16
Identity: William McIntyre
After the confrontation with Jimmy, the whole gang had rallied to help me.
The carpet of stars hung above us just as it had when we last camped at this spot. It seemed like it had happened in another lifetime. An owl hooted softly in the darkness. Bob sat with a beer balanced on his knee, half-illuminated by the fire, grinning at me.
I poked the embers and watched them dance.
“I told you everything would be fine.” Bob emphasized his point by raising his empty beer can.
I continued to stare into the fire, lost in my own thoughts. I imagined the heat of the sun warming green leaves of long ago, which soaked it up, slowly converting it into the lignin and biomass of the tree trunk. Then, after being stored for decades, that same captured sunshine radiated back out as heat energy when we burned the wood, warming my hands and face. That none of this was real didn’t detract from my daydreaming.
Since my own consciousness hadn’t winked out, we had to assume that my body was alive and healthy somewhere out there. We’d sent out what nearly amounted to a private army to try and find it, using up most of the fortune I’d amassed as Atopia’s hottest stock jock back in my brief blaze of glory. Back when I had a body.
The searching began within Atopia itself—a thorough physical search using platoons of pssi-minded cockroaches and rented psombies—followed by a full digital scan using a private cloud-dusting of smarticles.
Quickly, we’d expanded the physical search radius into the waters surrounding Atopia and then into the cities directly connected to our passenger cannon. We rented and sent out uncountable bots and synthetics, even human private investigators that scoured this world and the wikiworlds for any hint of my face or my body, any trace that signaled mine or Wally’s presence out there.
We found nothing.
In the face of the impending storms, the Atopian foreign office had halfheartedly taken up action against Terra Nova, trying to sue for access to the anonymous connection or to disconnect it, thinking that this would automatically snap me back into my body. Just like Atopia, however, one of Terra Nova’s key industries was acting as a data haven, and the same ironclad international treaties that protected Atopia applied here.
Terra Nova refused any action, citing the protection of its unconditional stance on the security of its customers and data. To gain access to the connection, they told us, I would have to log in from my corporal body. With no body, though, there was no bio-authentication, and therefore no access.
I was desperate at first, but gradually I began to come to grips with my situation.
Sometimes, they say, it takes a great loss to realize what is important. In my fight to find my body, I was humbled by the loyalty and ferocity of my friends and family as they came to my aid, even after I’d abandoned them in my greed.
The search had even brought some direction to Bob, shaking him out of the drugged slumber he’d been in for years, and brought him back together with Nancy. Vince put his vast spy network to work on my problem, and Sid and Vicious had worked tirelessly, combing the open worlds, hacking the closed ones, and searching the back-ways of the Atopian subsystems, trying to figure out how someone had hidden their tracks so well.
Even Martin had pitched in.
I poked the coals, watching little sparks escape and float back into the sky.
Brigitte and I were back together. She liked to joke that when we lived together before I was never around and it had been like living with a ghost, but now that I was a ghost, it was like I was there with her more than ever.
Or something like that.
She wasn’t much of a comedian, but she sure was the most beautiful and loving person I’d ever known. I had no idea how I’d let her slip away from me, but I would never let it happen again.
Vicious tossed a can into the fire and glanced my way. “Okay there, William?”
“Yes, Vicious, as a matter of fact, I am okay.”
People spent their lives searching for peace by chasing idle dreams, addictions, money, religion, and even other people, hoping to fill some gap. Now, for the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt at peace. All this time, it had been right inside me. I’d just never slowed down enough to look within.
A stream of air tickled my behind and I shivered. The wind was still blowing when a promising stock appeared on the radar, and sometimes it blew hard.
Without Wally or access to my body, I couldn’t reset my sensory mapping, so I was fated to forever feel this tickling. Now though, I found it reassuring, like rubbing an old scar.
Only one thing felt absent in my life, and it had taken on the eerie feeling of a missing limb. I looked toward the chair we’d set up in honor of our fallen comrade, where Wally used to sit next to me on our trips. I’d set it up beside me this evening, and it was conspicuously empty.
I often went back to replay that last talk I’d had with Wally.
It was hard to say whether he had really taken off to save me from the police. They did have a trace going on the security breach and would have found us eventually. Maybe he’d seen them coming and had decided to go. They’d issued a general notice of clemency on my case now, so even if he was trying to save us from jail, by now he would have known it was safe to return.
But he didn’t.
The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that Wally wasn’t trying to save me from jail. Maybe he was saving me from a worse fate, perhaps from myself. At the time, I was so busy digging myself into a deep, isolated hole that I might have never returned from it. I’d been suffocating myself in an impenetrable layer of greed and pride, trading friendship and love for money and power. Maybe he knew that I’d be better off this way.
I was sure that he’d like to return, and in fact I knew there was no place that he’d rather be than right here with us now, but he must have felt it was safer this way for some reason. It felt right, but I could never have gotten to this place on my own.
Wally and I had switched places.
I’d become him, living as a virtual being, and he’d become me, living out there in the real world in a real body.
Smiling, I remembered the last time we’d been here. Wally had told me that he loved me on our return home. I thought it was so odd then—but not anymore. Raising my beer can, I looked toward the empty chair beside me and toasted my absent friend.
Sometimes I guess you really did have to lose yourself to find yourself.