Netopia: A Thrilling Dystopian Novel (Science Fiction & Action)

by Y. G. Levimor

  Years later, Solly had a serious fight with his parents, the brave defenders of privacy and ‘old world’ dignity. Their world view was foreign to him. He believed that if everyone exposed themselves more, the world would gradually change for the better. He simply could not comprehend why his parents kept tilting at windmills. Anyone with half a brain could tell them the days of privacy were long gone. Over and over again, he explained how the information they shared could help make their lives more pleasant and with less background noise. His parents were not convinced, and the rift between them widened.

  Eventually, Pandy had become his only family.

  ***

  As a rule, Solly steered clear of bad memories. They shook his very existence. But from time to time, he was reminded of his lowest moments, like the day when he didn't wake up early like he normally did and even Pandy couldn't get him up. He tossed and turned, exhausted, crushed under a sudden heavy weariness. The room spun and his head became too heavy to lift. Flashes of light crossed his field of vision. His once quick mind, which could usually handle several parallel processes, was now able to concentrate on only one function and then dwelt on it for endless seconds. After hours of inexplicable stagnation, he slowly realized his thoughts were on strike, a rulebook slowdown; each thought was conceived, pondered on, and put to rest in turn. For the first time in years, he delved into individual thoughts, as if in deep meditation. It was horrible. Pandy did not understand what had come over him, and Solly tried explaining it to her over and over again:

  “I'm seeing every thought clearly. I'm fixed on something, and I can't let it go to think about anything else. Maybe it's fatigue? Or something in my brain?”

  Days came and went, and he noticed his productivity at work drastically dropped. Clients complained that he neglected their business, and his partners were beginning to be concerned. They took on most of the workload and left him to stare at his thoughts. He became a lazy deadbeat who couldn't manage more than one item of work a day. Solly taxied from one expert analysis to the next, and the last one determined, through an extended nano-bot scan that toured his entire body and accurately mapped his brain, that he represented a “rare case, with only several dozen instances recorded all over the world.” He learned that no cure for his condition was available yet. Researchers termed it Slow Motion Thought Disorder - SMTD.

  His consultation with the expert began badly.

  “Look, Mr. Grey, we don't have a full understanding of your condition. We know it's caused by a virus, but not much else. As we speak, algorithms all over the world are studying this rare phenomenon. It could disappear the same way it appeared. Other than that, there's nothing more I can tell you. We ran a dynamic FMRI on you, and all the indicated areas in your brain show up very gray. See it here?” said the expert, pointing to the right side of a huge 3D brain projection, which supposedly represented what went on inside Solly's head.

  Solly nodded, but understood none of it.

  “Those who are afflicted with your condition develop a very clear and focused pattern of thought, but one which is also very slow. It really is an odd sensation. Patients initially describe it as euphoric, suddenly being able to think things through, but they pay the price in loss of parallel thinking functions.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. I'm losing clients, staring at the changing walls, I can't do more than one thing at a time. Me! I could always think faster than anyone else, and now I'm practically crawling! What can I do?”

  “Rest. I'm afraid that's all you can do. Relax. Some say stress is at the root of it. Several of the patients who were diagnosed in the past six months were cured within a month. Some took several months...”

  “Several months?!”

  He made his way out of the medical center and toward his black shining neocar step by slow step. He wanted to feel like someone else, someone who was not treading water. He opened a Scibeer

  [9] and almost drained it in several large gulps. "We'll come out on top of this, like champs, right, Pal?" he addressed the red panda cat, probably hoping to be assured by his furry companion. Pandy simply laid her tiny head on Solly's knee.

  After his diagnosis, Solly put most of his utterly inefficient time into trying to retrieve medical findings on the other patients who suffered from his condition. In the meantime, dozens of projects previously under his supervision were put on hold, after having already ground to a halt due to delays in communication and research. Without Solly's legendary output, his two partners were buckling under the pressure and began to resent his unusual condition. All his explanations about the virus were shrugged off. They needed him to deliver; from where they stood, he was simply being lazy.

  In the end Solly was forced to sell his share in the company.

  He started waking up around noon. His apathy toward Pandy depressed the neopet, who needed human affection by design. Solly had no energy left for affection; his limited faculties were barely sufficient to keep him moving. He stopped shaving, stopped working out, and saw little daylight. His gaze was constantly directed at the data flickering on the wall. He used all his power to try and focus, searching for information on any available channel, consulting with astounded experts from all over the world, with people who knew people and with the other patients he could find.

  Days turned into months and Solly was becoming a wraith. His health deteriorated, his anxiety brought about respiratory problems, and his thoughts stretched further and further, until finally he imagined himself lost in one endless thought. Even brushing his teeth took a full hour, when all he had to do was apply a chocolate gel made of self spreading starch quanta which did all the actual work.

  Every once in a while, he experienced a symptom the experts referred to as the ‘black rainbow.’ All he could see was black, with a full complement of rainbow colors brushing through the darkness. The effect lasted only seconds, but left a lingering feeling of helplessness which added to his anxiety. He was afraid to leave the house, worried it might happen while he was out.

  Gradually, Solly also neglected his blue-eyed, silver-striped tending owls, and one day found them dead in their room. Mortality was part of the magic that made neopets so real. When he saw them lying motionless, their little furry feathers languid and tousled to the side, Solly sat down and wept. He felt responsible for their death. And he was. The little creatures were nourished by the love of their owner, without which they withered away. It was a digital death, but nevertheless a definite one - every digital animal had only one lifespan written into its code. He simply spent too long dwelling on his misery.

  One evening he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and chewing on antidepressant sunflower seed snacks while his ex-partners conferred with him on the wall. He watched them with glazed indifference; they mumbled parting words and apologies. Solly said his own cold farewell. Things can’t get any worse, he thought, and prepared to sleep, hugging Pandy who lay beside him with her tail tucked in her neck.

  Later, when he crashed to the floor tired and teary, a new idea occurred to him. Could there be an upside to his circumstance? Suddenly he thought that if he was going to be cursed, he might as well try and turn the situation in his favor.

  His long information forays finally yielded two other people who had his virus, both abroad, and he sent them invitations to a wall conference. The two appeared in front of him, staring at him, dispirited and confused. It wasn't easy finding patients willing to speak with each other, as most were far too depressed and tended to be reclusive, disconnected from the network and withdrawn into their pain.

  Their names were Kirsten and Andre. She was a young redhead, an ideas promoter who had yet to establish her career, and he a successful life coach - older, but didn't look a day over twenty. They both contracted the virus around the same time Solly did, and by now looked tired and sullen, like him. The three convened.

  "How are you?" asked Solly.

  "How are you?" asked Andre.

  "How are you?" asked Kirsten.
>
  They realized they were all saying the same thing at the same time and fell silent. Then the chorus continued with, "Pleased to meet you," directly followed by a simultaneous:

  "What's going on here? We're all talking together!" shouted Solly.

  "What's going on here? We're all talking together!" shouted Andre.

  "What's going on here? We're all talking together!" shouted Kirsten.

  They continued to shout in unison in this way, as if a hidden conductor was giving them cues.

  In fact, the three spoke together throughout most of the spasmodic conversation. They agreed to stay connected for hours in their provisional support group, looking for answers in their counterparts. Before long, they realized they were mentally connected. How could it have happened? And what about their personal thoughts, their memories? What about the unique histories they all carried to make them individuals?

  Countless questions remained unanswered. The more they talked, the more they understood that they didn't actually share all their thoughts, and even if they talked at the same time it didn't necessarily mean they were thinking the same thing. But they shared the same basic thoughts. They were thirsty, hungry, angry, horny and curious all at the same time. They felt bonded by fate. Connected in mind.

  They decided to keep the discovery to themselves. No expert, until then, even entertained the thought that all SMTD patients could be linked. No one, until then, had made a point of examining several together, or bothered inviting a group of them to a conference call. Solly sensed he was on the verge of a hair raising medical breakthrough. But it wasn't the first thing on his mind just then. He was mostly concerned with knowing if he was ever going to overcome this oddball affliction.

  The more he delved into it, the more it became apparent that the virus had some arcane method of coordinating behavior between all the minds it infected, as far apart geographically as they were.

  The possibility was beyond comprehension. They were programmed to practically be identical. Solly was amazed. How much power, exactly, was there in a thought, that it could cross distances and infect someone else? He felt he wasn't alone in the world, and it somehow gave him a small degree of consolation.

  After painstaking research, he discovered that the only possible physical link he had to Kirsten and Andre was a place they had all been to before they knew each other. It was during the previous Christmas, at a huge party inside a private White Label jet, one of the most beautiful and extravagant aircraft in the world, owned by a media mogul. The three were guests on the plane, which made its way to an exquisite exotic island, all decorated, glowing with colored lights and strewn with gifts in every corner of the cabin. Around 200 people partied all the way there and back. None of the three remembered the other two, but they clearly shared the same space, and it was probably there that they contracted the disease. As to how exactly that happened, they still didn't know.

  The next several days were insane. The excited Solly let all his experts know about the discovery, and after a series of tests provided confirmation, he was guaranteed world renown. But Solly insisted on remaining anonymous, not wishing the world to know of his disease. This wasn't how he wanted to be famous.

  “I won't be a medical curiosity show.” He made it clear to the panel of scientists.

  Researchers later published their findings on the first bio-digital virus – after running a controlled experiment on a limited group of test subjects, which forced them to phrase their conclusions carefully.

  All Solly cared about was that they find a cure, and preferably before his condition got any worse.

  Inexplicably, as his thoughts decelerated, his dreams were accelerating. By the time he woke up, he had finished dreaming entire worlds. Images, people and situations were flashing through his mind in succession at breakneck speed. So he slept a lot: everything was possible in his dreams. He was free, and that's what he wanted. It was grim reality that reminded him of being stuck.

  He started chipping away at his fortune. He could not make do with the bare minimum… eating the same nano-foods as regular people, without the vitamins and minerals that added to the cost of keeping his Dream Maker stocked. Something in him refused to fall in line with his new financial circumstance. He wanted to tell himself that he was still rich and all powerful. He increased his costs instead of reducing them and cursed himself. He became addicted to health snacks and started getting muscle atrophy from staying reclined in the same position most of the day.

  The experts were right. The remission was as sudden as the onset. Solly woke up one morning and was surprised to notice his thoughts were zipping. The discovery threw him into a fit of loud laughter. A huge relief. Every day saw his thoughts increase in speed, and he regained his former self.

  The next time he spoke to Andre and Kirsten, he found their thoughts had diverged. They could now communicate without echoing each other. Smiles and laughter came from every screen.

  Solly wondered if the whole episode was real or a dream.

  He was suddenly hit with a feeling of longing. One night, when he stared at the dark walls that had once featured Andre and Kirsten's faces night and day, he found himself wishing the illness back.

  “I miss it,” he told one of his examining scientists.

  “Something like Stockholm Syndrome, eh?” the professor answered. “Your mind was abducted, and you wish you were back in that prison.”

  “We were one synchronized mind,” Solly reminisced. “Of course, I'm glad the virus is gone, but we shared thoughts, we connected. There was something amazing about it… it drove the loneliness away.”

  “It really is extraordinary, the power of thought,” the scientist answered matter-of-factly.

  Minds

  For days and nights, Solly marveled at the idea that loneliness could be dispelled by the ultimate intimate connection – the one that starts in the mind, unmediated, without having to press any buttons or even move. But why stop there? He would have loved to have a network of thoughts, to replace other forms of communication. Everything begins and ends with the mind anyway. He decided the name for the network would be 'Minds.'

  He didn't have an inkling that this passing thought about thoughts was going to turn the world on its head.

  When the sensational idea for a network of minds first came to him, Solly felt a delectable euphoria. He had all the necessary tools and technological know how. Times were changing, and various methods that made his vision possible were already being developed and put to some use. It called for a massive investment, to the tune of hundreds of millions of Unis, which he did not have at his disposal. Regardless, he was optimistic and content.

  He could not imagine anyone not wanting to create a world in the mind and share it with others.

  Solly knew he would have to gather all the possible options into one network, a one-stop-shop for every dream, every flight of fancy or fantasy only attainable in thought. It would obviously have to be based on reality, but embellished, and remodeled to accommodate everyone. If, for example, some people loved the sunrise, why not let them see it whenever they wanted to? Or if someone bought a red dress, but suddenly wanted it to be white, why not just display it as a white dress? And if someone always dreamed of traveling back to the age of dinosaurs, why not? Go ahead, and take a date with you on a perfectly real adventure that will only be projected in your mind.

  All it took were special lenses and components which showed viewers whatever they wanted to see, like a daydream programmed on demand.

  The more he thought about it, the more excited he became. The prospective network of thoughts could offer endless possibilities: programming publicly shared worlds which took shape in the mind, and diving into them - alone, in couples, or groups. The process itself was simple and feasible, Solly realized. In Minds mode, the user could augment existing reality or replace it with an alternative one. His heart pounded with excitement when the magnitude of his idea hit him.

  For instance, now, s
itting in his empty room, the space around him could be transformed into a stormy ocean, prehistoric landscapes or a packed ballroom. All these sights would be projected to the eyes through lenses.

  The weather would change according to desire. Every user would live in his favorite scenery and season, be it jungle, sea, snow, an urban landscape or a village. Everything could be adjusted to fit a selected time period. Through the lenses, all visible architecture would conform to the style of a designated era. The style of design, clothing, color schemes – everything would fall into line with a thought.

  Partners for rent would be made available for virtual dates. People would be able to view alternative faces on their partners during intimate moments, by mental request. Couples would walk, hand in hand, through nineteenth century alleyways, when they were actually each at home, at a safe physical distance.

  The worlds of entertainment, culture and recreation would also receive a sensory upgrade. One could go on tour with a favorite band and ‘attend’ any concert by recreating the venue in real time. Fitted with a component implant, a person could pay to be anywhere, anytime, and with anyone. Solly knew the world was ripe for it, because scientific advances had led a need for total escape.

  No one will be able to resist this progress, he thought with excitement. No one will want to be left behind in a gray existence.

  “It’ll be better than any drug,” he told the development team he assembled. “People won’t be able to turn down an invention that could add significant value to their lives. They’ll all sign up. In time, they’ll stop seeing any reality that doesn't pertain to them. They won't run into anyone they dislike, or spend time in places they don't want to be in. The world outside will become boring, mundane and predictable. We're going to create a world that offers limitless parallel realities, and I'm not talking view screens - but projected directly to the eyes and thoughts, in the most basic layer of perception.”