The Complete Atopia Chronicles

4



THE SENSE OF TOUCH was the most underappreciated of all the senses, at least of the senses the rest of the world had. When the first elemental life had ventured out into the primordial goo, it was its sense of touch that kept it safe from danger.

Touch was the most ancient of our senses, existing before any sight, sound, taste, or smell existed. It was essential to the feeling of things being a part of your body. When you played tennis, did you think about the racquet hitting the ball as you swung? No. The racquet became a part of you. Tools that began as extensions of our bodies soon became a part of it.

It was the same with any tool we used, and pssi made it possible to make tools out of information flow in the multiverse and incorporate into our bodies in much the same way.

For me, the flow of information was an apt metaphor. As surfing became my obsession at a young age, my innovation had been to remap my tactile sense into the water around me.

Sitting on my surfboard, bobbing up and down between the swells, I could feel the pressure and shape and even the temperature of the water’s surface around me through my skin, and the thousands of neurons attached to each hair follicle could sense tiny subsurface eddies and water currents.

After nearly twenty years of dedicated practice, my brain had neuroplastically reformatted to devote a large part of itself to my water-sense, and I now had the most highly attuned tactile array of any pssi–kid, or for that matter, anyone else in the world. Sitting with my eyes closed, I could feel the water moving and undulating around me as a perfectly natural and integral part of my body.

I was one with the water, and it was one with me.

Still a little hung-over from the previous evening, I opened my eyes to awake from my reverie. Atopia sure was pretty from out here, with its thick forests rising up from white sandy beaches. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move and a beautiful stag suddenly burst forth from the forest underbrush. We eyed each other for a moment, and then he disappeared.

Above decks, the floating island of Atopia was covered in forests that were teaming with ‘wild’ animals, but like everything else out there, their neural systems were loaded with the smarticles that floated in the air and water around us. Everything here was a part of the pssi network, but I doubted that the animals ever realized they were off in virtual worlds as they stampeded through synthetic savannahs while vet–bots tended to their real bodies in downtime.

Not much wild was left in the world today. It was ironic that tourists now lined up to come to a completely artificial island built to perfect synthetic reality, all to enjoy a shred of the old reality hiding inside it by dusting themselves down in smarticles.

Smarticles were the pixie dust that permeated everything on Atopia, a system of nanoscale particles that worked as both a sensor and communication network, floating everywhere in the air and water. They suffused through the bodies of living creatures to lodge into their nervous systems to form the foundation of pssi.

Pssi enabled not just jumping off into virtual worlds, but also the sharing of experiences and even bodies. A philosopher had once rhetorically asked what it was like to be a bat, meaning that it was something we could never know, but out here on Atopia, you could inhabit a bat, a bear, a fish, a shark, a tree, and even, sometimes, yourself.

The beaming sun was drying the salt water into crystals on my skin, making it itchy as it baked, and I scratched my neck and shifted positions on my board. A breeze mixed the sea air with the musty odor of a tangle of seaweed floating nearby.

While the water was cold, my pssi tuned it out and I was perfectly comfortable. I just had to be careful my muscles didn’t get too sluggish when it came time for action.

Seagulls squawked and wheeled in the sky, and otters were playing out in the kelp not far away, chattering away about whatever otters chattered about. Some were floating around on their backs, eating a breakfast of clams they had scrounged from aquaculture bins below.

Out here I felt a certain peace that escaped me elsewhere, a deep meditative calm outside the madness. I came out here often to think about Nancy, to think about my brother, to think about how I had messed everything up. Looking up, I could see nimbus clouds striping the blue cathedral of the sky.

It was just another day in paradise.

After some fuss, Vince Indigo, the famous founder of PhutureNews, had agreed to come surfing with me this morning. He’d become my regular surf buddy this past year, but had recently, and suddenly, dropped off the map.

Convincing him to come out this morning had been a major struggle, and even then, he didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. He was just staring off into space, not his usual chatty self. I was about to call out to Vince, to see what was bugging him, when I was interrupted.

“Hey.”

I looked down to find Martin sitting on the front of my board. We bobbed up and down in the swells together.

“Hey to you too, buddy,” I responded sheepishly. “Sorry about this morning, I know it was your birthday.”

Martin always kept the same clean-cut, square jawed image going despite the vagaries of fashion—fashion being so ugly these days, apparently, that its look had to be changed almost hourly. I grinned back into his pale blue eyes, a reflection of my own, and admired the tight buzz cut he was sporting today. Buzz Aldrin came to mind, or perhaps better, Buzz Lightyear.

You could hardly have imagined two twins more different.

“Don’t worry about it. Dad always gets worked up about that stuff, I don’t care.”

“Yeah he sure does,” I laughed, “and thanks for not ratting on me. So, Inuit huh? No Eskimos left in this world today?”

“Not according to me, I guess.”

We laughed together. It was nice.

“I just get so tired of him talking about Jimmy all the time,” I added, and Martin nodded.

When we were growing up here, I’d been just about the only one who’d tried befriending Jimmy. He’d been something of an oddball kid, but he shared the same birthday as my brother and I, so I guess I’d felt some kind of natural affinity towards him.

When his parents had abandoned Jimmy as a teenager, Patricia Killiam, his godmother and head of Solomon House Research Center, had asked our family to take him in. No good deed goes unpunished, as they said, and the downward spiral our family had been in, just continued ever steeper. To our father, Jimmy was now the shining star and savior of our family honor.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” agreed Martin.

“I guess it’s hard to be encouraging if your son is a stoner surfer,” I laughed. “Anyway, who cares? I’m doing what I love.”

“Then what more could you ask for?”

I laughed and shrugged.

“Got some big action today?” he asked, changing the topic.

“Huge.”

I was sure he’d already checked out the big barrels being laid down across the northern crescent. Storm systems were generating some dangerous waves today, and that was just how I liked it.

“Anything interesting coming in?”

One of my phuturecasts was focused on incoming swells as it predicted the shape and size of the break, how the pipe developed and a dozen other factors. I could just sit here and watch the horizon for waves, but this way I could track swells coming from miles out and select the perfect one to get set at just the right point.

“Yeah, there have been a few nice ones, but I’m waiting for the real beast.”

Martin laughed. “Always the perfectionist, huh?”

“Well, with some things anyway.”

“Yeah, with some things.” He smiled and looked away.

“Bob!” came a yell from across the water. It was Vince, waving at us. “Bob, I need to get going!”

“Already?”

“Yeah, I need to get back to that thing.”

“I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do,” I observed.

Vince was one of the richest guys in the world, and lately all he’d be doing was surfing with me. I wondered what had suddenly gotten his hair on fire.

“Anyway, ping me if you change your mind. Hey, you should check out all that weird stuff on the news channels, and good luck!”

“Thanks, Bob,” he replied as his primary subjective flitted off, leaving his proxxi to guide his body home, “and good luck to you to!”

Both Martin and I waved goodbye, and then sat silently for a few minutes, enjoying the sea, sky and silence.

Martin looked down awkwardly. He was struggling with something.

“Bob, we should probably have a chat. I want to understand what’s going on with you.”

I looked down too.

“Yeah, I’ve been wanting to talk to you too…”

Maybe the time was right to bring up the gorilla in the room, but just then my metasenses started tingling.

“… but maybe in a few minutes?” I blurted out.

I detached my primary subjective point of view to spin it far out into the Pacific. My viewpoint coasted in just above the water, following a monster swell that was making its way towards us. It was huge, at least twenty feet deep, even out in the open ocean, and as I followed, it sprayed and frothed angrily, surging powerfully towards the glimmering speck of Atopia in the distance.

“This is the one I’ve been waiting for! I totally want to talk, but could I catch this wave first?”

I snapped hard back into my body and, using a phantom, punched up a visual overlay of how this wave would be breaking in a few minutes.

“No problem,” Martin laughed, pointing at the simulation. “Oh yeah, that’s gonna be huge!”

The wave would peak at nearly forty feet and generate an almond shaped pipe that would continuously sweep past the northern crescent for more than two miles. The system selected an optimal drop-in point and I quickly plotted some possible surf paths from ideas I had. It was a big wave and I’d have to travel fast to catch it right. The triangular fin of a shark I’d commandeered appeared, slicing through the water behind me, and I reached out to catch it and began racing across the water.

“Nice,” said Martin.

We skimmed the waves, the wind barely ruffling his hair. He was admiring my handiwork on the projection floating between us.

“So you’re going to pull a dead man stall, switch back to hide in the barrel and then finish with a rocket Tchaikovsky to back hang two?”

“Yes sir, that’s the plan,” I replied with a grin. “Hey can you switch to the back with everyone else so I can get this show on the road?”

Martin disappeared, and I let go of the shark’s fin and leaned forward on my board to begin paddling to the drop in, taking big, clean strokes. As the social cloud buzzed about the impending ride, my dimstim stats began surging as thousands of people stimswitched into me to enjoy the ride.

It was a funny feeling knowing that thousands of people were inside my skin. I couldn’t feel anything but I could sense it, and it sent shivers down my spine. As I snapped my full water–sense into place, the world dropped away, my senses sharpened and I began quickening.

With smarticles infused throughout pssi-kids’ nervous systems from birth, we’d quickly picked up on the trick of quickening by using smarticles to accelerate the conduction of nerve signals along axons. We could literally amp up the speed of our nervous systems this way on command, but only in short bursts as we depleted energy stored in the smarticles, and, more problematically, began to overheat our brains.

Quickening the body was one thing, but quickening the mind was entirely something else. It had to be managed in a very controlled fashion so as not to lose conscious coherence in the seat of the mind where it all came together. Like anything, it took time, patience and training to build up this capacity, and when it came to quickening, like surfing, I was one of the best.

With each breath, I concentrated on accelerating the quickening, feeling the world slow down as I sped up. Switching my visual field into surround mode, I literally had eyes in the back of my head—I closed my eyes as my visual cortex adjusted to the 360 degree view.

I focused instead on the ripples of water coming through my water–sense and the sinews in my shoulders and back stretching and pulling me across the surface as I accelerated my paddling tempo, quickly gathering speed to match the incoming monster. It began to grow behind me, rolling up and into my skin, surging towards and into me.

My board angled forward and began to skim faster and faster. With a final stroke I opened my eyes, grabbed my board and popped up onto it, leaning forward to accelerate as the wave urged me on. It wasn’t really behind me, the wave was me. I could feel it swelling through my water–sense as if my body was expanding and peaking, with little bits of me frothing off the top as it began to crest.

My board sped down the face of the wave as it began to break, and then I slowed as I neared its base and stepped to the back of the board, almost stalling as I sank back down a little. I smiled and waved to the crowds on the beach, and a collective gasp went up as they watched the monster booming down behind me.

An instant before disaster I jumped forward and cut the board back into the wave to sail up its rushing face. As the wave roared around the northern crescent, I started snapping a series of turns back and forth off its top. Nearing my finale, I finished with an acrobatic turn that dropped me freefalling into the thundering maw of the beast. The crowds on the distant beach squealed with excitement at my disappearing silhouette.

The noise inside was deafening, and it used all of my quickened water–sense to fall feet first onto the board and navigate the roaring and rushing world of foam. Crouching low, almost hugging my board, I let myself slide backwards as I was sucked into the back of the roaring whirlpool, my senses merging with it into a singularity, cradling my fragile body in a delicately maintained balance.

At the last moment, I leaned forward and accelerated away from the maelstrom at the back of the barrel. A crazily spinning translucent tunnel opened up ahead of me, revealing bright daylight beyond, and I eased ever further forward. I began to stand up taller and walked towards the front of my board and turned around.

Tchaikovsky was playing loudly in my dimstim now and I closed my eyes to begin conducting. I shot backwards out of the mouth of the barrel, propelled by a powerful jet from the collapsing tube. I back-hanged my two heels off the front, now with just the tips of my toes on the nose of the board.

Beginning to slow, I opened my eyes and turned around to walk towards the back of the board, listening to the mad applause from the thousands of dimstimmers who had enjoyed the show. The world began to return to normal time as I released the quickening, feeling the burning heat within my body begin to ease off. Sighing happily, I sank back into the water and straddled my board to float again gently in the water.

Martin appeared back on the nose of my board, giving me a little golf clap.

“Nice show, buddy. That was awesome!”

“Thank you, thank you very much,” I said, wiping the water from my face as I looked around happily, and then looked back at Martin and the tourists still clapping on the beach. I couldn’t resist showing off again.

The water began to thicken up around me as I summoned tens of millions of tiny zooplankton up from the depths below. I kept them near me when surfing, just in case.

With a few carefully placed kicks I levitated up out of the water, forcing millions of my little friends to treadmill their hardest just at the right point to support each step, and then I stood right up on the water and took a few steps to bow to the crowds with a flourish.

This brought gasps and more pointing from the tourists—they can walk on water!

Sinking back down, I grabbed onto my board again and dispersed my little helpers. Martin was shaking his head, grinning widely.

“That last part was a bit much,” he laughed, but I could sense a certain glumness.

“Buddy, you have to lighten up…live a little.”

I immediately regretted my choice of words, but Martin didn’t notice anything. I slicked back my hair again, trying to stop the water from streaming down into my eyes.

“Are you going to come out camping with me and Willy and Sid and the boys later?” I asked after a little reflection.

“Am I invited?”

“Of course,” I laughed.

“And you’re going to continue surfing today, even with the storm warnings in effect?”

“Come on, Martin…”

“Okay, anyway, I’ll see you later, camping will be great,” Martin responded brightly. “I just worry about you sometimes.”

I nodded.

“Are we still going to have that chat?”

“Maybe later.”

The moment had passed for him too.

“I have a lot of stuff to get done. You be careful with those storms brewing out there, could swing in some weird waves.”

“I will, I promise, and I’ll see you later,” I replied with a small salute.

With that, Martin nodded and winked as he signed off and faded from view.