17
Identity: Jimmy Scadden
I held Patricia carefully in the anonymous security blanket. Rick wouldn’t be happy finding me talking to her right now.
“Things are under control at Command,” I said. “Preparing for a state of emergency is just a precaution, and having the tourists leave is the sensible first step.”
“I don’t disagree. What I mean is—do you know who’s doing this?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” The list of possible suspects was thin.
She took a deep breath. “You really think it’s the Terra Novans? You have proof ?”
“No,” I admitted, “but who else could it be?”
Everyone knew they wanted to slow down the pssi program, to give their own product a chance in the market. The commercial stakes were huge.
“We need proof. It doesn’t make sense. The risk of an offensive like this completely exceeds the potential returns. I need you to find out what’s going on.”
“I’m on it,” I replied, a little exasperated.
“And keep an eye on Rick—he’s shut me out.”
This was beginning to feel like nagging. “I will, Patricia, I promise.”
“I love you, Jimmy. You take care, okay?”
“I will,” was all I said. She looked hurt. “Bye for now.”
I cut off the channel. She knew how busy I was.
It was hard to concentrate on her needs with my mind so widely splintered. Samson and I were spread far and wide throughout the multiverse, trying to figure out how someone had managed to target Atopia like this without us getting advance notice.
Patricia was right in one thing—we had to keep an eye on Rick. Despite declaring himself in charge, he wasn’t much use anymore. I knew Rick’s wife had been depressed. We’d all been concerned, but this reality suicide had taken things on a new and disturbing path.
It was, however, something I could relate to.
My own mother was a hopeless soapstim junkie in addition to being a drunk. It was bad enough to be disinterested enough in your own life to patch into someone else’s, but Mother didn’t even go that far. Her favorite pastime had been patching into synthetic soaps, an endless universe of autonomously generated and farcically campy dramatic-romance worlds.
Mother hadn’t even bothered to give up her life for someone else’s experience—she’d given it up for an empty, soulless simulation. It was like a gameworld for her, but instead of facing down some challenge, she just sensed it passively while the soapstim told her that “her” ex-husband wasn’t dead, but had been in a coma for twenty years and was now in love with her stepsister’s boyfriend, or some other nonsense.
Living in passive fantasy worlds made for a painful reinstatement when she returned to her real life. Being out for so long all the time, her brain’s wetware lost much of its neural connectivity with her physical self, so when she came back, she had to drive her body around using her proxxi, Yolanda, as an interface to her intentions. It gave her a jerky, unnatural way of moving, which only fueled her constant frustration.
“You little worm!” she would scream at me as she settled back into her body after a long session, already a few drinks into calming her nerves. Mother wasn’t very technical, but she was an expert in using security blankets to screen her sessions with me from the outside world.
“It’s all your fault!” she would slur. “That dirty bastard.”
As a parent, she had full access to my pssi, and I had no way of blocking her out until I was granted full control of it myself. In her worst moods, she would amp up my pain receptors and reach into my nervous system virtually to squeeze, pinch, and pull on it. It left no physical marks, but it was excruciatingly painful, and I’d squeal and scream in the private Misbehave world she’d created for this special form of punishment. Even as a toddler, I began to learn ways to hide and crawl into the cracks of the pssi system, deep into the darkest corners, away from anyone else. I slowly found ways around the blocks and cages Mother tried to keep me in, sliding past the pssi-controls to hide. Samson would crawl in with me, along with all the friends we’d created to hide together with us.
Down, down I would dive, into the deepest recesses of my body, trying to hide my consciousness in the submolecular gaps between my stinging, screaming neurons while she tortured me, sinking her virtual nails into my pain centers for crimes I didn’t understand.
I never understood what I’d done wrong, but I assumed I must have been bad. Samson would just sit beside me, staring numbly while she abused me.
The learning bots and teachers at the academy had noticed I was falling behind the other children, but they just thought I was slower. In their well-intentioned na?veté, they figured I needed more parental attention.
“Gretchen,” explained Ms. Parnassus during the initial parent-teacher interview that occurred at the end of my first year at the academy, “I think you need to restrict his access to the gameworlds. He’s distracted, like he wants to be somewhere else all the time.”
“I do try,” admitted Mother truthfully. She did do her best to cut me off from everyone.
“I try to take the time for private lessons with him as often as I can,” she added with a sweet, crocodilian smile, “but you know how it is. He can be such a handful.”
Ms. Parnassus smiled reassuringly at us both.
“Isn’t that right, Jimmy?” my mother added, turning to me, flashing her teeth. “You don’t want to Misbehave, do you?”
I sat terrified beside her, a shell hiding inside a shell. I didn’t want to do anything to anger her, and I desperately didn’t want to be snatched off to Misbehave. I shook my head and smiled bravely, holding back tears.
“He’s a bright child,” said Ms. Parnassus. “He scores extremely high in the gaming systems, but he has a hard time socializing.”
I never got on well with the other kids in the Schoolyard, the education-portal balanced halfway between the real and synthetic worlds where young pssi-kids played. Extremely shy, I mostly played by myself, though Bob and Sid sometimes managed to drag me into the occasional game of flitter tag with the rest of the kids. Without escape to my own private worlds, and restricted to the Schoolyard, I found it difficult to focus my mind.
“And he’s a little devil to keep on hand,” added Ms. Parnassus. “He slips and slides away if you don’t watch him every second!”
“That he is,” Mother agreed, nodding, “and that he does.”
“His mind is always somewhere else,” Ms. Parnassus continued. “It’s very hard to keep him focused.”
“Oh, he’s just always been that way, haven’t you, Jimmy?”
Mother fluffed my hair. I was terrified.
“Does he have any special things that you do together? Stuff that just you and he do when you play?”
“Oh, you and your daddy play, don’t you, Jimmy?” laughed my mother, smiling at me cruelly.
“That’s nice,” said Ms. Parnassus. “Is there anything he’s particularly good at when you play together?”
“The little rascal is very good at hiding.” Mother crinkled her nose at me, showing her teeth.
“Like hide-and-seek?”
“Something like that.”
In her lies, my mother was being honest. If there was any game that I was good at, it was hide-and-seek.
I was the master of hiding in plain sight.