11
Finally, after longer than I could remember, I was really enjoying my walk through Buen Retiro Park in Madrid. Summer was turning fully towards fall, and the leaves were starting to come off the trees, creating a beautiful golden carpet underfoot. A perfectly faultless blue sky hung overhead.
In my mind’s eye, I saw myself stepping gracefully to the side as a helicopter crashed down from the heavens, nearly crushing me on a walk through Stanley Park in Vancouver the next day. In another splinter, I watched a car swerve, bouncing into my beach buggy as I turned into a parking lot in Malibu a few days later. The car clipped the surfboard I’d tied to the back of the beach buggy, sending it spinning around. I ducked just before the board would have knocked my head off.
It was all effortless action, like a ballet with death.
We’d found a solution to my problem. Since we’d stabilized them a few weeks back when I was in Tibet, the density of death events had quickly fallen. There were still nearly twenty thousand future fatalities we had to avoid to maintain my healthy timeline, but what had been terrifying a few weeks ago was now just a walk in the park.
Literally.
I strode purposefully as I walked around Retiro Park, on each step picking out another yellow leaf underfoot to grind into the gravel, imagining them to be tiny harbingers of doom I was snuffing out. Looking up from my work, I found myself standing in front of the Crystal Palace.
Down the path a little way, a woman leaned over to pick up one of the leaves and began laughing then crying, completely oblivious to everyone around her. Not wanting to disturb her, I shifted my walk onto another trail. I glanced back over my shoulder, but she was already gone.
She’d looked awfully familiar.
To protect myself, I’d developed a kind of temporal immune system, stretching out into the alternate universes connected to me. An army of killer-tomorrow-bots spun through the probabilistic spaces surrounding me, neutralizing threats, clotting dangerous portals and pathways both into the future and through the past. This immune system had become a part of me, a part of my living body, a highly attuned death sense that allowed me to thread my way through even the most dangerous of situations.
For once, the conspiracy theorists were right. Some of the tabloid worlds had begun publishing stories about a shadowy force that had been detected, pushing and pulling the future prediction networks. The shadowy force they were referring to was me, but there was something else out there too—the thing that was trying to hunt me down. But now I was hunting it as well.
The hurricanes threatening to destroy Atopia had more of my attention. In my situation, it was impossible to ignore the possibility that the storms were aimed at me, a final attempt to destroy my power base after attempting to trap me there. The idea just didn’t stick, though, and while the storms looked like they would damage Atopia, they were no real threat to me.
I turned my face up to feel the morning sunshine. Where my life before had been sliding into apathy, the past few months had led me on a spiritual journey into an almost mystical place. Decoding the hidden pattern had helped us navigate the most stable path through my future, and it was leading us further and further back. There was a hidden truth I was just beginning to glimpse, buried somewhere in humankind’s history.
The solution to my problem was simply to carry on. I was still engaged in a desperate struggle against death, but it had become more like a dance, with effortless action guiding me through. I’d reached a heightened state of being that I would never have been able to achieve any other way.
In the struggle to save myself, I’d been reborn.
As this timeline wore on, people began filtering out the predictions of my death as the attempts of another bored trillionaire at getting attention. The world, at large, was erasing me from their networks as phuture spam, and even the FDMs had gotten bored. The man with no future, who existed only in the moment, was invisible to a world fixated on anywhere but where they actually were.
On my end, I’d come to grips with my situation. My death had become a local solution to the universe that, with the massive resources at my disposal, I’d brought under control in a tight but stable spiral.
The irony just made it that much richer.
I was trapped by my future prediction systems, my own creation, unable to even tell people what was happening. Even more ironic was that I didn’t really even know if it all was true. It was possible that I was just running around every day, doing it all for no reason.
But then, this was life.
I smiled at that thought.
The existentialists did say that life was all about pulling the victory of meaning from the jaws of senseless absurdity, and in that I’d discovered a purpose I’d struggled to find before. That purpose was finding out who was doing this to me, and why, and the trail was leading back to core of Atopia.