The Complete Atopia Chronicles

33





Identity: Patricia Killiam



“I THINK THE clinical diagnosis would be sadistic sociopath with multiple personality disorder,” said Marie.

I looked up from my desk at her and nodded. We’d finally managed to piece together what was happening. It was frightening, even more frightening than the news that my own medical systems were on the brink of ultimate failure.

“It’s not what I think you need to think about now,” she added. “I’ll pass this onto Bob.”

“Safely,” I added pointlessly. Marie just nodded back.

Images of Shiva, the great destroyer and creator, floated into my mind. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. He was extremely good at hiding his tracks. We only really had the one incident at Nancy’s birthday party as a window into his mind, and even that was fleeting. Fleeting but infinitely disturbing, and I’d made things worse.

Like a tick in a bear’s fur, he’d burrowed his way into the deepest reaches of the program. He’d pushed all my buttons to get what he wanted, even as a child. More of the problem was that even then, it didn’t all add up.

“Do you think he was really involved in the disappearances of Susie and Cynthia and the others?” I asked Marie. “Why would he attract attention to himself like that with people so close to him?”

“He must be unaware of a part of himself, deceiving himself,” Marie speculated. “It’s the only way he could have passed all our psych tests, but it’s hard to say. Having pssi installed in the developing brain of an unstable sociopathic mind has created something…new, I guess.”

The science of self-deception lay at the heart of modern psychology. The goal of self-deception wasn’t about deceiving the self, but about more effectively deceiving others. Deception was a cognitively demanding activity that left telltale signatures no matter how good the liar. By truly deceiving yourself, on the other hand, you could escape detection, but with the generalized risk of falling out of touch with reality.

This was something we’d compounded with pssi.

Deception of all kinds increased with intelligence. The bigger the neocortex, and the higher the intelligence, the more an organism tended to lie and deceive itself, and Jimmy was about as smart an organism as I’d ever come across. I wasn’t sure it was accurate to say he was even human anymore. Whatever he had become, he was now the master of deception.

“I also think he may have constructed a fantasy world about his own abuse to justify his behavior,” added Marie. “We don’t have any evidence that his parents ever did anything to him.”

I considered this.

“Split personality disorder is almost always the result of abuse as a child. If his parents didn’t abuse him, then who did?”

Marie shrugged.

“If he’s managed to fool himself,” I sighed, “then he’s certainly managed to fool us.”

I wondered about all the ways I’d been fooling myself to arrive at this point.

Self-deception also tracked closely with war and the worst of human evils. Pssi had catapulted human capacity in many ways, but by any measure, Atopia had now become the most deceptive place on earth, and we were about to unleash it on the rest of humanity under the guise of being its savior. The road to hell really was paved with the best of intentions.

All the careful planning to cover every base, to push the future to converge on one stable outcome, it was all slipping away. Then again, control was always an illusion, just another self-deception. I should have known better.

On the other hand, perhaps larger forces were in play. A major transition in human evolution had been the development of trust as an evolutionary step. Pssi had now almost fully passed human evolution from genetic and into memetic encoding, and the speed of the transition was too fast for human culture to catch up. One result was that the new human pssi-forms were becoming more selfish.

In the ultimate extension of this, there was the potential for one singular being to become dominant over the whole super-organism of humanity as billions of people were about to be connected together via the pssi network. On the brink of removing death as an evolutionary force, it was frightening to consider what lay ahead.

What was worse? Allowing billions of people to die, or saving them to live lives of perpetual suffering under the control of a monster? My monster, I added as a footnote to that thought.

I didn’t answer my own question.

Perhaps it would have been impossible for me to see what was happening, no matter what controls I could have put in place. He had used my own blind spot, my latent desire for a child of my own, as my life had begun slip away from me. I could feel my love for him burn in me even as I understood the beast I may have created.

“Can we remove him from the Board somehow? At least get him off the Security Council?” I pondered aloud.

Marie responded by echoing my thoughts more than anything else.

“He’s already aligned himself with powerful supporters, he’s a celebrity in the world media, and I’m sure he’d have some nasty surprises up his sleeve if we tried confronting him in the open,” she replied. “We lack enough hard data on Jimmy to resolve phutures involving him. It’s almost like he’s a ghost.”

I continued the thought for her, “Yes, and if we can’t prove anything, it will look like the disgruntled ramblings of an old woman throwing her last rocks into the glass house.”

I was thinking about all the fuss I’d been raising at the Board meetings about minimizing the addictive effects of pssi. It’d all fallen on deaf ears as they’d reviewed the projected profits, with Hal cheering from the sidelines about being able to clip the addictive circuitry of the brain. Now there was some self-deception at work.

And now, it had all fallen on my doorstep.

“Probably better to keep under the radar for now,” agreed Marie. “I do think that your idea of encouraging the formations of composites should yield some protection from Jimmy.”

“Perhaps.”

“And what about the data from the neutrino telescope?” asked Marie.

I sighed. I’d kept the POND results absolutely locked down, trying to forget it myself. How could it be real? It defied imagination.

“Cut it off from Atopia immediately,” I replied. “If there’s anything to it I want that data far away from here.”

My skin crawled thinking of the ways Hal and Kesselring could spin the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, if it was true and not some artifact of the viral infection.

“Send a report back into the science community that it was a failure, and leave the connection key with the package delivered to Bob and Nancy. But only to them.”

“I’ll take care of it,” she replied simply.

Looking at Marie, I couldn’t believe I felt such love and affection for a machine, a virtual projection that didn’t really exist, something that I’d created. Then again, all our children, biological or not, were created by us, and it wasn’t accurate to say that Marie didn’t exist. I’d never really thought of her as my child before that moment, always as more of a sister. Perhaps she was both.

“After I’m gone, communicate everything to them, right?” I confirmed with Marie. “Send Nancy and Bob out to find Willy’s body.”

“I understand, Patricia, don’t worry.”

“I know, it’s just...”

“I know.”

Silence descended. I had one final point.

“Marie, after I’m gone, I want you to continue to, well, to be.”

“But proxxi terminate with their owners, Patricia. That goes against the whole program.”

“It’s been done before,” I said, smiling. “Anyway, it’s done. I’ve already made a special provision in my will. There are some advantages to being the senior researcher at Cognix.”

“Are you sure?” Marie asked, giving me a quizzical look. “This will create precedent…”

“Exactly,” I smiled. “I think this situation calls for special consideration, and I want you to continue on with the work we’ve started on the Synthetic Being Charter of Rights. Besides…”

“Besides what?”

I looked at Marie carefully.

“Aren’t you the least bit worried about ceasing to exist? Doesn’t this arrangement strike you as unfair?”

She smiled and gently shook her head.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

I let out a quiet laugh at that. I didn’t think this old body had any tears left in it, but I guess it still had a few. Wiping them from my face, I felt my papery skin. So fragile, and yet we dreamt of immortality.

“Everything is in order,” I said quietly, needing to get this over with. “I think I’d like this time to myself. Goodbye Marie, and say goodbye to Nancy for me.”

§

I turned off my pssi for the last time and my office faded into the muted colors of my real world living space, a small apartment near the beaches. It was small, but one of only a handful of them on the surface of Atopia. Almost everyone else lived below deck.

In the end, Jimmy had given me what I wanted—for the world to embrace pssi—but he had exacted his price for it. Perhaps ending my life was something I really wanted, and he’d simply been the instrument of my desire.

If it really was a case of split personality, perhaps there was something to save in Jimmy, perhaps he wasn’t to blame, that he was being manipulated himself. It could be the key to stopping whatever was happening.

All of my medical systems were shutting down. I had chosen this moment myself. Of all the things that pssi could give us, perhaps the least touted was dignity in death. It was just me, by myself in the world for perhaps the first time in nearly half a century.

So this is what reality feels like. I had forgotten.

Wearily, I lifted my ancient body off the chair in the kitchen that Marie had left it sitting on. I decided I wanted to go and inspect my tiny garden out back to see what damage had been wrought by my inattention over the years.

Slowly, limping, I walked out my back door and reached my garden. I looked around. Some plant pots were blown over, and everything had a dull grey tint to it in the dim pre-dawn light. I ambled over to a sun lounger near the back, near an old raspberry bush nearly as decrepit as I was, and collapsed into it. A few last rays of the sun would be nice to catch if I could.

So, I won’t last to see pssi spread into the world. Maybe that was for the best. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with the pace of change anymore, and not sure I wanted to be around and responsible for what might be coming.

My own end, I thought to myself, it had to come, but I’d always managed to suspend disbelief about it. Now there was something we all had a talent for. I laughed and thought of Cody Chavez, living in a world of Elvis impersonators. Maybe Hal was right, maybe Cody was happiest in his suspension of disbelief. Maybe that’s what his life meant to him. Who was I to say otherwise?

“Marie,” I called out, “I have one last story to tell you.”

I couldn’t see or feel Marie anymore, but I knew she was with me. In fact, I knew she would be surrounding and cradling me like a baby right now, and that was a comforting thought. As I began to understand my end was coming, I had begun telling Marie stories of my earlier life, before machines had begun to record memories, before digital trails tracked our pasts out behind us while we blindly forged ahead.

Telling Marie my memories, my stories, made me feel like a part of me would survive on, as well as a part of some of the people in them. I had saved my most important, my most cherished and hidden story, for last.

Memories of the spring of 1940 flooded me now as I spoke, remembering the evacuation of my sisters and I, and all the rest of the children, from London in advance of the bombing campaigns that would signal the start of the Battle of Britain.

We’d been sent to live in the countryside with a nice family, just outside the village of Andover. It was hard to believe at the start, living in such an idyllic setting, that the world was tilting towards war. And spring wasn’t just blooming in the flowers that year, but also in my young heart—my God, to be sixteen again, to see the world through such trusting and naïve eyes.

In practically the next field over from us, they had hastily assembled the new Over Whallop RAF station and airfield, and as the spring gave way to summer we were suddenly overrun by gangs of handsome young men on their way to their missions into the sky.

Visions came to me of the daring young men and their flying machines, sitting carelessly about outside their flapping khaki tents, smoking cigarettes, and with a sudden wail of alarms they would spring off bravely into the sky.

My young man was Aaron Adair, as fitting a name for a flying man as there ever was. I remembered cautious, furtive glances over hedgerows, quiet talks on quiet walks on moonlit nights, a first kiss, the fervor of first love and the squeals of laughter with my sisters in our attic bedroom as I shared it all. And then the dreaded sirens, the fearful waits and joyous returns, the smells of oil and sweat and gunpowder mixed with passionate nights and declarations of undying love.

And then...

I remembered a trembling bicycle ride down a muddy lane, awkwardly and unsteadily splashing through grey puddles. As clear as if it were yesterday, I remembered the lonely squeak of the cow gate opening onto the field, the falling rain soaking me through, and a numb walk towards a smudge in the sodden grass. I stood there, inspecting the dripping remains of my love’s prized Spitfire, its wreckage strewn artlessly across the grassy expanse; burnt, twisted, and slowly fading in time.

Tears streamed down my face, lost in the rain.

I cried as I did then. This was my most private of memories, unspoken to anyone now living, unspoken even to myself in over a century. Having lived through the rest of that horrible war, destroying a generation, I was driven to see an end to pointless conflict, to find a way to cheat death, to find a way to stop it all, and perhaps even to stop time.

My heart would never love again, not in that way. I never married, and focused my mind on finding ways to escape reality, and perhaps, irrationally, to find a way back to him. At least that’s what I’d started out doing, as unspoken as it was. In the end, looking back, it had all taken on a life of its own, and my own love had, in the end, blinded me.

But now, at my own end of time, I remembered, and I remembered why.

My love, perhaps I will find you now.

Wiping away my tears, I gently eased myself back in the lounger, pleased to see that dawn was beginning to break on the horizon. It looked like it would be a nice day. I looked to one side at my long forgotten raspberry bush.

Within its spiny gray branches I was surprised to find, still surviving, one bright red, juicy looking raspberry, standing out in surreal relief from the grayness surrounding it. I leaned over and picked it, rolling it around in my fingertips as I considered my life. I was afraid, but I was also so tired, and the last of my resistance slipped away.

I popped the raspberry into my mouth and began chewing it.

I thought of the billions of humans out there, some asleep, some awake, but most somewhere in between. I thought of the tens of billions of synthetic souls now roaming the multiverse and the infinite inner space we had created together; we and the machines. I wished them all well.

That raspberry was delicious, I couldn’t help thinking as the darkness slipped in. It was so extraordinarily bittersweet.

With a gentle sigh I exhaled my last breath and slipped away as the last of the stars faded above me.

§

In the early morning dusk, a beautiful Monarch butterfly fluttered and danced its way through Dr. Killiam’s garden. Dr. Killiam lay in her chair, finally at peace. The butterfly seemed to consider her for a moment, dancing this way and that above her motionless body, and then fluttered away, gaining altitude.

As it darted back and forth, ever higher, it was joined by a Brown butterfly, marked by strong, concentric circles on its wings. Joyously, the two touched and danced off into the distance, rising above and away to leave Atopia below.

The first rays of sunlight pierced the horizon, illuminating thin, red and gold clouds, high in the aquamarine sky.

A new day was dawning.