Summary of Atopia Chronicles
Atopia Chronicles, the first book in the Atopia trilogy, is told through a series of five stories that reveal the world one step at a time, with a final novel-length work that ties them all together. All the stories start at the same moment in time, interweaving with one another as they occur simultaneously. The full text of the first Atopia story, Blue Skies, is included in this Compendium (just search your Table of Contents), but for those interested, below is a summary of each story of the full book.
Prologue
Atopia Chronicles opens with Dr. Patricia Killiam, lead researcher for Cognix Corporation, discovering an unusual signal in the data from the POND—the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector. Dr. Killiam and her staff are located on Atopia, a vast floating city-state in the Pacific just off the coast of California. Her staff tell her that there is no doubt this is a signal from the deep reaches of interstellar space, and that it has to be from an alien civilization. The message seems to be some kind of warning and—even more stupendous—one directed somehow at Atopia. Dr. Killiam warns her staff not to tell anyone about the signal.
First Story – Blue Skies
Olympia Onassis is an advertising executive living in the bustling metropolis of late-twenty-first century New York City. She is in charge of a new program to bring the new Dr. Killiam’s new virtual reality product “pssi”—the Poly-Synthetic Sensory System—into the market. It is by far the largest marketing program of all time, with an advertising launch budget of billions of dollars.
The stress is enormous, and Olympia suffers from panic disorder. She sees her doctor, who—after failed attempts at other therapies—recommends that she try a new product. A major cause of stress in the late-twenty-first century is advertising, which permeates almost every inch of space in New York. The product the doctor recommends is a synthetic reality system that can block out any advertising in a person’s environment.
Olympia realizes this must be a beta test of the new product she is in charge of launching into the general public in a few months, and she agrees, although skeptical. She goes through the process of installing the pssi product by swallowing a glass of water containing trillions of “smarticles”—nano-scale smart particles that attach to the neural system and are able to change what a person sees, hears and feels.
Her doctor turn on the advertisement-blocking feature, and goes for a walk outside. The difference is astounding—all the noise of ads, the flashing lights, the holographic ads floating over sidewalks, all of it is gone. Just people walking by, trees, a new quiet city. When she watches TV, all the ads are gone, even in the magazines she reads.
When she gets home, she is introduced to her proxxi—a personal digital assistant that appears in augmented reality, sitting right in her living room on the couch across from her. Her proxxi introduces itself. It looks exactly like Olympia, which she finds disconcerting and annoying. The proxxi says that it is the digital control and interface to her new synthetic reality system, but Olympia has no head for anything technical, so she asks the proxxi to talk with Ken, her tech person at the office.
The next week at the office is brutal, and Olympia’s frustration mounts with everything and everyone around her. On the walk home one day, her tech assistant Ken tells her that her new synthetic reality system can erase not just advertisements, but anything that is bothering her. Olympia asks him to erase all the garbage from the street and graffiti from walls, which he does, and then goes one step further and erases some homeless people from her reality. Of course they are still there, Ken explains, but the synthetic reality technology also has the ability to control her body for her, making sure she doesn’t hurt herself by knocking into something she doesn’t see.
The next week is even worse, but Olympia finds a way to make the office more bearable by selectively blocking out certain people she finds annoying. One thing she really finds annoying is the proxxi, so she asks Ken to take over and get root control of it so she doesn’t need to deal with it. At the end of the week, the final straw is that Olympia’s boss tells her that the person she hates the most—her nemesis in the office, Roger—will take over leadership of the new project she has worked so hard so.
In a screaming rage, she leaves the office, goes home and settles onto the couch with a bottle of wine. She leaves a message for Ken, instructing him to set her synthetic reality system to erase everything and everyone she finds annoying until she tells him otherwise. She’s going to take a break, and wants to enjoy it.
The next morning she awakes refreshed and decides to go for a run. Halfway to Central Park, she starts to notice something odd. Nobody else is around. No cars driving. No people walking. The city is deathly silent. In a panic, she tries to call Ken, but he doesn’t answer. She tries to call her doctor, but nothing. She tries to call everyone and anyone, even tries going door to door and eventually to her office, but the entire city is devoid of people, everywhere she searches.
Weeks go by, and Olympia goes on a lonely journey, traveling around New York, and then on an automated passenger transport to other cities around the world—but it is the same everywhere. Nobody. She realizes she felt annoyed at everyone and everything at the end, but there has to be some problem, because now she wants nothing more than to see anyone else—but nobody else ever appears. She is the last person left on Earth, or at least, the last person left on the version of Earth she has become stuck inside.
Second Story – Child Play
Rick Strong is the new Commander of the ADF—the Atopian Defence Force. Atopia is an independent, sovereign city-state, a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean, two miles across and reaching more than five hundred feet into the depths, home to half a million Atopians. It’s a high-tech retreat where the world’s wealthy came to escape the crush and clutter of a packed and polluted Earth—but it can’t forever rely on the good graces of its closest ally, America, so it spent a vast sum of money on its own defensive weapons.
Cognix Corporation funded the development of Atopia. It is the leading technology company of the mid-to-late-twenty-first century that rises to dominate the synthetic reality and intelligence markets. Its founder is Herman Kesselring.
The story starts with Commander Strong about to test the slingshot weapon systems—these are powerful off-centre rotating platforms that can sling tens of thousands of explosive pellets at miles-per-second speeds and can destroy anything from ships to aircraft to even ballistic missiles at ranges of hundreds of miles. The test lights up a massive protective dome of plasma twenty miles around and up into space around Atopia—a huge success, and one that impresses the world on broadcast TV and media.
Dr. Patricia Killiam congratulates Commander Strong on the success of the test. For not only is Dr. Killiam the lead researcher for Cognix Corporation, she is also one of the founders of Atopia as a libertarian haven. Jimmy Scadden is introduced as the newest member to the ADF team, an expert in conscious boundary technology, useful in cyberwarfare skirmishes.
Rick Strong is a former US Marine who fought in the first Weather Wars skirmishes, battles between China and India high in the Himalayas. He came to Atopia about a year before with his wife, Cindy. This is a second chance for them, after Rick suffering from PTSD from combat, and her depressive episodes related to this. While he is managing to adjust to the use of unlimited virtual reality on Atopia—and interface with his own proxxi, Echo—his wife is having a much harder time adjusting. Space on Atopia is limited, because everyone on Atopia can venture off into unlimited, perfectly sensory realistic virtual worlds, or augment existing reality into any shape or form they want—but Cindy just can’t get used to it.
She wants to have a child, and Rick isn’t quite ready. He has an idea: why not try proxxids? These are virtual reality children, a part of the test protocol of Atopia, but they aren’t just fake little babies—these are simulations, using the real DNA of the parents, of what their real children would look and act like. Reluctantly,
Cindy agrees, and a day later, little Ricky appears in the new virtual nursery room addition to their apartment.
In the whirlwind, Cindy begins to experiment more with the pssi technology, at first adding new rooms to their apartment, but then creating whole new homes in augmented reality in Connecticut, then taking their new family on trips to places around the world, all without leaving the confines of Atopia. At the same time comes a series of new proxxid babies, and she gets into the full swing of managing her brood. Rick is impressed how fast she has taken to the technology, and amazed at how her depression has lifted and how great she is with the kids. He is a little unsettled, though, at how fast the kids grow up: after just a month, little Ricky is already four years old—they grow at exponential rates to simulate what they’d be like at different ages.
Rick tells Cindy that he thinks they’re ready to have a real child, but Cindy tells him that she wants to wait, she wants to try a few new proxxids first. Rick gets angry and blows up at her, telling her that he can’t stand having a half dozen simulated children running around the house when he gets home from a busy day at work.
He’s under stress. He’s responsible for protecting the safety of the citizens of Atopia, and is facing down daily cyberattacks, they believe from Terra Nova, a competing off-shore colony based in the Atlantic Ocean just off Africa’s west coast. Even more worrying, due to global warming of the past century, massive hurricanes appear in both the Pacific and Atlantic ocean basins, a sequence of four of them acting very strangely. Rick is able to move the Atopian platform around at a few miles-per-hour to avoid any coming storms, but these one defy predictions. He has to move Atopia right near the coast of America with little room to manoeuver.
He comes home the next day to find the place quiet and calm. Cindy has prepared a beautiful dinner, and says she’s taken care of everything. No more proxxids. They can move on to the real thing, but she needs to break for a while. They take a series of virtual holidays and enjoy themselves while he struggles to figure out the storms. Everything is going well and Rick suggests they get pregnant, but Cindy falls into another depression.
Suddenly, one day at work, he gets a call from a doctor. His wife has committed “reality suicide”, a new form of mental isolation where the pssi user cuts off all connections to reality. Rick rushes to the hospital, where he finds his wife in what appears to be a coma.
Further investigation reveals that his wife hadn’t been terminating the proxxids, but had secreted them away in a private virtual reality world of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. It was a synthetic reality house that they’d constructed together. Because the proxxids were based on their mutual DNA and legal authorization, she couldn’t change them, and they aged at horrific speeds—but she knew that Rick wouldn’t let her keep them, either. So she spent their last days together with them, six proxxid children that grew from babies into seventy-year-olds and then died in a matter of months. His wife was happy with Rick in those months, going off to her secret virtual world with her children while he was at work, but when they died, she couldn’t stand it. She committed virtual suicide and hid herself away in a self-imposed prison inside her own mind where she replayed memories but nobody else could reach her.
The storms are threatening to destroy Atopia, but Rick doesn’t care anymore. He sits by his wife’s bed, holding her hand, off in virtual worlds of his own with children he never really had.
Third Story – Timedrops
The story opens with the scene of a man hidden inside an autonomous drone aircraft high up at the edge of the atmosphere. He was trying to escape from Atopia, using the slingshot weapons test as a diversion to cover his tracks—but he miscalculated. The drone malfunctions, and in a way that the man saw coming, but tried to avoid. The slingshot weapons test fires up and lights the atmosphere in a searing wall of flame that consumes the drone and kills the man.
Vince Indigo is the famous trillionaire founder of the Phuture News Network. Phuture News is a twenty-four-hour news network, but instead of dealing with news of today, it reports on the news of the phuture. It delivers high-probability news stories that haven’t happened yet, with a particular focus on celebrity (e.g., “Tomorrow morning, a famous celebrity will die in a plane crash”). Phuture News is used not just to passively watch what will happen to the outside world, but to predict what happens in people’s immediate environment (e.g. friends, family, work, etc. . . . ). Combined with pssi, people on Atopia don't just read about possible future events, they actually experience them as they begin to live even further in the worlds of tomorrow.
Vince was the man inside the drone that was destroyed, but we discover that the event didn’t really happen—at least, not in the timeline Vince is still alive in. Where the future is normally the singular outcome of this universe in the next moment of time that your mind finds itself in, a phuture is defined as a “possible future” and just one of a set of any possible future universes this timeline may slide into, based on the “nearly infinite multiverse” model of physics. Vince only experienced a virtual version, one phuture, of the drone event that killed him, and it’s just one of hundreds of possible ways he may die in the next few days.
The problem surfaced a few weeks before, when he was alerted to a high probability that he might be killed in a sporting accident with a friend due to the friend’s intoxication and recent breakup with his wife. From there the problem mushroomed, with daily added alerts of ways he might be killed in the next days or weeks. As the owner of the Phuture News Network, Vince has access to the most advanced future predictions on the planet, and Vince finds himself literally fighting off hundreds of future death threats a day, winding and weaving his way through his days to try and make sure he doesn’t get killed.
Using his massive resources as one of the planet’s wealthiest people, he tries to find out what is happening to him—even if there really is something happening. For it all might just be a mirage, a paranoid exercise by someone obsessed by the future. He meets with his surfing buddy Robert Baxter, has meetings with his old friend and past mentor Patricia Killiam, and eventually tracks what he thinks is the source to a tribe of Yupno natives in the mountain highlands of Papua New Guinea—a group of people who mysteriously believe that time has no direction.
None of this is any use, however, and Vince ultimately only finds comfort by visiting a monastery in Lhasa, where a Buddhist master Yongdzin teaches him to bend with whatever reality he finds himself within. Vince notices there the strange resemblance that the Buddhist statues have to pssi technology, of people with multiple arms and heads living in timeless worlds.
Interlude
In an short interlude in the middle of the book, we discover that Dr. Patricia Killiam and Herman Kesselring, the two founds of Atopia, aren’t just interested in releasing a new technology product with pssi. We find out that they are the ones that unleashed the future death threats onto Vince Indigo, one of Patricia’s oldest and dearest friends, as well as a massive conspiracy of some sort that involves lying to the world about their technology.
The reader is also introduced to another feature of pssi technology, one that allows the user to create an almost unlimited number of virtual arms and fingers in virtual space, called phantoms, that the user can plastically reformat their brain’s neural programming to control.
Brothers Blind
Robert Baxter is one of the first generation of pssi-kids—the first children that were born on Atopia twenty years ago, the first humans that had lived all of their lives with access to unlimited virtual reality and neural fusion into the pssi technology that allowed them to morph their minds. For Bob, this meant creating a customized water sense, one that let him map the tactile neurons of his body onto the water’s surface when he surfed, to be become a master on the surfboard.
Bob dropped out of the Atopian pssi-kid academy as a teenager, and for the past few years he’d earned his living hosting his own “dim stim”, where he allows other peo
ple to jack into his sensory channels and eyes and ears to physically experience what it’s like to be one of the world’s greatest surfers. It’s the like the ultimate reality show, where people can literally be him, and he never turns it off—much to the annoyance of a constant parade of girlfriends through his life.
Even though his father is the head of public relations for Atopia, Bob can’t be bothered to get involved—the same as most pssi-kids his age. Bob has dropped off into a self-indulgent world of drug abuse and video games, but amplified in the endless virtual worlds of Atopia. He and best friend Sid take ketamine and other psychoactive substances and play in the synesthetic worlds of Humungous Fungus, or in gameworlds where they hunt down Genghis Khan on the steppes of Asia or steal cars in 1980’s era Los Angeles. They have a difficult time distinguishing between the real world and the virtual worlds they play in.
Each pssi-kid has their own proxxi, their digital alter-ego that appears as a real person to them. Sid has chosen to name his Vicious, while their friend William has chosen to name his Wallace, but Bob just calls his Robert—because his proxxi is the more serious version of him. Bob’s family has adopted Jimmy Scadden, who works with Commander Strong at the ADF. Bob is constantly annoyed because his father always seems more proud of Jimmy, as if Jimmy was his real son, and not Bob and Martin.
All is not just fun and games, though. Bob’s drug use spirals out of control, even beyond what his fun-loving friend Sid thinks is healthy. As the hurricanes threaten Atopia, pinning it against the side of America, an evacuation of Atopia is ordered—but mysteriously, nobody seems to want to leave, even if threatened with imminent death. More odd, Bob’s brother Martin discovers that his name isn’t on the evacuation manifest.
Matthew Mather's Compendium Page 30