The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2)

by Matthew Mather

  Unless he didn’t know himself.

  Sid needed to get more eyes on this. Vince and Connors were still in the cavern, trying to establish the connection to Terra Nova. Sid pinged Vince, dragging his attention back into the private space. Vince accepted.

  But before Sid could say anything Vince blurted out, “Sid! We have a message from Bob!”

  Sid blinked. “How, uh,” he stuttered. “How did you know?”

  Vince’s eyes were wide. “Didn’t you hear me? We got a message from Bob. He’s not dead.” He grimaced. “I mean, not exactly dead.” He shook his head. “Just look on the main display.” Bob was connecting into them, his projection already appearing in the cave. “Don’t you want to say hello?”

  Vicious was already handling the introductions through Sid’s body in the cave. Bob smiled and started to explain what happened, but Sid resisted.

  “You need to see this.” Sid pulled Vince’s attention to what he’d found.

  Vince’s expression turned from excitement to confusion. “Bob sent the POND message? Why didn’t he tell us?”

  “Maybe he didn’t know about it himself,” ventured Sid, trying to make sense of it. “Should we ask him?”

  Vince hesitated as well. “Maybe you should explain to me what’s in the POND message.”

  Sid was still sifting through it himself. Not all of it was Bob’s sensory encoding. Some of it was instructions, some of it network diagrams. He couldn’t make sense of much of it yet, but one consistent message came through. He forwarded this part of the message to Vince.

  In the cavern, Bob was explaining how he had to sacrifice his physical body to get close to Jimmy, how he let Jimmy kill his physical body to force a wedge into Jimmy’s mind. Jimmy was gone. With the truth revealed, he destroyed the other side of himself. Bob now had control of all the Allied weapons systems.

  “So Bob killed himself?” Vince said to Sid. In augmented space, the message that Bob had sent himself in the POND transmission sat in highlighted bold text in front of both Sid and Vince: Don’t let me kill myself.

  Sid nodded. Some of the network diagrams in the POND message looked familiar. They matched what they found inside of Willy’s body. He began to see what he couldn’t let himself see before. “That network traffic between Jimmy and Bob on Atopia, I’d discounted it before as an artifact of the volume of traffic going through Atopia.”

  Vince understood what Sid was saying. “So the fourth nexus point was inside Atopia.”

  Back in the cavern, Vicious asked Bob about Nancy, about his family. His face impassive, Bob replied that James wiped them out, erased their minds, destroyed any traces of them in the networks.

  Vince slumped into a chair in the private workspace, squeezing the heels of his hands against his temples. “Usually chloros translates as pale, as in the pale rider, and like you said it also means pale green.”

  Sid waited for him to finish his thought.

  “But there’s also another meaning of chloros.”

  “What’s that?” asked Sid with a mounting sense of dread.

  “Chloros can also be translated as recently dead.”

  Sid stared at Bob. “There was another translation for that ancient text where you found the clue for Willy. In ancient Greek, Pobeptoc could be literally translated as Robert.”

  “The Book of Robert,” said Vince quietly. “So the Fourth Horseman . . .” He didn’t finish his words.

  They both stared into Bob’s smiling face.

  “So Bob is Death,” whispered Sid.

  28

  SMOKE WAS STILL rising from the blasted top levels of Atopia where Kesselring’s private gardens once stood. The charred remains of Kesselring’s retreat stood at one end, but at the other was a single copse of green trees that remained intact, a small patch of green against the blue of the seas and skies beyond.

  Bob sat next to Nancy, holding her hand. Her face was blank.

  The priest stood in front of Bob. “Give Tyrel back control of the weapons systems.”

  Bob still had full systems access to Terra Novan resources, even access to all of Mikhail’s darknets, and now, with Jimmy gone, he’d taken over control of Allied networks as well. He held the world in his hands.

  Looking at Nancy’s blank face, Bob felt rage rising up inside him. “Should I?” She was gone. Bob was sitting next to her body, but it was an empty shell. James had erased her mind and any traces of her in the networks. Bob’s mother and father, as well.

  He’d failed them.

  “We are not here to inflict more suffering, but to reduce it, ease it,” replied the priest, his long robes flowing in the wind. When the network pyrotechnics had cleared after Jimmy destroyed himself, the priest appeared. He had never been far. “And the longer you hold them, the more they will fear. We don’t need the weapons systems.”

  The green trees at the edge of the destruction swayed in the breeze. Nancy sat with her hands in her lap.

  “Is it gone?” Maybe Jimmy had destroyed himself, but whatever had infected him, was it gone as well?

  “No.”

  “Then how do we stop it?”

  “Do you want to stop it,” asked the priest, “or do you want to stop the suffering?”

  “Nancy?” Bob squeezed her hand. “Nancy!” he yelled, shaking her.

  There was no glimmer of recognition in her eyes. No connection in the hyperspaces surrounding them. Just a blank mindspace filled by her body.

  Why did I run? I could have saved her. The rage of self-loathing rose in the back of Bob’s mind. Why was it that he could protect everyone but the ones he loved?

  “They’re awakening now, all of them,” said the priest.

  “All of them?” choked Bob between his tears. “Not just the disappeared?”

  The priest nodded.

  “Give back the weapons,” insisted the priest. “We don’t need them.”

  “Why should I?” Bob snarled from gritted teeth.

  “Because”—the priest paused and laid a hand on Bob’s head—“there are better ways to stop the suffering.”

  29

  “YOU SURE YOU’RE okay?” Sid asked Bob.

  Bob’s main subjective was already in a meeting with Tyrel and Mohesha as they tried to coordinate a stand-down of the Allied forces and African Union forces. Sid received a message from Zoraster. He was safe. A splinter of Bob’s mind walked together with Sid and Vince and Willy up the service tunnel toward the central bunker to meet the Reverend. The rest of their gang went ahead, leaving them an opportunity to catch up.

  Sid checked and rechecked, querying Bob’s cognition frameworks while Willy and Vince made small talk. He had to make sure this was Bob. So far every test returned a positive result. His friend had cheated death. He felt ridiculous for coming to the conclusion that Bob was the Fourth Horseman when all seemed lost.

  In a flash, it all was over.

  “Guys, you can stop,” laughed Bob, “it’s me.”

  Vince and Sid hadn’t disclosed what they thought they’d discovered to anyone yet. Too much was happening, and anyway, Bob had released all the weapons systems back to Allied and Terra Novan control. Terra Nova was badly damaged, as was Atopia. Mohesha and Tyrel had enough to handle without throwing something else onto the plate, something that didn’t seem to have any bearing.

  Even so, with both sides standing down, everything under control, something didn’t feel right. What had they missed? The pieces just didn’t seem to fit. Then again, as Zoraster told him, war wasn’t neat. It was messy. Maybe Sid just had to let it go.

  While it had been a happy shock to find Bob standing in front of them, walking and talking, that was only because Sid assumed that all of Bob’s cognition systems would have perished with him. Having his dead friend returned to life wasn’t that all that surprising. The line between physical and
digital had long since been blurred for Sid. Talking to the resurrected version of Bob didn’t faze him.

  Sid contacted his own mother on Atopia the second normalized channels had opened. She scolded him, told him what a scare it was seeing him on the newsworlds. He told her it was a mistake. The relief that he felt, knowing his family was okay, was intense. He couldn’t imagine what Bob had to be feeling. “I’m sorry about Nancy, about your mother and father,” Sid said to Bob.

  Bob kicked some gravel along the floor of the tunnel. “Me too.”

  Talking to his dead friend might not disturb him, but Sid was worried. He knew Bob could lash out. Sid was tensed up, waiting for the explosion, waiting for Bob to process what had happened. Sid waited for the screams and tears and anger.

  But there was nothing.

  This was definitely an instantiated Bob he was talking to, all the background checks proved it beyond a doubt, but he was barely registering any emotions. Had something happened in the cross-over?

  Bob’s projection shrugged its shoulders when Vince sympathized about his parents being killed.

  “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made,” said Bob, looking at Vince. “For the greater good, you know?”

  Vince opened a private channel to Sid. “This is creeping me out.”

  “Me too,” replied Sid.

  “Maybe he’s just shell-shocked,” Vince suggested.

  “Maybe.” Sid wasn’t convinced. Bob’s face looked sad, withdrawn. It both was and wasn’t the Bob he knew.

  “Should we bring up the POND data?”

  Sid took a deep breath. They hadn’t had the time to bring this up yet. When they decoded the POND signal, Terra Nova and the Commune had been on the edge of destruction, in a final fight for existence. In almost the next instant, it was over, the fight was won, and an intense flurry of activity started to gain control over the situation. What was in the POND message was mysterious, but it was hardly mission critical.

  Or was it?

  “We need to tell him,” Sid replied. “Maybe he can answer the mystery, and it’s his own sensory streams in the POND data. He’ll be able to decode what’s in there way faster than me.”

  “And you’re not worried that his main message to himself was, Don’t let me kill myself ?”

  In the background, all over the world, the disappeared were reawakening. It was messy. People were awakening not just in their stasis pods, but in virtual worlds and in augmented space, coming to their senses to find themselves walking the streets like ghosts outside of their bodies.

  “Of course I’m worried,” Sid replied. “But we shouldn’t wait. Bob can help us.”

  Vince shrugged.

  Dropping from their private conversation, Sid put an arm on Bob’s shoulder. “We decoded the POND signal.” He forwarded the decryption tags to Bob. “I don’t know what to make of it, but it seems like you sent yourself a message.” Sid watched his friend’s face carefully.

  Bob accepted the key. His face creased up. “This is my own sensory data, what in the heck?”

  So Bob didn’t know. “I don’t know, buddy, we were hoping—”

  But Sid was cut off midsentence.

  “Sidney?”

  It was a familiar voice, but one Sid hadn’t heard in years. It pinged long forgotten memories. “One second,” he said to Vince and Bob as he shifted his primary subjective to have a look.

  In a newly formed world, in their old family home back in Hoboken, New Jersey, Sid’s grandmother stood before him. He’d never even been there before. His grandmother had visited them once on Atopia, when he was four, just before she’d died. She motioned for him to sit down.

  “Grandma?”

  “Sit down, Sidney, it’s time to eat,” she insisted, waving a spoon at him. She was cooking.

  Sid obeyed and sat at the kitchen table. He began testing the metatags of the world he was in, but there were none. His mother appeared through the living room door.

  “Sid,” said his mother, “what are you doing here?” She pointed behind her. “Did you see in the living room?” There were more people in there. He recognized his grandfather, and through a portal from this world to another, he could see more, all connected together in a string that stretched back in time.

  “Vince,” Sid called out in alarm, bringing his mind back into the corridor. “I just—” He wasn’t sure what to say.

  “I just met my mother,” said Vince, stopping walking in the corridor and staring at Sid. “She died forty years ago. What the hell is happening?”

  “They’re being released.” It was Bob speaking. Sid and Vince turned to him. “All of them, they’re being released.”

  “Who?”

  “Everyone.”

  Sid grabbed Bob’s shoulders. “Every who?”

  “Every human, everyone who reached the threshold of self-aware intelligence.”

  And in an instant Sid understood. His splinter network spread out from his grandmother’s kitchen, back through the portals and into the other worlds connected to it. Each generation of his family had come back to life, each one of them seeing just the generation or two that it knew. Parts of their cognition and memories were resurrected. Enough for them to be aware, but not fully cognizant. Vince grabbed Sid’s hand and shared what was happening inside his networks.

  It was the same thing.

  “Who’s that?” asked Sid’s grandmother.

  Sid looked up into the corner of her kitchen. It was an image of Bob, but not the Bob walking with him in the corridor, nor the version of Bob talking with Tyrel and Mohesha. It was Bob on the top level of Atopia, sitting with Nancy. A man in flowing robes stood before them.

  “That’s my friend Bob, Grandma,” Sid replied.

  But if that was Bob, who was walking with him in the corridor? He checked and rechecked the metatags. “Bob, what the hell’s going on? Is that one of your splinters?” Sid directed Bob’s attention to the image of him on the rooftop of Atopia. “And who’s that you’re talking to?”

  For the first time since Bob’s return, his face registered something more than mild emotion. “I think we’ve got a problem, Sid.”

  “No kidding.”

  Sid sensed both the Terra Novan and Atopian synthetic reality systems flaring in a massive spike of activity. Behind it all, the space power grid continued to cycle back and forth. It wasn’t damping down, but intensifying.

  “That’s me, too,” Bob replied after a pause. “Another copy of me. It must have happened when I died.”

  This was getting worse and worse. “And who’s that you’re talking to?” Sid asked again.

  “The priest.”

  “Who?”

  “The priest,” Bob repeated. “Mohesha told you about him, didn’t she? Didn’t I mention him?”

  Sid shook his head. “No, you didn’t.” He tried raising Mohesha on a private channel, but there was no response. Global communication systems were overloading. A sinking feeling settled into Sid’s gut. He began pinging his friends, and the sinking feeling solidified into a hard ball of fear.

  What was happening to Vince and Sid seemed to be happening to everyone with whom he could get in touch.

  Tens of billions of human minds were being resurrected somehow, each of them in places they remembered, speaking their own language, everything translated and intermediated by the Terra Novan and Atopian synthetic reality platforms. All the other synthetic worlds were being displaced by these new realities.

  And all of them were watching Bob on the roof of the Atopian towers.

  “Sid?”

  “Yeah?” He turned to face Bob.

  “I’ve had a look at the POND data.”

  Sid didn’t need to ask Bob what was happening. He knew what was happening. It was happening everywhere, in every time, and to everyone.

  “And
?”

  “I think something very bad is about to happen.”

  30

  BOB LOOKED DOWN at the farming towers of Atopia, a thousand feet of steel and glass reflecting the blue of the ocean around them. He squeezed Nancy’s hand again. It felt like he was holding a dead fish.

  Jimmy had released the disappeared, and in a flood, James had released everyone else. In his mind’s eyes, Bob saw them, the millions and then billions of minds that were being recreated, their awarenesses blossoming back into the multiverse. He looked into Nancy’s eyes beside him. She smiled vacantly.

  The knuckles of his hand holding Nancy’s were white. She flinched.

  “Life is suffering,” said the priest, looking to the horizon.

  Bob’s mind flashed. A man impaled on a pike in a medieval battle, red and white banners flapping in the breeze; a woman sitting by a garbage heap, haggling for the price of her child with a group of men; a slave pushing his hands up between the floorboards of a ship, its sails heaving in the mid-Atlantic; a hulking Grilla, its eyes glazed over in a drug-induced stupor in a ghetto; the imprint of the digital slaves, the synthetic intelligences that he’d help create inside of the virtual worlds of Atopia. These and countless other impressions crowded his mind.

  “But not all life is suffering.”

  In another mind he saw a different world, a world without humans. This mind soared above green forests and plains filled with buffalo and seas singing with whales.

  “Humans are not evil by nature. The evil is in what causes the suffering, the desire and attachment of the mind.” The priest paused. “Intelligence is the root of attachment. Intelligence is the evil.”

  Bob closed his eyes.

  The priest kneeled in front of Bob. “There is a path to the cessation of suffering.”

  “Yes,” whispered Bob.

  He had no physical form here anymore. One universe was as real as the next now. The vastness was suffocating.

  “All of reality is created, it is both as real and not real, everything and nothing.” The priest cupped Bob’s chin, trying to get him to raise his head. “How many worlds have you already created and destroyed?”