Complete Atopia Chronicles (45 page)

As we walked, she gently brushed aside a patch of yellow orchids that she stepped through as tenderly if they were children at play. The woody atmosphere was perfect and synthetically warm, but slightly cloying under an indistinct vanilla sky. Her long flaxen hair spilled down her back, held in place by a garland of white flowers, and a flowing translucent gown revealing hints of her tiny body beneath.

The breeze swept waves of glittering cherry blossoms and silvery oak leaves around us like a snowstorm, and fireflies sparkled in our wake while we walked through the gathering dusk.

“How is Patricia?” she asked. It was common knowledge we were close.

“She’ll be fine,” I replied with a smile. “She’s very old, these things happen. The doctors say she’ll be back good as new tomorrow, or the next day.”

“Good.” She smiled warmly, but then her eyes clouded over. “And these storms, we’re not in any danger are we? I guess it can’t be that serious if you’re here.” Her smile returned.

“Don’t worry about the storms,” I assured her. “I wouldn’t advise going topside when they get here, but we’ll be fine.”

“Double good,” she laughed. Then she flinched, her side spasming.

It was some event out in the world, some type of disaster that had sparked into her body. She had such an exquisitely tuned neural pain network; it was what had attracted me to her. She smiled at me as the spasm subsided.

“It’s nothing,” she smiled. “I have this…”

“I know,” I interrupted gently. “No need to explain.”

I reached down to hold her hand, and she smiled, watching me.

“So, Mr. Jimmy Jones, my friend Willy speaks very highly of you,” Susie laughed.

I walked with my hands behind my back, formal, slightly stiff, and was wearing my ADF Whites. There could have hardly been a starker contract between the two of us.

She laughed, and spun out in front of me, reaching up to snatch a blossom out of the air. She stopped in front of me, curtsied, and offered me the blossom. Her eyes were full of mischievousness.

“So what would an ADF officer want with me?” she laughed.

“I need your help. It’s hard to explain.”

“Need my help?” she giggled. “I thought this was a date?” She pouted playfully.

“It is.” I looked down and away, trying to appear embarrassed. “I mean, I feel like you’re someone who could be really special to me.”

She danced away from me, trailing her hands through the flowers.

“Oh I’ve looked you up, Jim–bob Jonesee...that incident with the bugs...” she laughed, and then stopped to turn to look at me. “That was a bit odd, don’t you think?”

I winced.

“I was just a kid. I was a kid trying to find a way to deal with my pain,” I tried to explain. “You wouldn’t understand, nobody does...how could you, you grew up with such love.”

She considered me for a moment. “What do you mean?”

I was silent.

“Jimmy?” she asked again, softer this time.

My face reflected sorrowful pain. “My friends call me James.”

She nodded. “Okay then, what is it, James?”

“I’ve never shared this with anyone, Susie. I don’t know why I feel like I can share this with you. Can we make this private?”

“Of course,” she replied, pulling down a glittering golden security blanket around us.

I took a deep breath.

“My mother, well, she…” I tried to say, but stopped as I let a tear glisten in my eye. I sat down on a nearby tree stump. Susie came to sit beside me, and put her hand on mine and squeezed it. She said nothing, but just waited.

“It would be easier if I showed you,” I said looking into her eyes. She nodded and released her subjective control to me.

Suddenly Susie and I we were sitting in a corner of the Misbehave world my mother had created to punish me in.

We were reliving a rendering of my inVerse from when I was barely two, and in front of us, sitting on chair in the middle of an empty concrete room was Mother, suspending my tiny two year old body in the air by one arm.

“It’s all your fault!” she spat in my tiny face, the veins in her forehead swelling. She fumbled with some pssi controls and then reached inside my body to dig her synthetic nails deep into my nervous system, scraping them down the length of the neural pain receptors in my body. I screamed in unimaginable agony.

“Shut up, you little bastard. Nobody can hear you in here. Just shut up!” she yelled at me. I screamed and screamed, my little face purple and apoplectic.

Susie wrapped her arms around me, horrified, and tears welled up in her eyes.

“Turn it off James, please!” she cried, and then, just as quickly, we were back in the forest, with the cherry blossoms gently settling around us, sitting on the tree stump amid the deep grass and swaying flowers.

She held onto me tightly and cried. I sat impassively, and leaned to kiss the top of her head.

“I’m so sorry, James,” she just kept repeating. “I’ll do everything I can to help you.”

“It wasn’t just my mother,” I said after a moment, letting my voice crack a little. I looked away.

“What else?” she asked. “Show me.”

So I did. I took her back into another silently screaming night in my small sweaty body, the prison of my childhood world.

It had been a bright and sunny day, and my dad and I had just returned from fishing with the dolphins. Mother was off in another one of her never ending soapstim fantasies, and Yolanda had just finished making us dinner and chatting about the day.

Yolanda liked the dolphins too. I took her on inVerse dives with Samantha, and she would clap her hands and laugh with me.

Later, alone, and with a security blanket settled around the house for the evening, my dad tucked me into bed, and then crawled in beside me to cuddle.

“You had a good time with Samantha and the dolphins today, right, Jimmy?” asked my dad, holding me tight, brushing back a few golden locks of hair from my pale face. I nodded, my little heart beating faster with creeping terror.

“It’s okay if daddy holds you for a while, right Jimmy?” he asked, pleadingly. “Daddy gets lonely sometimes too.”

I nodded, trembling now, feeling his hands on me, feeling his hands on places that felt wrong. I loved my dad, and I could sense he needed something from me. He had been nice with me that day, bringing some joy into my dark and constricted little life.

So I let him touch me. I disappeared down my rabbit hole and into the recesses of the pssi system. He touched me all over with his real hands, his phantom hands, enveloping my body while pleasuring himself.

I cowered in the depths with my make believe friends.

“Don’t tell anybody about these times with Daddy, okay Jimmy? It’s a secret between you and me. If you can do that, I’ll make sure to take you out to play with Samantha, okay?”

It seemed like a reasonable deal to me at the time, so I hid inside and waited for the bright days of rocketing through the foam and spray.

As I snapped us back into real space, Susie had begun crying again. I was crying too.

She looked into my eyes. “James, we can tell people, we can punish them...you poor soul...”

“It won’t change anything, Susie, but you can help me.”

“How James? I’m so sorry. I’ll do anything to help.”

“I just need you to do something for me.”

16

Identity: Patricia Killiam

IT HAD TAKEN me two full days to recover, and in that time, a world already spinning out of control had suddenly taken an even steeper descent into chaos.

We’d started hardening Atopia for the now inevitable collision with the storms, and an escalation process was being discussed regarding possible evacuations. The rate of unexplained disappearances was spiking again, and in the midst of all this, I received a ping that Rick’s wife had committed some kind of reality suicide.

It seemed she hadn’t been terminating the proxxids. It wasn’t hard to guess what had happened.

“How is your wife doing, Rick?”

It was the end of a long day for everyone as we’d begun planning for possible disaster, but longest of all for Rick. I was at a loss for words. Reality suicide was a new phenomenon, deeply tied into the way pssi interacted with our unconscious minds, and just one more thing we didn’t understand properly yet.

I’d asked for this emergency meeting with Rick because my communication network with Command had suddenly been shut off, and nobody was responding to me.

“It’s hard to tell,” he replied unsteadily. “I mean, she looks fine. She looks like she’s asleep. I wish…”

“I don’t think blaming yourself is going to help,” I offered. “Anyway, we haven’t managed to crack the security blankets covering the worlds she was in before this happened, so we really don’t know what the full story is yet.”

Rick wiped his face with the back of one hand and stared down at the floor. We were sitting in my mahogany walled office. Pictures of ancient, four-masted sailing ships lined the walls.

“We know enough of the story to know how we got here,” he said with a dead voice, on the edge of tears. Then his mood shifted abruptly.

“This is your fault Patricia. You recommended using the proxxids,” he spat out venomously, looking up at me with menacing eyes. “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”

I recoiled slightly. This was a combat soldier after all.

“I don’t think laying blame is constructive at this point,” I began to say. I hadn’t exactly recommended them.

“We’re all just lab rats to you, aren’t we?” he growled, venting his anger. “I know what you let people do with proxxids—I’ve looked into the whole thing in more detail—it’s disgusting. You disgust me.” His breathing was ragged now. “You have no idea what you’re doing here, what you’re doing to people, do you? We’re just guinea pigs to you.”

He gathered himself and looked down at the floor, containing his emotions. I didn’t know what to say.

“Rick I’m sorry…”

“Sorry just isn’t good enough. Time for experimentation and best efforts is over,” he stated flatly. He stood up.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Getting away from these storms, we’ll be taking control from here on. This is now a military matter.”

He shook his head, averting my eyes, and without another word flitted off to disappear out of my office and back to Command, not even leaving a polite splinter behind.

I was stunned.

The storms had continued to defy phuturecasts and we were running out of room to back away from them. It was obvious something was directing them, but despite swarming the seas with smarticles and drones and everything else we could throw at it, we couldn’t even begin to stop them or understand how it was happening.

Usually two storm systems of this magnitude, in one oceanic basin, tended to dissipate, one into the other, but these two were pumping each other up and expanding.

It was unlikely that we’d sustain core structural damage even in a direct hit by either or both of them, but that was making the sorts of assumptions that trapped us here in the first place.

Now I understood why my communications had been cut off. Rick was formally taking control and declaring an emergency. All civil power was now in the hands of ADF Command.

“Marie, could you splinter me that latest report?”

I reached down to smooth out a wrinkle in my skirt, trying to regain my composure. Marie looked up at me from some files she was studying from the chair she was sitting in at the side of my office.

“We’ve had something of a breakthrough,” she responded excitedly. “The high surface temperatures seem to be caused by migrations of dinoflagellate blooms. Someone out there has been planning this for a long time.”

She splintered me all the data sheets before continuing.

“It looks like they seeded the ocean surface with iron dust to grow some bioengineered plankton and they’re now directing huge swarms of the little creatures, basically sucking energy from one part of the ocean and into another. Definitely bioengineered and directed.”

“Can we stop it? Can we find out who’s doing it?” I asked. She shook her head. “Was Sintil8 able to find anything for us?”

“He was some help,” she replied with a nod. “What we’re looking at could be a new addition to the Weather Wars arsenal.”

I sighed. Directed cyclone warfare could add a whole new wonderful chapter to the ongoing book of human conflict. Of course, weather had always been a decisive factor in war.

My personal favorite, a story my father had told me as a child, had been the defeat of the Spanish Armada by England five hundred years ago. The British victory had less to do with the genius of Sir Francis Drake than simply a week of wind that had pinned the Armada against the French side of the English Channel. The wind had held the Spanish in place, giving the British ‘weather gage’ to float fire ships into the hapless Spaniards, destroying the fleet before it even had a chance to attack.

The defeat of the Armada had halted the Habsburg invasion of land forces, at that moment poised to cross over from the Netherlands. The direction of wind for a few short days had dictated the outcome of the next five hundred years of global geopolitics, even the rise of America itself as a superpower.

What we faced now was far more than simply a wind in the wrong direction.

“We can’t fire weapons at blooms of microorganisms, nor at hurricanes,” added Marie. “We’re just going to have to stay out of their way as much as possible. If you want more of a run down, you’re better off speaking with Jimmy.”

Even that was going to be difficult now, given the state Rick was in. And the list of possible suspects behind these storms was worryingly thin.

“Or perhaps Bob?” I suggested, thinking about who may be able to provide some fresh insight. “He has a curious relationship with directing little creatures like you’re describing. Why don’t you talk with him?”

Marie nodded. “I’ll see if I can get some input from him.”

She paused.

“What?” I asked. I could see she had something else on her mind.

“It’s strange,” Marie answered. “Yes, we can see how they’re doing it, but the numbers don’t quite add up. Even with what we’ve discovered, they shouldn’t be able to direct weather as severe as this.”