The Complete Atopia Chronicles

6



THE GLARE OFF the hood of the ’67 Mustang made me squint, and the sweat beading down from my forehead stung my eyes as I tried to wipe it away. The police were just beyond the barricade, less than two hundred feet away, and I could hear them nervously loading their weapons and talking in short, staccato bursts into their walkie–talkies.

Waves of heat rose up from the tarmac that was melting into the soles of my Converse. Hot rubber mixed with the smell of burnt gunpowder and equal parts fear and body odor. Body odor.

Subtext Bob to Sid: Could you please dial down the BO, I’m choking over here.

Sid looked over and cracked a smile as he peeled his back harder against the side of the car. He had his sunglasses on and was soaked in sweat too, but looking cool as a cucumber and totally in his element. Sid’s grin widened as he pulled out a ridiculously oversized handgun he had somehow hidden in the small of his back.

“So what do you think, should we make a run for it?” I asked breathlessly.

“Hell yeah, little buddy,” came the reply as he magically produced a second cannon from somewhere on his person. “I’ll just crawl into the back and you squirm into the driver seat and get us going. We gotta meet up with the boys to have any chance at busting out of this one!”

“Okay, then, let’s do this.”

A voice came over a loudspeaker from the roadblock, down between the derelict buildings and burnt out car shells up ahead. “Come on out with your hands up, we don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Rolling my eyes, I complained to Sid, who was already crawling cat–like into the back seat, “Can’t they come up with anything better than that?”

I immediately filed a request for snappier dialogue and then stowed my own anemic feeling .357 Magnum into the breast pocket of my leather jacket. I reached for the door handle and squeaked the passenger side door open, sliding in chest down across the stick shift, humping my body across. A bullet ricocheted off the concrete.

“Hold your fire!” came the voice on the loudspeaker again. “Come on out boys, we can still do this the easy way!”

“Bob,” Sid whispered urgently, “are you ready to go yet?”

I rotated my body around, reaching down to test the pedals with one foot as I hunched over to put the key in.

“You betcha, let’s hit it!” I replied.

With surging excitement I turned the ignition to fire up the five hundred horses under the hood. Pushing down the clutch, I jammed it into first and without looking over the dash, released it and hit the accelerator. The unbridled power of the engine surged us forward and we began peeling out in a cloud of vaporized rubber and exhaust.

I swerved wildly, trying to maintain some kind of control. The bullets started flying and I could feel them impacting the car, punching through the windshield, shattering the glass onto me. Sid was on his back, kicking upwards with his feet, trying to knock out the sunroof.

We were rapidly accelerating and I needed to risk it, so I peeked over the dash through the destroyed windshield. I saw an officer walk out and crouch in the middle of the street, hoisting something onto his shoulder.

“Sid!” I yelled. “Rocket launcher!”

“On it!” he screamed back over the roar of the engine.

I punched it into third. With a final grunt Sid kicked out the sunroof, and it went spinning out and away into space above us. In the same fluid motion he popped up through the open roof with a lunatic grin. Swinging out both of his cartoonishly outsized weapons, he began blasting away. Peeking out over dash again, I saw the head of the cop holding the rocket launcher explode in a mist of red spray.

The rest of them ducked for cover.

The bullets were coming fast as we neared point of impact with the barricade. Sid rotated his body backwards, jamming his back into the edge of the sunroof and bracing his legs underneath. He leaned out flat on the roof of the car, pointing both guns to each side. As we smashed through the barricade, Sid let go with a terrific volley of fire that took out four LAPD officers in explosions of blood and guts, as they looked up with surprise from their hiding places.

With a second crunching impact, we cleared the last of the cruisers, swerving hard to avoid as much of the blow as possible. I heard Sid grunt in pain, but then he lifted himself back up and swiveled around to face the gauntlet ahead of us.

Dozens of cop cruisers were parked on either side of the street, and they were taking dead aim at us. I gunned us into fourth and slid as low as I could in the seat, reaching to take out my own feeble weapon, hoping for the best.

The metallic tang of blood seeped into my mouth, and I looked down to see I was bleeding profusely. I’d been hit, but the shock of the fight was staving off the pain, at least for now. This gameworld didn’t allow tuning down your pain receptors—you had to deal with it. This was going to get messy.

Suddenly, one of the cop cruisers to our right exploded and lifted into the air, tumbling slowly back to earth in a fiery arc. Several cops ran out screaming in flames, wildly shooting their weapons. Sid picked them off quickly as another cruiser exploded and incoming automatic weapons fire began raining down on the police. They all turned to look up the street.

Willy and Martin were hanging off a cherry red GTO, blazing away at the cops with automatic weapons. Vicious was reloading what looked like a rocket launcher of his own. They waved at us merrily with their free hands. I gunned us into fifth and sat up higher in the driver seat, leaning forward to pull some of the remains of the smashed windshield out of the way.

It was all about style points from here and Sid did a beautiful job double fisting shots off both sides of the car, blowing away police officers one after the other with geometric precision as he looked skywards and let loose with a deranged cackle.

Our audience had spiked way up. As one of the best crews in the world at this game, we had over four million people tuned in to watch our escape scene today, and Sid was determined to put on a good performance for our fans.

Passing the last of the cruisers, he dragged a grenade out, pulled the pin with his teeth and sent it sailing right into the open driver side window. It exploded with a satisfying crunch and a few uniformed body parts bounced off a nearby chain link fence.

I congratulated him, “Nice work, Sid!”

Martin, Vicious and Willy had peeled off to follow closely behind in their GTO, and the low throaty growl of both engines mixed together in a bone shaking symphony. By now they would have put a general call out to all the special weapons squads, so we’d have hundreds of them chasing us down as we tried to leave the city.

Our gameworld audience had spiked to over six million and was climbing fast. This was going to be a great show.

“You hit?” asked Sid. He climbed down out of the sunroof.

“Yeah,” I replied, putting a hand under my shirt, wincing. My finger found a small hole on the side of my ribcage. “Not too bad. A through and through I think, but it would help if you wrapped me up. You hit?”

“Ah, I think my ear got blown off,” he said, holding one hand to a bloody mess on the side of his head as he doubled over in pain, “but the real problem is a gut shot.”

“Bad?”

It looked bad.

“It hurts like hell but it’ll bleed out slow, I should live for another couple of hours.”

Ah, not so bad then. I smiled. Maybe we’d make it out of Los Angeles after all.

As we sped up the street, I could see something walk into our way.

A pedestrian? Not cops, anyway. It was someone in a green suit, hunched over, and then there were more of them, blocking the road. Cars lined both sides of the street so I couldn’t swerve off, and I could hear growing sirens in the distance with flashing lights coming at us from all angles. Up ahead it had all the appearances of a herd of little green men now, completely blocking the road.

What the hell?

I jammed on the breaks and we skidded, squealing to a halt as we ploughed into the first couple of greenies, bumping over them messily amid roars of pain. The other car skidded to a stop behind us.

Furious, I flew open my driver side door as we stopped, weapon in hand, to confront whatever was going down here. Sid popped back out of the sunroof, grimacing, with both cannons out aiming front and center.

A short, stocky green man with pointy ears and a broad forehead, wearing spiked shoulder pads and holding an enormous axe, ambled up to me.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

I could see he had some vampires with him too.

“We are against the discrimination shown to the Bangladeshi.”

“What?” Then it dawned on me.

“Sid!” I yelled. “Sid, did you set the authenticated login to this world when you created it?”

Silence. Except for the growing whine of the approaching sirens.

“Sid?!” I asked again, looking back at him.

“Ah shoot,” he replied, wincing in pain. He looked down at the blood that was oozing from his gut wound. “I forgot.”

Dejectedly he banged both of his weapons down on the roof of the car.

These were obviously Comment Trolls. Without authenticated login, people could just connect into this world anonymously, which was fine if you just wanted to watch, but anonymity tended to bring out the worst in people.

With the massive audience we’d accumulated for this game, and with the login anonymous, we’d just attracted the mother lode of Comment Trolls. Hundreds of them were now blocking the road. They’d use the opportunity to broadcast their opinions, whether they had anything to do with this world or not.

“I’m sorry dude,” continued Sid, waving a gun in the air. “I was just so busy. My mother was over, I had a splinter set this world up…”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Perhaps I could reason with them.

“Dude, please, this is 1988 Los Angeles,” I complained to the lead Comment Troll. “We’re just trying to get out of here. There were no trolls in ‘88 Los Angeles, and no vampires either.”

I considered this for a moment. On closer inspection those were Forum Vampires he had with him. They could be useful.

“Maybe there were vampires. But come on guys, please.”

My dimstim stats were dropping as fast as our gameworld audience. I had to do something entertaining, and quickly. The head Comment Troll was right in my face now. He smelled real bad and had some butt ugly oily pimples going on.

“Master,” he growled at me.

Well, at least he was playing along in character. Not a total a*shole, then. Perhaps there was an opportunity here.

“Master, we are sorry, but this is an open gameworld, and we have the right to express our opinions here.”

I nodded my head.

“Yeah, this an open gameworld, but only if you’re coming to get laid and get paid,” I explained in a sing song tone, smiling to expose my two gold capped front teeth and holding a West Side finger salute near my chest. “Look if you want to join the Bloods or the Crips I’m down with that, but don’t be a bitch and mess up our game, homie.”

I shrugged and held my hands up, wide eyed, shaking my head.

“Who are you to tell me what to do?”

“I’ll tell you who I am, my brother,” I said, bringing my .357 Magnum up between his eyes and pulling the trigger.

Curiously, it didn’t result in his brains blowing out the back of his head as it should have, but the bullet seemed to glance off his thick skull and ricochet in a splatter of oily blood and hairy flesh. I guess I’d never tried shooting a troll in the head at point blank range with a .357 before.

As I considered this, my left forearm exploded in pain. The troll standing next to him had swung his axe to lop off my left hand which I was lifting up to give the lead Comment Troll the finger with.

Blood spurted out of my severed appendage as I backpedalled away from the threatening horde, blasting away indiscriminately with my firearm. Sid was covering my retreat, picking off trolls and vampires as they advanced. They were tough sons–of–bitches, and we wouldn’t have made it except for the suppressing automatic weapons fire that Vicious and Willy added as we ran back.

Breathlessly we all rallied behind the GTO, and I ripped off my t–shirt and mashed my severed forearm stump into my leg, trying to wrap a tourniquet under my armpit. Sid leaned over to help me as Vicious and Willy continued to let go with their M–16’s.

“Where the hell is Martin?” I managed to pant out.

He should have been manning the rocket launcher. That would give those a*sholes something to think about. Sid ducked up to look inside the car.

“Aw man, I think Martin is dying,” he replied. He tightened up my tourniquet.

I wrenched around to take a look myself. Martin was writhing in the back seat, soaked in blood and whimpering.

“Goddamn baby,” I said, shaking my head. “Martin, what the hell?”

I turned back to Sid.

“Those guys were miles away, they had tons of cover. How the heck did he get so messed up?”

This was going to get a lot trickier with one man down, Sid barely functional and me missing an arm.

“You’re useless, you know that?” I yelled at Martin.

He whimpered back between the pain, “Sorry Bob, I didn’t mean to...”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re always sorry,” I muttered under my breath.

Sid stared at me disapprovingly. He was shaking his head.

“Dude, you shouldn’t be so mean to him all the time,” Sid reproached. “Talk to him, okay?”

I said nothing.

“Okay?” demanded Sid between the bursts of automatic weapons fire. “You promise?”

Rolling my eyes I sighed, “Okay, yes. You’re right. But let’s just get out of this first, okay?”

Looking back up over the GTO, I could see the trolls were reassembling and advancing by holding up their bloodied comrades in front of them as shields. They were fast too. This wouldn’t be easy. I looked around for the rocket launcher as Sid picked up an Uzi from the back seat and snapped in a clip.

We looked at each other, starting to enjoy ourselves. I was awkwardly trying to slide the launcher from the back seat, with my one remaining hand, to balance on my shoulder, when all of a sudden a massive burst of gunfire erupted from both sides of us.

The LAPD had finally arrived, and pandemonium erupted for a while as it turned into a three way pitched battle. By now, the vampires had taken wing and began swooping down on the hapless police officers who just screamed in disbelief.

A few of the braver cops continued to take some pot shots at us, but their overall enthusiasm for taking out gangland members seemed to dissipate after the first few were hacked to pieces by foul smelling demon spawn wielding their skull topped axes. Sid and Willy laid off a few more rounds at the trolls, but then just gave up, laughing.

§

I didn’t have long to live and I could feel the lifeblood ebbing away from this body. I propped myself up on the hood and leaned against the bullet–ridden windshield of the GTO. Martin had already died some time ago.

“Dude, that was actually pretty cool!” I admitted to the lead Comment Troll, taking the offered smoke from him to have a drag.

He was sitting up on the car with me. Most of his bloody forehead had been shorn away by my bullet, showing white bone underneath, but he was in a jolly mood.

“That gameworld audience went through the friggin’ roof,” he agreed. “There are already thousands of copycats going on.”

As he said this, an LAPD officer came running out of the bushes, disheveled and bloody but intact, running up to me.

“Mother of God, please help me, please,” he whimpered, his hands pressed together in a prayer position.

I just raised my eyebrows and shrugged, giving the smoke back to the troll. The officer looked at the two of us and began backing away, shaking his head and making small pathetic noises. At that moment a large, muscular troll burst through the same bushes the cop had come through.

“Ah ha!” the new troll announced. “There you are!”

He pounced on the officer, who managed to back away a step or two, holding his hands up defensively.

The troll began methodically hacking away at the officer with his axe. I had to close one eye as bodily fluids spurted and splattered onto me amid blood curdling screams. I looked at the troll leader, shaking my head with eyebrows raised.

He smiled back at me and nodded.

“Ah, Fred, Fred!” said the troll leader, raising one stumpy green arm.

Dripping in blood, Fred looked up from his whimpering prey. “Yeah?”

“Could you give it a rest, Fred?”

Fred pouted and frowned, and then sighed.

“Fine.”

Grumbling under his breath, he stuck the point of his axe through the police officer’s skull. This ended all the commotion. The troll skulked off.

My vision was swimming.

“Sid? You ready to go?”

True to his assessment, Sid had bled out slowly and hadn’t gotten another scratch. Sitting atop a pile of stinking corpses, he was now chatting up a female troll over near our Mustang.

“Yep!” he waved back, and picked up his gun and stuck it in his mouth.

“Cool.”

I picked up my .357, looked at the head troll and said, “Let’s do this again sometime.”

With a smile I opened my mouth and stuck in the barrel of my gun. Tasting the sharp tang of metal and gunpowder, I pulled the trigger. The last thing I felt was the curious sensation of my head exploding backwards into space and suddenly, I was floating in blackness.

Dead. At least in that universe.

It was a funny thing. We could now die a hundred, a thousand, a million times out in the synthetic worlds we traveled through—we just couldn’t die in our identity world. It was just that one place out of millions where we couldn’t die, it was a solution set approaching zero.

With all the flittering between worlds and bodies, stimswitching with friends, people borrowing your body and your body being driven around by your proxxi, you’d think it would get confusing to figure out where or when you were or how to get back into your own body, and it could be disorienting. That was why a basic feature of pssi, hardwired at the deepest level, was what we affectionately called the Uncle Button—when you gave up and wanted back into your own body, you punched it. You just had to remember that it was there.

I sighed as I floated in the dimensionless black space and performed the well worn ritual: look down to where your chest should be, reach into your chest, punch it, and whammo, I felt myself falling backwards.

Now I was jogging through trees near the eastern inlet. Sunlight was streaming down through the green canopy above.

“Taking me for a jog?”

“Uh huh, you asked me to, remember?” replied my proxxi, Robert, just a voice in my head. “Did you read the latest storm warnings?”

“No…” I replied, disinterested. I knew they were having a hard time steering out of the way of Hurricane Newton and it looked like we might have to battle through the edges of the storm, but what did I care. I’d just be off in the gameworlds anyway.

“Well it’s gotten a lot worse,” Robert explained, “you’d better not get too dug into the gameworlds this afternoon, and stay off the pharmacologicals.”

“In case of what?” I asked, surprised. It was rare Robert would ever ask me to do something.

“Just in case.”

I shrugged. Sure. He seemed worried.

“Do you want to transition control to you?” he asked, apparently satisfied.

“Naw,” I replied, “just take us home, just in case like you said. I’m going for another gameworld session with Martin.” I felt bad now for yelling at him.

“That’s probably a good idea,” replied my proxxi.

§

For the rest of the day we opted to go old school and return to Mongol battle. We all met up afterwards at a tiki–bar on the beach for some beers. It was well past nightfall, and the place was packed with tourists.

Martin loved the Mongolian battle worlds. He was still hopped up from the fight and was jumping around in the sand, howling away as he aped Bruce Lee style karate moves. Sid, Vicious, Robert and I watched him with amusement.

“Bob, that was awesome, you ducking and diving like that, it was like, superhuman!”

I’d had Sid remap my tactile water-sense for Mongol battle so that I could feel arrows coming at me like eddy currents through my skin. The incoming projectiles had become a part of my body, and as I quickened, I was able to duck and weave away with blinding speed, roaring through the battle as I hacked away at the Tatar scum.

“Yes, it was superhuman. That is perfectly accurate, we have superhuman abilities. We are in fact supermen. At least until the rest of humanity plugs into pssi, at which point…”

I paused to take a swig of my beer.

“We will just be, well, just men again.”

I shrugged and smiled. I could see that Martin wasn’t troubled by existential angst anymore. It was nice to be nice to him for once.

Sid smiled. He liked it when I was nice to Martin. He leaned over and whispered under his breath, “You’re going to talk to him, right? For you, you understand?”

I rolled my eyes but nodded.

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t give up do you?”

The surf had been pounding noisily as we all sat there, but a truly gargantuan wave suddenly thundered in, literally shaking the party lanterns hanging off the tiki–bar. Everyone turned to look out into the blackness. Those were some monster storms brewing out there.

Just then, a system of pssi alert channels began to activate.