This is the last straw for Bob. In a screaming fit, he tells Martin why it is that he never sees his proxxi, Dean; why it is that Martin never comes surfing with him anymore; why it really is that Bob takes drugs all the time. It’s because Bob’s real brother died four years before, committed suicide, but his family couldn’t handle it. So they used the Atopian virtual reality system to resurrect his proxxi to think he was their son. Martin breaks down into tears, never realizing that he wasn’t real. The obvious was hidden from him using a “cognitive blind spot”, and everyone has them, whether we realize it or not.
This is just another messed up experiment down the rabbit hole of unlimited synthetic reality, and Bob finally comes to terms with it—but in his investigations, he realizes that something else, something more sinister, is going on within Atopia.
Neverywhere
William McIntyre is one of Sid and Bob’s best friends, and attended the pssi-kid academy—but he wasn’t born on Atopia. He was brought there when he was seven years old, brought away from his mother from what some describe as the “doomsday” cult of the Commune, a massive compound and complex built in the foothills of the Montana Rockies. Getting onto Atopia required his father taking on a massive amount of debt, and Willy has found a way to begin to repay it—by using “distributed consciousness” to allow him to be in dozens of places at once, and use this to beat the stock market. He starts to amass a sizeable fortune and finally pay off his father’s debts.
Atopian distributed consciousness isn’t exactly the thing it describes, but more of a simulation of this, using computation entities called “splinters” that allow a user to send a version of themselves to be at an event or investigate something without needing to actually be there physically. This entity then provides highly compressed information, in a way only the user can understand, based on that user’s life experiences.
Nancy Killiam is an old childhood friend of Willy, and the love of Bob’s life, although he’s been estranged from her in the past few years since his brother killed himself and Bob sank himself into drugs. Nancy is also is also the inventor of distributed consciousness, at least the version of this technology being offered to the general public through her newly formed company, Infinixx. For pssi-kids, distributed consciousness was a trick that came as naturally as learning to walk, but Nancy was the one that brought it to the attention of her great-great-grand-aunt, Patricia Killiam. The business world at the end of the twenty-first century sees distributed consciousness as the next great productivity booster after the first wave of AI has begun to subside in legal messes.
Willy works for Nancy at her company, and they come to loggerheads when Nancy discovers that Willy is using more of more of her system’s resources for his own moonlighting enterprise. She confronts him and tells him that he can’t use company resources for his own project, and she cuts him off.
Everything Willy worked for might disappear, and his family drown under their debts. Willy is at a loss under Bob’s adopted brother, Jimmy Scadden, who works with Commander Strong and has access to high-level Atopian technology, approaches him with a deal: if Willy will introduce Jimmy to a girl he’s got a crush on, Jimmy will fix Willy’s access to give him almost unlimited access to distributed consciousness. In a flash, Willy’s business is back up and booming even more than before.
Nancy is about to launch her new company to the world. The event is to be held in Atopia’s main ballroom, with the launch focusing around the throwing of a physical switch that routes power into the main processing core, and this will link together the individual systems in India, China and more. Nancy is on the world’s media all day, touting the amazing benefits of being able to be everywhere but nowhere at the same time. She asks everyone, including her aunt Patricia Killiam, to join her for the big event.
When the time comes to throw the switch, Nancy asks Patricia to do the honors—but Patricia informs her that she is only there in her virtual presence. Nancy quickly polls everyone on the stage with her, but though the ballroom is packed with people, absolutely nobody is there in person. Everyone has attended using their virtual avatars. And this includes Nancy herself. The world media laughs as billions of people watch the switch that nobody can throw. The media disaster throws Atopian stocks into turmoil, and Kesselring is furious.
Soon after, Willy approaches Bob with a problem—Willy seems to have lost his physical body. In the deal he did with Jimmy, he was helped to route his conscious stream out through Terra Nova and back through the Atopian firewall so that he could log anonymously into the Infinixx core as many time as he liked without Nancy knowing who it was. He began to splinter his mind into thousands of pieces as he chased more and more money—but while he was out there, somehow, someone stole his physical body away from Atopia.
The body and his mind are still connected into Terra Nova and back from there into Atopia, so he still appears the same to everyone in their augmented reality. The problem is that the physical location of his body is unknown—and as a data provider with a firm confidential agreement secured using Willy’s physical biometrics, Terra Nova refuses to release the contract until Willy can confirm using his physical body.
The problem is, he can’t find his body.
Bob brings in Sid, who is an IT expert, and together with Vince Indigo and Nancy, they confront Jimmy Scadden and demand that he fixes the problem. Jimmy says he can’t do anything—he just showed Willy a way to do what he wanted, but he can’t do anything about Terra Nova, which is quickly becomes an enemy state of Atopia.
Willy’s body seems lost forever, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He stops obsessing over chasing money and focuses on his relationship with his girlfriend Brigitte. Anyway, on Atopia, having a physical body isn’t really a requirement, and he thinks that maybe his proxxi, Wally, stole his body away as a way of trying to help him.
Genesis and Janus
The story starts, one final time, with Patricia Killiam and the slingshot test firing at ASF Command. Briefly, Patricia meets with the doomed Olympia Onassis, and thanks her for introducing a group of reporters. At the end of the test firing, Patricia congratulates Commander Strong and then recommends to him that he take young Jimmy Scadden on as a new member of his team
Jimmy Scadden is Bob’s adopted brother, but his parents had once lived on Atopia. His mother was distantly related to Patricia Killiam, and his mother and father had used that connection to earn themselves a highly coveted spot within the ultra-rich denizens of Atopia. Jimmy remembers fondly the days that his father used to take him out to work on the kelp farms and play with the dolphins when he was a child.
His parents mysteriously left Atopia, abandoning Jimmy there when he was barely a teenager, but Patricia took him under her wing and found an adoptive family with Bob’s parents. Jimmy responded beautifully, and together with Nancy Killiam, are Patricia’s star pssi-kids that she proudly shows off to the world media.
Jimmy didn’t have an easy time growing up, and Patricia knows a little of the abuse he suffered. A darker side of the Atopian technology is revealed, one that enabled Jimmy’s mother to trap him in claustrophobic virtual worlds when he was a child, before he had full control over his own pssi system. Worse, sometimes she used to use it to torture him, by directly accessing his pain systems through the neural interfaces, in a way that left no marks but were excruciating.
At a Cognix Corporation Board meeting, Patricia brings up data about a very strange string of disappearances—people whose minds disappear into the endless virtual worlds made possible by Atopian technology, and either refuse or can’t find their way back out. At first it was just one or two, and they found their way back quickly, but in the past few weeks, there had been dozens and perhaps hundreds of people that had disappeared. A
At first, Kesselring criticizes Patricia and tells her that they can’t be responsible for people going off and pleasuring themselves in the virtual multiverse. Then he becomes angry and suggests it had to be
either Sintil8—a notorious Russian gangster—or their arch-rivals Terra Nova, and furthermore brings up the strange hurricanes that are threatening Atopia. Is this some new weapons of the Weather Wars? Both Sintil8 and Terra Nova have been trying to stop the product release of Atopia pssi technology.
Patricia isn’t convinced, and suspects something going on with Kesselring.
Troubled, she decides to open up a private virtual world into her past. She is over a hundred years old, and reveals that she was once a student of Alan Turing in the years just before he took his own life in Cambridge, England. At the time, Turing had just proposed his own famous test for determining sentience: if a black box came down out of the sky, and we talked with whatever was inside, if we couldn’t tell if it was a person or not—then by definition it was an intelligent being inside, whether human, artificial or otherwise.
At the time, Patricia had put forward her own thesis. By the same token, she hypothesized that if a conscious observer couldn’t distinguish between a simulated reality and the real world, then didn’t the simulated reality meet the criteria for being as “real” as the real world? Did perception actually create reality? Turing had listened carefully, and then put forward his own worry: if that was the case, then what would happen if a being was able to create its own powerful realities, and then drag everyone else into them?
It was a question that had haunted Patricia for a hundred years.
Despite going back to chat her old mentor—albeit a virtual reconstruction of him—Patricia still can’t shake the feeling that something awful is going on inside of Atopia, and she worries that Kesselring is up to something. In an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic, she establishes contact with the gangster Sintil8, as well as contacting her old friends Mohesha and Tyrel at Terra Nova. For while Terra Nova may now be regarded as an enemy of Atopia, Patricia had once worked with the world’s community to help establish all off-shore seasteads. Maybe she can convince her old friends to stop whatever it is they are doing, and more than that, understand why they are doing it.
Meanwhile, Jimmy strikes up a friendship with Dr. Hal Granger, a colleague and fellow Board member with Patricia, although she despises the man. Jimmy tells Dr. Granger that, in his research, he is close to solving the problem of perfect transference of consciousness and memories into a computer, realizing the age-old dream of immortality. Jimmy promises to put Dr. Granger first in line if he helps Jimmy with his project. At the same time, we get another view of the meeting where Jimmy offers to help Willy gets unlimited access to distributed consciousness.
Patricia meets with Sintil8, the Russian gangster, and reveals that his real name is Mikhail Butorin, and that he may be one of the only people in the world older than Patricia. Long ago he was a tank commander in the Russian army that defeated the Nazis, when he lost the first parts of his body. He is now just a brain in a box somewhere—but where, nobody knows. He meets in a virtual space with Patricia, who tells him she suspects Kesselring is up to something and asks for his help with the disappeared people, and finding out where the storms are coming from. Of course Sintil8 asks something in return, but it’s not obvious what.
She gets back to Atopia just in time to witness Nancy’s Infinixx mess, and Kesselring is furious. With stress mounting, Patricia suffers a kind of stroke and is incapacitated. Her doctors reveal that something is wrong, and she doesn’t have long to live.
At the same time, in a private world, Jimmy reveals to his girlfriend that he wasn’t just abused by his parents, hurt by them, but that his father sexually molested him, and used the Atopian pssi system to hide it. He begs for her to help him by giving him unrestricted access to her own pssi system.
Patricia makes it back to ADF Command to try and help with the storms just as Commander Strong’s wife commits reality suicide. He’s angry and blames Patricia for suggesting them, telling her this whole project is madness and that she has no idea what she’s doing to people. Martial law is declared under a state of emergency as the storms threaten to crush Atopia against the coast of America, and control of all systems is taken away from Patricia—but strangely, almost none of the half million inhabitants want to leave, even in the face of imminent death.
At an emergency meeting, Jimmy suggests a last ditch plan to save Atopia by using the slingshot weapons to burn a hole through the churning hurricanes. Kesselring, Commander Strong, Dr. Granger and the rest of the Board vote to give Jimmy control of all of Atopia’s systems to try and make it happen. Patricia is the only abstainer, and she requests a private meeting with Jimmy where she asks him about his parents, what happened to them—she’s never been able to find any trace of them since they left. Jimmy denies any knowledge, but Patricia has seen enough to see the darkness inside of him.
Meanwhile, ordered to evacuate, Bob also notices that nobody seems to want to leave. He wants to find out what is going on as well, so he uses the confusion to smuggle himself, Nancy, Sid and Vince Indigo down to the computing core of Atopia, five hundred feet below the waterline. They plug directly in, and almost immediately see the truth that had been hiding in front of them in the open—that pssi is intensely addictive, and Patricia and Kesselring are going to hook the world on virtual crack cocaine, and more than that, it is her that is trying to kill Vince.
Bob immediately confronts Patricia with this, and she admits it is true. The reason is that for over 50 years, she has been perfecting futuring technology along with Vince, and she always sees the same end result: total apocalypse driven by mankind’s insatiable appetite for physical luxury. The only way forward was to move humans from the world of physical consumption and into virtual consumption, and effectively put the human race to sleep for a generation while the planet healed itself—but at the cost of turning humanity into a collective junky.
At that moment, with the hurricanes blasting against the surface of Atopia, ripping it apart—Jimmy decides not to light up the slingshots. Atopia will be destroyed. Patricia returns to ADF Command and fights for control against Jimmy, but he unleashed a psychic weapon that total disables her, and then reveals why.
There were never any storms.
The storms were just a group virtual reality infection, infecting all of the half-million inhabitants of Atopia. While the rest of the world watched in horror, Atopia had almost driven itself aground and started up its fearsome weapons. America had been on the brink of unleashing a volley of nuclear missiles to destroy Atopia. It’s revealed that the reality infection came from Terra Nova, although this seems crazy—why would they do something like this?
It’s too late for Patricia, though. Her medical systems are failing and she’s about to die, so she retires to her home on the surface of Atopia for a few last moments in her physical body. She reveals what really happened: that Jimmy Scadden is a dangerous sociopath that has wormed his way into control of Atopia, and that it is him that has been stealing peoples’ minds, trapping and torturing them in virtual worlds they can’t escape.
In her last act of desperation before she dies, she leaves a message for Robert Baxter and his friends, the only ones that were able to see things for what they were. Leave Atopia, she tells them, and find Mikhail Butorin, use him to find William McIntyre’s body. It holds the key to understanding what happened to Jimmy, and who might be controlling him.
***
From the author
I hope you enjoyed this summary of the Atopia universe! If you want read the full Atopia Chronicles, click here, or search for Atopia Chronicles on Amazon.
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Matthew Mather's Compendium Page 31