Complete Atopia Chronicles (49 page)

While we walked, I keyed through some parameters with my phantoms to wash away the tables and structures to be replaced with only one of the models, which then floated in space in front of us, slowly rotating. I was keenly aware of Cynthia’s grip on my sweaty hand.

“Cool,” she said, watching the visually enhanced synaptic firing of the neuron floating in front of us. It was a working model.

“This isn’t just a model,” I declared, “this is actually happening inside me right now.”

After some testing I had installed them in my own developing wetware to see how the models would respond. I started to explain how it worked, how this was an upgrade to what we were doing already, how it provided a more reliable pathway to empathy.

Empathy was something I didn’t understand, or rather, I understood it, but I just didn’t feel it.

While I was nervously trying to explain my project, Cynthia had wandered off, looking around the rest of my work space. I wanted to show her something really special, so I was engrossed in my model, busy burrowing through the cell walls trying to change some protein pathways.

“What’s in here?” she asked, opening a door.

“Oh, ah, nothing!” I cried out, but it was already too late.

As soon as the portal had opened a crack, she’d dropped into the world beyond. I quickly abandoned my model and shot off into that world behind her.

Instantly I was standing beside her in semidarkness. Shafts of light bore down from the blackness above, illuminating a writhing mass of insects and worms and other creatures pinned painfully to the walls of my labyrinthine private universe. An image of my mother’s face hung in space above us, twisted in hate.

“Who’s my little stinker?” she repeated and repeated, her face contorting and distorting.

I came here to heal myself, to reconnect and re-stimulate some of the sensory pain I’d felt. The process seemed to allow me to refocus my mind. I had picked out some particularly nasty moments from my childhood and worked through them bit by bit, simultaneously bathing my sensory system in the pain from the thousands of little creatures I had pinned to the walls. I didn’t understand why, but it helped.

Cynthia shivered and looked around with wide eyes, scared but excited.

“This is way fucking creepy man,” she whispered, looking around at the half illuminated animals pinned to the walls, scraping and clawing futilely, never dying, never free, always trapped and in pain.

Tears began to well up in her eyes looking at the hopeless little creatures.

“I can feel them,” she squeaked, her eyes growing wide. “This is horrible!”

Then, suddenly, she was gone, flitting back to the birthday party.

Shocked, I stood still for a moment as the blood drained from my face. I wasn’t sure what to do. I closed down the image of my mother and the space went dark and quiet, apart from the soft wriggling of the creatures on the walls.

I hadn’t remembered that there was a portal to this place from my workspace. I was too flustered to think clearly at the time. I began quietly swearing at myself, then, suddenly, I felt Samson grabbing me, pulling me back to reality.

I snapped back into my body with a sudden sense of vertigo. I heard laughter around me, but I wasn’t back at the party. Somehow I was in my private space again. The bugs were squirming painfully on the walls as before, but all the party guests were standing in the middle of it somehow, and the bugs were magnified, giant monsters vainly trying to pull their bodies from the pushpins stuck through them.

Above it all, my mother was venting down on us all, “Who’s my little stinker?”

Cynthia had stolen a copy of my world and projected it out here in public at the beach. I felt myself shrink in horror. Cynthia was laughing with her friends, and they were all pointing at me and screeching, “Who’s my stinky Jimmy!”

The adults were dumbfounded as to what was going on. It had all happened too quickly for them, but someone regained control of the situation and the big-top tent reappeared with the balloons and monkeys. Everyone turned and looked at me, the kids laughing and giggling, the adults staring without comprehension.

“Why did you do that?” I screamed at Cynthia.

An intense, burning anger beyond my searing humiliation filled me. All the years of containing my fear, my frustration, my hiding and cowering, it all boiled over the edges of my psyche.
I could kill her right now
, I thought. The world turned a bloody red in front of my eyes, and demons shifted inside.

Cynthia shrank back into the protective knot of her friends, all of them still laughing.

I gathered myself and focused on her, channeling my voice through the pssionics and amplifying it beyond deafening.

“Why did you do that?!” I bellowed from a hulking, grotesque caricature of myself.

A shockwave of pure hatred shattered away from me, almost knocking over the assembled guests. I felt like I was about to physically explode when I caught myself and stopped. My anger imploded back into me and the bottle corked back up.

The laughing had stopped. In fact the scene was deathly quiet now, except for whimpers from some of the smaller children. Shocked faces were turned towards me, watching me. Someone started crying. It was Cynthia.

At that moment Nancy Killiam opened the portal door and announced, “I’m heeeere!”

She was all decked out in a frilly dress and pigtails. I began to run, tears streaming down my face, shoving my way past Bob.

“Hey, I didn’t know, hey Jimmy...” he tried to say as I ran past him, almost knocking down Nancy as I ran out, escaping from the blinding glare of judgment. By that point I was already gone, detached, and it was Samson taking over my body to hide it somewhere safe.

I was already back in my private world, and it was burning. Great flames were consuming the walls, the corridors, the passages and nooks and crannies of my childhood. The little creatures pinned everywhere to the walls squealed in high keening agony as the blaze devoured them.

I watched, impassively, as the inferno consumed itself and flamed out. My face grimly reflected the smoldering ruins in shades of dark oranges and blood reds. Never again, I promised myself, never again.

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and on that day I felt myself shatter and schism but then reform to heal and grow, becoming adult perhaps, becoming something different. The developing child inside me, my personality until then free floating, coalesced and hardened. Invisible things fell into place, the pain stopped, and the shell finally finished closing around me, opaque, powerful. Impenetrable.

§

A few days later, back at home, I was studying for some Solomon House entrance exams.

My mother had just arisen from the dead, and was making her way, in her jerkily soapstim junkie way, towards me with a fresh drink in hand to help her wake up from the sensory coma she’d been in for the past few days.

“Hey stinker, I saw you embarrassed me at that Killiam party, what the hell were you thinking?” she half slurred, half laughed at me.

“Some security expert you are,” she sniggered, taking a swig from her drink. She waved her hand at me dismissively. I watched her blankly.

“They killed the dolphins you know,” she added, cruelly recalling the security breach that had been the start of the end with Terra Nova. “Dirty smelly fish, serves them right.”

Still I said nothing.

“So I guess nobody is coming to your party, huh, stinky Jimmy?”

She wasn’t really asking, she was more enjoying herself and smiling knowingly at the new name the kids were now calling me. She was behind me, and had turned away to refill her drink.

I slowly closed the interface to my notes and twisted towards her, pulling down a dense security blanket that enveloped us in a glittering glacial blue. She turned back to me.

“What?” she barked, feeling the blanket close in around us. She threw her head back. “Something to say, little worm?”

I smiled at her, flames glittering in my eyes.

“If you ever talk to me again, Mother, if you ever so much as lay a hand on me or utter one more word to me from that trashy, dirty mouth of yours again,” I said, evenly and slowly, smiling at her. “I will make sure that you regret ever existing, that you live out the remainder of your pathetic life in unearthly agony.”

I smiled to make the point. The fire burned ever brighter in my eyes, and the flames reflected in hers.

Looking at me she was about to say something, but then stopped herself as her vacant mind filled with alarm, feeling my naked malice inhabiting the room. I could taste her fear and my smile widened. She just turned and shuffled away, and I released the security blanket with a flick of a phantom.

“Enjoy the soapstim mum!” I gaily called after her, and returned to my notes.

I’m going to ace this test.

21

Identity: Patricia Killiam

THE WINDS WHIPPED and howled, churning the surface of the ocean into a frothing maelstrom. Gigantic waves surged and crested under the driving storms. Two massive Category 5 hurricanes colliding was a once in a mega-annum event, and Atopia was stuck like a seed about to be crushed between these two grinding wheels.

Suddenly, bright pinpoints of light appeared flashing through the sheets of dark, whipping rain. Then more pinpoints of light flared and began illuminating the heaving seas below. The pinpoints rapidly multiplied, glittering and then flashing into a sheet of superheated plasma that vaporized the rain, sending plumes of vapor rocketing up through the atmosphere.

We were all in Command, watching this on a projection in the middle of the room.

“The slingshots weren’t designed to be used this way,” explained Jimmy while we watched the growing inferno begin to notch a tiny gap between the two colliding monsters.

“Usually they only keep up with sustained operation for a few minutes to take out incoming kinetic threats, but we’ve made some modifications to sink away the heat. We should be able to operate them continuously for at least a few hours, maybe more, but enough to get the job done.”

The view point on the projection swept away and upwards, zooming backwards into space until we could see most of the colliding hurricane systems, with Atopia highlighted on the seas between them.

Jimmy accelerated the simulation speed, and we watched as a narrow gap between the storm systems appeared and Atopia was sucked through it.

“We’ll use the slingshots to blaze a super-high pressure system through the middle of the two colliding storm systems,” Jimmy explained, pointing to the projection.

“Then we’ll drive Atopia at maximum speed straight into it. The relative vacuum we create will literally suck us through behind it as we burn a path forward with the slingshots.”

Jimmy smiled, and the highlighted pinpoint of Atopia popped through to the other side of the storms in the simulation.

A singular, loud clapping punctuated the mesmerized room. It was Kesselring, beaming at Jimmy. Soon, everyone began to join in.

“Jimmy, son, you’ve saved us!” Mr. Kesselring cried out. “Brilliant, simply brilliant!”

Despite my own developing plans to derail the launch timing, relief that we would escape destruction in the storms almost overwhelmed me. I couldn’t help but join in the clapping. It was brilliant, and it looked like it would work.

“It will be a bumpy ride through,” added Jimmy, “but not too bad.”

He shook his head, waving away our applause. It was nothing, no problem, he seemed to be telling us.

Kesselring leaned over to me confidentially and noted, “Patricia, absolutely excellent work in bringing Jimmy onto the Command team.”

“Thanks,” I replied, nodding, but my clapping trailed off as I looked towards Rick. He was joining in as well, but with a completely vacant expression.

“Looks like it will work,” I added to Kesselring, “but I need to get back to something urgently.”

Kesselring shrugged and kept clapping loudly.

§

I collapsed my main subjective away from Command. Marie had already filled up a glass of scotch for me as I moved to sit down behind my desk and put my feet up.

“Through the storms we go,” said Marie gravely.

I took the drink from her. Instead of sitting, I decided instead to keep standing, and began pacing in tight circles in front of my desk like a caged tiger.

Marie brought up the phutureworlds we had been working on for so many years now, their projections floating in my display spaces, staggered from the most critical to least, filling my eyes with death and destruction as they faded into the distance. She was bringing them up to make a point.

“None of this makes any sense,” I complained, still pacing and taking a sip from my scotch.

My understanding of warfare was academic. Open warfare was, in essence, an information-gathering exercise. From a game theory point of view, attack and defense were designed to resolve the capabilities of opponents until both sides converged on the same accurate assessments.

I’d openly shared almost all information regarding Atopia with the world to avert such a conflict—‘almost’ being the operative word. Perhaps by sharing what I’d been hiding, I could negotiate a peace with Terra Nova, but it was hard to shake the feeling of being a traitor to my own cause.

Even then, it was hard to imagine Terra Nova being so desperate to slow us down as to purposely direct Category 5 hurricanes into the densely populated West Coast. Even a weakened America would be sure to retaliate, with great prejudice, after the damage these storms would cause. Terra Nova would be ensuring its own downfall.

Once upon a time, before Kesselring had approached me for the Atopia project, I had helped build the foundations for Terra Nova as well, and I now remained perhaps the last person on earth who could fix whatever was going on.

“Are you ready?” asked Marie. “This may be our only chance.”

“You’re right,” I replied. With all the attention focused on the emergency at hand, a window of opportunity had opened up for us to talk with the Terra Novans directly and in secret; a chance to perhaps strike a grand bargain. “So everything is set up?”