6
“A great evil will consume you all!” The man’s filthy, mottled face barely restrained a threatened apoplectic fit as he balanced precariously atop an upturned four-gallon paint can.
Wheezing asthmatically, his eyes rolled up toward the damp skies before returning to earth to hunt through the crowd. His gaze swung around to lock onto me and I stared back. Trembling slightly, his already distended pupils widened as he peered at me.
“A great evil is already consuming you, sir,” he whispered, directly addressing me as I passed. And then he screeched to the crowd, pointing at me, “A GREAT EVIL is upon us!”
Shivering, I looked away, but nobody paid much attention.
I was off on another one of my walks to try and clear my mind, this time through Hyde Park in London, and I was just passing Speakers’ Corner near Marble Arch. The steady thrum of the automated passenger traffic hummed in the background while the electric crackle of London’s city center hung just past the peripheries of my senses.
It was morning for me, but already well past midday here, halfway around the world from Atopia. The usual collection of crackpots and doomsayers had already installed themselves for the afternoon tourist crowds. I usually enjoyed standing and watching, listening to the passionate ramblings of the desperate men and women on their soapboxes, exhorting us to save ourselves. But today it felt wrong, or perhaps worse, it felt right.
Hunching over, I kept my eyes to the ground and wound my way through the crowd, making my escape into the sanctuary of the park.
Even here in my virtual presence, I had to keep up my guard, a point-of-presence being a potential point of entry into my networks. I had a whole sentry system of future-selves walking through the park in the immediate future ahead of me.
Threading my way through the periphery of the crowd, my splintered ghosts walked seconds and minutes ahead of me, testing the informational flow through this path and that, dropping data honey pots here and there to pick up straggling invaders, testing for the safest narrow corridor into my future. Salvation for me was threading the eye of a needle, and without being able to see a clear future, it felt as if my hands were tied behind my back or my limbs amputated.
Taking some slow, deep breaths, I tried to relax.
The sun was bravely fighting its way through the wet skies, and small collections of people had begun to install themselves on the low-slung green-and-white striped loungers scattered across the grassy expanse at this end of the park. I was heading directly toward the constabulary near the eastern end of the Serpentine. On my rambles through Hyde Park, I always ran a historical skin so that I could enjoy the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and I could see its roof gleaming past a copse of trees in the distance.
I’d developed a thing for Crystal Palaces.
Right at that moment, however, that same reality overlay was projecting the Tyburn gallows next to a gaggle of old ladies who’d slumped into their loungers in the middle of the field. An execution was in progress, or at least a hanging. The ashen corpse of Oliver Cromwell spun slowly in the breeze, much to the delight of the crowd collected for the spectacle that had ushered London into 1661.
“Old Crommie is dancing the Tyburn jig!” leered the ghost of a sharp-jawed woman in sodden rags.
No matter which way I turned, death seemed to surround me. Quickly I cropped the reality skin into a narrow window of time around the present and 1851, and the crowd and execution dropped away.
Visions of the trail around the Serpentine pond floated into my consciousness as my splinters walked ahead of me. I collapsed my probable paths to head toward Kensington Road and the entrance of the Crystal Palace and the cool of the ancient oaks that stood there, quietly marking their own way through time.
Patricia Killiam had asked to speak with me today. Walking across the edge of the park, I summoned a splinter into a media feed of her in another of her endless string of press conferences, and an image of the live event popped into my mind. She’d been an early supporter of much of the deep technology behind the Phuture News Network and was one of my oldest and dearest friends.
In an overlaid visual display, a reporter was just asking her a question. “Isn’t the world population stable now, even declining? Shouldn’t that help calm the resource shortages?”
“The core problem isn’t population,” explained Patricia, “but that everyone wants to live lives of material luxury. Supporting ten billion middle-class citizens on planet Earth was never going to work, and the only solution is to create a simulated reality that is good enough to satisfy our material cravings.”
It was probably the millionth time that Patricia had gone through this.
“And why is this proxxi thing such a key part of all this?” asked the same reporter.
“Your proxxi controls a dynamic image of your neural wetware so it can control your physical body when you’re away,” she continued. “This enables you to seamlessly drop off into any virtual space, any time you like—even in the middle of a conversation, since your proxxi can finish it for you. It’s like an airbag for your body and mind, except that this airbag can act as your official representative.”
The crowd nodded. They loved this stuff.
“If you don’t want to go to that meeting or work cocktail tonight,” she finished, “just send your proxxi! Why not? It’s your life!”
This earned a big round of applause.
As the press conference split up, Patricia’s main point-of-presence shifted into my reality, and she materialized walking in step beside me in the park. Her eyes watched me all the way through her transition. I could almost feel her weariness.
“So what’s all this on Phuture News about you dying today?”
Now I understood why she’d wanted to chat in person. I tensed up.
“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, old friend,” I replied, shaking my head and smiling.
She raised her eyebrows. “At least you seem to have a sense of humor about it.”
Phuture News had begun publishing stories about the death of its founder. The mounting density of my termination events had pushed my death into reality for everyone living in the world of tomorrow.
“I wanted to check up on you in person,” she continued, “to see if you needed anything.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m just fooling around.”
A lie, but I had no choice. In my situation, admitting anyone into the circle of trust was extremely dangerous. Expanding the network of people who knew what was happening would spread the probability matrices, and I needed razor-sharp phutures to effectively head off my threats.
She watched me curiously, almost sadly. “Playing? You sure? This seems a funny way to have a laugh.”
“Don’t worry,” I reassured her.
She cocked her eyebrows at me.
“Really, don’t worry,” I repeated. “And thanks for taking the time to drop in.”
By now we’d reached the edge of the Serpentine. It was filled with small blue paddleboats being driven around by enthusiastic tourists. Views of Kensington Palace crept over the weeping willows in the distance, and despite the brave advances of the sun, a light rain had begun to fall again.
“Is there anything I can help with?” she asked. “You can trust me, Vince. Tell me what’s happening.…”
The walls of my future squeezed ever tighter around me.
“Everything’s fine,” I reiterated. “And I do trust you, Pat. I just still have a hard time believing you work for Kesselring now.”
Kesselring had tried to engineer a hostile takeover of Phuture News many years ago, back when it was barely a start-up, with plans to strip it down and profiteer from the future. He’d used some aggressive and illegal tactics to try and get what he wanted. Patricia had been on our board back then, and we’d fought off Kesselring together.
“A necessary evil,” replied Patricia. She looked into the distance. “You promise to ping me if you need anything. I mean it, if you need anything.…”
“I will.”
She stared at me silently. We’d known each other a long time.
“I promise, I will,” I laughed. “Now go on, I know how busy you are.”
Patricia nodded and smiled.
“You take care, Vince.”
With that, she faded away to leave me alone to finish my walk, or at least, alone with my crowd of future-selves arrayed around me.
“It does seem to be getting worse, though,” I said to myself glumly after she was gone. I was covering up the issue of my increasingly probable death as some kind of prank. Most people didn’t seem to think it was very funny. Neither did I.
I scuffed my foot in the dirt again as I passed in front of the Crystal Palace. Looking up, I watched some leaves falling from the trees in the distance, wondering if they felt any regret as they came to rest against the earth.