Complete Atopia Chronicles

by Matthew Mather

  The men were all off hunting today, chasing pigs that had escaped from neighboring villages in the thunderstorms of the night before. Monkeys barked through the underbrush, their catcalls joining the symphonies of songbirds whose feathers lit up the steaming forest like splashes of flickering paint against a knotted green canvas.

  Picking up a smooth stone sitting on the earth, I casually ducked my head as a poison dart snipped past, barely missing me. One of the children cried out to my right. A mother picked the child up by his arm and spanked him. He’d been playing with his father’s blow gun, not knowing what he was doing, probably imitating his dad. Even inhabiting someone else, whatever was hunting me down was trying to kill this body as well.

  The mother looked towards me and shrugged, apologizing. I smiled back, returning my attention to the witch doctor. Dodging death was nothing I got excited about anymore.

  “In da roond,” explained the tribal elder, speaking in a kind of English-creole-pidgin that was the lingua franca of the Papua New Guinea highlands.

  The two most linguistically diverse places left on Earth were also the most culturally and technologically polarized: this place, still barely out of the Stone Age, and New York City, the bustling megalopolis tipping the world into the 22 century. Each retained over a thousand languages, but where almost all in New York were machine translatable, and thus part of the new global lingua franca, almost none of the New Guinea languages were. I was struggling to understand what this elder was equally struggling to explain to me.

  “Round, like, like in a circle?” I stuttered back in my best attempt at native Yupno. Speaking through this body was difficult.

  A giant tree frog watched me lazily from its perch in the branches nearby. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a frog in the wild. Of course, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in the wild.

  To get to this remote and rugged place, we’d had a portable communication base station dropped in, and then we convinced a nun running a nearby mission to come and persuade them to have one of the villagers drink a glass of water laden with smarticles, allowing my subjective to enter and control their body through the communication link.

  It was the only way I could speak with this particular elder, the Yupna witch doctor and keeper of holy secrets. The smarticles hadn’t fully suffused into this body, so I felt numb and disconnected, and they would be soon flushed out, so I had to hurry.

  The witch doctor shrugged and smiled, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. His eyes sparkled at me. I smiled back, my pssi filtering his body language into a form that made sense to me. My gaze shifted to a break in the jungle that revealed the glacier capped mountain ranges beyond, stretching upwards into the bright sky. He was trying to explain his perception of the shape of time, or rather, its lack of shape.

  “Here and now”, “Back in the 20’s”, “Going forward”…the modern world was fixated on spatial metaphors for time, the idea of the past being behind us and the future ahead. Not the Yupno, though. In this remote valley it had forgotten, time had no linear form to its inhabitants. To them, it flowed uphill, backwards, in forms and in shapes. They laughed at our conception of its forward flow. This Stone Age culture experienced directly something Einstein had only glimpsed at through his equations.

  The pattern Hotstuff had detected had led us here, and she was sitting on a log across the cooking fire from the elder and I, fetchingly dressed in tight safari shorts with her hair done up in a long single braid that she was playing with, nibbling on, and twirling between her fingers.

  “He means time runs forwards and backwards, but not like a stream—more like currents in a lake,” she suggested. “No, like a reservoir, that’s more what he means.”

  “Like a reservoir?” I asked the elder.

  He nodded. With long arms, he reached up and circled his hands around slowly, finally coming to rest, ending at me. The Yupno had a way of pointing towards doorways when speaking about time, a curiosity I was just beginning to understand.

  Inhabiting the body of this tribal member, I was trying to see if time felt any different for me. It didn’t, but something here felt odd.

  Amazingly, the elders here hadn’t batted an eye at the idea of one of their own being magically inhabited by an alien spirit, nor the idea that I was conversing with an invisible ghost Hotstuff, in their midst. It seemed perfectly natural to them.

  The witch doctor pointed to where Hotstuff was sitting.

  “The spirit name?” he asked.

  Hotstuff raised her eyebrows.

  “Hotstuff,” I replied, shrugging to her.

  “HOT stuff,” he repeated, “hot STUFF?”

  I nodded, and he smiled ever wider.

  “And your name?” I hadn’t thought to ask before.

  He pointed at his own chest.

  “Nicky,” he said proudly, and then added, “Nicky Nixons.”

  I laughed and shook my head—Nicky Nixons the witch doctor.

  “It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Nicky Nixons. My name,” I said, pointing to myself, “is Vince Indigo.”

  “Yes, in dee go…” he replied, nodding sagely, as if he’d always known, as if my name held a meaning he knew and I didn’t.

  “Vince, this is all very touching,” interjected Hotstuff, “but we have to get going. We’re out of time here.”

  She splintered some upcoming death events into my display spaces, one of them a bio-electronic Ebola-based retrovirus that ended with my internal organs almost instantaneously liquefying while I was brushing my teeth tomorrow morning. She immediately firewalled off the data tunnel from the jungle we were sitting in, just in case.

  “It’s even getting dangerous just being here.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, let’s get me going,” I replied. “But you stay a while and see what you can learn from him.”

  It was time to get to work again. The sensory frames of the jungle and Nicky Nixons quickly faded away to reveal the confines of a small, sparse apartment, somewhere in the lower levels of the Atopian seascraper complexes. In augmented space, an endless array of workspace cubicles radiated outwards from the apartment, in the New London financial metaworld. The cubicles were busily occupied by thousands of copies of Willy McIntyre, one of Bob’s best friends, and my newly appointed stock trader.

  “So I assume business is good?” I asked Willy, sensing the arrival of his primary subjective.

  Hotstuff was feeding me a report on Willy’s business, and I could see that these weren’t just bots and synthetics he had working; these were full blown splinters, hundreds of them. I didn’t care what he was up to. I just needed to get in and out. Time was a ticking bomb for me, and I had to go and defuse a dozen other situations right away.

  “Business is very, very good,” replied Willy, now standing beside me, and watching me watching his financial army at work below.

  He looked like the cat that had just eaten the canary, and about ready to burst and let me in on some secret. In the report from Hotstuff, I could see that Willy had fully paid off the multi-generational mortgage for his family, and was well on his way to amassing a pretty sizeable fortune, but I didn’t have the time or energy to talk . Death was calling.

  “Yeah, I’d noticed you’d amped up your Phuture News services pretty dramatically,” I said carefully, “but that’s not why I’m here. I’ll just send you the details of what I need right now. I can see you’re a busy man.”

  I immediately uploaded the transaction I needed executed into one of his splinters.

  “You want me to what?” he exclaimed. “You know this is going to look suspicious, especially with me working for Infinixx.”

  “From what I’ve heard, you don’t work for them anymore.”

  Willy stopped fidgeting and stared at me. “Yeah that’s right, but it will still look odd.”

  “You wouldn’t be making any profit off this, and nobody will know,” I explained. “I know it seems crazy, but if you could do
this for me, and keep it quiet, I can pay you an awful lot of money. I need you to dump all that stock and chalk up a huge loss for me, and I need you to do it from New York.”

  I looked at his face. He was watching me watching him.

  “And be careful,” I said after a moment, suddenly feeling he was in over his head.

  “It doesn’t look like there will be any problems with this transaction, Vince, in fact…” he began, not catching my meaning.

  “No, not with that,” I interrupted, “with what you have going on here.”

  “There’s nothing going on here.”

  We both stood and stared at each other.

  I sighed. I needed to get going.

  “Just be careful, okay?”

  He hesitated, but then smiled.

  “No problem, Mr. Indigo.”

  This kid was going to get himself in trouble. He offered his hand to shake, and I shook it, but my mind was already elsewhere.

  I quickly flitted off to the roof of the Cognix towers.

  9

  A DEEP, HAUNTING wail reverberated through the morning air, carrying me upwards, beyond the highest of the Himalayan peaks, but also inwards and backwards, deep into my mother’s womb. A million deaths surrounded me, all threaded outwards from my moment of creation, a cosmic embryo of existence secured by the thin timeline threading through it all that kept me alive.

  §

  My body was drenched in sweat under the hot sun that beat down from the Columbian sky. I was making my way across the Plaza de Bolivar, wiping the sweat off the nape of my neck with a t-shirt I’d pulled out of my backpack. Tourists were standing around in small groups, looking around at the grand framed portico walls, sweating together under the same sun that was baking us. Pigeons scattered at my feet.

  I had to keep moving. A small security contingent was shadowing me from a distance, but I was trying to stay incognito. Out of the corner of my eye, a Coca-Cola sign called out from under the shade of an awning, and I shifted my path towards it and the small convenience shop at the corner of the plaza.

  “Hola!” I announced as I entered, feeling the relief of cool air sweeping over me. I slid open the door to a small refrigerator at the side of the register, pulling out a can of soda, and, parched, opened it and began gulping it down. The shop keeper appeared from the back just as I was about finished it.

  “Senor!” he exclaimed, his eyes wide as he stared at me.

  “What?”

  I put the can down. Was he that upset that I hadn’t paid for it first?

  I reached into my pockets, feeling suddenly energized and awake. I fumbled around excitedly for some pesos. A small group of people had appeared in the shop, staring at me, which I knew could only mean one thing. Instead of feeling scared, I felt a rush of adrenaline, now excited about whatever was about to happen, even though I knew it was death.

  My heart banged, my chest exploding. I couldn’t breathe. I looked at the shop keeper, now staring in horror at the can of soda in my hand. My vision began to swim as I made for the door, my knees giving way in a euphoric rush. At the edges of my senses, I could hear clapping, in fact, I could hear applause. I waved to my fans as the blackness descended.

  §

  The dung-chen horns sounded again, their low, baleful moans awakening my mind fully from its semi-lucid dream state. I blinked and looked out the window of the room I’d been sleeping in. The rising sun was announcing the start of a new day, though Lhasa was still enveloped in shade as the sun fought its way over the towering peaks surrounding the valley.

  Still half asleep, I let my mind wander back to the death event in Columbia we’d just averted. They had been smuggling narcotics in the soda cans, and I’d unwittingly downed one before anyone could warn me off. We shifted the path of my walk later today through Bogota away from the Plaza de Bolivar entirely, just in case.

  A troubling development was the flash death mobs. The same way that people would mob around an accident on a street corner to gawk, with future prediction technology and the wikiworld, people could now flit to nearly any spot on the planet to witness accidents taking place. They called them flash death mobs.

  With so many predicted future deaths, I’d now attracted my own flash death mob fan club, and my future deaths were now small celebrations, with people flitting in to witness the endless sequences of clever deaths that I would narrowly avert. They figured this was a future installation art project of some kind, and I couldn’t afford to tell the world the truth, so I was just rolling with it.

  I shook my head.

  The patterns had now led us to Lhasa to study the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text dedicated to experiences that lay between life and death. It was maddeningly difficult to understand as most of it was coded in symbols. We had gone there to participate in the Monk Debates, to talk directly with the ones that really understood the text.

  A familiar tapping echoed through the wooden doorway, slightly ajar, of the shared room I was sleeping in. I was inhabiting the body of a Buddhist monk from the Sera monastery on the outskirts of Lhasa. In return for borrowing his corporal form, I’d offered the monk a chance for some truly out-of-body meditation sessions using the pssi network, something they didn’t normally have access to here.

  Smarticles were an internationally controlled substance. My transport of them outside of Atopia, and especially what I was doing here, was highly illegal.

  “Don’t even try it,” I warned Hotstuff.

  I pulled the bed sheets off myself. She stood there pouting in the doorway, all done up in a French Maid outfit, but of course still with her riding crop in hand. I stood and quickly pulled my maroon dhonka robe up and around myself.

  Weeks had passed and death was closer than ever. I was still here, but barely. The day before there’d been nearly fifty thousand ways I could have died in the millions of phutures we were tracking, and I’d even had to fight off two sequences in real time and real space, an incredibly close call.

  While we’d managed to slow down the contagion, we hadn’t been able to stop its spreading. We’d tried simulations of locking my body in a vault, but this made things worse, as the death events piled up, making even the slightest of exposures of my body to the outside disastrously threatening, eventually ending in some kind of terrorist strike against my hiding place.

  We had hundreds of thousands of bots and synthetics running around now doing large and small things to sweep the death events back, but I was still the key to many of them. Today was going to be a big day, and by all indications we would be fighting death off more fiercely than ever.

  “So what’s the bad news?” I sighed.

  The rest of the sleeping mats in my room were empty, the other monks apparently much earlier risers than me, but then again, they were real Buddhist monks. I stretched, yawning, and rubbed my neck, expecting the worst. I needed to get some hot tea into this body before the morning meditation session.

  “Good news!” exclaimed Madame Hotstuff, snapping the riding crop against my monk’s ass, urging me awake. She swished the air in front of her with the riding crop to leave it finally pointing towards the door. We began to walk. “Today it seems the threats have begun to recede—or at least, they’ve stabilized in number.”

  “Really?”

  My constricted future eased ever so slightly. Finally.

  We walked out the door and into the hallway, passing a group of monks busily on their way somewhere. Hotstuff sashayed her way past them in her stilettos and knee high stocking, smiling at them appreciatively.

  “Really,” she stated, looking back at me and snapping her riding crop against the rough hewn rock wall of the corridor. She smiled and gave a playful little growl. “It looks like the new ring fencing of a perimeter around your phutures has begun to pay off, that combined with this new meditation and awareness stuff.”

  “So what was it then?” I asked. If we’d found a way to contain it, then there must be a path to the root source, some forensic proce
ss we could use to follow it backwards.

  Hotstuff lowered the riding crop.

  “Vince, honey, remember what Nicky Nixons said, what Yongdzin is saying. You need to stop thinking in deterministic terms. Remember the reservoir. Expand the reservoir, live in the moment.”

  “Right,” I replied. “Live in the moment, effortless action.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Hotstuff…Hotstuff…” I intoned solemnly, pressing my monk’s hands together in a prayer while we walked.

  “I do wish you’d chosen a different word for your mantra than my name.”

  I opened my eyes and winked at her. “Hey, it works for me.”

  “Well, as long as it works for you,” she sighed, smiling and rolling her eyes. “The patterns are solidifying. Whoever did this has left a trail of Easter eggs behind, we think leading to a back door. Nicky Nixons has been a lot of help.”

  “Well remind me to thank him sometime personally,” I replied, now eager to have a look at what was on the agenda today.

  We’d arrived in the cafeteria, if one could call it that, in the center of Sera Jey. I grabbed a cup of tea and sat down with Hotstuff at a wooden table in the corner. A list of the day’s activities floated into view over the bench.

  “Not so bad for today, mister, not as bad as yesterday.”

  By now we’d built up an espionage and counter-espionage network that outstripped any but the wealthiest of corporations and nation states, all with the specific directive of bending the future timeline to my will, to keep me alive. We’d funneled all the money we could from Phuture News and sold off all my assets to fund the program.

  One thing in particular floated up through the threat matrices.