The Complete Atopia Chronicles

16





Identity: William McIntyre



AFTER THE CONFRONTATION with Jimmy, the whole gang had dove into my problem, trying to figure out what had happened.

I poked the embers of the dying fire, watching them dance.

The carpet of stars hung back above us like it did before, that day long ago when we were last camping at this spot. An owl hooted softly in the darkness. Bob sat with a beer balanced back on his knee, half illuminated by the fire, grinning at me.

“I told you everything would be fine, Willy,” Bob pointed out with his empty beer can.

I continued to stare into the fire, lost in my own thoughts.

What was it, I wondered, about the embers of a fire that so mesmerized me? I imagined the heat of the sun, warming green leaves of long ago, the leaves soaking up the sunshine, slowly converting this into the lignin and biomass of the tree trunk. Then today, after being stored for decades, that same captured sunshine was radiating back out as heat energy when we burned the wood, heating my hands and face as I watched in silent wonder. Thank you, tree, for giving your body to me.

Since my own consciousness hadn’t winked out, we had to assume that my body was alive and healthy somewhere out there.

We’d sent out a veritable private army to try and to find it, using up almost all of the considerable fortune I’d amassed as Atopia’s hottest stock jock in my brief blaze of glory back when I had a body.

The searching had begun within Atopia itself, a thorough physical search using platoons of pssi–minded cockroaches and rented psombies, followed by a full digital scan using a private cloud dustings of smarticles.

We’d quickly expanded the physical search radius into the watery surroundings and into cities directly connected to our passenger cannon. We sent out and rented time in uncountable bots and synthetics, even human private investigators that scoured this world and the wikiworlds for any hint of my face, my body, in fact any trace of any kind signaling mine or Wally’s presence out there.

We’d found nothing at all.

In the midst of the looming storms, the Atopian foreign office had halfheartedly taken up action against Terra Nova, trying to sue for access to the anonymous connection or to disconnect it, thinking that this would automatically snap me back into my body. Just like Atopia, however, one of Terra Nova’s key industries was acting as a data haven, and this business was protected by the same iron-clad international treaties that protected Atopia.

Terra Nova resisted any action that would weaken the perception of its unconditional stance on secrecy and security of its customers and data. To gain access to the connection, they told us, I would have to log in from my corporal body. With no body, there was no bio-authentication and therefore no access.

At first I was desperate, but bit by bit I gradually came to grips with my situation. Vince had come forward and shared his story with our group, an even more bizarre tale that had left him almost paralyzed. His resolve in dealing with his situation had helped me put mine in perspective.

Sometimes, they said, it took a great loss to realize what was important to you. In my fight to find myself, and in defending me morally, I was humbled by the loyalty and ferocity of my friends and family, even after I’d abandoned them in my own pursuits.

The search had even brought some direction to Bob, shaking him out of the drugged slumber he’d been in for years now, bringing him together with Nancy for the first time in as many years. Vince had put his vast spy network to work on my problem, and Sid and Vicious had worked tirelessly, combing the back ways and alleyways of the Atopian subsystems, trying to figure out how someone had hidden their tracks so well. Even Martin had pitched in.

I poked the coals some more and watched little sparks escape and float back into the sky.

Brigitte and I were back together. She liked to joke that before when we lived together I was never around, so it was like living with a ghost, but now that I was a ghost, it was like I was there with her more than ever. Or something like that. She wasn’t much of a comedian, but she sure was the most beautiful and loving person I’d ever known. I had no idea how I’d let her slip away from me, but I would never let it happen again.

“Alright there William?” asked Vicious, tossing a can into the fire, casting a look my way.

“Yes, Vicious, I am all right, as a matter of fact,” I answered, nodding back. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt perfectly at peace.

I felt a stream of air tickling my behind, and I shivered. The wind was still blowing when a promising stock appeared on the radar, and sometimes it blew hard.

Without Wally or access to my body, I couldn’t reset my sensory mapping, so I was fated to forever feel this tickling in my nether regions. Now though, I began to find it reassuring, like rubbing an old scar from an accident you’d survived.

Only one thing felt really absent in my life, and it had the eerie feeling of a missing limb. I looked towards the empty chair we’d set up in honor of our fallen comrade, where Wally used to sit next to me on our trips. I’d set it up beside me this evening, now sitting conspicuously empty.

I went back often and replayed that last talk I’d had with Wally, and watched his face as he spoke. It was hard to say whether Wally had taken off to save me from the police—they did have a trace going on the security breach and would have found us eventually. Maybe he’d seen them coming and had decided to take off. They’d issued a general notice of clemency on my case now, so even if he was trying to save us from jail then, by now he would have known it was safe to return—but he didn’t.

The more I thought about it, the more I became sure that Wally wasn’t trying to save me from jail. Perhaps he was saving me from a much worse fate, perhaps from myself. At the time, I was so busy digging myself into a deep, isolated hole that I may have never returned from it.

In retrospect, I wasn’t finding happiness, but suffocating myself in an impenetrable layer of avarice and pride, trading friendship and love for money and power. Maybe he knew that I’d be better off this way. I was sure that he’d like to return, in fact I knew there was no place that he’d rather be than right here with us now, but he must have felt it was safer this way, for some reason.

Somehow it felt right, but I could never have gotten to this place on my own. Wally and I had switched places. I’d become him, living as a virtual being, and he’d become me, living out there in the real world in a real body.

Smiling, I remembered that day when we were last camping here, and Wally had told me that he loved me on our return home. I’d thought it was so odd then, but no more. Raising my beer can, I looked towards the empty chair beside me, and toasted my now absent friend.

Sometimes I guess you really did have to lose yourself to find yourself.

Wally, wherever you are out there, I just wanted to tell you one thing: I love you too, Wally.