The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2)

by Matthew Mather

  “You realize it was futile to try and stop us getting inside,” said Jimmy, draping himself across the Reverend’s desk. Jimmy wasn’t just projecting himself here virtually—he’d infected the body of one of the Commune’s residents.

  The Reverend finished preparing his tea and turned to Jimmy. “Do you need to inhabit my son’s body?”

  “Have to, and want to, are two different things.” Jimmy smiled. “But what I do need is some information.”

  “I know what you are.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you know anymore. Whatever is in there”—Jimmy pointed at the Reverend’s head—“will soon be in here.” He pointed at his own head.

  “The Day of Judgment is soon coming—”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” Jimmy interrupted, his smile growing wider. “But your day of judgment has already arrived, and I don’t think your God will help you now.”

  Jimmy slid into the Reverend’s cognitive networks. The Reverend’s cup of tea, halfway to his mouth for a sip, slid out of his fingers and tumbled to smash on the wooden floorboards. A wet stain spread around the Reverend’s feet as his body shuddered at the invasion, his mind struggling to resist.

  Nancy watched dispassionately. “Can I speak to you privately?”

  Smiling back from the Reverend’s face, Jimmy’s eyes narrowed. “About what?” But he instantiated a series of dense security blankets around them.

  “You and I have had our differences,” said Nancy, “but we’ve known each other a long time. I think we want the same things.”

  “Do we indeed?”

  In augmented space, Nancy watched Jimmy crack the Reverend’s mind open like a nut, spilling its contents into a data bucket.

  Nancy nodded. “Kesselring approached me today. He’s worried you’re gaining too much power, and he’s convening a meeting of senior shareholders to limit your reach.” It was a gamble. For security reasons she couldn’t connect to the other splinters of her mind. She couldn’t be sure.

  Jimmy stopped disgorging the Reverend’s mind. He looked at Nancy.

  “Is that right?”

  5

  “COPY THAT, DCA, we’re releasing control to you now,” said Connors. Her networks handshaked with the capital city aerial routing system. Up ahead, the spike of the Washington Monument rose above an urban sprawl that spread, twinkling, to the horizon.

  Four fighter drones rose up in formation around their turbofan to escort them in.

  Vince’s mind was still roiling. How was it possible that the old Russian, Mikhail Butorin, had dug up an ancient text that just happened to explain where to find Willy’s body? It had been the critical clue that led them to him. And yet it came from a two-thousand-year-old manuscript found a hundred years ago, buried in the Egyptian desert. Was the text just random coincidence? Or had Butorin purposely lied? Any other conclusions stretched all believability.

  All the things he was obsessing over—ancient carvings on buildings depicting what looked like alien creatures, the Voynich manuscript, images of Buddha with multiple arms and legs, even the Buddha carved from a meteorite—the Terra Novan hypothesis fit all these, but it felt too neat.

  “Are you going to tell me why you need to speak to Allied Command?” Connors asked. “You’re not going to be telling them some doomsday nonsense, are you?” She turned to him. “Can I trust you?”

  “Yes, you can trust me.” He was going to tell the truth, or at least, he was going to tell most of it.

  The Mall hovered into view, that green strip of space in the middle of Washington that stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol Building. Vince remembered family trips to the Smithsonian as a child. The memories were still vivid. For forty years he’d lived on Atopia, but he was still American, and this place held an aura that inspired him.

  Why wait till now, though? His mind kept circling back. Why lay dormant for two hundred million years? If these beings existed, they had almost god-like power. Why would they be interested in us? Mindless destruction didn’t make any sense.

  The web of turbofan transports in the air grew denser. Below, Vince saw traffic moving like fish in a stream. He was overcome by the idea that he was watching the dying motions of a doomed world, the people going on with their lives as if anything mattered anymore, as if they were still alive.

  But was it doomed?

  The Potomac River snaked around the city into the distance, and their turbofan dropped down and followed it, accompanied by their drone escorts. It wouldn’t be long until Vince was locked down.

  “One thing.” Vince touched Connors’s arm. “I’d like to release Hotstuff. I don’t know if I’m going to get out of this, and it’s not fair for her to be stuck in some hellhole with me.”

  A part of her would always stay inside him, but he could release her core identity into one of his shell companies. Bob had already released his proxxi entirely. It felt like the right thing to do, but he needed Connors’s help.

  She looked at him, her expression unreadable.

  Vince let go of her arm. “I know you could get into a lot of trouble—”

  “Go ahead.” Connors opened a channel for Vince to let Hotstuff out.

  6

  The KEY TO creating convincing synthetic realities was attention to detail, and nobody was better at it than Atopian pssi-kids. And no pssi-kid was better than the legendary Sidney Horowitz. Sid laughed grimly at his own internal monologue. It was the same trash talking he used in the game worlds, but this was no game.

  This was real.

  The adrenaline felt like holding a mouthful of nails, but he wasn’t in any physical danger. Zoraster was the one who was there physically, but looking at Zoraster, the big monkey looked remarkably calm. Zoraster smiled at the drone Sid was inhabiting.

  “Is it working?”

  “You wouldn’t be standing there if it wasn’t,” Sid replied, projecting a smile.

  This was a one-time shot. Hacking into a hardened military network wasn’t something that you could do on the fly. Mikhail and the Ascetics gave them a collection of back-doors and exploits to get inside the military networks. They said they would work. Soon they’d find out.

  The skirmish they started with Alliance forces was blossoming into a full-blown battle. Hundreds of incoming Alliance drones lit up Sid’s situational maps. He hacked into everything he could, even distant command posts and orbiting satellites, burrowing into their sensors, subtly modifying them. Detecting stolen or wrecked systems was much easier than detecting small changes in data flow. The sensors were the eyes and ears of the robot attackers that created their reality, each one feeding into the main situational map of the enemy.

  By controlling their reality, Sid controlled the battle and could destroy at will, but he had other goals.

  It was a game of misdirection played out in milliseconds using optical and radio cloaking, alternately jamming and releasing communications while he slipped in false sensor readings. The attacking weapons systems just missed their marks as they aimed at shifting ghosts.

  Sid launched cyberattacks at the same time as kinetic ones—defusing and exploding ordnance in transit, recognizing patterns that would be forming in the future, splitting the battle into alternate realities, and having the enemy attack itself in bursts of friendly fire. Both sides were layering reality filters with feints and decoys, and it was Sid’s job to see through it and anchor a base reality for his team to fight through.

  Sid helped the Grilla commandos dance through the raindrops of incoming fire without getting wet—or not too wet, anyway. He was purposely leaving gaps in their defenses. If the Allied forces decided the battle wasn’t possible to win, they’d carpet-bomb the area. Zoraster’s plan needed the Alliance to send in a transport to mop up, and that was what Sid was trying to engineer.

  A nearby explosion rocked the drone Sid’s main point-of-presen
ce was riding in, blinding him. A tank-bot wheeled across the dusty ground, the air buzzing with shrapnel. It took aim.

  “You okay, kid?” grunted Zoraster in a private comm channel.

  The Grilla bounded from behind Sid’s drone in two loping steps, grabbing and tossing the two-ton tank-bot into the air like a child’s toy. Even a natural mountain gorilla could dead lift a ton, and a raging Grilla in an exoskeleton and battle armor was something fearsome to behold.

  “Yeah, I’m—”

  Before Sid could finish, another explosion fried his drone. His primary subjective dropped into dimensionless space for a fraction of a second while he latched onto another bot nearby. By the time his senses returned, the comm channels were filled with screams.

  “Fall back!” Zoraster yelled across all frequencies.

  Directly in front of Sid’s new drone, one of their Grilla commandos was hit, his leg severed. Blood spurted from an artery. As Sid watched, transfixed, the coagulants in the Grilla’s bloodstream kicked in, staunching the flow. At the same time, the Grilla’s exoskeleton arm extended downward and clicked into the damaged leg structure.

  Sid’s situational map glowed red. The Alliance had designated it a kill zone. All kill decisions went to automatic, the attacking drones disengaging from their sensors and shifting into a frenzy. There were no humans here, just Grillas. Sid concentrated and threw an invisibility shield down around the injured commando.

  “Norrece, you mobile?” Zoraster growled, bounding over and picking his friend up.

  Norrece nodded, putting down one arm to support himself. He stood on the improvised leg his exoskeleton had reformed. They ran back under cover of their own drone support. A signal in Sid’s situational display confirmed they’d achieved their goal. A transport was coming in.

  “Now we do it my way,” Sid said to Zoraster. “Drop your weapons.”

  Zoraster let go of Norrece, letting him run for cover. “What’s next?”

  The main Alliance drone force was already taking off to the south, chasing the retreating Grillas, but a swarm of them still circled overhead. Zoraster dropped his MD and dropped a utility belt of detonators and explosives.

  “If we carry any weapons, it’ll be harder to mask our presence,” explained Sid. He had the transport on visual. It was dusting the horizon. He looked at Zoraster. “Come on, all of them.”

  Frowning, Zoraster reached into his body armor to pull out an old gunpowder-pistol and a knife. He dropped them into the dirt as well.

  The transport grew in size until it was hovering above them, its exhaust blasting away the dirt beneath their feet. With a roar it descended, rocking on its landing gear while the whine of its electric turbofans cycled down.

  The hatch opened.

  “Stay still,” Sid instructed. The Alliance wouldn’t be expecting this. It was as much a technical feat as a magic trick of misdirection. He hardened the reality filters around them.

  Bipedal bots climbed out of the transport, oblivious to the presence of Zoraster or Sid’s drone in their midst. They began scavenging through the debris of the battle, looking for any scraps of machines that might be analyzed for data recovery.

  Sid powered up the rotors on his drone and hovered, sending up a small cloud of dust. “Don’t worry,” he said to Zoraster. “Just continue straight on, slowly, no sudden movements.”

  Zoraster took a deep breath and walked through the knot of Alliance bots to the transport. He grabbed the rung of a ladder on the side and began climbing up. “You better be sure about this, kid.”

  Sid watched the Grilla disappear into the hatch of the transport, then he powered up his drone and followed.

  7

  THE ORANGE LIGHT of a sodium bulb on a solitary lamppost spread across the cracked concrete sidewalk. Bob floated, searching the blackness. He found what he was looking for in a cinder-block shack, its corrugated-tin roof hung aslant. Slivers of electric light shone through the cracks in its closed wooden shutters.

  Bob heard voices within, raised voices. An argument.

  He glided from the sidewalk to the side of the shack, across tufts of crabgrass littered with trash, and eased himself up to the door. Reaching forward he pushed it open. Inside, rust stains leaked down the walls onto metal shelves piled high with stacks of graying paper.

  The argument stopped. All faces turned to the door.

  Toothface, the one who’d captured Bob—hunted him—was sitting at a table. Across from him sat the gaunt-faced paramilitary who had guided Bob up the Yoba River. Two of his men sat on a couch against the far wall, dressed in stained fatigues, slouching with their rifles, smoking cigarettes.

  Ignoring them, Bob crossed the room, directly toward Toothface. Bob’s former guide jumped out of his seat, backing away, hesitating, but Bob didn’t hesitate. A blade flashed in his hand, slicing through the air into Toothface’s neck. The table and chairs clattered to the ground as Bob fell onto Toothface, urging the knife deeper, hot blood pooling beneath them onto the concrete.

  FREUD CALLED DREAMS the “royal road” into the unconscious, all the forbidden wishes you had but wished you didn’t. Bob wondered what wishes his dreams were yearning for, but this last one wasn’t hard to interpret.

  Waking and sleep were becoming hopelessly intermixed while he roamed virtual worlds of his own creation, his body trapped in the life-support unit at the bottom of the oceanic transport. It was refreshing to finally get outside his own mind, into a synthetic external world. The Ascetics controlled this section of the darknet, and the priest bartered to get access.

  Squinting, Bob looked across breaking waves caressing a perfect beach. He sat in the shade of palm trees that drooped to the surf, thick with green coconuts. Digging his fingers into the hot sand, he leaned back to stretch his legs. “So Sid’s doing okay?”

  “He’s good, mate,” Bunky replied, the underminer’s avatar sat beside him in the sand. “He helped Zoraster infiltrate Allied HQ.”

  “That’s good,” said the priest, pacing behind them. “The Red Rider must be stopped.”

  “And Vince?”

  Bunky scratched his neck. “Haven’t gotten much from him, but he’s gone into Washington. It’s all going to plan, if you can call it that.”

  Bob’s body had arrived at a deep-water connection point in Rio de Janeiro. Bunky came in person to oversee the transfer from one oceanic transport to the next. The underminers had close connections with the transportation guilds. More than that, though, Bunky was bringing underminers around the world to the cause.

  “So you’ve found these crystals everywhere?” Bob asked.

  Bunky nodded. “Once you know what to look for, they’re pretty easy to spot, spreading into the rock strata under the big cities like mold on cheese. Sibeal says it might explain how Atopia is expanding its computing infrastructure so quickly.”

  This had been something of a mystery. The computing infrastructure Atopia controlled didn’t seem to add up to the exponential proliferation of virtual worlds that were spawning from it.

  “So it’s merging with Atopian pssi?”

  Bunky shrugged. “Beyond me, mate.”

  “And these other underminer guilds, they’re joining in?”

  “Never thought of myself as an evangelist, but yeah, for the most part.” Bunky flashed his broken-tooth grin. “Especially when I show them the stuff. They’re digging it all out now, trying to slow the spread.” An alert lit up in Bunky’s workspace. “I can’t stay in this world much longer.”

  They were connected in a darknet pleasure world, part of the Spice Routes that crisscrossed the underside of the multiverse. Bob heard children playing in the distance, laughing. He looked up the beach to see them splashing in the water.

  “You’re straight onto the Atopian territorial boundaries on this transport,” Bunky added. “No idea what you’re going to do then.” He c
ocked his head and looked at Bob. “But that’s why they’re sending you, buddy. I guess you’ll know.”

  Bob shook his head. “I hope so.”

  “Me too, mate, me too. Listen, I really have to run.” He clapped Bob on the shoulder. “Good luck, and nice to meet you.” Smiling, Bunky faded away, leaving Bob alone with the priest.

  Bob watched dark shadows sweep across the ocean. He rose to his feet.

  “What do you think?” Bob asked the priest. They began walking together, up the beach toward the children.

  The priest hung his head. “It matters little what I think.”

  “That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that.”

  “I think our quest is suicide.” The priest looked into Bob’s eyes. “But not to act is also suicide.”

  They walked in silence until they were near the children. No adults were in sight. One of them ran up to Bob, splashing through the water.

  “What’s your name?” Bob asked.

  The young boy, dressed in swimming shorts and not more than seven or eight, looked into Bob’s eyes. “You can call me what you like.”

  Bob reached down and ruffled the boy’s hair. “That’s a strange name. What are you doing here?”

  “Whatever you want,” replied the boy.

  All of the children were staring at Bob. There were six of them, playing what looked like a game of tag. The thatched roofs of huts stood over the tops of sand dunes lining the beach.

  Bob frowned. He checked their metatags. These were proxxids, simulated children derived from copyrights of real human DNA. They shouldn’t be here. Not alone. They were supposed to be with their copyright owners. “Are your parents over there somewhere?” Bob waved a hand toward the huts.

  The boy smiled. “No.”

  Bob’s smile faded and dread seeped into his veins. “Then why are you here?” But he already knew.