As the Security Council meeting broke up, I materialized back in my office under an extremely heavy security blanket. Marie was waiting for me.
“So it seems we may yet be doomed to relive the past,” she said as I arrived. “Atopia, the island-city of the future, filled with magical beasts and people, may slip beneath the waves—legend passing into legend.”
I rubbed my temples. “We need to slow things down.”
Our phutures had destabilized. Everyone’s resolve to keep the program on track, despite the mounting risks, had been the last straw to force me into unilateral action. Things were out of control. I had to act alone.
“Give Sintil8 our authentication key to initiate,” I instructed Marie. The pssi program would suffer in the short term, but it needed to be done. “And did you set up the meeting with the Terra Novans?” The time had come to lay all our cards on the table, for everyone’s benefit.
Marie nodded. If a proxxi could look nervous, she did now.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of this,” I assured her. “I need to talk with Jimmy.”
I pinged an urgent request for him to come down to my office in his first subjective and Marie disappeared. Leaning back in my chair, I tried to think of the right way to broach a new and troubling discovery that Marie had dug up.
A moment later, Jimmy appeared in one of my attending chairs, looking annoyed. This was a new Jimmy, all hard edges, and again I felt uncomfortable.
“I’ve got a lot on my plate right now,” he said. “What’s so important?”
I looked toward the ceiling, and then back at Jimmy, observing him carefully. “I’ve been trying to locate your parents, but I can’t find them anywhere out there.”
“I have no idea where they are. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t care less.”
“No idea?”
I’d taken a huge chance at the meeting, secretly installing invasive pssi-probes into the smarticle cloud during the session to find out if the people I worked with were being honest. As far as my probes could tell, Jimmy was telling the truth.
“The last I heard, they were back in Louisiana. Did you send some bots down there?”
“Yes. I’ve tried everything I can think of to locate them.”
Jimmy’s face darkened. “Just like you can’t find the dolphins, right, Patricia?”
Where did that come from?
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What dolphins?”
Years ago, there’d been an unresolved security incident that had proved the beginning of the end of civil relations with Terra Nova. One of the outcomes had been the revocation of the work permits for our uplifted dolphin friends. We’d had to send them all back to Terra Nova, but they’d all been happy and healthy. I’d even checked in on the beautiful creatures myself on a trip to Terra Nova a few years back.
Looking at Jimmy’s furious expression, I realized something was very wrong.
19
Identity: Jimmy Scadden
I held Patricia’s gaze firmly, feeling anger boil inside me.
I don’t have time for this.
“I don’t know where my parents are,” I replied with finality.
We hadn’t kept in touch after they’d left Atopia, or, more accurately, after they’d abandoned me. I was only fourteen at the time, but Patricia had already begun to take me under her wing by then. When they’d left so abruptly, she’d swooped in like a savior angel, pulling me in tight.
I felt bad about being so short with Patricia now, but lately she’d started to annoy me as I discovered her various hypocrisies. Her loyalty to the cause, her own cause, had become as thin as any pssi illusion.
On the other hand, if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be where I was now.
I remembered the moment when Patricia had first come into my life. Almost involuntarily, a splinter wandered off, back into my inVerse to experience the moment again, perhaps to try to rebuild my bond with Patricia even as I felt it slipping.
Soon after my fourth birthday, Patricia had dropped in for a visit with my parents. Nancy Killiam and I were distant cousins, but our side of the family was where the dark horses ran. Patricia saw an opportunity to bring us back into the fold when Atopia was being planned and had extended a generous offer to my parents to join the project.
It hadn’t exactly worked out as my family had hoped, or at least as my mother had hoped. She thought we were going for a drive down Entitlement Road. The cramped, three-room cell near the bottom of the Atopian seascraper complex, hundreds of feet below the waterline, didn’t live up to her expectations.
Patricia’s visit that day was both rare and uncomfortable.
“We’ve been following Jim,” she said, accepting a hot cup of coffee from my mother’s proxxi. “He’s showing some amazing talents.”
Mother grimaced. “You sure you have the right Jimmy? Little stinker here is only good at hiding from Mommy, aren’t you?”
Patricia watched my mother carefully, then smiled. “He is very good at hiding and evading. He manages to slip through some of our tightest security fences, like a little fish wriggling through our fingers.”
“Yes, a little fish!” my mother exclaimed, holding me close and trying to exude maternal warmth. I flinched like a hand-shy puppy.
“But there’s something else.”
“Nothing serious I hope.”
“At Jimmy’s last checkup, his nociceptive pathways were showing some very unusual activity. We’d like to add his data feed to the child-monitoring network. Would that be all right?”
“His what pathways?”
“His nociceptive pathways, the neural network of his pain receptors.”
“And what’s unusual?”
“It’s just unusual, like they’re in some kind of disarray. He doesn’t complain of any unusual pain does he?”
“Of course not, do you, Jimmy?” Her smile was menacing.
Wide-eyed, I shook my head.
“So can we add him to the monitoring system?”
Silence.
“Patricia, we’ve been over this a thousand times before with the Solomon House staff. We have our right to privacy,” Mother declared theatrically. “I’m happy to be here, but there are limits!”
Despite the histrionics, she had a valid point. Patricia herself had baked strict privacy controls and rules into the foundations of the laws and systems governing the pssi system. Individuals and families had an absolute right to their privacy, unless there was some good reason otherwise.
“Is there anything wrong with Jimmy?” my mother asked. “Is he healthy?”
Patricia sighed. “He’s perfectly healthy. His mind seems distracted, and there’s some unusual neurological activity, but physically, he’s perfect.”
“Well then.…”
Patricia thought for a moment and then stood and walked to our side of the table. She sat down on the couch next to us and put an arm around me, looking up at my mother. “Could I take a more active role in Jim’s development? As a teacher, if you see what I mean. I don’t want to intrude on your mothering, of course.”
Mother eyed her, weighing the situation. “That would be an honor, of course,” she replied after a moment. “Wouldn’t it, Jimmy?”
It was less a question than a statement.
I sat dumbly between the two of them, unable to say anything, cringing, sure that Patricia was about to become part and parcel of some new awfulness in my small life. Fearful of the horrors awaiting me, I dug in deeper and deeper, building my shell.
As they bid each other good-bye, I got up and slipped away to hide away from my mother, sliding into tiny worlds within tiny worlds for refuge. Mother quickly gave chase, however, eventually cornering me in the Little Great Little, past fields of glowing jellies, under a thunderfall whose white sensory noise I often hid behind.
“I know you hide here, little worm,” she said, her voice oozing venom. “Don’t think I don’t know where you go.”
Hate distorted her features here, her skin flaking red and crimson, and her hands turned into fearsome claws that she gripped and scratched me with. Pulling a tight security blanket around us, she squeezed me until I thought I would pop.
I squirmed and whimpered.
“Not a word to Aunt Patty, little worm, do you understand? If you say anything to anyone, I’ll tell them all about you and your daddy. Do you want that?”
Smiling at me, she laughed from a fanged and fearsome mouth.
“No, Mommy,” I squealed, “not a word, of course not.”
I began to cry.
“Such a little crybaby.” Mother waved her claws around at the purple canyon walls. “None of this is real.”
And then she was gone, popping out of the Little Great Little and into another one of her soapstim fantasies to burrow away from her own pain.
Dad must have known something was going on because he appeared just after Mother left, looking pale and dejected. “Don’t say anything about you and me, Jimmy. It’s secret, you know? They would put me away in the farms if you told anyone, Jimmy. Do you want to turn your dad into a psombie?”
I shook my head. “Of course not, Daddy. I won’t tell anyone.”
Samson, who’d remained quiet, emerged from his hiding place under the thunderfall, and we sat down together, holding hands. Dad left us there without saying another word.
My fascination with pain began very early. Sometimes, we won the topside lottery for passes to go above. I vividly remembered those days, those rare moments when we could enjoy the air above-decks. While my parents would sun themselves on the beach, I would hang at the edge of the palms and palmettos nearby.
At the fringes of the dark forest, I would summon little creatures to venture forth into my hands. Taking great care in their capture, I’d stimshare into them to feel their squirming pain as I slowly pulled off their legs, one by one. When all of their legs were gone, I would gradually squeeze them between my chubby fingers, flitting into them to feel their spasms of agony as I crushed their legless little bodies.
Feeling their agony helped me cleanse my own pain.
And, perhaps, I enjoyed it a little, too.