The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2)

by Matthew Mather

  “Then I have someone for you to meet.”

  Clenching his teeth, Bob groaned and tried his body again. Pushing against the concrete wall, he inched his way to his feet. “Let’s get going.”

  Holding Bob’s hand to steady him, the priest led him along a path at the side of the stream, past stinking piles of plastic bags and eel bones and shredded packaging. They walked through an opening under tarps, held aloft by haphazard wooden poles, onto a dusty street between mud brick houses that leaned unsteadily into each other. A scooter buzzed by, honking at Bob as he nearly fell into it. The boy riding double on the back turned and gave Bob the finger.

  Bob stared at the trail of blue exhaust following the receding scooter. “Where are we?”

  “Goudjoul, on the side of Lake Chad.” The priest adjusted his grip on Bob, then looked up into the sky. “Or at least, what used to be Lake Chad. We have crossed the great divide.”

  Images flowed into Bob’s mind, information pulsing through the connection with the priest. Goudjoul was a small frontier town between the Allied and African Union territories, on an island in a sea of algae on the border of Chad. Lake Chad used to be a vast inland sea, but all that remained was a puddle of green—it was the only place on Earth where the species of algae outnumbered the species of animals. Bob followed the priest’s eyes up and saw the comet hanging in the sky, ever larger, its tails spreading ever wider. The critical thing was that they were on the other side of the Sahara desert, on the fringe of sub-Saharan Africa.

  “Come,” urged the priest, motioning toward a crowd gathering in an open square ahead.

  Bob felt something sticking to his leg and looked down. A leech had attached itself. He reached down and yanked it off, leaving an oozing wound.

  The priest saw his look of revulsion. “Parasites make up the majority of life on Earth.” Grabbing the leech, he held it in front of Bob’s eyes. “Do you hate them? Do you see yourself? Humans are the greatest parasites of all.”

  He threw the leech into an alleyway and kept walking. The lesson was over.

  In this place a ragged, half-naked man aroused little curiosity, and Bob stumbled behind the priest. Am I hungry? He wasn’t sure. Everything felt like a dream, the images before his eyes flat and two-dimensional. He eased through the crowd like a ghost, sensing the people around him. People walked by him, the men in cloaks, the women in burkas, hidden from view, but not hidden from Bob.

  On Atopia he took for granted, like breathing, the speeding up of consciousness, the ever-expanding meta-cognition systems fueled by the machines, but here, the humans were so slow. He could sense the neural potentials flowing through their bodies, anticipate their movements, know their intentions before they became consciously aware themselves—he could almost hear their thoughts flowing through them.

  In the few people who were connected to the pssi multiverse, Bob was intercepting the thoughts and images flowing through their external cognition networks. The memplex here was shallow and homogenous, the allowed external-thought patterns restricted. They were free to think what they wanted in their meat-minds, but the digital minds here were forced open to the local council. They were regularly cleansed of unclean ideas.

  The Atopian network was present here, nudging itself into this crack in the side of the African Union. There were a few people using pssi, but there were more that were renting it. Spinning into a viewpoint that hovered above the bazaar, he picked out the psombies, the minds of their owners given free access to the multiverse play worlds in exchange for lending their physical bodies to Cognix Corporation.

  Bob and the priest stayed well clear of them.

  Something else he stayed out of was communication networks. He could have reached out into them, but he was in unfamiliar territory that was crawling with Atopian access points. He had to remain invisible.

  Up ahead was a laamb wrestling match. This Senegalese sport was the biggest in Africa, almost the biggest in the world, and every town had its local contests on weekends. A thickly-muscled man sat scratching in the dirt, his eyes wide, and his neck muscles taut. He was speaking to the spirits, the loa. This area was under heavy influence of voudon, the ancient religion that spread from here into the Americas hundreds of years before.

  The crowd grew denser. Bob began noticing the deformed and injured scattered throughout. The Wars were fueling massive death tolls in central Africa, and starvation and plagues were driving people into the cities, at least those who could afford it. Despite the amputations and injuries, there were no mandroids here. The area was too poor to support the robotic ecosystem that outnumbered humans elsewhere. If the African Union was a rising superpower, here in the fringes it was still grindingly deprived.

  A young boy caught Bob’s eye. He was sitting on a tree stump, his withered arms and legs curled up into his body at awkward angles.

  “Hi,” said Bob in Chadian Arabic, the words flowing from his mouth.

  The boy looked up and managed a pained smile, flies buzzing away as Bob reached out to touch him. Flitting into the boy’s nervous system, Bob discovered the source of the deformation—a demyelinating nerve disorder brought on by malnutrition. Simple enough to fix, at least in the short term. Bob concentrated, letting his mind flood into the boy’s neural system. He began restructuring the grey matter. He wasn’t used to the technology the priest infused into him, but it was superior to Atopian pssi in many ways, even as a novice.

  Bob smiled, releasing the boy, and continued walking into the crowd.

  THE STRANGE MAN’S touch felt like cool water running into the boy’s veins. The pain disappeared, and the boy’s arms and legs unfolded. He smiled, leaning over to put his feet on the ground. Reaching up he pulled on his father’s hand, who turned to look down in amazement at his son, standing on his own feet for the first time in years.

  The man cried in disbelief and began calling to his wife and friends. The boy stared silently at the disappearing silhouette of Bob. The crowd at the edge of the laamb wrestling circle was frenetic, screaming and thundering with the ongoing fight. Bob had to force his way in, past the men preparing themselves, their eyes, not seeing. He found the priest talking to two scruffy military men.

  “Transportation into the African Union, no questions?” said a gaunt man dressed in threadbare khaki fatigues, an aging AK-47 slung over one arm. He was talking to the priest.

  The priest nodded and pointed at Bob.

  The man’s eyes lit up. “Ah, yes, yes.” He turned to speak to another man in fatigues beside him. They both nodded. He turned back to Bob. “This is danger. Will be expensive. Much risk.”

  “You will be rewarded,” the priest said. “I will make arrangements.”

  Staring into Bob’s eyes, the man smiled with a mouthful of broken teeth. “At the main dock, tonight, just before the sun goes down.”

  “Sure,” Bob replied, trusting the priest knew these men.

  The gaunt man continued to stare at Bob.

  “Do I know you?” Bob asked.

  The gaunt man laughed. “We are all friends here. Good, we will see when the sun goes down, down by the docks.”

  With a roar from the crowd, one of the wrestlers pinned the other to the ground. Bob heard the crack of breaking bones, earning another roar. The laamb wrestling match was over, and the crowd began dispersing.

  Bob stood in place, in a daze. The men in fatigues were gone, the priest was gone. Something nibbled one of his fingers. He looked down. A goat had wandered up to him. It bleated and nudged him again, looking up at Bob with its slatted-pupil eyes. Bob sensed its fear. It was lost and hungry.

  He was lost too.

  Bob reached down and petted it. He decided to care for it, find it some food, some shelter. He’d always had a soft spot for animals. They were simply non-human people, with the same abilities to make conscious decisions, grieve and worry and love. And this went both
ways; in humans, there was also the beast.

  Then again, looking down into the animal’s eyes, even if he fed it and found it shelter today, what would happen to it tomorrow? The animal was a bag of bones, its fur mangy. Perhaps a quick end, to stop its suffering, was better.

  AN UNDULATING CARPET of green stretched to the horizon. It glistened under the setting sun. The African Union began somewhere over that horizon, and Bob was close, finally on his way.

  The AU was the second axis of world power behind the Alliance of China and America. A deep distrust of the old world and colonial powers ran deep, a distrust that ran into the bloodstream of anything African. The AU was commissioning its own aircraft carriers, at-sea platforms, and south-south trade outstripped north-north for the first time in history: the distance of Lagos–Rio was half that of New York–Frankfurt. It was also the first jurisdiction to grant full human rights to certain uplifted animals, the Grillas.

  Bob settled into his seat of the wooden longboat, its gunnels worn with time and sweat. An ancient internal combustion engine, probably from an even more ancient car, was fixed to the back of the boat, its drive shaft extended and attached to a propeller. The engine roared, the driver standing high in the back like a gondolier, cutting a path forward with the boat through the algae.

  “I can come as far as the border,” said the priest, sitting just ahead of him. “There is a transport waiting. Beyond that, I cannot. Just as you have enemies outside, there are those in Lagos who hunt me.”

  Bob nodded. He couldn’t ask for more than that, knowing how much he missed—feared for—his own loved ones. He hoped it wasn’t too late.

  Once they cleared the ragtag collection of boats in the harbor, the driver gunned the engine. Bob had never seen a gas-powered one before, and he watched the fumes pouring out of it and into the naked atmosphere with a morbid fascination.

  They were smuggling him past the legal check points up the Yoba River and into Nigeria. The paramilitaries arranged a drone transport from there through the exclusion zone. An outbreak of nano-goo a decade ago had forced evacuations and a tactical nuclear strike by China on its own failed site in the Gobi desert, so replicator factories now had to be physically firewalled off from the rest of the world. The exclusion zone around Assembler City outside of Lagos was the best way to get in without anyone noticing.

  Turning, Bob squinted ahead, westward, into the setting sun. Something was dead ahead of them. What is that? A forest? Something was casting long shadows across the pond-scum surface, but whatever it was, as the boat approached, it parted, moving aside to create a path.

  The driver throttled back the engine.

  It was people, hundreds of them, standing naked, knee-deep in the shallow water with their arms outstretched. The webbing between their fingers glowed green in the light, and folds of skin stretched from their arms to their bodies—a Greenie colony, people bioengineered with photosynthetic engines in their epithelial mitochondria.

  They fed off sunlight.

  The boat glided through them. Bob turned to watch their faces, their eyes closed, impassive. He saw the lignin-thermoplastic shell of their habitat burrowed into the side of the dune island behind them. There had to be a deep-core thermal generator in there. It was expensive to maintain a colony like this—nothing about it was natural—and just around the corner there was grinding poverty and suffering.

  Bob shook his head, looked away to stare back into the setting sun.

  24

  “ROBERT BAXTER AND Sidney Horowitz,” said the newsworld announcer, an elfin girl with a deadly serious face, “friends or accomplices?” She paused for dramatic effect. “Or BOTH?”

  An image of Atopia floated into the display space of the splinter Sid had following this thread. “And how are they related to the disgraced Vincent Indigo? The greatest personal financial loss of all time, over a trillion dollars gone with the collapse of his empire . . .” The social clouds tethered to the story erupted at mention of a trillion dollars: “Can you imagine?,” “What was he thinking?,” “Serves him right,” “Did they find him yet?,” followed by a chorus of, “Who cares . . .”

  Most of it was just noise, but one thread led into an interesting aside: a ride through the pneumatic tube system under New York with the reconstructed mind of one of the party-goers injured in the attack on Hell. It was new information, and the splinter encoded this into a memetic ping to catch Sid’s primary attention. Sid added this to other data being collected. It seemed that Bob had been heading for the passenger cannon on the day of the attack. He sent agents to conduct a deeper forensic sweep.

  In another newsworld, an image of the glowing skyline of Manhattan’s financial district floated into view, followed by a view of three-dimensional tunnels underneath it, layer upon layer, millions of conduits. A panel of media pundits, in severe black suits, weighed in: “Sidney Horowitz is still definitely in Manhattan, and the NYPD is asking anyone with any information . . .”

  Sid had heard it all before, a million times in a million mediaworlds, but listening to it still sent dread tingling into his fingertips. Worse, he could only imagine what his mom was going through. But this is what I always wanted, right? A rebel, fighting for a cause, fighting for his friends. Sid nervously tapped his phantoms and dove into restructuring the airflow mechanics of the tunnel systems.

  His bravado was wearing thin.

  Pressure was coming down on the Midtown den. The underground was a collection of misfits, and to their credit—with the authorities bearing down—they were coming together. But not all the parts fit, and not everyone was happy. It wouldn’t be long until someone gave Sid up.

  “You all right, mate?” Bunky asked, noticing Sid on the mediaworlds again. The inky blackness of an access tunnel stretched out ahead. Sid was riding shotgun in Bunky’s mechanoid.

  Retreating a chunk of himself into the physical world, Sid looked at Bunky in the dim red light. “I guess.” he replied. Since the attack on New Orleans, it was anybody’s guess what would happen next. The phrackers were busy modifying future timelines as best they could to try to deflect the attention from Sid, but their efforts were starting to be noticed. It was just adding to the incriminating evidence.

  A flashing door appeared in the rock wall ahead. They were on their way to a materials testing lab with the rocks they collected at the spots where Willy’s proxxi stopped in the underground. They didn’t find any machines, didn’t see anything unusual, so they dug out some samples from the surrounding rock to test.

  Bunky smiled at Sid with his broken, toothy grin. “Mate, we’ve got your back. Don’t worry.”

  The access door opened ahead of them, and Bunky’s mechs began unloading the samples.

  Sid smiled and retreated to his inner worlds, monitoring the stream of data from his splinter network. “Was the police action in New Orleans a step too far?” echoed one newsworld. He spun through some splinters monitoring the physical world: “A winter hurricane? Depression in the Caribbean looks like it will build into category four and hit the east coast in January . . .” He moved his attention into a different newsworld. “Central Africa reports a huge locust swarm that swept through the desert and into Chad . . .” This last newsworld story was so unusual that it pricked his attentional matrices. When was the last time a spontaneous locust swarm moved through the Sahara? He filed the thread for closer inspection.

  “The Synthetic Beings Charter of Rights has been derailed by Nancy Killiam, the heir of the founder of the SyBCoR movement itself, the late Patricia Killiam . . .” another story began, which flowed into, “. . . glitches in the Atopian synthetic reality system, or ghosts in the machine? We talk now to . . .” which streamed into, “. . . tens of thousands more disappearances reported by independent sources . . .”

  Sid smiled. Like a frog sitting in water heated to a boil, the public was barely noticing. At first the disappearances had been e
xplained away as system problems, then psychological ones, but what Sid suspected was Jimmy’s excesses were getting difficult to hide.

  “. . . but Jimmy Scadden, head of conscious security for Atopia, says that terrorist actions related to Sidney Horowitz . . .”

  Sid’s smile evaporated.

  Going through his list of projects, he checked the decryption agents working on the POND data, to see if the mysterious messages from a parallel universe could be unwound into anything intelligible. Nothing yet. He felt a familiar phantom pulling his consciousness, and his smile returned. He didn’t resist.

  Coming back into real space, his proxxi, Vicious, was disgorging his body from the mechanoid and onto the terrace of the White Horse Pub. He tweaked the serving bot for a round of beers and slid himself into a seat between Sibeal and Zoraster.

  “Anything new on the POND data?” Sibeal asked right away. It was a hot topic in the pub.

  Sid shook his head.

  “I’m sweating like a glassblower’s asshole!” whooped Shaky as he sat down on the other side of the table with Bunky. The serving bot slapped a beer down in front of him and he grabbed it up.

  Sid turned to Sibeal. “Anything new on your side?”

  “Some bad glass out there.” She spun some data into a private workspace with Sid. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen before. What do you make of it?”

  Sid slid a part of his mind in to take a look. “Doesn’t look like it was doing anything wrong.”

  “Did you see how it was mutating? And it’s not attached to any human tags—”

  “Come on, it wasn’t doing anything.” Sid felt annoyed at the way she always targeted machine intelligences. Maybe he felt like he had to stand up for his proxxi, Vicious, who was sitting across from them in his virtual projection.