The Complete Atopia Chronicles

Identity: Jimmy Jones



I SMILED AND nodded my goodbye to Patricia as she faded out of Command.

“I think that’s a good idea, Commander,” I said once she was completely gone. “I mean about going to see your wife. I can handle the rest of this.”

Rick looked over from the slingshot controls at me, smiled, and began nodding. Standing up from his workstation, he shifted the controls to me, and then walked over.

“Thanks Jimmy, I really appreciate it. You and Patricia have a pretty special bond, don’t you?”

I smiled.

“We do,” I agreed while I focused on some security protocols that had been breached during the weapons test. Somebody had been poking around up there in the UAV that had been destroyed during the test. Odd.

“It hasn’t been easy moving here,” he continued. “At least, it hasn’t been easy for Cindy.”

I filed the security breach report away to have a look at later, and looked up at the Commander.

“I can’t imagine how much of a change it must be for her,” I replied, “or for you, for that matter.”

Rick nodded, and then pulled a security blanket down around us. The other Command staff looked up from their workstations, wondering what was going on.

“Confidentially, son, I’ve heard that you had it pretty rough growing up here.”

I shrugged. He put his hand on my shoulder.

“If you ever need anyone to talk to,” he said softly, “I had it rough growing up too.”

“Thanks…” I replied uncertainly, surprised at this sudden intimacy.

“I’m just saying, any time, and of course, entirely confidential.”

“I appreciate that Commander,” I answered more confidently. “And I will, but I’m fine.”

I pulled down the security blanket, feeling self-conscious with all the rest of the staff there.

“Why don’t you get on to seeing your wife?”

He smiled. “I will. You just remember, anytime, right?”

“Right.” I smiled back at him.

“See you later, Jimmy.”

§

While Atopia was marketed as this amazing place, and the tabloid worlds were constantly spinning stories about the fantastic pssi-kids that grew up here, my own parents fighting had made my experience on Atopia a special sort of hell I had to drag myself through. Now I had the perspective to view it, even appreciate it, as a part of the fire that had forged me, but back then, pssi could be cruel.

I remembered it all.

“Look,” said my mother, back when I was an infant, soon after they’d first arrived on Atopia, “look at him, so cute. I think he just shat himself again, and he’s looking around wondering what the bad smell is.”

She was laughing at a shared rendering of my inVerse. She even tried sharing the smell with the guests. I wasn’t even a year old, and Mother was at it again, and drunk of course.

“Look, look, smell that?” she laughed. “Can you believe something so small and useless could make a smell so bad?”

As children, we had no right to privacy from our parents. Mother was always criticizing everything I did, in minute detail, and in excruciatingly public fashion.

My parents had been having another couple over for coffee, and Mother had turned our cramped apartment into a synthetic space projection that was decked out like a Spanish palace for the evening. We were sitting in the middle of an open courtyard, under a deep blue sky, surrounded by a three story terracotta palazzo, the walls decorated with intricate murals inlaid with tiny blue, white and gold tiles.

I was playing between potted ferns next to a small pool filled with colorful Koi fish. A fountain bubbled water into the pond, sprayed from the penis of a cherubic statue of a small boy. Dragonflies buzzed at the water’s edge, holding my attention as I reached towards them.

I still hadn’t learnt to walk yet, so I sat on my haunches in my own excrement, eyes on the dragonflies, curiously sniffing the air around me.

“Don’t you think you should change him?” asked Steve uncomfortably. He worked in the aquaponics group with my dad, and they spent a lot of time together, both at work and off hours. It was a source of friction between my parents.

“It’s all that fish protein in his little diet,” continued Mother. “Phil seems to think it will help his brain development and help him grow big and strong. So far, it just doesn’t seem to be working.”

She laughed again, louder this time, shrugging her shoulders. The guests didn’t share her sense of humor, but politely tried to smile and nod just the same.

Mother finished laughing at her own joke.

“Yolanda!” she yelled unnecessarily. “Could you change Jim, please?”

Mother smiled at my guests as her image flickered just a little. She detached and her proxxi, Yolanda took over control of her physical body. The pssi functioned less than flawlessly at this prototype stage, years ago, and the net effect was that Mother seemed to remain in place while Yolanda materialized into view and morphed away with her body to stand up.

Yolanda smiled at the guests, and then walked over to pick me up, holding me tenderly, and then disappeared into a side room to change me.

“Isn’t it just the best thing?” Mother gushed to the guests, referring to the pssi which was still a new toy to them back then. This was the first time Steve, and his wife Arlene, had done a social call with my parents. Our family didn’t have many guests over. We weren’t what you’d call popular.

“I was skeptical at first, when Patricia Killiam, my great aunt,” she emphasized, stopping for effect, “offered us a berth, but really, it has made my life so relaxing.” She smiled.

“It is amazing,” agreed Steve, happy to have gotten off the topic of nappies. “It’s completely changed our lives as well. All the build–up wasn’t just hype.” He nodded and looked around the room.

“Absolutely,” agreed Mother, “I mean, who would have thought? I modeled my proxxi after my own nanny from when I was growing up. I feel so at home now. Little Jimmy here has hardly put a dent in my lifestyle.”

“We’re still learning new ways to use it too,” added Steve’s wife, trying to add something to the conversation. “It is nice to take the time to have real face time with people, though. Synthetics do lack a certain…something.”

Everyone around the table nodded, except Mother who just crinkled her nose a little. An uncomfortable silence settled.

“Well!” exclaimed Mother, breaking the silence. “Who would have imagined that we’d end up in the most technologically advanced place on earth, and I’d be a fishmonger’s wife!” She tittered, looking towards my father. He just stared down into his coffee.

“Gretchen, we manage the aquaculture program, we’re not exactly fishmongers,” my father sighed, stealing a tiny hateful glance her way, but smiling broadly to the guests.

Steve nodded and added, “Yeah, and we farm kelp too!”

Mother smiled her tight lipped smile that I was all too familiar with.

“That’s nice. Call it what you like,” she declared. “We’re here and that’s all that matters!”

Yolanda walked back in and offered me to Mother, who took me on her knee and smiled into my little face.

“How’s my little stinker?” she laughed, shaking me more than lightly.





Identity: Patricia Killiam



“THERE’S SOMETHING VERY odd about this latest string of disappearances,” I stated, getting to my point of calling this private meeting with Kesselring, the CEO and owner of Cognix Corporation.

The rash of people disappearing into the multiverse and leaving their bodies behind had gotten worse. It was now even common, but after an initial alarm by friends and family we’d usually find them burrowed deep in some hedonistic fantasy world. Lately, though, cases were sprouting up where we hadn’t been able to find them.

“Do you think that bastard Sintil8 could have anything to do with it?” Kesselring asked. “He’d love to find a way to derail the program. Are you keeping an eye on him?”

“More or less.” I had my own private discussion going on with Sintil8, nothing I wanted Kesselring to know about. Looking at him, I could see he didn’t suspect anything. “Anyway, these new disappearances are different. Their brains are highly stimulated, a sensory overload we don’t understand.”

I took a deep breath and shifted in my seat, drumming my fingers against the conference room table.

The same privacy laws I’d been instrumental in creating now meant that we couldn’t dig any deeper into peoples’ minds without their consent. After the mess of the Cyber Wars, I’d forced Cognix to build ironclad privacy systems into pssi from the ground up to protect the rights of users. Root pssi control was like having access to the soul of a person and was the fundamental building block everything else branched out from.

“We need to figure out what on earth is going on.”

Kesselring sighed.

“I don’t disagree, Pat, but a few people off pleasuring themselves in the multiverse isn’t enough to delay the entire program. This is a massive undertaking we have put in motion.”

The global marketing program to launch pssi commercially was easily one of the biggest promotional campaigns of all time, at least by a private corporation—if this label could really be applied to us anymore.

I considered this for a moment while I watched the glittering cover of the security blanket that had fallen around us when he arrived. Even with security built–in from the ground up, if you wanted to be really sure you were safe from prying eyes, it was best to use a blanket. The one surrounding us now was Kesselring’s personal, impenetrable shield that had an odd and shifting color that was similar to the indistinct bluishness of water in a glacial run–off stream. Maybe that was why it felt so cold to me.

“Do you think the Terra Novans are involved somehow?” I asked.

“They would love to put a stick in our spokes,” he snarled back. “Anyway, I have someone looking into it. We have to be extremely vigilant from this point onwards, Patricia.”

I watched him carefully, wondering how vigilant he was being about me.

“You’ve probably heard, but Rick has agreed with us to nominate Jimmy to the Security Council,” I said. “If anyone can ferret out what is going on, he can.”

I was still rooting for Jimmy even if he didn’t need it anymore.

When Jimmy’s parents had left I had taken him under my wing. He was now my star pupil, along with Nancy of course. In my long life I’d never had any children of my own, and these two were as close as I’d come.

His mother, my great-grand-niece, had abandoned him here, and I blamed myself for not intervening sooner in that domestic situation. In the end, Jimmy had been the one to pay the price, but he was beginning to blossom now. I couldn’t have been more proud.

Kesselring eyed me, sensing my protectiveness.

“Yes, Jimmy is an excellent choice,” agreed Kesselring. “In fact, he’s the one I have helping me out.”

I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t known Jimmy was working directly for Kesselring on anything.

“What are they up to?” I mused under my breath, thinking about the Terra Novans, but now thinking about Kesselring as well.

“I don’t know,” replied Kesselring, not catching my full meaning, “but this just reinforces my point of view that we need to push ahead as quickly as possible. As you said yourself, we need to maximize the network effects of the product introduction…”

“Yes, yes,” I completed the sentence for him, “to gain the highest saturation throughout the population as quickly as possible.”

I paused and stared directly into his eyes.

“So we’re going to be giving it away for free?”

He smiled. “Of course.”

“And it doesn’t worry you that we’re not telling people the full story?”

“Of course it worries me,” he said looking down at the floor, “but again, what choice do we have?”

He looked up from the floor and into my eyes. “We need to make sure we stabilize this timeline as best we can.”

As we approached the point of no return, all the careful planning and clever analyses suddenly had the feeling of blind faith, and I’d had faith shot out of my skies early in life.

“Patricia,” he said, watching me intently, “the lives of billions rest in our hands. We cannot fail.”

He was right. What we were doing couldn’t be worse than letting billions of people die.

Could it?