9
Dappled sunlight streamed down through the jungle canopy high above, illuminating the hard-packed earth below. It cast a patchwork of light and dark that stitched together scenes of smoke rising from cooking fires, laughing children darting between thatched huts, and women sitting and gossiping together as they stripped the white skins off sweet potatoes, carefully wrapping each one in banana leaves and depositing them into a stone-lined pit.
The men were hunting today, chasing pigs that escaped from neighboring villages in the thunderstorms of the night before. Monkeys barked through the underbrush, their catcalls joining the symphonies of songbirds whose feathers lit up the steaming forest like splashes of flickering paint against a knotted green canvas.
Picking up a smooth stone sitting on the earth, I casually ducked my head as a dart snipped past, barely missing me. One of the children cried out to my right. A mother picked the child up by his arm and spanked him. He’d been playing with his father’s blowgun, not knowing what he was doing, probably imitating his dad. Even as I inhabited someone else, whatever was hunting me down was trying to kill this body as well.
The mother looked toward me and shrugged, apologizing. I smiled back, returning my attention to the witch doctor. Dodging death was nothing new anymore.
“In da roond,” explained the tribal elder, speaking in variant of Tok Pisin, an English pidgin that was the lingua franca of the Papua New Guinea highlands.
The two most linguistically diverse places left on Earth were also the most culturally and technologically polarized: this place, barely out of the Stone Age, and New York City, the bustling megalopolis tipping the world into the twenty-second century. Each retained over a thousand languages, but where almost all in New York were machine translatable, and thus part of the new global lingua franca, almost none of the New Guinea languages were. I was struggling to understand what this elder was struggling just as hard to explain to me.
“Round, like, like in a circle?” I stuttered in my best attempt at native Yupno, the tribe here. Speaking through this body was difficult.
A giant tree frog watched me lazily from its perch in the branches nearby. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a frog in the wild. Of course, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in the wild either.
To get to this remote and rugged place, we’d had a portable communication base station dropped in, and then we convinced a nun running a nearby mission to persuade one of the villagers to drink a glass of water laden with smarticles, allowing my subjective to enter and control his body through the communication link.
It was the only way I could speak with this particular elder, the Yupno witch doctor and keeper of holy secrets. The smarticles hadn’t fully suffused into this body, so I felt numb and disconnected, and they would be soon flushed out, so I had to hurry.
The witch doctor shrugged and smiled, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. His eyes sparkled at me. I smiled back, my pssi filtering his body language into a form that made sense to me. My gaze shifted to a break in the jungle that revealed the glacier-capped mountain ranges beyond stretching upward into the bright sky. He was trying to explain his perception of the shape of time, or rather, its lack of shape.
“Here and now,” “back in the twenties,” “going forward”…the modern world was fixated on spatial metaphors for time, the idea of the past being behind us and the future ahead. Not the Yupno, though. In this remote valley, time seemed to have no linear form to its inhabitants.
To them, it flowed uphill, backward, in forms and in shapes. They laughed at our conception of its forward flow. This Stone Age culture directly experienced something Einstein had only glimpsed through his equations.
The pattern Hotstuff detected had led us here, and she was sitting on a log across the cooking fire from the elder and me, fetchingly dressed in safari shorts with her hair done up in a long single braid that she was playing with, twirling between her fingers. Of course, since she was simply an augmented reality projection in the pssi system, I was the only one who could see her.
“He means time runs forward and backward, but not like a stream—more like currents in a lake,” she suggested. “No, like a reservoir, that’s more what he means.”
“Like a reservoir?” I asked the elder.
He nodded. With long arms, he reached up and circled his hands around slowly, finally coming to rest, ending at me. The Yupno had a way of pointing toward doorways when speaking about time, a curiosity I was beginning to understand.
Inhabiting the body of this tribal member, I was trying to see if time felt any different for me. It didn’t, but something felt odd.
Amazingly, the elders hadn’t batted an eye at the idea of one of their own being magically inhabited by an alien spirit, nor the idea that I was conversing with an invisible ghost, Hotstuff, in their midst. It seemed perfectly natural to them.
The witch doctor pointed to where Hotstuff was sitting, almost as if he could see her.
“The spirit name?” he asked.
Hotstuff raised her eyebrows.
“Hotstuff,” I replied, shrugging at her.
“HOT stuff,” he repeated, “hot STUFF?”
I nodded, and his smiled widened.
“And your name?” I asked—I hadn’t thought to inquire before.
He pointed to his chest. “Nicky,” he said proudly, and then added, “Nicky Nixons.”
I laughed—Nicky Nixons the witch doctor.
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Nicky Nixons. My name,” I said, pointing to myself, “is Vince Indigo.”
“Yes, in—dee—go…,” he replied, nodding sagely, as if he’d always known.
“This is all very touching,” interjected Hotstuff, “but we have to get going. We’re out of time here.”
She splintered some upcoming death events into my display spaces, one of them a bio-electronic Ebola-based retrovirus that ended with my internal organs liquefying while I brushed my teeth the following morning. She firewalled off the data tunnel from the jungle we were sitting in, just in case.
“It’s getting dangerous just being here.”
I nodded. “Okay, let’s get me going,” I replied. “But you stay awhile, see what you can learn from him.”
It was time to get to work again. The sensory frames of the jungle and Nicky Nixons quickly faded away to reveal the confines of a small, sparse apartment somewhere in the lower levels of the Atopian seascraper complex. In augmented space, an endless array of workspace cubicles radiated outward in the New London financial metaworld. The cubicles were busily occupied by thousands of copies of Willy McIntyre, one of my surfer friend Bob’s best friends and my newly appointed stock trader.
“So I assume business is good?” I asked Willy, sensing the arrival of his primary subjective.
Hotstuff was feeding me a report on Willy’s activities, and I could see that these weren’t just bots and synthetics he had working—these were full-blown splinters, hundreds of them. I didn’t care what he was up to. I just needed to get in and out.
Time was, as ever, against me.
“Business is very, very good,” replied Willy, now standing beside me, watching me watching his financial army at work below.
He looked like the cat that had eaten the canary: about to burst with some secret. In the report from Hotstuff, I could see that Willy had fully paid off the multi-generational mortgage for his family. He was well on his way to amassing a sizeable fortune, but I didn’t have the time or energy to talk.
Death was calling.
“I noticed you amped up your Phuture News services,” I said carefully, “but that’s not why I’m here. I’m sending the details of what I need, right now.”
I uploaded the transaction into one of his splinters.
“You want me to what?!” he exclaimed. “You know this is going to look suspicious, especially with me working for Infinixx.”
“From what I’ve heard, you don’t work for them anymore.”
Willy stopped fidgeting and stared at me. “Sure, but it’ll still look odd.”
“I know it seems crazy, but if you could do this for me, and keep it quiet, I can pay you an awful lot of money. I need you to dump all that stock and chalk up a huge loss, and I need you to do it from New York.”
I looked at his face. He was aware of the way I was watching him.
“And be careful,” I said after a moment, feeling he was in over his head.
“It doesn’t look like there will be any problems with this transaction—”
“Not with that,” I interrupted. He wasn’t catching my meaning. “I mean with whatever you have going on here.”
“There’s nothing going on here.”
We stared at each other.
I needed to get going. “Just be careful, okay?”
He hesitated, but then smiled. “No problem, Mr. Indigo.”
This kid was going to get himself in trouble. He offered his hand and I shook it, but my mind was already elsewhere.
I quickly flitted off to the roof of the Cognix towers.