walked to the barn. “Brothers? I didn’t know you had brothers.”

In the shared space that he’d opened up, she replied, “You never asked.”

The barn was in the process of being reclaimed by the encroaching swamp, and the knotted arms of wisteria vines engulfed it, dragging it back into the embrace of the earth. Vince kicked clumps of grass and weed away from the bottom of one door and pulled it, hearing the crack of rotten wood as it opened. “You’re right, I don’t know anything about you. Are you religious, Connors?” Inside it was dim, and his visual systems switched to low-light imaging. The interior was piled with junk—discarded aluminum furniture with legs sticking out, a rusted claw-foot bathtub, jumbled piles of wood. Vince stooped to pick up the body of a plastic doll, and then spotted its head nearby and picked that up as well. He tried reattaching them.

“My family was Catholic, but it never appealed to me,” Connors replied. “Too much fire and brimstone. Why, are you?”

Vince carefully stepped his way through the junk. Looking overhead, he was relieved to see that the roof seemed intact. “No.” Some planks near a far wall looked like they were in good shape, and he went to have a look. “Or, I mean I wasn’t.”

“What do you mean, you weren’t?”

Gingerly, Vince reached down to pull up one of the planks. He remembered his grandmother’s stories about always checking under the seat in an outhouse. Black widows and brown recluse spiders would just love a pile of wood like this. He inspected the timber he picked up. Covered in cobwebs, but it was straight and dry. “Did you know that Buddhists think that people in the past—the very long past—were basically immortal? And that the Jataka stories from India, written down thousands of years ago, talk about an infinite number of parallel universes, side by side, and that we create reality with our minds?”

“You know,” replied Connors after a pause, “I did not know that.” Her mind was obviously elsewhere as she tried to figure out the drone controls.

“Ever wonder why the prophets describe epiphanies as ‘out of body’ experiences?” Vince continued. “That when they talked with God, they felt like they were moving into another world?”

“I don’t know—because they were talking with God?” Connors emphasized the last word. Her sarcasm was obvious even through the virtual comm link.

Vince shoved aside debris with his foot to clear a wide patch of earth to make a fire pit. He worked in silence for a few minutes.

“Where’s this coming from?” asked Connors.

Vince picked up a rusted tricycle and inspected it. “When I met Mikhail, he was talking about Iran, about how the old Nazis were obsessed with it.”

“Seriously?” The avatar Connors was presenting in the shared discussion space frowned. “That’s what you talked about?”

“She finally believes something I say, and then she can’t believe what I’m saying,” mumbled Vince under his breath.

Satisfied he had enough space, he started laying down several of the thicker planks, and then put the rest cross-wise on top of them to create a platform. “Have you ever seen those images of Buddha with the multiple arms and heads? Like when Vishnu tries to impress the Prince in the Bhagavad Gita and takes on a multi-armed form?”

Connors grunted as she pulled out a circuit board. “I don’t know what prince you’re talking about, but yeah, I’ve seen the Buddhas with the arms and heads. What does this have to do with anything?”

“You’re going to laugh.”

“Try me.”

Having finished building the platform for sleeping on, Vince looked around for anything that they could use as a cover. The sun was going down. He sighed. “Doesn’t all of this sound a lot like pssi? Multiple phantom arms sprouting out with splintered minds, out-of-body excursions into other worlds—humans on the verge of immortality?”

He was right. Connors did laugh. He couldn’t blame her.

“Mikhail also mentioned the Voynich manuscript—have you ever heard of it?”

“No, I have not.”

Hotstuff pinged Vince that they had finished what they could on the drone, and that Connors was on her way inside the barn.

Vince uploaded the data he had on the six-hundred-year-old Voynich manuscript, and images of naked nymphs, unrecognizable plants, astrological diagrams, all written in an unknown alphabet, flooded the shared display space between them. Translation tools hadn’t been able to make sense of it, but they did confirm that it contained coherent information. None of the plants or animals were anything that had existed—at least, not in this world. In their shared space, Connors looked at it and sent Vince another frowning emoticon.

“When I was running around a few months back, trying to save my life from whatever future threat was trying to kill me,” Vince said, rummaging around in a pile at the back of the barn, “I spent a lot of time decoding ancient texts. I’m sure I saw something in there.”

“In where?” Connors was leaning against the frame of the open barn door.

“In the past. The end of ordinary reality is the start of the merger with the divine for Buddhists—so my question is, if we’ve reached the end of ordinary reality with pssi, what exactly would we be merging with?” Speaking of miracles, Vince found a metal case filled with what looked like tablecloths. He pulled one out and held it aloft. They weren’t even that moldy. They’d make great covers.

Connors nodded. “I think what you need to merge with is a good night’s sleep.”

Climbing back through the scattered junk, Vince tossed the metal case on the floor. It was going to be cold. They’d better get a fire going soon. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Anyone want to chat with the outside world?”

Hotstuff materialized sitting on a cross-beam above their heads. She was back to wearing battle fatigues. No sexy outfits anymore.

“You got it working?” Connors asked.

Hotstuff nodded. “Main avionics are shot, it ain’t getting airborne, but we can get comms working. A clean channel right into the main data trunks in the sky. But you’ve capped the connection on this side.”

Connors nodded and smiled. “Didn’t want you guys escaping.”

“So you’re going to contact your government buddies?” Vince looked down at the floor. “Last time you tried that, they flattened half of Louisiana.”

“There are still some people—”

“I think it’s time to give me a chance, no?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Do I look like I’m kidding? Look, you can chaperone, throw a security blanket around me, whatever you want.”

Connors lifted her hands to her face and rubbed her eyes.

Vince held his arms wide. “I’ve got a lot of friends, Connors, in a lot of places.”

“Okay,” Connors conceded, “we can try it your way. But I remain in control of the connection.”

Smiling, Vince nodded. He wondered if he’d be able to get in touch with Sid or Bob, or perhaps the Commune and Brigitte. He hoped someone was still left out there.

While Hotstuff and Connors began setting the parameters of the communication link, Vince retreated inside his head to look at the texts Mikhail gave him. Like the Nag Hammadi libraries, they appeared to be ancient pre-Christian Gnostic, but it was like nothing he’d ever seen before.

The texts were written in precursor of Aramaic, so Vince’s automated translators were having a difficult time making sense of it, but in the Book of Pobeptoc an impossible passage popped out at him: “Wal lie body is where the flesh eaters live.”

The Book of Pobeptoc. Was he seeing things? How could it be possible?

23

A sea of green sludge sat fermenting between rolling mountains of sand under a sky dotted with distant clouds. In a hollow between the dunes, on a dusty peninsula that jutted into the blooms of algae, was a shanty town of corrugated tin and mud brick. Everywhere was garbage. At the side of a putrid stream in the middle of the town a man in ragged jeans was sprawled out, shirtless, emaciated, and covered in sores.

“Wake up, young master.”

Bob opened his eyes to find the priest looking down at him, cradling him in his arms. The smell of rot and decomposing flesh nearly made him gag. He spat out a mouthful of water.

“Slowly.” The priest brought the cup to Bob’s lips again.

Taking a deep breath, Bob blinked and leaned his head forward, taking a sip. He was leaning against a wall of rough concrete blocks, in merciful shade. In front of him, a pig was rooting through a mound of plastic bags in a pool of water, and further, several young boys were stooped over, stepping through the muck, searching. One of them kicked aside a robot scavenger, pulling away a tin can for which the bot was going. The boy made a face at the bot and it scurried away. He deposited the tin can into a sack slung over his shoulder.

“Can you stand?” the priest asked.

Bob wasn’t sure. How did I get here? Closing his eyes he tried pushing himself up, and, trembling, his body responded, but only just. “Give me a minute.”

The priest nodded and offered more water. It spilled around Bob’s beard. Beard. Bob reached up to feel his face. It was covered in shaggy hair. It was the first time he had ever grown facial hair. It itched.

“We need to keep moving,” whispered the priest, looking toward the knot of children hunting through the islands of garbage in the stream. “You still want to get into the African Union, yes?”

Bob nodded. Across the filthy river, standing above the corrugated tin roofs, stood the local microwave array that received and transmitted to the space power grid. Africa was leapfrogging ahead, replacing old-style infrastructure with more efficient ideas like the matter-net.

“Then I have someone for you to meet.”

Clenching his teeth, Bob groaned and tried his body again. Pushing against the concrete wall, he inched his way to his feet. “Let’s get going.”

Holding Bob’s hand to steady him, the priest led him along a path at the side of the stream, past stinking piles of plastic bags and eel bones and shredded packaging. They walked through an opening under tarps, held aloft by haphazard wooden poles, onto a dusty street between mud brick houses that leaned unsteadily into each other. A scooter buzzed by, honking at Bob as he nearly fell into it. The boy riding double on the back turned and gave Bob the finger.

Bob stared at the trail of blue exhaust following the receding scooter. “Where are we?”

“Goudjoul, on the side of Lake Chad.” The priest adjusted his grip on Bob, then looked up into the sky. “Or at least, what used to be Lake Chad. We have crossed the great divide.”

Images flowed into Bob’s mind, information pulsing through the connection with the priest. Goudjoul was a small frontier town between the Allied and African Union territories, on an island in a sea of algae on the border of Chad. Lake Chad used to be a vast inland sea, but all that remained was a puddle of green—it was the only place on Earth where the species of algae outnumbered the species of animals. Bob followed the priest’s eyes up and saw the comet hanging in the sky, ever larger, its tails spreading ever wider. The critical thing was that they were on the other side of the Sahara desert, on the fringe of sub-Saharan Africa.

“Come,” urged the priest, motioning toward a crowd gathering in an open square ahead.

Bob felt something sticking to his leg and looked down. A leech had attached itself. He reached down and yanked it off, leaving an oozing wound.

The priest saw his look of revulsion. “Parasites make up the majority of life on Earth.” Grabbing the leech, he held it in front of Bob’s eyes. “Do you hate them? Do you see yourself? Humans are the greatest parasites of all.”

He threw the leech into an alleyway and kept walking. The lesson was over.

In this place a ragged, half-naked man aroused little curiosity, and Bob stumbled behind the priest. Am I hungry? He wasn’t sure. Everything felt like a dream, the images before his eyes flat and two-dimensional. He eased through the crowd like a ghost, sensing the people around him. People walked by him, the men in cloaks, the women in burkas, hidden from view, but not hidden from Bob.

On Atopia he took for granted, like breathing, the speeding up of consciousness, the ever-expanding meta-cognition systems fueled by the machines, but here, the humans were so slow. He could sense the neural potentials flowing through their bodies, anticipate their movements, know their intentions before they became consciously aware themselves—he could almost hear their thoughts flowing through them.

In the few people who were connected to the pssi multiverse, Bob was intercepting the thoughts and images flowing through their external cognition networks. The memplex here was shallow and homogenous, the allowed external-thought patterns restricted. They were free to think what they wanted in their meat-minds, but the digital minds here were forced open to the local council. They were regularly cleansed of unclean ideas.

The Atopian network was present here, nudging itself into this crack in the side of the African Union. There were a few people using pssi, but there were more that were renting it. Spinning into a viewpoint that hovered above the bazaar, he picked out the psombies, the minds of their owners given free access to the multiverse play worlds in exchange for lending their physical bodies to Cognix Corporation.

Bob and the priest stayed well clear of them.

Something else he stayed out of was communication networks. He could have reached out into them, but he was in unfamiliar territory that was crawling with Atopian access points. He had to remain invisible.

Up ahead was a laamb wrestling match. This Senegalese sport was the biggest in Africa, almost the biggest in the world, and every town had its local contests on weekends. A thickly-muscled man sat scratching in the dirt, his eyes wide, and his neck muscles taut. He was speaking to the spirits, the loa. This area was under heavy influence of voudon, the ancient religion that spread from here into the Americas hundreds of years before.

The crowd grew denser. Bob began noticing the deformed and injured scattered throughout. The Wars were fueling massive death tolls in central Africa, and starvation and plagues were driving people into the cities, at least those who could afford it. Despite the amputations and injuries, there were no mandroids here. The area was too poor to support the robotic ecosystem that outnumbered humans elsewhere. If the African Union was a rising superpower, here in the fringes it was still grindingly deprived.

A young boy caught Bob’s eye. He was sitting on a tree stump, his withered arms and legs curled up into his body at awkward angles.

“Hi,” said Bob in Chadian Arabic, the words flowing from his mouth.

The boy looked up and managed a pained smile, flies buzzing away as Bob reached out to touch him. Flitting into the boy’s nervous system, Bob discovered the source of the deformation—a demyelinating nerve disorder brought on by malnutrition. Simple enough to fix, at least in the short term. Bob concentrated, letting his mind flood into the boy’s neural system. He began restructuring the grey matter. He wasn’t used to the technology the priest infused into him, but it was superior to Atopian pssi in many ways, even as a novice.

Bob smiled, releasing the boy, and continued walking into the crowd.

The strange man’s touch felt like cool water running into the boy’s veins. The pain disappeared, and the boy’s arms and legs unfolded. He smiled, leaning over to put his feet on the ground. Reaching up he pulled on his father’s hand, who turned to look down in amazement at his son, standing on his own feet for the first time in years.

The man cried in disbelief and began calling to his wife and friends. The boy stared silently at the disappearing silhouette of Bob. The crowd at the edge of the laamb wrestling circle was frenetic, screaming and thundering with the ongoing fight. Bob had to force his way in, past the men preparing themselves, their eyes, not seeing. He found the priest talking to two scruffy military men.

“Transportation into the African Union, no questions?” said a gaunt man dressed in threadbare khaki fatigues, an aging AK-47 slung over one arm. He was talking to the priest.

The priest nodded and pointed at Bob.

The man’s eyes lit up. “Ah, yes, yes.” He turned to speak to another man in fatigues beside him. They both nodded. He turned back to Bob. “This is danger. Will be expensive. Much risk.”

“You will be rewarded,” the priest said. “I will make arrangements.”

Staring into Bob’s eyes, the man smiled with a mouthful of broken teeth. “At the main dock, tonight, just before the sun goes down.”

“Sure,” Bob replied, trusting the priest knew these men.

The gaunt man continued to stare at Bob.

“Do I know you?” Bob asked.

The gaunt man laughed. “We are all friends here. Good, we will see when the sun goes down, down by the docks.”

With a roar from the crowd, one of the wrestlers pinned the other to the ground. Bob heard the crack of breaking bones, earning another roar. The laamb wrestling match was over, and the crowd began dispersing.

Bob stood in place, in a daze. The men in fatigues were gone, the priest was gone. Something nibbled one of his fingers. He looked down. A goat had wandered up to him. It bleated and nudged him again, looking up at Bob with its slatted-pupil eyes. Bob sensed its fear. It was lost and hungry.

He was lost too.

Bob reached down and petted it. He decided to care for it, find it some food, some shelter. He’d always had a soft spot for animals. They were simply non-human people, with the same abilities to make conscious decisions, grieve and worry and love. And this went both ways; in humans, there was also the beast.

Then again, looking down into the animal’s eyes, even if he fed it and found it shelter today, what would happen to it tomorrow? The animal was a bag of bones, its fur mangy. Perhaps a quick end, to stop its suffering, was better.

An undulating carpet of green stretched to the horizon. It glistened under the setting sun. The African Union began somewhere over that horizon, and Bob was close, finally on his way.

The AU was the second axis of world power behind the Alliance of China and America. A deep distrust of the old world and colonial powers ran deep, a distrust that ran into the bloodstream of anything African. The AU was commissioning its own aircraft carriers, at-sea platforms, and south-south trade outstripped north-north for the first time in history: the distance of Lagos–Rio was half that of New York–Frankfurt. It was also the first jurisdiction to grant full human rights to certain uplifted animals, the Grillas.

Bob settled into his seat of the wooden longboat, its gunnels worn with time and sweat. An ancient internal combustion engine, probably from an even more ancient car, was fixed to the back of the boat, its drive shaft extended and attached to a propeller. The engine roared, the driver standing high in the back like a gondolier, cutting a path forward with the boat through the algae.

“I can come as far as the border,” said the priest, sitting just ahead of him. “There is a transport waiting. Beyond that, I cannot. Just as you have enemies outside, there are those in Lagos who hunt me.”

Bob nodded. He couldn’t ask for more than that, knowing how much he missed—feared for—his own loved ones. He hoped it wasn’t too late.

Once they cleared the ragtag collection of boats in the harbor, the driver gunned the engine. Bob had never seen a gas-powered one before, and he watched the fumes pouring out of it and into the naked atmosphere with a morbid fascination.

They were smuggling him past the legal check points up the Yoba River and into Nigeria. The paramilitaries arranged a drone transport from there through the exclusion zone. An outbreak of nano-goo a decade ago had forced evacuations and a tactical nuclear strike by China on its own failed site in the Gobi desert, so replicator factories now had to be physically firewalled off from the rest of the world. The exclusion zone around Assembler City outside of Lagos was the best way to get in without anyone noticing.

Turning, Bob squinted ahead, westward, into the setting sun. Something was dead ahead of them. What is that? A forest? Something was casting long shadows across the pond-scum surface, but whatever it was, as the boat approached, it parted, moving aside to create a path.

The driver throttled back the engine.

It was people, hundreds of them, standing naked, knee-deep in the shallow water with their arms outstretched. The webbing between their fingers glowed green in the light, and folds of skin stretched from their arms to their bodies—a Greenie colony, people bioengineered with photosynthetic engines in their epithelial mitochondria.

They fed off sunlight.

The boat glided through them. Bob turned to watch their faces, their eyes closed, impassive. He saw the lignin-thermoplastic shell of their habitat burrowed into the side of the dune island behind them. There had to be a deep-core thermal generator in there. It was expensive to maintain a colony like this—nothing about it was natural—and just around the corner there was grinding poverty and suffering.

Bob shook his head, looked away to stare back into the setting sun.

24

“Robert Baxter and Sidney Horowitz,” said the newsworld announcer, an elfin girl with a deadly serious face, “friends or accomplices?” She paused for dramatic effect. “Or BOTH?”

An image of Atopia floated into the display space of the splinter Sid had following this thread. “And how are they related to the disgraced Vincent Indigo? The greatest personal financial loss of all time, over a trillion dollars gone with the collapse of his empire…” The social clouds tethered to the story erupted at mention of a trillion dollars: “Can you imagine?,” “What was he thinking?,” “Serves him right,” “Did they find him yet?,” followed by a chorus of, “Who cares…”

Most of it was just noise, but one thread led into an interesting aside: a ride through the pneumatic tube system under New York with the reconstructed mind of one of the party-goers injured in the attack on Hell. It was new information, and the splinter encoded this into a memetic ping to catch Sid’s primary attention. Sid added this to other data being collected. It seemed that Bob had been heading for the passenger cannon on the day of the attack. He sent agents to conduct a deeper forensic sweep.

In another newsworld, an image of the glowing skyline of Manhattan’s financial district floated into view, followed by a view of three-dimensional tunnels underneath it, layer upon layer, millions of conduits. A panel of media pundits, in severe black suits, weighed in: “Sidney Horowitz is still definitely in Manhattan, and the NYPD is asking anyone with any information…”

Sid had heard it all before, a million times in a million mediaworlds, but listening to it still sent dread tingling into his fingertips. Worse, he could only imagine what his mom was going through. But this is what I always wanted, right? A rebel, fighting for a cause, fighting for his friends. Sid nervously tapped his phantoms and dove into restructuring the airflow mechanics of the tunnel systems.

His bravado was wearing thin.

Pressure was coming down on the Midtown den. The underground was a collection of misfits, and to their credit—with the authorities bearing down—they were coming together. But not all the parts fit, and not everyone was happy. It wouldn’t be long until someone gave Sid up.

“You all right, mate?” Bunky asked, noticing Sid on the mediaworlds again. The inky blackness of an access tunnel stretched out ahead. Sid was riding shotgun in Bunky’s mechanoid.

Retreating a chunk of himself into the physical world, Sid looked at Bunky in the dim red light. “I guess.” he replied. Since the attack on New Orleans, it was anybody’s guess what would happen next. The phrackers were busy modifying future timelines as best they could to try to deflect the attention from Sid, but their efforts were starting to be noticed. It was just adding to the incriminating evidence.

A flashing door appeared in the rock wall ahead. They were on their way to a materials testing lab with the rocks they collected at the spots where Willy’s proxxi stopped in the underground. They didn’t find any machines, didn’t see anything unusual, so they dug out some samples from the surrounding rock to test.

Bunky smiled at Sid with his broken, toothy grin. “Mate, we’ve got your back. Don’t worry.”

The access door opened ahead of them, and Bunky’s mechs began unloading the samples.

Sid smiled and retreated to his inner worlds, monitoring the stream of data from his splinter network. “Was the police action in New Orleans a step too far?” echoed one newsworld. He spun through some splinters monitoring the physical world: “A winter hurricane? Depression in the Caribbean looks like it will build into category four and hit the east coast in January…” He moved his attention into a different newsworld. “Central Africa reports a huge locust swarm that swept through the desert and into Chad…” This last newsworld story was so unusual that it pricked his attentional matrices. When was the last time a spontaneous locust swarm moved through the Sahara? He filed the thread for closer inspection.

“The Synthetic Beings Charter of Rights has been derailed by Nancy Killiam, the heir of the founder of the SyBCoR movement itself, the late Patricia Killiam…” another story began, which flowed into, “…glitches in the Atopian synthetic reality system, or ghosts in the machine? We talk now to…” which streamed into, “…tens of thousands more disappearances reported by independent sources…”

Sid smiled. Like a frog sitting in water heated to a boil, the public was barely noticing. At first the disappearances had been explained away as system problems, then psychological ones, but what Sid suspected was Jimmy’s excesses were getting difficult to hide.

“…but Jimmy Scadden, head of conscious security for Atopia, says that terrorist actions related to Sidney Horowitz…”

Sid’s smile evaporated.

Going through his list of projects, he checked the decryption agents working on the POND data, to see if the mysterious messages from a parallel universe could be unwound into anything intelligible. Nothing yet. He felt a familiar phantom pulling his consciousness, and his smile returned. He didn’t resist.

Coming back into real space, his proxxi, Vicious, was disgorging his body from the mechanoid and onto the terrace of the White Horse Pub. He tweaked the serving bot for a round of beers and slid himself into a seat between Sibeal and Zoraster.

“Anything new on the POND data?” Sibeal asked right away. It was a hot topic in the pub.

Sid shook his head.

“I’m sweating like a glassblower’s asshole!” whooped Shaky as he sat down on the other side of the table with Bunky. The serving bot slapped a beer down in front of him and he grabbed it up.

Sid turned to Sibeal. “Anything new on your side?”

“Some bad glass out there.” She spun some data into a private workspace with Sid. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen before. What do you make of it?”

Sid slid a part of his mind in to take a look. “Doesn’t look like it was doing anything wrong.”

“Did you see how it was mutating? And it’s not attached to any human tags—”

“Come on, it wasn’t doing anything.” Sid felt annoyed at the way she always targeted machine intelligences. Maybe he felt like he had to stand up for his proxxi, Vicious, who was sitting across from them in his virtual projection.

“Yet,” Sibeal replied.

Sid put his beer down. “I’ll bet you’re happy SyBCoR got slammed.”

Sibeal frowned. “SyBCoR would make my job a lot easier, if you want to know. The big AIs hide inside corporate structures so even if they kill people, it’s hard to get the shareholders to stand down.”

“Worse than people?”

“At least if they had civil rights and obligations, the playing field would be evened. And it was your friend Killiam who killed it, and I bet it wasn’t on moral grounds.”

The argument wasn’t really anymore whether the machines qualified as “people” philosophically, but more about the economic chaos from granting billions of machines even basic civil rights. The rise of Atopian pssi was, in theory, supposed to buffer this effect by moving economics into virtual consumption.

“Anyway, machine intelligence is different,” added Sibeal. “I don’t know why—”

Sid knew she was about to get into the statistical inference versus biological debate. He cut her off. “Do you understand why you do things?”

Sibeal looked at him defiantly. “Of course.”

“There’s a difference between rationalization and reasoning. You do things because you want to, because a set of reasons put up afterwards always make it fit. Reasoning is just an illusion—”

“You’re going to talk to me about illusions? You’re the master of illusions.”

“Exactly.”

“Kids, kids,” Bunky interjected. “Come on now, we’re here for a nice pint.” He raised his glass and grinned. “And those results are coming in from the materials lab. How about we focus on that?”

Sibeal took a deep breath and looked away from Sid. She opened a virtual workspace and dragged everyone’s subjective into it, and then pulled in the results from the rock sample testing.

Living underground, they were all experts on rocks.

After a few seconds, Sibeal sighed. The results looked typical: mostly metamorphic rock, the mica schist that formed the bedrock under Manhattan. Some flakes of quartz and granite gneiss—the crystalline basement of the crust under the East Coast—and some ground-up glacial till.

“Wait, what’s that?” Sid asked, dragging one of the test results to the top of the workspace.

Bunky and Shaky’s avatars frowned, but Sibeal’s eyes grew wide.

“Quasi-crystals,” she said aloud, pulling up more samples into the center of the test-result world. “Do you see that?”

Shaky’s avatar nodded. “What’s that doing there?”

Sid looked up the definition: A quasiperiodic crystal is a structure that is ordered but not periodic.

“That’s not even an icosahedrite,” Bunky pointed out.

Sid shook his head. “What?”

Sibeal forwarded him some background data, but it was barely intelligible. “Quasi-crystals don’t occur naturally—at least, not on Earth.”

“The only ones in nature are from the Koryak Mountains in Russia,” added Bunky. He was something of a rock historian. “And some in the New Guinea highlands. But all have extraterrestrial origin.” In the pub he took a sip from his stout, leaving him a foamy mustache. He smiled. “What I mean is they’re from meteorites.”

Sibeal spun the model of the crystal structure around in space. “And these look natural, not lab-grown. There’s residue of uranium.” She popped their viewpoints back into normal space at the pub. “Bunky, can you contact underminers in cities where Wally’s proxxi made stops, see if they can find any more of this?”

Bunky nodded.

Sid didn’t quite understand, so he pulled up the tech sheets Sibeal had forwarded him.

A splinter following world events chimed in with a future prediction that had topped the ninety-percentile, “With Atopia joining the Alliance, it is only a matter of time before a kinetic attack is launched against Terra Nova unless it gives in to UN demands for weapons inspection…”

Something else was bothering him. The digital organism Sibeal had been complaining about, it shared some of the same digital fingerprints as the virus that infected and nearly destroyed Atopia.

Burrowing into his workspace to investigate, he shrugged off an attempt by someone to grab his primary subjective. Closing his virtual eyes, he sighed, relenting, deciding he’d better apologize to Sibeal for his rant earlier. She was right about that glass being odd. He opened a private space, a small meeting room with beanbags on the floors and walls covered in whiteboards.

But it wasn’t Sibeal.

Vince materialized sitting in a beanbag across from Sid. He smiled. “Miss me?”

25

“Back!” broadcast the droid across a wide spectrum of audio and radio frequencies, its red and blue lights strobing at the crowd. A second droid was working the other side of the plaza, while a third and fourth rolled in and sprang into action, pushing back the street vendors and hawkers and robotic scavengers.

It wasn’t easy clearing a landing space for a VTOL in the Lagos slums.

Bob stood still in the center of the square while the crowd dispersed, his head bowed. He wore a stained white robe and sandals, his dirty blond hair falling around his shoulders, merging with his beard. Passage through Assembler City was thankfully uneventful, just about the first thing that had gone to plan in this whole adventure. The drone he’d hidden in had passed by one automated transport and microwave array after another, eventually depositing him here in the outskirts of the Lagos mega-city.

A light mist began to fall, and the moisture triggered a phase change in the bio-plastics lining the alleyways and shop stalls. Like blooming flowers, walls and awnings spread against the coming rain.

Over the tops of the tin roofs and neon signs, the Spike—a glass tower a mile high—glittered between scudding clouds in the night sky, dominating the skyline of Lagos beside the greyed-out hundred-story Islamic business feminist complex. A point of light flashed from near the top of the Spike, and Bob watched it arcing through the murky air. The point of light grew into an African Union turbofan transport. A knife-point of light stabbed out from it, illuminating Bob in a cone of white in the middle of the now-cleared plaza.

Stepping back from the center, Bob gave the transport room to land. The blast from its exhaust blew a cloud of dust and scattered debris. Bob closed his eyes, but his mind was already away, his primary subjective jacked into a private Terra Novan communication channel. The moment he made a data connection with Terra Novan representatives, his body was flooded with their own synthetic reality technology.

Observing from a virtual point-of-view in a conference room at the apex of the Spike, Bob watched his body climb up and into the transport far below in the slums.

The relief of reaching a safe harbor was almost overwhelming. Bob felt like he was resurrected, been brought back to life after wandering the underworld. Somehow he managed to navigate his way out, past the tortured souls that remained trapped there. The past week was a blur. He felt different. Most of his external mind wasn’t reconnected yet, and a lot of it might stay lost, but it wasn’t just that.

After making a connection, he was instantly cordoned off, his presence isolated by thick security blankets. He hadn’t spoken to anyone yet, and so Mohesha pinging him, asking if she could come and talk to him, felt like the start of his journey home. He’d done what Patricia asked. He made it to Terra Novan territory, and could tell Mohesha what he knew. Perhaps his part was done.

“We were afraid we had lost you,” Mohesha said as soon as her virtual presence materialized in the room with him. She looked down through the windows at the transport. “We haven’t been introduced, I’m—”

“I know who you are.” Bob turned to face her, a slender, dark-skinned woman with close-cropped black hair and kind eyes. She was an old friend of Patricia Killiam, and was, in fact, a student of Patricia’s more than fifty years before. Together they created the foundations for synthetic nervous systems, the foundation for both Atopia and Terra Nova.

Mohesha smiled. “You understand bringing you here is dangerous.”

Given that I’m a hunted terrorist. Bob resisted the urge to defend himself.

The room was cool, their voices echoing through the empty room. It was a conference space designed for international meetings, forty chairs lining each side of a massive table ten feet across. The floor-to-ceiling glass window walls sloped outward. They were alone.

“Patricia told me to come.”

“I know.” Staring through the window, Mohesha’s reflection hung side by side with Bob’s. “Atopia has formally declared war, joined the Alliance with America.”

“I had nothing to do with what happened in New York.”

Mohesha spun mediaworlds into Bob’s sensory frames, announcing the sighting of Robert Baxter in the Lagos slums. “It doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t do anymore. International courts have filed for your extradition, to Atopia of course. They claim you possess stolen information that threatens Alliance security.”

Bob retreated from the window. “Not stolen, it was given to me.” He sat down in one of the conference table chairs.

“By Patricia? This is Patricia’s proxxi data?”

Bob nodded. He was holding the data cube Patricia gave him in the center of his systems, protecting it like an egg. It seemed another world and time when she gave it to him. It was a burden he’d be glad to be rid of.

“And you have it with you?”

Bob nodded. Leaning his elbows onto the table, he pressed his hands together and steepled his fingers. The data cube might be a burden, but he hesitated to just give it up. “I have it encrypted in the bio-electronics in my body.”

“Good.” Mohesha watched the transport arcing through the sky on its return, cradling within it the precious cargo of Bob’s body. “One more thing.”

Bob looked at her. “What?”

“Did you find Willy’s body yet?”

26

“This proves it!” screamed a newsworld anchor, his face apoplectic. “Robert Baxter is a Terra Novan spy, flying home to roost.” In the background hung a three-dimensional image, the viewpoint flying around from all angles, of Bob climbing into the transport in the Lagos slums from the night before. “The Allies need to launch an immediate attack on Terra Nova before we get a repeat—”

Sid controlled the primary feed, and he switched to another newsworld.

“—with Atopia joining the Alliance, an era of peace stretches forward for humanity. In countries where their synthetic reality system has been successful, we’re seeing the highest happiness indices that have ever—”

Sid switched worlds again.

“—they are trying to destabilize Atopian technology for their own gain.” This time a square-jawed synthetic anchor, in a suit and tie with his hair neatly parted and his voice steady. “Granting asylum to Robert Baxter, while refusing UN weapons inspectors entry to their space power grid installation is not—”

Vince swiped away the mediaworlds with a phantom. “Enough. At least we know Bob is safe. Did you send out a message?”

Nodding, Sid sent a copy of his inquiries to the external Terra Novan offices. There was no response. “I still can’t believe he made it.” He must have one hell of a story to tell.

He was with Sibeal and Zoraster in the White Horse. It was their meeting place. On the other side of a fused augmented reality were Vince and Connors in the barn in the Louisiana bayou, sitting on peeling wooden chairs. Now that he knew where Bob ended up, Sid was able to retrace his path through parts of the accessible wikiworld. Sid bought bits and pieces of the data path that weren’t publicly available. He’d already contacted the paramilitaries that had taken him up the Yoba River.

Connors stared at Sibeal through the augmented reality display. “Explain to me again these crystals you found?”

After some haggling, Vince had convinced Sid to allow her into the meeting. Understandably, Sid wasn’t comfortable including in their discussions a member of the same police forces that were trying to hunt him down. He only allowed it on the condition that her memories of the discussion would be externally stored, where they could be wiped if needed.

The shared meeting space blossomed into a visualization of atomic orbitals, shared valence bonds, and crystalline structuring graphs. “Quasi-crystals don’t occur naturally on Earth. The only ones found outside a lab were discovered in the Koryak Mountains and Indus Valley.”

The viewpoint zoomed to sub-atomic detail, zeroing in on the wave pattern of a single electron. “At each point that Willy’s proxxi stopped in the undergrounds of cities, we found traces of these same formations.”

“Meaning either it was looking for them, or it implanted them there,” Connors said.

Nodding, Sibeal dove into technical details about the resonance of spin between quarks in the crystals’ sub-atomics and power dissipation curves from a surrounding matrix of uranium.

Sid had been researching the quasi-crystals for hours already. Deciding to take a break, he opened a private world to chat with Vince. They morphed away from their physical bodies to sit down at another table in the White Horse, their conversation protected by a glittering security blanket. “So you’re telling me you were possessed by a voodoo spirit?”

“I don’t know, it all happened pretty fast. It felt the same as sharing sensory channels in a synthetic world.” Vince smiled. “But, you know, some of us just can’t help having fun no matter what we’re doing.”

“Figures you would be inhabited by… who was it? Papa Ougan, the voodoo spirit of boozing and womanizing?”

Vince laughed. “Yeah, that’s what they say.”

“And I see you’re going all Stockholm syndrome.” Sid motioned at the image of Connors, already up to her elbows in schematics with Sibeal. “The woman kidnaps you, loses you”—Sid checked the latest mediaworlds on the Phuture News meltdown—“about a trillion dollars, threatens you with jail, and you want to make her a part of our gang?”

“What can I say?” Vince laughed again. “I’ll get it all back, and it wasn’t personal. She’s just doing her job. I respect that.”

Sid shook his head in wonderment. “You’re one special kind of guy.”

Vince’s smile faded. “Seriously, though. She’s a straight shooter, wants to do the right thing, and more than anything, she wants to make her mark, prove herself. I think she could be a big asset.”

“If you say so.” Sid switched topics. “So you want details on where we tracked Willy’s body?”

Vince nodded.

“It stopped at each of these cities in the continental United States”—the room faded into a view of the entire Earth, with New York, Chicago, and Washington highlighted—“and then moved on to Europe and the Middle East.”

“Where did it end up?”

Sid spun the globe. “We think we saw traces in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, but that’s where the trail ends.”

“Anything else?”

There wasn’t much else to go on. Something tweaked in the back of Sid’s mind. “There was one other thing that didn’t make sense, or at least, I couldn’t fit it in.”

Vince nudged him. “What?”

“This might seem ridiculous, but I was reading some of the religious texts you sent me—the ones Willy’s proxxi was reading in the Commune in Montana.”

“Been reading a lot of those myself. So what is it?”

“There was one phrase that I couldn’t find any other reference to, something scrawled into the notes you sent me: The beginning of man, where time stops in a thousand tongues.”

“That sounds like pretty standard Gnostic nonsense,” Vince said after a pause. He frowned. “Wait a second. Where time stops…”

Sid looked at him. “What?”

“I met with that gangster Patricia told us to find.”

“Sintil8?”

“Yeah, that’s his stage name. Real name Mikhail Butorin. He gave me a copy of some Gnostic texts that he dug up in the Egyptian deserts a hundred years ago, the Book of Pobeptoc. There was a passage in there that popped out at me.” He shared it with Sid. “Wal lie body is where the flesh eaters live.”

“That’s just a translation coincidence,” Sid said. “Or maybe Butorin is having a bit of fun with you. Doesn’t he encourage his followers to eat their own flesh? That’s one sick—”

“Where did you say the trail ended, Jakarta?”

Sid nodded.

“Where time stops,” Vince whispered. He laughed, and then collapsed their private meeting space and grabbed everyone’s attention from the lecture on quantum computing Sibeal was giving.

“Did you say some of those quasi-crystals were found in the wild up in the New Guinea highlands?”

Everyone stared at Vince.

Sibeal nodded. “Yeah, New Guinea. Why?”

Sunlight streamed down through the jungle canopy, and a lime-green parrot fluttered overhead. Pushing back the last of the foliage before the village, Vince peered in. Smoke rose from cooking fires between thatched huts, and children chased each other, squealing, while their mothers prepared sweet potatoes in stone-lined pits.

Vince was projecting himself into the village through the base station repeater that he dropped here months ago, just about the time Willy’s body disappeared. It was when the future death threats were peaking, hunting him down, forcing him on a goose chase around the world to try to protect himself. This part of the world was still remote and wild; there were no networks, no wikiworld feeds, barely any technology beyond what humans had a thousand years ago. The perfect place to hide, it was still in a primal state… the beginning of man.

It was here that Vince had met the Yupno witch doctor, Nicky Nixons. The Yupno didn’t perceive time in the same way the rest of the world did. They didn’t just see it as going forward, but also as going backward, sideways and in circles… where time stops.

If it was primitive, it was also one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth. The New Guinea highlanders spoke a thousand tongues.

Vince remembered that it had seemed like Dr. Nicky Nixons was able to see his proxxi, Hotstuff, even though, without any smarticles in his system, it would have—should have—been impossible.

Hunched over one of the cooking fires, Vince saw a man, naked save for a loin skin, covered in chalky paint the witch doctors applied to those searching the spirit worlds. He was arranging sweet potatoes in the cooking pits. The villagers here wouldn’t be able to sense Vince’s virtual presence unless they were loaded with smarticles and connected to the base station repeater. Vince walked over and put a hand on the man’s shoulder.

The man turned and looked up—and smiled.

“Hey, Mr. Indigo,” said Willy’s proxxi.

27

The turbofan transport was on its way to Terra Nova.

Bob felt a swarm of medbots scouring his body as he lay in an emergency pod. The symbol of Terra Nova, a thick circle with a square cross through its center, was imprinted on the ceiling of the passenger compartment his body was in.

“This man you escaped with,” Mohesha asked, “do you have any additional information?”

The priest had come further than Bob expected, all the way into Lagos. They said their goodbyes just before Bob initiated the contact sequence with Mohesha. Bob hesitated. The priest said he had enemies here. He didn’t want to get his savior into any trouble.

“Just that he was a priest, and that he wasn’t welcome in the AU.” Bob spun some information packets with the priest’s face into Mohesha’s networks. He’d do his best to protect the priest if anything came up. He owed him.

Mohesha assimilated the data. “Ah, yes, we know him. A Bedouin shaman, but an advanced user of our technology. We don’t see him as a threat, but politics in Africa are complicated.” Mohesha stood next to Bob and put an arm on his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep his identity between us.”

Mohesha pinged Bob for location, and taking a deep breath, he released it to her. “You can relax, young man, you are with friends now. Come, let me show you more of what we’re about.” Mohesha took charge, and his primary viewpoint rocketed out from the top of the Spike, up and into the dark clouds. They looked down at an enhanced image of the plains surrounding Lagos.

She highlighted a circular area two miles in diameter, dotted with radio receiver dishes. “This is what Atopia is pushing for UN weapons inspectors to look at.”

It was the microwave power array for Lagos, part of the space power grid that the African Union and Terra Nova pioneered. Bob was familiar with it: over a hundred satellites in LEO, each capable of transmitting hundreds of megawatts of power in line-of-sight microwave bursts.

Nearly two hundred years ago, the “old” world built dense networks of power transmission lines that stretched across America and Europe and China, but with the sharp rise in commodity metal prices, replicating this in Africa had been impossible. So they created the space power grid, becoming the leader in wireless power transmission.

“They’re worried the power grid could be used as a directed energy weapon in a coming conflict,” explained Mohesha. “But it’s the basis of our economy, and we cannot consider demands to throttle or limit it.”

Mohesha began spinning out one project after another into private worlds for Bob to see. Bob watched her Chief Science Officer credentials flash as each one opened. A massive tornado filled Bob’s visual fields.

“The controlled vortex project can capture energy from the upper atmosphere,” Mohesha explained, “and convert it into usable kinetic energy at ground level.”

There were a dozen vortex installations across Africa. Promoted as terraforming projects to combat global warming, they generated vast energies. Anything that generated that much power could be used as a weapon, a new and terrifying Weather War weapon, he thought but didn’t say.

Mohesha spun their viewpoint a hundred miles into space and highlighted a ring running under the western half of the African continent. “The supercollider, a project only the African Union has been able to realize.”

It was on the drawing board for decades, the ultimate endgame in a series of high-energy physics experiments to probe the very nature of the fabric of the universe. A thousand miles in circumference, it ran beneath Lagos, toward southern Africa and then eastern Africa, and even ran under the Sahara desert to the north. It was the scientific triumph of the AU, and was only just operational.

“Patricia was a big supporter of many of these projects.” Mohesha brought in views of other projects, the Arbitrarily Large Phased Array—ALPHA—a swarm of satellites that collected solar energy and beamed it down to Earth via the space power grid. “The supercollider, in particular, was the twin of Patricia’s own Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector.” Mohesha paused. “Patricia shut down the POND just before the crisis. Do you know why?”

He shook his head. “No idea.” Bob’s attention sharpened—the POND data, the transmission from another universe. “I’ll give everything I have to the Council.” Not that he didn’t trust Mohesha, but it might be wise to wait. “Patricia asked me to talk directly with them.”

Mohesha paused before collapsing the display spaces. “Yes.” She sighed. “I miss her. It is good you made it. You’re the genetic embodiment of everything Patricia worked toward. You are her children, her pssi-kids. She is not gone, she is with you, in you.”

Their viewpoint sailed across the ocean, and the crystal towers of Terra Nova glistened in the distance. Mohesha guided them in, circling the main tower complex. They materialized together, walking next to each other in a tropical garden of flowering red begonias and gladiolas. It was already dark, but the night garden was lit by the soft glow of aerial plankton.

Bob had questions of his own, things that he’d been waiting to ask. “You say you miss Patricia, but she said it was you who infected Atopia with the reality skin that nearly destroyed us.” Mohesha had used Patricia’s trust to gain access to Atopian networks. “You used her.”

He stared at her. He wasn’t sure if she’d try to deny it.

Mohesha’s face turned to the floor. “It was the only way.”

Bob waited for more, but she just walked ahead of him. “Half the reason my friends and I are being hunted is because they think Sid and I created that virus,” he added after a few seconds.

She turned to him. “You think we should admit we attacked Atopia? That would be an automatic declaration of war. The uncertainty is all that’s buying us time. Patricia was lost to us already. Now it’s too late. There will be more bloodshed, and on a far larger scale than just Atopia.”

“More bloodshed?” The skin on Bob’s arms prickled. “What do you mean?”

Mohesha turned away and started walking again. She turned his attention to the sky, amplifying an image of the comet, its curved tail like a giant scythe aimed at the Earth. “The comet is decelerating too quickly. It was supposed to remain in an extra-lunar orbit.”

Bob’s systems assimilated the data she sent him. “But it’s not going to hit Earth.”

“Not yet, no.” She emphasized yet.

“And you think this has something to do with Atopia? With Jimmy?”

She shrugged. “It’s hard to say.”

“Is this the destruction you see coming?” Bob jumped forward several steps to get even with Mohesha. “Is this the bloodshed?” There were ways a comet could be stopped. It was still on the far side of the sun, a hundred and fifty million miles away. He grabbed Mohesha, turning her to face him.

Her face remained impassive. “It might be best, as you said, to wait for the Council meeting.” She pulled away and kept walking.

Bob stood still. He glanced at the enhanced image of the comet in the sky. It faded as Mohesha released it. “When can I reconnect with my friends?”

As soon as he made the connection with Mohesha, her networks had given him a status update. Sid had pinged Terra Nova with several requests. His friends were safe. Terra Nova hadn’t responded to them yet, but they’d know that Bob was all right. The mediaworlds were in a frenzy with the images of him getting picked up already. Bob watched the probability of imminent kinetic attack against Terra Nova spike in his phuturing channels.

He was out of the frying pan and into the fire.

“As soon as your physical body is secured in Terra Nova, we’ll let you talk to them. In the meantime, get some rest.” Her face softened. “Soon you’ll be free to roam your worlds with them again.”

“And my proxxi, how long will it take to reconnect with him?”

Terra Novans had a strict approach to synthetic intelligences. You couldn’t just create and destroy them here. Bringing one in required processing. In the desert, Bob decided to free Robert from his service, to abandon the use of a proxxi. The priest’s lessons had sunk in. The only problem was that he was sure Robert wouldn’t want to be freed, but that was another bridge for another day.

“It’ll take a few days for the legal process to engage. You can still converse with him in a secure space, but his essence will be held in a holding world.”

Bob nodded.

Mohesha paused. “I do have one question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“This data beacon from Patricia, did you share it with anyone else?”

Bob stared into her eyes. It wasn’t a time to hide information, but something made him want to keep these cards close to his chest. “Nobody,” he replied.

28

“Can’t we just cut off the connection to Terra Nova?” Sibeal asked.

The excitement of finding Willy’s body—with Willy’s proxxi—wore off fast. Now they were trying to figure out how to reconnect Willy’s mind to Willy’s body directly. Sibeal was sitting at the cooking fire in the New Guinea village, together with Sid and Vince. Connors was observing through an avatar, and Bunky and Shaky and the rest of the gang from the White Horse Pub were ghosting through Sibeal.

Before any of that, though, one thing needed to be cleared up.

Sitting next to Sibeal on the log by the fire, Sid turned to face her. “Are you still planning on turning him in for bounty?” A part of him had thought that they’d never find Willy’s body, but all of a sudden everything had changed. He’d almost forgotten the reason why they’d struck a bargain, why Sibeal and her friends kidnapped him in the first place. Was the friendship routine just a sham? Just a scheme? In the background he was readying a systems attack that would disable the Midtown den. He waited for her answer.

She crinkled her nose. “Well, we didn’t really find him.”

Sid frowned. “What do you mean?” Was she trying to be clever?

“Vince found him. I mean, we couldn’t take credit for someone else’s work.”

Sid relaxed his attack vectors. “Otherwise you would?”

Now she laughed. “Cool off, hot shot, of course we wouldn’t. This is about more than just money now.”

“Good.”

“Good. Now can we work on Willy?” She began filling a shared workspace with Willy’s brain’s network connection topographies. “And you can let go of your sneak attacks.” She smiled. “Do you think I didn’t let you trap Zoraster that time?”

Sid laughed, shaking his head, and relaxed. He began highlighting paths on the connection diagrams. “Willy’s mind is working inside there.” He pointed at Willy’s head, and Willy’s proxxi smiled with it. “But it’s routed through Terra Nova. If we cut the connection, his consciousness will remain stuck in his head without any sensory input.” Full sensory deprivation was a fate worse than death.

Sibeal nodded. “So we need to open a channel to Terra Nova?”

“I’m trying.” With mounting cyberattacks and an impending physical attack, Terra Nova kept only a few diplomatic connections open. The connection to Willy’s head wasn’t one of them.

“Maybe we could just stick a wire in there…” Sibeal waved a hand at the base of Willy’s skull.

“Are you kidding? We’d need surgical isolation—”

“I am kidding.” Sibeal looked at Vince and rolled her eyes. He smiled back.

A silent pause was punctuated by barking howler monkeys. For the moment they were stumped.

“Okay, Wally, time to tell us what happened,” Vince said. “Why did you steal Willy’s body?”

Willy’s proxxi stared at the smoldering fire at the bottom of the cooking pit, his face smeared with Yupno warrior paint, caked around his forehead and into his hair. Taking a deep breath, he looked up at the gang.

“Jimmy Scadden is stealing peoples’ souls inside the Atopian system.”

Now Sid rolled his eyes. Please, tell us something we don’t know. “And that’s why you left, because you found out?”

Willy’s proxxi nodded.

More silence while monkeys howled.

“That’s just great,” Sid said, throwing a sweet potato into the fire. A whole lot of work for nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. They had finally found Willy’s body. That was something. He picked up another potato.

“There’s more.” Willy’s proxxi looked at Sid. “He’s not crazy, not some psychopath. It’s not Jimmy’s fault. He’s been infected—his mind breached—he’s not in control.”

Sid stopped mid-swing. “And you know who this person is?”

Wally shook his head. “I found out when Jimmy helped me re-program the Atopian perimeter. He gave me access to his personal conscious firewall subroutines. A communication leaked out.”

“And that’s when you left?” Vince asked.

“I had to. Whatever was controlling Jimmy, it knew I’d found out. It would have killed us.”

“And what are these crystals you went and looked at?” asked Sibeal. Her research revealed that they interacted with neural potentials.

Wally smiled. “So you saw that. I found some embedded in the Atopian infrastructure. When Jimmy leaked the communication to me, it mapped back to a set of nodal points.”

Sid tried to put it together. “So what, this is like a different version of synthetic reality technology?”

“If it is, it’s far advanced of anything I’ve seen,” Sibeal observed.

“Is this why they tried to destroy Atopia?” Sid frowned. Even if Jimmy was being controlled by someone else, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives aboard Atopia seemed a heavy price.

“I don’t know.” Wally shook his head. “I was just trying to protect Willy. When I saw Vince drop the repeater connection point here, it seemed about as far away as I could get.” He looked away.

“Are you okay?” Sid asked. Willy’s proxxi looked like he was going to cry.

Wally took a deep breath. “I’m not scared, not for me.” He sniffled and smeared the war paint across his face with the back of one hand. “Have you talked to Willy? Is he okay? It’s been so frustrating—he’s right inside here”—he tapped his skull with one finger—“but I have no way of talking with him.”

“Don’t worry. Your brain activity looks normal.” Sid had done an external scan. “Bob’s at Terra Nova now. He’ll get in touch and we’ll be able to sort this out soon.”

“I still don’t understand why the Terra Novans wouldn’t just try to isolate Jimmy,” Sibeal said. “Why try to destroy the entire Atopian colony?”

Sid nodded. It seemed like overkill no matter which way he tried to look at it. Suspicious overkill. “We’d need to get a channel into Terra Nova—”

“That won’t be a problem.”

Everyone turned around.

Bob stood at the edge of the jungle, still in his white robe and sandals. “The Terra Novan Council is about to start. I suggest we look for answers there.”

29

The light came from within and without, the surface function of the meeting space like a stone worn smooth in the river of time. The space was thought-plastic, molding itself around each attendee. At the head of the table-concept was Tyrel, leader of the Terra Novan Council. At his side was Mohesha, surrounded by a halo of the other members of the Terra Novan leadership. Their faces appeared both young and old at the same time, their features harmonizing with the thought patterns of the observer. In the background, fleeting images shifted in dark forests, thoughts and ideas and images spinning through the meta-cognition systems of the assembled, each merging with the other through virtual-synaptic connections that brought the separate parts into a single, cohesive whole.

“You have many questions.” Tyrel brought the meeting to order. “As do we.”

Willy was there, his virtual presence wedged between avatars of Bob and Sid, with Sibeal and Vince flanking them. There wasn’t time for celebration at their reunion. The presence of Mikhail Butorin hovered in a dark patch of the light. He smiled at Vince.

Tyrel formed an image of an oceanic platform. It was Atopian in design, but looked nothing like Atopia itself. Its surface was angular, jet black. A schematic of its capabilities sprung up around it. “Allied battle platforms are encroaching on the African Union in physical space. The deadline for allowing UN weapons inspectors access to the space power grid facilities has lapsed.”

Connors wasn’t invited. An agent of the Alliance was too risky to include, even one that appeared friendly. Back in the barn in Louisiana, as night fell, she was playing cards with Vince’s proxxi by candlelight. Vince kept a splinter of himself watching over her.

Tyrel looked around the table. “The time to act is now, my friends.”

“With all due respect,” Vince said. “I’m still going to need some convincing of this ‘friends’ part. We’ve risked our lives to get here, and you’re the ones that nearly killed us and our families when you infected Atopia with that reality skin. Seems to me you brought this on yourselves.”

The battle platform gave way to a flood of situational data. “This fight is not of our choosing, but of necessity.” He looked at Bob. “We need the information Patricia left you, and we need access to the data in Willy’s body.”

Bob stared at Tyrel. Patricia’s instructions were to deliver the data she collected here, but had she known what they were up to? Who to trust? He shook his head. “With the greatest of respect, Vince is right. Before we share anything, you need to convince us that we’re with friends.” He glanced at Vince. “Explain why all this is necessity.”

Data flowing into the sensory focal-point of the meeting slowed to a stop, went blank, and was replaced by pinpoints of light spreading up and down, left and right into infinity, ordered in irregular but repeating patterns.

“You’ve seen these crystals,” Mohesha said, her presence rising to the center of their thought-space. “A complex alloy of metals that enables the stable flow of sub-atomic quantum states between neighboring atoms.” Data was uploaded into the shared cognition of the meeting space. These quasi-crystals could hold information at quantum scale, transmit and transform the information.

“A computing device,” Sibeal said. “One that can sense neural potentials.”

“Yes.” The matrix of pinpoints of light faded. “Self-replicating, difficult to distinguish from natural mineral.”

“Unless you know what you’re looking for.” Sibeal caught Mohesha’s attention. “Do you have anything to do with it?”

“We only recently discovered the crystals, but it confirms what we’ve suspected for some time.”

“And that is?”

“A truth glimpsed by secret societies in the past.” Tyrel took back the focal point. “Something we hadn’t the means to understand until now. Now it is almost too late.”

Bob pulled their attention to him. “Is this something from space?” Natural quasi-crystals were found in meteorites, and his first thought was the POND signal. Did Tyrel know about it? He hadn’t shared the information yet.

“Possibly, but we think the crystals are ancient, regenerating from the deep past.”

The mind’s eye of the meeting space opened up into a field bordered by strange-looking trees, and giant animals with green skin stood eating ferns at the edges. None of the plants or animals looked recognizable, not of this Earth.

“We suspect there was a technological civilization of Earth before, two hundred and fifty million years ago, before the Great Permian Extinction that wiped out life for tens of millions of years.”

The meeting space shifted to alien-looking bipedal humanoids, with mottled green skin, walking through soaring structures. The viewpoint retreated upward, revealing a city of skyscrapers twinkling beside an ocean. Bob stared. Somehow he’d seen it before.

“They developed systems similar to our synthetic reality technologies. We think this is convergent evolution, that biological and memetic evolution will push technological civilizations to produce synthetic reality systems in the same way that an eye will evolve over and over again. Like an eye, nervenets are evolutionary adaptations that allow organisms to see, to perceive the true fabric of reality.”

The space around them grew dark.

“When their world ended,” continued Tyrel, “their technology persisted, self-replicating, building itself into the fabric of the Earth. Like the wikiworld we use, it’s been constantly recording. A memory of every human is contained in this machine, every person that ever existed, but apart from this function, it’s been dormant.”

“Dormant?” Bob said. “So it’s woken up?”

“They’ve been waiting.”

Bob waited. “For what?”

“For sentience to arise once again.”

Silence.

“Why would it be waiting.”

“Not it,” Tyrel said slowly, “they.”

“They?”

“Because their world did not just end, it was destroyed.”

“So what are you saying? How does this relate to Jimmy?”

“Because he is evidence of the truth that has long been suspected.” Tyrel returned the meeting space to the gardens on the surface of Terra Nova. “The Great Destroyer has returned.”