Complete Atopia Chronicles (51 page)

Kesselring and Cognix had given me tactical command of the operation. My primary subjective was now floating up at the edge of space, watching overlays of the constantly updated simulations. Far below me, the two storm systems were grinding into each other. From this distance, everything seemed to be moving in calm, orderly slow motion, but I had firsthand experience of the violence at sea level from several splinters I had combing the oceans ahead of us at that same moment.

Almost equally important, I had Samson interfacing with the world media as we worked to downplay the situation. The questions and inquiries we were getting were unusually low in volume, and there were nearly no attempts at data incursion into the outer perimeters.

Either we were doing an awfully good job at containing the situation media-wise, or something else was going on, but more important things had my attention.

Since the Infinixx incident, Kesselring had taken Patricia off the media circuit. Her association and relation to Nancy was too much of a distraction. To be honest, I think they didn’t trust her, but neither did they need her anymore.

Where before the emotional media campaign had been centered around confidence and trust in our bid to gain and win regulatory approval, as Hal Granger took over, we had begun centering more on the elevational and inspirational messaging. It was devoid of any real content when looked at in detail, but nobody did anymore.

The hard work of gaining the trust of experts and governments was now complete as Atopia had passed clinical trial certifications in all major jurisdictions. What was left now was simply inspiring the dreams of the masses to desire pssi for themselves.

Hal had begun using me in the media campaigns now instead of Patricia, a poster child for Atopia and the future to come, young and handsome in my pressed military ADF Whites. I’d started to gain my own celebrity status.

As we’d neared the American coast, they’d scrambled their own defensive systems and Atopia was now being orbited by squadrons of ageing F35s and swarms of aerial drones. Naval forces had scrambled out their bases in San Diego and were hanging back at the edges of the storms. We just didn’t have the maneuvering speed of a regular ship, otherwise we wouldn’t be stuck. 

Several of my splinters were overseeing the constant chatter with the American security forces and other floating platforms and seasteads, but again, these were strangely subdued. We’d just received confirmation of authorization to power up our weapons systems with barely an argument. I put it down to their trust in our program, as well as the close relations I’d built up through Rick with General McInnis.

Despite the awesome power in the slingshot batteries, to channel the energy from our fusion reactor into the atmosphere, we still only had a narrow window of opportunity to make my plan work, otherwise we would be scooped up into one or other of the storms and mercilessly thrashed against the coast.

As a precaution, we were going to power up every other weapons system we had, including the mass driver and rail guns, just in case we needed to throw more at it.

The point of no return was fast approaching. I was jacked up, quickening my mind as I reached outwards into the hyperspaces around Atopia, but I figured I could use a little more chemical help. I let my pituitary glands squeeze off some more cortisol and adrenalin into my bloodstream and immediately felt my phantoms begin to jitter ever so slightly, my blood pressure rising and cheeks flushing.

24

Identity: Bobby Baxter

OUR MIND WAS flooded with images, millions of impressions and ideas, of experiences and worlds. Slowly, an impression began to form, a hint of something that didn’t fit.

A vision of my brother Dean and I, when we were kids, floated into my mind. We’d always been pushing our own limits and testing the boundaries of our parents’ patience, and one day we’d decided that we were going to sail over a thousand miles through the open ocean to America, all by ourselves. We were barely ten at the time.

After weeks of planning we’d managed to sneak off, hiding our tracks. We’d almost driven our parents sick with worry when we’d gone missing the first day. By the time we were far enough off to escape interference, we’d announced to everyone the adventure we’d embarked upon. We would have made it, except that halfway there, after a week at sea, our smarticles reserves had begun to deplete. Physically we were perfect, and the weather had been good, but the itchy, desperate feeling of our smarticle supply running low had convinced us to turn around.

My mind hovered back onto Atopia itself, to the million and more Atopians packed in below decks, waiting for the coming hurricanes. Thousands of tourists had been shipped off in a matter of hours when the order had come through, yet none, not even one, of the native Atopians had opted to leave. Even in the face of potential destruction they stayed, wrapped in the warm embrace of pssi. They were afraid of leaving, but why?

I’d only been out about an hour when it finally dawned on me.

It was so obvious it was shocking, and yet so close that it had been impossible to see the forest for the trees. In fact, none of the trees even wanted to see it, never mind the animals in the forest who were lustily eyeing the leaves and branches.

“Sid, I have it, I know what’s going on!” I shot up out of the water in my eureka moment.

Snapping back into my body, I began collapsing the millions of nodes of my collective mind with Nancy. She gasped, our minds and nervous systems shredding apart, and sat up with me. Her breathing was hard and ragged, and she gripped me tightly. I held back onto her.

“And?!” yelled Sid. The gang was all sitting around the tub Nancy and I were in.

“Don’t keep us waiting, son!” added Vicious.

I shook my head.

“Sorry, I can’t tell you yet. I need to talk to Patricia first. This doesn’t make sense. Or maybe it does. I don’t know. I thought I knew her better than this.”

“Aw, come on man!” yelled Vicious. “You can’t be serious!”

“Just let me talk to Patricia first, please, okay?” I asked. “Please, just a tiny bit more patience.”

Wide eyed and on the edge of their seats, they all stared at me in disbelief. Giving Nancy a kiss, I immediately flitted out, sending a high priority request into Patricia’s networks. What was she thinking?

§

Patricia accepted my ping on the first bounce and opened her sensory channels to me. I appeared in her private wood paneled office, sitting in one of her attending chairs. She was sitting across from me behind her desk, and looked like she’d been expecting me.

I just blurted it out. “I know what you’re doing!”

It was foolhardy, perhaps even dangerous, to drop this bomb, but I felt like I knew Patricia. This made it all the more perplexing.

“You’re trying to kill Vince,” I added breathlessly. “The pssi weapons programs, I know about all of it. Are you behind all these disappearances as well, did you steal Willy’s body? Did you sabotage Infinixx? Why are you doing this?”

She sighed and tipped her cigarette into an ornate crystal ashtray, considering me carefully.

“We weren’t trying to kill Vince,” she admitted softly. “I just wanted to keep him occupied. But I had nothing at all to do with the disappearances or what happened to Willy, and certainly nothing to do with Infinixx.”

I stared at her in disbelief.

“I want to say, what happened with your brother,” she continued, grimacing. “I was against all that, but it was what your family wanted at the time. Of course, Hal snapped it up as an opportunity to demonstrate yet another way pssi could remove unhappiness.”

She tapped her cigarette into the ashtray again, and took a sip from her never ending scotch.

I shook my head. Was she trying to bring me into the circle of blame?

“That was a real killer application, all right,” I shot back at her angrily. “Why are you doing this?”

“Since you came to me, why don’t you tell me what we’re doing, Bob?”

She smiled thinly.

I looked at her, shaking my head.

“You’re hooking the world on virtual crack is what you’re doing!”

25

Identity: Patricia Killiam

SILENCE HUNG IN the air. I paused, waiting for Bob to calm down.

“Yes, pssi can have very addictive side effects in an uncontrolled environment,” I admitted, taking another sip from my drink, “but it leaves the body very healthy. The drug you’re referencing ends up killing most people, whereas those on pssi will live immensely long lives.”

Bob shook his head angrily. “Yeah, perfect, keep them alive as long as possible to suck out as much money as you can, right?”

I stared at him without saying anything. It was surprising he’d managed to discover the pssi weapons programs. This was something I hadn’t even known about, one of the things Kesselring had been hiding from me. I’d only just found out myself through Sintil8.

“People directly stimulating their pleasure centers,” continued Bob heatedly, “ramping up their dopamine output. Forget about sex, just plug into my pleasure broadcast. Of course it’s addictive.”

“Quite frankly, I’m surprised at this sudden bout of prudishness,” I replied. “As far as I can remember, you were one of the ones who enjoyed all of this stuff the most.”

“I don’t care what people do. Be happy, do what you want.” He shrugged. “My problem is how you’re hiding how incredibly addictive it is.”

I shared his concern, but as chief scientist, it was my responsibility to defend what we were doing.

“Dr. Granger has found ways to short circuit the addition pathways.”

“Sure you have,” he replied sarcastically. “Using the problem to fix the problem, sounds perfect. And I’ll bet you’ll charge a nice fee for it too.”

This was exactly what I’d said when Kesselring and Hal had suggested it to me. I sighed.

“It does sound suspicious,” I agreed, “but we needed to get regulatory approval as quickly as possible. We couldn’t afford to let the process get stuck.”

He looked at me with mounting disgust.

“So it was all about getting to market faster?”

“In a way,” I admitted, nodding my head slowly. I was so tired.

“Encouraging people to have synthetic babies, living in fantasy worlds or reliving a past they can’t accept,” he continued furiously, gaining steam again. “If not that, then they’re emo-porn junkies, living life as parasitic reality vampires.”

I felt angry as well. While I’d set this whole thing in motion, once it was going I’d been forced to accept a lot of things I wasn’t comfortable with. The synthetic babies, proxxids, had been one of Hal’s ideas and central to the program for reducing birth rates. I’d never been comfortable with this and many other things. My own anger made me defensive.

“Fantasy worlds? Are they really, Bob?” I lashed out. “You have your own dimstim, and a very popular one, from what I’ve heard, and emo-porning is not something I condone. Anyway, since when have people wasting their lives on reality programming been an issue?”

“That’s not the point, Patricia,” he yelled back, “you’ve set all this up to turn the world into your junkie!”

We glared at each other.

“You’re up on stage every day, touting the benefits of pssi to the world—going green, boosting work productivity, free limitless travel, live forever.” Bob was walking around my office now, waving his hands in the air. “And you’ve got Nancy up on stage pulling for it too! How much does she know, I wonder?”

He looked towards the ceiling and held his arms wide.

“The great Patricia Killiam, godmother of all synthetic reality, globally renowned and trusted the world over,” he cried, “and the biggest drug pusher of all time!”

He looked back down from the ceiling at me accusingly. I sighed again, deeper this time. It was time to come clean. I looked down at my feet.

“What you’re saying is true,” I observed quietly, “but the benefits are true as well.”

“The first dose is free,” he snorted, “but then you start paying once hooked. Isn’t that what the release plan is? You’re giving it away for free?”

“Yes, that is the plan,” I sighed, nodding my head in resignation. “You understand what we’re doing, but you don’t understand why.”

“Oh, I understand all right,” he countered, “to make money, be powerful, to be more famous. The world is going to hell in a hand basket, and you’re the vultures ready to pick over its bones.”

That stung. I winced, but at least he had arrived at the crux of the issue.

“Yes,” I said after a moment, “the world is going to hell in a hand basket, as you say, but I’m not sure you understand the extent of it. Come with me, Bob, I need to show you something.”

He shook his head.

“Please, just come with me.” I nudged him with my phantoms.

Grudgingly he released control to me and we dropped through inner space to appear on a city street. Not just a city street, but one that was still charred from some cataclysmic event that had incinerated the place. There were bodies strewn everywhere, blackened flesh and bone exposed through shredded clothing.

“Look around Bob,” I said sadly. “This is the future without pssi.”

I drove our viewpoint around.

“War is horrible,” Bob replied, unimpressed. “But this isn’t your fault. How are you going to stop war with pssi?”

“We can’t stop war, but we discovered we could remove the root cause of it.”

I pulled our projection viewpoint back into space, far above the earth, and we watched as pinpricks of light erupted and sent tiny shockwaves across its surface.

“You’re watching a full scale nuclear war in progress. This is representative of many phutures for the human race.”

“But this is just one phuture,” Bob objected. “Everyone shifts their timeline when they see bad things coming.”

I shifted the viewpoint back, bringing into scope thousands and then millions of alternate future Earths, all burning under some apocalyptic scourge, whether biological, chemical, nanotechnology gone wrong or dozens of others.