But now, at my own end of time, I remembered, and I remembered why.
My love, perhaps I will find you now.
Wiping away my tears, I gently eased myself back in the lounger, pleased to see that dawn was beginning to break on the horizon. It looked like it would be a nice day. I looked to one side at my long forgotten raspberry bush.
Within its spiny gray branches I was surprised to find, still surviving, one bright red, juicy looking raspberry, standing out in surreal relief from the grayness surrounding it. I leaned over and picked it, rolling it around in my fingertips as I considered my life. I was afraid, but I was also so tired, and the last of my resistance slipped away.
I popped the raspberry into my mouth and began chewing it.
I thought of the billions of humans out there, some asleep, some awake, but most somewhere in between. I thought of the tens of billions of synthetic souls now roaming the multiverse and the infinite inner space we had created together; we and the machines. I wished them all well.
That raspberry was delicious, I couldn’t help thinking as the darkness slipped in. It was so extraordinarily bittersweet.
With a gentle sigh I exhaled my last breath and slipped away as the last of the stars faded above me.
§
In the early morning dusk, a beautiful Monarch butterfly fluttered and danced its way through Dr. Killiam’s garden. Dr. Killiam lay in her chair, finally at peace. The butterfly seemed to consider her for a moment, dancing this way and that above her motionless body, and then fluttered away, gaining altitude.
As it darted back and forth, ever higher, it was joined by a Brown butterfly, marked by strong, concentric circles on its wings. Joyously, the two touched and danced off into the distance, rising above and away to leave Atopia below.
The first rays of sunlight pierced the horizon, illuminating thin, red and gold clouds, high in the aquamarine sky.
A new day was dawning.
EPILOGUE
Identity - Bobby Baxter
SHIVERING, I PULLED my sweater tight around me. For where we may have to go, I’d better start getting used to my own body. San Francisco sure was colder than I’d imagined.
From this vantage point, across some boulders and a field of grass at the edge of a stand of Redwoods we had settled in to camp underneath, I could dimly make out the tops of the Golden Gate Bridge poking out from under a thick blanket of fog rolling into the bay. Night was falling and we’d lit a fire. I extended my hands towards the burning and crackling wood.
So this was what camping was really like. I liked the synthetic version better.
Following encrypted instructions from Marie, we’d gone off the grid as far as possible in as short a time as possible. The state park above San Francisco was a designated network-free zone and, after collecting up some tents and camping supplies in the city itself, we’d been dropped off up here and hiked ourselves to the edge of the forest.
I still couldn’t believe Patricia was gone.
Walking around out there, I had the crushing and numbing sensation of being blind and deaf and dumb even though I could see and hear and talk. Being cut off from the dense communication network on Atopia gave me the feeling we had been transported back into the dark ages. My body fairly sang with the urge to drop it all and get back into the warm, comfortable embrace of the pssi on Atopia, but I resisted it as best I could.
Atopia was the only place I’d ever known, and I’d taken for granted, like breathing, feeling the steady thrum of information through my metasenses. My phantoms were still there, arrayed around me in empty hyperspaces, stretching out and away from me, but my metasenses were completely numb. It felt as if most of my body had been amputated.
It was true what they said—the future was already here, just unevenly distributed, and while I belonged to the future, there I was, suddenly in the past with the rest of humanity. The world, however, was about to receive the gift of the future we’d been working on so hard for them, and they could barely wait to get their hands on it.
I laughed silently to myself. People had to be more careful about what they wished for.
Vince had come with us. He figured whatever Patricia’s last instructions were, they might possess some key to his own problem. Sid had come, as well as Brigitte and Willy.
Well, Willy had sort of come. Up here in the state park, there was no network connectivity so we’d had to embed a splinter of him into Brigitte for the trip into the woods. Brigitte seemed to enjoy having her own bit of Willy to take everywhere with her, and I doubted Willy would be getting that splinter back anytime soon.
Martin had elected to stay behind, to stay with our parents, something I’d thought sensible as well at the time. All of our proxxi had made the trip as well, embedded as they were into our bodies. So there the nine of us sat around the campfire—me, Robert, Sid, Vicious, Vince, Hotstuff, Brigitte and her proxxi Bardot, and Willy’s slightly confused splinter.
Nancy hadn’t come with us despite me pleading with her, but this was before we’d learned what Jimmy had become. I should have tried harder, should have forced her to come along with us right away as Patricia had asked. Nancy had insisted she would catch up with us, but it was too late.
Jimmy had asked her to stay on a while to help with the investigation and all the preparations for the Atopian state funeral for Patricia, despite the rumors of her working with the Terra Novans. Jimmy had been the one that had sponsored the state funeral, despite resistance from the Council, so Nancy had felt some obligation towards him. With a sense of dread, I realized Jimmy was keeping her there on purpose.
A week had passed since we’d left, and newly passed constitutional changes on Atopia had enabled Jimmy and Rick to maintain the state of emergency, a state of emergency that would never end.
Having barely survived destruction, the once cherished civil liberties that Atopia had been founded upon, and without Patricia there to defend them, were quickly and unceremoniously thrown out the window. Almost overnight Atopia had transformed itself into a police state, and Jimmy was quickly amassing a private psombie army—for protection, of course.
In the ensuing investigation, it’d been discovered that the viral skin had been vectored from the Terra Novans through Patricia’s own specialized pssi system. The current best guess was that it had been her old student Mohesha who had implanted it. As a novel zero-day infection, Patricia had gone on to infect everyone she’d come into contact with, which had then spread quickly into everyone on Atopia.
Command and control of the virus had been regulated by leaking data back and forth through Willy’s persistent conscious connection from Terra Nova and into Atopia. Worse still, ripping apart the code, they’d revealed a lot of similarities with the viral skins Sid had been creating. To top everything off, secret communications between Patricia and the Terra Novans, and even Sintil8, were discovered, although the content of these were unknown.
All in all, it’d cast a dark shadow on our group.
Patricia had kept secret her decision to not terminate Marie when she’d died. She had encoded Marie onto a miniature data cube and smuggled it off Atopia right before the lockdown had started. We’d picked up the data cube containing Marie from an antique store in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, the cube hidden in what looked like a walking stick.
After lighting a fire at our campsite, we’d started a private network to connect us all, and awoken Marie from the data cube. Her ethereal image had risen before us above the fire, wavering in the night air, a ghost that told us a truly frightening nighttime tale as we huddled together, explaining the monster that Jimmy had become and the danger we all faced.
I yearned for my days back on the beach.
Within days, hundreds of millions of people would be fusing their bodies and minds into the pssi network. While the rate of change had already been hurtling forward, it would now take an even dramatically steeper upward trajectory.
With conscious transference at the brink of rea
lity, most humans alive today would achieve an immortality of sorts. Our souls were about to go from the stuff of legend into the stuff of hard and fast reality.
That was the big picture.
In the short term, with pssi released, they were predicting a precipitous drop in consumer goods spending, a large part of which would be redirected into the pssi network. Economies would falter, and more wars would be spawned, and those with entrenched interests in supplying material goods would launch a series of attacks on Atopia itself. All of this had been previewed, and was the reason Atopia had been built with its own defensive weapons.
With a decrease in material consumption, the resource pressures would ease, and gradually, over the years, conflicts would die out. With a growing majority of people getting their every need cared for within the pssi multiverse, the desire to struggle would flame out. Pssi was the great equalizer of the classes.
Of course, there was the darker side.
While on Atopia we’d taken a relatively benign approach in our quest to understand the capabilities of pssi, it was only dawning on me the terrible things that the billions of people in the rest of the world may end up using it for. It was a fair bet that some cheerful souls were already thinking up some fearsome ways of weaponizing it.
And this was exactly what Kesselring had been hiding from Patricia. Cognix had been secretly undertaking weapons programs with several nation states to prepare their readiness for the pssi launch. Jimmy was involved of course.
The good news was that the phutures had stabilized—no apocalyptic wars, at least not in the near future. But pssi wasn’t the only game in town either. A crush of other transformative technologies was crowding the future, and we’d have to wade our way through this brave new world to find Willy’s body.
It had become obvious that Jimmy had killed his own parents, and was behind dozens and perhaps hundreds of disappearances including Cynthia, Susie, and even Commander Strong’s wife. We suspected he had sabotaged Patricia’s medical systems as well, so he had killed not only his own mother, but his godmother as well. He seemed to do it all by giving people what they wanted, and then exacting his price for their desires.
The key to it all was somehow in Willy’s body, wherever that was. It was the key to stopping whatever Jimmy was becoming, my key to getting Nancy back and protecting my family from him as well.
I suspected Jimmy had been involved in killing Dean to get closer to me, or at least involved in Dean’s decision to kill himself.
§
The next morning we all sat back around the embers of the fire. Vince was making cups of coffee and handing them out.
“Did you read the news Willy sent in this morning?” asked Vince as he handed me my cup.
“Yes,” I replied.
Simultaneously with the commercial release of pssi into several major metropolitan areas, Cognix had announced the beginning of construction of seven new Atopia–class floating platforms at strategic physical locations around the globe. They had the cash flow now.
There had even been excited talk on Phuture News about giving Atopia a seat on the United Nations Security Council and appointing Jimmy. He’d begun calling himself Jimmy James.
We’d had to bring our own smarticles. They flushed out of the body if they weren’t topped up, plus we didn’t know how secure the old ones were, so Patricia had created our own secret variant for us. On Atopia, the environment was infused with them so we didn’t have to think about it, but here, we needed our own supply.
I pulled out the bag filled with our new smarticle powder from my backpack, and dipped a twig I’d picked up from the ground into it. I lifted the twig to my nose and inhaled the powder. The easiest way into the body was through the mucus membranes.
“Can’t we just tell people what we know?” mused Vince as he cupped his coffee, blowing the steam off it. I offered him the bag of powder and he took it.
“No, we don’t have enough,” I replied. “After what’s happened, it’d look like more Terra Novan interference. Coming from us, it wouldn’t exactly look reputable, and would probably get us in a lot of trouble. We need to fly under the radar as much as possible.”
“Yeah, I think we need to have a serious chat with Sintil8, wherever he is, before we do anything else,” added Willy’s splinter.
“Hey, don’t believe everything you think, Willy boy!” laughed Sid as he worked away on our private metaworlds. “At least before you check with me!”
Sid was trying to be funny, but he was right. He had hacked into our personal pssi systems and begun hardening them against exposure to Cognix, starting with backups to our memories and our own cognitive intrusion detection systems. We had to make sure our minds remained our own.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” I asked Vince.
“I’m the perfect person to have along!” he laughed.
It was true. The only place he existed was in the present, and for most of the world this hardly counted anymore.
“Ah yes, the man with no future,” laughed Sid. “Aren’t we a motley bunch to trust for saving the world?”
I wasn’t in a humorous mood.
“Look Sid, we have no choice in this.”
I had to get Nancy out of there. It was too dangerous to let her know what she was facing, so we couldn’t tell her about Jimmy. I shuddered to think what he could be capable of.
“I suppose it all depends on how you look at it,” continued Sid, “maybe it’s not so bad.”
I shook my head at him incredulously.
“Well I mean you and Nancy, together being able to see everything.”
“Yes…?”
“You’re like the omniscient being who walks on water, searching for the body of man to save the soul of mankind from eternal suffering.”
“Squaring off against what seems to be the devil, no less,” chipped in Vicious. “I mean, it’s all been done before mate, and so far so good!”
“Tell me that doesn’t sound biblical,” suggested Sid, now transformed into a talking burning bush sporting two stone tablets with our names inscribed on them.
“Well,” I replied, my mood lightening, “I bet Christ’s disciples didn’t include a punk rocker.”
I cast a sideways glance at Vicious and smiled.
“Oooh,” replied Vicious, returning my grin, “but I’ve heard that Judas Priest weren’t far off mate.”
I laughed. “I’m going to be careful of you, then.”
“And the whole key to this is in my body?” said Willy, shaking his head. “Wally must have left us some clues. We just need to look.”
“Brings a whole new meaning to ‘Where’s Waldo’ dunnit?” laughed Vicious, unable to contain himself. This brought laughs from everyone, including Willy’s splinter.
Smiling, I looked at all of them one by one, looking to me for leadership.
“I’m sure this wasn’t what the prophets had in mind when they imagined the Second Coming,” I joked grimly, “but we’ve got no choice.”
“Moscow huh?” asked Hotsuff, looking at Brigitte and Bardot and then down to inspect her camping short shorts. “I’m going to need a whole new wardrobe.”
“Yeah, sure,” I replied. I looked around at our little gang. “I think we’re going to need a lot of things.”
The trail to Willy’s body began and ended with Sintil8, who’d now totally disappeared off the grid.
Terra Nova was almost hermetically blockaded, both in the physical and cyber realms, so there was no help there, but since Willy’s mind was still with us, his body was still alive out there somewhere.
The thought of tracking down a gangster like Sintil8 frightened me, but then, our choices had boiled down to the lesser of two rather nasty evils. The only clue we had was Sintil8’s real name, Sergei Mikhailov, which Patricia had managed to dig up.
Clouds of smarticles released in San Francisco yesterday had begun to float in on the breeze, even up here, and I could feel small channels and rivulets of
information begin to flow, connecting me to the multiverse. As refreshing as it felt to my metasenses, it now took on a darkly ominous feel as well.
“Let’s get a move on people,” I said as my phantoms shivered. “I think it’s best that we stay away from major cities as much as possible.”
“That’s not where I think I am anyway,” added Willy for good measure.
The four of us with physical bodies shouldered our backpacks of gear and checked around the campsite for anything left behind. I kicked some dirt onto the smoldering remains of the fire.
Stopping for moment, we all smiled at each other, and then started out on the path that led into the great Redwood forest and beyond.
* * *
Thanks for reading!
If you enjoyed Atopia and want more, please go and write a review, no matter how small, on Amazon right now! This was my first novel—writing isn’t my full-time job (yet!) but I’d like it to be, and by leaving reviews on Amazon you can help me get there. Having more reviews on Amazon has a direct impact on rankings and encouraging other people to read. I also read all the reviews and it’s great to hear your feedback!
* * *
If you’d like to join my beta reading list for my next novel, or would like to share some thoughts or chat, just email me at [email protected]
SPECIAL THANKS
I’d like to thank my editors, Eddie Mumford and Andrew Kozloski, and in particular Allen Tierney who did a whole edit of the book as an unsolicited favor!
A special thanks to the many people who helped me make this possible, including Robert Megeney, Danny Grant, Dave Sachs, Quito Galiana, Nancy Zadler, Yulya Faibusovitch, Paul Warne, Garnet Alexander, Andrea Rabinovitch, Mary Lim, Eric Montcalm, Miriam Aczem, Alex Moon, Myleen Sjodin, Vaseem Baig, and Brendan O’Malley.
An extra special thanks goes out to Mr. John Jarrett, who lives somewhere out near Perth in the Land Down Under, who in addition to beta reading also created the graphic for the Atopia logo!
Complete Atopia Chronicles Page 44