Bob and I sat on our boards and waited for a decent set of waves just inside the edge of the kelp forest near the Western Inlet, not far from my habitat.
Atopian kelp, the base of our ecological chain, had been bioengineered to grow inverted, with its holdfast becoming a gas-filled bladder floating on the surface and the kelp blades spreading hundreds of feet down into the depths. It sprouted outward at a fantastic rate like a watery mangrove, beginning near the edge of the underwater extremity of Atopia and stretching from there to about two miles out across the water.
From here I could just see my personal habitat bobbing in the distance. My wealth afforded me the luxury of my own private living space, a household attached to one of the passenger cannon supports, sprouting up out of the water and into the sunshine. Most of the million-plus inhabitants lived below decks in the seascrapers stretching into the depths. Atopia was the ultimate in dense, urban planning.
I’d been one of the earliest converts to the Atopia marketing program, pulling up stakes from my wandering existence around the Bay Area to move onto the original Atopian platform nearly thirty years ago. Of course, some of my closest friends were founders of the Atopian program, so it hadn’t really surprised anyone.
America just wasn’t what it used to be anymore, with constant cyberattacks pushing it into an insular downward spiral and the Midwest returning to the dustbowl of more than a hundred years earlier. No good end was in sight, and entanglements in the Weather Wars were squeezing the last drops of blood from a country already gone dry.
For me, the kicker had been the surfing. Floating free in the Pacific, Atopia was exposed to huge, open-ocean swells. When they caught just right, these would break and curl into pipes that broke for miles as they swept around its perfectly circular edge. Atopia was a magnet for the best surfers in the world, but it was hard for them to compete with residents who used pssi. Outsiders thought that with pssi we were cheating the gods, but really the gods were jealous.
These days, those gods seemed to be having a particular issue with me.
Bob was waiting for the ultimate wave, and while I’d managed to catch one good one, I didn’t have his attuned water-sense and was having a hard time relaxing into it. Time was pressing down heavily.
“Bob!” I yelled out across the water, interrupting a conversation I could see he was having with his brother-of-sorts, Martin. “I need to get going!”
“Already?”
“Yeah, I need to get back to that thing. Hotstuff is on my back. ”
My promised hour wasn’t up, yet Hotstuff was flooding me with things we needed to get done. It was impossible to enjoy the surfing, perhaps even dangerous.
I’d better get on with it.
“I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do,” declared Bob. “Anyway, ping me if you change your mind.”
With a wave good-bye I flitted off back to my habitat, leaving Hotstuff to guide my body home.
3
I checked out some news Bob sent me as I returned to the top deck of my habitat. There’d been a rash of UFO sightings in the Midwest the night before, and he knew I was a paranormal fan-boy. On this day, though, more important things were on the agenda.
I strode back and forth like a caged animal, my mind racing, and then made my decision. I looked out toward the breaking waves. There was really no option.
“Ready for business?” Hotstuff was waiting for me on a stool at the deck bar, drinking a latte and going over the morning’s news, tapping her high heels against the polished blue-marble floor. Behind her, my carefully curated collection of some of the world’s rarest whiskeys and cognacs sparkled in the midmorning sunshine. It was about the time I’d usually be waking up, but I’d already been up since dawn.
“Do we have to?” I asked uselessly. A little taste of that Aberlour would be nice.
“Some kind of action is required,” Hotstuff observed. “Even inaction is an action. Perhaps the only kind of action you seem to enjoy lately.” She raised her eyebrows in disdain while she scanned the European financial reports.
“Summon the Council.” I sighed, scratching my stubble.
Portals to my homeworld opened up off the deck, and I walked into our main conference room, shifting my attire into a navy sport coat with a stiff-collared white shirt. Hotstuff strode in behind me, her tidy chignon and crisp suit radiating efficiency and purpose.
One by one, my councilors materialized around the long cherry-wood conference table that glistened under the bioluminescent ceiling. About half of them appeared dull-eyed, having just woken to patch in from whatever time zone they were in for this surprise meeting. The other half weren’t human, but our trusted synthetics, and they appeared bright and cheerful, their smiles following me around the room toward the head of the table.
Then again, perhaps I had them mixed up. Maybe the dull-eyed ones were my synthetics. I had a hard time telling the difference anymore.
These weren’t just your run-of-the-mill women and sims, but, like Hotstuff, more like a twelve-year-old boy’s fantasy. They posed casually around the room as if a fashion shoot could be announced at any instant, with the long conference table springing into action as a catwalk.
My calling a sudden meeting like this was unusual, to say the least, and they watched me cautiously. Information packets were dispersed, appearing on the table in front of them as I sat down.
“No need for pleasantries.” This wasn’t a social call. “Look at your instructions. We’re going to be liquidating everything.”
A pause while they assimilated the data downloads.
“Questions?”
“No questions regarding the details, sir,” chimed one of them, Alessandria. “But it may help to understand your motivation. Some of the assets you are seeking to liquidate, are, um, well, they’re not what you want people to know you’re in a hurry to sell.”
My motivation, now that was a good question.
There were only two things I really knew. First, that I had no idea what I was trying to escape from, just that, whatever it was, it was trying to kill me. And second, just sharing the idea that something was trying to hunt me down made my situation even more dangerous. To minimize risk, I had to pretend nothing was happening.
“No reason,” I replied as casually as I could. “Just the whim of a bored trillionaire. I don’t want to raise suspicion, so keep this on the down-low, right?”
Perhaps that was the wrong choice of words.
“On the down-low?” Roxanne, my resource manager for the Asia Pacific region raised her eyebrows. “You want me to just dump all the yachts, the islands, the racetracks…?”
“Yes.”
At this I felt a twinge of remorse. The baubles of Indigo Entertainment, my latest and ill-fated attempt at a new foray into the business world, still held some sparkle in my eye.
While I could lay claim to being super-wealthy, I had to admit I couldn’t say the same about being super-intelligent. My success in the business world was more about luck, and luck was hard to replicate. My original luck, the good fortune that had made me my fortune, had been helped along by my friend and long-time mentor, Patricia Killiam, and a team of incredibly smart people. It had also been born from a single-minded obsession with the future, or perhaps, just one future in particular.
“Don’t go out and just dump it,” explained Hotstuff. “Don’t attract attention. Be subtle. Go out there and do what we pay you for. Anyway, most of the Indigo Entertainment stuff is a waste of time.” Hotstuff looked toward me. “I don’t think we’ll need to explain ourselves very much.”
Roxanne considered this, shifting around in her chair. “I may have someone who could be interested.”
The paranoia set in. Perhaps these assets were what whoever was messing with me wanted. Is Roxanne in on the fix? I looked carefully at her. Hotstuff sensed what I was thinking and headed me off before I could say anything.
“Very good,” Hotstuff replied to Roxanne. “If there are no more questions, please everyone, get to work.”
Nobody objected, and, one by one, just as they’d appeared, my councilors faded from the conference room.
When they’d all gone, Hotstuff looked at me sympathetically. “You’re going to need to trust your team,” she said slowly. After a pause she added, “And you’re going to need to trust me.”
Visions of Kurt G?del, the famous Austrian mathematician, sprang to mind. Suffering from deep paranoia, he’d only accepted food prepared by his wife to eat. When she fell ill one day and was sent to hospital, he refused to eat food given to him by anyone else. He died of starvation just shortly before his wife had returned.
“I just hope nothing happens to you,” I replied. “I’m not sure I could starve myself.”
While proxxi had full access to our memories and sensory systems and could usually guess what we were thinking, they couldn’t read our minds. Not yet, anyway.
Hotstuff gave me a funny look.
I shrugged. It wasn’t worth explaining.