The Complete Atopia Chronicles

24





Identity: Bobby Baxter



OUR MIND WAS flooded with images, millions of impressions and ideas, of experiences and worlds. Slowly, an impression began to form, a hint of something that didn’t fit.

A vision of my brother Dean and I, when we were kids, floated into my mind. We’d always been pushing our own limits and testing the boundaries of our parents’ patience, and one day we’d decided that we were going to sail over a thousand miles through the open ocean to America, all by ourselves. We were barely ten at the time.

After weeks of planning we’d managed to sneak off, hiding our tracks. We’d almost driven our parents sick with worry when we’d gone missing the first day. By the time we were far enough off to escape interference, we’d announced to everyone the adventure we’d embarked upon. We would have made it, except that halfway there, after a week at sea, our smarticles reserves had begun to deplete. Physically we were perfect, and the weather had been good, but the itchy, desperate feeling of our smarticle supply running low had convinced us to turn around.

My mind hovered back onto Atopia itself, to the million and more Atopians packed in below decks, waiting for the coming hurricanes. Thousands of tourists had been shipped off in a matter of hours when the order had come through, yet none, not even one, of the native Atopians had opted to leave. Even in the face of potential destruction they stayed, wrapped in the warm embrace of pssi. They were afraid of leaving, but why?

I’d only been out about an hour when it finally dawned on me.

It was so obvious it was shocking, and yet so close that it had been impossible to see the forest for the trees. In fact, none of the trees even wanted to see it, never mind the animals in the forest who were lustily eyeing the leaves and branches.

“Sid, I have it, I know what’s going on!” I shot up out of the water in my eureka moment.

Snapping back into my body, I began collapsing the millions of nodes of my collective mind with Nancy. She gasped, our minds and nervous systems shredding apart, and sat up with me. Her breathing was hard and ragged, and she gripped me tightly. I held back onto her.

“And?!” yelled Sid. The gang was all sitting around the tub Nancy and I were in.

“Don’t keep us waiting, son!” added Vicious.

I shook my head.

“Sorry, I can’t tell you yet. I need to talk to Patricia first. This doesn’t make sense. Or maybe it does. I don’t know. I thought I knew her better than this.”

“Aw, come on man!” yelled Vicious. “You can’t be serious!”

“Just let me talk to Patricia first, please, okay?” I asked. “Please, just a tiny bit more patience.”

Wide eyed and on the edge of their seats, they all stared at me in disbelief. Giving Nancy a kiss, I immediately flitted out, sending a high priority request into Patricia’s networks. What was she thinking?

§

Patricia accepted my ping on the first bounce and opened her sensory channels to me. I appeared in her private wood paneled office, sitting in one of her attending chairs. She was sitting across from me behind her desk, and looked like she’d been expecting me.

I just blurted it out. “I know what you’re doing!”

It was foolhardy, perhaps even dangerous, to drop this bomb, but I felt like I knew Patricia. This made it all the more perplexing.

“You’re trying to kill Vince,” I added breathlessly. “The pssi weapons programs, I know about all of it. Are you behind all these disappearances as well, did you steal Willy’s body? Did you sabotage Infinixx? Why are you doing this?”

She sighed and tipped her cigarette into an ornate crystal ashtray, considering me carefully.

“We weren’t trying to kill Vince,” she admitted softly. “I just wanted to keep him occupied. But I had nothing at all to do with the disappearances or what happened to Willy, and certainly nothing to do with Infinixx.”

I stared at her in disbelief.

“I want to say, what happened with your brother,” she continued, grimacing. “I was against all that, but it was what your family wanted at the time. Of course, Hal snapped it up as an opportunity to demonstrate yet another way pssi could remove unhappiness.”

She tapped her cigarette into the ashtray again, and took a sip from her never ending scotch.

I shook my head. Was she trying to bring me into the circle of blame?

“That was a real killer application, all right,” I shot back at her angrily. “Why are you doing this?”

“Since you came to me, why don’t you tell me what we’re doing, Bob?”

She smiled thinly.

I looked at her, shaking my head.

“You’re hooking the world on virtual crack is what you’re doing!”