The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2)

by Matthew Mather

  Bob nodded, too weak to argue. So now Jimmy is the Anti-Christ. But not everything out of the priest’s mouth was nonsense. He was more connected to the world than Bob realized. He knew a lot about Atopia. More important, though, the priest had access to a synthetic reality technology that he was letting Bob channel. Bob had never experienced the Terra Novan systems, not first hand, and this had to be some variant. There was more to this priest than met the eye.

  And without him, Bob would already be dead.

  “We can’t head into Egypt,” Bob whispered between cracked lips.

  Egypt was the only one of the African countries that wasn’t a part of the African Union. It was officially neutral, but fell more under the umbrella of the Alliance, and therefore more under Atopia’s sway.

  The priest leaned against the wall of crystal and stared into it. “There are a series of oases leading into Egypt, it is the easiest—”

  “I can’t go that way,” Bob croaked. “Is there a way toward central Africa?”

  “There is a way, but you’d die if you went yourself.”

  Venturing into Egypt, in Bob’s current state with this bounty on his head, was as good as giving up. There had to be more like Toothface out there. He was hunted now. He needed to get into friendly territory—it was his only chance—but he couldn’t expect the priest to risk his own life. Bob needed to get into the African Union and get in touch with Mohesha, Patricia’s old friend on Terra Nova. She knew he was coming. She could help.

  Or should he just give up? This was way beyond anything he ever imagined. He didn’t know what the right thing to do was anymore. But then the angry voice in his head, You can’t fail again.

  “Just tell me the way.”

  18

  SID PUT HIS pint down. “The Devil and God got into a big fight over that.”

  “Over what? Responsibility?” Sibeal snorted.

  Sid wagged a finger at her. “What I’m saying is that God giving free will to humans is what got the Devil so upset.” He smiled. “Or at least, that’s the story.”

  They were arguing at a table in the White Horse Pub deep under Midtown. A half-finished burger sat in front of Sid beside three empty pint glasses. Leaking runoff from new construction rained down onto the corrugated metal roof, and all levels of the pit and cave walls were abuzz with the chatter and clatter of machinery. The pub smelled of stale beer and mech-grease.

  Sid found himself using his reality skins less and enjoying the grittiness of the “real” world the more he stayed underground. He reached out with a phantom limb to tweak the serving bot for another beer. A bit more than a week, and he was already a part of the scenery, just another regular. Of course, Zoraster was never far, the Grilla shadowing him wherever he went.

  Sibeal wasn’t one to be interested in theories without some practical application. “So you’re saying that if something is pre-programmed, then it’s not responsible?”

  “If you had no choice, would you feel responsible?” Sid replied.

  “I think responsibility and accountability are different. No matter what, if you do something, you’re accountable.” Sibeal took a deep breath. “So who won?”

  A serving bot placed another beer in front of Sid. “Who won what?”

  Most of Sid’s attention was splintered into an array of workspaces where he worked with his proxxi on cracking the data beacon Bob left behind. Sibeal constantly pestered Sid about the beacon, so Sid had made a deal: if she granted him access to outside data pipes, he’d give her a view into what was inside the data beacon. This outside access was promised despite the objections of Zoraster, who felt a better option might be to simply bury Sid at the end of a service tunnel and be done with it.

  “This fight between God and the Devil,” Sibeal said.

  Sid picked up his beer and frowned. “You know, I don’t know.” He took a sip. “I guess it’s a constant battle.”

  “And do you think we have free will?”

  Sid took another sip. “I think there’s a more important question.”

  “And what’s that?” Sibeal was working with Sid to crack the beacon, so, like Sid, only half of her attention was at the table.

  Sid smiled. “Do you feel like you have free will?”

  “Come on.” Sibeal shook her head. “Are you being stupid on purpose? Of course I’m making choices.”

  “Then that’s all that matters.”

  In a splinter he always had tracking the Grilla, Sid saw Zoraster growl and shake his head. He was eavesdropping, shadowing Sid, sitting in a corner of the pub out of sight. Sid smiled and ordered him a beer—he knew a conversation like this would set the big monkey off. A second and a half later, a serving bot slapped it down in front of Zoraster. He grabbed it and sucked half of it down, glaring at Sid.

  Sibeal poked him. She found a match for one of the beacon’s encryption keys. Sid nodded at her, impressed, and accepted the key. It was good work. “So you and your glasscutter friends hunt machine intelligences—do you think they have free will? Like you think you do?”

  “Are you asking if I feel guilty for hunting them down?”

  Sid took a sidelong glance at his proxxi, Vicious, who was working beside him in their virtual workspaces. “Yeah, I guess I am. It’s one thing to hunt a person—they have rights, due process—but a synthetic intelligence? Terminated at whim . . .?”

  “So we’re the bad guys?” She withdrew her splinters from their shared workspaces. “These are virtual worlds with virtual beings, Sid. And if I have no free will, as you say, then how could I feel guilty? Want to talk morality?”

  Sid watched a pattern emerge from the virtual workspaces they shared. He threw his primary presence in to take a closer look.

  “Nothing to say?” Sibeal demanded.

  “Forget it, I was just messing around.” In the virtual workspace, one encryption key was fitting into another, the chain enclosing Bob’s data beacon opening up.

  “This is such a load of horseshit!” roared a voice that stopped both Sibeal and Sid in their tracks. It was Zoraster, lumbering up from his table to confront them. “You two, dancing around each other like teenagers in heat.”

  Sibeal frowned at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking—”

  “Your little crush is putting us all in danger,” he growled, pushing aside two tables. “We should have turned this worm in for a reward days ago. Now the heat’s on, the feds are breathing down our necks. We already got what we needed, why are we waiting?”

  Sibeal stood to face the Grilla. While she stood just a foot shorter than him, he was four times wider at the shoulders. “Don’t you want to find the truth? If what Sid is telling us is true . . .”

  Sid told them everything he knew, what Patricia Killiam told them about Jimmy Scadden, stealing peoples’ minds, corrupting the pssi program from the inside out. He didn’t have proof, though.

  “The truth?” Zoraster grabbed Sid by the back of his neck. “The truth is that we have no idea what’s inside that data beacon, and you’re granting him outside access to share it. You know the kind of trouble this could get us all in?”

  Sid squirmed to get out of Zoraster’s grip. “It’s a risk for me, too. I have no idea what Bob put in that beacon. I’m being totally open with you, and the second we open that thing, either you’ll see I’m lying or you’ll get your proof.”

  Zoraster picked Sid up off the ground as if he were a toy. “You’re making your responsibilities ours.”

  “Put him down!” Sibeal yelled.

  “And here you are,” Zoraster continued, ignoring Sibeal, “chatting about free will and responsibility—a slippery fish with a silvery tongue. In the real world, you do something wrong, and you’re responsible. It’s that simple. Time to own up, fly boy.”

  Sid dangled in the air, staring into Zoraster’s face. “But what is the ‘real w
orld?’ ”

  “This”—Zoraster banged the pub tabletop, knocking over the empty glasses—“is the real world, my friend. Screw it. Enough is enough.” He turned, Sid flying through the air on the end of his arm.

  “I don’t think so,” Sid whispered.

  Zoraster snarled. “What did you . . .”

  The outlines of the pub and pit walls shimmered.

  “. . . say? . . .”

  The world around them reformed, and Sid and Sibeal were standing on the floor of a repair pit, several tunnels down from the main den. Now Zoraster was the one suspended in the air, twenty feet up in the tight grip of a construction mechanoid.

  “What the . . .?” He squirmed, then roared, the sound echoing down the tunnels.

  Sid laughed. “Really? You expect me to be here for a week and not crack into everything? Overpower your synthetic immune systems, hijack your realities? You might think you’ve been watching me.” Sid smiled. “But I’ve been the one watching you.”

  “Let . . . me . . . down!” Zoraster flexed, straining in the grip of the mechanoid. Its metal fingers shuddered, but did not give.

  “Calm down, you big monkey.”

  Sibeal’s eyes grew wide. “You really shouldn’t call him a—”

  Sid put one hand up. “We’ve cracked the data beacon. Who wants to see what’s inside?”

  At that, Zoraster quit wriggling.

  “Outside access first,” Sid reminded Sibeal.

  “Don’t do it,” Zoraster growled, but it was too late.

  “Your security blankets are bullet proof, right? Both outgoing and ingoing?” Sid asked Sibeal. There might be something nasty inside.

  Sibeal nodded.

  Dangling the unopened data beacon in a private virtual world, Sid reached out to grab the exit key from Sibeal. In an instant he was out, spinning a part of his consciousness—chaperoned by a splinter of Sibeal—to soar above New York while he reconnected his meta-cognitions systems with his outside search agents. At the same time, Sibeal opened the data beacon, spreading its contents across the walls of a secured space.

  “My God,” she whispered.

  Sid left a good chunk of his attention matrix with her. From what he saw, most of what Bob put in the beacon was data from Patricia Killiam that Sid had already seen. At least this would confirm his story, hopefully calm the Grilla down. He watched Sibeal as she absorbed details of Jimmy Scadden’s probable exploits on Atopia; killing his own mother, killing Patricia Killiam, trapping the wife of Atopia Defense Force’s Commander, Rick Strong, in a simulated reality suicide.

  “What’s in there?” Zoraster grunted. He wasn’t plugged into the data stream.

  Sibeal looked at Sid. He shrugged, why not. Something tugged at Sid’s awareness, and a mediaworld broadcast opened up around him: mushrooming explosions, a wave of attack drones descending onto a submerged city. “Why didn’t you tell me?” New Orleans had been attacked.

  “Nothing we could do.” Zoraster relaxed as he assimilated the stories about Jimmy. “Could you let me down from here?”

  The mechanoid’s hand opened up, dropping Zoraster to the floor of the pit.

  They hadn’t found Vince yet, Sid saw as he scanned the media reports, so maybe he escaped. Or maybe they captured him. Or maybe he was dead. Nothing in his networks gave any indication of where Bob might be. As the number-one suspect in the Manhattan attack, a manhunt was underway by nearly every police agency on the planet, but so far, it seemed nobody had any ideas.

  Sibeal grabbed Sid. “What the hell is this?”

  Sid was busy dropping agents into the Louisiana networks and digging into the New York passenger cannon logs. “What?”

  “This Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector data.”

  The POND? Sid had heard of it. It was one of Patricia Killiam’s pet projects. “It’s a planetary scale neutrino detector that Dr. Killiam embedded on the floor of the ocean—”

  “I know what the POND is,” interrupted Sibeal. She grabbed Sid’s primary subjective and dropped a stream of data into it. “But what is this?”

  Sid’s mind did a double-take. He redirected part of himself to see what Sibeal was freaking out over. The POND had detected something in the neutrino flow it was monitoring—a message or transmission. He tried to understand the script of physics that came next, but it appeared the message emerged from another universe, or, at any rate, not from a terrestrial source.

  “Aliens?” Sid mumbled, trying to get his head around it. Bob never told him anything about this.

  From the logs, Patricia terminated the POND project right after the message was received. While the translation systems weren’t able to decode the content, a contextual pattern had emerged. It wasn’t just a message—it appeared it was a warning, and one directed specifically at Atopia.

  “I’ve never seen this before,” said Sid. “I’m as surprised as you are.”

  Sibeal began running her own translation memes through it. “Can this be real?”

  For once, even Zoraster was silent.

  The back of Sid’s mind tickled, and he reflexively shoved away whatever it was, trying to focus on the POND data. Then it tickled again. He swiveled his attention outward. In an instant, he began shutting down his external networks and cutting off the agents he’d instantiated in Louisiana. He closed down the world with the data beacon in it.

  Sibeal turned to him. “Why’d you do that?”

  “Something in that data beacon we just opened, it’s alerted Atopia.”

  A composite of pssi-kids, ones that Sid grew up with on Atopia, just turned their attention his way. He’d sensed them in the bar the night of the attack in Hell. Bob had warned him about the danger of exposing the private data on Jimmy Scadden. It was what had gotten Patricia killed, and why they had to escape from Atopia.

  But Sid hadn’t appreciated just how dangerous it could be.

  “Something got out,” Sid said. “The second that data on Jimmy was decrypted . . .”

  Now that the can of worms had been opened, he suspected the whole Midtown den was in danger. There was no telling what Jimmy might do to anyone who knew his secrets.

  He was afraid they were about to find out.

  19

  HIGH OVER THE Gulf of Guinea, the coast of Africa a thin line on the horizon, a drone began dispersing decoys, dropping them toward the distant speck of the Terra Nova platform. The viewpoint dropped down, following the warheads as they spiraled in, and then the inferno of the Terra Novan slingshots began to fill the air with superheated plasma. The simulation halted, and the shared reality space of the meeting morphed into streams of financial data and mortality statistics that ballooned into the attendees’ meta-cognition frameworks.

  It was a joint planning meeting between Atopian and Allied staff, held in virtual space. The meeting’s presentations spawned into alternate realities that stretched forward and backward in time. The simulations grabbed each attendee’s consciousness as needed to explain what needed to be understood. Questions were raised and answered in private meeting spaces that popped in and out of existence.

  The senior staff of Allied Command was present with their senior staff. Their black-and-red uniforms composed a full two-thirds of the circular conference table in the meeting world created for the event, with the other third made up of the Atopian representatives. Jimmy Scadden presided over the whole thing, conspicuously outfitted in his military whites.

  Nancy Killiam excused herself, pulling her consciousness into the identity space of the conference room. Taking a deep breath, she leaned forward and put her elbows onto the polished mahogany table. She buried her face into her hands, rubbing her temples with the heels of her hands.

  Jimmy noticed her retreating. “Is everything all right?” He began calling the meeting to the last point, dragging the focal point of everyone’s mind back to
him.

  Nancy stared at him, wondering how much he knew. Bob had been in a passenger cannon pod, arcing high over the Atlantic, when he reached out to her. He’d dropped her a data beacon before he’d cut off contact, but she hadn’t told anyone.

  “If you have any more information, now would be the time.” Jimmy smiled.

  “No,” Nancy replied coolly, “I have nothing new.”

  This was mostly true. She hadn’t decoded the beacon. It was too risky. For now.

  One by one, the meeting participants inhabited the bodies sitting around the table. In the background, around the peripheries of the room, the merged realties of the simulation worlds continued to evolve, like a shifting veil of rain.

  “We all have personal relationships with Vincent Indigo, Robert Baxter, Sidney Horowitz, but this is how traitors work,” Jimmy added. He knew she was thinking about Bob. “They use you, your history together—”

  This was both dangerous and patronizing. She shifted the latest tracking reports into the meeting’s informational spaces. “Thank you, Mr. Scadden, but I’d point out that it was you who had the last contact with Robert Baxter before he left Atopia, in fact suggesting that he leave, if I remember.”

  Everyone was at the table now, and they were listening to his exchange with Nancy.

  Jimmy blinked. “Yes, but—”

  “Robert Baxter and I were friends,” she continued, “but he is a part of your family.”

  Jimmy turned to the rest of the meeting. “I’m quite sure everyone knows where I stand.”

  “I think that it is quite clear where everyone stands,” said Commander Zheng, head of Allied Command, looking at Jimmy. “Except you.”

  The Alliance had grown increasingly aware of the disproportionate influence Atopia was wielding as pssi spread into their consumer populations. While it had sided with the Alliance, in the past Atopia had never formally joined.

  “You know my condition for joining the Alliance,” Jimmy replied. He brought a series of Terra Nova attack simulations to the center of the meeting space.