The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2)

by Matthew Mather

  Laughing, the Colonel replied, “I hope you have more than that. If I had a dollar for every plot—”

  “The Terra Novans think Jimmy Scadden is some kind of reincarnation of the devil that’s dragging the world into an apocalypse.”

  The Colonel stopped laughing. He was verifying the feedback loop into Vince’s mind. He knew Vince was telling the truth. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  Vince frowned. “It doesn’t?”

  “Just more extremists.” The Colonel shook his head. “What proof do you have?”

  “I have information that Patricia Killiam gave to our group.” Reaching inside himself, Vince unlocked a data vault containing a recording of what Patricia had given them. He sent it into the Colonel’s systems.

  “Interesting,” the Colonel replied, analyzing the contents. “Tell me more.”

  “They think a computing matrix of crystals is forming under cities, connecting into an ancient machine. The Terra Novans have been studying it.”

  “An ancient machine?” The Colonel’s eyebrows arched. “Have you seen these”—he paused—“crystals”—he drew out the word—“yourself?”

  Vince stared out the window at the winking lights of the turbofan skyways hanging in a small patch of sky that was just visible. “No.”

  “So you want me to believe that there is some kind of alien technology—”

  “Not alien,” interrupted Vince, “just not human. And no, I’m not asking you to believe anything. I’m just telling you what the Terra Novans think.”

  The Colonel nodded. “And where is this leak?”

  Vince shook his head. “I just know they think your organization is compromised at some level.”

  The Colonel finished assimilating the data Vince sent. “The neutrino detector data, this is new. What else do you know about this?”

  “I have no idea, just what Patricia said. The Terra Novans have no idea either.”

  “Again, from aliens?” The Colonel smiled.

  Vince said nothing, and didn’t return the smile.

  The Colonel asked one last question. “And William McIntyre. We know you were searching for his body at the Commune. Did you find him?”

  Vince took a deep breath. “No.” He shook his head. “No, we didn’t.”

  10

  “DO YOU BELIEVE in heaven and hell?” asked Sid.

  Sid rotated the viewing lens of the bot he was inhabiting toward the Grilla. Zoraster was splayed out against the trunk of the tea tree in the middle of their enclosure, inspecting the fur on one of his arms.

  “Goddamn bugs.” Zoraster picked at his arm, his surprisingly dexterous fingers finding the offending six-legged creature, a brightly-colored beetle. He set it down and watched it scurry off. “Like the human Bible version of heaven and hell, you mean?”

  Sid’s bot nodded. “I guess.”

  “I’ve seen a lot of pain, kid, and I can tell you, plain and simple, suffering is hell.” Zoraster rocked forward on his haunches and checked down the sight of the rifle again, looking at the Allied headquarters compound on the other side of the valley. “Whether it’s physical, in your head, in this world, or the next—hell is wherever you find suffering.”

  Sid-bot didn’t bother reminding Zoraster that he didn’t need to keep doing a visual check. Sid was constantly monitoring the site. “So then a lack of suffering is heaven?”

  Leaning against the tree, Zoraster grunted what Sid imagined was a laugh. “I didn’t say that.” He scratched under his exoskeleton. “I don’t think there needs to be an opposite of hell, just a lack of suffering—so I think there’s hell and not-hell.”

  “That’s not very optimistic.”

  “You wouldn’t be either if someone as messed up as humans designed you.” Zoraster found another insect in his fur and, again, gently removed it to set it free. “Do I have a soul?” he asked rhetorically. “And if I do, did humans create it? On the balance, I’d prefer not to risk it.”

  Sid-bot balanced itself on one side to rotate its lower gimbals. “I like to think there’s a heaven.” A breeze ruffled the enclosure, shaking loose a flurry of white-and-yellow tea blossoms that gently settled around the gorilla and robot.

  “If what Mohesha is saying is true,” Zoraster ventured, “then you’ve got your heaven. A copy of every human mind that has existed is in that nervenet somewhere. Endless life and meeting of passed loved ones.”

  Pushing itself onto its other side, Sid-bot rotated its other gimbals. “Maybe.” It stopped and de-focused its optical lens to stare into infinity. “But if it’s possible that something exists, does it really matter whether it exists here or not? Whether we can actually see it?”

  Zoraster frowned. “I don’t follow.”

  “I mean, if there are an infinite number of universes, then if it’s possible to imagine something, isn’t it the same as actually existing somewhere?”

  The Grilla rolled his eyes. “You have a messed up way of looking at things. Saying everything is true also makes nothing true. There need to be limits.” Zoraster thumped the ground with one giant hand. “How’s the signal doing?”

  This splinter of Sid’s mind was connected through a ground-based mesh network of insect-bots that stretched to the border of the African Union. It was low bandwidth, but information was steadily seeping back and forth.

  Sid-bot checked the feed. “The network map is really starting to come together.” The plan was working. They were tracking data flow through the crystal network.

  “Good,” grunted Zoraster. It was the first indication the plan was working. “So do you believe all this stuff Tyrel is saying?”

  Sid-bot nodded, the gears in its neck whirring back and forth, and then wagged its head side to side. “It’s hard to dispute the evidence—”

  Zoraster interrupted him. “You Atopians just nearly wrecked yourselves fighting a giant storm that didn’t exist. How can you be sure this isn’t more of the same?”

  “You’re right, but we tested for that. There are too many proof points, too many interconnected instances. And in a way it didn’t surprise me.”

  The Grilla frowned. “What didn’t surprise you?”

  “We’ve found life on Mars and Titan—our solar system is teeming with it—and one in five stars out there have planets in habitable orbits. There’s got to be trillions of eyes staring back at us from out there, but not a single transmission or evidence of any kind?”

  “Except for that POND signal,” Zoraster noted.

  “Yeah, except for that.” Sid was still working around the clock on that, but nothing yet apart from a repeating nine-element sequence that hinted it was a warning signal. “So we’ve finally been contacted by other life, one way or the other. I’m relieved.”

  “Relieved? These things want to kill us.”

  “Maybe, but like they say, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. Mohesha thinks nervenets are an example of convergent evolution, that any intelligent organism will eventually develop and integrate into their minds, just like they’d always develop eyes of some kind. I think she’s right.”

  Zoraster sat in silence, absorbing this. “You’re a strange kid.”

  Sid-bot affected the best smile it could. “Thanks.” He shared more of the network diagram. “You can look at this nervenet like a virus that can infect both people and machines.” The shared display, a geographic map of the world, crisscrossed with glowing lines. “We’re getting a peek at its command-and-control structure. Once we start to locate the nodal points, Mikhail and the Ascetics will hunt them down, begin exorcising them—”

  Zoraster nodded. “And if Bob can cut the head off, we might have a chance of stopping it. Why don’t we just kill anyone that’s connected in this map?” He pointed at the nexus nodes that were already lighting up.

  “People infected by the nerve
net didn’t do anything wrong.”

  The smile slid from Zoraster’s face. “You’re right.” He rolled forward to get up onto his knees.

  “I could do some cutting off right now,” said Zoraster, leaning to stare down the barrel of the rifle sight. “Just one shot, and boom, no more head on this part of the snake.”

  The moment he uttered these words, the Allied compound disappeared in a brilliant flash. His internal systems only just protected his retinas in time to avoid being blinded. Sid-bot jumped up. The monitoring feed coming from the headquarters winked out, and a second later a shockwave ripped through their enclosure, shredding it in a thundering concussion.

  “Zoraster, what the hell did you do?” messaged Sid-bot.

  The roar was still reverberating through the valley, a mushroom cloud was climbing into the sky above the spot where the Allied buildings had been just seconds before. Shaking his head and coughing, Zoraster pushed himself up from the ground. Tea blossoms were swirling around them in a cloud of dust. “Didn’t do anything,” he groaned, holding his side. Something had hit him.

  A swarm of attack drones rose from the roiling clouds on the other side of the valley. They headed directly for the spot where Sid and Zoraster were hiding.

  “Zoraster!” pinged Sid-bot across all of the Grilla’s emergency channels. “You gotta get moving!”

  The whine of incoming fire rained down around them. Zoraster looked at the advancing drones, then back at Sid-bot and smiled. “Call me Furball, kid, and don’t worry, I’ll—”

  The transmission cut.

  SITTING IN THE White Horse Pub in UnderMidTown, Sid put his beer down. “Zoraster? Are you there?”

  There was no response.

  In a viewpoint from a weather satellite, hundreds of miles above India, a smudge of smoke spread across the Arunchal valley. An alert pinged Sid’s networks, and he opened the channel, expecting to see Zoraster’s face, but instead he found an image of an oceanic tanker.

  Bob had arrived at the Atopian perimeter.

  11

  HIS CHALK SQUEAKED across the blackboard as Bob finished writing out the minimum critical parameters for fissile actinides. His hand ached. The board was filled with equations. With a flourish he underlined the result. The chalk snapped in his fingers, the broken end tumbling onto the threadbare Persian carpet of his study. He turned to his guest. “So, you see?”

  A rakish man, his hair slicked back, leaned forward. His freshly pressed suit squeaked against the polished leather of the copper-studded wingback chair he slouched in. “Are you sure?”

  Bob stared at the decimal point of his result. Just a mote of calcium carbonate stuck against the sheet of porcelain enamel of the blackboard, but it represented something that would change billions of lives. “Yes.”

  In an ornate mirror behind the man in the chair, Bob saw his reflection: an old man stared back at him, a fringe of white hair circling a balding head, bushy black eyebrows above thick jowls, and an unkempt suit. He dusted the chalk dust off the arms of his jacket.

  There was a quiet rap on the door. “Would you like some tea?” came the muffled voice of his wife.

  “No, Margrethe, but I think we might get some air,” said Bob. “The children could still go and play in Tivoli, why don’t you bring them out?”

  Bob glanced at the man in the chair, who nodded. Outside the windows, fluttering yellow leaves fell from bare trees in a gust of wind. Winter was coming.

  “Please bring our coats,” Bob called out.

  Getting up from the chair, the man walked close to the blackboard.

  “I have to leave, Niels,” said the man. “I need to tell Goering in person.”

  Bob nodded. “Margrethe!” he called out. “Could you please fetch Mr. Heisenberg’s cases?”

  BOB STARED ACROSS the Dead Man’s Walk Desert, pulling down goggles to protect his eyes.

  A voice echoed from a loudspeaker, “. . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”

  The next instant, a blinding flash enveloped his senses and an intense heat burned into the flesh of his face. An orange fireball leapt into the sky on the distant plain, billowing up into a mushroom cloud. The air was eerily calm. Behind him Bob heard words in a language he hadn’t heard spoken in thousands of years.

  “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,” said a voice in Sanskrit, just as the shockwave roared through their observation point.

  “WE HAVE ARRIVED,” an automated message announced, waking Bob up. He activated his somatic systems and groaned as he struggled upright. This was as far as the transport network could take them. From here he had to find his own way.

  The dreams were more intense.

  “They aren’t just dreams,” the priest told Bob when he spoke of them, “these are your past lives. As the nervenet grows stronger, the psychic fabric of the past is weaving itself into this world.”

  Memories of the dreams faded like morning fog under a rising sun. Bob only retained fleeting impressions of them. Nothing of the dreams remained in his inVerse, the recording of everything he ever saw or felt, and he couldn’t find any trace of them in his meta-cognition systems.

  Bob verified their location. They were in an off-shore docking complex, one the Ascetics assured him they controlled. For a short time they could mask his signature from any sensors. He was close now. Bob could feel it, the thrumming vibration of the Atopian multiverse just past the event horizon of his senses.

  More than anything, he felt a craving to get back inside.

  The priest was awake and sitting up in his opened bio-containment unit.

  “We can go up top,” Bob said to him, swinging his legs onto the floor.

  Taking a moment for them both to stretch, Bob led the priest to the service ladder on the wall of the cargo bay. People weren’t supposed to be in here, not awake. Soon it would be crawling with bots loading and uploading. Bob wanted to feed some fresh air into his lungs. Grabbing the first rung, he felt its cold metal. He clipped into the splinters that watched the world while he slept, leaving his body to climb by itself.

  His mind exploded into the mediaworlds.

  Green-scaled faces filled one visual display. “Bioethics boards reconsider license of recombinant DNA manufacturer Remedica in the wake of discovery of a nest of human-lizard chimeras in Waco, Texas,” said the splinter monitoring the story. “Would you like more?” Bob accepted, and a flood of images around the idea circled his mind; flying human bats and grotesque experiments gone wrong, self-assembling robotics fused with organic layers of living tissue, synthetic reality nervous systems tying it all together in the expanding eco-system of the Atopian stimulus.

  “Should we tell them?” asked a newsworld in a splinter circling at the edges of Bob’s awareness. He pulled it closer to his center. “Why would we?” was the answer. The object of discussion was a virtual world filled with synthetic beings, none of them aware that their world was simulated. The man that created it was posing as God to his creatures. He overrode controls forcing external awareness in digital organisms that could pass the Turing-threshold.

  “The Destroyer of Worlds is upon us,” rang a shrill voice in another mediaworld. Bob shifted his attention to the ever-expanding sphere of the doomsday cults. “The day of judgment is coming. Two thousand years ago the Kalachakra tantra predicted a future war where the forces of Shambala would arrive in flying ships to begin a new external cycle of time—”

  Bob disengaged from the mediaworlds. He stood on the deck of the transport, in the open for the first time in weeks. He clipped into his body to feel the cool wind and taste the sea air. He sensed Atopian smarticles, a dusting of them floating on the breeze from Atopia. His skin tingled. The priest stood beside him, his robe flapping in the breeze.

  On the horizon Bob saw something, a glitter that stood out against the deep blue. The twinkling light was the reflect
ion of the sun off the glass-walled farming towers of Atopia, less than five miles away. Nancy was there, his family was there.

  All that stood in his way was Jimmy.

  Bob turned to the priest. “Thank you for coming this far, without you . . .” He searched for words.

  “It is not just for you that I have taken this journey.” The priest held his arms wide. “But for all of God’s creatures. We must stop this scourge.”

  They silently watched the waves.

  “From here I go alone,” said Bob. “If you can maintain the connection to Mohesha, make sure that the Terra Novan resources are available when we need them.”

  The priest nodded. “I will wait here.”

  Stripping out of the coveralls he wore in the hibernation pod, Bob prepared himself. His skin shimmered as his epithelial layers exuded a hydrophobic layer of protection against the water, while he began leaking perfluorocarbons into his lung tissue. Nodding at the priest, Bob dove headfirst from the platform into the frigid waters and began networking into depths.

  These waters were his home.

  12

  JIMMY SCADDEN STARED at the ocean through a break between the trees. He stood in Herman Kesselring’s private gardens at the apex of the farming tower and research centers—the highest point on Atopia, and one that Kesselring kept very private.

  Jimmy had been summoned, in person.

  “Why did you change the report?” Kesselring asked. He pulled the hood off the peregrine falcon sitting on his gloved hand and began feeding it raw meat.

  They were in a grass field dotted with blooming purple heather, several hundred feet across, bordered by pines and yews. In augmented space, the real forests of Kesselring’s private gardens stretched into the Austrian Alps of his home. Set back in the trees at the edge of the space was Kesselring’s retreat, a wood-shingled, two-story chalet with white stucco walls.

  “What report, Mr. Kesselring?” Jimmy stood straight, his hands clasped behind his back. “I thought you called me up here to discuss details of the operation.”