Complete Atopia Chronicles Part 51

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 gla.s.s 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 w.i.l.l.y'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 s.p.a.ce, 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 G.o.d, to be sixteen again, to see the world through such trusting and naive eyes.

In practically the next field over from us, they had hastily a.s.sembled 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 pa.s.sionate nights and declarations of undying love.

And then...

I remembered a trembling bicycle ride down a muddy lane, awkwardly and unsteadily splas.h.i.+ng 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 gra.s.s. I stood there, inspecting the dripping remains of my love's prized Spitfire, its wreckage strewn artlessly across the gra.s.sy 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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.u.t.terfly fluttered and danced its way through Dr. Killiam's garden. Dr. Killiam lay in her chair, finally at peace. The b.u.t.terfly seemed to consider her for a moment, dancing this way and that above her motionless body, and then fluttered away, gaining alt.i.tude.

As it darted back and forth, ever higher, it was joined by a Brown b.u.t.terfly, 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.

EPILOGUE.

Ident.i.ty - Bobby Baxter s.h.i.+VERING, I PULLED my sweater tight around me. For where we may have to go, I'd better start getting used to my own body. San Francisco sure was colder than I'd imagined.

From this vantage point, across some boulders and a field of gra.s.s at the edge of a stand of Redwoods we had settled in to camp underneath, I could dimly make out the tops of the Golden Gate Bridge poking out from under a thick blanket of fog rolling into the bay. Night was falling and we'd lit a fire. I extended my hands towards the burning and crackling wood.

So this was what camping was really like. I liked the synthetic version better.

Following encrypted instructions from Marie, we'd gone off the grid as far as possible in as short a time as possible. The state park above San Francisco was a designated network-free zone and, after collecting up some tents and camping supplies in the city itself, we'd been dropped off up here and hiked ourselves to the edge of the forest.

I still couldn't believe Patricia was gone.

Walking around out there, I had the crus.h.i.+ng and numbing sensation of being blind and deaf and dumb even though I could see and hear and talk. Being cut off from the dense communication network on Atopia gave me the feeling we had been transported back into the dark ages. My body fairly sang with the urge to drop it all and get back into the warm, comfortable embrace of the pssi on Atopia, but I resisted it as best I could.

Atopia was the only place I'd ever known, and I'd taken for granted, like breathing, feeling the steady thrum of information through my metasenses. My phantoms were still there, arrayed around me in empty hypers.p.a.ces, stretching out and away from me, but my metasenses were completely numb. It felt as if most of my body had been amputated.

It was true what they said-the future was already here, just unevenly distributed, and while I belonged to the future, there I was, suddenly in the past with the rest of humanity. The world, however, was about to receive the gift of the future we'd been working on so hard for them, and they could barely wait to get their hands on it.

I laughed silently to myself. People had to be more careful about what they wished for.

Vince had come with us. He figured whatever Patricia's last instructions were, they might possess some key to his own problem. Sid had come, as well as Brigitte and w.i.l.l.y.

Well, w.i.l.l.y had sort of come. Up here in the state park, there was no network connectivity so we'd had to embed a splinter of him into Brigitte for the trip into the woods. Brigitte seemed to enjoy having her own bit of w.i.l.l.y to take everywhere with her, and I doubted w.i.l.l.y would be getting that splinter back anytime soon.

Martin had elected to stay behind, to stay with our parents, something I'd thought sensible as well at the time. All of our proxxi had made the trip as well, embedded as they were into our bodies. So there the nine of us sat around the campfire-me, Robert, Sid, Vicious, Vince, Hotstuff, Brigitte and her proxxi Bardot, and w.i.l.l.y's slightly confused splinter.

Nancy hadn't come with us despite me pleading with her, but this was before we'd learned what Jimmy had become. I should have tried harder, should have forced her to come along with us right away as Patricia had asked. Nancy had insisted she would catch up with us, but it was too late.

Jimmy had asked her to stay on a while to help with the investigation and all the preparations for the Atopian state funeral for Patricia, despite the rumors of her working with the Terra Novans. Jimmy had been the one that had sponsored the state funeral, despite resistance from the Council, so Nancy had felt some obligation towards him. With a sense of dread, I realized Jimmy was keeping her there on purpose.

A week had pa.s.sed since we'd left, and newly pa.s.sed const.i.tutional changes on Atopia had enabled Jimmy and Rick to maintain the state of emergency, a state of emergency that would never end.

Having barely survived destruction, the once cherished civil liberties that Atopia had been founded upon, and without Patricia there to defend them, were quickly and unceremoniously thrown out the window. Almost overnight Atopia had transformed itself into a police state, and Jimmy was quickly ama.s.sing a private psombie army-for protection, of course.

In the ensuing investigation, it'd been discovered that the viral skin had been vectored from the Terra Novans through Patricia's own specialized pssi system. The current best guess was that it had been her old student Mohesha who had implanted it. As a novel zero-day infection, Patricia had gone on to infect everyone she'd come into contact with, which had then spread quickly into everyone on Atopia.

Command and control of the virus had been regulated by leaking data back and forth through w.i.l.l.y's persistent conscious connection from Terra Nova and into Atopia. Worse still, ripping apart the code, they'd revealed a lot of similarities with the viral skins Sid had been creating. To top everything off, secret communications between Patricia and the Terra Novans, and even Sintil8, were discovered, although the content of these were unknown.

All in all, it'd cast a dark shadow on our group.

Patricia had kept secret her decision to not terminate Marie when she'd died. She had encoded Marie onto a miniature data cube and smuggled it off Atopia right before the lockdown had started. We'd picked up the data cube containing Marie from an antique store in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, the cube hidden in what looked like a walking stick.

After lighting a fire at our campsite, we'd started a private network to connect us all, and awoken Marie from the data cube. Her ethereal image had risen before us above the fire, wavering in the night air, a ghost that told us a truly frightening nighttime tale as we huddled together, explaining the monster that Jimmy had become and the danger we all faced.

I yearned for my days back on the beach.

Within days, hundreds of millions of people would be fusing their bodies and minds into the pssi network. While the rate of change had already been hurtling forward, it would now take an even dramatically steeper upward trajectory.

With conscious transference at the brink of reality, most humans alive today would achieve an immortality of sorts. Our souls were about to go from the stuff of legend into the stuff of hard and fast reality.

That was the big picture.

In the short term, with pssi released, they were predicting a precipitous drop in consumer goods spending, a large part of which would be redirected into the pssi network. Economies would falter, and more wars would be sp.a.w.ned, and those with entrenched interests in supplying material goods would launch a series of attacks on Atopia itself. All of this had been previewed, and was the reason Atopia had been built with its own defensive weapons.

With a decrease in material consumption, the resource pressures would ease, and gradually, over the years, conflicts would die out. With a growing majority of people getting their every need cared for within the pssi multiverse, the desire to struggle would flame out. Pssi was the great equalizer of the cla.s.ses.

Of course, there was the darker side.

While on Atopia we'd taken a relatively benign approach in our quest to understand the capabilities of pssi, it was only dawning on me the terrible things that the billions of people in the rest of the world may end up using it for. It was a fair bet that some cheerful souls were already thinking up some fearsome ways of weaponizing it.