“An excuse?” roared his emotional self, a vein popping out in his neck. “You call this an excuse?”
“I agree, we should wait,” said his lazy side.
His emotional self shook its head. “You’re the reason we’re in this mess. Taking drugs? Idiot. The same reason that Martin—”
“Hey, stop that.” Bob’s inspirational side held up his hands. “This is a mess, but it’s not our fault. We’re out here trying to help. We’ll get out of this, but we need to plan for the worst. So we should tell her.”
His cautious side remained adamant. “Patricia said no connections to Atopia under any circumstance.”
“Sid’s gone and we can’t find Vince. What difference does it make? This is all gone to hell already.” His emotional side clenched his jaw. “Make the connection.”
“Let’s take a minute and think.” The main part of his mind considered what the rest of him was saying. “Who set this off? ”
“Does it matter? We need to get everything we know to Nancy.” The face of his emotional facet turned beet red.
His cautious side took a deep breath. “I guess you’re right . . .”
All the parts of his mind were coming to the same conclusion.
“We’ll make contact in the place nobody else knows about.”
They all nodded. They all knew what he was thinking.
15
VINCE LEANED BACK and stretched his neck. “You really shouldn’t switch off my Phuture News feeds.” It was all that was keeping them safe, he didn’t add.
Special Agent Sheila Connors was busy with her remote team. They were firewalling Vince off from the world. She grunted, “You and your friends have been busy.”
Connors shared a mediaworld about the terrorist attack in New York. It was filled with images of Robert Baxter emerging from the pneumatic tube system. “A few thousand disappeared, plus six billion future infractions. Half the world is on the hunt for you and your gang.”
Vince watched the news report, still working in the background to release his agents into autopilot. Each new security blanket Agent Connors created restricted his outward paths. He only had a few minutes, perhaps seconds.
“Our gang?” Vince snorted. “We had nothing to do with that.”
“You’re sure?” Agent Connors’ tech team continued to jam up the communications channels around them. “So you didn’t hack into the phutures of ten billion people?”
Vince paused. He didn’t like to lie. “That was for a good reason—”
“And you’re not operating an international espionage ring, modifying the future on a massive scale?”
Vince shrugged. “Like I said—”
“There’s always a good reason with people like you.”
Vince smiled. People like you. Coming from Atopia, Vince felt like an intruder, but it wasn’t because of the technology. He felt like an intruder when he watched people, walked by them in the streets, watched them living their little lives. Once he’d been like them, before the wealth, the fame.
Now he was different. He felt . . . what? Sorry for them?
Down below he watched the lights of Atlanta slide by, twenty million of those little people living their futile lives. Maybe she’s right, he thought, looking out the window. Maybe I am just a rich asshole. “I’m not going to argue, but you really shouldn’t turn off my Phuture News feeds,” he repeated.
Agent Connors raised her eyebrows. “Or what?” She was using a version of pssi, and in an overlaid display Vince watched her phantoms cycling through their security controls. Mr. Indigo was hers now, and she clicked off the control of his proxxi.
Vince felt the last of his connections close down. He could still see, but he felt blind.
In the Commune, he had been cut off from his future feeds, but his proxxi Hotstuff was working in the background. And the Commune was a data dark spot. There had been some measure of safety—the dangers Vince couldn’t see couldn’t see him either. But now Hotstuff was shut down, and out here, in full view of the world, it wouldn’t be long until whatever was hunting him would catch up. Watching the last of the lights of Atlanta disappear, he realized they must be on their way to Cuba. Almost the whole southern half had become a gulag for the Alliance.
At least it would be warmer than Siberia.
He didn’t need to see fighter drones approaching, didn’t need to hear Agent Connors’ attempts to argue that they weren’t carrying a deadly virus. He didn’t need to watch the flames and roar of the attack, the desperate attempts to fight back. He didn’t need to see it, because even without his future feeds, he knew it was coming.
16
THE GRAY SEAS of the English Channel rolled beneath clouds that hung above it like stains against the sky. The chalk cliffs of the Dorset coast stretched into the foggy distance, and Durdle Door, an oval hole burrowed through the cliffs by the ocean and time, stood above the beaches like a doorway to another world. Smooth rocks, with heads full of seaweed, lay about in jumbles in the tidal pools. In the middle of them, a small boy in swimming trunks, with awkward legs sticking out at angles, was waiting.
“Bob,” said a little girl, approaching cautiously. “Is that you?”
The boy nodded.
She dropped her bright orange pail and began running to him.
The boy stood, waving a tiny fishing net in the air. “I figured you would see me here,” he said. “And before you ask, I feel fine.” The first thing out of her mouth was always, how are you feeling? So Bob pre-empted.
It was one of their childhood worlds, where Bob and Nancy came as kids to hunt through rocks, to swim, and explore—a special place that was theirs alone. It was Bob’s safest place, even if storm clouds filled it now. Nancy ran to hug him. They sat down facing each other on the wet-seaweed rocks, up to their ankles in tidal-pool seawater.
“What happened in New York?” Nancy asked.
Bob rocked back a little. It wasn’t like her to just jump straight into it. “I don’t know what happened.” Bob saw the explosion of mediaworlds linking him to the attack. He was monitoring the chatter of network traffic searching for him. He’d attached his identity to hundreds of metatags of people leaving the city. It would take time for them to sift through it, hopefully enough for him to get away. “I had nothing to do with it.”
Lightning lit up storm clouds in the distance.
“Why have you been hiding from me, Bob? Why are you running?”
A peal of thunder rolled across them.
“I’m not running.” He shook his head. “I mean, I wasn’t running. It was Patricia who asked me to leave. She sent us out to find Willy’s body.”
Nancy frowned. “She sent you to find Willy’s body?”
“I don’t know why.” That wasn’t entirely true. “There’s something in Willy’s body, something to do with Jimmy she needed us to find out.” Looking down, he picked a periwinkle off the rock and inspected it. The tiny creature retreated into its shell. “It’s not safe. She made me promise to take you with us, but I failed, I left you behind.”
More lightning, and the hollow crackle following it came quicker, louder.
Nancy grabbed both of Bob’s hands. “Jimmy’s assembling his own private psombie army in cities all over the world. I’ve seen it. Is that what you’re trying to stop?”
What should he tell her? He wanted to tell her everything, how much he loved her, how much of a danger Jimmy was. But what made sense? More than just their lives were at stake. Say nothing, and you might lose her. Say everything, and you might lose her. What was the right thing to do?
“Be careful of Jimmy, he’s not what he seems.”
Nancy shivered. “I know. I don’t trust him, or Kesselring, they’re playing power games—”
“He killed Patricia.” Bob squeezed her hands. “And his own parents. It’s not just politics. Something else is goi
ng on.”
A bolt of lightning ripped the sky apart behind them, accompanied by a deafening boom.
Nancy stood and pulled Bob to get up. “Let’s get inside.” Rain started falling. She motioned toward a yellow cabana on the beach.
Bob looked into the pool of water at his feet, the surface rippling in colliding circles as raindrops hit it. A crab scuttled by. Bob felt sluggish, his mind drifting. “I need to go.” He handed Nancy the periwinkle, embedding within it the encrypted data that Patricia had left him. It was a risk—it meant the data was returning into the Atopian ecosystem—but Nancy needed to know.
She took it, and leaned in to kiss his cheek. Bob turned and kissed her, then started shutting down the tunnel to the world, but he was weak. It took nearly all of his energy just to hand the data beacon to Nancy.
The crab he’d seen at his feet inched up on top of the seaweed covered rock next to him. It raised itself up on its hind legs, spreading its arms to the sky. Lightning thundered again, and tendrils of electrostatic discharge snaked across the sky to illuminate the white cliffs.
The crab looked at Bob, its mouthparts gnashing. “You’ll make a nice bounty, my friend.”
Bob’s mind was swimming. He logged into his bio-stats. Something was wrong. He’d been physically poisoned somehow.
Snapping his primary subjective out of the sea-world, he popped his viewpoint back into the passenger pod. The milky film of the atmosphere hung over the curve of the Earth, while steely pinpoints of stars hung above.
Nausea overcame him. He retched.
His vitals were way off, his heart racing. A low rumble began. It was the retrorockets of the pod firing. They shouldn’t be firing now, somewhere a hundred miles in space over the middle of the Atlantic. The pod was being diverted. Data pipes into the multiverse were shutting down, and, fighting to remain conscious, he made another copy of the data he’d given to Nancy and sent it out in a sealed beacon.
If Sid was still out there somewhere, he might find it.
Blackness descended.
17
“I HAVEN’T HAD any contact with Bob,” Nancy lied.
Jimmy was sitting in a chair behind a huge desk, facing away from her. They were in the palace of his elaborately maintained private universe. He stared down the length of a long reflecting pool which divided his manicured gardens, stretching to the horizon. Ornate moldings, gilt in gold, framed frescoes of angels in the ceilings. Thick velvet curtains draped lead-glass windows. “Did he tell you anything?” Jimmy turned to look at her.
“I told you I haven’t talked to him since he left.” She shifted in her chair. “I’d tell you if I did.”
Jimmy smiled. “I’m just finding out whose side you’re on.” He looked at the ceiling. “Of course you understand it would be treason if you had contact.”
“Treason?”
“And hid the contact, I mean.”
Nancy felt her cheeks flush, but in this projected space her face remained stone-still. “I don’t believe ‘treason’ is an offense described in the Atopian constitution.”
“You know what I mean. Anyway, enough, I was just asking.” His smile grew wider. He turned to Dr. Granger. “Please continue with the summary of operations.”
Dr. Granger was sitting in an attending chair with a pile of reports in his lap. He smiled at Nancy and then began unpacking his presentation. Charts and graphs started filling the shared display spaces above Jimmy’s desk.
“Happiness indices are at all-time highs in places where pssi has spread through the population,” began Dr. Granger. “Crime is dropping, and business productivity and profits are skyrocketing at companies that have adopted the pssi-suite. A complete success.” Dr. Granger stopped and looked at Nancy. “The Infinixx distributed consciousness app is the most downloaded sensory interface.”
This was Nancy’s own creation. She took a deep breath. “I still disagree—”
“The Board’s decision is final,” interrupted Jimmy, staring into his gardens.
Nancy hung her head. Instead of forcing new users to create their own memetic structures, using their own memories, they’d instead adopted a cookie-cutter approach. They were pre-formatting people’s expanding minds. It made it easier to access their thoughts, but the public didn’t seem to mind. Or even notice. They just wanted the endless reality.
Jimmy argued for a backdoor to combat viral reality skins, like the one that nearly destroyed Atopia. Nancy was able to hold him back in the general release, but in each jurisdiction there were secret deals going on, allowing governments to peer into the minds of the population. If people had nothing to hide, then they had nothing to fear, went the line of reasoning that Jimmy kept putting forward. And everywhere that pssi was released, the people were happier than ever—happy, but living in dreamworlds.
“The subsea computing facilities are on track,” continued Dr. Granger, and began detailing the self-replicating data warehouses being constructed under sea floors, using seawater for cooling and powered by geothermal generators. It was a vast computing organism growing into the crust of the Earth to make virtual space for the billions of personal universes being created within the pssi multiverse.
“Any progress on the legal front?” asked Jimmy halfway through Dr. Granger’s run-down on the computing facilities.
More graphics spun into their shared spaces. Anti-trust suits were being brought under control, and key patent litigations against Terra Nova continuing.
“And what happened to Patricia Killiam’s personal research projects. The POND, for instance?”
Dr. Granger shrugged. “She terminated that before she passed.”
Jimmy turned to the two of them. “I was talking to Nancy.”
Nancy’s attention was elsewhere. “Pardon? The POND?”
“The Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector,” Jimmy said. “Don’t tell me you don’t know of it.”
Of course Nancy had heard of it. “But I don’t see how that has any—”
“Everything has relevance, Ms. Killiam. Your aunt shut that project down just before she passed, and the data from it is missing. I’d bet that Baxter took it, and I’d like to know why. He’s a prime suspect in the New York attack, and we need to know what’s going on.”
Jimmy paused. “His terrorist actions were designed to halt the spread of pssi, to incite fear in the consumer population.” Over a thousand people’s minds had been wiped out in the New York attack, a thousand people now vegetative psombies. “He’s continuing your Aunt Patricia’s campaign against us.”
Nancy could sense she was on thin ice. “I don’t believe she was working against us.” And the attack in New York wasn’t what was slowing down the release. Half of the billion new users of pssi were displaying signs of tech-induced schizophrenia, and even the AI-run tech support channels weren’t enough to sort out all the problems.
Jimmy rocked his head back and stared at the ceiling. “Then who was she working against?”
Nancy stopped herself from saying, you. “I don’t know, Jim, you know more than me.”
Jimmy looked at her, squinting, and then slowly returned his gaze to the reflecting pool.
Part 2:
Heresy
1
“WHERE AM I?” Sid was still stuffed in the black sack, his connections to the outside world cut off. After being dragged out of the bar, he’d been thrown over the shoulder of the Grilla. In stops and starts he was carried, pushed, and dragged down one tunnel after another, deep into the bowels of New York.
They’d stopped for a few minutes. It seemed like this was the destination. Sid used inertials to track every inch of the path down. By his calculations they were three hundred and sixty-two feet under Third Avenue and Forty-Second Street. He knew exactly where he was. Sid’s question wasn’t about spatial coordinates—he just wanted to know what they’d say before he crushe
d them.
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Sid recognized the voice as Bunky’s, one of his kidnappers from the bathroom.
In an overlay some scant details appeared as his internal pssi displayed what it had so far: British birth origin, Somerset accent, blood vessels on the surface of facial skin indicating probable history of alcoholism. In another situation it seemed like someone he’d enjoy meeting. Sid played along. “Bad news, please.”
The Grilla dumped him onto a chair, ripping the cover off him in a motion that nearly flayed the skin off his arms.
“A martyr, I like that,” Bunky said. “The bad news, my friend, is that you’re completely fucked.”
Sid blinked and looked around. His sensory system gathered information at the same time as his extrasensory one did the same, hacking into any networks nearby. He was in a large cavern, roughly hewn from black bedrock. Naked fluorescent bulbs dotted wet-streaked walls. Gaping holes led outward. The cavern was filled with a shanty town of tin roofs and lopsided structures that filled the floor and climbed the walls. Halfway up one side of the walls, at the mouth of one of the tunnels, Sid was seated on a terrace, surrounded by his captors.
“Now the good news.” Shaky, his other kidnapper, smiled at Sid. “You’re in a pub. The White Horse. I mean if you’ve got to be fucked, might as well be in a pub, right?” He cackled at his own joke.
Sid’s internal systems were piecing things together. Both Bunky and Shaky were at Battery Park when he walked around there with Bob. His inVerse plotted their paths from recordings, mapping their paths backward in the recorded wikiworld.
A serving bot dropped a pint of beer in front of Sid. “Yeah, I know I’m in a pub.” He picked it up and took a swig.
One of the first things he hacked into, in the seconds since they removed the cloak, was the food and drink system of the establishment they were in. Sid had ordered a beer. In fact, several beers. More plunked down in front of Shaky and Bunky. They roared with laughter.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 8