The Complete Atopia Chronicles

Identity: William McIntyre



I SIGHED, BUT happily now. Sitting belly-deep in the water on our boards, a dark mass moved smoothly underneath us. The Great Whites had begun their nightly garbage collection sweep of the undersea ledge. Bob noticed them too and smiled.

“This was great,” beamed Bob. “I’m really glad you made it out today.”

“Well I said I would, didn’t I?” I laughed back.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t always mean it’ll happen,” observed Bob, shaking his head but smiling, “at least, not lately.”

The setting sun was painting a picture-perfect end to the day in pink and azure clouds hanging high in the sky. We bobbed around in the water for a bit in silence, and then another one of the Great Whites slid silently past. It was time to get in.

“I guess that’s fair,” I replied. “Work has just been such a grind lately.”

We both leaned forward and began a lazy paddle back to the beach.

“I’m sure it has been. Well at least you look more relaxed today.”

It was true. After my talk with Jimmy I could finally see a way out, perhaps even a means to really break through. It would require a huge amount of work, but at least I could see a crack of opportunity to crawl through.

Bob, slightly ahead of me now, smiled back at me. I smiled at him too, and his grin widened.

“See you on the beach!” he called out and then turned abruptly. I was wondering what the heck he was smiling about when my board suddenly angled up, spilling me forward. In my daydreaming, I’d lost track of my water-sense.

“Thanks a…” was all I managed to get out before I swallowed a big mouthful of foamy saltwater and my world crashed into a watery tumult as a large wave broke over me.

§

Surfing at the end of the day had been legendary. The coming storms out in the Pacific had generated amazing incoming swells, and we’d spent the late afternoon riding twenty foot monsters to the delight of the crowds watching from the beach.

Bob had picked up a few female tourists, and taken them out for some tandem surfing, a sport he had almost single handedly resuscitated. We’d only just managed to disentangle ourselves from them by the end of the day, after I’d made it clear I wanted to make it a boys’ night out.

Darkness had fallen as we sat at a tiki–hut beach bar under an awning of palms fringing the powdery sands of the beach. Bob and Sid were already stoned, and I was well into my sixth beer, a large mouthful of which I had just spat out, projectile fashion, trying to hopelessly contain a burst of laughter.

An elderly woman, obviously a tourist, was walking past us as we slouched on our stools against the bar. Her breasts were undulating back and forth near her knees, complemented by a grotesquely protruding rear end, both spilling out of her modest bikini as they swung back and forth in a counterbalancing rhythm.

Sid had started up a new reality skin he’d created called Droopy. It grossly magnified the physical characteristics of women we looked at, scaled by the intensity of their attention towards us.

He’d just pointed out this new victim who was making her way towards the bar, and she had given us such a scowl that her tits had literally mushroomed out of her chest to bounce off the beach.

“Jesus, Sid, you’re killing me!” I choked out, wiping spittle from my mouth and desperately averting my eyes from the glare of the scowling matriarch.

She just made things that much worse, and was practically engulfed by her now gargantuanly distended mammary glands as she slowly dragged her expanding bottom through the sand.

“It’s the blob!” screeched Vicious, pointing with eyes wide in mock fear. “Run! Run away now!”

To make his point, Vicious ran helter-skelter into the jungle behind the bar.

I doubled over, howling with laughter and just not caring. The swollen, rolling subject of our consideration had now turned sharply on her heel, and was slugging off through the sand away from us, apparently not needing a drink anymore. As she retreated, she slowly returned to normal proportions.

“Oh,” I gasped, rubbing the tears from my eyes, giggling, “we should do this more often.”

“We do this every day, son. What you mean is, you should do this more often,” pointed out Vicious, peering out carefully from the bushes at our retreating victim. He was right.

Vicious returned to the bar, now that the coast was clear. He sat back down on his stool in his punkish best, with his black jeans rolled up to his knobby knees, sporting a ripped t–shirt, his eternally spiked black hair contrasting nicely with his pasty white complexion. The rest of us comfortably lounged in our swim shorts. Sid eyed me merrily, and then spat the remainder of a mouthful of beer onto me and laughed.

We all laughed.

“William!” someone screeched into my emergency audio channel.

Wally popped in beside me. “You’d better take this right away, she’s pissed.”

He took control of my body, and I detached quickly to respond to Brigitte.

“Yes my splinter winky?” I answered, my face radiating innocence as I dropped into my workspace to take the call. She stood scowling in front of me.

“William, I am working late finishing some interviews, and all of a sudden, my interviewee’s breasts start swelling and spilling out onto the table, which is totally distracting and embarrassing.”

Oh shoot, I had forgotten we were sharing realities.

“Ah geez, sorry about that, I was just having a little fun with the boys...” I started to say.

“You’re drunk,” she stated incriminatingly, “and you guys are pigs.”

“…come on…”

“Cochon!” she added, shaking her head.

“Brigitte, please,” I said defensively, “I’m only sharing realities because you asked. This isn’t a big deal...”

“William,” she cut in, “Willy...”

She paused, looking sadly at the floor. I waited.

“You know, I have barely seen you in weeks, months even,” she continued, “and you can’t even take the time to have breakfast with me, and here you are off with...ah…ca fait rien.”

I switched off my end of the shared reality, frustrated.

I hadn’t seen the boys in weeks, and I’d been doing my best to spend any spare time I had with Brigitte. It wasn’t my fault I needed to focus more and more on my moonlighting work. My early gains had quickly been gobbled up after Nancy had restricted my splinter limit, and my bank account was now fast turning into a blank account.

I felt trapped.

We fell into a mutually accusatory silence.

“Willy, I think we need to talk,” she said after studying me.

“I think so too,” was all I replied.

§

While Brigitte finished up with work, I flitted back to the boys. My mood was ruined, however, so I begged off and tried going back to work for a bit to lose myself.

Soon enough, Brigitte pinged me and appeared briefly in my workspace. Taking a resigned look around at what had replaced her, she took my hand and flittered us off to a quiet corner of the beach for our talk.

The day had settled into a heartbreakingly beautiful evening, and a crescent moonrise was casting a sparkling carpet over inky seas. Waves gently caressed the shore, and she held my hand tightly in hers, walking me through the wet sand at the water’s edge. We slowly left a trail of footprints behind us.

“Willy,” she pleaded, “my heart is breaking, Willy. I love you, but I can’t do this anymore. Please, let’s sit down and fix this. Just tell me what you need.”

“Brigitte, I love you too, but...I just don’t feel like we share the same goals anymore,” I replied. “I need to focus on my business right now.”

And then the pause, that hurtful space of silence between words that shifted worlds.

“Look, I don’t want to hurt you. I think the best thing could be for us to separate for a while so I can figure this out.”

She looked into my eyes while the tears welled in hers. Her feet left the ground, and she floated in front of me as I walked, holding both my hands now. Cast in the soft monochromatic moonlight, she hovered like a ghost before me.

“Willy,” she sobbed, “you want me to leave you?”

I can’t believe that I did it, but I slowly started to nod, looking steadily into her eyes.

Catching her breath sharply, she looked away, her body convulsing as she tried to stop the coming sobs. She let go of my hands. Brigitte floated up and away from me and into the starry sky. Perhaps not like a ghost, but more like an angel.

My footsteps continued alone in the sand awhile before being washed away by the waves. It was as if we had never been there at all.

The Infinixx launch was coming up, and I had to rush to try the idea Jimmy had suggested before the end of the beta program. Brigitte would understand, and once I had everything going we could have the life together that we’d always wanted. What I had planned was going to blow everyone away. I just needed to focus.

I went back to work.





Identity: Nancy Killiam



ITCHING. ITCHING DESPERATION. Sweaty visions of bunched up sheets, of desire for release, pain, guilt, of junkies staring with hollow eyes; these all flooded my mind. The desperation gave way to confusion, a mad whispering of ideas that meant something, but didn’t mean anything to me. Then something else, a contained space, I was trapped in a small vehicle that suddenly burst into flames. Just as quickly, I was sitting, combing my hair, and looking back into a face that wasn’t mine.

I closed down my splinter network, collapsing my conscious webwork at the same time.

“It’s some kind of bug,” explained Karen, my technical lead. “The subjective streams are getting crossed somehow, and there’s meme-matching problems, too.”

“Do we know what the problem is?”

Launch time was fast approaching. While building our technology platform, we were at the same time using it to provide for our own proof of concept. The problem was that bugs tended to get cycled back, amplifying their effects.

“We think so. We’re just running some final QA now before letting it out into the eco-system.”

“What caused it?” I asked. We’d been having some speed bumps, but nothing as serious as this.

“It seems like a code change somewhere in the kernel layers. We’re trying to figure it out.”

“You’re sure this will solve it?” Honestly, I didn’t care what caused it, I just needed it fixed. “I have another press event in a few minutes. Tell me the truth.”

“Yes,” confirmed Karen with some conviction, “that’ll solve it.”

I looked around the table. The meeting room pulsed softly and silently in its synthetic reality cocoon. Things didn’t have the feeling of a problem being solved.

“What?”

A few of them looked down at the floor, and Karen just shrugged and hit me with it. The details of a lawsuit splintered into my consciousness.

“Some guy in Minnesota is suing for emotional damages after his sensory stream got crossed with his teenage daughter’s.”

“Oh my God.” The details flowed through my splinter network. The girl had been out with her boyfriend. I shook my head, my mind filling with my own memories of growing up. Never mind the father; it was the girl who would be damaged after this.

“And you’re only bringing this to me now?”

“It was just filed ten minutes ago,” replied our legal counsel, a loaner from Cognix corporate who had now appeared in the meeting.

His slicked back image made me tense up.

“Do you need to be here right now?” I demanded. This was supposed to be a private meeting.

He shrugged. “That depends…”

“On what?”

“On whether you still want to be running this company by the end of the day,” he replied coolly, looking at the ceiling, and then he turned to stare directly into my eyes. “You need to deal with this right now.”

I sighed. Dealing with lawyers was something I didn’t think I’d ever get used to, but running Infinixx didn’t give me much choice.

“Nothing in the media worlds yet?” I asked rhetorically. Cunard had already run a background check in the seconds since we’d learned of the problem. There was nothing so far.

“No,” replied our lawyer, “they’ve agreed to keep it quiet.”

He looked around the room at my technical staff, appearing bored.

“For a settlement I imagine.”

“Yes,” he smiled, looking back towards me, “as you imagine.”

“Even though they signed off on a hold harmless clause with the beta testing?”

“This sort of thing could get, well, it could be pretty media friendly,” explained the lawyer, looking even more bored as he said it, if that was possible, “or pretty unfriendly, depending on how you look at it.”

This was exactly the reason why I couldn’t let Willy increase his splinter limit, unexpected repercussions and technical glitches like this. We just couldn’t afford the risk.

“Make the deal,” I sighed. The lawyer nodded and faded away.

“And Karen,” I added, “fix this problem. I don’t care what it takes, but get it fixed.”

§

The Infinixx platform had been designed to enable even regular humans to manage the trick of distributing their consciousness. For us pssi–kids, who grew up with the knack for doing this, the Infinixx platform was an amplifier that multiplied what we could already do, but learning the trick was a little more difficult for the general population than we’d imagined.

Our slogan was ‘Everyone. Everywhere. Everytime.’ or E3. The ‘E’ and the ‘3’ were stylized in the logo, facing each other to form an infinity symbol above the Infinixx name. It was all very clever branding.

“What exactly does it mean?” I was asked at the press conference immediately following the tech meeting.

We were announcing the slogan and unveiling our marketing program. The media people were very proud of it and were hanging in the wings of the presentation space, egging me on to nail their positioning.

“E3 represents the infinite possibilities of the future that we’re bringing to life,” I rolled out breathlessly. “E3 is the idea that anyone can be everywhere and anywhere at any time they like—while still never needing to be anywhere they don’t want.”

I paused before my finale, catching my breath.

“For the first time, people will be free to be nowhere and everywhere at the same time—E3 represents total freedom!”

Applause rang out as I raised my hands to the crowd. I managed to say all of this without the slightest of smiles, even though I wasn’t sure I understood what it meant. All that mattered was that the marketing department was in love with it.

§

While distributing consciousness was a nice trick, what had the business world so excited were the implications for productivity. Synthetic intelligences and phuturing had been able to push the needle a long way, but lately they’d been stalled in their revenue enhancing capabilities, and distributed consciousness was the new buzzword in investor circles. Many groups were pursuing something like it, but with our intimate link to Cognix and our unique abilities as pssi–kids, we had an edge nobody else could match. The investments had just poured in.

The explosive growth was an adrenaline rush.

We’d begun synthesizing intermediate management as splinter constructs, their personalities and experiences amalgamated from the team members they would be managing. Our managers thus became a little bit of everyone they managed, but despite this, people still hated them for some reason.

Even with these innovations, it was a grind, especially the constant need to bring in new talent. Picking new staff became a Herculean task with each new staff member counting as ten—the productivity multiplier goal we were trying to demonstrate—so a mistake picking out any new employee tended to magnify itself. We were constantly having endless rounds of human resources meetings in our main conference room, discussing the merits of new candidates.

“Did you hear about Cynthia, that new administrative girl we hired?” asked my VP of Human Resources, at the start of one of those meetings. My VP of Synthetic Resources rolled her eyes and looked towards me, as if I-told-you-so.

Cynthia has been a great hire, but had recently dropped off the radar without any warning. People disappearing off into cyber hedonistic fantasy worlds weren’t uncommon, but Cynthia had been my pick. She’d seemed a little more reliable than that.

“Yeah, I heard about that. So her neural functions are off the charts, but they can’t find her and she’s off in the multiverse somewhere?” asked Kelly, my co–founding business partner.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with us, does it?” I suddenly exclaimed, pulling the splinter for this meeting into the center of my consciousness.

“No, nothing to do with us,” confirmed Kelly, “but speaking of strange, how about Vince Indigo. Have you seen the flash death mobs he’s attracting?”

There were a few laughs around the table. I stayed quiet. I had a feeling Vince and Patricia were up to something, but didn’t want to say anything. Cunard pinged me right then for the start to yet another press event.

“The Security Council has taken over Cynthia’s file now,” said Brian, our Chief Technical Officer, bringing the discussion back. “Let’s keep moving. Speaking of the Security Council, what does everyone think of Jimmy getting nominated?”

“I think Jimmy is great,” I replied.

“Of course you would,” snorted Kelly. “More of the Killiam clan in charge, but then what’s good for the goose…”

“Hey!” I said defensively. “That’s not fair. Jimmy’s family is barely related to mine.” My cheeks blushed.

They all rolled their eyes.

Jimmy was related to me, but only distantly. Our great-grandfathers had been cousins, whatever that made us. All of that didn’t make any difference to me, and the awkwardness I felt now was because Patricia had asked Bob’s family to adopt Jimmy when he’d been left in her care.

I’d been dating Bob at the time, and in fact we’d been inseparable as children. From that point on, though, I’d been teased for dating what amounted to my cousin, if only cousin-in-law. Childhood taunts had a way of sticking with you in life.

“Gang, I have to get to the next press event,” I added, happy for a reason to exit-stage-left, and flitted off for the next press conference.