Complete Atopia Chronicles

by Matthew Mather

  “Yeah, there have been a few nice ones, but I’m waiting for the real beast.”

  Martin laughed. “Always the perfectionist, huh?”

  “Well, with some things anyway.”

  “Yeah, with some things.” He smiled and looked away.

  “Bob!” came a yell from across the water. It was Vince, waving at us. “Bob, I need to get going!”

  “Already?”

  “Yeah, I need to get back to that thing.”

  “I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do,” I observed.

  Vince was one of the richest guys in the world, and lately all he’d be doing was surfing with me. I wondered what had suddenly gotten his hair on fire.

  “Anyway, ping me if you change your mind. Hey, you should check out all that weird stuff on the news channels, and good luck!”

  “Thanks, Bob,” he replied as his primary subjective flitted off, leaving his proxxi to guide his body home, “and good luck to you to!”

  Both Martin and I waved goodbye, and then sat silently for a few minutes, enjoying the sea, sky and silence.

  Martin looked down awkwardly. He was struggling with something.

  “Bob, we should probably have a chat. I want to understand what’s going on with you.”

  I looked down too.

  “Yeah, I’ve been wanting to talk to you too…”

  Maybe the time was right to bring up the gorilla in the room, but just then my metasenses started tingling.

  “… but maybe in a few minutes?” I blurted out.

  I detached my primary subjective point of view to spin it far out into the Pacific. My viewpoint coasted in just above the water, following a monster swell that was making its way towards us. It was huge, at least twenty feet deep, even out in the open ocean, and as I followed, it sprayed and frothed angrily, surging powerfully towards the glimmering speck of Atopia in the distance.

  “This is the one I’ve been waiting for! I totally want to talk, but could I catch this wave first?”

  I snapped hard back into my body and, using a phantom, punched up a visual overlay of how this wave would be breaking in a few minutes.

  “No problem,” Martin laughed, pointing at the simulation. “Oh yeah, that’s gonna be huge!”

  The wave would peak at nearly forty feet and generate an almond shaped pipe that would continuously sweep past the northern crescent for more than two miles. The system selected an optimal drop-in point and I quickly plotted some possible surf paths from ideas I had. It was a big wave and I’d have to travel fast to catch it right. The triangular fin of a shark I’d commandeered appeared, slicing through the water behind me, and I reached out to catch it and began racing across the water.

  “Nice,” said Martin.

  We skimmed the waves, the wind barely ruffling his hair. He was admiring my handiwork on the projection floating between us.

  “So you’re going to pull a dead man stall, switch back to hide in the barrel and then finish with a rocket Tchaikovsky to back hang two?”

  “Yes sir, that’s the plan,” I replied with a grin. “Hey can you switch to the back with everyone else so I can get this show on the road?”

  Martin disappeared, and I let go of the shark’s fin and leaned forward on my board to begin paddling to the drop in, taking big, clean strokes. As the social cloud buzzed about the impending ride, my dimstim stats began surging as thousands of people stimswitched into me to enjoy the ride.

  It was a funny feeling knowing that thousands of people were inside my skin. I couldn’t feel anything but I could sense it, and it sent shivers down my spine. As I snapped my full water–sense into place, the world dropped away, my senses sharpened and I began quickening.

  With smarticles infused throughout pssi-kids’ nervous systems from birth, we’d quickly picked up on the trick of quickening by using smarticles to accelerate the conduction of nerve signals along axons. We could literally amp up the speed of our nervous systems this way on command, but only in short bursts as we depleted energy stored in the smarticles, and, more problematically, began to overheat our brains.

  Quickening the body was one thing, but quickening the mind was entirely something else. It had to be managed in a very controlled fashion so as not to lose conscious coherence in the seat of the mind where it all came together. Like anything, it took time, patience and training to build up this capacity, and when it came to quickening, like surfing, I was one of the best.

  With each breath, I concentrated on accelerating the quickening, feeling the world slow down as I sped up. Switching my visual field into surround mode, I literally had eyes in the back of my head—I closed my eyes as my visual cortex adjusted to the 360 degree view.

  I focused instead on the ripples of water coming through my water–sense and the sinews in my shoulders and back stretching and pulling me across the surface as I accelerated my paddling tempo, quickly gathering speed to match the incoming monster. It began to grow behind me, rolling up and into my skin, surging towards and into me.

  My board angled forward and began to skim faster and faster. With a final stroke I opened my eyes, grabbed my board and popped up onto it, leaning forward to accelerate as the wave urged me on. It wasn’t really behind me, the wave was me. I could feel it swelling through my water–sense as if my body was expanding and peaking, with little bits of me frothing off the top as it began to crest.

  My board sped down the face of the wave as it began to break, and then I slowed as I neared its base and stepped to the back of the board, almost stalling as I sank back down a little. I smiled and waved to the crowds on the beach, and a collective gasp went up as they watched the monster booming down behind me.

  An instant before disaster I jumped forward and cut the board back into the wave to sail up its rushing face. As the wave roared around the northern crescent, I started snapping a series of turns back and forth off its top. Nearing my finale, I finished with an acrobatic turn that dropped me freefalling into the thundering maw of the beast. The crowds on the distant beach squealed with excitement at my disappearing silhouette.

  The noise inside was deafening, and it used all of my quickened water–sense to fall feet first onto the board and navigate the roaring and rushing world of foam. Crouching low, almost hugging my board, I let myself slide backwards as I was sucked into the back of the roaring whirlpool, my senses merging with it into a singularity, cradling my fragile body in a delicately maintained balance.

  At the last moment, I leaned forward and accelerated away from the maelstrom at the back of the barrel. A crazily spinning translucent tunnel opened up ahead of me, revealing bright daylight beyond, and I eased ever further forward. I began to stand up taller and walked towards the front of my board and turned around.

  Tchaikovsky was playing loudly in my dimstim now and I closed my eyes to begin conducting. I shot backwards out of the mouth of the barrel, propelled by a powerful jet from the collapsing tube. I back-hanged my two heels off the front, now with just the tips of my toes on the nose of the board.

  Beginning to slow, I opened my eyes and turned around to walk towards the back of the board, listening to the mad applause from the thousands of dimstimmers who had enjoyed the show. The world began to return to normal time as I released the quickening, feeling the burning heat within my body begin to ease off. Sighing happily, I sank back into the water and straddled my board to float again gently in the water.

  Martin appeared back on the nose of my board, giving me a little golf clap.

  “Nice show, buddy. That was awesome!”

  “Thank you, thank you very much,” I said, wiping the water from my face as I looked around happily, and then looked back at Martin and the tourists still clapping on the beach. I couldn’t resist showing off again.

  The water began to thicken up around me as I summoned tens of millions of tiny zooplankton up from the depths below. I kept them near me when surfing, just in case.

  With a few carefully placed kicks
I levitated up out of the water, forcing millions of my little friends to treadmill their hardest just at the right point to support each step, and then I stood right up on the water and took a few steps to bow to the crowds with a flourish.

  This brought gasps and more pointing from the tourists—they can walk on water!

  Sinking back down, I grabbed onto my board again and dispersed my little helpers. Martin was shaking his head, grinning widely.

  “That last part was a bit much,” he laughed, but I could sense a certain glumness.

  “Buddy, you have to lighten up…live a little.”

  I immediately regretted my choice of words, but Martin didn’t notice anything. I slicked back my hair again, trying to stop the water from streaming down into my eyes.

  “Are you going to come out camping with me and Willy and Sid and the boys later?” I asked after a little reflection.

  “Am I invited?”

  “Of course,” I laughed.

  “And you’re going to continue surfing today, even with the storm warnings in effect?”

  “Come on, Martin…”

  “Okay, anyway, I’ll see you later, camping will be great,” Martin responded brightly. “I just worry about you sometimes.”

  I nodded.

  “Are we still going to have that chat?”

  “Maybe later.”

  The moment had passed for him too.

  “I have a lot of stuff to get done. You be careful with those storms brewing out there, could swing in some weird waves.”

  “I will, I promise, and I’ll see you later,” I replied with a small salute.

  With that, Martin nodded and winked as he signed off and faded from view.

  5

  HOW IN THE WORLD did I get roped into attending a baby shower for a proxxid?

  It seemed everyone was having a simulated baby these days, but Nicky had somehow convinced me to come to this event. Anyway, wasn’t a baby shower supposed to be before the baby was born? This and many other questions filled my mind as we arrived in the entertainment metaworld created for the event. I was immediately dragged over to the Strong family for the obligatory salutations.

  “Congratulations Commander Strong!” I said enthusiastically, smiling as I reached out to pump his hand.

  Rick smiled back and shook my hand vigorously, rolling his eyes slightly.

  “Thanks Bob.”

  “And of course congratulations to the lovely new proxxid mother,” I laughed, reaching over to kiss his wife Cindy on the cheek, looking down at the baby in her arms.

  “…and this lovely lady is?” asked Commander Strong, looking towards my date.

  “Ah shit, ah, I mean, oh shoot,” I mumbled, turning to introduce my newish girlfriend. “This is Nicky. Hey do you want a drink?”

  Nicky shot me a tight lipped smile, shaking her head, and turned to graciously introduce herself to the Strongs. I nodded and smiled, leaving them to it, and wandered off towards the alcohol stand. Maybe she didn’t want a drink, but I sure did.

  I sighed.

  A baby shower. How did I let these things happen to me?

  Any party was, however, a great reason to get stoned. With that thought, I popped a tab of MDMA from my pocket into my mouth. Virtual drugs weren’t bad, but they weren’t quite the authentic experience, and I liked to style myself as a retro abuser. Ah, now I was rolling with the champions. Just another great day in the world of Bobtopia.

  I grabbed a drink and walked over to sit down on a couch. We were now waiting for some last person to show up to sing the birthday song. Actually, we weren’t really waiting, since everyone everywhere knew exactly where everyone else was at any moment.

  We were just, well, what the hell were we doing? I guessed we were waiting, but we all knew exactly how long we had to wait. There was a difference, wasn’t there? Or perhaps we had reached the end of waiting, and were now embodying some new verb that defined what waiting was when we all knew exactly how long we had to wait.

  I decided then and there I was going to call it phwaiting and immediately published this inspiration into my social cloud. With my creative work done for the day, I scanned some Phuture News flowing across the bottom of my display spaces. More celebrities were about to drop dead or start doing tons of drugs or stop doing them and go into rehab.

  Boring.

  Flicking my phantoms, I opened an overlay and researched the definition of ‘wait’: transitive verb—to stay in place in expectation of. I guess we didn’t need a cool new word as this seemed to amount to what we were doing. Already, my proxxi Robert was splintering me over four thousand variations on the idea of waiting from the remaining distinct human languages.

  The character of my inspiration suddenly hollowed. I posted an announcement regarding the death of phwaiting back into my social cloud and watched the meme explode and die.

  At the same time, a fast trending news report splintered that the Chinese were talking about sending a manned mission to Mars. It had been about thirty years since China had landed men on the moon again, on their best guess of Mao’s birthday one holiday season, but their plans at a permanent moon base had fizzled when water deposits had proven harder to extract than imagined. Now their new grand plans just seemed ludicrous, even if Mars and half of the rest of our solar system seemed to be practically teeming with life.

  Why spend any time or effort moving a physical body around when you could just flit anywhere in an instant using sensor networks? Everything that was happening in the outside world seemed so amazingly wasteful and nonsensical to those of us who lived on the inside of Atopia—but then again, soon everyone would be as blessed as us.

  Bored, I collapsed most of my displays and opened up an overlay to watch a new game the boys had started. Sid, Vicious, Martin and my own proxxi Robert were already hot into some apocalyptic other-world battle, pinned down in a cave by an android army, flanked by giant armored worms. It looked like a lot more fun than what I was doing, so I tried to splinter in but Sid blocked me. He was right. Either I had to be there fully or not at all. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of them. Anyway, I could just joyride in Robert if I wanted.

  The rest of my displays held forth on a multitude of other live wikiworld feeds. The Bieb was just delivering his inaugural address as the 52nd President of the United States, and in an interesting first was singing the first few lines of his speech. I guess the Bieb Bill had passed.

  In another feed, Manchester United had scored in a Premier League game, and they’d begun replaying the goal with a stimcast of the hapless LA goalie that ended with him crashing face first into one of the goalposts, breaking his nose in a bloody explosion of pain. What they managed to broadcast was a pale reflection of what his pain would have really felt like.

  Nervenet sensory broadcast technology was still in its infancy outside Atopia, but all that would be fixed with the release of pssi. Flicking off the news feeds, I focused back on the pitched battle the boys were in. Someone had just blown Martin’s head off. I shook my head. Martin was hopeless.

  I checked my dimstim stats, and a few dozen people were still logged into my body. Christ, I was bored out of my head and there were still people who would prefer to be me than do whatever boring shit they could be doing on their own.

  Glancing at my biostats, I could see that my heart rate was hovering in the mid-forties, my cortisol was a little high, my insulin low, but all systems go and things would be moving around soon as the MDMA hit. Looking good Bob, I told myself, if your heart rate were any lower you’d slip into a coma—and that sounds pretty good about now.

  The room was crowded, with people milling about industriously, getting drinks, engaging in small talk, doing whatever tiring stuff adults did at a baby shower. One side of the room was lined with retro–modern impressionists to match the sleek, minimal décor of the world they’d created for the event. The other side was a terrace, open to the outside, looking down from a few stories up onto the leafy beach promenade of east A
topia.

  Sulking seemed like a good option at this point while I waited for the drugs to hit my bloodstream, so I opened up Bunnies and sent a sub–proxxi to get me another drink. Innocent little rabbits appeared floating in space in front of me, exiting their underground warrens, sniffing the ground for food.

  I flicked my finger at one of them, and a fireball magically issued forth, flaming towards the hapless little creature. It looked up, confused, and then squealed as the fireball engulfed it, spasming in agony and squeaks as its fur incinerated. The other rabbits ducked for cover, and then slowly crawled back out to sniff at their erstwhile compadre.

  My eyes narrowed as I lined up the next victim.

  “Bob, what are you doing?” came a subtext from Nicky. “Could we just be a little sociable?”

  I grumbled and shut off Bunnies.

  Lucky little bastard didn’t know how close he came to the big ticket.

  The sub–proxxi was back with my drink by now and I thanked him, taking the proffered drink for a sip. Turning off my kinetic collision subsystems, I rolled out of the couch’s embrace and stood up to stride purposefully through one of the remote guests, a round, balding little man who affected a shocked look. Served him right if the best he could do was project a round, balding image; someone should tell him he can look anyway he wanted.

  My brazen etiquette violation earned some raised eyebrows, but it felt way too crowded in here, so I decided on further anti–social behavior and flipped my pssi off at everyone. The lush environment of the entertainment world immediately disappeared as I slipped into identity mode, and the featureless confines of the small, rectangular room we were actually in appeared around me.

  I felt better, taking another gulp of my drink, feeling refreshed as my own senses connected me to the world, when things took on a suddenly colorful sheen. On the other hand, that could be the Ecstasy kicking in.

  The few people that remained in the small room were mostly in a corner near Nicky, who was still chatting with Cindy Strong, now cradling empty space in her arms.