The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2)

by Matthew Mather

  The Atopian council had done its best to downplay the near-disaster of the Terra Novan reality skin, to limit the damage to its brand and upcoming product release. In this they’d almost succeeded too well. Nobody on the outside believed Atopia had been in mortal danger. The impression was that it had all been a kind of extravagant corporate espionage between these two competitors as they rushed to release their products.

  The Alliance had been willing to go along with blockading Terra Nova in the physical and cyber realms, but Jimmy was pushing for an all-out kinetic attack with full Allied support. The varied conflicts of the Weather Wars were finally subsiding, and an attack against Terra Nova would constitute an act of war against the African Union.

  Jimmy looked around the table and smiled. “The Great Peace is almost upon us, ladies and gentlemen. Terra Nova is all that stands in your way.” He turned to Zheng. “It is your choice.”

  The Alliance needed Atopia. Very little would stand in its way of dominance if Atopia joined them, but if it switched sides, or went its own way . . .

  Zheng stared at him, his jaw set for a long moment. Then he nodded.

  20

  THE MAN WITH the ax paused, waiting for the screaming to stop. The earth was muddy from a rain shower, but the fast-moving clouds overhead cleared a patch of blue sky and the sun just managed to shine into the grassy courtyard between the farmhouse and barn. With a whimper, the screaming abated. Satisfied, the man balanced a log on the chopping block, squared his feet and swung his ax back—but then paused again.

  A line of birch trees shimmered against the backdrop of the dark forest that rolled up into foothills of the Ural Mountains, and someone appeared. A man, of slight frame and tentative step, peering toward the farm. Hesitating, the newcomer hung back.

  The broad-shouldered man raised his ax in salute. “Mr. Indigo! This way!”

  He motioned toward a patio set against the back of the farmhouse. Then he returned his focus to the log—still balanced on the chopping block—and swung back his ax again, looping it around to neatly split the wood in two. The ax stuck into the chopping block, and the man left it there, pausing to wipe the sweat from his brow with the back of one arm. He pulled his dangling suspenders up around his shoulders and walked up to the patio.

  VINCE CONTINUED WALKING toward the farmhouse. It was a synthetic space construct. Just an instant before he had been walking through the Louisiana swamp that the eagle-drone—that rescued him—had deposited him into. Someone dragged his primary subjective into this world. So he continued walking to see what they wanted.

  He checked back with Hotstuff.

  “All good here,” she replied to his query. In an overlaid display he watched her continue to slog through the swamp with his body. “Somebody’s hacked your subjective channels. I could try to get it back—”

  “No,” said Vince, still walking toward the farmhouse. “It’s fine.” The man ahead of him was motioning again, inviting him to come and sit on the patio. There were no metatags, no background data feeds on either this world or the man, but Vince could guess.

  “So,” said the man loudly as Vince neared. “You’ve been wanting to see me.” The man laughed. “In a manner of speaking.”

  The thick Russian accent was surprising. No automated translation, but the man wasn’t a native English speaker. This just confirmed Vince’s suspicions. “Wanting to see you might be an exaggeration, but yes, I’ve been looking for you.” Vince reconsidered his statement. “Someone asked me to look for you.”

  The man on the patio nodded. “Dear Patricia Killiam, a victim of her own creation. A certain tragic poetry, nyet?”

  The screaming began again, a soul-tearing screech from the barn, and Vince stopped on the stairs leading onto the patio.

  “Pay no attention to that,” said his host with a wave of one hand.

  An image materialized in Vince’s display space of a man bound and gagged. He was naked, his body laced in welts and old scars, but his face was obscured with black goggles, a large spike protruding from one eye. Vince frowned. “That’s—”

  “—Sledge,” continued the broad-shouldered man. “Yes, the one you met when you first arrived.” Sledge began screaming again, some unseen agent twisting his body in agony. “He was the one who contacted the Federals, led them to the Saint John ceremony. Led them to you, in fact. We’re just teaching him a small lesson in loyalty.”

  The image of Sledge faded, but the screaming remained. Vince braced himself and continued up the stairs to the patio. The man stood and extended one hand. “How rude of me. My name is Mikhail.”

  Vince shook his hand. What were the rules of conduct when meeting a notorious gangster? Probably erring on the side of caution was advised. Vince scanned reports from Hotstuff on Mikhail: rose up through the ranks of the Russian mafia in the late twentieth century after starting a career in Stalin’s security apparatus. Some even hinted that he’d been a tank commander in the Red Army’s defeat of the Nazis outside Leningrad, the battles in which he’d probably lost the first parts of his own body. The best guess was that he was now just a brain in a box somewhere, but exactly where, nobody knew. He was one of the oldest people alive—if the term could really be applied to him anymore.

  “Some call me Sintil8, but I think we can dispense with facades, Mr. Indigo.” He let go of Vince’s hand and motioned for him to sit down opposite him at a rough-hewn wooden table. “And before you ask, Connors is safe. We are directing your proxxi to her location now.”

  Vince surveyed the area. His threat assessment systems had no information. Vince was reduced to using his meat-mind, and he strained, his inner voice looping through warnings. Looking behind him, nobody was visible, nothing apart from the trees and mountains behind the dirt trail that led out of the farm. Then again, he was only seeing—only sensing—what Mikhail wanted, allowed, him to see. There was no getting around the fact that he was entirely at the gangster’s mercy. Vince half-shrugged and took a seat.

  “Drink?” asked Mikhail, and without waiting for an answer summoned someone inside. “Aberlour is your favorite, yes?”

  A mandroid, this one a stump of flesh suspended on two thin metal legs with matching arms, appeared with a bottle of scotch and two tumblers, setting them down between the two men. It made to leave but Mikhail raised an arm.

  “Susan,” said Mikhail to the mandroid, “I’d like to introduce you to Mr. Vincent Indigo.” He paused, smiling. “But I think you might have already met on Atopia.”

  The mandroid—Susan—turned to Vince, attempting a smile with the scarred remains of her mouth. Red photoreceptors glittered in the back of her empty eye sockets. “A pleasure, Mr. Indigo,” she said, her voice a rasping electronic signal that entered Vince’s consciousness from behind.

  Vince squinted, staring back into her skull-face. Yes, Commander Strong introduced him to this mandroid when they were working on deciphering the storms threatening Atopia three months ago. He reached out to shake her hand, feeling cool metal. She turned, releasing his hand, and disappeared back into the farmhouse.

  Mikhail poured the scotch into the tumblers, watching Vince. “So you are searching for William McIntyre’s body, yes?” he asked, handing one of the glasses over. Raising his own, he nodded, cheers, and took a drink.

  Vince stared at Mikhail. He’d imagined tracking down Sintil8 and sending an agent to gather information from a distance. This was much more intimate. He didn’t think dissimilating would help. It was time to lay the cards on the table. “Yes,” he replied.

  Mikhail raised his glass again and drank. “Good.”

  Vince considered the drink in his hand. If Mikhail wanted to kill him, he’d had ample opportunity, and anyway, he reminded himself, this was a synthetic projection. He took a sip. It tasted like Aberlour. Vince settled into the chair. “Did you help Willy’s proxxi steal his body? Smuggle it out of Atopia?”
/>   Mikhail pursed his lips. “Yes.”

  “How did you get it out without leaving a trace?”

  “Susan was there, with others, of course.” Mikhail smiled. “And the Spice Routes—the darknets—even Atopians needed their secrets.”

  Vince nodded and took another drink. At last, some progress. “Okay, so then why?”

  “Because he discovered something very useful to me.”

  Vince studied Mikhail’s face. He’d been one of the most powerful opponents of Atopia from the very start, lobbying to have access to the brain’s pleasure pathways removed from its protocols. As one of the greatest purveyors of pleasures in the physical world, and arms dealer to all sides of the Weather Wars, the organizations he worked with stood to lose a lot of money when Atopia launched itself into the world.

  “You mean Jimmy Scadden stealing people’s minds in the pssi system?” Vince asked. “Were you hoping to use that to stop its release?”

  “Perhaps.” Mikhail cocked his head to one side. “But there was more to it than that.”

  Vince took another sip from his scotch. “And what was that?”

  Mikhail nodded. “Why Jimmy committed these acts.”

  “And why did he?”

  “That is something we are going to find out together, Mr. Indigo.” Mikhail sat back in his chair with his drink.

  “Together?”

  “I don’t think we’ll find Willy’s body otherwise. Not in time, anyway.”

  “For what?” Vince asked, and then it struck him. “Wait, you don’t know where Willy’s body is?”

  Mikhail shook his head.

  Now things were making some sense. Bob had the information from Patricia. Mikhail needed them, needed their help to get what he wanted. “Okay, I get it.”

  “Good.”

  “So now we’re working together, what is it that Willy’s proxxi has that is so important?” Vince didn’t really expect him to answer, but wanted to see what he’d say.

  “Mr. McIntyre’s body holds the key to something I have been searching for a very”—Mikhail looked skyward—“very long time. When I was a young man, I fought against the Nazis.”

  As Mikhail spoke, he uploaded data packets into Vince’s meta-cognition systems. It was better to show than to tell. Images of burning villages flashed into Vince’s display spaces, place names and dates flooding his short-term memory. The playback switched to a bleak wooden shack, of bodies stacked one atop the other.

  “I was captured, interred in one of their POW camps, and did what I had to in order to survive.”

  Vince watched an image of an emaciated young man, missing an arm, walking through a pack of SS officers. They were smoking and chatting, laughing, oblivious to the intruder in their midst as he lifted cigarettes and packs of chocolates from their pockets.

  “But they soon learned of my . . .” Mikhail paused. “Let’s say, special skills.”

  An image filled Vince’s mind of the same young man, strapped to a wooden board, his head pinned back and probes inserted and clipped to him, the room filled with oscilloscopes and electronic devices.

  “In weakness, I turned on my own. I became a part of the evil.”

  Now the young man was wearing an SS uniform, his cold eyes watching a stream of people being ushered into gas chambers.

  “The Nazis were obsessed with the occult. Aryan is a Sanskrit word—Iran literally means ‘land of the Aryan.’ Did you know that?” Mikhail arched his eyebrows.

  Vince shook his head.

  “Hitler’s prized possession was an ancient Buddhist statue from the Indus Valley, carved from a meteorite. He claimed it contained the ultimate power over reality and death, the fountain of everlasting youth.”

  Vince saw an image of the statue, enshrined on an oak table in the middle of the Berghof.

  “That didn’t work out too well,” Vince muttered.

  Mikhail ignored him. “It was the real reason he started the Nazi space program and planned moon bases—to search for more of it—for the exotic crystals it contained. Some secret societies called it Vril, but there have been many names.”

  “Why are you showing me all of this?” asked Vince.

  “I know that you’ve studied the ancient manuscripts.” Mikhail sat up and leaned into the table, looking straight into Vince’s eyes. “Whomever understands this message shall never die. Does this sound familiar, Mr. Indigo?”

  Vince nodded.

  “The Gospel of Saint Thomas.” Mikhail went on: “When you make two into one, when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and when you make male and female into a single one, when you make eyes in place of an eye, and hands in place of a hand, then you will enter.” Mikhail paused. “. . . the last word is untranslatable. These texts were dug up in Nag Hammadi at the end of 1945. I was part of a team that found them.”

  “Can you get to the point?”

  “Connect the dots,” replied Mikhail. “Have you ever heard of the Voynich manuscript?”

  The Voynich manuscript. Vince had heard of it, but didn’t know what it was. He instructed Hotstuff to search their internal data files.

  “But you have seen the Buddhist statues, the ones with many heads and hands.”

  Vince nodded. Like the ones he’d seen in the Chenrezig monastery.

  Mikhail leaned back from the table. “Your Mr. Jimmy Scadden is not just a madman, but I think influenced by something I’ve seen before. Willy’s body contains the key to unlocking the secret.”

  Vince just stared at him. “What secret?”

  “Toward the end of the Second World War, I fought with the Afrikaan units with the Rommel, the Desert Fox. Our units were destroyed by the Allies, but I escaped capture. I met someone out there.”

  An alert wailed in Vince’s audio channels. Mikhail scowled, summoning a graphic that hovered over the table.

  “It seems our friends aren’t done yet.” An image of drones skimming the Louisiana bayous spun into the space between the tables. “We need to cut this short and send you back to Connors.” He stood up.

  Vince held out one hand. “Wait. Who did you meet?”

  Mikhail stared at Vince. “I think you just met one at Pontchartrain.” Mikhail began deconstructing the world they were in, the mountains and forests collapsing to an interior point of space. “There are those that walk among us that are not of us.” He uploaded a document to Vince as he vanished. “The Nag Hammadi texts weren’t all that I found.”

  21

  THERE ARE NO atheists in foxholes. Picking up a fistful of hot sand, Bob watched it pour through his fingers, just like the grains of life felt like they were being sucked from him and into the scorching air. He squinted into the sun. There are no atheists stranded alone in the middle of Sahara, either.

  Then again, he wasn’t alone.

  “The mind creates suffering as a natural product of complex processes.” The priest was always walking ahead of him, leading the way. “Nothing can really be said to be ‘I’ or ‘me,’ we are all one.” He fixed Bob with his black eyes. “You need to get up.”

  This suffering isn’t shared, Bob wanted to scream as he pulled himself back to his feet. But the priest had to be hurting as well, and Bob was the one who had insisted they come this way, out into the deep desert. Even a Bedouin had to feel this heat. It wasn’t just the heat. With zero humidity, every molecule of water on the inside of his body wanted to get outside. Bob desperately wanted to rest, to dig his way into the cool sand beneath the surface, to bury himself. Please make this wind stop. It was eating into his skin like a blowtorch.

  “We need to keep moving,” the priest insisted.

  So far they had connected with two oases, stopping at each to fill their canteens and themselves with as much water as they could. And to eat, but Bob tried to forget this. He steeled himself and
plodded off behind the priest. Each breath felt like it was burning his lungs, as if the oxygen within it were on fire. They were nearing the top of a sand dune, hundreds of feet high, and on each footstep he would crunch through the stiff top layer of sand, his foot sinking underneath.

  Toothface was still hunting them. From time to time a drone would appear in the immense blue sky, or a swarm of hunting beebots would buzz at the peripheries of his consciousness. Each time, the priest would hide them in the folds of the desertscape.

  “How much farther?” He’d been out of water for a day.

  “Not much more now.” The priest returned a few steps to support Bob, pulling him up to the top of the ridge.

  Bob laughed, and would have cried if any tears were left in him. He’d hoped to see another gaping hole into the bowels of the Earth, dark cliffs guarding a hidden sanctuary of palms. But all that greeted them on the other side was an endless sea of white dunes, riding all the way to the horizon.

  “Come.” The priest held Bob’s hand. “Follow my voice.” He led the way down. “There are many kinds of intelligence, just as there are many kinds of suffering. It seems a hopeless, endless cycle, but one that can be broken . . .”

  Bob closed his eyes and tried to follow, but his legs buckled, spilling him down the side of the dune. In his mind he tried to get up, but his body remained still, his face to the sun, his eyes closed.

  The priest knelt beside him in the sand, his hand on Bob’s shoulder. “We are close. Not much further now.”

  But Bob couldn’t will his body to move.

  Bob had never really contemplated death before. On Atopia, it seemed like something that happened to other people, in some remote parts of the world, like catching malaria. How did I arrive here? There was the story, and then the story of how the story was told in his head, and then there was the story of the parts that were left out. Why had Patricia asked him to do this?