7
Floating at the edge of space, we watched two massive hurricanes converging, swirling ominously in three dimensions below. My dad had asked us to get together as a family to see firsthand what was happening. The storms had strengthened in the past day, both past Category 4, and were threatening to pin and crush Atopia against the west coast of America.
Atopia was still holding its own as we backed away, but it was running out of room. The phuturecasts didn’t see any way around them, and a complete surface evacuation had been ordered. The impregnable fortress of Atopia was under threat.
Jimmy was right in the thick of the emergency preparations, of course.
Flitting back to our family habitat to get ready, I clipped back into my body. After a rushed inventory assessment with my proxxi, it seemed I really didn’t need to bring much. With some time to spare, I let my mind slip backward and away to an early inVerse memory of my family that I liked to escape to when I felt stressed.
Blinking in the sunshine, I could feel sand trapped wetly in the crack of my ass. At the time, I was having too much fun to notice it as my brother chased me around the beach on his pudgy little legs. We’d just turned four, and I’d passed the point where my parents had allowed Robert to fully take over my body, but he hadn’t progressed there yet.
Though we were twins, my brother had somehow always lagged behind me.
He chased me around the beach, squealing with excitement and waving his bright orange plastic digger, and just before he could touch me, I would flit out to another spot nearby, disappearing to reappear a few feet away. He hooted with delight each time I did it, and I would stick out my tongue and waggle my hands, thumbs in my ears, and raspberry him. With squeaks of glee, he would change directions and run at my new spot.
I couldn’t stop laughing.
My mom and dad were sitting together on a beach blanket, my dad’s arm around her, and Mom with her great big sunglasses on, laughing with us. She laughed so hard that she was almost crying, pressing her face into my dad’s chest, which just egged me on as I flittered willy-nilly around the beach, taunting my younger-by-a-few-minutes baby brother.
I hadn’t seen my mom laugh in years. My dad either for that matter. Quitting the inVerse, I wiped the tears from my eyes.
InVersing, going back to relive your own personal universe of stored sensory memories, was a dangerous thing if you let it get its tentacles into you. When you were happy, it didn’t matter, you never seemed to bother with it, but when you felt sad or frightened, sliding back into the past—becoming a person you once were, happy and carefree—was about as addictive as something could get.
But reVersing was worse still—not just going back and reliving the past, but running new wikiworld simulations from a decision point you’d made and changing that decision to enable a new world to evolve and spin on from that point. A simulation of how the world could have been, not how it was.
Some people believed that perhaps these weren’t just simulations, but portals into alternate realities that branched off from our own timeline. Windows into life as it could have been, as it actually was somewhere else. It was hard to tear yourself away when it was something, or someone, you desperately missed.
Many people I knew spent more time inVersing and reVersing, or as glassy-eyed emo-porners, than they did living their lives in the present. Dr. Granger said on his EmoShow that going back and reliving the past helped us grow emotionally, that is was a part of a process that helped us to find resolution and happiness.
I wasn’t so sure.
What my family had done, though, was worse than all that. It made a certain desperate sense at the time, as we’d tried to deal with our grief, as I’d tried to deal with mine. In fact, the whole thing had been my idea. It was an idea I was regretting more than I could bear any longer.
Morning had broken in wet smudges while I thought about all this. I was sitting on the covered deck of our island habitat, watching the huge swells generated by the coming storms gathering and slapping together like drunken sailors. Despite the surging surf, the air was eerily still—the proverbial calm before nature’s big show. Ragged, scudding clouds hung under an ominous and luminous sky.
A steaming cup of coffee, hot and practically thick enough to stand a spoon in, warmed my hands as I cupped them together. Watching the churning, watery tumult, my surfer-mind tried to force order from the chaos, tried to find a pattern from here to safety.
I flitted out of my body and into the local wikiworld to a point about fifty feet off the deck right in front of me, watching myself watching the waves. Robert took a sip of coffee for me and waved. I just stared back.
Our habitat looked small and vulnerable from here against the backdrop of the ocean. Dark, wicked-looking clouds were stealing quickly across the horizon, piling up in the sky in an enormous approaching wall. Swinging my gaze around to stare inward toward Atopia, it looked muted and small beneath the roiling clouds.
From this perspective, the huge incoming swells were rising up toward the beach, almost obscuring it as they surged and broke on their ride around Atopia. Instead of their usual rhythmic thumping, the waves were breaking at different points, choppy, bewildered.
Massive clouds of spray were sent booming upward from the collapsing waves, hanging the beaches in veils of misty white fog. As I watched, a sharp wind began to blow and gain in strength within seconds, snapping the flags to attention on top of our habitat.
The storms were upon us.
Clipping fully back into my body, I began to scan a list of what needed to get finished for the evacuation.
“Bobby, do you have a minute?” asked Martin, pinging me on a dedicated family channel.
I’d turned off all the other channels, even my dimstim, as I tried, for once, to focus on the here and now. I glanced at the list again before I answered. “Sure, come meet me in my room.”
I could at least start to organize my stuff while we talked. Crossing the deck, I made for the lower levels, dropping down a set of stairs and opening the door to my room. It was dark inside with the shades drawn. I didn’t go in there much these days. Accessing the room controls, I faded the glass walls to transparency while opening some vents to let a bit of fresh air in. The fusty, closed-in smell of the room gave way to brisk ocean air. I heard a knock.
“Come on in,” I called out.
Martin materialized near the couch set against the glass wall to the open ocean. His eyes were downcast, and he fidgeted with the fabric on his pant leg as he flopped himself down onto the couch, his hoodie obscuring his face.
“What’s up, bud?”
“I was looking at the evacuation manifest, and, well, I’m not on it. I tried pinging Dad about it, but he’s ignoring me for some reason. Could you try to reach him? Do you know why?”
The words froze me in my tracks. Of course the evacuation list was an ADF function, and not a part of the Solomon House research project. Their personnel manifests would be different. Dad must be splintered in a dozen places, fighting for control of the public relations situation and trying to put a positive spin on Atopia being crushed by the two giant storms. He wouldn’t have had time to consider the manifests.
I shrugged and lied, “I have no idea. Must be some kind of clerical error. Who cares? Let’s just get a move on, huh?”
Martin didn’t stir or say a word. He just sat and wrung his hands, cracking his fingers.
I couldn’t take it anymore.
I snapped.
“Martin, look.” I’d been thinking about doing this for a long while now, and I let some anger swell my courage. “I don’t know the best way to say this, but.…”
“What?”
“Martin, look…,” I repeated.
He looked at me.
“You know you’re dead, right? At least some part of you must know.…” I trailed off, unsure of what to say next.
There was silence—anxious silence—before his furious response. “Are you stoned again?”
“I’m not stoned.” I paused, trying to find a way through this. “I’m angry, but not at you. I don’t know.”
If I didn’t get this out now, he would just forget. A cognitive blind spot was at work on his memories and perception. It was sort of as if you were walking in the desert, and there was a hovercraft following a dozen paces behind you that dusted away your footprints as you went along. There were a few steps that you could still see behind you, but beyond that there remained just a general impression of where you had been, or more appropriately, who you had been.
“So I’m dead? Very funny, asshole. You’re messed up, man. Stop with the drugs, they’re screwing with your head. Just tell Dad to get me on the evacuation list. I’m outta here.”
He got up to leave.
“Don’t leave, Martin. This is important. I’m not kidding and I’m not stoned.”
I moved all my phantoms to block his paths outward into the multiverse and pulled a glittering security blanket down around us at the same time. “Look at you! This isn’t even that much of a shock. If someone told me I was dead, I’d laugh at them, but you’re getting defensive.”
“I’m not dead, Bobby. I’m right here, talking to you.” Martin smiled awkwardly. He wasn’t telling me as much as asking me.
“Don’t you find it at all odd that everyone else here has a proxxi, but you don’t?”
“I have a proxxi—Dean.”
“Uh huh. And when was the last time you were in your physical body?”
“I don’t know, it’s been a while,” he replied, shrugging as he cocked his head upward. “What about that time that you and I went surfing and you crashed into that—”
“That was seven years ago, Martin, seven years.…”
“So what? Maybe I’ve been detached for a while, but that doesn’t prove anything. I know lots of people who hardly spend any time at all in their bodies.” He looked at the floor, burrowing his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, rocking back and forth slightly.
Meanwhile, my own frustration was boiling over. I could feel my cheeks flushing.
I had to blame someone.
“Goddamn it, it’s your fault he’s gone, Martin,” I screamed at him, finally letting it go. “Every day I have to look at your grinning face and just take it. I feel like smashing that smile in, but what difference would it make?”
I was full-on venting now, the words coming out before I even knew what I was saying. The world shifted red as blood surged in my veins and my blood pressure indicator shot off the charts. I took a deep breath and watched it sink back down, trying to calm myself.
Screaming wouldn’t accomplish anything.
Martin was silent, pale, his hands shaking as he took them out of his hoodie pockets and held them up. “What’s wrong with you?”
I had ahold of myself now. “It’s not what’s wrong with me. Or maybe it is. I think it’s what’s wrong with this place.”
“You’re not making sense. What are you getting all crazy for?” He started crying, perched on the edge of the couch.
I took a deep breath. “Martin, look. My brother, Dean, killed himself about six years ago, an intentional drug overdose. Brain dead at first, but they kept his body in stasis, vegetative, but you were still active. You—his proxxi. You were still attached to him, your network intimately wired into his dead body and holding all his memories. When we switched off the machines and his body died, we transferred you entirely into the pssi network.”
My voice cracked as I tried to continue, “It was too much for us. It wrecked Mom. Dad as well. There you were, but he suddenly wasn’t. Mom took to spending all her time with you, saying how much it helped her. All of us started spending time wandering back into the inVerse you shared with Dean.”
Martin looked at me, his world falling away through the floor, trying to make sense of what I was saying.
“What do you mean? I’m your brother!”
“You’re not,” I said sadly, shaking my head. “We had Dr. Granger install a cognitive blind spot in your systems, so you couldn’t see what was front and center but saw everything around it. One day, they pulled a linchpin somewhere in there, and you just thought you were him. We left the blind spot active to sweep away anything that didn’t fit.”
“Bobby, Jesus, Bobby…,” pleaded Martin, tears streaming down his face.
With the anger having blown through, my sails deflated. Closing my eyes, I exhaled and stretched my neck from side to side, taking a moment before looking back at him.
“At the time, I couldn’t take it, and Mom and Dad couldn’t either. It was a way of fixing the pain, pretending it didn’t happen. If we just suspended disbelief that little bit more, our own blind spots took over and you became him.”
Watching his face twist up in pain, it was time for me to own up.
“To be honest, this was my idea to begin with. But now it’s taken on a life of its own—you’ve taken on a life of your own. Now Cognix is using…it…your situation…as another application of pssi.” I paused to take a deep breath. “How much will people be willing to pay to never lose a loved one? And it does seem to work, which is the worst of it.”
Martin wiped away his tears with the back of one hand. “It’s funny, now that you tell me, I can see it all, even remember it all. I guess I always sort of knew it, but I love Mom and Dad so much, and you, too.” He wiped away more tears. “But why do you blame me? Why are you so angry at me?”
“For impersonating my brother?” I snorted, but immediately regretted it, seeing more pain flash in his eyes. I let my last sparks of anger fizzle. “I think that Dean just felt like you, his proxxi, was a better version of him, that Mom and Dad liked you better, that people were happier when you answered a call than if he did. He was a great guy, not that he didn’t have his issues,” I said, smiling sadly. Dean was lazy and irresponsible, amazing and funny. “But he just had so much trouble keeping up with it all.”
“With all what?”
“With his pssi experiment!” I shot back, angry again. “Living in a hundred worlds at once, being here, and there, and somewhere and someone else all at the same time. Dean just figured, ‘Why not, I’ll just remove myself, and you’ll all be able to keep a better version without all the effort.’ In his messed up head he didn’t think he was dying, he figured he was leaving a better version of himself to continue on. That’s what he left in his note, anyway.”
I looked down at the ground, my own tears coming. Why was it I’d been able to be so many things, to be so smart, but I hadn’t been there for him?
Martin looked at me thoughtfully. “But maybe I am him, Bobby. I think like him, I look like him, and I remember everything—every memory he ever had.”
“But you’re not him.”
“What makes a person dead?”
Stupid question.
“Dead is dead,” I shot back. “When the doctors say you’re dead.”
“When the heart stops?”
“When the brain goes dead, when the memories are lost, the essence of the person.…”
“Most of your own memories are in the pssi. Would they be gone if you suddenly were?”
“No.…”
“So if a person’s memories aren’t gone, if some essence of them remains, are they truly dead?”
He paused. I said nothing.
“Remember having a bath together in the sink, Mom sponging us off and singing in the dark, when the first fusion core went offline, remember that?”
I smiled as tears rolled down my cheeks. “I remember.”
“Remember throwing our toys over the deck into the ocean when nobody was watching, getting our proxxies to cover for us, and how angry Mom was when we went and hid in one of the shark’s mouths when we went swimming for them?”
“That was your idea,” I laughed, nodding.
“We were quite the gang growing up. Us and our proxxies…Bobby and Robert, William and Wallace, Sid and Vicious, Dean and Martin, Nancy and Cunard.…”
“That was quite the gang.”
“Have you talked to Nancy much lately?” asked Martin softly.
“No, I…not since, well, since you.…”
“You should talk to her.” He looked at me steadily for a while. “Hey, do you remember that night? We were sitting on the guardrails to the passenger cannon entrance. We must have been barely teenagers, and we were drinking that fermented seaweed? You had Robert override the security systems, and we had the whole place to ourselves. It was just you and me sitting there.”