The Complete Atopia Chronicles

20





Identity: Bobby Baxter



“SID!” I YELLED out into our private emergency channels.

“Jesus, Bob, what?” he replied as his reality instantly merged with mine.

I watched him before me, engrossed in some data mining blitz as he searched through reams of multiverse worlds. Even with the storms threatening, he was still on the hunt for Willy’s body, his dozens of phantom hands dancing through the hypercontrol spaces around him.

“You know, if you play with your phantoms too much, you’ll grow hair on the palms of your hands,” I couldn’t help joking as I watched him and Vicious working their magic.

“No more Humungous Fungus this week, I’ve had enough, buddy.” They gave me several fingers. I silently watched them fiddle around some more.

“So what has your hair on fire?” he asked after a pause.

“No more Humungous Fungus for us, I agree,” I replied. “Something is seriously wrong with this place, and we are going to find out what.”

This stopped them in their tracks. Sid looked at me.

“Now you’re finally talking turkey.”

He cracked a smile.

“Sid, drop everything.”

All his phantoms immediately dropped to the ground.

“We’re getting the band back together.”

“Jimmy too?” asked Sid. Vicious was already shaking his head.

“No, I think we’d better let Jimmy sit this one out.”

Jimmy had bigger fish to fry right now. Not only that, but something about him made me very uneasy.

“But I’m going to ping him and tell him that we’re going to mount a search of our own, to try and help figure out the situation. That way we won’t raise any alarms if we scan the perimeter.”

I thought about that for a second.

“Plus, I want him to know what we’re doing.”

I wasn’t sure why. It was just intuition.

“Sure,” said Vicious carefully, “but just don’t tell him too much.”

That wasn’t a problem. I didn’t know too much.

“I think we should get Vince in on this too,” added Sid.

Nodding, I pinged Jimmy and shifted my primary subjective into a tight and secure channel space he immediately opened up to me.

Now I was sitting in a small, pristine white room at a white interview table. Jimmy was sitting before me, his hands clasped on the table, staring directly into my eyes.

“Did you find Wally yet?” said Jimmy as I fully arrived, cracking the faintest of smiles. “What’s going on? No surfing today?”



Identity: Jimmy Jones

“No,” replied Bob, “even I couldn’t handle what’s going on out there right now.”

That was the truth. The storms had converged, and the winds were beginning to tear at the forests as our beaches were pounded mercilessly by an angry ocean. Surface access would be shut off soon as we finished stowing everything and everyone below decks.

As we entered American territorial waters, their air force and navy had scrambled to surround us, battling their own way through the storms. Despite that we were close allies, the prospect of suddenly having a wholly independent country slide across the map to invade their space had raised some hackles, even if they understood we had absolutely no choice in the matter.

The world was already a dangerous enough place from their point of view, and they weren’t too happy about us invading their space. Of course, the prospect of two giant hurricanes simultaneously slamming into one of America’s most populated coasts had them occupied with their own typically belated emergency preparations.

Communications were strangely incoherent. It may have just been the storms, but we seemed to be getting contradictory diplomatic messages from one moment to the other.

And, of course, the storms were getting worse. As they neared the coast, and each other, they defied all physics and were gaining in strength, progressing into Category 5 and still intensifying. Unless we could do something about it, we would be beached on the continental shelf just south of Los Angeles, and the prospect of a fully energized fusion core running aground in America had raised the diplomatic tension bar just that much higher.

I had a plan of how we could escape, and was running phutures of it right at the moment Bob had pinged me. As busy as I was, Bob’s primary subjective calling me on an emergency channel was unusual enough to warrant the attention of a splinter.

“So what can I do for you?” I asked, not bothering to explain how busy I was. Bob was many things, but he wasn’t stupid.

Bob took a deep breath. “Look, I’d like to help out. I think I may be able to find a way to see what is happening.”

“Really?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. “And just how do you propose to do that?”

“I know how busy you must be so I won’t waste time on details,” he said looking down at his feet, “but you know I have special abilities, from all the time we spent together. Just trust me, Jimmy, is what I’m asking, and open up some ports for me to scan the multiverse.”

I looked at Bob. Memories flashed from our long past childhood friendship, and memories more recently as my adopted brother. Maybe he could help somehow.

“Okay Bob, go ahead,” I replied, “you have our cooperation. Just feed us back anything you find.”

In all cases, I’d keep a close eye on them.

“You got it Jimmy.”

I closed the connection and returned to the simulation underway. A giant fireball filled my primary mind.

“Seems like it will work,” said Samson, my proxxi. We were going over my plan for escaping from the hurricanes, which we were scheduled to explain to the Council within the hour. “Why don’t you take a quick break and decompress before we present?”

That seemed like a good idea. The fireball slipped away and I relaxed, letting my mind wander back to the meeting with Bob. I was surprised he had any interest I helping out, but then again, the last time he had helped me out had been the biggest catastrophe of my life growing up. I dispatched several agents to watch what he was up to.

§

I’d secretly thought of Bob as my big brother, as a kid, and in another twist of fate, that’s exactly what he’d become when his family had adopted me at Patricia’s suggestion.

I’d always had a hard time fitting in. The easy way that the other pssi-kids socialized and made friends had always escaped me, but Bob had often tried to be there for me, and had done his best to help me fit in when others had ignored me.

My special skills in conscious boundary systems had quickly brought me to the attention of the Solomon House Research Center, so academically my life had taken off from an early age, but my interpersonal skills had floundered hopelessly, and pssi-kids could be mercilessly cruel.

As I got older and gained in pssi power, my only relief was that I finally managed to escape from under the oppression of my parents. I began to easily slip past their every attempt to corner me and I gained my own freedom.

Nancy Killiam’s thirteenth birthday party was the defining disaster for me as a kid. My own thirteenth birthday was just around the corner, and I was worried that nobody would come to my party, most especially Cynthia, the girl I’d developed my first crush on.

While girls had generally ignored me, Cynthia had magically started to talk with me one day, asking about my research work at the Solomon House. I had no idea how to react or what to do, so I went to the only person I knew to talk to.

“Look,” said Bob back then, “you just gotta stop acting so weird.”

Bob was squinting into the slanting sunshine as we walked across the beach at the end of the day. He raised one hand to shade his eyes. We were walking towards the large blue and yellow circus tent where Nancy’s party was being held. Waves broke softly and rhythmically in the background and the air was filled with the smell of cotton candy and the sound of children at play.

I shrugged. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. All that snooping around, hiding where you’re not supposed to be,” he answered, looking me square in the eyes.

My face flushed red. The other pssi-kids had already begun their tentative sexual explorations of each other, not just rag dolling or flitter switching, but taking a real interest in their blooming, newly adolescent bodies.

I had watched all this happening, awkwardly, hanging from the shadows. Sometimes, unknown, I would slip in between and into them as they kissed, sharing sensations and stimswitching with each other.

Pain was my childhood specialty, but these new, tender emotions and sensations intrigued me.

“Everyone is talking about you, you know,” continued Bob, scratching his head as we passed into the shadow of the tent and moved towards the entrance.

My dad had come ahead of me, the only one dragging a real gift under his arm, which I found embarrassing.

I saw him off in a corner under a glade of palms talking with some other adults, patting his prize affectionately. More kids and parents were quickly arriving, through portals near the entrance, in ones and twos; here a furry argumentative little Minotaur being dragged by his mother, and there two screaming pink teddies trailing fluorescent silvery balloons.

Everyone’s reality skins fused and melted together as they entered, producing a confusing kaleidoscopic mash-up around the entrance as they stopped and looked around before fanning out inside.

Some parents were arguing with their kids to merge their realities with everyone else properly, arguments that were erupting into tantrums from both sides.

Bob looked around for somewhere quiet to talk. Organ grinder music had started up, somewhat macabrely, and little monkeys dressed in evening suits appeared, scuttling between the assembled guests, handing out information packs for the evening. Drinks and snacks floated and bobbed in refreshment islets between everyone. Bob took my arm and led me to a bench off to one side, under the shade of some saw palmettos.

“Jimmy, I know you don’t have many friends,” said Bob, his voice hushed now, “and I know it can’t be easy for you.” His voice trailed off as he searched for words.

“Okay, first thing, quit with the splatter skins, those were funny when we were little but it’s a bit odd when people...” he started to say, and then the head of one of the nearest adults suddenly shattered in a gory explosion of brains and skull fragments as if hit by high caliber rifle fire.

The headless, bloody victim continued to pick up a drink that floated by and poured this into its gaping neck wound. I smiled awkwardly. Bob glanced at this and looked back at me, shaking his head. I switched it off.

Bob looked up at the sky and then back at me.

“And I know you’re the king of the rag doll, but nobody wants to play that stuff anymore, get it? Stop asking people if they want to come inside your body with you, it’s starting to get weird.”

I nodded. I knew this but I couldn’t help it. I promised myself right there I’d stop.

“We all know you’re this specialist at finding cracks in the pssi system,” he continued, “but you gotta stop sneaking around. We’re adults now, and adults don’t sneak.”

Of course we weren’t and of course they did. I nodded again, regardless.

“So, you’ll quit sneaking into people’s bodies when they’re not looking right?” He waited for me to nod, and then added, “Look, why don’t you come out and try some surfing with me, whaddya say?”

“Sure Bob, you’re right, I mean, yes of course, I’d like that,” I mumbled, anxious but grateful.

Bob had always been nice to me, but this was the first time he, or anyone, really had had a heart to heart with me. The territory both scared and excited me.

“So you’ll come surfing?” asked Bob, smiling toothily at me now.

“Yeah sure,” I said, and smiled back.

He gave me a little punch in the arm. I guessed we were buddies now.

“Okay cool. So about Cynthia, look, she’s a girl, and girls want you to open up, be sensitive. I mean, I can tell you’re sensitive.” He laughed, looking into my puppy dog face. “Okay forget that.”

“She said she wanted to see something fun,” I suggested helpfully.

He looked up and considered for a moment.

“Yeah, girls like cool stuff. Perfect! Just open up to her a little. Why don’t you show her some of the stuff you’ve been working on at Solomon House? That should impress her. Girls like smart guys.”

“Do you really think so?” I asked. I had some new neural interface models I had been working hard on testing with Dr. Granger, who had taken a keen interest in my abilities.

I kept the models in my personal work space and hadn’t let anyone in there before. My private worlds were very private. After finally escaping from the clutches of my mother and father I hadn’t let anyone near me, emotionally or physically, and spent most of my time alone with my proxxi Samson and our simulated friends.

“Sure, open up a little, she’ll love that.”

Bob laughed, winking at me, and then raised his eyebrows, giving me a little poke with one of his phantoms to indicate something behind me. With a shake of his head he waved me off from turning my head around.

Instead, I snuck a peak behind me without turning my head, overlaying part of my visual channel with a local wikiworld view, and saw Cynthia coming up behind us. She noticed my ghost checking her out anyway.

“Go get ’em Tiger,” Bob said encouragingly as he got up to leave. “I’ve gotta go and catch my own sweetheart.”

Bob and Nancy had been intertwined since they were kids and had grown into the pssi–kid power couple. He walked back to the gathering crowd to leave me and Cynthia alone.

“Hey Cynthia,” Bob said playfully as he walked past her, looking back to wink at me again. Cynthia smiled at him and turned her gaze towards me. I began to sweat profusely.

“Hi Jimmy,” came Cynthia’s singsong voice. She skipped the last few steps up to me. I was dumbfounded for what to say, so I said nothing and smiled weakly. “So, what’s up?”

“Not...not much, how...how are you?” I stammered.

My mind went blank.

“…Cynthia,” I managed to stutter out after a few seconds of agonizing silence.

“I’m great!” she replied brightly, smiling shyly. “How’s your research going?”

“Uh, yeah, good...hey,” I replied, thinking of what Bob had said. “I could show you some of the stuff I’m doing at Solomon House if you like.”

“Really? Cool!” Her eyes and smile widened. “Can we go now?”

I nodded. Why not?

“Mum!” she yelled, and her mother’s face floated up between the two of us.

“Yes, Cynthia? You don’t need to yell you know,” her mother admonished.

Cynthia just continued unfazed, “I’m just going to flit out with Jimmy for a bit to show me some of the stuff he’s working on at Solomon House.”

Cynthia’s mother looked suitably impressed.

“Work at the Solomon House? But you’re just a baby,” she remarked, looking my way and furrowing her brow. “Anyway, yes, sure, but I’m pinging you back the second Nancy gets here.”

Cynthia grabbed my hand and squealed excitedly, “Let’s go!”

I felt an electric thrill, feeling her touching me, that spread like wildfire to settle hotly in my crotch. An erection immediately sprang to life. Cynthia could sense something going on from my embarrassed, flushed cheeks. She looked at me mischievously.

“Come on Jimmy, let’s go!” she squealed again.

I pulled her back and away and we dropped out from our bodies and into my private work space. I’d never brought anyone here before, and I felt naked. It was thrilling if frightening.

In one layer of my visual field I could see Samson, inhabiting my body back at the beach, holding hands with Cynthia’s proxxi near one side of the blue and yellow tent. They were watched carefully by Cynthia’s mother’s proxxi, and they went off to get some cotton candy. I smiled.

Cynthia and I were standing together in a large, white laboratory with gleaming floors and walls with a view out of smoky glass windows onto Atopia stretched out below, the same view physically as the real Solomon House atop the farming complex.

Above stainless steel tables floated a variety of working models of mirror neuron interfaces I was working on with Dr. Granger. He shared my interest in the physiological basis of emotion and the ability to use it to direct the hive mind, but where he was more interested in happiness, I had taken more of an interest in fear—something the other researchers had mostly passed by.

While we walked, I keyed through some parameters with my phantoms to wash away the tables and structures to be replaced with only one of the models, which then floated in space in front of us, slowly rotating. I was keenly aware of Cynthia’s grip on my sweaty hand.

“Cool,” she said, watching the visually enhanced synaptic firing of the neuron floating in front of us. It was a working model.

“This isn’t just a model,” I declared, “this is actually happening inside me right now.”

After some testing I had installed them in my own developing wetware to see how the models would respond. I started to explain how it worked, how this was an upgrade to what we were doing already, how it provided a more reliable pathway to empathy.

Empathy was something I didn’t understand, or rather, I understood it, but I just didn’t feel it.

While I was nervously trying to explain my project, Cynthia had wandered off, looking around the rest of my work space. I wanted to show her something really special, so I was engrossed in my model, busy burrowing through the cell walls trying to change some protein pathways.

“What’s in here?” she asked, opening a door.

“Oh, ah, nothing!” I cried out, but it was already too late.

As soon as the portal had opened a crack, she’d dropped into the world beyond. I quickly abandoned my model and shot off into that world behind her.

Instantly I was standing beside her in semidarkness. Shafts of light bore down from the blackness above, illuminating a writhing mass of insects and worms and other creatures pinned painfully to the walls of my labyrinthine private universe. An image of my mother’s face hung in space above us, twisted in hate.

“Who’s my little stinker?” she repeated and repeated, her face contorting and distorting.

I came here to heal myself, to reconnect and re-stimulate some of the sensory pain I’d felt. The process seemed to allow me to refocus my mind. I had picked out some particularly nasty moments from my childhood and worked through them bit by bit, simultaneously bathing my sensory system in the pain from the thousands of little creatures I had pinned to the walls. I didn’t understand why, but it helped.

Cynthia shivered and looked around with wide eyes, scared but excited.

“This is way f*cking creepy man,” she whispered, looking around at the half illuminated animals pinned to the walls, scraping and clawing futilely, never dying, never free, always trapped and in pain.

Tears began to well up in her eyes looking at the hopeless little creatures.

“I can feel them,” she squeaked, her eyes growing wide. “This is horrible!”

Then, suddenly, she was gone, flitting back to the birthday party.

Shocked, I stood still for a moment as the blood drained from my face. I wasn’t sure what to do. I closed down the image of my mother and the space went dark and quiet, apart from the soft wriggling of the creatures on the walls.

I hadn’t remembered that there was a portal to this place from my workspace. I was too flustered to think clearly at the time. I began quietly swearing at myself, then, suddenly, I felt Samson grabbing me, pulling me back to reality.

I snapped back into my body with a sudden sense of vertigo. I heard laughter around me, but I wasn’t back at the party. Somehow I was in my private space again. The bugs were squirming painfully on the walls as before, but all the party guests were standing in the middle of it somehow, and the bugs were magnified, giant monsters vainly trying to pull their bodies from the pushpins stuck through them.

Above it all, my mother was venting down on us all, “Who’s my little stinker?”

Cynthia had stolen a copy of my world and projected it out here in public at the beach. I felt myself shrink in horror. Cynthia was laughing with her friends, and they were all pointing at me and screeching, “Who’s my stinky Jimmy!”

The adults were dumbfounded as to what was going on. It had all happened too quickly for them, but someone regained control of the situation and the big-top tent reappeared with the balloons and monkeys. Everyone turned and looked at me, the kids laughing and giggling, the adults staring without comprehension.

“Why did you do that?” I screamed at Cynthia.

An intense, burning anger beyond my searing humiliation filled me. All the years of containing my fear, my frustration, my hiding and cowering, it all boiled over the edges of my psyche. I could kill her right now, I thought. The world turned a bloody red in front of my eyes, and demons shifted inside.

Cynthia shrank back into the protective knot of her friends, all of them still laughing.

I gathered myself and focused on her, channeling my voice through the pssionics and amplifying it beyond deafening.

“Why did you do that?!” I bellowed from a hulking, grotesque caricature of myself.

A shockwave of pure hatred shattered away from me, almost knocking over the assembled guests. I felt like I was about to physically explode when I caught myself and stopped. My anger imploded back into me and the bottle corked back up.

The laughing had stopped. In fact the scene was deathly quiet now, except for whimpers from some of the smaller children. Shocked faces were turned towards me, watching me. Someone started crying. It was Cynthia.

At that moment Nancy Killiam opened the portal door and announced, “I’m heeeere!”

She was all decked out in a frilly dress and pigtails. I began to run, tears streaming down my face, shoving my way past Bob.

“Hey, I didn’t know, hey Jimmy...” he tried to say as I ran past him, almost knocking down Nancy as I ran out, escaping from the blinding glare of judgment. By that point I was already gone, detached, and it was Samson taking over my body to hide it somewhere safe.

I was already back in my private world, and it was burning. Great flames were consuming the walls, the corridors, the passages and nooks and crannies of my childhood. The little creatures pinned everywhere to the walls squealed in high keening agony as the blaze devoured them.

I watched, impassively, as the inferno consumed itself and flamed out. My face grimly reflected the smoldering ruins in shades of dark oranges and blood reds. Never again, I promised myself, never again.

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and on that day I felt myself shatter and schism but then reform to heal and grow, becoming adult perhaps, becoming something different. The developing child inside me, my personality until then free floating, coalesced and hardened. Invisible things fell into place, the pain stopped, and the shell finally finished closing around me, opaque, powerful. Impenetrable.

§

A few days later, back at home, I was studying for some Solomon House entrance exams.

My mother had just arisen from the dead, and was making her way, in her jerkily soapstim junkie way, towards me with a fresh drink in hand to help her wake up from the sensory coma she’d been in for the past few days.

“Hey stinker, I saw you embarrassed me at that Killiam party, what the hell were you thinking?” she half slurred, half laughed at me.

“Some security expert you are,” she sniggered, taking a swig from her drink. She waved her hand at me dismissively. I watched her blankly.

“They killed the dolphins you know,” she added, cruelly recalling the security breach that had been the start of the end with Terra Nova. “Dirty smelly fish, serves them right.”

Still I said nothing.

“So I guess nobody is coming to your party, huh, stinky Jimmy?”

She wasn’t really asking, she was more enjoying herself and smiling knowingly at the new name the kids were now calling me. She was behind me, and had turned away to refill her drink.

I slowly closed the interface to my notes and twisted towards her, pulling down a dense security blanket that enveloped us in a glittering glacial blue. She turned back to me.

“What?” she barked, feeling the blanket close in around us. She threw her head back. “Something to say, little worm?”

I smiled at her, flames glittering in my eyes.

“If you ever talk to me again, Mother, if you ever so much as lay a hand on me or utter one more word to me from that trashy, dirty mouth of yours again,” I said, evenly and slowly, smiling at her. “I will make sure that you regret ever existing, that you live out the remainder of your pathetic life in unearthly agony.”

I smiled to make the point. The fire burned ever brighter in my eyes, and the flames reflected in hers.

Looking at me she was about to say something, but then stopped herself as her vacant mind filled with alarm, feeling my naked malice inhabiting the room. I could taste her fear and my smile widened. She just turned and shuffled away, and I released the security blanket with a flick of a phantom.

“Enjoy the soapstim mum!” I gaily called after her, and returned to my notes.

I’m going to ace this test.