There was no way into the open multiverse.
He tried contacting Bob, tried to find a path out to send out emergency beacons, to deactivate Bob’s synthetic-K. Sid jumped sideways and bounced off a wall around his attackers. The world slowed down. He twisted and spun. The path to the entrance in front of him cleared. He just needed one . . . more . . . step . . . and then the entrance filled with the hulking shape of the Grilla.
It grabbed him like a rag doll.
Held by the Grilla, the music around Sid transformed into a deep animal growl, his mind filling with images of steaming jungles, splashing blood, and twitching flesh. Sid tried hacking into their smarticle networks, but they were battle-hardened.
Sibeal pulled a shiny black sack out of her backpack. Lifting her arms high she pulled it over Sid’s head. He squirmed without effect. Its fabric was laced with metal wires. A Faraday blanket that stopped electromagnetics. The Grilla pulled the sack around him, and Sid felt his connections to the outside world cut off. A black hole opened in the wall of the bathroom, and the Grilla stepped into it, dragging Sid along.
11
VINCE LOOKED AT the night sky. A thick carpet of stars hung like a bowl atop the mountaintops ringing the Commune; the bright smudge of the comet was just disappearing behind a peak. Zephyr drove him and Elspeth and Brigitte out past the perimeter again, this time for Elspeth to talk to Willy.
A few weeks had marked the first time Elspeth had seen her son in the fifteen years since she had to leave him on Atopia. Back then, she’d been overcome with fear, unable to stay, but it was a decision that haunted her. Meeting Willy, holding and kissing and hugging him, had been an incredibly emotional reunion. But now Vince and Brigitte were telling her that it hadn’t been Willy at all. It was incomprehensible that the person she’d met and shared tears with just days before had been an impostor, and worse, a thief who had stolen her son’s body.
Vince was caught up in her shock, shaken out of his emotional slumber. So he made a simple suggestion—why not just come outside the perimeter and meet the “real” Willy in his virtual presence?
He hadn’t anticipated the Reverend’s swift acceptance of the idea, given their strict stance against synthetic reality technology, but then again, it was his daughter. What were rules if not things to be bent?
Zephyr sat in the cart stoically. Vince could only imagine how all of this was reinforcing Zephyr’s ideas of the wickedness of the outside world. Three trips to the perimeter in one day was about as much as the kid could take. He wasn’t used to this much contact with the outside world, but it was on the Reverend’s strict orders. Vince was taking a walk while Brigitte and Elspeth sat on a blanket in the wet grass under the stars.
Brigitte dropped a packet of smarticle powder into a canteen of water, swirling it around, and handed it to Elspeth. “Drink it,” Vince heard Brigitte whisper to Elspeth. “Don’t worry, I’ll guide you.”
What Vince was feeling didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t one thing or the other, nothing he could put his finger on. It was a combination of things, a perspective that brought the elements of his mind together to create an image that looked familiar—a nagging sensation that one thing fit into another, a square peg that should be a round one if he could just hold it the right way.
He tried to dismiss the feeling, telling himself it was just his mind making patterns from noise, but the more he read into the old religious texts of the Commune, the stronger the feeling became, the stronger the images burned into his mind of creatures with six wings, eyes inside and out, of the eleven-headed Buddha he’d seen in a Chenrezig monastery with dozens of arms.
But it couldn’t be possible.
He pushed it into the back of his mind and focused on assimilating his waiting splinters. “Himalayas overtaking Greenland as second-largest reserve of frozen water after Antarctica,” went one phuture broadcast, with temperatures in Europe projected to plummet as the Gulf Stream continued to slow.
Part of the mystery around how Willy’s body had made it inside the Commune was that the smarticle network inside it should have shut down, and communication in and out should have been impossible. But, somehow, someone had kept the technology working, hiding it from the Commune’s sensors. The Reverend said he had no idea how. Vince believed him.
At least one important mystery had been solved.
Vince queried Elspeth about things she talked about with Willy’s imposter, intimate details that whomever was inhabiting Willy’s body shared with her. Outside the perimeter, Vince uploaded and correlated the information with Willy. Everything matched, down to the last detail. The only entity that would have that level of correct information about Willy had to be his proxxi, Wally—without a doubt, it was Willy’s proxxi that stole his body.
Vince felt a new presence bloom into being in the local multiverse. Elspeth. She sat beside Brigitte, now lit by a glowing pssi-halo, her newly-minted metatags hanging in overlaid display spaces around her. The smarticles had infused into her neural system. She was pssi-aware.
“Just relax, breath slowly,” Brigitte instructed, holding her hand.
Elspeth’s eyes darted back and forth. Her white-knuckled hands gripped the blanket as her perceptions grew sharper and deeper, the informational flow of the multiverse connecting into her sensory systems for the first time. “I’m okay,” she replied. “Could you get Willy?”
She didn’t need to ask.
“Hey, Mom.” Willy appeared from behind a copse of trees nearby. His virtual image glowed alongside a patch of bioluminescent kale.
“Willy?” Tears sprang into Elspeth’s eyes. “My baby, what have they done to you?” Forgetting the illusion, she sprang up and ran to her son, embracing him.
Vince looked away, hiding his own tears. He looked at Zephyr, sitting on the wagon, watching the whole strange scene. Zephyr couldn’t see Willy, he couldn’t even hear the words Elspeth was speaking to Willy in the pssi audio channel, but he watched her jump up and run toward the trees, crying and embracing thin air.
Zephyr didn’t bat an eye, his stoic expression speaking volumes—the outside world was just strange.
Vince returned his attention to the phuture splinter competing for his attention: Newlandia’s application to the UN as the first sovereign virtual nation looked like it was going to happen, while civil rights protests raged in San Francisco from a continued ban on mind uploading research. “Immortality is God’s domain,” complained the Christian Democrats of America.
A whirring began in the sky and Vince spun his point-of-view into the space above them, zooming in to track Deanna’s electric turbofan. It was time for them to get to New York.
“I’m not coming.” It was Brigitte, a virtual splinter of her standing beside him in a private communication space, while her body remained sitting on the blanket with Willy and Elspeth. “My place is here, at least for now.”
Vince was going to argue, but then looked at Willy and his mother, Elspeth, gripping Brigitte’s hands.
“Let me talk to Sid and Bob.” Vince started up a virtual meeting space, pinging Sid and Bob, but there was no response. He knew they were at an underground club in New York meeting the glasscutters. He pinged again. Still nothing. Why weren’t they answering? Then the realization: He’d let Bob and Sid go by themselves to a rave club in New York. I knew I shouldn’t have left those two alone.
He had to make a decision. His gut said no, splitting up even more was a bad idea, but looking at Elspeth gripping Brigitte’s hand swayed his emotions back. It might be useful to have someone inside the Commune, and it seemed like the right thing to do. For them, at least.
The turbofan growled, leaves and grass blowing past them as it hovered. Vince sent instructions for it to land next to him. He looked into Brigitte’s eyes. “Okay, but you stay in regular contact?”
She nodded.
With a final blast, the tu
rbofan settled into the grass. Brigitte’s virtual presence retreated into her body and she waved at Vince. He smiled back, then looked toward Zephyr. “You take care of them.”
Zephyr nodded, tipping his hat. He didn’t ask any questions.
Gripping the rungs of the turbofan’s access ladder, Vince wondered if he was making a mistake. Grumbling, he swung himself into the cushioned front seat and reached around to strap in the webbing. The clear plastic cockpit enclosure closed and the turbofan began cycling up again, roaring underneath him. With a final wave he bid Brigitte goodbye. The turbofan lurched into the sky and Vince settled into the harness, letting his alpha and theta waves settle his brain for a short sleep on the way into Manhattan.
12
THE METHANE STORM on Titan raged, the world a thrashing kaleidoscope before Bob’s senses, but he felt something more troubling than Sid’s sudden disappearance: other pssi-kids from Atopia were in Hell, and they were searching. The fabric of the local multiverse bent under their psychic weight as Bob sensed them scraping against his identity-theft algorithms. They might be good enough for the world out here, but pssi-kids would make short work of ripping through the thin veil Sid built to hide them.
Bob had to get out of Hell, and soon.
The music roared around and inside Bob. He steadied himself, trying to inhibit the drug coursing through his digital neurons, cursing that he’d let Sid rope him into it. How could I be so stupid?
Even before the thought I need to escape had fully formed, he left his body behind, jacking his primary subjective past the security systems and into the Purgatory entranceway. He stopped and looked around—the Grilla was gone, and there was no sign of Sid.
While his mind searched for channels out into the open multiverse, his body quickened, flooding itself with smarticles, darting through the dancers back to the physical entrance of Hell. Across the full sensory spectrum of Hell a sharp keening began, a knife that cut through the assembled meta-cognition systems.
Bob sensed it coming.
He threw up walls, started splitting his personalities, splintering himself to hide in every corner he could find.
And then it happened.
Time stopped.
Bob’s mind filled with white noise. His sensory channels mushroomed, sliding out of control, squeezing together, blending into each other. The pressure built, vibrating, shaking, and just as the needles began piercing, he heard the screams of the thousands of people in Hell, their minds shredding around him.
Bob threw off one layer after another of his meta-cognition framework like throwing up a stack of bullet-proof vests to stop incoming machine gun fire. He retreated backward in time, and then sideways into any confined information space that wasn’t burning. Like bubbles of paint, parts of his mind started exploding in wet pops. He gathered himself inward. What little remained kept probing for escape routes. Finally he slid up the network of the pneumatic tubes and outward to the surface.
Below him, the screaming had stopped, but so had the collective awareness.
As Bob’s body raced out of the maze of tunnels, everywhere sagging bodies stared out from blank eyes. Bob spread his identity metatags onto everyone he passed, jacking into their bodies, starting them running in random directions to hide his escape. He began spinning alternate realities, layering and fusing them into the sensory systems of the others, the pssi-kids, slippery eels that slid through the data systems of Purgatory.
Retreating through one world and then another, he found himself running through a burnt and barren landscape with the stakes of tree stumps stabbed into its smoking earth. Ash was falling from a ravaged sky.
“We know you’re here,” hissed the Hunter, a neural fusion of a gang of pssi-kids he’d known growing up, Daxter and Axel and Gunner. Now they weren’t kids anymore. It seemed they were working for Jimmy, and they were hunting for him.
Bob tried to focus, the world swimming before his eyes. He kneeled down behind a tree stump and began dialing up all the worlds connected to the battle gameworld. One thought remained in the stunted awareness he had left: Get to the passenger cannon. In the real world, a thin slice of his digital awareness skimmed through the wet streets of New York, dragging his physical body behind it like a rag doll on a string.
13
THE TWENTY-FOUR leaders are returning, said Zephyr. Lightning crackled across the sky behind him. What do you think happened to Willy? asked Vince. He was possessed by a demon, replied Zephyr. Don’t you believe in demons, Mr. Indigo?
A jolt woke Vince up.
“It’s just the refueling drone.” Hotstuff was riding shotgun beside him in the turbofan.
Through the canopy, in the soft glow of the instrumentation lights, Vince watched a drone’s articulated arms pull out the main battery pack of their turbofan and replace it with a fresh one. The hop from Montana to New York required an in-air battery drop. The American government didn’t use the African space power grid and couldn’t refuel via microwave burst in flight like most of the rest of the world.
Vince shook his head and closed his eyes.
The drone held the turbofan like an insect in its legs. The night sky slid by above. Finished, the drone disengaged with a jolt, and the whir of the turbofan ratcheted up a notch. It started climbing back to cruising altitude.
A garbled message from Bob popped up on Vince’s messaging systems: “Where’s Sid? I can’t find Sid.” Vince latched onto Bob’s message stream, but it was cut off in an eruption of network traffic. Vince’s phutures slid sideways. The mediaworlds erupted: A terrorist attack in the Purgatory Entertainment District, Atopian splinter group responsible. Authorities hunting for suspects.
The refueling drone cut through the air above them.
Vince shot up in his harness. “What the hell?”
“Don’t know, boss.” Hotstuff dispatched agents into the New York networks. “Some kind of pssi-weapon was unleashed in central New York, right on top of Bob and Sid’s last known location.”
Vince’s phuturing network was still set in high avoidance mode. Nothing major should have been able penetrate the protective web surrounding him and his friends, not without some advance notice. “How did this get past us?”
Hotstuff grabbed Vince’s primary presence and dragged it into their war room. She spun out a series of scenarios, graphing their interconnectedness. “Being in Commune’s black hole generated discontinuities in our future timeline.”
Another jolt.
The drone was re-attaching itself. In a secondary display space Vince frowned, watching the drone’s insect-legs wrapping themselves around the turbofan.
Hotstuff looked at him, her eyes growing wide. “Vince, watch out . . .”
And then she was gone.
Vince’s main point-of-presence snapped from the war room back into his body in the pod of the turbofan. The only sound was the rush of the air past the canopy and the whine of the engine.
The stars slid by overhead.
“Mr. Vincent Damon Indigo,” announced a voice over the comms channel of the turbofan. “I am Special Agent Sheila Connors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You are under arrest for breach of future confidentiality.”
14
THREE GEES OF acceleration squeezed Bob into the aerogel of the passenger cannon pod seat, then five gees, then briefly six as it angled up from its subterranean launch tube. His pod launched into free space with a thudding concussion, the air ionizing around it in a blistering tunnel as it bored through the lower atmosphere. His body popped out of the foam seat in the shift to near-zero gravity, the sheen of ionization sputtering out as the pod gained altitude, clearing the densest layers of air on its ballistic flight path across the Atlantic on its way to Lagos.
Escaping New York had been a game of capture the flag, with his body and physical brain as the prize. He started by ducking it into the aging subway sy
stem, then a VTOL pick-up and drop-off to the other side of town and quick succession of self-driving taxi exchanges and sprints up and down building staircases while he scattered decoys in his wake. Bob used the predictive policing models of the city to figure out where patrolling drones would be. It was a lot like the games of flitter tag he used to play with the other pssi-kids on Atopia, but this time with life-threatening stakes.
In the twenty minutes it took him to reach and clear the passenger cannon security checkpoints, the NYPD joined the chase. With only seconds to spare, his pod was in the last batch of launches—even in this ultra-modern metropolis, it took time to lock a city down.
Bits and pieces of his mind reassembled themselves at random—secure back-ups of memories and ideas floating back into his brain on the thin data stream. The capsule gained altitude into space. Bob’s cognitive frameworks were still fighting off the shimmer of the drug Sid had infected him with. He created a virtual world, shielded beneath an onion skin of encryption, to have a talk with the reassembling bits of his intellect.
Alone, was the first thought that mushroomed into his mind, you’re alone.
Turning inside himself, in a panic he checked the data cube Patricia entrusted him with. It was still there, embedded in the center of his mind. The world he created solidified in his visual channels. A hexagonal chamber appeared with a copy of himself seated against each of six yellow walls. The data cube sat in the middle of the room, a faceted ruby that glittered darkly.
“Should we tell her?” the main part of his mind asked. “Is that what I really look like?” He stared at the copies of himself staring back at him, blue eyes beneath blond dreadlocks tied back in a ponytail.
“It’s too dangerous,” replied his cautious self. “You just want an excuse to talk to her.”
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 7
