13
Identity: William McIntyre
The police station loomed before me at the base of the vertical farming complex, and I was making my way towards it.
The Boulevard was the only real street we had, a wide pedestrian thoroughfare that crossed from the eastern to western inlets, dividing in half the four gleaming farm towers at the center of the surface of Atopia.
Glamorous palms lined both sides of the street, bordering the tourist shops, restaurants, and bars whose terraces spilled out into the kaleidoscopic melee in between. Even with the storms threatening and the evacuations announced, the atmosphere was still carefree and festive.
At least for now.
It’d been ages since I’d been above, and I hadn’t been to these parts since I was a tween. I stood blinking in the bright sunshine as I tried to think my way through what was happening to me.
I felt alone and exposed.
What else can I do?
Looking up at the towers, I imagined myself as one of the psombies inside. My hand trembling, I opened the police station doors. Cool, administrative air swept over me, and the clerk at the desk, an attractive young woman, smiled at me synthetically.
“Can I help you, sir?” she asked, as sweet as a police officer could be.
“Yes, I’d like to file a missing person report.”
I walked toward her as calmly as I could.
Her face registered just the proper amount of seriousness before she queried, “And who is the missing person, sir?”
I paused for a moment.
“Me.”
After reporting my body missing to the police, the first person I turned to was Bob. It was amazing how quickly you could go from feeling invincible one moment to needing the protective embrace of friends the next.
At least, I hoped they were still my friends.
“Hey stranger, you take a wrong turn somewhere?” joked Bob as I appeared in one of his regular beach-bar haunts. Even with the storm warnings, he was still surfing. Taking a swig of his beer, he waggled it toward me, did I want one? I shook my head. “What can I help you with?”
I cast a thick security blanket around us, and we were surrounded by its glittering and softly undulating shell. Bob raised his eyebrows and took another swig.
“What’s up?” He screwed his eyebrows. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll just lay it out.” I paused. “I’ve lost my body.”
Another pause.
“What do you mean—you’ve lost your body? Does this have anything to do with what happened at Infinixx?”
“I don’t think so.” I sat down on a stool next to him and rubbed the back of my neck. “Wally, or someone—I’m assuming it’s Wally—has stolen my body.”
Bob’s eyes narrowed, and then he smiled. “Whatever game you’re playing, I’m in.” His smile slowly disappeared as he studied my face.
“I just got back from the police station,” I continued. “Not only can’t I find my body, but now I’ve been charged with a felony and I’m under arrest.” I didn’t mention that I was also under investigation for my trades in Infinixx stock.
“So how are you here? Did you post bail?”
I shook my head. “It’s complicated.”
“I’d say.”
Leaning my head back, I rubbed my eyes.
“We’d better get Sid in here,” suggested Bob.
I sighed. “I guess we better.”
Bob’s face slackened for an instant as he detached, and then he was back. Sid and Vicious materialized on barstools inside the perimeter of the security blanket.
Even before he’d fully appeared, Vicious looked down his nose at me and declared, “Oooh, so the high and mighty has stooped to mix with us again, eh?”
“Knock it off !” snapped Bob. “This is serious. Sid, you looked at Willy’s situation?”
Sid stood the best chance of anyone at figuring out what was going on. We waited while he reviewed the scenarios.
“Let me make sure I have this straight.” Sid was all business, this was his domain. “You reprogrammed rules in the Atopian perimeter to allow an outgoing connection to Terra Nova. Then you logged your consciousness network into a secure Terra Novan account, anonymized your signal, and then sent multiple connections back into Atopia to create the effect of multiple personalities accessing the network?”
“Right.”
“And now your body appears to have left Atopia entirely, without your knowledge, and you can’t contact Wally.”
“Right again.”
“And the Terra Novans have absolutely refused to divulge or break the anonymous connection, and the connection has been paid-up one hundred years in advance.”
“That is correct.”
Bob looked at me and tried to summarize, “So your body is out there somewhere. You’re doing all your thinking in your lost brain, and it’s communicating with you here into your virtual body, but Wally is driving your body around out there and won’t communicate back.”
“That seems to be about it.”
“That’s an interesting pickle, my friend,” offered Vicious.
“So what, has Wally gone nuts? Can’t we just locate and shut him down in the multiverse somehow?” Bob asked.
“No,” said Sid. “A proxxi isn’t the same as other synthetic beings. He doesn’t really exist in the multiverse. They’re biological-digital symbiotes embedded in our bodies. Wally can control Willy’s body when Willy’s mind is away, and he can venture out into the multiverse from there, but if he’s routed through an anonymizer in Terra Nova, then we won’t be able to track him down easily.”
“And my Uncle Button doesn’t work,” I added. “It was never designed to be filtered back this way.”
Bob put down his beer. “So I ask again—has Wally gone nuts?”
“It’s not as simple as that,” I admitted. “I told Wally to take emergency action if it looked like there was trouble. Illegally breaching the Atopia perimeter is a serious offence.”
“So you told Wally to do this?” Sid laughed, rolling his eyes.
“You’re like a bloody one-man Zionista, mate!” Vicious cut in. “One man, displaced from his body, wandering the multiverse, hoping to get back to his stolen homeland—”
“Please,” I complained. “I didn’t tell Wally to do this. I told him that if it looked like we were in trouble to take whatever action he deemed necessary to make sure we were okay.”
“And how on Earth did you manage to ignore him when this went down?” Sid asked incredulously.
I took a deep breath. “With this new setup, my mind was shattered into hundreds of splinters, and fed through the anonymizer. Wally couldn’t always get my attention. That’s why I asked him to take immediate action without me, if necessary.”
“Seems to have taken action all right,” Vicious laughed, clearly enjoying this.
“Enough!” Bob exclaimed. “Enough already. Vicious, you’ve had your fun, and Willy has been a bit difficult lately, but he’s in trouble and needs our help. Right now.”
I choked back tears. I didn’t deserve Bob’s kindness after the way I’d been treating him.
“Sorry, right, mate,” mumbled Sid and Vicious together.
“Wally, one question,” Vicious asked, the gears of his brain turning. “So you’re arrested and charged and convicted, right?”
I nodded. For straightforward crimes it didn’t take a much time—synthetic lawyers and judges weighed in and contested cases within minutes.
“But you’re still with us. So I understand why they can’t get your body, but why can’t they restrict your virtual self ?”
“The anonymizer randomly logs into Atopia repeatedly if its signal gets restricted. Since my login carries an authenticated Atopian citizen tag, and since it was deemed unconstitutional to restrict access to Atopia for any citizen, they can’t block my access here, but then they can’t contain me either.”
“That makes you one very interesting person to know, my friend.”
I could see where he was going with this. “I’m not about to test anyone’s patience right now.”
“Still,” he added, shrugging, “but you’re here aren’t you? Why didn’t you voluntarily stay in detention?”
I shrugged back. “Would you if you’d lost your body? I need to figure out what’s happened.”
Bob stared at me. “How did you figure out how to do all this? It seems a little beyond your area of expertise.”
“Jimmy.”