24
Identity: Jimmy Scadden
This had better work.
Dragging a live fusion reactor with a million lives aboard through the center of two converging hurricanes was enough to make anyone nervous.
But even with the pressure mounting, my mind was extraordinarily clear. It rang crisply with purpose and energy.
I’d never felt better in my life.
Kesselring had given me tactical command of the operation. My primary subjective was now floating up at the edge of space, watching overlays of the constantly updated simulations. Far below me, the storms were grinding into each other. From this distance, everything looked like it was moving in calm, orderly slow motion, but the violence at sea level was astounding. Already, most of Atopia’s forests had been destroyed.
I was using Samson as my primary media interface as we worked to downplay the situation. The questions and inquiries we were getting were unusually low in volume, but I didn’t have the time to investigate. Either we were doing an awfully good job at containing the situation media-wise, or something else was going on, but more important things had my attention.
Since the Infinixx incident, Kesselring had removed Patricia from the media circuit. Her association with Nancy was too much of a distraction. I don’t think Kesselring trusted her anymore, but then again, he didn’t need her anymore either.
The original emotion-driven media campaign had been centered on confidence and trust in our bid to win regulatory approval. The hard work of gaining the trust of experts and governments was now complete—Atopia had passed clinical trial certifications in all major jurisdictions.
What was left was to simply inspire in the masses a desire pssi for themselves. Dr. Granger had taken over the media messaging, and we began delivering more elevating pitches. It was devoid of any real content when looked at in detail, but nobody did that anymore. Dr. Granger started using me—young and handsome in my crisp ADF Whites—in the media campaigns instead of Patricia, a poster child for Atopia and the future to come.
I was becoming a celebrity.
Celebrity or not, the Americans were screaming at us to stay away from shallow coastal waters. As we entered their territorial waters, they’d scrambled to muster their defensive systems. Squadrons of aging F-35s and swarms of aerial drones now circled Atopia. From their base in San Diego, US naval forces had surrounded us and were hanging back at the edges of the storms. We didn’t have the maneuvering speed of a regular ship; if we had, we wouldn’t have been stuck.
Several of my splinters were overseeing the constant chatter with the American security forces and other floating platforms and seasteads, but again, these were strangely subdued.
We’d just received confirmation of authorization from the American military to power-up our weapons systems. There was barely an argument. I put it down to their trust in our program, as well as the close relations I’d built up through Rick with General McInnis.
Despite the awesome power in the slingshot batteries, we only had a narrow window of opportunity execute my plan. If we slipped by even a few seconds, we could be scooped up into one or the other of the storms and mercilessly thrashed against the coast. As a precaution, we were going to power-up every other weapons system we had, including the mass driver and rail guns, just in case we needed to throw more at it.
The point of no return was fast approaching. I was already jacked up, quickening my mind as I reached outward into the hyperspaces around Atopia, but I needed to be at the top of my game. I let my adrenal glands squeeze off some more cortisol and adrenalin into my bloodstream and immediately felt my phantoms begin to jitter ever so slightly, my blood pressure rising and cheeks flushing.
25
Identity: Bobby Baxter
Our minds flooded with millions of impressions and ideas, experiences and worlds. Slowly, a thought began to build, a hint of something that didn’t fit.
A vision of my brother Dean and me from when we were kids floated into my mind. We’d always been pushing our limits, testing the boundaries of our parents’ patience, and one day we’d decided that we were going to sail over a thousand miles through the open ocean to America, all by ourselves.
We were barely ten at the time.
After weeks of secret planning, we snuck off, hiding our tracks. We almost drove our parents sick with worry when they discovered us missing. We would have made it, except that halfway there, after a week at sea, our smarticle reserves had begun to deplete. Physically we were perfectly healthy, and the weather had been good, but the itchy, desperate feeling of our smarticle supply running low had convinced us to turn around.
My mind hovered over the minds of the million Atopians packed belowdecks awaiting the fast-approaching hurricanes. Thousands of tourists shipped off in a matter of hours when the evacuation order came, yet nearly none of the native Atopians had opted to leave. Even in the face of death they stayed, wrapped in the warm embrace of pssi.
They were afraid, but not of death, and the thought began to more fully form itself.
It was so obvious that it was shocking, and yet so close that it was impossible to see the forest for the trees. More to the point: none of the trees wanted to see the forest.
I shot up out of the water. “Sid, I know what’s going on!”
Snapping back into my body, I began collapsing the millions of nodes of my collective mind with Nancy. Pulling her out of the water with me, she gasped as our nervous systems tore apart, her breath hard and ragged. She gripped me tightly.
“And?!” yelled Sid. The gang was still sitting around the tub.
“Come on, out with it,” Vicious urged.
I put out a hand. “I need to talk to Patricia first. It doesn’t make sense. Or maybe it does. I thought I knew her better.”
Wide-eyed, they stared at me in disbelief. Giving Nancy a kiss, I immediately flitted out, sending a high-priority request into Patricia’s networks.
What was she thinking?
Patricia accepted my ping on the first bounce, immediately opening her sensory channels to me. I appeared in her private wood-paneled office, sitting in one of her attending chairs. She sat across from me behind her desk, looking as if she’d been expecting me.
I just blurted it out. “I know what you’re doing!” It was foolhardy, perhaps even dangerous, to drop a bomb like this, but I felt like I knew Patricia. This made it all the more perplexing. “You’re trying to kill Vince,” I added breathlessly. “The pssi weapons programs, I know about all of it. Are you behind all these disappearances? Did you steal Willy’s body? Sabotage Infinixx? Why are you doing this?”
She sighed and tipped her cigarette into a crystal ashtray. “I had nothing to do with Willy, or the disappearances,” she said. “And certainly nothing to do with what happened to Infinixx.”
“So you’re denying it?” I had evidence of what she’d been up to. “You’re not trying to kill Vince?”
Finishing her cigarette, she butted it out and took a deep breath. “Not trying to kill Vince, no. Just keeping him occupied.”
I stared at her in disbelief.
“I do want to say,” she continued, “what happened with your brother, I was against that, but it was what your family wanted at the time, what you wanted at the time.” Now she took a sip from her never-ending scotch. “Of course, Granger snapped it up as yet another way pssi could remove unhappiness.”
“That was a real killer application, all right,” I shot back. “Why are you doing this?”
She smiled thinly. “Since you came to me, why don’t you tell me what this is?”
“What this is?” I gaped. “Hooking the world on virtual crack, that’s what this is!”