The Complete Atopia Chronicles

9



A DEEP, HAUNTING wail reverberated through the morning air, carrying me upwards, beyond the highest of the Himalayan peaks, but also inwards and backwards, deep into my mother’s womb. A million deaths surrounded me, all threaded outwards from my moment of creation, a cosmic embryo of existence secured by the thin timeline threading through it all that kept me alive.

§

My body was drenched in sweat under the hot sun that beat down from the Columbian sky. I was making my way across the Plaza de Bolivar, wiping the sweat off the nape of my neck with a t-shirt I’d pulled out of my backpack. Tourists were standing around in small groups, looking around at the grand framed portico walls, sweating together under the same sun that was baking us. Pigeons scattered at my feet.

I had to keep moving. A small security contingent was shadowing me from a distance, but I was trying to stay incognito. Out of the corner of my eye, a Coca-Cola sign called out from under the shade of an awning, and I shifted my path towards it and the small convenience shop at the corner of the plaza.

“Hola!” I announced as I entered, feeling the relief of cool air sweeping over me. I slid open the door to a small refrigerator at the side of the register, pulling out a can of soda, and, parched, opened it and began gulping it down. The shop keeper appeared from the back just as I was about finished it.

“Senor!” he exclaimed, his eyes wide as he stared at me.

“What?”

I put the can down. Was he that upset that I hadn’t paid for it first?

I reached into my pockets, feeling suddenly energized and awake. I fumbled around excitedly for some pesos. A small group of people had appeared in the shop, staring at me, which I knew could only mean one thing. Instead of feeling scared, I felt a rush of adrenaline, now excited about whatever was about to happen, even though I knew it was death.

My heart banged, my chest exploding. I couldn’t breathe. I looked at the shop keeper, now staring in horror at the can of soda in my hand. My vision began to swim as I made for the door, my knees giving way in a euphoric rush. At the edges of my senses, I could hear clapping, in fact, I could hear applause. I waved to my fans as the blackness descended.

§

The dung-chen horns sounded again, their low, baleful moans awakening my mind fully from its semi-lucid dream state. I blinked and looked out the window of the room I’d been sleeping in. The rising sun was announcing the start of a new day, though Lhasa was still enveloped in shade as the sun fought its way over the towering peaks surrounding the valley.

Still half asleep, I let my mind wander back to the death event in Columbia we’d just averted. They had been smuggling narcotics in the soda cans, and I’d unwittingly downed one before anyone could warn me off. We shifted the path of my walk later today through Bogota away from the Plaza de Bolivar entirely, just in case.

A troubling development was the flash death mobs. The same way that people would mob around an accident on a street corner to gawk, with future prediction technology and the wikiworld, people could now flit to nearly any spot on the planet to witness accidents taking place. They called them flash death mobs.

With so many predicted future deaths, I’d now attracted my own flash death mob fan club, and my future deaths were now small celebrations, with people flitting in to witness the endless sequences of clever deaths that I would narrowly avert. They figured this was a future installation art project of some kind, and I couldn’t afford to tell the world the truth, so I was just rolling with it.

I shook my head.

The patterns had now led us to Lhasa to study the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text dedicated to experiences that lay between life and death. It was maddeningly difficult to understand as most of it was coded in symbols. We had gone there to participate in the Monk Debates, to talk directly with the ones that really understood the text.

A familiar tapping echoed through the wooden doorway, slightly ajar, of the shared room I was sleeping in. I was inhabiting the body of a Buddhist monk from the Sera monastery on the outskirts of Lhasa. In return for borrowing his corporal form, I’d offered the monk a chance for some truly out-of-body meditation sessions using the pssi network, something they didn’t normally have access to here.

Smarticles were an internationally controlled substance. My transport of them outside of Atopia, and especially what I was doing here, was highly illegal.

“Don’t even try it,” I warned Hotstuff.

I pulled the bed sheets off myself. She stood there pouting in the doorway, all done up in a French Maid outfit, but of course still with her riding crop in hand. I stood and quickly pulled my maroon dhonka robe up and around myself.

Weeks had passed and death was closer than ever. I was still here, but barely. The day before there’d been nearly fifty thousand ways I could have died in the millions of phutures we were tracking, and I’d even had to fight off two sequences in real time and real space, an incredibly close call.

While we’d managed to slow down the contagion, we hadn’t been able to stop its spreading. We’d tried simulations of locking my body in a vault, but this made things worse, as the death events piled up, making even the slightest of exposures of my body to the outside disastrously threatening, eventually ending in some kind of terrorist strike against my hiding place.

We had hundreds of thousands of bots and synthetics running around now doing large and small things to sweep the death events back, but I was still the key to many of them. Today was going to be a big day, and by all indications we would be fighting death off more fiercely than ever.

“So what’s the bad news?” I sighed.

The rest of the sleeping mats in my room were empty, the other monks apparently much earlier risers than me, but then again, they were real Buddhist monks. I stretched, yawning, and rubbed my neck, expecting the worst. I needed to get some hot tea into this body before the morning meditation session.

“Good news!” exclaimed Madame Hotstuff, snapping the riding crop against my monk’s ass, urging me awake. She swished the air in front of her with the riding crop to leave it finally pointing towards the door. We began to walk. “Today it seems the threats have begun to recede—or at least, they’ve stabilized in number.”

“Really?”

My constricted future eased ever so slightly. Finally.

We walked out the door and into the hallway, passing a group of monks busily on their way somewhere. Hotstuff sashayed her way past them in her stilettos and knee high stocking, smiling at them appreciatively.

“Really,” she stated, looking back at me and snapping her riding crop against the rough hewn rock wall of the corridor. She smiled and gave a playful little growl. “It looks like the new ring fencing of a perimeter around your phutures has begun to pay off, that combined with this new meditation and awareness stuff.”

“So what was it then?” I asked. If we’d found a way to contain it, then there must be a path to the root source, some forensic process we could use to follow it backwards.

Hotstuff lowered the riding crop.

“Vince, honey, remember what Nicky Nixons said, what Yongdzin is saying. You need to stop thinking in deterministic terms. Remember the reservoir. Expand the reservoir, live in the moment.”

“Right,” I replied. “Live in the moment, effortless action.”

“Exactly.”

“Hotstuff…Hotstuff…” I intoned solemnly, pressing my monk’s hands together in a prayer while we walked.

“I do wish you’d chosen a different word for your mantra than my name.”

I opened my eyes and winked at her. “Hey, it works for me.”

“Well, as long as it works for you,” she sighed, smiling and rolling her eyes. “The patterns are solidifying. Whoever did this has left a trail of Easter eggs behind, we think leading to a back door. Nicky Nixons has been a lot of help.”

“Well remind me to thank him sometime personally,” I replied, now eager to have a look at what was on the agenda today.

We’d arrived in the cafeteria, if one could call it that, in the center of Sera Jey. I grabbed a cup of tea and sat down with Hotstuff at a wooden table in the corner. A list of the day’s activities floated into view over the bench.

“Not so bad for today, mister, not as bad as yesterday.”

By now we’d built up an espionage and counter-espionage network that outstripped any but the wealthiest of corporations and nation states, all with the specific directive of bending the future timeline to my will, to keep me alive. We’d funneled all the money we could from Phuture News and sold off all my assets to fund the program.

One thing in particular floated up through the threat matrices.

“So there’s no way around it?”

In all the long list of things I’d had to do, this one hit closest to home and I was struggling with it.

“No boss, sorry,” replied Hotstuff. “And you’d better take care of it before the morning meditation.”

I felt terrible about sabotaging the launch of the Infinixx distributed consciousness project, but there didn’t seem to be any way around it. A Triad gangster network in Hong Kong would have used it to pinpoint some of my other activities, and disabling the launch was a key vector in keeping my lifeline intact.

I shrugged. Progress was progress. I’d better stick with what was working. Using a communication phantom I punched up Patricia’s networks, requesting an urgent, private meeting with her primary subjective.

A large Chenrezig statue, the Buddha of Compassion, sat at the head of the long chamber I was in. I stared up into its face, and then inspected its dozens of arms stretching out around it like star fire. Immediately above its main face, eleven of its other faces gazed down benevolently. I was struck by how eerily similar its array of outstretched arms resembled what phantom limbs used in the pssi system would look like, if they were visible in real space. Shaking my head, I turned my gaze out of the window to the majestic peaks around us.

The plains surrounding Lhasa were filled with permanent makeshift encampments of international troops that stood as a buffer between the Chinese and Indian bases that lined the opposite sides of the valley. The Americans were there as a part of the UN mission, as well as NATO forces, but the largest contingent was the African Union.

Africa was where many thought hope for the future could be found; where the engine of a new economic powerhouse was beginning to growl. It was closely linked with Terra Nova, the off-shore colonies competing with Atopia, with their own synthetic reality product.

“You want me to what?” asked Patricia, materializing at the seat across from me and pulling my gaze back from looking out the window. A glittering security blanket settled around us. Patricia paused for a moment while the blanket sealed. “Do you have everything you need? What’s this about?”

She’d helped me smuggle the smarticles out of Atopia, even helped me set up my covert communications network, and all this without even asking me what it was for. I hadn’t been able to tell her, it was just too dangerous. Thank God for old friends.

“I’m fine,” I replied in a quiet voice. “I don’t need any more materials. I just need you to come help me right now with something, in your physical form.”

This sounded odd even before it came out, especially coming from the slight frame of my monk, diminutive in front of this world famous scientist.

“There are some things I need some direct help with, and it’s critical to get done right now. I can’t say more than that, except that it needs to be kept a secret.”

Patricia eyed me carefully. “You realize the launch of Infinixx is in less than an hour?”

“I’m not saying you can’t go, just go virtually. Isn’t that what your whole project is about anyway? And what’s the difference? I need your help right now.”

This was definitely weird, but I’d gotten over my squeamishness about these sorts of requests.

She hesitated.

“Look, you said I could rely on you if I ever needed anything right?”

“Yes, I suppose…”

“So I’m asking.”

She sighed. “I guess it won’t make any difference.”

“Perfect,” I replied, sensing this mission accomplished. “I appreciate it, Pat.”

An awkward silence ensued.

“So what’s going on with these storm systems?” I asked casually, changing the topic

I was curious to see if Patricia had anything more to say than what I got through the mediaworlds. I’d been so caught up in my own disasters lately I’d hardly paid attention to the storm systems that were threatening Atopia. With a little more breathing space, I’d started to let my mind assimilate more of what was happening on the outside. These storms were the big news.

“We don’t know,” she replied, shrugging, “but they’re definitely not natural.”

Not natural? I hadn’t heard that before.

“Really?”

“Something is going on, and we’re not sure what,” she replied.

No kidding, I thought to myself, but I just kept quiet.