“Horowitz the mastermind scientist!” Vince thumped the table and shook his head. “I just always imagined your surname . . . ah, never mind. It doesn’t have a bad ring to it, on second thought.”
The main living area, attached to the front of the aging farmhouse, was more of the type of thing Bob was used to on Atopia—lignin-based bio-thermoplastics curving smoothly into an oval dome thirty feet high and fifty feet across, climate controlled as phase-shifting particles in the membrane shell regulated heat and molecular flow across its boundary. Sparrows were nesting at its apex, darting around.
“Want some breakfast?” asked Deanna, busy cooking at the stove. She was an old friend of Vince’s, from way back. “I mean, when your body gets down here.” She was still getting used to the way the Atopians flitted around their conscious points-of-view. “And since we have all the masterminds at the table now, could you explain to me what happened to Willy’s body again?”
Bob nodded, and an angular-armed bot on top of the refrigerator opened itself and handed a packet of gro-bacon to Deanna. Communal eating was just one more in a list of things Bob was getting used to. He glanced at Sid, expecting him to answer Deanna, but Sid was already lost to the world again—optimizing the geothermal regulator under the farm, rearranging the drone scheduling, doing a systems analysis of the mixture of crops in the surrounding fields. Like a chameleon he melted into his surroundings; he’d already added cowboy boots to his usual repertoire of ragged jeans and t-shirts. Bob wished he could lose himself so easily.
“It was my fault,” Willy’s avatar offered, glancing at Brigitte. “I was trying to make money by splintering my mind into hundreds of pieces, trying to be everywhere at once in the stock markets.” He looked at the table. “What I was doing was illegal, at least at the time, so I tried to hide it by rerouting my conscious stream through an anonymous connection on Terra Nova.”
Deanna turned to Willy from her cooking and crinkled her nose. “But how did that lead to losing yourself, or I mean, your body?”
Willy forced a grin. “At a certain point I was so widely splintered that I lost track of home base, so to speak, and that’s when my proxxi took off with my body.”
Deanna frowned. “He stole it? I thought your proxxi friends were there to protect you.” She glanced at the table of proxxi—Hotstuff, Robert, Vicious, and Bardot—sitting around an identical table in a virtual projection next to the gang.
“That,” Bob interjected, “is exactly the mystery. We think he was protecting Willy, but we don’t know from what.”
“From myself,” Willy muttered, and Brigitte squeezed his virtual hand.
“And you have family in the Commune?” Deanna asked. “That’s why you want to get in there?”
Willy nodded. “Yeah, my mother. If I hadn’t been so stupid, none of us would be here . . .”
Bob shook his head. “That’s not true, Willy, there’s bigger things going on.”
“And this has to do with that virus that infected the virtual reality systems on Atopia, those fake storms that nearly wrecked the place?”
Vince held up a hand. “Sorry, Deanna, as I said before, we can’t say more. And we really appreciate your help.”
She arched her eyebrows and returned to the stove. “All those things they’re saying about you in the mediaworlds, you could stop all that just by coming out—”
Vince cut her off. “We just need to get into the Commune.”
Shrugging and smiling, Deanna scooped the bacon and eggs onto a plate.
Bob took a deep breath. Nearly six weeks of waiting, a month and a half of letting the dust settle, and this was where they were—still waiting for approval to enter the Commune. Vince thought it best if they all stayed together. The Commune’s agents liked things to move slowly during their process. Bob shook his head. “This is such a waste of time.” He looked at Willy and Brigitte. “I mean we need to get searching, do something. Not just sit here.”
Sid looked up, dragging his attention away from his virtual workspaces. “Hey, calm down, we’re all a little itchy from switching to the new smarticles, your body is going into withdrawal—”
“What the hell are you doing optimizing the farm’s geothermal pumps?” With his phantom hands, Bob stood up and grabbed Sid’s virtual workspaces and pulled them into primary reality for everyone to see. “Shouldn’t you be trying to find Willy’s body?”
“Hey!” Sid grabbed his workspaces back and filed them away. “I am searching for Willy, but there’s only so much I can do.”
Vince reached out and tried to get Bob to sit back down. “Patience, young man, patience. We have a plan, we’ll stick to the plan.”
Bob shook him off. “And who put you in charge?” Spinning a splinter of his mind into the fields around the farm, he checked a tripped motion sensor, but it was just a stray buffalo calf.
“In charge?” Vince laughed. “Are you kidding? Anyway, isn’t all this what Patricia wanted?”
The poly-synthetic sensory interface—pssi—product release by Cognix had worked as planned. Over a billion users had joined in the first six weeks since its release, but, like many start-ups, operational demands caught up and slowed it down. More important was that it had started to work in its world-saving ambitions. Just two months from release and there’d been no new flare-ups in the Weather Wars, and projected birth rate indicators seemed to be dropping.
“Then why the heck did she send us out here?” Bob shot back. The release of pssi was having the effect that Patricia had created the entire Atopian project for—to push humankind on a new path away from material consumption and into a new world of virtual consumption—but was Jimmy still the threat to the program that she’d imagined?
Bob’s body, inhabited by his proxxi, finally came walking down the stairs, but Bob decided to keep his own point-of-view fixed in his virtual self. As Bob’s body seated itself at the table, Deanna walked over and dropped the plate of fried eggs and toast in front of it, and Robert, Bob’s proxxi, started using Bob’s body to eat it.
“I’m done waiting.” Bob fidgeted and spun his viewpoint out around the farm again, but then in the corner of one eye he saw his body’s hand pick up a strip of bacon. “Hey, none of that!” His body was getting fat from all this sitting around, and bacon wasn’t going to help.
His proxxi, Robert, looked at Bob from his own eyes and smiled. “No need to yell.” He diverted the bacon onto the floor for Deanna’s ever-watchful dog.
“Sometimes, I don’t know why I put up with you,” Bob fumed at his proxxi. It was intended to be rhetorical.
“Ever wonder if I think the same thing?” his proxxi replied without skipping a beat.
Because you have no choice, Bob thought but didn’t say.
“I think we’re all getting a little stir crazy.” Deanna wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “The bots need some help loading lumber, and I need to scan a package in town. How about coming in with me?”
“Sure,” mumbled Bob. “I’ll flit in when you’re on your way.”
Deanna rolled her eyes. “I meant you in your body, Bob.”
3
THE PICKUP TRUCK bounced its way along the gravel road under a clear Montana sky. Bob rolled down his window to get some air, letting his viewpoint escape and spin out above the fields.
Golden fields of summer oats, ready for harvest, swayed in the breeze. Between them, the green shoots of the secondary harvests rose up through their ranks with the winter wheat. Thickets of sunflowers dotted the landscape, alongside clumps of sugar beets in leafy-green patches, barley, and more. The traditional dry land farming of the area had turned wetter and warmer in past years, while much of the southernmost plains had returned to the dustbowl of more than a hundred years earlier.
Swarms of ornithopter beebots hovered between the swaying wheat and oats, while crawlers and mulebots scoured the ground. The
robotic harvesting ecosystem was powered by both the sun and waste organic matter that the crawlers brought back to the hives where it was combusted for energy. The harvest was in full swing, but it wasn’t really farming anymore—at least, not like it used to be.
When Bob came outside, Deanna was kneeling, picking up a handful of earth and staring at the horizon. “I often wonder what my daddy would have thought of all this,” she said.
A generation ago, a strain of genetically modified crops—which grew sulphuric acid in their stems at the end of the seasonal cycle—had been experimented with to eliminate tillage. The trials were abandoned, but not before the gene jumped into the wild, burning away a swath of America before it was stopped. With traditional farming already on its last legs, a Defense-sponsored program to root out the damage and replant the Great Plains with semi-wild perennial crops began, using robotic drones to tend and harvest the multicrop.
“Did your family own the place a long time?” Bob asked as they drove into town. Not everything was in the databases.
“A few generations of farmers. But it’s not like when I grew up here. Nobody left, not the old ones, anyway.”
Perennials and robotics had saved the heartland, reducing emissions and erosion, but it had also eliminated the need for humans. Most of the center of America, away from the coasts, became deserted, with herds of reintroduced buffalo again roaming the skeletons of ghost towns strewn across the plains. Food production slid under control of the newly formed Defense Agricultural Division. The Great Plains had become a drone-infested wilderness, and DAD was now feeding the country.
“So were you and Vince, well, were you ever . . .” Bob struggled to find the right words. He’d been itching to ask since they got here, but he was trying to resist his constant urges to pry. Everything about coming out here—hiding, staying quiet, confined to one place and one small group of people—ran against the grain of Bob’s character.
Deanna laughed. “Yes, we were. A long, long time ago. I met him when my family sent me to MIT to study robotic harvesting, to try to keep up.” She sighed. “And look where that got us.”
DAD had been created at the outbreak of the Weather Wars, when maintaining the food supply became a critical national security function—but it also had a darker purpose. The tens of millions of drones used in food production could be repurposed in the event of an attack, from inside or out. As their pickup truck rumbled its way along the gravel road into town, Sid was covering them, hacking into the sensor systems of the thousands of drones that were recording the truck’s passage, erasing the image of Bob sitting next to Deanna.
“When did you last see Vince?”
She laughed. “Before three weeks ago—when you all arrived—I hadn’t seen or heard from him in more than thirty years.”
“And you just took us in when he showed up on your doorstep?” Bob shook his head. He liked Vince, but the man had a way of taking people for granted that rubbed Bob the wrong way.
Deanna turned to look at Bob. “Vince isn’t so bad, you know. Sure, he can be conceited, loves to talk more than get things done—”
“Superior, controlling,” Bob continued for her.
“Someone’s in a bad mood,” laughed Deanna. “Yeah, all those things, and wouldn’t you be if you were him?” She shook her head. “But you know, he’s also incredibly clever, and no matter how shallow he can be sometimes, you’ll never find a more dedicated friend. He’s not used to dealing with real people.”
Now Bob laughed. “That’s a problem for everyone from Atopia.”
“That’s better.” Deanna smiled. “And you know what?”
The truck bounced on a rock in the road, knocking Bob into the air. He steadied himself. “What?”
“Ten years after Vince and I last spoke, twenty years ago now—just after PhutureNews started to take off—I received a message from the land registry people that someone bought the deed to my family’s farm.”
“What do you mean?” Bob had assumed she owned the place.
“When things went bad here, my family lost it after working the land for nearly a hundred years. But someone bought it and put it back into my name.” Tears welled in Deanna’s eyes. “I never found out who, but I know. That man looks after his own. Taking you in and hiding you was the least I could do.”
Bob looked away. He had to admit, Vince was dedicated. He’d spent a fortune already, and he never wavered. Bob turned back and smiled at Deanna. “He is a good guy, sorry, you’re right.”
Bob released his primary presence again to skim out above the fields. Coming up on the edge of town, they passed abandoned gas stations and grain silos and minimarts. Derelict farmhouses dotted the landscape. Further in the distance, larger, aggressive-looking new developments hugged the foothills. These were massive, a tribute to the new materialism version 2.0 that the explosion of the robotic ecosystem had brought to America. This area of Montana, along the eastern edge of the Rockies stretching up from Yellowstone, was one of the few areas of the interior of America experiencing an influx of new residents, but they weren’t here for the farming.
The reason was below, the magmatic upwelling that brought abundant geothermal power.
It was also the reason the Commune was here.
“IT’LL JUST TAKE me a minute to authenticate this package.” Deanna hopped out of the truck. “Why don’t you follow the bots to the lumber yard? I’ll be there in a sec.”
Bob sent a splinter to find out what a “lumber yard” meant. Thousands of references opened and he began assimilating the data. He eased down the lever that opened the aging pickup’s door, marveling at the mechanics of it. As he jumped out, the robotic carriers clambered out of the bed of the pickup, bouncing the truck up and down on its suspension.
Deanna watched him, amused. “Just follow the bots. They know where they’re going.” She closed her door.
Embarrassed, Bob closed down the lumber splinter. “Sure.”
The quad-bots, nearly as old and dented as the pickup, waited for a cargo transport to pass on the road before running in their awkwardly graceful trot toward a large building down the other side of the street. With a wave to Deanna, Bob burrowed his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and followed them.
It was nearing midday on Monday, and work crews from the surrounding area were stopping in for lunch in the town center. The wide sidewalks, built in an earlier and more optimistic time, felt empty. Trucks and cars competed with robots, legged carriers, and VTOL turbofans for parking spots along the side of the road. Bob scanned the faces he passed, sending splinters to hack and tap into the cameras and sensors nearby to search for anything that might be threatening. Just to be on the safe side, he initiated the identity-theft algorithm from Sid that morphed his ID from one person to the next as he passed them.
At the intersection he stopped and looked up at the traffic signals, the colored lights like ancient semaphores. A knot of workers emptied from a bar at the corner behind him. Bob couldn’t help staring at them, forgetting that he was staring from his physical body and not through an invisible ghost in the wikiworld.
“What you looking at, kid?” said one of the workers, the metal elbow of a robotic prosthetic limb poking through the ripped flannel of his shirt. He took a step forward, wobbling back and forth. Both of his legs had to be mechanical as well.
“Sorry.” Bob looked down and kept walking.
Many of the people here were mandroids of one form or another, Weather War veterans with wrecked bodies replaced by robotics. As ever, rural communities were providing more than their fair share of fodder for the Wars. Bob shook his head, a faraway splinter scanning the scorched earth around the city.
Something triggered an alarm.
Tensing, Bob flooded his body with smarticles, quickening his nervous system, the world slowing down as his mind sped up. Spinning, he shot backwards a few steps, reach
ing out to grab a young girl just as she tripped and fell out into the street. A transport growled past just inches from them.
The girl gasped.
More threat alarms triggered. Someone grabbed a weapon in the bar behind him. The emotional constructs of the workers nearby spiked into aggression, and a police camera focused on him. The attentional structure of the whole area zeroed in on Bob.
Reacting without thinking, Bob launched a protective wall into the surrounding digital infrastructure, throwing up one hand with a dozen phantoms that he spun around himself and the girl. Doors and windows rolled closed and locked, and the cars and transports passing in the street skidded to a halt. Overhead, turbofans were redirected away from the area. Screeching white noise filled the audio inputs of people nearby, doubling them over in pain, while he scrubbed the local data and video feeds, firewalling off this section of the wikiworld.
“Stop! Stop!” Deanna yelled, running up the sidewalk behind him. “He’s with me.”
Still crouching, Bob looked around. He watched Deanna running toward him in slow motion. The person in the bar with the weapon was kicking down the door Bob just locked. Bob scooped the girl into his arms, getting ready to bolt, and then Deanna was there. She leaned close and held him back.
“It’s okay, let her go,” Deanna whispered into his ear.
With a crash, the door to the bar shattered open and a man appeared holding a shotgun. The gang of workers had disengaged from the white noise attack. They realized where it had come from, and their emotive aggression constructs spiked into directed anger focused on Bob.
“It’s okay, Phil, this is just a mistake!” yelled Deanna, holding a hand up at the man with the shotgun. She repeated to Bob, “Let her go, it’s okay.”
The girl was breathing in quick panicked gasps in Bob’s arms. He released her, and with a cry she pushed him aside and ran toward the man with the shotgun, collapsing into his chest.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 2
