“You’re that Baxter kid in the news,” said one of the workers, pointing at Bob. They might be in the country, but they were still connected. Even out here, he couldn’t escape the negative media. “We don’t want no smart-asses around here.”
Smart-asses. He meant people using Atopian smarticles. As pssi had spread, so had the pssi-kids. Celebrities in some circles, pssi-kids’ ability to infer thoughts, to seem like they were everywhere at once, was as unnerving as it was amazing.
“What are you doing mixing with them, Deanna?” asked the man with the shotgun.
“That’s my business.” Deanna picked Bob up. “You mind your own.” She whispered again in his ear. “Release everything, right now.”
Trusting more than understanding, Bob unlocked the windows and doors in the area. Close by and into the distance, their mechanisms clicked and snapped through the silence. The engines of cars and transports in the streets started up again.
Above the hum, Bob heard the man with the shotgun. “You get him out of here.”
“NOT EXACTLY THE way to keep a low profile,” Deanna joked as they bumped their way back along the dirt road to the farm. “People aren’t used to pssi-kids in rural Montana.”
Bob sulked in the seat beside her. Reality had a different edge here, rough and wild, and wasn’t something Bob could mold the way he was used to. Even a cursory probe of the social cloud showed that almost nobody in Cut Bank was using pssi yet, even as the rest of the outside world had rushed to adopt it in the past weeks. Deanna was nearly the only one in the city even wearing lens displays.
“They’re afraid of what they don’t understand,” added Deanna when Bob didn’t respond. “All they have to go on are the lies spread in the mediaworlds about you.”
“I saved that girl’s life.”
A phuturecast sweep had tripped Bob’s alarms and predicted her stumbling over a dropped package onto the road, falling right into the path of an oncoming transport.
“I know that and you know that, but they didn’t see it. They just saw you running and grabbing her.” Deanna sighed. “That was her father with the gun. I know you know that now, but still, you should’ve looked a bit deeper yourself.”
He’d been too quick in assessing and reacting to the threat. He’d failed to parse that the man grabbing the gun was the father of the girl he was rescuing. He could have defused the situation, but instead he made it worse. He made it more dangerous.
“You want to try?” asked Deanna after another mile of silence, nodding at the wheel. Montana was one of the few states where it was still legal to manually drive—in the rest of the country only automated driving was allowed on public roads.
That got Bob’s attention, and his mind collapsed inward from the cloud of splinters following the truck. “Yeah, maybe I could get my proxxi to learn it . . .”
“I mean do you want to try it?”
Bob shifted in his seat. “Ah, maybe.” But he wasn’t sure. He spun back out into his splinters.
After another mile of silence slid by, Deanna smiled and looked at Bob. “One moment you can be like gods, and the next, babes in the woods.”
Coming up on the farm, she parked the truck next to the old barn out back. Its graying clapboard sagged under the weight of time. Part of its roof had fallen in. The timbers were rotten.
“Endless reality brings an end to morality, that’s what the doomsdayers are saying about Atopia,” Deanna said as they climbed out of the truck. The robot carriers in the back started unloading the lumber.
“Nothing is endless.” Bob’s main subjective, still flying around the fields, brought itself back to the conversation. “If it was endless reality, nothing would mean anything, and that’s not true.”
“It’s not?” Deanna smiled. She was teasing him.
“I’m here for Willy, my friends, and because Patricia asked me.”
“But you didn’t want to be here, did you?”
Bob looked down. The only place he wanted to be—where he burned to be—was next to Nancy, back on Atopia, but his friends needed him here. “That’s a hard question.”
Deanna paused and waited for him to look up. “But here you are.”
It was time for Deanna to get to work. They walked around the back of the barn and she unlatched its door, swinging it wide open. Something pinged her incoming circuits. Bob waited.
Holding onto the barn door, Deanna smiled. “Looks like one good turn does deserve another.”
“What happened?”
“The Commune granted Vince and Brigitte entry.” Deanna disappeared into the darkness of the barn.
Bob reviewed the message from the Commune’s Reverend that Deanna sent him. “They won’t let me and Sid in? Just Brigitte and Vince?” He tried to make sense of it. If this was in response to Bob saving that girl in town, then why wasn’t he invited?
A gust of air and dust and hay rocketed out from the barn. Bob squinted and staggered back. The sleek outlines of Deanna’s electric jet hovered into view, the setting sun glinting off its polished curves.
“No idea,” said Deanna, on comms now. The turbofan’s engine ratcheted up several decibels as it rose. “But looks like somebody’s watching out for you.” Her jet jumped up into the sky, receding to a tiny dot before disappearing on its way into New York.
Deanna was a two-sleeper—a tweeper—dosing up on a cocktail of melatonin and synthetics to sleep twice a day on her three-and-a-half hour commute into and out of New York on her personal electric turbofan each morning and night. The tweeper movement claimed it was natural to sleep twice a day and that this was the way humans used to sleep. The way they went about it wasn’t natural, though, tweaking their nervous systems with drugs and electronics.
It made no sense to Bob. Why didn’t she just flit into work, using a virtual projection? But this was just one in a long list of things on the “outside” that made no sense. It seemed wasteful, but then all the energy for her back-and-forth trips was sucked up from the ground, from the geothermal generators, and Bob certainly had no standing to complain about anything seeming unnatural.
Bob stared at the spot where Deanna’s jet had disappeared into the sky.
A THIN LINE of light hung on the horizon, the remains of the setting sun disappearing as stars began spreading across the sky. Willy had always heard how nice it was to walk in the countryside, that reality was different than flitting in and experiencing it in the wikiworld. Confined in his virtual self now, he was afraid he’d never get to find out. He let his point-of-view spin out around the perimeters, shifting into infrared. In the plains in the far distance, a herd of buffalo scattered at the noise of a passing drone.
Willy was taking an opportunity for some personal time with Brigitte before she went into the Commune. With pssi installed in Brigitte’s neural pathways, even if Willy was only a virtual presence here, to Brigitte he still looked and felt as real as if he was there physically. Still, he was a lucky man that she didn’t make a big deal of it. They held hands as they walked down a path leading away from the farmhouse.
“Do you really believe all that stuff Patricia told us about Jimmy?” Brigitte asked. “About him taking over Atopia? That he stole Commander Strong’s wife’s mind?” She paused. “Do you think he killed Patricia?”
Willy didn’t hesitate. “She’s dead, isn’t she? Isn’t that enough evidence?”
“Maybe it was natural . . .”
“Nothing about Atopia is natural. People like her don’t die anymore.” Willy sighed. “Do you really think it was just coincidence?”
“No, I guess I don’t.” Brigitte carefully stepped between glowing sugar beet leaves. Genes from bioluminescent houseplants, a novelty fifty years before, had jumped into the wild a long time ago. Now patches of the outdoors, grasses and plants and even some trees, glowed as brightly as the stars over their heads. “It’s very brave of everyone
to come out here.”
Willy kicked his foot along the ground. “They’re here because of me, because of my mess.”
“That’s not true.”
“I think it’s better if my body stays lost. Something worse might happen if we find it.”
“Willy, stop that.”
Holding hands, they looked up at the faint smudge of the comet being brought into Earth orbit. It was being billed as the spectacle of the millennium. Where Atopia was trying to help the world flee into inner virtual spaces, supporters of the Comet Catcher mission were dreaming of humanity jumping outward. Either way was an escape from the crush and clutter that plagued Earth.
“I do know that I’m not the only reason Bob is here,” Willy said after a pause. “He likes to please people. It’s his only fault, if that could be one.” He considered his statement for a second. “That plus his temper.”
“I know why Bob’s upset.” Brigitte stopped to pick one of the glowing leaves at their feet. “I know what it means to be afraid for someone you love.” She looked into Willy’s eyes. “He’s worried about Nancy.”
Willy squeezed her hand. “It’s not just that. You only know Bob as the stoner surfer, but back when we grew up together, he was the star of the Academy. He was Patricia’s favorite. He was a couple with Nancy since they were kids.”
“Was it what happened to his brother?”
Willy nodded. “To us it seems a long time ago, but to him . . . When Martin committed suicide, Bob blamed himself. Something happened he never told us about. He’s angry at himself, angry at the world, and he hid it under drugs, pushing Nancy away, pushing us all away.”
They continued in silence, walking to sit underneath an oak tree on a hill overlooking the farmhouse.
“I wish we could talk to Nancy,” Brigitte said, breaking the low hum of the drones circling in the fields. “Tell her what’s going on.”
Willy shook his head. “Any message we send her might be intercepted by Jimmy. It would just make things worse—for her and for us.”
Nodding, Brigitte considered. “I bet she’s figured out a lot more than you think already.”
Willy looked at Brigitte “Have you seen her on the mediaworld presentations? Up on stage, holding hands with Jimmy? Doesn’t seem like she’s caught on that something is wrong with him.”
Brigitte raised an eyebrow. Of course she’d been watching the mediaworlds. “You think you guys are the only smart ones?”
Over dinner, Bob, Sid, and Vince had come up with a plan. Sid made contact with a hacking community in the New York underground who might have leads to finding Willy’s body. Now invited, Vince and Brigitte would go to the Commune the next morning, while Sid and Bob would move on directly to New York, hopping a ride in Deanna’s turbofan.
“Nancy’s not the one I’m really worried about.” Willy dug his heels into the earth. “That anger inside of Bob, I’m not sure what he’d do if anything happened to her.”
4
THE BIPEDAL BUGGY lumbered its way up the soggy mountain trail with Brigitte and Vince crammed together in its tight passenger compartment. The path wasn’t maintained, the terrain rough and nearly impassible, but then that was the point—the Commune didn’t like visitors.
This is a wild goose chase, thought Vince as he swayed back and forth. The Commune—where Willy’s mother lived—was the only connection Willy had on the outside. This was the most obvious place to look. Whoever stole Willy’s body, they’d be a million miles from here by now. Ten billion people on the planet, and Vince had already spent a fortune combing it for any sign of Willy.
But then again, this wasn’t Vince’s first goose chase.
At least the future death threats—the unending series of possible future fatalities that plagued him in the past months—had nearly stopped. The imagined futures that pinned him down on Atopia were dissipating the further removed he was from that world. Hotstuff, and the international espionage network she’d set up, had been working hard at containing the future threats. Their efforts paid off. His futures were already becoming part of his past.
On Atopia, the plan to go out and find Willy’s body had seemed crucial. Vince craved the excitement of an adventure. But out here, in the light of day, strapped to the back of a robotic crawler as it rocked between the pine trees, with virtual projections of Willy and Hotstuff riding shotgun, it all felt . . . well . . . ridiculous.
Willy’s virtual projection tapped him on the shoulder. “Bob’s dad left a beacon for him yesterday.”
“I thought Sid terminated all communications.” Vince turned to Willy. “Aren’t we hiding?”
“His dad’s getting desperate. He left an encrypted packet attached to a data beacon in the open multiverse,” Willy explained. “Bob retrieved a copy yesterday.”
“And?” There had to be a reason Willy was bringing this up now.
“Bob opened it. His dad was begging him to come back to Atopia, telling him that they would get all the charges cleared.”
In an overlaid display, Vince watched a mediaworld broadcast on the continuing Bob-and-Sid-and-Vince conspiracy: “Why did Sidney Horowitz disappear from Atopia after the attack? We’ve all heard a lot of theories, but the fact that he and Robert Baxter are friends with Vincent Indigo makes it seem all the more suspicious . . .” Vince cut off the broadcast. He’d heard it a million times already. The newsworlds were predicting more terrorism against Atopia, and every story featured a connection to himself or Sid or even Bob.
Worse was Willy’s predicament, and losing his body was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Before the attack against Atopia, a warrant had been issued for Willy’s arrest for breaching Atopian border security. After the attack, and with Willy’s body missing and his virtual presence having fled, the warrant was stepped up to an international one with Interpol getting involved. He was a hunted man.
Terrorists were blamed for the rise in the number of disappearances of pssi-connected users, but this didn’t seem to be deterring the public from flocking to it. The media didn’t specify who the terrorists were, just that their aim was to slow down the spread of Atopia’s product release. The implication was always that Sid and Bob were tied to Terra Nova. That Willy’s body counted as one of the “disappeared” didn’t detract the media from lumping him in with the Terra Novan conspiracy theories.
“And Jimmy and Nancy were hanging over his dad’s shoulder during the whole message,” Brigitte added. “Jimmy was saying that he’d take care of everything, that he and Nancy were worried sick.”
“She sure doesn’t look worried on stage,” Vince said, regretting it even as it came out. Nancy might look happy in the press events and promotion holograms that were promoting Atopia, but who really knew what was going on in the background, what she might have been forced into doing?
But then again, that was exactly the point: who really knew?
Hotstuff frowned at him. “She’s been trying to get in touch with us, but Bob blocks her. Of course she’s worried. She’s thinking the worst.”
And the worst could be very bad.
Vince nodded, but his mind was already elsewhere, gathering the last incoming data before their connections were cut off. The trees thinned as they reached the plateau. In a clearing before them a network of dusty dirt roads stretched into buildings and farmhouses that undulated into the distance. Storm clouds gathered over snowy peaks, while cows huddled for protection under ponderosa pines that lined the edges of the farms and forests.
Vince instructed the walker where to stop. “This is it,” he announced. Comms would be cut off soon. Inside the event horizon of the Commune, there were no wikiworld feeds, no data streams at all. In a few minutes, he’d need to shut off his feeds from the PhutureNews for the first time in thirty years.
“Don’t be so nervous, boss.” Hotstuff was done up in safari gear for the trip. “I’ve go
t it covered. We’ll wait for you here.”
With flare-ups in the Weather Wars subsiding, the mediaworlds were filling up their empty slots with an unending stream of reports of new apocalyptic cults, and the Commune was the granddaddy of them all. For the first time they caught a glimpse of the shimmering halo that hung in the sky over the Commune. Drones hovered around its perimeter. One skimmed in front of them, its angular curves black and menacing. Behind, almost invisible, floated the aerial plankton, tiny bots that floated on the breeze, their nano-scale rotors keeping them in place. They formed a shell a few dozen feet thick, stretching ten miles around the circumference of the Commune and a mile above it, acting as a giant, electrically-connected Faraday cage that shielded the Commune from any outside electromagnetics and confounded visual and audio signals, as well.
Nearing the outermost road, the walker stopped and squatted.
“I guess this is where we say goodbye,” said Vince to Hotstuff as he unhooked himself from the seat and clambered down, stopping to lend a hand to Brigitte.
Not only would comms be shut down, but so would the smarticle networks in their bodies. They’d been pinged with warnings to turn them off the last hundred yards as they approached the perimeter. This meant Hotstuff and Willy couldn’t make the trip. The walker stood up and turned around, making its way back the way they came. Brigitte and Willy began their goodbyes, and Vince turned away.
The Commune was mute on the topic of how they were supposed to get there. Their only instructions were to meet the robotic walker at a specified longitude and latitude along a mountain road. Vince squinted into the distance and then up at the gathering storm clouds. “Maybe the rest of the way on foot?”
“Don’t think so.” Brigitte pointed to a trail of dust rising on one of the roads coming out from the town center.
It was a horse and cart.
Vince shook his head. “You can’t be serious.”
The storm clouds churned over the mountaintops, obscuring them, as the buggy and horse neared. There was one driver, dressed in black with a large matching hat. The rolling clouds hit the Commune’s perimeter, skidding across its surface to form a dome high in the sky before breaking. The man on the cart motioned to them, urging them toward him.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 3