Complete Atopia Chronicles

by Matthew Mather

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

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

  A great mop of blond hair lived a life of its own above his twinkling blue eyes, and while he had all the appearances of the uber-surfer, there was a persistent and unmistakable intelligence underpinning it all—the philosopher king of wave hunters. What a great kid, it was just too bad.

  “So…surfing today?” asked Bob lazily.

  Yeah, he was high. Sizing up Hotstuff’s outfit, he grinned appreciatively.

  “No, sorry, Bob. Can’t make it. Something has popped up.”

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

  “I really can’t,” I reiterated weakly. Jealously I watched the waves. My nerves were frazzled. Honestly, I could use a little relaxation, and I hadn’t been out surfing in weeks.

  “What could you possibly have to do?” asked Bob. “I thought you were like the richest guy in the world? Get someone else to do it!”

  “I wish I could…”

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

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

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

  §

  Bob and I were sitting on our boards and waiting for waves just inside the edge of the kelp forest, near the western inlet and not far from my habitat.

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

  My wealth afforded me the luxury of my own private habitat, a household that was attached to one of the passenger cannon supports, sprouting up out of the water and into the sunshine. Most of the million-plus inhabitants here lived below decks in the seascrapers stretching out into the depths. Atopia was the ultimate in dense, urban city planning, but then that was the whole idea: with access to limitless synthetic reality, Atopians didn’t need much in the way of real space.

  I’d been one of the earliest converts to the Atopia marketing program, pulling up stakes from my wandering existence around the Bay Area to move onto the original Atopian platform in the early 40’s.

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

  For me, in my rich, insular world, the kicker had really been the surfing. Floating free in the Pacific, Atopia was exposed to huge, open ocean swells. When they caught just right, these would break and curl into pipes that broke for miles as they swept around its perfectly circular edge.

  Atopia was a magnet for the best surfers in the world, but it was hard for them to compete with residents who used pssi—poly-synthetic sensory interface— technology. There was a kind of religion to surfing, and outsiders thought that with pssi we were cheating the gods, but really, the gods were jealous.

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

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

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

  “Already?”

  “Yeah, I need to get back to that thing.”

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

  “I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do,” declared Bob, shrugging. “Anyway, ping me if you change your mind. Hey, you should check out all that stuff on the news!”

  “Thanks, Bob.”

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

  2

  I CHECKED OUT the news Bob had sent me as I returned to the top deck of my habitat. There’d been a rash of UFO sightings in the Midwest last night, and he knew I was something of a paranormal fan boy. Today, though, more important things were on the agenda.

  I strode back and forth like a caged animal, my mind racing, and then stood still as I made a decision, looking out towards the breaking waves.

  “Ready for business?” demanded Hotstuff.

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

  “Do we have to?” I asked uselessly, thinking of how a little taste of the Aberlour would be nice.

  “Some kind of action is required,” she observed. “Even inaction is an action, and perhaps the only kind of action you seem to enjoy lately.”

  Hotstuff raised her eyebrows in disdain while she scanned the European financial reports.

  “Okay then, summon the council,” I sighed, scratching my stubble.

  Portals to my homeworld opened up off the deck, and I walked into our main conference room, shifting my attire into a navy sport coat with a stiff collared, open necked white shirt. Hotstuff strode in behind me, her braided bun of hair and short skirted business suit radiating efficiency and purpose.

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

  Then again, perhaps I had them mixed up, the dull eyed ones now looking like my synthetics. I had a hard time telling the difference anymore.

  Everyone around the table, however, was most definitely female, and not just your run-of-the-mill varietals, but, like Hotstuff, more like a twelve year old boy’s fantasy. They posed casually but intently around the table as if a fashion shoot could be announced at any instant, with the long conference table springing into action as a catwalk.

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

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

  A pause while they assimilated the data downloads.

  “Questions?”

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

  The motivation, now that was a good question. There were only two things I really knew; first, that I had no idea what I was trying to escape from, just that whatever it was, it was trying to kill me, and second, just sharing the idea that something was trying to hunt me down made my situation even more dangerous. To minimize risk I had to pretend nothing was happening.

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

  Perhaps this was the wrong choice of words.

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

  “Yes.”

  I said this with a twinge of remorse. The baubles of Indigo Entertainment, my latest and ill-fated attempt at a new foray into the business world, still held some sparkle in my eye. While I could lay claim to being super-wealthy, I couldn’t say the same about being super-intelligent.

  Success in the business world was more about luck, and luck was hard to replicate. My luck had been helped along by a team of incredibly smart people, and born from a single-minded obsession with the future, or perhaps, just one future in particular.

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

  Roxanne considered this, shifting around in her chair.

  “I may have someone who could be interested,” she said after a moment.

  Then the paranoia set in. Perhaps liquidation was what whoever who was messing with me wanted, and was it possible that Roxanne was in on the fix? I looked carefully at her. Hotstuff sensed what I was thinking and headed me off before I could say anything.

  “Very good,” Hotstuff replied to Roxanne. “Get to work then. Any more questions?”

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

  When they’d all gone, Hotstuff looked towards me sympathetically.

  “You’re going to need to trust your team,” she said slowly. After a pause she added, “You’re going to need to trust me.”

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

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

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

  I shrugged and smiled.

  3

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

  I stared into the mirror, deep into my bloodshot eyes. Condensation from the hot shower fogged over my image as I inspected the angry blood vessels ringing my irises.

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

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

  I sighed, unscrewing the bottle cap and holding it between my teeth. I leaned back, pulling back the lid of my left eye and depositing a drop into it. I sighed again, rubbing the eye, and then switched to the other one.

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

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

  §

  “See what I mean?”

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

  That had been close.

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

  “Yeah,” I replied, “I guess surfing can wait.”

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

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

  The bathroom immediately morphed into my battle room. Hotstuff splintered a hyper-dimensional graphic into my display spaces that plotted several thousand alternate future worlds of my life. Many of the lifelines terminated abruptly, and therein laid the problem with going surfing—I had to save my own life today, and not once, but many dozens of times over.

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

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

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

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

  A few days later I received another prediction informing me that there were a half a dozen scenarios involving my death. It had been a fairly simple task then to engineer a path through them all, but from that point the solution to my ‘non death’ had started to become increasingly bizarre and rarified. On top of it, I couldn’t tell anyone, or ask any help to navigate these future arcs—the solution sets became unstable unless I kept it to myself.

  I suddenly began to find myself running around Atopia asking people to do odd jobs for me and flittering off to the four corners of the multiverse on inane assignments just to keep myself alive. Things had begun spinning out of control like a surreal and twisted joke.

  We’d managed to rout almost all of the incoming threats yesterday by sending out bots and synthetics, and in critical cases
myself personally, to nudge the advancing future timeline of my world this way or that. Today, however, some of the future death threats were beginning to creep into the hours and minutes just ahead. What had started out a few months ago as the odd warning of some low probability events to be carefully avoided had steadily progressed into a constant stream that signaled my impending death, and we had no idea how or why it was happening.

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

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

  Someone with lesser resources than me would’ve just died, without fanfare, and that would have been that. In my unique position and with my almost limitless resources, however, I could literally see everything coming and dodge and weave my way through it.

  You’d have thought that someone edging up on seventy would’ve accepted their mortality with a little more grace, but here on Atopia I was still a spring chicken. I wasn’t ready to accept a trip on the ultimate voyage just yet.

  Sensing my mind wandering, Hotstuff decided to summon up another particularly gruesome termination. She growled playfully, swatting at me again with her riding crop while I watched myself being liquefied in the bio-sludge facilities. I felt like I was being stalked by the army of darkness with Betty Boop as my sidekick. Just how many ways could a person die? Her tactic was successful however, and I refocused on the New York project.

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

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

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