The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2)

by Matthew Mather

  The battle platform gave way to a flood of situational data. “This fight is not of our choosing, but of necessity.” He looked at Bob. “We need the information Patricia left you, and we need access to the data in Willy’s body.”

  Bob stared at Tyrel. Patricia’s instructions were to deliver the data she collected here, but had she known what they were up to? Who to trust? He shook his head. “With the greatest of respect, Vince is right. Before we share anything, you need to convince us that we’re with friends.” He glanced at Vince. “Explain why all this is necessity.”

  Data flowing into the sensory focal-point of the meeting slowed to a stop, went blank, and was replaced by pinpoints of light spreading up and down, left and right into infinity, ordered in irregular but repeating patterns.

  “You’ve seen these crystals,” Mohesha said, her presence rising to the center of their thought-space. “A complex alloy of metals that enables the stable flow of sub-atomic quantum states between neighboring atoms.” Data was uploaded into the shared cognition of the meeting space. These quasi-crystals could hold information at quantum scale, transmit and transform the information.

  “A computing device,” Sibeal said. “One that can sense neural potentials.”

  “Yes.” The matrix of pinpoints of light faded. “Self-replicating, difficult to distinguish from natural mineral.”

  “Unless you know what you’re looking for.” Sibeal caught Mohesha’s attention. “Do you have anything to do with it?”

  “We only recently discovered the crystals, but it confirms what we’ve suspected for some time.”

  “And that is?”

  “A truth glimpsed by secret societies in the past.” Tyrel took back the focal point. “Something we hadn’t the means to understand until now. Now it is almost too late.”

  Bob pulled their attention to him. “Is this something from space?” Natural quasi-crystals were found in meteorites, and his first thought was the POND signal. Did Tyrel know about it? He hadn’t shared the information yet.

  “Possibly, but we think the crystals are ancient, regenerating from the deep past.”

  The mind’s eye of the meeting space opened up into a field bordered by strange-looking trees, and giant animals with green skin stood eating ferns at the edges. None of the plants or animals looked recognizable, not of this Earth.

  “We suspect there was a technological civilization of Earth before, two hundred and fifty million years ago, before the Great Permian Extinction that wiped out life for tens of millions of years.”

  The meeting space shifted to alien-looking bipedal humanoids, with mottled green skin, walking through soaring structures. The viewpoint retreated upward, revealing a city of skyscrapers twinkling beside an ocean. Bob stared. Somehow he’d seen it before.

  “They developed systems similar to our synthetic reality technologies. We think this is convergent evolution, that biological and memetic evolution will push technological civilizations to produce synthetic reality systems in the same way that an eye will evolve over and over again. Like an eye, nervenets are evolutionary adaptations that allow organisms to see, to perceive the true fabric of reality.”

  The space around them grew dark.

  “When their world ended,” continued Tyrel, “their technology persisted, self-replicating, building itself into the fabric of the Earth. Like the wikiworld we use, it’s been constantly recording. A memory of every human is contained in this machine, every person that ever existed, but apart from this function, it’s been dormant.”

  “Dormant?” Bob said. “So it’s woken up?”

  “They’ve been waiting.”

  Bob waited. “For what?”

  “For sentience to arise once again.”

  Silence.

  “Why would it be waiting.”

  “Not it,” Tyrel said slowly, “they.”

  “They?”

  “Because their world did not just end, it was destroyed.”

  “So what are you saying? How does this relate to Jimmy?”

  “Because he is evidence of the truth that has long been suspected.” Tyrel returned the meeting space to the gardens on the surface of Terra Nova. “The Great Destroyer has returned.”

  Part 3:

  Treachery

  1

  THE ORANGE GLOW of sunset faded behind bearded silhouettes of cypress trees lining the bayou. Fireflies began their mating dance as darkness fell, winking between the Spanish moss that draped into the waters, while a symphony of crickets and spring peepers kept rhythm with the wind that swayed the treetops.

  Vince and Connors started a fire in the hard-packed earth under cover of the barn roof. There wasn’t much they could do about heat signatures, but avoiding direct overhead visual observation was something.

  “So what happened in the meeting?” Connors asked Vince again.

  Vince knew she wasn’t happy about being excluded, but then she couldn’t do much about it. Now she wanted answers.

  He slid another branch into the fire. It was muggy, but the heat would be soon replaced by a damp chill. Not only that, but they had to eat something. Strips of catfish sizzled on an improvised grill. Trying to avoid Connor’s questions, Vince had gone fishing as soon as his primary subjective returned from the Terra Novan Council meeting. Standing knee-deep in the muck amid lily pads and cattails, he let some of his smarticles loose in the water. A fat catfish had swum obligingly into his hand within a few minutes, after he flitted into its mind and asked it to come.

  What happened in the meeting? Vince wasn’t sure how to answer this. The Terra Novans believed there was some ancient technology at work—the nervenet—similar to but more sophisticated than existing synthetic reality systems. They said that when Saint John sat in the cave on Patmos Island and wrote down the Apocalypse, he had connected to this old machine. What he wrote down wasn’t as much a prediction, but a description of what had happened before, and what would happen again, like an echo.

  Humans had been connecting into this nervenet for thousands of years, but it took a certain “society of mind” that only religious ascetics, who practiced meditation, managed to achieve. For the Terra Novans this explained why prophets described moving into other worlds, out-of-body-experiences, and talking to gods who were just imprints of ancient intelligences trapped in this nervenet.

  They believed the release of the Atopian technology was the last straw that awoke this old machine, that this was why the crystals were appearing and replicating. Hundreds of millions of people connecting into virtual worlds triggered this tipping point with a burst of global neural activity. The old world and new were merging, the realities fusing, and Jimmy was the reincarnation of the Great Destroyer, the White Rider of legend. This was why they tried to destroy Atopia, to stop the release of pssi, to stop the unleashing of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  It felt insane.

  He felt insane.

  He’d been hoping—praying—when they contacted Terra Nova, that everything would sort itself out, that things would become clearer. Now things were less clear, more frightening whether he believed them or not. Either there was an ancient being let loose that was bent on destroying the Earth. Or, one of the most powerful groups in the world sincerely believed that the Apocalypse was underway and were ready to start a global war over it.

  Those were his two options. Both were terrifying.

  “There are some crazies operating out there, and we need to stop them,” Vince finally answered. One way or the other, that was true.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” Connors slid a branch into the fire. “What, like terrorists? That was Robert Baxter who appeared in the forest in New Guinea, wasn’t it? What was with the robe and sandals?”

  Vince had forgotten that she was ghosting him in the forests of New Guinea when they found Willy’s proxxi. Connors had seen Bo
b appear at the edge of the forest. Then again, the whole world knew that Bob was in Terra Nova. The mediaworlds were whipping into a frothy conspiracy fever over it. “Yeah, that was Bob. He was in the meeting.” He sighed. “And this goes way beyond terrorists.”

  At the meeting, Vince had instantiated a private channel with Bob to say hello, but Bob barely acknowledged him. It wasn’t like Bob. He’d changed. Something happened to the kid. Something bad.

  Sid and Bob seemed to swallow the Terra Novan story. Then again, they were pssi-kids: they barely saw any difference between the real world and the imaginary ones they inhabited. If Sid woke up one morning as the Queen of England, he wouldn’t be surprised—he’d just ask for a cup of tea. Bob wanted to get back on Atopia, rescue Nancy and his family away from any danger, and apart from that, he just wanted to make everyone happy. Sid was excited that there might be a new system of realities he could explore. Vince was the only voice of reason.

  And he was faltering.

  He felt like he was stuck in a mirror maze. Part of the problem was that he’d already been halfway there himself, reading secret codes into ancient manuscripts, half-believing that there was some fantastical explanation for the multi-headed Buddhas. But before this was a kind of intellectual game, good for chatting about over beers. Now it was laid out as fact.

  Or, rather, someone was trying to convince him it was fact. Terra Nova could just be another sophisticated institution with a doomsday cult at its center, like countless others around the world—the Communes, even the Catholic Church itself.

  “I need answers, but I can wait a bit.” Connors poked at the catfish. “Are you okay?”

  Vince smiled, his mind raging in the background. “Yeah, I’m fine. I think those are ready.” He leaned forward with a clean wedge of plastic, and flicked one of the filets onto it. He inspected it. They were done. “Did you ever have anything weird happen to you, that you can’t explain?” He deposited half of the catfish onto an improvised plate for Connors.

  “Like what?”

  “When I was a kid”—Vince took a tentative bite of the catfish, it was hot—“I was maybe twelve, and we were going on vacation with my family. My dad was driving, and I was dozing in the back with my cousins. But I swear to God, I could hear what they were going to say before they said it. And it wasn’t a fluke, I could do it again and again by getting into this lucid dreaming state.”

  “That’s amazing.” Connors picked her fish up with her fingers and took a bite.

  “What, the fish or my story?”

  Connors’ catfish fell apart, spilling onto her plate. She rolled her eyes at her own clumsiness. “That you were alive when people still drove cars.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  When they’d talked, Mikhail Butorin claimed he had supernatural powers that came and went, like clairvoyance, invisibility, and more. If Vince connected the dots—and took the Terra Novan explanation at face value—it meant Butorin had been connecting into this ancient nervenet, but just didn’t know it. It sounded nuts.

  “No, I’ve never experienced anything like that.” Scooping the bits of fish up on her plate, Connors looked at Vince. Flickering firelight reflected on her face. “The more you tell me, the more I can help. What about those crystals? Is it some kind of alternate pssi technology?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what they think it is.”

  “They being the Terra Novans?”

  Vince nodded.

  “And it’s not theirs?”

  He picked up another piece of catfish “Not that they said, anyway.”

  “But there are some kind of terrorists at work?”

  He stared into her eyes. Terrorists. She always came back to this idea. She would think it was crazy if he said that Jimmy Scadden was the White Horseman of the Apocalypse, that ancient aliens were infiltrating Atopia. Even he thought it was crazy. “Something like that,” he replied.

  Sitting there with Connors, listening to the frogs chirping, everything felt surreally calm. Time was always something he’d wanted more of, but it could also be the enemy. It was time for action before he convinced himself out of what he needed to do. Emotions were one thing, and logic was another, but in the end, he had to do the right thing. And for Vince, there was only one option.

  “I need you to take me into Washington, as your prisoner. I have information for Allied Command—I need to speak to their most senior person. Then I can tell you everything.”

  Connors frowned. “And just how do you propose to do that?”

  Out of the darkness, beyond the doorway of the barn, a small bot appeared. Connors reached around to grab anything she could fight back with, but Vince held up one hand to calm her. “It’s okay.”

  The bot dropped a pile of mechanical parts onto the grass and disappeared back into the darkness.

  “These are the parts we need to fix the turbofan out front,” Vince explained.

  Connors rocked forward to her feet. “And you got these how?” She walked over and kneeled to inspect the parts.

  “I still have some connections.”

  They collected the parts and walked out front, toward the downed turbofan.

  “So can you get me in front of a senior Allied commander?” he asked. “Do you think you can do that? It’s important.” They reached the turbofan. Connors opened the access hatch and they both switched to low-light imaging in their optics systems.

  “Maybe, but my last attempts to raise comms with my boss didn’t work out too well.”

  “Try again.”

  Connors paused. “You have dangerous friends, Vince. I’m not sure all your connections and money can protect you anymore.”

  “These are dangerous times.”

  “I’m being serious. Are you sure you want to go to Washington?” She stuck her head inside the access panel.

  Vince smiled. A few days ago, Connors had been in a rush to arrest him and bring him to Washington, and now he wanted to go and she was resisting taking him there. She was so driven to do the right thing. “Can you fix it?”

  Connors grunted. “I think so.” She pulled her head out. “You know what they’re going to do to you if you go there? You know, right?”

  Vince sighed and nodded.

  “This is a national security issue now, not just some jumped-up white-collar crime. They’re going to rip into you.”

  “I know.” Vince looked up at the stars. Sooner or later you had to pick sides. “I’m going to tell them everything. Make the call.”

  “If you’re thinking this will get you off the hook, get your Phuture News back—”

  “That’s not what’s this is about.” Vince looked down into Connor’s eyes. “This is about doing the right thing.”

  She met his gaze. “Okay then.” She leaned her head back through the access panel.

  “And I want to get you somewhere safe,” he whispered under his breath while her head was deep inside the drone. He glanced at the horizon, at the streak of the comet just rising, then looked up at the stars—but there was nowhere safe to go, not on this world, not anymore.

  2

  EIGHT SILVER CAPSULES hung motionless together, spaced out over a four-kilometer line. The gold and silver webs of city lights crept through nightshade far below. A burst of sunlight illuminated the curve of the Earth, the rising sun blossoming across seas and the wrinkles of snow-capped mountains. Retrorockets fired on the capsules, tiny soundless bursts that slowed them in tandem. One after another they dropped from space, glowing orange and then white as they tore into the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

  Sid’s display spaces lit up. “We’ve tripped the Alliance defenses. Wait for my signal.”

  On Himalayan mountaintops strung along the Chinese side, batteries of slingshot shield-effect and surface-to-air weapons systems powered up, zeroing in on the incoming threats. The f
irst of them lit up, spreading a blanket of incendiary pellets in the path of the capsules. The pellets exploded and flamed into a wall of plasma.

  Sid waited, watching the distance close. “Now!”

  The capsules shed their blistering shells, and dozens of fragments rocketed out from each at random angles, hundreds of decoys that zigged and zagged on hard angles, spreading across thousands of cubic kilometers of space.

  As one of the world’s best players in tactical combat in the gameworlds, Sid had been given command of the infiltration. He’d never been involved in real combat, but there was barely any difference anymore between the real world and the gameworlds he dominated. When they were planning this, he’d insisted that they didn’t have any better options, that he could execute this better than anyone else they had.

  Now he was hoping he was right.

  His mind spread out into the future, modeling the incoming flux of defensive strategies in hundreds of phutures that evolved and collapsed in fractions of seconds as their predictions came true or faltered. Latency delays between the battle zone and his meat-mind were too long, so he’d embedded an autonomous splinter of his mind into the attacking capsules. A very thin stream of perceptual data updated his primary consciousness several seconds after the fact.

  Electromagnetic cloaking systems bent radio and visual wavelengths around the invaders, rendering them nearly invisible, while darknets descended to disrupt the informational spaces that linked this physical space to the cyber-worlds. Weaving and dodging, dozens of the decoys flamed out in the blazing defenses, but one and then another of them got through, slamming into the mountainsides and foothills of the Langtang Valley in the middle of the Himalayan plateau.

  “We made it,” sighed Sid’s splinter to nobody else but itself. It had embedded its primary point-of-presence in the fragment-decoy in which Zoraster’s body was encased.