Bob nodded. Getting in touch with Terra Nova was the next logical step. Ever since the attack on Atopia, though, Terra Nova had been blockaded in the physical and cyber realms. Secure communication from this side of the world was difficult, so they needed to get physically closer. “Way ahead of you,” said Sid, uploading the details. Deanna had already arranged transit for them on the New York passenger cannon, to Lagos in Africa.
“What about Sintil8?” Willy asked. His image flickered.
Terra Nova linked the connection between Willy’s mind—in his lost body—and Willy’s virtual presence here, and they were having trouble maintaining the connection. Bob worried that it might wink out altogether, exiling Willy into the outer reaches of the multiverse.
Vince smiled. “Leave the gangsters to me.” His future-altering espionage and counter-espionage network had tentacles reaching into the underworld. “I think it’s time we switched gears. I’ll be in New York the day after tomorrow. There’s not much more I can do in the Commune.”
“Perfect.” Sid fiddled with his phantoms, uploading data into Vince’s networks. “After we pick up some more bootleg smarticles, tonight Bob and I are going to Hell.”
9
IN THE BLUE daytime sky, Wormwood was just visible to the naked eye. The comet’s dust-and-ion tails separated as it neared the sun, turning it into a tiny feathery “v” in the sky. Vince glanced at Zephyr, his chaperone on the hike past the perimeter of the Commune.
They had walked out on foot, two miles each way for some fresh air. Vince had needed to get outside of the Commune’s perimeter to get communication uplink, to talk with Sid and Bob back in New York. No comms in or out from under the radiation shield. A splinter of Vince’s mind was still lounging on a chair in Herald Square, chatting with Willy and Sid, but his main subjective was back at the edge of the Commune with Zephyr, staring into the sky at the comet.
Vince shielded his eyes from the sun with one hand. “Quite the sight, huh?”
Zephyr nodded, his mouth open, staring up. “Grandpa says people are bringing it here on purpose, that it’s one of the signs.”
Vince rolled his eyes. Sign of what? That people on Earth were doing bat-shit-nuts things like building Communes? But as crazy as what they were doing was, a part of him was fascinated. Below the surface of the Commune was a network of tunnels built into the bedrock of the mountains. The Commune wasn’t just an alternate-Amish experiment—it was a fortress for the end of times. He respected their dedication. More than that, these were genuinely nice people. That was a rare thing in this world.
And he had to admit, he felt safe inside the Commune’s perimeter.
When Vince shared that Willy wasn’t running Willy’s body anymore, the Reverend helped Vince track down what Willy’s body had been doing inside the Commune. After talking to the town librarian, they discovered that Willy’s body had been reading old manuscripts, ancient copies of Gnostic texts that detailed the Apocalypse. Hoarding ancient texts like this was the sort of thing the Commune was famous for, the prototype for hundreds of copycat doomsday cults that were sprouting up around the world.
“Do you really buy into all that stuff?” Vince asked, still staring at the comet.
“And ye will know the truth, and it shall make you free,” Zephyr replied. It was early morning, and the grass underfoot was stiff with the frost of the night before. He turned to face Vince. “Do you know what apocalypse means?”
A drone buzzed past them, darting back and forth to capture motes of spent aerial-plankton that fell like snow, collecting them to return to the recycling center. The rising sun lit up the face of the mountain behind the Commune village in the distance.
Vince shrugged. “Death? Destruction? The end of days?”
“No.” Zephyr looked down from the heavens. “Apocalypse is a Greek word, and it literally means ‘lifting of the veil.’ ”
“So something is about to be revealed?” Vince didn’t mean to edge his words with sarcasm, but they rolled out that way.
“You might not think much of me, Mr. Indigo, but some of the world’s most respected people have joined the Communes.”
“Sorry, Zeph, I didn’t mean it like that.” Vince was well aware of the weekly roll call of new “Communistas”—mediums, celebrities, actors, retired politicians, famous scientists. There wasn’t just one Commune. This one was the largest, but there were dozens around the world.
“Many come to escape, as you did to Atopia. But on Atopia you try to cover the real world—reality skins, virtual worlds, limitless sensory stimulation. The Communes have been trying to cut through that, to see things more clearly.”
They’d re-entered the perimeter now, and Vince’s virtual reality systems and communications cut off again. He stared at the grass at his feet while he walked, dewdrops from the thawing frost glistening in the slanting sunshine. Going back outside the perimeter and reactivating his body’s smarticle network felt like sliding a comfortable sheath around his senses, a plastic version of reality.
Now he felt . . . what?
More alive?
“Make no mistake, Mr. Indigo.” Zephyr clenched his jaw and looked into the sky at the comet. “The War in Heaven has begun.”
10
“HOLY SHIT, SID, what the hell did you do?”
Bob felt like he was dropping into the bowels of the underworld as the elevator sank into the depths. Visions of Cerberus slavering over the entrance to the spirit lands raised a spine of fur on the nape of Bob’s feline neck.
“Hell,” Sid giggled, “is exactly right.”
While New York “above ground” had stayed more or less the same for the past century, New York below was something else. It’d become an endless network of tunnels burrowing below the same bedrock that supported the crumbling skyscrapers reaching into the sky above. Day and night, city-block-long automated earthworm diggers churned through the foundations of Manhattan, burrowing it out.
Hollowing below was cheaper than building above.
Their elevator had arrived just seconds before—a sleek white egg propelled through the pneumatic tube system that fed the Purgatory Entertainment District, deep beneath the streets of Midtown.
“No chaperones allowed,” Sid warned. Bio-synthetics, like proxxi, were banned underground after a spate of psombie intrusions. Sid and Bob turned off the connections to their proxxi. You had to be yourself when entering Purgatory.
“We need to fit in,” Sid said as the elevator dropped. “If we go to Hell looking straight we’ll stand out like sore thumbs. We have to blend in. Consider this camouflage.”
Bob blinked and tried to focus. “What do you mean, fit in?”
Sid’s usual skin of a battered jacket, ripped jeans, and sarcasm had been replaced with a muscular-looking werewolf. Bob reached up to scratch his head but discovered a paw smoothing down the fur over his long ears.
It was his paw.
Sid patted Bob’s head. “I slipped some synthetic-K into your pssi channels and dressed us up for the party.”
The plastic walls of the elevator egg shimmered before Bob’s eyes. The last thing he remembered was closing off some details with Robert, knowing that he’d have to turn his proxxi off, and then everything went sideways. Sid must have slipped the K into his meta-cognition systems. It wasn’t a real drug, more like a virus Sid had infected his networks with. “Turn it off, Sid. This isn’t the time for one of your pranks.”
The elevator slowed.
“You need to loosen up.” Sid’s fanged mouth affected his lopsided grin. “Have a laugh with me, just for a few minutes? When we make the connection, I’ll turn it off and firewall a private meeting space.”
The egg rotated open.
The yolk of Bob’s mind slid out ahead of them, assaulted by the onslaught of the Purgatory entranceway. Pounding music poured out from a maelstrom flecked with d
istant lightning storms as it sucked the contents of the lobby into the spinning entrance portal.
A zoopharm of creatures thronged the waiting area. Some were in humanoid forms, but many were in fantastical shapes as old school met new in a trendy retro mash-up. Time-shifting faeries spun golden trails of temporal pixie dust in tight curls, while goblins danced aloft with fiery dragons sporting necklaces of shimmering sensory mirrors. In one corner a mass of snakes circled a dancing clutch of witches, and in the other a gang of neon pink babies shared a joint.
Everywhere Bob’s sensory spaces glittered and sparkled.
Hundreds waited in the shared pre-party space, and catching a glimpse of a stoned satyr passed out in the corner, Bob realized that for many this was as far as they went.
An uplifted gorilla in body armor poised as bouncer on the metal gangway spanning from the lobby into the black hole at the center of the entrance. Names floated in pssi-space in front of the Grilla, and with a huge paw it pecked them off. The individuals selected, up and down the hallway, sparkled in highlights before being sucked off into the center of the vortex.
“Follow me.” Sid grabbed one of Bob’s paws. Walking through the crowd, Sid released a weapon of mass seduction that cast a spell of sexual attraction, morphing their skins into objects of desire for everyone they passed based on analyses of likes and dislikes distilled from social cloud data.
Bob watched his mind follow its process, the step-by-step rationalization of the decision to enjoy the drugs for a few more minutes. What was the harm? It’d been a long time since he and Sid even had a minute to enjoy themselves. Just like the old days. The synthetic-K was settling in nicely. Maybe he could give this just a few more minutes.
Walking up the causeway to the Grilla, Sid announced himself. The Grilla’s fur bristled, its nostrils flaring. It was aroused—was it female? Bob could only guess what it saw as they arrived.
“Yeah sure,” the Grilla rumbled. Sid made a deal. “Go to Hell, boys.”
In an instant they were sucked through the eye of the spinning storm of Purgatory and into Hell.
In reality, such as it was, Hell was a moldy and silent room packed with people. With pssi, though, it pulsed alive in an orgy of sensory stimulation as Hell’s professional sense-shifting artists warped the partygoers’ realities together with the customized sensory landscapes of the bar.
Each person’s sound environment was based on their own musical preferences, merged with the beats and themes spun out from the sense jockeys hovering above the dance floors. Right now they were threading out a high beat-per-minute techno that was fusing into Bob’s new wave break beats to birth a syncopated, bass-heavy sound that was just perfect for his wandering mind.
Passing some immortal Goths on the dance floor, the music Bob heard shifted from drum-and-bass-inspired hardcore into industrial coldwave, and then his tunes morphed into freeform happy hardcore as they stopped to watch some pssi-boys and pssi-girls breaking it down in displays of neuroplastic gymnastics on the dance floor.
Sid collected drinks from a bartender and poured one of them into a bowl. Bob lapped it up while Sid surveyed the masses of bodies undulating before him like a raptor hovering above a kill. “Not bad, huh?”
Bob was already licking the bottom of his empty bowl. “Give me the key to unlock this synthetic-K.” He shook his head. “This is too much.”
Sid’s fangs showed at the edges of his smile. “Ask me one more time and I’ll unlock it.”
The pulsing sensorgy around them thrummed through Bob’s senses. He couldn’t argue that he wasn’t enjoying it. Just five more minutes. He shrugged. “So who are we meeting?”
“They’re going to find us.” Sid motioned toward some couches in the middle of the dance floor. “Why don’t we chill over there?”
Bob began wobbling over. The sense jockey started spinning more down-tempo themes, complete with fluorescent visual traces and a hypnotic aromatic scent that vibrated through the atmosphere. Bob looked back as he walked, watching his feet leave a phosphorescent trail across the floor. Weaving dancers flashed stuttering optical tracks and strobing fireballs against a black night sky.
He let his mind slide down the rabbit hole.
“Hey, boys,” came a voice amid the jumbled colors, “how you doing?”
Bob shook his head. From the melee crowding his visual systems, the image of a young woman distilled itself—or rather, the image of a large pink cat woman.
“My name’s Sibeal,” she purred. Her tail flicked back and forth, touching Sid.
Bob was collapsed on the couch, swimming in a sensory overload. “Turn off the synthetic-K, Sid, this is too much . . .”
“That might be her,” Sid said on a private channel. “Give me a minute.”
Bob shook his head. We have to stay together, he meant to say, but Sid disappeared into the crowd.
The sensory overlay of the couches gave the impression that dozens of hands were caressing him, and Bob shivered as he felt it kick in. He pulled his legs up onto the couch in a semi-fetal position.
He could wait a minute.
The pssi-boys and pssi-girls in front of him were putting on a great show, spinning and gyrating as their bodies morphed with the beat of the music. One of them transitioned from two arms to four arms to six and then into a humanoid-millipede form that wormed around a spinning dance move. The dynamics and physics of this multi-legged body shifted perfectly as he morphed from one form to another. The dancer’s real body appeared underneath the pssi overlay as the music stuttered, doing its best to mimic the synthetic body’s motion that the kid was controlling.
The music stopped and the space filled with a pink mist of ionized vanilla. Bob frowned. Where was Sid? He was pretty sure it had been more than “a minute”. The caressing hands of the couch slackened, and applause filled the room.
In the fog Bob saw a familiar shape, standing out of place, but he couldn’t focus his mind.
The general announcement channel sounded in Bob’s auditory channels. “Let’s hear it for SJ Sanjeeve!”
The applause grew louder.
Who was that? The shape became more distinct.
“And now what you’ve all been waiting for, Atopia’s own Kid Psssssssi–cho!”
A cheer went up through the crowd, and the room dropped into blackness.
“That’s Jimmy,” Bob said aloud, ripping himself up from the couch’s embrace. Or was it? Bob’s mind had congealed under the influence of the drugs.
The pink mist faded into a red-orange grayness, and a sub-audio vibration shook Bob’s flesh. The ground transmogrified itself into a rippling lake with tenuous wisps of vapor clinging to its surface. As the dancers around Bob shuffled their feet, they sent out waves like they were walking on water. A few of them laughed and began kicking up splashes at each other.
The fog lifted and craggy terra cotta mountains appeared ringing the distant horizon beneath a burnt orange, star-speckled sky. The bone-shaking vibrations of the music mounted in urgency. Through the dissipating fog, the rings of Saturn appeared suspended in the sky, stretching impossibly far up above the dance floor that was perched precariously on its edge. A methane storm cloud was rolling quickly across the horizon, roiling across the mountain ridges as it descended on the crowd.
The dance hall had been patched into the sensor-mote network on Titan, at Kraken Mare near its north pole.
Bob reached out into the familiar hyperspaces that connected him with Sid, but he felt nothing. He tried pinging Robert for help, but realized his proxxi channels were locked down. He sloshed through the methane lake, squinting into the crowd.
The audio wound itself into a keening shriek, and the first globs of methane rain started falling onto the crowd, splashing into the lake, sending vapor shooting upward. On cue, the music dropped into a planet-shaking bass rhythm that sent waves through the lake, to
ppling boulders down the mountainsides in the distance. The crowd went crazy, bursting into dance, jamming all of Bob’s sensory channels.
Where was Sid?
“NO USE TRYING to get any outgoing, mate.” The man in front of Sid slapped the smooth bedrock wall to make his point. “No signals get through this.” He reached a hand out. “Shaky.”
Sid clicked off the synthetic-K coursing through his pssi. The world came into focus. Who was this guy? He studied the close-cropped gray stubble atop the little man’s head and reached out to take his hand. No data on him appeared in Sid’s displays, no future prediction models, no nerve conduction potentials he could tap into to figure out what was coming. “ ‘Shaky?’ ” Sid asked. “You mean like ‘shaky hands?’ ”
The man pumped Sid’s hand, smiling and crinkling his nose. “No, mate, my name is Shaky.”
The guy next to Shaky put out his hand too. “Bunky.”
Sid let go of Shaky’s hand and shook Bunky’s. “Sid.”
The girl Sid had made contact with in the main hall, Sibeal, strode into the communal bathroom. “We need to go now!” She shifted out of her reality skin into worn cargo pants, a black tank top, and a grim expression.
A second ago the bathroom had been filled with partygoers, but they’d all exited as if on cue.
Shaky and Bunky’s smiles had disappeared as well.
They were the only ones there.
One instant was all it took for Sid’s world to change. It took just fractions of a second to realize it was a trap, but it was fractions too late. Sid unleashed a barrage of jamming across all radio frequencies, sending splinters out to hack into the digital infrastructure around him. He logged into the bathroom taps, the hand dryer, the sensory transponders above the sinks, the advertising hologram hanging behind Sibeal, but it was no use.
They had him cold. Flooding his gray matter with smarticles, he quickened, dropping to the floor as Bunky and Shaky reached for him.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 6
