The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2)

by Matthew Mather

  If it was primitive, it was also one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth. The New Guinea highlanders spoke a thousand tongues.

  Vince remembered that it had seemed like Dr. Nicky Nixons was able to see his proxxi, Hotstuff, even though, without any smarticles in his system, it would have—should have—been impossible.

  Hunched over one of the cooking fires, Vince saw a man, naked save for a loin skin, covered in chalky paint the witch doctors applied to those searching the spirit worlds. He was arranging sweet potatoes in the cooking pits. The villagers here wouldn’t be able to sense Vince’s virtual presence unless they were loaded with smarticles and connected to the base station repeater. Vince walked over and put a hand on the man’s shoulder.

  The man turned and looked up—and smiled.

  “Hey, Mr. Indigo,” said Willy’s proxxi.

  27

  THE TURBOFAN TRANSPORT was on its way to Terra Nova.

  Bob felt a swarm of medbots scouring his body as he lay in an emergency pod. The symbol of Terra Nova, a thick circle with a square cross through its center, was imprinted on the ceiling of the passenger compartment his body was in.

  “This man you escaped with,” Mohesha asked, “do you have any additional information?”

  The priest had come further than Bob expected, all the way into Lagos. They said their goodbyes just before Bob initiated the contact sequence with Mohesha. Bob hesitated. The priest said he had enemies here. He didn’t want to get his savior into any trouble.

  “Just that he was a priest, and that he wasn’t welcome in the AU.” Bob spun some information packets with the priest’s face into Mohesha’s networks. He’d do his best to protect the priest if anything came up. He owed him.

  Mohesha assimilated the data. “Ah, yes, we know him. A Bedouin shaman, but an advanced user of our technology. We don’t see him as a threat, but politics in Africa are complicated.” Mohesha stood next to Bob and put an arm on his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep his identity between us.”

  Mohesha pinged Bob for location, and taking a deep breath, he released it to her. “You can relax, young man, you are with friends now. Come, let me show you more of what we’re about.” Mohesha took charge, and his primary viewpoint rocketed out from the top of the Spike, up and into the dark clouds. They looked down at an enhanced image of the plains surrounding Lagos.

  She highlighted a circular area two miles in diameter, dotted with radio receiver dishes. “This is what Atopia is pushing for UN weapons inspectors to look at.”

  It was the microwave power array for Lagos, part of the space power grid that the African Union and Terra Nova pioneered. Bob was familiar with it: over a hundred satellites in LEO, each capable of transmitting hundreds of megawatts of power in line-of-sight microwave bursts.

  Nearly two hundred years ago, the “old” world built dense networks of power transmission lines that stretched across America and Europe and China, but with the sharp rise in commodity metal prices, replicating this in Africa had been impossible. So they created the space power grid, becoming the leader in wireless power transmission.

  “They’re worried the power grid could be used as a directed energy weapon in a coming conflict,” explained Mohesha. “But it’s the basis of our economy, and we cannot consider demands to throttle or limit it.”

  Mohesha began spinning out one project after another into private worlds for Bob to see. Bob watched her Chief Science Officer credentials flash as each one opened. A massive tornado filled Bob’s visual fields.

  “The controlled vortex project can capture energy from the upper atmosphere,” Mohesha explained, “and convert it into usable kinetic energy at ground level.”

  There were a dozen vortex installations across Africa. Promoted as terraforming projects to combat global warming, they generated vast energies. Anything that generated that much power could be used as a weapon, a new and terrifying Weather War weapon, he thought but didn’t say.

  Mohesha spun their viewpoint a hundred miles into space and highlighted a ring running under the western half of the African continent. “The supercollider, a project only the African Union has been able to realize.”

  It was on the drawing board for decades, the ultimate endgame in a series of high-energy physics experiments to probe the very nature of the fabric of the universe. A thousand miles in circumference, it ran beneath Lagos, toward southern Africa and then eastern Africa, and even ran under the Sahara desert to the north. It was the scientific triumph of the AU, and was only just operational.

  “Patricia was a big supporter of many of these projects.” Mohesha brought in views of other projects, the Arbitrarily Large Phased Array—ALPHA—a swarm of satellites that collected solar energy and beamed it down to Earth via the space power grid. “The supercollider, in particular, was the twin of Patricia’s own Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector.” Mohesha paused. “Patricia shut down the POND just before the crisis. Do you know why?”

  He shook his head. “No idea.” Bob’s attention sharpened—the POND data, the transmission from another universe. “I’ll give everything I have to the Council.” Not that he didn’t trust Mohesha, but it might be wise to wait. “Patricia asked me to talk directly with them.”

  Mohesha paused before collapsing the display spaces. “Yes.” She sighed. “I miss her. It is good you made it. You’re the genetic embodiment of everything Patricia worked toward. You are her children, her pssi-kids. She is not gone, she is with you, in you.”

  Their viewpoint sailed across the ocean, and the crystal towers of Terra Nova glistened in the distance. Mohesha guided them in, circling the main tower complex. They materialized together, walking next to each other in a tropical garden of flowering red begonias and gladiolas. It was already dark, but the night garden was lit by the soft glow of aerial plankton.

  Bob had questions of his own, things that he’d been waiting to ask. “You say you miss Patricia, but she said it was you who infected Atopia with the reality skin that nearly destroyed us.” Mohesha had used Patricia’s trust to gain access to Atopian networks. “You used her.”

  He stared at her. He wasn’t sure if she’d try to deny it.

  Mohesha’s face turned to the floor. “It was the only way.”

  Bob waited for more, but she just walked ahead of him. “Half the reason my friends and I are being hunted is because they think Sid and I created that virus,” he added after a few seconds.

  She turned to him. “You think we should admit we attacked Atopia? That would be an automatic declaration of war. The uncertainty is all that’s buying us time. Patricia was lost to us already. Now it’s too late. There will be more bloodshed, and on a far larger scale than just Atopia.”

  “More bloodshed?” The skin on Bob’s arms prickled. “What do you mean?”

  Mohesha turned away and started walking again. She turned his attention to the sky, amplifying an image of the comet, its curved tail like a giant scythe aimed at the Earth. “The comet is decelerating too quickly. It was supposed to remain in an extra-lunar orbit.”

  Bob’s systems assimilated the data she sent him. “But it’s not going to hit Earth.”

  “Not yet, no.” She emphasized yet.

  “And you think this has something to do with Atopia? With Jimmy?”

  She shrugged. “It’s hard to say.”

  “Is this the destruction you see coming?” Bob jumped forward several steps to get even with Mohesha. “Is this the bloodshed?” There were ways a comet could be stopped. It was still on the far side of the sun, a hundred and fifty million miles away. He grabbed Mohesha, turning her to face him.

  Her face remained impassive. “It might be best, as you said, to wait for the Council meeting.” She pulled away and kept walking.

  Bob stood still. He glanced at the enhanced image of the comet in the sky. It faded as Mohesha released it. “When c
an I reconnect with my friends?”

  As soon as he made the connection with Mohesha, her networks had given him a status update. Sid had pinged Terra Nova with several requests. His friends were safe. Terra Nova hadn’t responded to them yet, but they’d know that Bob was all right. The mediaworlds were in a frenzy with the images of him getting picked up already. Bob watched the probability of imminent kinetic attack against Terra Nova spike in his phuturing channels.

  He was out of the frying pan and into the fire.

  “As soon as your physical body is secured in Terra Nova, we’ll let you talk to them. In the meantime, get some rest.” Her face softened. “Soon you’ll be free to roam your worlds with them again.”

  “And my proxxi, how long will it take to reconnect with him?”

  Terra Novans had a strict approach to synthetic intelligences. You couldn’t just create and destroy them here. Bringing one in required processing. In the desert, Bob decided to free Robert from his service, to abandon the use of a proxxi. The priest’s lessons had sunk in. The only problem was that he was sure Robert wouldn’t want to be freed, but that was another bridge for another day.

  “It’ll take a few days for the legal process to engage. You can still converse with him in a secure space, but his essence will be held in a holding world.”

  Bob nodded.

  Mohesha paused. “I do have one question for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This data beacon from Patricia, did you share it with anyone else?”

  Bob stared into her eyes. It wasn’t a time to hide information, but something made him want to keep these cards close to his chest. “Nobody,” he replied.

  28

  “CAN’T WE JUST cut off the connection to Terra Nova?” Sibeal asked.

  The excitement of finding Willy’s body—with Willy’s proxxi—wore off fast. Now they were trying to figure out how to reconnect Willy’s mind to Willy’s body directly. Sibeal was sitting at the cooking fire in the New Guinea village, together with Sid and Vince. Connors was observing through an avatar, and Bunky and Shaky and the rest of the gang from the White Horse Pub were ghosting through Sibeal.

  Before any of that, though, one thing needed to be cleared up.

  Sitting next to Sibeal on the log by the fire, Sid turned to face her. “Are you still planning on turning him in for bounty?” A part of him had thought that they’d never find Willy’s body, but all of a sudden everything had changed. He’d almost forgotten the reason why they’d struck a bargain, why Sibeal and her friends kidnapped him in the first place. Was the friendship routine just a sham? Just a scheme? In the background he was readying a systems attack that would disable the Midtown den. He waited for her answer.

  She crinkled her nose. “Well, we didn’t really find him.”

  Sid frowned. “What do you mean?” Was she trying to be clever?

  “Vince found him. I mean, we couldn’t take credit for someone else’s work.”

  Sid relaxed his attack vectors. “Otherwise you would?”

  Now she laughed. “Cool off, hot shot, of course we wouldn’t. This is about more than just money now.”

  “Good.”

  “Good. Now can we work on Willy?” She began filling a shared workspace with Willy’s brain’s network connection topographies. “And you can let go of your sneak attacks.” She smiled. “Do you think I didn’t let you trap Zoraster that time?”

  Sid laughed, shaking his head, and relaxed. He began highlighting paths on the connection diagrams. “Willy’s mind is working inside there.” He pointed at Willy’s head, and Willy’s proxxi smiled with it. “But it’s routed through Terra Nova. If we cut the connection, his consciousness will remain stuck in his head without any sensory input.” Full sensory deprivation was a fate worse than death.

  Sibeal nodded. “So we need to open a channel to Terra Nova?”

  “I’m trying.” With mounting cyberattacks and an impending physical attack, Terra Nova kept only a few diplomatic connections open. The connection to Willy’s head wasn’t one of them.

  “Maybe we could just stick a wire in there . . .” Sibeal waved a hand at the base of Willy’s skull.

  “Are you kidding? We’d need surgical isolation—”

  “I am kidding.” Sibeal looked at Vince and rolled her eyes. He smiled back.

  A silent pause was punctuated by barking howler monkeys. For the moment they were stumped.

  “Okay, Wally, time to tell us what happened,” Vince said. “Why did you steal Willy’s body?”

  Willy’s proxxi stared at the smoldering fire at the bottom of the cooking pit, his face smeared with Yupno warrior paint, caked around his forehead and into his hair. Taking a deep breath, he looked up at the gang.

  “Jimmy Scadden is stealing peoples’ souls inside the Atopian system.”

  Now Sid rolled his eyes. Please, tell us something we don’t know. “And that’s why you left, because you found out?”

  Willy’s proxxi nodded.

  More silence while monkeys howled.

  “That’s just great,” Sid said, throwing a sweet potato into the fire. A whole lot of work for nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. They had finally found Willy’s body. That was something. He picked up another potato.

  “There’s more.” Willy’s proxxi looked at Sid. “He’s not crazy, not some psychopath. It’s not Jimmy’s fault. He’s been infected—his mind breached—he’s not in control.”

  Sid stopped mid-swing. “And you know who this person is?”

  Wally shook his head. “I found out when Jimmy helped me re-program the Atopian perimeter. He gave me access to his personal conscious firewall subroutines. A communication leaked out.”

  “And that’s when you left?” Vince asked.

  “I had to. Whatever was controlling Jimmy, it knew I’d found out. It would have killed us.”

  “And what are these crystals you went and looked at?” asked Sibeal. Her research revealed that they interacted with neural potentials.

  Wally smiled. “So you saw that. I found some embedded in the Atopian infrastructure. When Jimmy leaked the communication to me, it mapped back to a set of nodal points.”

  Sid tried to put it together. “So what, this is like a different version of synthetic reality technology?”

  “If it is, it’s far advanced of anything I’ve seen,” Sibeal observed.

  “Is this why they tried to destroy Atopia?” Sid frowned. Even if Jimmy was being controlled by someone else, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives aboard Atopia seemed a heavy price.

  “I don’t know.” Wally shook his head. “I was just trying to protect Willy. When I saw Vince drop the repeater connection point here, it seemed about as far away as I could get.” He looked away.

  “Are you okay?” Sid asked. Willy’s proxxi looked like he was going to cry.

  Wally took a deep breath. “I’m not scared, not for me.” He sniffled and smeared the war paint across his face with the back of one hand. “Have you talked to Willy? Is he okay? It’s been so frustrating—he’s right inside here”—he tapped his skull with one finger—“but I have no way of talking with him.”

  “Don’t worry. Your brain activity looks normal.” Sid had done an external scan. “Bob’s at Terra Nova now. He’ll get in touch and we’ll be able to sort this out soon.”

  “I still don’t understand why the Terra Novans wouldn’t just try to isolate Jimmy,” Sibeal said. “Why try to destroy the entire Atopian colony?”

  Sid nodded. It seemed like overkill no matter which way he tried to look at it. Suspicious overkill. “We’d need to get a channel into Terra Nova—”

  “That won’t be a problem.”

  Everyone turned around.

  Bob stood at the edge of the jungle, still in his white robe and sandals. “The Terra Novan Council is abo
ut to start. I suggest we look for answers there.”

  29

  THE LIGHT CAME from within and without, the surface function of the meeting space like a stone worn smooth in the river of time. The space was thought-plastic, molding itself around each attendee. At the head of the table-concept was Tyrel, leader of the Terra Novan Council. At his side was Mohesha, surrounded by a halo of the other members of the Terra Novan leadership. Their faces appeared both young and old at the same time, their features harmonizing with the thought patterns of the observer. In the background, fleeting images shifted in dark forests, thoughts and ideas and images spinning through the meta-cognition systems of the assembled, each merging with the other through virtual-synaptic connections that brought the separate parts into a single, cohesive whole.

  “You have many questions.” Tyrel brought the meeting to order. “As do we.”

  Willy was there, his virtual presence wedged between avatars of Bob and Sid, with Sibeal and Vince flanking them. There wasn’t time for celebration at their reunion. The presence of Mikhail Butorin hovered in a dark patch of the light. He smiled at Vince.

  Tyrel formed an image of an oceanic platform. It was Atopian in design, but looked nothing like Atopia itself. Its surface was angular, jet black. A schematic of its capabilities sprung up around it. “Allied battle platforms are encroaching on the African Union in physical space. The deadline for allowing UN weapons inspectors access to the space power grid facilities has lapsed.”

  Connors wasn’t invited. An agent of the Alliance was too risky to include, even one that appeared friendly. Back in the barn in Louisiana, as night fell, she was playing cards with Vince’s proxxi by candlelight. Vince kept a splinter of himself watching over her.

  Tyrel looked around the table. “The time to act is now, my friends.”

  “With all due respect,” Vince said. “I’m still going to need some convincing of this ‘friends’ part. We’ve risked our lives to get here, and you’re the ones that nearly killed us and our families when you infected Atopia with that reality skin. Seems to me you brought this on yourselves.”