Complete Atopia Chronicles

by Matthew Mather

“So there’s no way around it?”

  In all the long list of things I’d had to do, this one hit closest to home and I was struggling with it.

  “No boss, sorry,” replied Hotstuff. “And you’d better take care of it before the morning meditation.”

  I felt terrible about sabotaging the launch of the Infinixx distributed consciousness project, but there didn’t seem to be any way around it. A Triad gangster network in Hong Kong would have used it to pinpoint some of my other activities, and disabling the launch was a key vector in keeping my lifeline intact.

  I shrugged. Progress was progress. I’d better stick with what was working. Using a communication phantom I punched up Patricia’s networks, requesting an urgent, private meeting with her primary subjective.

  A large Chenrezig statue, the Buddha of Compassion, sat at the head of the long chamber I was in. I stared up into its face, and then inspected its dozens of arms stretching out around it like star fire. Immediately above its main face, eleven of its other faces gazed down benevolently. I was struck by how eerily similar its array of outstretched arms resembled what phantom limbs used in the pssi system would look like, if they were visible in real space. Shaking my head, I turned my gaze out of the window to the majestic peaks around us.

  The plains surrounding Lhasa were filled with permanent makeshift encampments of international troops that stood as a buffer between the Chinese and Indian bases that lined the opposite sides of the valley. The Americans were there as a part of the UN mission, as well as NATO forces, but the largest contingent was the African Union.

  Africa was where many thought hope for the future could be found; where the engine of a new economic powerhouse was beginning to growl. It was closely linked with Terra Nova, the off-shore colonies competing with Atopia, with their own synthetic reality product.

  “You want me to what?” asked Patricia, materializing at the seat across from me and pulling my gaze back from looking out the window. A glittering security blanket settled around us. Patricia paused for a moment while the blanket sealed. “Do you have everything you need? What’s this about?”

  She’d helped me smuggle the smarticles out of Atopia, even helped me set up my covert communications network, and all this without even asking me what it was for. I hadn’t been able to tell her, it was just too dangerous. Thank God for old friends.

  “I’m fine,” I replied in a quiet voice. “I don’t need any more materials. I just need you to come help me right now with something, in your physical form.”

  This sounded odd even before it came out, especially coming from the slight frame of my monk, diminutive in front of this world famous scientist.

  “There are some things I need some direct help with, and it’s critical to get done right now. I can’t say more than that, except that it needs to be kept a secret.”

  Patricia eyed me carefully. “You realize the launch of Infinixx is in less than an hour?”

  “I’m not saying you can’t go, just go virtually. Isn’t that what your whole project is about anyway? And what’s the difference? I need your help right now.”

  This was definitely weird, but I’d gotten over my squeamishness about these sorts of requests.

  She hesitated.

  “Look, you said I could rely on you if I ever needed anything right?”

  “Yes, I suppose…”

  “So I’m asking.”

  She sighed. “I guess it won’t make any difference.”

  “Perfect,” I replied, sensing this mission accomplished. “I appreciate it, Pat.”

  An awkward silence ensued.

  “So what’s going on with these storm systems?” I asked casually, changing the topic

  I was curious to see if Patricia had anything more to say than what I got through the mediaworlds. I’d been so caught up in my own disasters lately I’d hardly paid attention to the storm systems that were threatening Atopia. With a little more breathing space, I’d started to let my mind assimilate more of what was happening on the outside. These storms were the big news.

  “We don’t know,” she replied, shrugging, “but they’re definitely not natural.”

  Not natural? I hadn’t heard that before.

  “Really?”

  “Something is going on, and we’re not sure what,” she replied.

  No kidding, I thought to myself, but I just kept quiet.

  10

  FINALLY, IN LONGER than I could remember, I was really enjoying my walk through Beun Retiro Park in Madrid. Fall had begun to turn fully to winter, and all the leaves had fallen off the trees to create a beautiful golden carpet underfoot. Perfectly faultless blue skies hung overhead.

  In my mind’s eye, I could see myself stepping gracefully to the side as a helicopter crashed down from the heavens, nearly crushing me on a walk through Stanley Park in Vancouver the next day. In another splinter, I could see a car swerve, bouncing into my beach cruiser as I turned into a parking lot in Malibu a few days later. The car clipped the surf board sitting in the back of the cruiser, sending it spinning around. I ducked just before the board would have decapitated me. It was all effortless action, like a ballet with death.

  We’d found a solution to my problem. Since we’d stabilized them a few weeks back when I was in Tibet, the density of death events had quickly begun to fall. There were still nearly twenty thousand future fatalities we had to avoid to maintain my healthy timeline, but what had seemed terrifying and unfathomable just a few short weeks before, had become just a walk in the park. Literally.

  I strode purposefully forward as I walked around Retiro Park, each step picking out another yellow leaf underfoot to grind into the gravel, imagining each to be a tiny harbinger of doom I was snuffing out with each step. Looking up from my work, I found myself standing in front of the Crystal Palace.

  Down the path a little way, a woman leaned over to pick up one of the leaves, and then began laughing, and then crying, completely oblivious to everyone else around her. Not wanting to disturb her, I shifted my walk onto another trail. I glanced back over my shoulder towards the woman, but she was already gone. She’d looked awfully familiar.

  To protect myself, I’d developed a kind of temporal immune system, stretching out into the alternate universes connected to me. An army of killer tomorrow-cells spun through the probabilistic spaces surrounding me, neutralizing threats, clotting dangerous portals and pathways both into the future and through the past. This immune system had become a part of me, a part of my living body, a highly attuned death-sense that allowed me to effortlessly thread my way through even the most dangerous of situations.

  For once, the conspiracy theorists were right. Some of the tabloid worlds had begun publishing stories about a shadowy force that had been detected, pushing and pulling the future prediction networks. The shadowy force they were referring to was me, but there was something else out there too. That something else that was the thing that was trying to hunt me down, but I was hunting it down as well.

  What had more of my attention were the hurricanes that were threatening to pin Atopia between them. In my situation, it was impossible to ignore the idea that perhaps the storms were aimed at me, a final attempt to destroy my power base after attempting to trap me there. Try as I might, the idea just didn’t stick, and though the storms looked like they would damage Atopia, they were no real threat to me.

  In my struggle to save myself, I had been reborn. I turned my face up to the morning sunshine, feeling its heat warm my soul. Where my life before had been sliding into apathy, the past few months had led me on a spiritual journey into an almost mystical place. Decoding the hidden pattern had helped us navigate the most stable path through my future, and it was leading us further and further back. A hidden truth I was just beginning to glimpse was buried somewhere in humankind’s history.

  The solution, as such, was no solution, but simply to carry on. It was everything and nothing, both the beginning and the end. I was still engaged in a desperate struggle
against death, as we all are, whether we saw it that way or not, but it had become more like a dance, with effortless action guiding me through. I’d reached a heightened state of being that I would never have been able to achieve any other way.

  As this timeline had worn on, the world had begun filtering the incessant predictions of my death as the attempts of another bored trillionaire at getting attention. The world at large had erased me from their networks as phuture spam, and even the flash death mobs had gotten bored. The man with no future, who existed only in the moment, was invisible to a world fixated on anywhere but where they actually were.

  On my end, I’d come to grips with, and even relish, my situation. My death had become a local solution to the universe that, with the massive resources at my disposal, I’d managed to bring under control in a tight but stable spiral, undertaking a list of nearly incomprehensible activities each day.

  The irony just made it that much richer.

  I was trapped by my own creation, unable to even tell people what was happening. Even more ironic was that I didn’t even know if it all was true. It was possible that I was just running around everyday doing it all for no reason. But then, this was life.

  I smiled at that thought.

  The existentialists did say that life was all about pulling the victory of meaning from the jaws of senseless absurdity, and in that, I’d discovered a purpose that I’d struggled to find before. That purpose was finding out who was doing this to me, and why, and the trail was leading back to Atopia.

  And so, I became a man with no future, but a man that danced happily between the raindrops, or perhaps, between the timedrops.

  EPILOGUE

  Identity: Patricia Killiam

  SITTING AND WAITING. Perfect the art of sitting and waiting, and you will live a long, long life.

  I was in the main Cognix conference room, perched about two thousand feet up in the complex spanning the tops of the farming towers at the center of Atopia. The afternoon sun was shining in hotly through the glass window-walls, and I was sure he was making me wait on purpose, knowing I was here in person.

  My mind was circling back to my press conference this morning, about what I’d been telling the reporters. Truths and half truths; I’d been mixing the both of them for so long I hardly knew the difference anymore.

  How was pssi going to end up changing the world? To be honest, I really had no idea. The real power of pssi, I wanted to tell them, was harnessing the brain’s natural ability for adaptively rewiring itself to extend the human mind into the multiverse, but this would have earned me blank stares.

  The human sensory and motor system had evolved to help us make sense of our environment and fend for ourselves within it, which had worked great when our ancestors were out hunting gazelle on the savannah, but the modern human environment was a massive flow of information and pssi made it possible to plug our nervous systems directly into it.

  Explaining that to those reporters was just a bridge too far for me to cross with them. It was easier to let them run into some pssi-kids on Atopia somewhere—they’d get the idea soon enough.

  I sighed.

  Being present in the flesh was something I’d begun to do more and more lately, sensing my own time growing short. Up here in the conference room the security blankets blocked outgoing and incoming communications, so there was no escaping down a rabbit hole while I waited. However, there was no sense in letting time, illusion or not, go to waste, so I decided to limber up a little.

  Taking a deep breath, I straightened up in my chair and clicked on the visual overlays of my phantoms, and they appeared arrayed around me. Concentrating, I began moving the phantom that controlled my spatial point of view. This little phantom was visible, floating disconnected beside my body like a little putty colored finger that I could move around.

  Despite working with this technology for more than thirty years, it still felt strangely thrilling to feel this projection as a part of me, its tactiles and kinesthetics wired into my own sensory system so that I could feel it stretch and click through the boundaries of its interface.

  The brain had an almost inexhaustible capacity to neuroplastically rewire itself. Learn to play the piano, and the brain devotes more of its motor cortex to your fingers. Cut off an arm, on the other hand, and your brain could adaptively learn to reroute its control of an artificial arm by reworking the way it used various packets of neurons.

  Phantoms were just an extension of this. Without removing any existing limbs or digits, we had created virtual fingers and limbs in synthetic spaces using pssi—the poly-synthetic sensory interface—to connect them to the neurons in the motor cortex. It was like having a dozen extra hands to manage controls, directly wired into our brains like a part of our bodies.

  The flip side of the coin was feeding data into our senses, whether touch, sight, sound or any of the dozens of other more minor senses humans possessed, to create an unlimited number of metasenses that warned or informed us of what was happening within the informational flow of the multiverse. Of course this included entirely synthetic sensory worlds we could transport ourselves into.

  Now we could completely customize our bodies and senses to the way we wanted to interact with real and virtual worlds. Helped along by the neurotrophic growth factors we’d embedded into the smarticles suffusing through our nervous systems, we’d discovered that the brain had a stunning capacity to grow and adapt to the pssi stimulus, far beyond even our wildest imaginings at the beginning of the project.

  I latched myself firmly into place at the conference table and connected my primary visual point of view to this spatial control phantom. As I stretched and moved it, my subjective point of view shot back outwards from the conference room to hover outside the building.

  Then I dove down into the treetops below, stopping just above the Boulevard. Quickly I cycled this phantom back and forth, limbering it up, and then I unlatched the rest of my phantoms. As I sat in the conference room with my hands resting gently on the polished cherry wood table, my eighteen phantoms danced around me, and I concentrated as I felt each of them sliding through their interface points, coordinating my visual and metasense overlays.

  These phantoms weren’t just projections; they were a part of my living, breathing body. It felt like I was dancing, and I leaned back in my chair, my eyes half closed and smiling, enjoying my performance.

  With a short characteristic tone announcing his arrival, Kesselring, the principle owner and CEO of Cognix Corporation, materialized opposite me on the other side of the table. I quickly and immediately stowed my phantoms as if sweeping toys back into a toy chest. He smiled as he watched me packing them away, waiting for me to finish before he spoke.

  Below a thick head of perfectly groomed black hair, Kesselring’s flecked hazel eyes shone intensely above a salt and pepper beard. The worn creases in his face projected just the right angles of intelligence and sagacity for a man of his stature.

  “Great work with the press today, Patricia. You are the best. You looked great!” he announced with some enthusiasm, if perhaps a touch patronizingly.

  “I do get tired of lying to them all the time,” I sourly complained.

  Maybe I was annoyed at him for making me wait, or perhaps I felt silly being caught playing with my phantoms. Really it was because I couldn’t shake the surreal realization that we were planning a conspiracy of the vastest scale, but, it wasn’t really a conspiracy, as in the end everyone would be complicit. We weren’t just building a better mouse trap here—we were building the best mouse trap of all time.

  “We’re not really lying to anyone,” said Kesselring. “We’ve been over this a million times. I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing it up.”

  “You’re right,” I sighed.

  He was right.

  We’d been over it countless times in the years since it’d become clear what we had to do, but as we neared the threshold, things just didn’t feel right anymore.

  He changed t
he topic to what he’d really called this meeting to discuss.

  “Do you think he suspects anything?”

  I sighed deeply.

  “Obviously he suspects something,” I replied, shaking my head, “but no, nothing to do with us, at least, not yet.”

  The hamster wheel we had Vince running on hadn’t been my idea, but then again, it was only my deep connections into the Phuture News Network technology that made what we were doing to him possible. I’d also made some modifications to his proxxi, Hotstuff, to keep him where we wanted him. The intention had never been to actually harm Vince, but we couldn’t afford to let him see what we were planning, at least, not until it was too late to stop us.

  “Good.”

  “But he’ll figure it out eventually,” I pointed out. I was already having a hard time holding off his agents. “He’s already most of the way there.”

  “Soon it won’t matter,” shrugged Kesselring. “And nobody would pay any attention to him anyway.”

  A pause while I eyed Kesselring, trying to lay blame elsewhere for what I’d done to my friend. I took a deep breath.

  “So we’re going to be giving it away for free?”

  Kesselring smiled. “Free to install anyway.”

  “And it doesn’t worry you that we’re not telling people the full story?”

  He rolled his eyes and looked down into the conference table, tapping his fingers.

  “Hal’s new work looks promising…”

  “Christ, don’t get me started on Hal,” I scowled. I could see Kesselring was hiding something from me.

  “I’m just saying…”

  “I know what you’re saying.”

  Using the problem to fix the problem was a disaster recipe for unintended consequences.

  “As you yourself have said many times,” he pointed out, “we need to maximize saturation of the product introduction to maximize networking effects. The Terra Novan’s own synthetic reality system isn’t far behind us. We need to get our product in first and fast to capture the market.”