The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2)

by Matthew Mather

  And then nothing.

  When he regained consciousness, it was quiet, just the sound of bullfrogs groaning in the darkness. He was soaked, twisted together in the metal and plastic wreck. He didn’t feel anything. Relaxing into what he assumed was his coming death, he closed one eye, looking at the stars in the sky, then opened it and closed the other. Two working eyes. Pausing, he tried wiggling his toes—and no spinal cord injury. Gingerly pulling himself out from the wreck, he’d checked his body for gaping bodily wounds. None of those either.

  Amazing.

  On closer inspection, he found some wounds to one leg, a cut clear across his face, but nothing major. Just seconds before he’d been at peace with death, and now, it was like he was reborn. He expected he would be horrified, in shock, after a traumatic accident where he was injured, almost killed, but it was quite the opposite. Vince had been overjoyed, ecstatic, hopping around in the swamp examining the mangled turbofan, marveling at it. He cheated death once again, and this time by himself.

  Vince opened his eyes and looked at Agent Connors. She was asleep.

  “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

  Vince looked up to see Hotstuff, her eyebrows arched as she stared at him.

  “Huh?”

  “Whatever.” Hotstuff was streaming him summaries of the threat reports. It wasn’t much—they didn’t have much network access—but then again, there wasn’t anything to report either. It seemed that cutting him off from Phuture News had also separated Vince from whatever was chasing him.

  “Any questions?” asked Hotstuff.

  “Um, no, this looks . . .” but Hotstuff signed off and faded away without letting Vince finish his sentence. He frowned.

  “I think your proxxi is jealous.”

  Vince turned to see Agent Connors smiling at him, her eyes half open. He forgot that he had opened his pssi channels to her and she was able to see his proxxi. He had wanted to be sure that she had the same situational data he had. They were in a dangerous spot.

  “Of you?” snorted Vince, shaking his head and returning his attention to the nearly empty threat reports.

  “The second we get out of here, make no mistake, you’re going to jail,” continued Agent Connors. “So don’t get any ideas.”

  Vince looked at her. “Me? Ideas?”

  Agent Connors rolled her eyes before closing them again.

  Hotstuff popped back into his visual frame, sitting across the table from him. “There’s someone coming,” she whispered.

  Before Vince could ask, Hotstuff sent him the report. An Ascetic was walking toward them. So his feelers had found something. Vince spun a viewpoint outside, watching the crowd of partygoers part like the Red Sea around the advancing figure—a stump of flesh suspended between six spindly metal legs, gliding spider-like across the ground.

  Vince kicked Agent Connor’s leg under the table, and she jolted awake. He spun the information packets on this Ascetic into her networks.

  “Mr. Indigo, I presume,” the Ascetic hissed directly into his head. It wasn’t speaking. It had no mouth. It closed the last few feet of distance by lifting itself up on its hind legs to bring its head even with their balcony.

  “Yes.” What was he supposed to say? There wasn’t any use running.

  “I have someone who wants to meet you,” continued the Ascetic, the naked slab of its body hanging in space in front of them. Skin was grafted across its face, pulled taut; no eyes, no ears, no mouth. “Someone you’ve been wanting to meet.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” whispered Agent Connors.

  The Ascetic turned its body toward her, revealing a large, square cross emblazoned on its flesh. “I am deaf, but I hear all, I am blind, but I see all. Ms. Connors, do you see?”

  Sheila’s face went pale. “What do you want?”

  “It is not what I want,” hissed the Ascetic, just a voice in their heads. “But what you want.”

  7

  “WE DON’T HUNT people.” Sibeal looked up, considering her statement. “Or, we don’t hunt humans. You’re our first.”

  Willy’s primitive avatar flickered. As the Alliance—America and Atopia and its allies—blockaded data pathways to Terra Nova, there wasn’t enough clean bandwidth getting through for him to project something more sophisticated. It was becoming obvious they were planning some new action against Terra Nova, but the mediaworlds, and even Phuture News, remained quiet.

  “You’re not hunting me,” said Willy’s avatar after a pause. “Just my body.”

  Sibeal nodded. “Not really even your body—we’re hunting your proxxi, Wally, who’s stolen your body.”

  Even Sid stopped for a moment to contemplate just how weird this situation was. He’d convinced Willy to come down and talk to the glasscutters, but his signal was getting weak. Even if the signal from Willy’s body was being routed through Terra Nova, his virtual presence wasn’t allowed inside it, and transmissions from Terra Nova weren’t allowed outside in Allied space anymore. His awareness was being squeezed into the thin cracks of the multiverse in between.

  Willy’s avatar remained static for a few seconds, and just when Sid thought the connection had been lost—“I’m not sure Wally is responsible,” came the audio stream from the avatar, but its lips didn’t move. “He might be doing what I asked, or what he thought I asked.”

  Sid had filled everyone in, about Willy telling his proxxi to keep them safe, no matter what, when he was running his illegal business.

  “So you’re saying it wasn’t him?” echoed ReVurb, the phracker—phuture cracker—Sibeal invited to be part of her team.

  Sid didn’t trust phrackers. Even if they weren’t telling the truth, they could engineer the future so what they were telling you became true. They were slippery. Only a small part of a phracker was in the present. Most of them hung around in expensively maintained alternate future realities that spun outward from the present moment in time. The other parts of them sat in the past, winding through post-factual worlds that could have happened if different decisions were made.

  “I’m sure it’s my proxxi that stole my body,” Willy replied. “But I’m saying he’s not responsible.”

  “Because you set him on this course?”

  After an even longer pause, Willy’s avatar nodded. Sibeal and ReVurb had been interrogating Willy for a good hour already.

  “So me and Willy have held up our end of the bargain.” Sid stretched his phantom limbs. “How about you show us what you know?”

  Sibeal looked at ReVurb, who nodded, and data packets were sent into Sid and Willy’s networks. Sibeal pulled their primary subjectives into a view of the American east coast from a hundred miles up, overlaying the names of cities and districts.

  “Each of these,” Sibeal explained, pointing toward red dots that appeared one by one, “are suspected points of entry by Willy’s body into the AEC infrastructure.”

  “Suspected?” Sid frowned. “But I thought you had something concrete—”

  With a stuttering breath, ReVurb pulled himself into the present. “He’s invisible in the zero timeframe, we can only derive his appearance by second-order artifacts in the positive and negative—”

  “I get it,” interrupted Sid, assimilating the data they’d sent him. They couldn’t observe Willy’s body directly in any data feeds, only a derivative of him in the past and future, like the wake of an invisible boat. Even so, Sid should have been able to see it.

  “There’s some very strong glass at work here,” added Sibeal, “like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”

  A light bulb went off in Sid’s head. “And the only reason you saw any of this was because Willy came into the underground.”

  “Right, we have our own sensor networks.” Sibeal pointed at the city centers of New York, Philadelphia, Washington, then spun the globe to indicate other points of contact
in London, Paris, and Istanbul with the trail fading in southern Asia. “This is as much as we have.”

  “So where am I now?” Willy asked. “Do we have an end—”

  His avatar flickered and then dimmed. Sid swore and dove into his workspace, trying to route alternate connections for Willy’s mind. In fits and starts, the avatar began to reappear.

  “I’m doing everything I can,” Sid said to Willy in a private space. With Bob gone, Sid felt responsible for Willy. It had become a personal point of pride to outsmart the Alliance filters, to keep the data coming so Willy could stay with them, but his pride was melting into fear for his friend. Sid didn’t have a lot of friends.

  “I know,” Willy replied. “I’d better send you some information Vince sent me—”

  Sid nodded, sensing some data packets arriving, and just then Willy’s avatar completely disappeared.

  Before Sid could give chase, ReVurb blocked his exits into the data pipes out of the underground. “Don’t bother, it’s hopeless.”

  “We do have some news—would you like the good or bad first?” Sibeal said after they let Sid work in futile silence for a few seconds.

  “Why do people keep asking me that?” Sid didn’t wait for an answer. He was still working in the background, but he knew Willy wasn’t coming back. He’d had enough with the bad news. “Okay, good news this time.”

  “It seems Mr. Indigo survived the crash. We’ve located him in New Orleans.” ReVurb smiled. “At least, that’s what they’re going to announce in the news tomorrow.”

  Vince was the granddaddy of the phrackers, although he was on the other side of a line that was increasingly thin. Now he was indicted, he’d practically joined their ranks. Probably something Vince, in his position, should have seen coming. In all cases, ReVurb seemed to be happy about it.

  Sid waited. “And the bad?”

  “The Ascetics have taken him.”

  Well at least he’s not dead, and then quickly on the heels of that thought, but he might wish he was if they couldn’t get to him soon. “Anything new on Bob?”

  Everyone there—Sibeal, ReVurb, Bunky—shook their heads.

  Sid’s proxxi pinged him, dragging his point-of-view into a workspace world. “What’s so important?” Sid grumbled. Vicious opened up a display. Before his avatar disappeared, Willy sent them some documents that Vince had forwarded him.

  Willy’s proxxi had been reading religious texts at the Commune. Vicious did a statistical analysis on the texts and one line stood out, something scrawled in the margins, a line Vicious couldn’t find any contextual links to: “The beginning of man, where time stops in a thousand tongues.” What the hell did that mean?

  8

  MOLEHILLS BECAME MOUNTAINS, at least from the point of view of the beetle Bob struggled to keep control of. The blanket of stars of the deep Sahara, thick enough for even an insect to imagine it could reach up and touch, hung above him in the sky. Moonrise was coming. He had to hurry.

  Two legs forward, two legs back, two other legs forward, first two legs back. Just keep the rhythm, Bob kept telling himself. He couldn’t see it yet, but even without a three-dimensional overlay map, the beetle’s keen sense of smell was homing them in to the garbage pile.

  Come on, you love this smelly stuff, Bob urged to the beetle’s small mind. But the beetle knew: here there were predators.

  The beetle topped a tiny crest of sand, each grain the size of a boulder, and the town’s garbage dump came into view. It was pitch black, but in the insect’s infrared-shifted vision the garbage glowed with heat against the cold desert floor. Within the glow, something shifted, something brighter, and then another.

  The rats were feeding.

  The beetle’s legs backpedaled, quivering, but Bob pushed it forward.

  Bob’s smarticle count was low, and keeping a communication link at nearly a half a mile was pushing his limits. Soon he would be empty. Already he felt the symptoms of withdrawal—his tweaking neurons, the buzzing itch on his insides that couldn’t be scratched.

  I’m sorry, Bob wanted to tell the beetle, I need help. I need you to sacrifice yourself for me. He wanted to explain how this was the only way. But how to explain that to a creature, any creature, that their time must come to an end so that yours could continue, that there was some other good that required their death.

  But there was no time for that. Bob pushed and pushed, ignoring the keening terror in the mind he was sharing. The looming pile grew larger, and then one of the warm red patches stopped, the saucers of its eyes turning toward Bob-beetle. In an instant it was over, the rat darting in and snatching the beetle from the desert floor, the beetle’s fear for an instant eclipsing the brightest of stars overhead.

  And then nothing.

  Bob’s telepresent link went blank, but he waited, maintaining the connection to the smarticles in the beetle’s body, which was becoming a part of the rat’s. The transfer was incomplete, but an image began forming. Mammals were much closer to home, much simpler to inhabit. Bob-rat now looked up from the garbage pile, tasting the remains of beetle shell in the back of his mouth.

  Rubbing his eyes, Bob withdrew his primary subjective back into the jail cell and looked around. In amplified low-light he surveyed the walls, watched the priest sleeping in the cot in the cell next to him, and listened carefully to the snoring of one of the men in the front. Nothing had changed, so he slipped his consciousness back into the rat.

  The smarticle density was too low for Bob to control the rat’s nervous system entirely, so he had to be selective. He tweaked the rat’s keen sense of smell. There’s something delicious in that structure up the road, was the message Bob implanted. The rat froze, its head swiveling to the horizon, and then it was off, scurrying toward the jail.

  9

  “SO HOW DO you like jail?” asked Vince, taking a gulp from his beer. He wasn’t too concerned about the Ascetics. They were criminals, if ones built around a quasi-religious cult centered on self-denial. He understood criminals, and it was always just about the money—it was never personal. Anyway, he was the one that contacted them. More distressing was his inability to see the future since Agent Connors’ team took away his Phuture News access. The lack of control was an itch he couldn’t scratch.

  Connors leaned over the railing of their room’s wrought-iron balcony, inspecting the exterior wall. The noise of Bourbon Street echoed from several stories below, while the whine of electric VTOLs spun through the black skies. She leaned back in and turned around. “Is that supposed to be clever?”

  “I mean,” Vince mumbled, “just wondering if you’re having any insight into what it feels like yourself.” He smiled. “It’s just a question.” Flopping down onto one of the two beds, Vince placed his beer on the center console and began playing with the room’s controls, but nothing activated. He frowned and gave up. “No matter how much the world changes, you know what stays the same?”

  Sighing, Connors bowed her head. “What?”

  “Beds!” said Vince, slapping the one he was on. “All this technology, all this change, and beds are pretty much the same thing as five hundred years ago, I’d bet.”

  Connors leaned out over the railing again. “You’re like a seventy-year-old kid, you know that?”

  Vince frowned and then smiled. “I’d bet a million dollars I know what you’re thinking.”

  “A million dollars is about what you spend on a pair of shoes, isn’t it?”

  “You know what I mean.” He took a sip of his beer. “You’re thinking, with one good leap I could just make it over to that next balcony.” He took another sip. “There’s no need to look out there. Hotstuff mapped the walls, exterior features, interior corridors.”

  It was about a thirty-foot vertical drop onto concrete. Connors sighed. “But you don’t want to escape?”

  “Not question of want, we’re in their ter
ritory. I’ve gone through thousands of scenarios, and the best one is to sit tight. We can negotiate our way out.”

  She turned to him. “You know what I think?”

  He sat up and smiled. “What?”

  “I think you want to be here.”

  “Want to be here? If I don’t get out of here, I could lose a couple of hundred-billion dollars.” With the charges filed against him, he could stand to lose more than just Phuture News. He could end up in jail. A real jail, where he wouldn’t be able to escape into simulated reality. A confined concrete cell. No future, no movement, no control—the thought made Vince ill. He put his beer down.

  Connors laughed. “I’m sure you can tie up the courts for years. I bet you have cash squirreled away all over the place. Characters like you always have escape routes planned.”

  That was pretty accurate, Vince had to admit. He nodded and picked up his beer again. Hotstuff, sitting in the corner, raised her eyebrows. Vince slouched into the silk pillows, inspecting the gold-flecked wallpaper and brass lighting fixtures above his head.

  Connors gave up on the outside. Leaning on the balcony railing, she turned to Vince. “So you said I had it wrong?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How so?”

  “We were trying to do the right thing when I breached all those future confidences.” Vince sensed that doing the right thing was what drove Connors forward.

  “And what was this thing?”

  “We found out that Cognix was hiding some test results on pssi.”

  “I heard about that. So that was you guys who forced it out?”

  Vince shrugged. “Didn’t quite work out like that, but we pushed the issue.”

  “Interesting.” Connors considered this. “And you don’t think your friend Robert Baxter had anything to do with the attack in New York?”