The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2)

by Matthew Mather

  “No way.” Vince shook his head vigorously. “He’s a good kid. Can be a bit of a flake . . .”

  Connors smiled. “And this coming from you?”

  Vince smiled back. Finally, a sense of humor. “Bob’s one bright kid.”

  “Not just a kid, a pssi-kid,” corrected Connors. “It’s hard to know what they might be capable of. They’re . . .” She paused, searching for the right words.

  “Not human?” Vince offered. “That’s not true. They’re just like us, but slightly more advanced. People 2.0.”

  “If you say so.” Connors pressed her hands together at her chin. It was her thinking pose. “And you know Baxter this well how?”

  “From surfing together.”

  Connors’ head sagged and she snorted. “Surfing together. Wow.”

  Vince sat upright in the bed. “You can tell a lot about a person from surfing with them. Board meetings, we’d call them, sitting in the swells and chatting. Bob has a lot of friends. That says something about someone.”

  “Sure. A lot of criminals have a lot of friends.”

  “Funny.” He put his beer down. “I’m being serious. The way someone lets other people get up on the waves, helps out if there’s a problem. He’s a straight shooter, nice guy, whatever you want to call it, but he didn’t unleash some weapon that hurt people. Of that I’m sure. His worst crime is being a little nosy.”

  Connors paused. “I heard he’s a drug addict.”

  Vince stared at her. “And did you also hear his twin brother killed himself?”

  “Yeah, I did . . .”

  “So give the kid a break.”

  Connors pushed herself off the railing and came into the room. She sat down on the bed opposite Vince. “And what about Sidney Horowitz. Do you think he had anything to do with that reality virus that nearly wrecked Atopia?”

  Vince didn’t answer as quickly this time. “Naw. Sid likes to think of himself as a rebel, likes to play pranks, even get up to some mischief, but he’s a good kid, too. A bit of a loner, but a good kid.”

  “Forensics said his digital fingerprints were all over that thing.”

  “Maybe, but it wasn’t Sid that unleashed it.”

  “You sound awfully sure.” Connors narrowed her eyes. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Vince finished off a last gulp from his beer. He put the empty bottle down. “What do you mean?”

  “Makes you look awfully suspicious to jump off Atopia right after someone sabotaged it, then go and hide. If you guys had nothing to do with it, what are you doing out here?”

  Sighing, Vince picked up a pillow and fluffed it, then stuck it behind his back and leaned against the headboard. “I’m not sure how much I should tell you.” Patricia had given them strict instructions to keep this to themselves. If nothing else, Vince liked sticking to a plan.

  Agent Connors pointed toward the locked door. “We should be working together to find a way out of this. I know you have more information than you’re telling me.”

  “Work together?” Vince threw his hands in the air. “Find a way out of this? We are only in this because of you.” He swung his legs off the bed to face her. “And I should help you for what, so you can drag me to jail? I saved your life.”

  Connors didn’t flinch or back away. “Someone’s got a quick temper.”

  “You come out of nowhere, try and snatch me out of the sky. You know nothing about me—”

  Agent Connors held one finger up in Vince’s face. “Oh, I know you.”

  “You know me?” He looked at the ceiling and then back at her. “Why don’t you tell me, then?”

  “I know you stole Phuture News away from your business partner when you started up.”

  Vince stared at Connors. “You know nothing about that.” He took a deep breath. “Want me to describe you?”

  Connors shrugged.

  “Let me see,” began Vince. “Workaholic, never married”—one hand shot up—“wait, married to the academy. That’s you.” He rocked back a little. “I bet your dad was a cop.”

  Connors’ face remained impassive.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Trying to live up to Daddy, always needing to prove yourself. That’s why you tried to snatch me out of the sky. All this drama. You need to prove yourself.”

  “Not bad,” said Connors quietly. “But I know you, too.”

  “Oh yeah? Try me.”

  “Just another rich asshole who thinks he’s above everyone else.”

  10

  “FOR THE MONEY, of course,” replied Bunky.

  Sid volunteered to help Shaky and Bunky repair one of the construction mechanoids. Melodies of a Lynyrd Skynyrd song echoed from a hundred years in the past. The music filled the virtual worlds Sid was building for the simulations. He had never heard the song before—a tribute from another time to an Alabama homeworld—but it was growing on him. Bunky picked it.

  “I mean, it’s not just the money,” Shaky added, “it’s our jobs, like, you know what I mean, mate?”

  They were trying to explain to Sid why they’d kidnapped him. On Atopia, money had never really been a motivator. It was just something that existed, in the background, secondary to the grand experiment that was Atopia. With unlimited access to synthetic reality, who needed money to buy things? You could just spawn as much of anything you liked, at any time, and perfect health was an unspoken part of the deal. On the outside, however, all these things he had for free on Atopia—the smarticles, unlimited multiverse access, skins—cost money.

  “It wasn’t really about kidnapping you, mind you.” Bunky clapped Sid on the shoulder. “We were just securing you. The money was supposed to come from the bounty for catching Willy’s proxxi.”

  Sid was discovering the extent of the obsession with money and material luxury that filled the collective conscience outside Atopia. “Yeah, I got that.”

  He was building virtual-world models of the rotator cuff joint of Bunky’s construction mechanoid, trying to fix a broken seal. Bunky and Shaky were riding along with him, in toy-balloon avatars attached to his consciousness as he spun through his virtual worlds. Sid looked up to see Bunky-balloon smile, a big grin with one front tooth broken in half.

  “Do you not get your tooth fixed because of the money?” Sid asked.

  Health care was the other fixation. Elective gene modifications could double life expectancy for the rich, but even basic health wasn’t always guaranteed for the poor. Atopia’s pssi technology was being applied across the systemic injustice like a numbing salve to treat a mortal wound.

  Sid wasn’t philosophical by nature—that was Bob’s domain—but it was hard not to ponder the more time he spent out here. He understood that the basics of economics had moved from products to services, and were now moving to trading information for the purpose of self-advantage in the purest form of the idea. What exactly the “self” referred to was the new problem. The definition of a “person” was losing coherence in the face of synthetic intelligences, neural fusioning, and the expanding cloud of information that made up a person.

  Shaky-balloon roared out laughing at Sid’s question. “Ha, no mate, Bunky here is deathly afraid of anyone drilling into that thick slab of a skull!”

  Bunky-balloon glowed red. Sid smiled.

  “Almost done,” Sid said, shifting attention away from Bunky. “Can you see the array?”

  Sid tried splintering the solution sets to Bunky and Shaky, but their external meta-cognition frameworks were childlike. Instead he began flipping through a series of images, showing each option visually.

  Bunky and Shaky nodded as one. “Yeah, sort of,” they both replied. If Sid didn’t know better, he would have suspected they were neurally fused, but he knew they were just best friends.

  The simulations were set in motion, and Sid spun the most likely scenario, a hol
lowed-out view of a giant robotic arm rotating in a three-dimensional space around Shaky and Bunky’s perspectives. Sid chuckled. They weren’t the sharpest cheeses in the drawer, but they had no problem understanding complex geometries.

  “What’s it like, like?” Bunky asked.

  Sid was deep into modifying his virtual-world model. “What’s what like?” It was the first time he’d gotten to work on repairing a complex robot first hand.

  “Being a pssi-kid—isn’t it kind of freaky, like? Is it true you don’t see any difference between the real world and virtual worlds?”

  Sid paused. If you’d asked him that question a few weeks ago, he’d have agreed. His virtual worlds were as real as the reality he experienced on Atopia. But reality on Atopia wasn’t the same as out here. “Yes and no,” he replied as he fiddled with his model. “It’s not easy to explain.” An infinite number of alternate universes, and pssi as the backdoor to crossing the threshold—on Atopia it made sense, but here, the dream was fading.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Bunky said after a pause. “You’re like a bloody god to these glasscutters.”

  Sid smiled. “Could have fooled me.”

  “Naw, he’s right,” said Bunky. “Sibeal practically squealed when you contacted her. She’s got some serious fan girl going on.”

  Sid ignored the praise, spinning the newest simulation into the hyperspace around their points-of-view. “So what do you think?”

  Shaky-balloon frowned. “Not bad, but . . .” With a jittery phantom limb—he wasn’t good at adapting his nervous system in virtual spaces—Shaky grabbed the projection and squeezed, popping them back into real space. Sid, Bunky, and Shaky were standing next to each other on a gantry above the construction mechanoid’s shoulder.

  “. . . I like things I can touch with my own two hands.” He banged the rotator cuff joint of the mechanoid with a hammer and laughed. “If you see what I mean.”

  “And I”—Sid spread a dozen of his phantom limbs around his body like wings—“like things I can touch with my own twelve.”

  Bunky laughed, and Shaky bent down to the mechanoid and began banging away, hammering at the joint.

  “After all my simulation work, really?” Sid shook his head as he watched. He turned to Bunky. “So you two are Midtown miners?”

  Bunky nodded. “New York central branch of the worldwide Urban Miners Association. We staked out Midtown years back, prospecting seams of urban ore under the streets.”

  “And that makes you money?” Sid asked, trying to get into the flow of their thinking.

  Bunky smiled. “Amazing amount of comatose stock down here—obsolete infrastructure, buried pipes, cabling, old landfill. We piece together old maps, way back to the 1850s all the way into mid-twenty-first century, mapping the city underground, and then dig it out, sometimes with city planning permission—”

  “—but most of the time without!” laughed Shaky, kneeling beside them with a crowbar jammed into the mechanoid’s shoulder.

  “Did you know”—Bunky paused, his eyes narrowing—“that a bin of electronics waste is a hundred times richer in precious metals than the finest wild ores dug from virgin soil?”

  “Didn’t know that.”

  Shaky stood up, satisfied with his work. “But the best is in the gutter.”

  “This one’s mind’s always in the gutter,” Bunky joked, slapping Shaky on the back.

  The arm of the construction mechanoid swung up and down. Whatever Shaky had done, it worked.

  “What I’m talking about,” continued Shaky, “is street sludge. We filter it from the sewers. Platinum group metals—palladium, rhodium—plus gold, silver from medications, industrial effluent, better than the highest grade—”

  Bunky elbowed him. “Enough, he knows, this is the great all-knowing Sidney Horowitz.” He winked at Sid. “Time for us to get to work, mate.”

  Without warning, the construction mechanoid’s digger-hand swung in and scooped Sid up. Of course Sid’s proxxi, Vicious, saw it coming, and angled his body to sit into the hand at just the right instant, recognizing this as a “friendly.” At the same time, Bunky and Shaky were hoisted into the riding compartments of their respective mechanoids, and with a low whine the other digger bots and worms in the pit whirred into life.

  Bunky looked over his shoulder at Sid. “We’re off to see what your friend Willy’s body was up to in the underground.”

  Sid nodded. Willy’s body had been pinpointed stopping at specific locations. The underminers were going to see what it’d found so interesting.

  In a few crunching strides, they were off down the tunnel leading from the repair pit. The smaller digger bots and worms followed behind. Where Sid’s neural system had plastically adapted to control his phantom limbs, Bunky and Shaky had trained theirs, through years of hard work, to be neurally adapted into their diggers and mechanoids, like learning to play a piano. Their tools and bots were as much a part of their bodies as their hands. Sid watched them disappear around a curve in the tunnel.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  Spinning on his heels, Sid turned. The Grilla, Zoraster, emerged out of the blackness of one of the service tunnels to his left. Sid hadn’t even known he was there. In augmented space, a glittering security blanket sparkled around Zoraster. It was hiding his digital signature in the local wikiworld. In real space, the beast seemed to appear silently from nowhere.

  Sid felt a noose around his phantoms in pssi-space, choking them back. Zoraster was pinning them. Sid had started sliding into the cracks of the digital infrastructure in the tunnels, looking for ways up and out. It was habit.

  “There’s a reason you’re not getting access to outside networks,” said the Grilla, tightening the virtual noose it threw around Sid. “Want to guess why?” The Grilla dropped twenty feet from the service tunnel to the pit floor, effortlessly, without a sound, its hulk looming over Sid. “I don’t trust you.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know.” Sid backed up a few steps. “I even got Willy down here to talk with you.”

  “You might think you’re making friends, that you’ve got these underminers and ‘cutters wrapped around your little finger,” Zoraster rumbled, “but trouble follows you and your friends.”

  “But I told you—”

  The Grilla shoved Sid back against the cold stone wall. “Save the sad story. Your friend Bob disappearing, you left all alone, your friend Indigo tracked to the Ascetics, goddamn gangster freaks.” Sid could feel the Grilla’s heat, his breathing like the bellows of a locomotive. “You’re good at sneaking around, Horowitz. You know what Grillas are good at?”

  Sid trembled. Where he’d been able to easily anticipate what Bunky and Shaky would say, even Sibeal and ReVurb, he had no idea what this Grilla would do. He shook his head.

  The Grilla turned and stalked away, jumping and swinging up the pit wall. “Killing,” Sid heard it growl as it disappeared into the blackness. “That’s what we were built for. Killing.”

  11

  HE HAD NO choice. Bob had to kill the man in order to escape.

  He’d run through hundreds of simulations after bringing the rat back into the jailhouse and sneaking it up to the man’s chair, using its little hands to slip free the keychain. With his low smarticle count, maintaining control over the rat was draining.

  Bob was exhausted.

  He slipped some of the rat’s smarticles into the guard by getting it to lick his hand. The guard was asleep, but his theta and alpha waves frequencies were shortening, his sleep lightening. Bob tried his best to push the man’s mind back down, but his circadian cycle was completing its daily loop, the Earth’s spin pulling this place back toward sunshine. The animal was awakening within. Daylight was coming, and there was only a half-hour gap between shift changes.

  Bob had to hurry. They were coming for him. Who “they” w
ere he didn’t know, or at least didn’t know who they were working for, but the likelihood of his situation improving was dwindling as quickly as his smarticle reserves.

  The guard was asleep against the door, and there was no way to ensure getting out without risking his raising an alarm—except to kill him. In Bob’s weakened state, knocking him unconscious would be unreliable and noisy, as would trying to slip into his mind and take control.

  He slipped into the rat’s consciousness. Pull, little friend, pull, he urged. The rat dug its incisors into the fraying rope, dragging the keychain under the wooden door. Its body strained, and then pulled free and started toward Bob, the keys jangling as they skidded across the stone floor.

  Pulling his awareness out of the rat, Bob got up from his cot and looked around the room. The priest was awake, sitting rigidly upright, his eyes luminous saucers in the reflected moonlight. Bob reached down between the bars of his cell and the rat backed up onto his hand, bringing the keys. Setting the rat on his shoulder, Bob reached around the bars and slid the key into lock, then creaked open the door to his cell. Barefoot, he padded across the cold flagstones, his heart thumping in his chest.

  Fear, that predator that lurked in the back of the mind, was shaping Bob’s mindscape, morphing his dreams of the future, coloring the ghosts of his past—fear for himself, fear for Nancy and his family, fear of the unknown. He wanted to curl into a ball and retreat into one of his fantasy worlds, but he couldn’t. They were counting on him, even if they didn’t know it. He couldn’t fail. Not again.

  His throat parched, his tongue sandpaper, he opened the door to the front office and peered through. Combining the rat’s visual input, staring from his shoulder, with his own, he built a low-light and infrared model of the room. The man’s janbiya, a curved dagger, sagged on one side of his sash. Everything was still where it should be. Everything was set.

  Could he kill a man? He didn’t want to, but really, he just had to plan it. Outside the window, a thin light was dusting the horizon. The man stirred.