4
I was up at sunrise the next day as well, my sleep again filled with nightmares, but nightmares that were spilling from dreamland into reality. The darkness was smearing into light, unconsciousness into consciousness, dream life into waking life, all becoming barely distinguishable from each other. Hotstuff was waiting patiently in our war room while I dragged myself into the bathroom for a shower to wake up.
I stared into the depths of my bloodshot eyes in the mirror. Condensation from the hot shower fogged my image while I inspected the angry blood vessels ringing my irises.
“Can we take a short surf break again this morning?” I asked Hotstuff, reaching into a drawer below the sink to get my eye drops.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she replied, shouting over the noise of the shower. “We have a lot to do. It’s getting more dangerous.”
I sighed, unscrewing the bottle cap and holding it between my teeth. Leaning back, I pulled back the lid of my left eye and deposited a drop into it. Rubbing that eye, I switched to the other.
“Come on,” I grunted from between clenched teeth, holding the bottle cap in place as I lined up the dropper above my right eye. “A half an hour out on the.…”
I gagged. The bottle cap had popped like a cork from between my teeth to lodge itself into my windpipe. My body convulsed as I tried to pull air into my lungs. Hotstuff was immediately beside me and already alerting the emergency services. Panic exploded in my veins. I clawed at the bathroom walls, doubling over onto the floor, my chest heaving.…
“See what I mean?”
I was standing back at the sink, staring into my bloodshot eyes, but Hotstuff was there with me, holding out her hand to take the bottle cap.
That was close.
I’d barely escaped that event, less than five seconds away in the future on an alternate timeline. I handed Hotstuff the cap and then, after a split second of contemplation, handed over the whole bottle. My eyes weren’t that bloodshot.
“I guess surfing can wait.”
Whatever it was that was hunting me down, it had infected the very personal and immediate realities surrounding me.
“Forget the shower,” I added. “Let’s just get to work.”
While my physical body remained in the shower, and Hotstuff controlled it to clean me up, my point-of-view switched into a virtual body. From my perspective, the bathroom immediately morphed into my battle room. Hotstuff splintered a hyperdimensional graphic into my display spaces that plotted several thousand alternate future-worlds of my life. Many of the lifelines terminated abruptly, and therein laid the problem with going surfing—I had to save my own life today, and not once, but many dozens of times over.
The day before, there had been over a hundred ways I could have died in the millions of future simulations that we had running for me as we tried to pick a safe path forward for my primary lifeline. My plan of trying to escape in the UAV, the one that was destroyed in the slingshot test the morning before, was one future that I’d barely avoided.
I picked out and watched one of the day’s more gruesomely predicted terminations. It played in a three-dimensional projection that hung in the middle of the room before me, starting with me being cut in half, then being burned to a crisp in some freak accident outside the passenger cannon. I watched with a morbid curiosity. My planned trip on the passenger cannon was definitely off the list of things to do.
The problem had originally surfaced some months ago, and it was accelerating at a worrying pace.
One morning, Hotstuff had mentioned to me that there was a high probability of my being killed in a scheduled stratospheric HALO jump. My future prediction system that morning had calculated that due to inclement weather and the likelihood of my skydiving partner being intoxicated the evening before thanks to a probable incident with his wife, there was a very large chance of an accident occurring. No problem, I’d happily announced over my morning coffee, just cancel the jump.
A few days later, I received another prediction informing me that there were a half a dozen likely scenarios involving my death. It was a fairly simple task to engineer a path through them all, but from that point, the solution to my “non-death” had started to become increasingly complicated. On top of it, I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening—the solution sets became unstable unless I kept it to myself.
So I found myself running around Atopia, asking people to do odd jobs for me, and flittering off to the four corners of the multiverse on inane assignments just to keep myself alive. Things began spinning out of control like a surreal joke, the punchline far out of reach.
We managed to rout the incoming threats the day before by sending out bots and synthetics—and in critical cases, myself personally—to nudge the advancing future timeline of my world this way or that.
Lately, however, some of the future death events were beginning to creep into the hours and minutes just ahead. What started out a few months ago as the odd warning of some low-probability events to be carefully avoided had progressed into a constant stream of events that signaled my impending death. We had no idea how or why it was happening.
“Most of the bases are covered for today,” Hotstuff explained, summoning up a probability scatter grid that sprouted outward from some critical nexus points. “There are just a few events that you need to handle personally, starting with this one in New York.”
She pointed to the nexus closest to me, and the future reality of that event spun out around us. I nodded, trying to take it in.
Someone with lesser resources than I had would’ve just died, without fanfare, and that would have been that. In my unique position as owner of Phuture News, and with my almost limitless finances, however, I could literally see the future coming and dodge and weave my way through it. Anyone else edging up on seventy might have accepted their mortality with a little more grace, but here on Atopia, I was still a spring chicken. I wasn’t ready to accept a trip on the ultimate voyage just yet.
Sensing my mind wandering, Hotstuff decided to summon up another gruesome termination. She growled playfully, swatting at me with her riding crop while I watched myself being liquefied in the bio-sludge facilities. I felt like I was being stalked by the army of darkness with Betty Boop as my sidekick.
How many ways can a person die?
Her tactic was successful, however, and I refocused on the New York project.
“You just need to steal a pack of cigarettes,” she explained while I watched the simulation play through.
“Sounds good,” I sighed. “Time to get ready for work.”
Sitting on the rooftop deck of my habitat, I took one longing look toward the breaking surf and then grumpily got up from my chair to begin the day’s activity list to keep me alive. How exactly stealing a pack of cigarettes from some woman in New York would help me out was impossible to understand, but there it was.
Resisting the almost uncontrollable urge to procrastinate, I heard myself say, “Okay, Hotstuff, let’s get this show on the road.”
The deck of my habitat faded away to reveal the grimy walls of a convenience store in New York. My consciousness had been implanted into a robotic surrogate that Hotstuff had set into position. The pristine lines of Atopia disappeared from my sensory frames, and even through the thin sensory input, the overpowering odor and seediness of the place hit me like a wave of virtual sewage.
I felt dirty, despite being remote from the robotic body, and had to fight back an urge to go and wash myself. I’d had a very bad time in New York as a young man, and memories of it still haunted me. This was the first time I’d gone back in forty years.
The target in question was yelling at the cashier behind the counter in front of me. In fact, she looked like she was about to hit him.
“Lady!” I shouted above her, raising my spindly metal arms in the cashier’s defense. “Lady, take it easy!”
She didn’t notice me as she fumbled around in her purse, entirely engrossed in whatever it was she was trying to do. Her face registered disgust, and she looked like she was having a worse day than even I was.
Eventually, after more theatrics, she negotiated her purchase. I hung back and followed her out the door, but at a distance.
She stopped outside to light up, standing under a wobbly holographic advertisement. After a few moments, I saw my chance. I moved, taking her by surprise, and pinned her against the wall. Terrified, she froze, and I fumbled at her, trying to grab the pack of cigarettes. Quickly, I pried it out of her hands.
“Get off me!” she screamed.
Jumping back with my prize in hand, I felt like I wanted to apologize, and I stared for a moment into her green eyes. She looked like someone standing on the edge of a cliff. Explaining myself wasn’t an option, however, and instead I melted backward into the pedestrian flow, leaving her there, shaking. It seemed absurd, but stealing this pack of cigarettes would collapse a whole stream of dangerous alternate futures for me.