The Complete Atopia Chronicles

3



I WAS UP at sunrise the next day as well, my dreams again filled with nightmares, but nightmares that were spilling from dreamland into reality. The darkness was smearing into light, unconsciousness into consciousness, dream life into waking life; they were all becoming barely distinguishable from each other. Hotstuff was waiting patiently for me in our war room while I dragged myself into the bathroom for a shower to wake up.

I stared into the mirror, deep into my bloodshot eyes. Condensation from the hot shower fogged over my image as I inspected the angry blood vessels ringing my irises.

“Can we take a short break for surfing again this morning?” I asked Hotstuff, reaching down into a drawer below the sink to get my eye drops.

“I don’t think that is a good idea,” she replied immediately, shouting over the noise of the shower. “We have a lot to do, things are getting more dangerous.”

I sighed, unscrewing the bottle cap and holding it between my teeth. I leaned back, pulling back the lid of my left eye and depositing a drop into it. I sighed again, rubbing the eye, and then switched to the other one.

“Come on,” I grunted from between clenched teeth, holding the bottle cap in place as I lined up the dropper above my right eye. “A half an hour out on the…”

I suddenly gagged. The bottle cap had popped like a cork from between my teeth to lodge itself into my windpipe. My body convulsed as I tried to pull some air into my lungs. Hotstuff was immediately beside me, and had already alerted the emergency services. Panic exploded into my veins and I clawed at the bathroom walls, doubling over onto the floor, my chest heaving and vision fading away.

§

“See what I mean?”

I was standing back at the sink, staring back into my bloodshot eyes, but Hotstuff was there with me, holding out her hand to take the bottle cap from me.

That had been close.

I’d barely escaped that event, less than five seconds away in the future on an alternate timeline. I handed Hotstuff the bottle cap, and then after a split second of contemplation, handed her the whole eye dropper bottle. My eyes weren’t that bloodshot.

“Yeah,” I replied, “I guess surfing can wait.”

Whatever it was that was hunting me down, it had infected the very personal and immediate realities surrounding me.

“Forget the shower,” I added. “Let’s just get to work.”

The bathroom immediately morphed into my battle room. Hotstuff splintered a hyper-dimensional graphic into my display spaces that plotted several thousand alternate future worlds of my life. Many of the lifelines terminated abruptly, and therein laid the problem with going surfing—I had to save my own life today, and not once, but many dozens of times over.

Yesterday there had been over a hundred ways I could have died in the millions of future simulations that we had running for me as we tried to pick a safe path forward for my primary lifeline. My plan of trying to escape in the UAV, the one that was destroyed in the slingshot test yesterday morning, was one of my futures that I’d barely avoided.

I picked out and watched one of today’s more gruesomely predicted terminations playing itself out before me. A three-dimensional projection hung in the middle of the room that started with me being cut in half and then being burnt to a crisp in some freak accident outside the passenger cannon. I watched with a morbid curiosity. My planned trip on the passenger cannon was definitely off the list of things to do today.

The problem had originally surfaced some months ago, and it was accelerating at a worrying pace.

One morning a few months back, Hotstuff had announced to me that there was a high probability of being killed in a stratospheric HALO jump I had planned. My future prediction system that morning had told us that, due to inclement weather and the likelihood of my skydiving partner being intoxicated the evening before from a probable incident with his wife, there was a very large chance of an accident occurring. No problem, I had happily announced over my morning coffee, just cancel the jump.

A few days later I received another prediction informing me that there were a half a dozen scenarios involving my death. It had been a fairly simple task then to engineer a path through them all, but from that point the solution to my ‘non death’ had started to become increasingly bizarre and rarified. On top of it, I couldn’t tell anyone, or ask any help to navigate these future arcs—the solution sets became unstable unless I kept it to myself.

I suddenly began to find myself running around Atopia asking people to do odd jobs for me and flittering off to the four corners of the multiverse on inane assignments just to keep myself alive. Things had begun spinning out of control like a surreal and twisted joke.

We’d managed to rout almost all of the incoming threats yesterday by sending out bots and synthetics, and in critical cases myself personally, to nudge the advancing future timeline of my world this way or that. Today, however, some of the future death threats were beginning to creep into the hours and minutes just ahead. What had started out a few months ago as the odd warning of some low probability events to be carefully avoided had steadily progressed into a constant stream that signaled my impending death, and we had no idea how or why it was happening.

“Most of the bases are covered for today,” Hotstuff explained, summoning up a probability scatter grid that sprouted outwards from a few critical nexus points. “There are just a few events that you need to handle personally, starting with this one in New York.”

She pointed to the nexus closest to me, and the future reality of that event spun out around us. I nodded, trying to take it in.

Someone with lesser resources than me would’ve just died, without fanfare, and that would have been that. In my unique position and with my almost limitless resources, however, I could literally see everything coming and dodge and weave my way through it.

You’d have thought that someone edging up on seventy would’ve accepted their mortality with a little more grace, but here on Atopia I was still a spring chicken. I wasn’t ready to accept a trip on the ultimate voyage just yet.

Sensing my mind wandering, Hotstuff decided to summon up another particularly gruesome termination. She growled playfully, swatting at me again with her riding crop while I watched myself being liquefied in the bio-sludge facilities. I felt like I was being stalked by the army of darkness with Betty Boop as my sidekick. Just how many ways could a person die? Her tactic was successful however, and I refocused on the New York project.

“You just need to steal a pack of cigarettes,” she explained while I watched the simulation play itself through.

“Sounds good,” I sighed. “Time to get ready for work.”

Sitting on the rooftop deck of my habitat, I took one longing look towards the breaking surf and grumpily got up from my chair to begin the day’s activity list to keep me alive. How exactly stealing a pack of cigarettes from some woman in New York would help me out was impossible to understand, but there it was.

Resisting the almost uncontrollable urge to procrastinate, I heard myself say, “Okay Hotstuff, let’s get this show on the road.”

The deck of my habitat faded away to reveal the grimy walls of a convenience store in New York. My consciousness had been implanted into a robotic surrogate—a robody—that Hotstuff had set into position. Even through the tinny sensory input, the overpowering odor and seediness of the place hit me like a wave of virtual sewage, as the pristine lines of Atopia disappeared from my sensory frames. I felt dirty, even in this robotic body, and had to fight back an urge to go and wash myself.

The target in question was yelling at the cashier behind the counter in front of me. In fact, she looked like she was about to hit him.

“Lady!” I shouted above her, raising my spindly metal arms in the cashier’s defense. “Lady, take it easy!”

She didn’t even notice me as she fumbled around in her purse, entirely engrossed in whatever it was she was trying to do. Her face registered deep disgust; she looked like she was having an even worse day than I was.

Eventually, after more theatrics, she managed to negotiate getting the pack of cigarettes from the cashier. I hung back, following her out the door, but at a distance.

She stopped outside to light up, standing under a wobbly holographic advertisement. After a few moments I saw my chance. I moved in quickly, taking her by surprise, pinning her against the wall. Terrified, she froze up, and I fumbled at her, trying to grab the pack of cigarettes. Quickly I pried it out of her hands.

“Get off me!” she screamed.

I jumped back, my prize in hand, and looked at her. Wanting to apologize, I stared for a moment into her green eyes, sensing anger and fear, but also a deeper anxiety, like I was looking at someone standing on the edge of a cliff.

Explaining myself wasn’t an option, however, so after an instant of contemplation I just shrugged halfheartedly at her and melted backwards into the pedestrian flow, leaving her there, shaking.

Somehow my stealing this pack of cigarettes would collapse a whole stream of dangerous alternate futures for me, so my job there was done.