Complete Atopia Chronicles

Prologue

“I can be good at anything I want,” I explained proudly. “I just need to apply myself.”

I smiled impressively and took another swig from the bottle of fermented seaweed. It was my fourteenth birthday and I was drunk. Or rather, it was our fourteenth birthday.

My brother and I were sitting on railings at one of the entrances to the passenger cannon, suspended hundreds of feet above the Atopian beaches. The steady thwump, thwump of the cannon discharging its nightly cargo shipments reverberated powerfully in the air around us. We weren’t supposed to be here.

“How did you override the security controls again?” asked my brother.

“Easy as pie!” I boasted. “Get your proxxi in here, I’ll download the details and show him.”

My brother looked away towards the breaking surf below.

“You always want to explain it to my proxxi,” he complained.

“Come on, seriously?” I chuckled. “You know you’re not good at security stuff.”

“I’m not good at anything,” he replied quietly. “How is it possible that you have such an easy time with everything, but I struggle so much? Aren’t twins supposed to be the same?”

“We’re not identical twins,” I laughed.

He looked hurt.

“Hey now, come on. Don’t exaggerate. You’re like the funniest guy I know. That’s a gift!”

He sighed. “It’s the same with everyone. Everyone wants to talk to my proxxi.”

“That’s not true, come on.”

He sighed again, but then he brightened up. “But you are amazing, Bob. You can do anything.”

I smiled. “See? Now that’s the spirit!”

1 Identity: Bobby Baxter

I am Temujin, great warrior of the Mongol clan of the Ong Khan. The year is 1198 and the heat of the summer solstice has baked the steppes dry and cracked. We will soon replenish Mother Earth and soak Her with the blood of our enemies, and I will rise to my rightful and God-given place among my people as the Universal Ruler, the Ghengis Khan.

Opening my eyes slowly, I listened to the crisp snapping of our banners flapping in the breeze and watched the Tatars amassing in the dusty distance on the plains below. Sitting outside the royal yurt with my trusty saber balanced on my knees, my body was flowing and pulsing with the power of my ancestors.

Today would end in victory, or in glorious death.

“Bob, do you ever get the feeling none of this is real?” asked Martin, sitting over to my right with a great wad of half chewed venison dripping from his mouth. His eyebrows were cocked high as he leaned towards me with the question, waving the rest of the bloody deer haunch around in circles for emphasis.

While my brother had always scored great in logic and linguistics, he’d just as consistently scored extremely low in existential intelligence. I groaned.

“Dude, you are totally ruining this for me.”

I’d asked him to be my partner in the gameworlds today, at the urging of our mother, but I was feeling like I’d live, or die, to regret the decision. A sinking feeling settled into my gut.

“Yeah I know, but, you know what I mean,” he continued, enthusiastically diving in to rip another hunk of meat off the bone. “I mean, how can I know that I really exist?”

I studied him carefully, deciding what to say next, but right now I needed to prop up our audience stats. Sid and the rest of the guys were counting on me.

“In a nutshell, my friend, you can’t,” I replied, working up an angle to get his head in the game. “I think, therefore I am, as Descartes famously put it in 1644. Since then, really no progress.”

“Mmmmm,” was all Martin could add philosophically as he looked skywards. “So how can I be sure that you’re not just some gameworld zombie?”

“Again, my friend, you can’t,” I replied. “Although from my point of view, the issue is rather more about you.” I laughed and he joined in. “But if we’re worrying about whether people around us are mindless zombies, then the question is rather moot, no?”

Martin smiled at that, wiping his greasy face with the back of one hand. Before we could continue, Vicious rode up. Vicious was my best friend Sid’s proxxi. A seventies British punk rocker, in his best pasty whiteness, looked awfully comical with knobby knees poking out from under Mongol battle armor. The leather helmet must have been hell on his spiky hair.

A big smile spread across my face.

Vicious could sense my amusement and grimaced, but gamely soldiered on. Trying to keep in character, he leaned towards Martin and said, “Sire, Master Sid asked me to bring you your mount and...ah...ah fook it, mate, yer horse is ’ere.”

Right behind him rode up my proxxi Robert, also bringing my mount. Wisely, he said nothing as he tossed me the reigns, looking towards Vicious and smiling. Vicious scowled back, and they both trotted off to get Sid and themselves ready.

I sheathed my saber, Martin dropped the remains of his meal on the floor, and we stood to get ready.

“I mean, I know this is a gameworld,” said Martin over the top of his horse, “but don’t you ever get the feeling, back in the world, that all of this is impossible?”

I laughed.

Back in the world—now there was an idea fraught with complications. In a cosmos already sporting an infinite number of universes, in just one of these we’d begun spawning our own infinity of digital universes. Collectively, they’d begun calling the whole jumble the multiverse, on the assumption that infinity and infinity overlapped somewhere.

If there were an infinite number of universes, then logically one of them had to have exactly the train of events that an arbitrary gameworld, like the one we were in now, had going on. So when we flitted into a gameworld, in a sense we were creating windows into the parallel universe the simulation was tracking.

According to some, there was an equivalency of actually being there if a conscious observer couldn’t distinguish the difference. So, the question of the day was this: were we just creating simulated worlds, or were we actually tunneling past the event horizon of our own universe to create portals into parallel universes?

Perception was reality. Was therefore, reality equivalent to perception? A slippery slope if there ever was one. Thus the question of this world being real or not was rather more troubling than it may have seemed.

I leaned forward to pat and stroke my horse’s neck, calming it as it strained around to look at me. It knew today was going to be bloody. Taking a grip on my tall wooden-framed saddle, with one foot in a stirrup, I returned to Martin’s question.

“So what exactly do you mean—is all of this impossible?”

I knew it would be impossible to win this battle without settling whatever was on his mind. I looked towards him as I swung up onto my horse.

“Look, I’m not stupid, I know all the stuff about the infinite number of alternate bubbly universes, this one springing from that, all spawning into each other,” replied Martin. “Whatever. It still doesn’t answer my real question.”

I settled comfortably into my saddle and we started off. The Mongolian saddle was designed to allow the horse to choose its canter, leaving the rider free to deal with other tasks—it was more of a platform than a saddle, a fighting platform. These guys had been way ahead of their time. I twisted around to check my quiver of arrows.

“Which is?”

“Why something and not nothing?”

My patience was beginning, as often with him, to wear thin. Why was it that human beings had this God-shaped hole in their heads that needed to be filled when the mind grabbed at straws? God certainly wasn’t a part of my life, not anymore.

“What’s going on, you caught religion or something?” I asked, catching glimpses of the Mongol warriors praying to their shamanistic gods as we began trotting through the yurt city.

Rising smoke from the cooking fires enveloped us, and the place was thick with the tension of the coming bloodshed. I raised my fist in a show of power and victory to those that turned to watch me pass. I felt suddenly angry.

“Do you know how stupid it is that you’d believe in God?”

Martin shrunk away at the criticism. “What, just because you don’t, you think everyone else is stupid? So you think mum joining the Elèutheros is stupid? Sid is a member, do you think he’s stupid?”

I sighed. It wasn’t his fault.

“No, that’s not it. Sid’s different. And don’t drag mum into this…”

Our mother had been disappearing further and further into her religion, even as the technology had sped further ahead. The Christian Elèutheros sect had gained an incredibly strong following on Atopia, pitching itself against the libertarian ideals that Atopia was founded upon, against what they perceived as the ultimate decay of society. Sid was a part of the Elèutheros hacking community, a somewhat different side to the sect than my mother. I didn’t quite understand it all.

“You always treat everyone like they’re stupid,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “Anyway, that doesn’t really answer anything, it’s just replacing one non-starter for another.” Martin shrugged. “It’s kind of giving up, religion, isn’t it?”

We trotted along for a bit. I said nothing, letting him finish his thoughts while I calmed my own down.

“I guess it would be comforting, though, to give in to faith, especially if you really believed in some sort of supernatural evil,” Martin said reflectively as we reached the outskirts of our camp. “But really, what’s it all for?”

“Now you sound like you’re talking about the meaning of life,” I replied.

Crap, he was all over the place and I needed his head in the game, not distracted with metaphysics. He’d been terrible in the gameworlds lately, and I could see why with all this stuff floating around in his head.

I checked my dimstim stats and my fans weren’t digging the philosophical talk. I’d better cut this short and get to the blood and guts.

“Martin,” I said, turning to him and smiling with brotherly love, “I will share with you my personal philosophy on the topic.”

He shrugged and smiled as we bounced up and down. I began my performance.

“First off, you can’t answer the creation question. You need to double think it out of your brain.”

We trotted along the front line of my amassing warriors while I let this settle. Martin took out one of his daggers to inspect it.

“Second, the only meaning to life is the one that you give it,” I continued, “and don’t let anyone tell you any different.”

Martin considered this, nonplussed as he tested the edge of his dagger. I’d saved the best bit for last.

“Finally,” I opined grandly, “we will never resolve our existential angst in our identity world, and this is why we play out here.”

“What, like an escape?” he said, crinkling his nose, rubbing the dagger against his stubble.

“Not just an escape, my friend, it goes much deeper than that. Out there, at home,” I said, pointing towards the sky as if we’d descended from it, which in a sense we had, “you can’t get a satisfactory answer as to whether there is a Creator or if there is a meaning to it all. If you really sit down and think about it, it’ll just give you a headache, right?”

He shrugged his agreement.

“Here, though, in the gameworlds, in this world—there is a definite Creator. Whoever built this game, they are the Creator here,” I explained. “And there is a purpose—whatever it was they designed the gameworld for. For instance, today, we kick the shit out of the Tatars. That is the God-given purpose of existing here today and I know this for an indisputable fact.”

A smile began to creep across his face. He put the dagger away in his vest.

“The kicker, my friend, is that this isn’t just a game. If you believe, if you truly believe, then this place becomes real, and we know God and his plan intimately.” I raised one hand into the air and wagged my finger. “So to answer your original question Martin, this is real.”

Martin smiled ever wider. I was enjoying it, too, and our audience stats began to gain. My body surged with excitement, and my disbelief melted away into this reality. Sid, Robert and Vicious joined us at the center of the massing troops as I finished my monologue.

“This is not just an escape my friends, this is not just a game!” I shouted. “This is not just entertainment! This satisfies and solves a deep seated existential pain that cannot be answered in any other way!”

The excitement grew in Martin’s eyes.

“Martin!” I cried, “are you with me?!”

I raised my saber and bow, reaching skywards into the early morning sunshine. A flock of birds took to wing far in the distance.

“Are you going to kick some existential ass with me today?”

“I’m with you Bob!” Martin screamed.

The warriors around us roared, and with that, we galloped off towards the massing Tatars, surging once more unto the breach.

“Today, we ride with God!”

My army thundered across the steppes and into destiny.

2

What was i again? I felt funny, disconnected, discom-BOB-ulated. Giggling, I looked down at myself, trying to focus my meandering mind. I had the shape of a giant yellow blob…wait, more like a giant yellow BOB…heh heh heh...with plastic skin, floating amid other aimlessly drifting blobs. Taking a deep breath, my blobness expanded and then contracted.

That was very satisfying, I thought, so I did it again, and a sense of relaxation began to soak through my membranes. My consciousness slipped backwards and sideways through time and space.

Another smaller blob, blue, collided with me, interrupting my introspection. The blue blob took a liking to me, and like two oil drops meeting on a watery surface, it began to merge into me, its blueness fusing with my yellowness to produce a bulging green smudge on my side. I tasted fresh blueberries in the back of my mouth.

Reaching out to the other blobs nearby, I discovered that I could swim through the goo and sweep them aside or towards me with some phantom telekinesis, tasting them as I went. And so began the game of collecting the tastiest blobs towards me, generating a flurry of savory color that mottled into my body as I twisted and spun through the rainbow rain.

After frothing things up so much, I couldn’t see anymore, so I stopped to let things settle. And the tiny blobs tickled all over as they floated up past me. I shivered. But these weren’t blobs, they were bubbles, and everything smelled so suddenly salty that I realized I was actually in the ocean.

Shafts of sunlight were stabbing down from the airy world above, to fade into the watery blackness below. I looked down at myself again to jiggle my newly hatched tendrils, and with an excited rush began wriggling off at full steam towards a mass of phosphorescent creatures dancing nearby in the voluminous darkness.

A translucent worm popped into view beside me so I halted.

Both of us were frozen amid specks of slowly sinking organic detritus that hung soundlessly in a stop-motion cloud around us. The worm snacked on one of the specks, and then another, watching me sideways. Curiouser and curiouser.

“Bob,” said the worm. “Bob, hey buddy! Is that you?”

Yes, I thought, I am Bob.

“Yeah, I’m Bob. I mean, yeah, it’s me,” I replied, dazed and confused in a happy sort of way.

“Bob, it’s me, Sid. Where have you been? It’s been crazy down here. You should have been there for the last set! It was freaking intense. Things got a little weird for a while there and then I suddenly thought, jeez, where’s Bob? And so I came over here to clear my head, and whammo, there you were. Crazy, huh?”

I giggled as my mind seeped into the here and now. That’s right. I’d come here with Sid, out to Humungous Fungus beyond The Looking Glass. We’d dropped into this chillworld to watch the slingshot test fire as part of the sensorgy party that’d been going on for a few days.

Memories oozed into my amoebic brain.

“Hey Sid, wazzzzzup?” was all I could think to say.

“Not much, man, not much at all,” Sid-worm giggled back. “Hey, they’re about to start the slingshot test, you ready to go?”

“Giddy up.”

The sensorgy transmogrification of the slingshot weapons test was still resonating hard as we relaxed at the peripheries of Humungous Fungus. The fiery might of the weapons demonstration had been funneled into a multisensory party mash-up that all the pssi-boys and pssi-girls had been waiting weeks for, but now it was over and a post-party depression had begun to sink in.

Most of our friends were emo-porning their way down from their highs, but I preferred to stick with the old school process.

“That was intense, man!” glowed Sid-worm. We were floating through a patch of dimensionless deprivation space, trying to cool off our nervous systems.

I munched on some mouth candy at the edge of the dimensionless space, trying to think of what I was trying to think about, and then, sudden clarity as the lost idea reformed itself. My disembodied mind latched firmly onto the thought like a drowning man at sea finding a life raft, my consciousness pulling itself up for a breath of fresh air.

“Oh yeah, hey, Sid, so do you really think I should talk to him? I mean, it’s not going to make a difference anyway.”

“Absolutely my friend, I think this is more about you, about your experience. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I replied, unconvinced.

My sense of wonder at the world around me had begun to lose its fizziness, and my tendrils were going limp. As I blinked and looked around, I could still see the bending and patterning of the visual hallucinations, but my head had snapped back into some sort of real space.

I sighed.

“Anyway, time to get back. It’s my brother’s birthday and my dad asked me to come home for a family breakfast.”

“I’m sorry, I forgot,” Sid worm said softly. He looked up into the light, considering something. “Bob, I love you, buddy, and maybe it’s not for me to say…”

“What?” I was still pretty high. Was he asking me a question?

“Well, maybe you should slow down a bit. You’re wasted all the time. I understand, but, well…”

I laughed. “Hey, if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black.”

“I’m just saying…”

“I know what you’re saying,” I admitted after a pause. “Look, I appreciate it, but let’s just get going.”

An urgent ping from Robert, my proxxi, arrived.

“My dad is already complaining about me being late,” I added, looking at the ping.

“Yeah, all right. Let’s head.”

With that we began to surge upwards towards the light, leaving the dancing creatures below. I remembered when my brother and I used to dance in Humungous Fungus together under the lights of the phosphorous jellies. It seemed like just yesterday.

3

Growing up on Atopia was great and all, but for me, pssi—the poly-synthetic sensory interface—was only good for two things; playing the gameworlds and getting stoned. Oh, and I guess it was cool for surfing too, so three things. Or, actually four. It was great for hiding the fact that I was stoned.

I was still buzzing from my excursion into Humungous Fungus, but I had Robert, my proxxi who controlled my body while I was out of it, filtering my movements and speech so that I appeared perfectly normal, or at least close to normal. Robert tended to overdo it in these situations, and if he wasn’t my proxxi I’d swear he did it on purpose.

As I came out onto the sun deck of our habitat overlooking the ocean, Robert nimbly handled seating me at the place open opposite my Dad. Martin was sitting to my left and my mum to my right, and sitting behind my mum was a guy dressed up in a toga with weather beaten leather thongs on his feet.

It was a beautiful morning, with a slight breeze just offsetting the unseasonably hot weather we’d been having lately. Gulls squawked in the distance over the kelp forests while waves swept calmly past on their way into Atopia.

My dad scrutinized me as I sat down.

“Bob, the least you could have done was be on time for your brother’s birthday breakfast.”

Martin smiled at me weakly from across the table. He knew I’d been out partying all night, and I felt suddenly bad. I smiled back at him and shrugged apologetically.

“And your food is cold already,” added my Dad.

Robert was filtering my speech, so when I responded, “So is your heart,” in response to my dad’s predictable dig, it came out of my mouth as, “Yes, sir. Very sorry for being late.”

This, of course, sounding like nothing I’d say, immediately got me in trouble.

“Are you stoned again?”

Robert did a pretty good job of having my face feign surprise. I just giggled away, safely detached inside my head.

“No sir,” responded Robert using my voice, while I sub-vocalized to Sid who was ghosting in on this, “Wouldn’t you be with a family like this?” Sid laughed too.

My dad leaned over and looked deep into my eyes. I burst out laughing on the inside while Robert covered for me.

“Dad, come on, I just didn’t sleep well last night, okay?”

Good one, Robert. That was true. I was out getting high all night and hadn’t slept a wink. My dad narrowed one eye and then just shook his head, straightening up and going back to buttering his toast.

“Anyway, Jimmy isn’t even here yet,” I pointed out, “why are you giving me so much trouble?”

“Jimmy has important things he needs to be taking care of right now.”

Unlike some of the people at this table, he didn’t need to add. It was like Jimmy was more of a son to him than his own sons were. It was always Jimmy did this and Jimmy did that, and I was getting more than tired of it. I sighed and angrily shook my head. It looked like it was going to be another one of those conversations.

“Bob,” complained my dad, “you’re twenty one years old. When are you going to find some direction in your life? You need to move on, son. You should have been here to see the slingshot test fire with us. We were all here. Jimmy was right there in the control room with Commander Strong.”

Here we go again. Robert deleted my expletives when he responded for me.

“Dad, I did watch the slingshots,” Robert replied for me, truthfully, “and I am doing something with my life. I have one of the top rated dimstims out there.”

It was true.

I was a professional vacationer, and thousands of people at a time paid money to stimswitch into me when I was out surfing. It was great money, and when pssi was released into the rest of the world I was going to be huge.

My dad wasn’t impressed at my entrepreneurial ambitions, however, and just ignored what we’d said.

“You have such an opportunity, Bob. What is happening here is a once-in-a-lifetime event and you’re right in the middle of it.”

That’s the problem right there, I thought, but this wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“I’m also one of the best surfers in the world,” I pointed out, something I figured any parent should be proud of. My imagined ranking wasn’t entirely fair since the rest of the world’s surfers didn’t have pssi, yet, which justified my obsessive need to be out there all the time.

My dad continued his ignoring game.

“You were one of the very first pssi-kids. You were top in your class at the Solomon House Academy before you dropped out,” he began to sermonize, wagging his toast-buttering knife at me. “Patricia Killiam was just asking me the other day about you, saying how impressed she was with your work when you were a Class I Freshman. She said there could still be a place at the Solomon House for you.”

He raised his eyebrows impressively as the knife came to rest pointing directly at me. My dad was the director of public relations for the entire pssi project, so it wasn’t just me he was chatting up about all this.

I groaned and rolled my eyes as I clicked off my proxxi filter. I’d handle this myself.

“A lot of stuff has happened shince then, wooden you say?”

I slurred out half the words. This got my Dad’s head shaking again and he looked skyward.

“Yes,” he responded, looking at me and then to Martin, “and look how well Martin is doing.”

He motioned with the knife across to the other side of the table. Martin smiled at me weakly, not wanting to get involved.

“Yeah, look at him,” I shot back, narrowing my eyes at both of them. “Martin and all of you are just the picture of shuper-booper family togatherness. And quit talking about Jimmy all the time, we’re your real sons.”

I aimed for thick sarcasm, emphasizing ‘real’, but I wasn’t sure if my enunciation was clear enough to convey it beneath the drugs. What had I taken again?

“Bob, honey, don’t be so mad. It’s his birthday today, let’s please be nice,” came my mum’s quavering voice. “Forgiveness is the key to life. Forgive yourself, son.”

I sighed. It looked like this was going to be a tag team event. I could see the guy behind my mum in the toga and sandals begin to lean forward as if to add something, but I leaned his way and angrily waved my finger at him to cut short whatever was coming from that corner.

“Not a word from you, okay?” I spat at him.

I was as patient as the next guy, but my mum having her personal Jesus following her around like a puppy dog, so that she could chat to him all the time, was getting on my nerves. It wasn’t so bad if her Jesus just sat there and spoke when spoken to, but it really drove me nuts when he started jumping into conversations.

“Mum,” I asked, turning to her, “what do I have to forgive myself for?”

“I don’t know, son. You have to figure that out for yourself,” she replied softly, in the way that only mothers can. “I know you can son, you have special abilities.”

My dad rolled his eyes, shaking his head at the three of us. He didn’t like it when mum started talking like this.

Our family had something of an unusual history, filled with flashes of brilliance and corners of darkness. My great-great-grandfather had been something of a nut. He claimed to have been able to speak with the dead and move objects with his mind. It was something my dad was ashamed of.

My grandfather had been almost as bad, and he and my father had stopped speaking a long time ago when my father had left New York to accept a job on the Washington beltway. The lunacy tended to skip a generation. My dad was just waiting for me to starting hear voices, and I honestly couldn’t blame him for worrying about me using drugs.

“There is evil in the world, son,” added Jesus for good measure.

I shot him my own evil glance.

“Only the evil that we make,” I replied, feeling suddenly defeated.

“Yes, the evil that we make.”

That stopped everyone in their tracks. I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes, fighting frustration on the one hand and a general sense of not being sure what was happening on the other. Maybe I could try a different tack.

“Look, all this stuff is great, but technology can make you stupid, you know?”

My addled brain was trying to find some way out of these woods I’d wandered it into. All four of them stared at me.

“Like a generation ago, Eskimos didn’t even have a word for ‘lost,’ and now without GPS they can barely find their way out of a frozen paper bag.”

“I believe they’re called Inuit,” suggested Martin. I looked at him hopelessly.

“That’s not the point. Look, I’m stuck in this thing, and I love all you guys,” I said, really thinking that I love most of you guys. “I have kind of a love-hate relationship with pssi right now and I want to use this stuff the way I want to. Okay, dad?”

My dad just shrugged.

“Okay, Bob. Whatever you think is best.”

He clearly didn’t think it was best.

“Just leave me to do stuff the way I want, in the time I want,” I said, grabbing some croissants and a glass of orange juice. “Anyway this was great. I’m going surfing. Is that okay with everyone?”

I was going to check on Vince to see if he wanted to go surfing.

Vince was the man.

4

The sense of touch was the most underappreciated of all the senses, at least of the senses the rest of the world had. When the first elemental life had ventured out into the primordial goo, it was its sense of touch that kept it safe from danger.

Touch was the most ancient of our senses, existing before any sight, sound, taste, or smell existed. It was essential to the feeling of things being a part of your body. When you played tennis, did you think about the racquet hitting the ball as you swung? No. The racquet became a part of you. Tools that began as extensions of our bodies soon became a part of it.

It was the same with any tool we used, and pssi made it possible to make tools out of information flow in the multiverse and incorporate into our bodies in much the same way.

For me, the flow of information was an apt metaphor. As surfing became my obsession at a young age, my innovation had been to remap my tactile sense into the water around me.

Sitting on my surfboard, bobbing up and down between the swells, I could feel the pressure and shape and even the temperature of the water’s surface around me through my skin, and the thousands of neurons attached to each hair follicle could sense tiny subsurface eddies and water currents.

After nearly twenty years of dedicated practice, my brain had neuroplastically reformatted to devote a large part of itself to my water-sense, and I now had the most highly attuned tactile array of any pssi-kid, or for that matter, anyone else in the world. Sitting with my eyes closed, I could feel the water moving and undulating around me as a perfectly natural and integral part of my body.

I was one with the water, and it was one with me.

Still a little hung-over from the previous evening, I opened my eyes to awake from my reverie. Atopia sure was pretty from out here, with its thick forests rising up from white sandy beaches. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move and a beautiful stag suddenly burst forth from the forest underbrush. We eyed each other for a moment, and then he disappeared.

Above decks, the floating island of Atopia was covered in forests that were teaming with ‘wild’ animals, but like everything else out there, their neural systems were loaded with the smarticles that floated in the air and water around us. Everything here was a part of the pssi network, but I doubted that the animals ever realized they were off in virtual worlds as they stampeded through synthetic savannahs while vet-bots tended to their real bodies in downtime.

Not much wild was left in the world today. It was ironic that tourists now lined up to come to a completely artificial island built to perfect synthetic reality, all to enjoy a shred of the old reality hiding inside it by dusting themselves down in smarticles.

Smarticles were the pixie dust that permeated everything on Atopia, a system of nanoscale particles that worked as both a sensor and communication network, floating everywhere in the air and water. They suffused through the bodies of living creatures to lodge into their nervous systems to form the foundation of pssi.

Pssi enabled not just jumping off into virtual worlds, but also the sharing of experiences and even bodies. A philosopher had once rhetorically asked what it was like to be a bat, meaning that it was something we could never know, but out here on Atopia, you could inhabit a bat, a bear, a fish, a shark, a tree, and even, sometimes, yourself.

The beaming sun was drying the salt water into crystals on my skin, making it itchy as it baked, and I scratched my neck and shifted positions on my board. A breeze mixed the sea air with the musty odor of a tangle of seaweed floating nearby.

While the water was cold, my pssi tuned it out and I was perfectly comfortable. I just had to be careful my muscles didn’t get too sluggish when it came time for action.

Seagulls squawked and wheeled in the sky, and otters were playing out in the kelp not far away, chattering away about whatever otters chattered about. Some were floating around on their backs, eating a breakfast of clams they had scrounged from aquaculture bins below.

Out here I felt a certain peace that escaped me elsewhere, a deep meditative calm outside the madness. I came out here often to think about Nancy, to think about my brother, to think about how I had messed everything up. Looking up, I could see nimbus clouds striping the blue cathedral of the sky.

It was just another day in paradise.

After some fuss, Vince Indigo, the famous founder of PhutureNews, had agreed to come surfing with me this morning. He’d become my regular surf buddy this past year, but had recently, and suddenly, dropped off the map.

Convincing him to come out this morning had been a major struggle, and even then, he didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. He was just staring off into space, not his usual chatty self. I was about to call out to Vince, to see what was bugging him, when I was interrupted.

“Hey.”

I looked down to find Martin sitting on the front of my board. We bobbed up and down in the swells together.

“Hey to you too, buddy,” I responded sheepishly. “Sorry about this morning, I know it was your birthday.”

Martin always kept the same clean-cut, square jawed image going despite the vagaries of fashion—fashion being so ugly these days, apparently, that its look had to be changed almost hourly. I grinned back into his pale blue eyes, a reflection of my own, and admired the tight buzz cut he was sporting today. Buzz Aldrin came to mind, or perhaps better, Buzz Lightyear.

You could hardly have imagined two twins more different.

“Don’t worry about it. Dad always gets worked up about that stuff, I don’t care.”

“Yeah he sure does,” I laughed, “and thanks for not ratting on me. So, Inuit huh? No Eskimos left in this world today?”

“Not according to me, I guess.”

We laughed together. It was nice.

“I just get so tired of him talking about Jimmy all the time,” I added, and Martin nodded.

When we were growing up here, I’d been just about the only one who’d tried befriending Jimmy. He’d been something of an oddball kid, but he shared the same birthday as my brother and I, so I guess I’d felt some kind of natural affinity towards him.

When his parents had abandoned Jimmy as a teenager, Patricia Killiam, his godmother and head of Solomon House Research Center, had asked our family to take him in. No good deed goes unpunished, as they said, and the downward spiral our family had been in, just continued ever steeper. To our father, Jimmy was now the shining star and savior of our family honor.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” agreed Martin.

“I guess it’s hard to be encouraging if your son is a stoner surfer,” I laughed. “Anyway, who cares? I’m doing what I love.”

“Then what more could you ask for?”

I laughed and shrugged.

“Got some big action today?” he asked, changing the topic.

“Huge.”

I was sure he’d already checked out the big barrels being laid down across the northern crescent. Storm systems were generating some dangerous waves today, and that was just how I liked it.

“Anything interesting coming in?”

One of my phuturecasts was focused on incoming swells as it predicted the shape and size of the break, how the pipe developed and a dozen other factors. I could just sit here and watch the horizon for waves, but this way I could track swells coming from miles out and select the perfect one to get set at just the right point.

“Yeah, there have been a few nice ones, but I’m waiting for the real beast.”

Martin laughed. “Always the perfectionist, huh?”

“Well, with some things anyway.”

“Yeah, with some things.” He smiled and looked away.

“Bob!” came a yell from across the water. It was Vince, waving at us. “Bob, I need to get going!”

“Already?”

“Yeah, I need to get back to that thing.”

“I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do,” I observed.

Vince was one of the richest guys in the world, and lately all he’d be doing was surfing with me. I wondered what had suddenly gotten his hair on fire.

“Anyway, ping me if you change your mind. Hey, you should check out all that weird stuff on the news channels, and good luck!”

“Thanks, Bob,” he replied as his primary subjective flitted off, leaving his proxxi to guide his body home, “and good luck to you to!”

Both Martin and I waved goodbye, and then sat silently for a few minutes, enjoying the sea, sky and silence.

Martin looked down awkwardly. He was struggling with something.

“Bob, we should probably have a chat. I want to understand what’s going on with you.”

I looked down too.

“Yeah, I’ve been wanting to talk to you too…”

Maybe the time was right to bring up the gorilla in the room, but just then my metasenses started tingling.

“… but maybe in a few minutes?” I blurted out.

I detached my primary subjective point of view to spin it far out into the Pacific. My viewpoint coasted in just above the water, following a monster swell that was making its way towards us. It was huge, at least twenty feet deep, even out in the open ocean, and as I followed, it sprayed and frothed angrily, surging powerfully towards the glimmering speck of Atopia in the distance.

“This is the one I’ve been waiting for! I totally want to talk, but could I catch this wave first?”

I snapped hard back into my body and, using a phantom, punched up a visual overlay of how this wave would be breaking in a few minutes.

“No problem,” Martin laughed, pointing at the simulation. “Oh yeah, that’s gonna be huge!”

The wave would peak at nearly forty feet and generate an almond shaped pipe that would continuously sweep past the northern crescent for more than two miles. The system selected an optimal drop-in point and I quickly plotted some possible surf paths from ideas I had. It was a big wave and I’d have to travel fast to catch it right. The triangular fin of a shark I’d commandeered appeared, slicing through the water behind me, and I reached out to catch it and began racing across the water.

“Nice,” said Martin.

We skimmed the waves, the wind barely ruffling his hair. He was admiring my handiwork on the projection floating between us.

“So you’re going to pull a dead man stall, switch back to hide in the barrel and then finish with a rocket Tchaikovsky to back hang two?”

“Yes sir, that’s the plan,” I replied with a grin. “Hey can you switch to the back with everyone else so I can get this show on the road?”

Martin disappeared, and I let go of the shark’s fin and leaned forward on my board to begin paddling to the drop in, taking big, clean strokes. As the social cloud buzzed about the impending ride, my dimstim stats began surging as thousands of people stimswitched into me to enjoy the ride.

It was a funny feeling knowing that thousands of people were inside my skin. I couldn’t feel anything but I could sense it, and it sent shivers down my spine. As I snapped my full water-sense into place, the world dropped away, my senses sharpened and I began quickening.

With smarticles infused throughout pssi-kids’ nervous systems from birth, we’d quickly picked up on the trick of quickening by using smarticles to accelerate the conduction of nerve signals along axons. We could literally amp up the speed of our nervous systems this way on command, but only in short bursts as we depleted energy stored in the smarticles, and, more problematically, began to overheat our brains.

Quickening the body was one thing, but quickening the mind was entirely something else. It had to be managed in a very controlled fashion so as not to lose conscious coherence in the seat of the mind where it all came together. Like anything, it took time, patience and training to build up this capacity, and when it came to quickening, like surfing, I was one of the best.

With each breath, I concentrated on accelerating the quickening, feeling the world slow down as I sped up. Switching my visual field into surround mode, I literally had eyes in the back of my head—I closed my eyes as my visual cortex adjusted to the 360 degree view.

I focused instead on the ripples of water coming through my water-sense and the sinews in my shoulders and back stretching and pulling me across the surface as I accelerated my paddling tempo, quickly gathering speed to match the incoming monster. It began to grow behind me, rolling up and into my skin, surging towards and into me.

My board angled forward and began to skim faster and faster. With a final stroke I opened my eyes, grabbed my board and popped up onto it, leaning forward to accelerate as the wave urged me on. It wasn’t really behind me, the wave was me. I could feel it swelling through my water-sense as if my body was expanding and peaking, with little bits of me frothing off the top as it began to crest.

My board sped down the face of the wave as it began to break, and then I slowed as I neared its base and stepped to the back of the board, almost stalling as I sank back down a little. I smiled and waved to the crowds on the beach, and a collective gasp went up as they watched the monster booming down behind me.

An instant before disaster I jumped forward and cut the board back into the wave to sail up its rushing face. As the wave roared around the northern crescent, I started snapping a series of turns back and forth off its top. Nearing my finale, I finished with an acrobatic turn that dropped me freefalling into the thundering maw of the beast. The crowds on the distant beach squealed with excitement at my disappearing silhouette.

The noise inside was deafening, and it used all of my quickened water-sense to fall feet first onto the board and navigate the roaring and rushing world of foam. Crouching low, almost hugging my board, I let myself slide backwards as I was sucked into the back of the roaring whirlpool, my senses merging with it into a singularity, cradling my fragile body in a delicately maintained balance.

At the last moment, I leaned forward and accelerated away from the maelstrom at the back of the barrel. A crazily spinning translucent tunnel opened up ahead of me, revealing bright daylight beyond, and I eased ever further forward. I began to stand up taller and walked towards the front of my board and turned around.

Tchaikovsky was playing loudly in my dimstim now and I closed my eyes to begin conducting. I shot backwards out of the mouth of the barrel, propelled by a powerful jet from the collapsing tube. I back-hanged my two heels off the front, now with just the tips of my toes on the nose of the board.

Beginning to slow, I opened my eyes and turned around to walk towards the back of the board, listening to the mad applause from the thousands of dimstimmers who had enjoyed the show. The world began to return to normal time as I released the quickening, feeling the burning heat within my body begin to ease off. Sighing happily, I sank back into the water and straddled my board to float again gently in the water.

Martin appeared back on the nose of my board, giving me a little golf clap.

“Nice show, buddy. That was awesome!”

“Thank you, thank you very much,” I said, wiping the water from my face as I looked around happily, and then looked back at Martin and the tourists still clapping on the beach. I couldn’t resist showing off again.

The water began to thicken up around me as I summoned tens of millions of tiny zooplankton up from the depths below. I kept them near me when surfing, just in case.

With a few carefully placed kicks I levitated up out of the water, forcing millions of my little friends to treadmill their hardest just at the right point to support each step, and then I stood right up on the water and took a few steps to bow to the crowds with a flourish.

This brought gasps and more pointing from the tourists—they can walk on water!

Sinking back down, I grabbed onto my board again and dispersed my little helpers. Martin was shaking his head, grinning widely.

“That last part was a bit much,” he laughed, but I could sense a certain glumness.

“Buddy, you have to lighten up…live a little.”

I immediately regretted my choice of words, but Martin didn’t notice anything. I slicked back my hair again, trying to stop the water from streaming down into my eyes.

“Are you going to come out camping with me and Willy and Sid and the boys later?” I asked after a little reflection.

“Am I invited?”

“Of course,” I laughed.

“And you’re going to continue surfing today, even with the storm warnings in effect?”

“Come on, Martin…”

“Okay, anyway, I’ll see you later, camping will be great,” Martin responded brightly. “I just worry about you sometimes.”

I nodded.

“Are we still going to have that chat?”

“Maybe later.”

The moment had passed for him too.

“I have a lot of stuff to get done. You be careful with those storms brewing out there, could swing in some weird waves.”

“I will, I promise, and I’ll see you later,” I replied with a small salute.

With that, Martin nodded and winked as he signed off and faded from view.

5

How in the world did I get roped into attending a baby shower for a proxxid?

It seemed everyone was having a simulated baby these days, but Nicky had somehow convinced me to come to this event. Anyway, wasn’t a baby shower supposed to be before the baby was born? This and many other questions filled my mind as we arrived in the entertainment metaworld created for the event. I was immediately dragged over to the Strong family for the obligatory salutations.

“Congratulations Commander Strong!” I said enthusiastically, smiling as I reached out to pump his hand.

Rick smiled back and shook my hand vigorously, rolling his eyes slightly.

“Thanks Bob.”

“And of course congratulations to the lovely new proxxid mother,” I laughed, reaching over to kiss his wife Cindy on the cheek, looking down at the baby in her arms.

“…and this lovely lady is?” asked Commander Strong, looking towards my date.

“Ah shit, ah, I mean, oh shoot,” I mumbled, turning to introduce my newish girlfriend. “This is Nicky. Hey do you want a drink?”

Nicky shot me a tight lipped smile, shaking her head, and turned to graciously introduce herself to the Strongs. I nodded and smiled, leaving them to it, and wandered off towards the alcohol stand. Maybe she didn’t want a drink, but I sure did.

I sighed.

A baby shower. How did I let these things happen to me?

Any party was, however, a great reason to get stoned. With that thought, I popped a tab of MDMA from my pocket into my mouth. Virtual drugs weren’t bad, but they weren’t quite the authentic experience, and I liked to style myself as a retro abuser. Ah, now I was rolling with the champions. Just another great day in the world of Bobtopia.

I grabbed a drink and walked over to sit down on a couch. We were now waiting for some last person to show up to sing the birthday song. Actually, we weren’t really waiting, since everyone everywhere knew exactly where everyone else was at any moment.

We were just, well, what the hell were we doing? I guessed we were waiting, but we all knew exactly how long we had to wait. There was a difference, wasn’t there? Or perhaps we had reached the end of waiting, and were now embodying some new verb that defined what waiting was when we all knew exactly how long we had to wait.

I decided then and there I was going to call it phwaiting and immediately published this inspiration into my social cloud. With my creative work done for the day, I scanned some Phuture News flowing across the bottom of my display spaces. More celebrities were about to drop dead or start doing tons of drugs or stop doing them and go into rehab.

Boring.

Flicking my phantoms, I opened an overlay and researched the definition of ‘wait’: transitive verb—to stay in place in expectation of. I guess we didn’t need a cool new word as this seemed to amount to what we were doing. Already, my proxxi Robert was splintering me over four thousand variations on the idea of waiting from the remaining distinct human languages.

The character of my inspiration suddenly hollowed. I posted an announcement regarding the death of phwaiting back into my social cloud and watched the meme explode and die.

At the same time, a fast trending news report splintered that the Chinese were talking about sending a manned mission to Mars. It had been about thirty years since China had landed men on the moon again, on their best guess of Mao’s birthday one holiday season, but their plans at a permanent moon base had fizzled when water deposits had proven harder to extract than imagined. Now their new grand plans just seemed ludicrous, even if Mars and half of the rest of our solar system seemed to be practically teeming with life.

Why spend any time or effort moving a physical body around when you could just flit anywhere in an instant using sensor networks? Everything that was happening in the outside world seemed so amazingly wasteful and nonsensical to those of us who lived on the inside of Atopia—but then again, soon everyone would be as blessed as us.

Bored, I collapsed most of my displays and opened up an overlay to watch a new game the boys had started. Sid, Vicious, Martin and my own proxxi Robert were already hot into some apocalyptic other-world battle, pinned down in a cave by an android army, flanked by giant armored worms. It looked like a lot more fun than what I was doing, so I tried to splinter in but Sid blocked me. He was right. Either I had to be there fully or not at all. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of them. Anyway, I could just joyride in Robert if I wanted.

The rest of my displays held forth on a multitude of other live wikiworld feeds. The Bieb was just delivering his inaugural address as the 52nd President of the United States, and in an interesting first was singing the first few lines of his speech. I guess the Bieb Bill had passed.

In another feed, Manchester United had scored in a Premier League game, and they’d begun replaying the goal with a stimcast of the hapless LA goalie that ended with him crashing face first into one of the goalposts, breaking his nose in a bloody explosion of pain. What they managed to broadcast was a pale reflection of what his pain would have really felt like.

Nervenet sensory broadcast technology was still in its infancy outside Atopia, but all that would be fixed with the release of pssi. Flicking off the news feeds, I focused back on the pitched battle the boys were in. Someone had just blown Martin’s head off. I shook my head. Martin was hopeless.

I checked my dimstim stats, and a few dozen people were still logged into my body. Christ, I was bored out of my head and there were still people who would prefer to be me than do whatever boring shit they could be doing on their own.

Glancing at my biostats, I could see that my heart rate was hovering in the mid-forties, my cortisol was a little high, my insulin low, but all systems go and things would be moving around soon as the MDMA hit. Looking good Bob, I told myself, if your heart rate were any lower you’d slip into a coma—and that sounds pretty good about now.

The room was crowded, with people milling about industriously, getting drinks, engaging in small talk, doing whatever tiring stuff adults did at a baby shower. One side of the room was lined with retro-modern impressionists to match the sleek, minimal décor of the world they’d created for the event. The other side was a terrace, open to the outside, looking down from a few stories up onto the leafy beach promenade of east Atopia.

Sulking seemed like a good option at this point while I waited for the drugs to hit my bloodstream, so I opened up Bunnies and sent a sub-proxxi to get me another drink. Innocent little rabbits appeared floating in space in front of me, exiting their underground warrens, sniffing the ground for food.

I flicked my finger at one of them, and a fireball magically issued forth, flaming towards the hapless little creature. It looked up, confused, and then squealed as the fireball engulfed it, spasming in agony and squeaks as its fur incinerated. The other rabbits ducked for cover, and then slowly crawled back out to sniff at their erstwhile compadre.

My eyes narrowed as I lined up the next victim.

“Bob, what are you doing?” came a subtext from Nicky. “Could we just be a little sociable?”

I grumbled and shut off Bunnies.

Lucky little bastard didn’t know how close he came to the big ticket.

The sub-proxxi was back with my drink by now and I thanked him, taking the proffered drink for a sip. Turning off my kinetic collision subsystems, I rolled out of the couch’s embrace and stood up to stride purposefully through one of the remote guests, a round, balding little man who affected a shocked look. Served him right if the best he could do was project a round, balding image; someone should tell him he can look anyway he wanted.

My brazen etiquette violation earned some raised eyebrows, but it felt way too crowded in here, so I decided on further anti-social behavior and flipped my pssi off at everyone. The lush environment of the entertainment world immediately disappeared as I slipped into identity mode, and the featureless confines of the small, rectangular room we were actually in appeared around me.

I felt better, taking another gulp of my drink, feeling refreshed as my own senses connected me to the world, when things took on a suddenly colorful sheen. On the other hand, that could be the Ecstasy kicking in.

The few people that remained in the small room were mostly in a corner near Nicky, who was still chatting with Cindy Strong, now cradling empty space in her arms.

Nicky looked over, her eyes flashing at me. I imagined knives shooting forth from her, pinning me helplessly and gorily to the wall before a crushing shockwave of disappointment finished me off in a splatter of social distortion. The ferocity of the image forced me to click my pssi back on, and the hubbub and space of party re-saturated my senses.

Luckily, what I’d felt before was in fact the MDMA, so I now felt much happier about everything on the whole.

Of course, by that point, Nicky was completely pissed. She grabbed me by the arm to pull me around the corner and into the hallway where we could be alone. Well, sort of alone. My dimstim stats instantly shot up as the social cloud sensed my mood and the fight coming on.

“You know Bob,” hissed Nicky, “we just don’t communicate. I thought you said you wanted to come here and now you’re embarrassing me. Can I ask you a question? Are you stoned again? Can you shut off your fucking dimstim for a minute please?”

“That’s two questions,” I shrugged, “and no to both of them. Sweetie, my dimstim is my work, my bread and butter, and good or bad I can’t just shut it off.”

I tried to smile winningly at her.

She stared at me in silence.

“Okay, yes, I am a little stoned,” I admitted.

She rolled her eyes. “And how can you call that stupid dimstim work? And this thing with your brother…”

I shrugged again, but then dialed up a Dragon skin with a phantom when she wasn’t looking.

“Hey, my dimstim is how we met. Don’t knock it. And don’t bring my brother into this!”

Narrowing my eyes, I added, “At least I work.”

She’d annoyed me now, so I was purposely pushing Nicky’s ‘piss me off’ button. This was going to be good. She didn’t like being reminded she was daddy’s little girl.

“Bob, all you do is sit around all day playing games or simulating vacation time for a bunch of meta-perves,” she snarled as her voice gathered momentum and the Dragon skin began to take hold. Her eyes flashed at me while her face and upper body began to morph into a cartoonish and slightly frightening form in my display space.

“Well, I mean, I make my own money,” I pointed out, shaking my head.

At that moment, I couldn’t help letting out an enormous yawn right in her face, which really set her off. What had I taken? It couldn’t have been the Ecstasy, that didn’t usually make me yawn. Or wait, did I take some mushrooms before as well? That must be it. Or was it acid? Was I candy flipping or hippy flipping? I frowned, trying to remember.

“Let me FINISH!” she barked at me, barely managing to contain herself.

The Dragon skin was working itself up nicely now. Her eyes bulged out and her neck elongated and sprouted a row of ridges, while her skin took on a distinctly scaly texture.

“Bob, the only reason your stupid dimstim makes any money at all is because I let you have sex with me on it, I swear to God I have no idea what I was thinking...”

I began to shrink a little from the Dragon but couldn’t help goading her.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, all my success is only due to the fabulous Nicky.”

Holy shit. The Dragon skin was amazingly frightening when you were stoned. I shook my head and couldn’t help laughing.

“STOP cutting me off!” she screamed.

She always had quite the temper. Her eyes had now bulged outwards into huge melon sized orbs with slatted cat pupils, and her head was bobbing back and forth on a neck that issued forth and grew from her blouse while a great gray, pimpled snout sprouted from where her nose had been.

Fangs menaced. Smoke began to curl from nostrils. Fireballs issued from her mouth. I cowered, giggling.

“Do you have that goddamn Dragon skin on? Jesus Bob!”

With that she turned tail, literally, and angrily stomped past me to storm out of the party. She left little burning patches behind her in the carpet.

“Nice Bob.”

It was Sid. He’d been ghosting the dimstim version of events, and now stood leaning on the wall of the hallway. I guess he’d already been killed in the battle I’d been watching. He laughed and shook his head.

“I’m not sure that’s the way to hold down a relationship.”

“Ah, she wasn’t for me. Anyway, she’s the one that chased me down.”

“Women, they always think they can change you, huh?”

“I guess.”

A pause while we looked at each other.

“Ready for some skin shopping?” I asked. I needed to get out of there.

“We’re going skin shopping?”

“Yes, my friend, I have decided my repertoire of skins now needs refreshing.”

As great as it was, the Dragon was getting old, plus it would be sad to use the Dragon on any girl after Nicky. I needed a new mythical creature with which to annoy the next woman in my life. I had a feeling Nicky wasn’t coming back into the fold anytime soon.

Sid just shrugged. “Sure. Why not.”

I sent an apology note about my little spat with Nicky to Rick and Cindy as we flitted out, and heard Sid asking, “What skins did you have in mind?” as we transitioned.

We appeared in what, for all intents and purposes, looked like a shoe store in 1920’s London, somewhere off Saville Row. Little boxes, whose covers danced with images and logos, lined the walls and aisles, and a smarmy synthetic salesman glided up to us.

“What can I do for you boys?” he asked, smiling.

“I don’t know, not sure,” I responded, not sure, plus high. “What have you got that’s new?”

He looked us up and down.

“You looking to skin up or skin out?”

“Either way, or both, just show us anything new,” replied Sid. Seeing my eyes swimming, he added, “And hurry up please.”

“Hmmm,” noted the salesthing as he put one hand to his chin. With the other he began swiping the wall, and the little boxes swept left and right and up and down at a blurring pace.

“We’ve got some new designer skins that do a great job of making everyone look good naked,” he began.

Both Sid and I rolled out eyes.

“Yeah you’re right, boring. How about this—more subtle—we’ve got some nice intelligence skins that make you look and act smarter.”

“Thanks buddy,” I replied, frowning, “what are you getting at?”

“Nothing, I’m just...okay then, look, we have some great new skins of Asia. The Snow Leopard, for instance...that’s all the rage now.”

“Naw, no animal stuff.”

“How about something more clever then? We have some that read your cognitive profile and make subtle changes to your wife or girlfriend to make them...”

Sid cut him off, “No wife or girlfriend stuff please.”

Sid looked at me and shook his head.

Smarmy the salesman tapped his finger to his mouth as he simulated thinking. “Okay boys, I have something really special, and it’s our new top seller.”

My interest piqued. “Go on, my smarmy friend.”

“We call it HappyTime—it’s a reality skin that makes subtle adjustments when you talk to or interact with people you know. It is guaranteed to help you lead a happier and stress free life.”

“Sounds good,” said Sid, “so what does it do?”

“Well, it makes slight changes in your perception so that you get the impression that you’re better off than your friends and family, diminishing the effects the further they are from you personally.”

Sid smiled. “So how does that work?”

“Well it doesn’t actually change anything, it just gives you the sense that your friend isn’t as happy with his new relationship as he really could be, or modifies how much you hear him telling you he makes at his new job,” it explained. “Little things so that you still get the gist, but modified so you feel like you’re doing better than they are.”

“And it works?”

“It works like a charm, proven by extensive research. You will lead a happier life, my friend, guaranteed or your money back.”

“Hey Sid,” I asked Sid.

“Yeah.”

“Am I actually getting paid big money for surfing and boozing all day while you slave away as a programmer at Solomon House?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, cool, I thought maybe I had HappyTime on already and I’d forgotten.”

“Fuck off, Bob.”

6

The glare off the hood of the ’67 Mustang made me squint, and the sweat beading down from my forehead stung my eyes as I tried to wipe it away. The police were just beyond the barricade, less than two hundred feet away, and I could hear them nervously loading their weapons and talking in short, staccato bursts into their walkie-talkies.

Waves of heat rose up from the tarmac that was melting into the soles of my Converse. Hot rubber mixed with the smell of burnt gunpowder and equal parts fear and body odor. Body odor.

Subtext Bob to Sid: Could you please dial down the BO, I’m choking over here.

Sid looked over and cracked a smile as he peeled his back harder against the side of the car. He had his sunglasses on and was soaked in sweat too, but looking cool as a cucumber and totally in his element. Sid’s grin widened as he pulled out a ridiculously oversized handgun he had somehow hidden in the small of his back.

“So what do you think, should we make a run for it?” I asked breathlessly.

“Hell yeah, little buddy,” came the reply as he magically produced a second cannon from somewhere on his person. “I’ll just crawl into the back and you squirm into the driver seat and get us going. We gotta meet up with the boys to have any chance at busting out of this one!”

“Okay, then, let’s do this.”

A voice came over a loudspeaker from the roadblock, down between the derelict buildings and burnt out car shells up ahead. “Come on out with your hands up, we don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Rolling my eyes, I complained to Sid, who was already crawling cat-like into the back seat, “Can’t they come up with anything better than that?”

I immediately filed a request for snappier dialogue and then stowed my own anemic feeling .357 Magnum into the breast pocket of my leather jacket. I reached for the door handle and squeaked the passenger side door open, sliding in chest down across the stick shift, humping my body across. A bullet ricocheted off the concrete.

“Hold your fire!” came the voice on the loudspeaker again. “Come on out boys, we can still do this the easy way!”

“Bob,” Sid whispered urgently, “are you ready to go yet?”

I rotated my body around, reaching down to test the pedals with one foot as I hunched over to put the key in.

“You betcha, let’s hit it!” I replied.

With surging excitement I turned the ignition to fire up the five hundred horses under the hood. Pushing down the clutch, I jammed it into first and without looking over the dash, released it and hit the accelerator. The unbridled power of the engine surged us forward and we began peeling out in a cloud of vaporized rubber and exhaust.

I swerved wildly, trying to maintain some kind of control. The bullets started flying and I could feel them impacting the car, punching through the windshield, shattering the glass onto me. Sid was on his back, kicking upwards with his feet, trying to knock out the sunroof.

We were rapidly accelerating and I needed to risk it, so I peeked over the dash through the destroyed windshield. I saw an officer walk out and crouch in the middle of the street, hoisting something onto his shoulder.

“Sid!” I yelled. “Rocket launcher!”

“On it!” he screamed back over the roar of the engine.

I punched it into third. With a final grunt Sid kicked out the sunroof, and it went spinning out and away into space above us. In the same fluid motion he popped up through the open roof with a lunatic grin. Swinging out both of his cartoonishly outsized weapons, he began blasting away. Peeking out over dash again, I saw the head of the cop holding the rocket launcher explode in a mist of red spray.

The rest of them ducked for cover.

The bullets were coming fast as we neared point of impact with the barricade. Sid rotated his body backwards, jamming his back into the edge of the sunroof and bracing his legs underneath. He leaned out flat on the roof of the car, pointing both guns to each side. As we smashed through the barricade, Sid let go with a terrific volley of fire that took out four LAPD officers in explosions of blood and guts, as they looked up with surprise from their hiding places.

With a second crunching impact, we cleared the last of the cruisers, swerving hard to avoid as much of the blow as possible. I heard Sid grunt in pain, but then he lifted himself back up and swiveled around to face the gauntlet ahead of us.

Dozens of cop cruisers were parked on either side of the street, and they were taking dead aim at us. I gunned us into fourth and slid as low as I could in the seat, reaching to take out my own feeble weapon, hoping for the best.

The metallic tang of blood seeped into my mouth, and I looked down to see I was bleeding profusely. I’d been hit, but the shock of the fight was staving off the pain, at least for now. This gameworld didn’t allow tuning down your pain receptors—you had to deal with it. This was going to get messy.

Suddenly, one of the cop cruisers to our right exploded and lifted into the air, tumbling slowly back to earth in a fiery arc. Several cops ran out screaming in flames, wildly shooting their weapons. Sid picked them off quickly as another cruiser exploded and incoming automatic weapons fire began raining down on the police. They all turned to look up the street.

Willy and Martin were hanging off a cherry red GTO, blazing away at the cops with automatic weapons. Vicious was reloading what looked like a rocket launcher of his own. They waved at us merrily with their free hands. I gunned us into fifth and sat up higher in the driver seat, leaning forward to pull some of the remains of the smashed windshield out of the way.

It was all about style points from here and Sid did a beautiful job double fisting shots off both sides of the car, blowing away police officers one after the other with geometric precision as he looked skywards and let loose with a deranged cackle.

Our audience had spiked way up. As one of the best crews in the world at this game, we had over four million people tuned in to watch our escape scene today, and Sid was determined to put on a good performance for our fans.

Passing the last of the cruisers, he dragged a grenade out, pulled the pin with his teeth and sent it sailing right into the open driver side window. It exploded with a satisfying crunch and a few uniformed body parts bounced off a nearby chain link fence.

I congratulated him, “Nice work, Sid!”

Martin, Vicious and Willy had peeled off to follow closely behind in their GTO, and the low throaty growl of both engines mixed together in a bone shaking symphony. By now they would have put a general call out to all the special weapons squads, so we’d have hundreds of them chasing us down as we tried to leave the city.

Our gameworld audience had spiked to over six million and was climbing fast. This was going to be a great show.

“You hit?” asked Sid. He climbed down out of the sunroof.

“Yeah,” I replied, putting a hand under my shirt, wincing. My finger found a small hole on the side of my ribcage. “Not too bad. A through and through I think, but it would help if you wrapped me up. You hit?”

“Ah, I think my ear got blown off,” he said, holding one hand to a bloody mess on the side of his head as he doubled over in pain, “but the real problem is a gut shot.”

“Bad?”

It looked bad.

“It hurts like hell but it’ll bleed out slow, I should live for another couple of hours.”

Ah, not so bad then. I smiled. Maybe we’d make it out of Los Angeles after all.

As we sped up the street, I could see something walk into our way.

A pedestrian? Not cops, anyway. It was someone in a green suit, hunched over, and then there were more of them, blocking the road. Cars lined both sides of the street so I couldn’t swerve off, and I could hear growing sirens in the distance with flashing lights coming at us from all angles. Up ahead it had all the appearances of a herd of little green men now, completely blocking the road.

What the hell?

I jammed on the breaks and we skidded, squealing to a halt as we ploughed into the first couple of greenies, bumping over them messily amid roars of pain. The other car skidded to a stop behind us.

Furious, I flew open my driver side door as we stopped, weapon in hand, to confront whatever was going down here. Sid popped back out of the sunroof, grimacing, with both cannons out aiming front and center.

A short, stocky green man with pointy ears and a broad forehead, wearing spiked shoulder pads and holding an enormous axe, ambled up to me.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

I could see he had some vampires with him too.

“We are against the discrimination shown to the Bangladeshi.”

“What?” Then it dawned on me.

“Sid!” I yelled. “Sid, did you set the authenticated login to this world when you created it?”

Silence. Except for the growing whine of the approaching sirens.

“Sid?!” I asked again, looking back at him.

“Ah shoot,” he replied, wincing in pain. He looked down at the blood that was oozing from his gut wound. “I forgot.”

Dejectedly he banged both of his weapons down on the roof of the car.

These were obviously Comment Trolls. Without authenticated login, people could just connect into this world anonymously, which was fine if you just wanted to watch, but anonymity tended to bring out the worst in people.

With the massive audience we’d accumulated for this game, and with the login anonymous, we’d just attracted the mother lode of Comment Trolls. Hundreds of them were now blocking the road. They’d use the opportunity to broadcast their opinions, whether they had anything to do with this world or not.

“I’m sorry dude,” continued Sid, waving a gun in the air. “I was just so busy. My mother was over, I had a splinter set this world up…”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Perhaps I could reason with them.

“Dude, please, this is 1988 Los Angeles,” I complained to the lead Comment Troll. “We’re just trying to get out of here. There were no trolls in ‘88 Los Angeles, and no vampires either.”

I considered this for a moment. On closer inspection those were Forum Vampires he had with him. They could be useful.

“Maybe there were vampires. But come on guys, please.”

My dimstim stats were dropping as fast as our gameworld audience. I had to do something entertaining, and quickly. The head Comment Troll was right in my face now. He smelled real bad and had some butt ugly oily pimples going on.

“Master,” he growled at me.

Well, at least he was playing along in character. Not a total asshole, then. Perhaps there was an opportunity here.

“Master, we are sorry, but this is an open gameworld, and we have the right to express our opinions here.”

I nodded my head.

“Yeah, this an open gameworld, but only if you’re coming to get laid and get paid,” I explained in a sing song tone, smiling to expose my two gold capped front teeth and holding a West Side finger salute near my chest. “Look if you want to join the Bloods or the Crips I’m down with that, but don’t be a bitch and mess up our game, homie.”

I shrugged and held my hands up, wide eyed, shaking my head.

“Who are you to tell me what to do?”

“I’ll tell you who I am, my brother,” I said, bringing my .357 Magnum up between his eyes and pulling the trigger.

Curiously, it didn’t result in his brains blowing out the back of his head as it should have, but the bullet seemed to glance off his thick skull and ricochet in a splatter of oily blood and hairy flesh. I guess I’d never tried shooting a troll in the head at point blank range with a .357 before.

As I considered this, my left forearm exploded in pain. The troll standing next to him had swung his axe to lop off my left hand which I was lifting up to give the lead Comment Troll the finger with.

Blood spurted out of my severed appendage as I backpedalled away from the threatening horde, blasting away indiscriminately with my firearm. Sid was covering my retreat, picking off trolls and vampires as they advanced. They were tough sons-of-bitches, and we wouldn’t have made it except for the suppressing automatic weapons fire that Vicious and Willy added as we ran back.

Breathlessly we all rallied behind the GTO, and I ripped off my t-shirt and mashed my severed forearm stump into my leg, trying to wrap a tourniquet under my armpit. Sid leaned over to help me as Vicious and Willy continued to let go with their M-16’s.

“Where the hell is Martin?” I managed to pant out.

He should have been manning the rocket launcher. That would give those assholes something to think about. Sid ducked up to look inside the car.

“Aw man, I think Martin is dying,” he replied. He tightened up my tourniquet.

I wrenched around to take a look myself. Martin was writhing in the back seat, soaked in blood and whimpering.

“Goddamn baby,” I said, shaking my head. “Martin, what the hell?”

I turned back to Sid.

“Those guys were miles away, they had tons of cover. How the heck did he get so messed up?”

This was going to get a lot trickier with one man down, Sid barely functional and me missing an arm.

“You’re useless, you know that?” I yelled at Martin.

He whimpered back between the pain, “Sorry Bob, I didn’t mean to...”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re always sorry,” I muttered under my breath.

Sid stared at me disapprovingly. He was shaking his head.

“Dude, you shouldn’t be so mean to him all the time,” Sid reproached. “Talk to him, okay?”

I said nothing.

“Okay?” demanded Sid between the bursts of automatic weapons fire. “You promise?”

Rolling my eyes I sighed, “Okay, yes. You’re right. But let’s just get out of this first, okay?”

Looking back up over the GTO, I could see the trolls were reassembling and advancing by holding up their bloodied comrades in front of them as shields. They were fast too. This wouldn’t be easy. I looked around for the rocket launcher as Sid picked up an Uzi from the back seat and snapped in a clip.

We looked at each other, starting to enjoy ourselves. I was awkwardly trying to slide the launcher from the back seat, with my one remaining hand, to balance on my shoulder, when all of a sudden a massive burst of gunfire erupted from both sides of us.

The LAPD had finally arrived, and pandemonium erupted for a while as it turned into a three way pitched battle. By now, the vampires had taken wing and began swooping down on the hapless police officers who just screamed in disbelief.

A few of the braver cops continued to take some pot shots at us, but their overall enthusiasm for taking out gangland members seemed to dissipate after the first few were hacked to pieces by foul smelling demon spawn wielding their skull topped axes. Sid and Willy laid off a few more rounds at the trolls, but then just gave up, laughing.

I didn’t have long to live and I could feel the lifeblood ebbing away from this body. I propped myself up on the hood and leaned against the bullet-ridden windshield of the GTO. Martin had already died some time ago.

“Dude, that was actually pretty cool!” I admitted to the lead Comment Troll, taking the offered smoke from him to have a drag.

He was sitting up on the car with me. Most of his bloody forehead had been shorn away by my bullet, showing white bone underneath, but he was in a jolly mood.

“That gameworld audience went through the friggin’ roof,” he agreed. “There are already thousands of copycats going on.”

As he said this, an LAPD officer came running out of the bushes, disheveled and bloody but intact, running up to me.

“Mother of God, please help me, please,” he whimpered, his hands pressed together in a prayer position.

I just raised my eyebrows and shrugged, giving the smoke back to the troll. The officer looked at the two of us and began backing away, shaking his head and making small pathetic noises. At that moment a large, muscular troll burst through the same bushes the cop had come through.

“Ah ha!” the new troll announced. “There you are!”

He pounced on the officer, who managed to back away a step or two, holding his hands up defensively.

The troll began methodically hacking away at the officer with his axe. I had to close one eye as bodily fluids spurted and splattered onto me amid blood curdling screams. I looked at the troll leader, shaking my head with eyebrows raised.

He smiled back at me and nodded.

“Ah, Fred, Fred!” said the troll leader, raising one stumpy green arm.

Dripping in blood, Fred looked up from his whimpering prey. “Yeah?”

“Could you give it a rest, Fred?”

Fred pouted and frowned, and then sighed.

“Fine.”

Grumbling under his breath, he stuck the point of his axe through the police officer’s skull. This ended all the commotion. The troll skulked off.

My vision was swimming.

“Sid? You ready to go?”

True to his assessment, Sid had bled out slowly and hadn’t gotten another scratch. Sitting atop a pile of stinking corpses, he was now chatting up a female troll over near our Mustang.

“Yep!” he waved back, and picked up his gun and stuck it in his mouth.

“Cool.”

I picked up my .357, looked at the head troll and said, “Let’s do this again sometime.”

With a smile I opened my mouth and stuck in the barrel of my gun. Tasting the sharp tang of metal and gunpowder, I pulled the trigger. The last thing I felt was the curious sensation of my head exploding backwards into space and suddenly, I was floating in blackness.

Dead. At least in that universe.

It was a funny thing. We could now die a hundred, a thousand, a million times out in the synthetic worlds we traveled through—we just couldn’t die in our identity world. It was just that one place out of millions where we couldn’t die, it was a solution set approaching zero.

With all the flittering between worlds and bodies, stimswitching with friends, people borrowing your body and your body being driven around by your proxxi, you’d think it would get confusing to figure out where or when you were or how to get back into your own body, and it could be disorienting. That was why a basic feature of pssi, hardwired at the deepest level, was what we affectionately called the Uncle Button—when you gave up and wanted back into your own body, you punched it. You just had to remember that it was there.

I sighed as I floated in the dimensionless black space and performed the well worn ritual: look down to where your chest should be, reach into your chest, punch it, and whammo, I felt myself falling backwards.

Now I was jogging through trees near the eastern inlet. Sunlight was streaming down through the green canopy above.

“Taking me for a jog?”

“Uh huh, you asked me to, remember?” replied my proxxi, Robert, just a voice in my head. “Did you read the latest storm warnings?”

“No…” I replied, disinterested. I knew they were having a hard time steering out of the way of Hurricane Newton and it looked like we might have to battle through the edges of the storm, but what did I care. I’d just be off in the gameworlds anyway.

“Well it’s gotten a lot worse,” Robert explained, “you’d better not get too dug into the gameworlds this afternoon, and stay off the pharmacologicals.”

“In case of what?” I asked, surprised. It was rare Robert would ever ask me to do something.

“Just in case.”

I shrugged. Sure. He seemed worried.

“Do you want to transition control to you?” he asked, apparently satisfied.

“Naw,” I replied, “just take us home, just in case like you said. I’m going for another gameworld session with Martin.” I felt bad now for yelling at him.

“That’s probably a good idea,” replied my proxxi.

For the rest of the day we opted to go old school and return to Mongol battle. We all met up afterwards at a tiki-bar on the beach for some beers. It was well past nightfall, and the place was packed with tourists.

Martin loved the Mongolian battle worlds. He was still hopped up from the fight and was jumping around in the sand, howling away as he aped Bruce Lee style karate moves. Sid, Vicious, Robert and I watched him with amusement.

“Bob, that was awesome, you ducking and diving like that, it was like, superhuman!”

I’d had Sid remap my tactile water-sense for Mongol battle so that I could feel arrows coming at me like eddy currents through my skin. The incoming projectiles had become a part of my body, and as I quickened, I was able to duck and weave away with blinding speed, roaring through the battle as I hacked away at the Tatar scum.

“Yes, it was superhuman. That is perfectly accurate, we have superhuman abilities. We are in fact supermen. At least until the rest of humanity plugs into pssi, at which point…”

I paused to take a swig of my beer.

“We will just be, well, just men again.”

I shrugged and smiled. I could see that Martin wasn’t troubled by existential angst anymore. It was nice to be nice to him for once.

Sid smiled. He liked it when I was nice to Martin. He leaned over and whispered under his breath, “You’re going to talk to him, right? For you, you understand?”

I rolled my eyes but nodded.

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t give up do you?”

The surf had been pounding noisily as we all sat there, but a truly gargantuan wave suddenly thundered in, literally shaking the party lanterns hanging off the tiki-bar. Everyone turned to look out into the blackness. Those were some monster storms brewing out there.

Just then, a system of pssi alert channels began to activate.

7

Floating up at the edge of space, my dad had asked us to get together as a family to see firsthand what was happening. We watched the two converging hurricanes swirling ominously in three dimensions below us. They had suddenly strengthened in the past day, both past category four now, and like two enormous threshing wheels, they now threatened to pin Atopia against the West Coast of America.

Atopia was still holding its own as we backed away, but we were now running out of room and the phuturecasts didn’t see any way around them. Surface evacuation had just been ordered. Jimmy was right in the thick of the emergency preparations.

Dread filled me realizing the impregnable fortress of Atopia was somehow threatened.

Flitting back to our family habitat to get ready, I clipped back into my body. After a rushed inventory assessment with my proxxi Robert, it seemed I really didn’t need to bring much, so, with some time to spare, I let my mind slip backwards and away, to an early inVerse memory of my family I liked to escape to in times of stress.

Blinking in the sunshine, I could feel sand trapped wetly in the crack of my ass. At the time I was having too much fun to notice it as my brother chased me around the beach on his pudgy little legs. We’d just turned four, and I’d just passed the point where my parents had allowed my proxxi, Robert, to fully take over my body, but he hadn’t yet progressed there yet.

Despite being twins, my brother had always lagged behind me.

So as he chased me around the beach, squealing with excitement and waving his bright orange plastic digger, just before he could touch me I would flit out to another spot nearby, disappearing suddenly from in front of him to reappear a few feet away. He hooted with delight each time I did it, and I would stick out my tongue and waggle my hands, thumbs in my ears, and raspberry him. With squeaks of glee, he would change directions and run at my new spot.

I was laughing and laughing.

My mum and dad were sitting together on a beach blanket, my dad’s arm around her and mum with her great big sunglasses on, laughing with us. My mum was almost crying she laughed so hard, pressing her face into my dad’s chest, and this just egged me on as I flittered willy-nilly around the beach, taunting my baby brother.

I hadn’t seen mum laugh in years, and neither my dad for that matter. Quitting the inVerse, I wiped the tears from my eyes.

InVersing, going back to relive your own personal universe of stored sensory memories, was a dangerous thing if you let it get its tentacles into you. When you were happy, it didn’t matter, you never seemed to bother with it, but when you felt sad or frightened, sliding back into the past and becoming a person you once were, happy and carefree, was about as addictive as something could get.

ReVersing was worse still, going back and reliving the past, but running new wikiworld simulations from a decision point you’d made, and changing that decision to enable a new world to evolve and spin on from that point—a simulation of how the world could have been, not how it was.

Perhaps these weren’t just simulations, but portals into alternate realities that branched off from our own timeline. Windows into life as it could have been, as it actually was somewhere else. It was hard to tear yourself away when it was something, or someone, you desperately missed.

Many people I knew spent more time inVersing and reVersing, or as glassy eyed emo-porners, than they did living their lives in the present. Dr. Hal Granger said on his EmoShow that going back and reliving the past helped us grow emotionally, helped us to find resolution and happiness—I wasn’t so sure.

What my family had done, though, was much worse. It had made a certain desperate sense at the time as we’d tried to deal with our grief, as I’d tried to deal with mine. In fact, the whole thing had been my idea, and it was an idea I was regretting more than I could bear any longer.

Morning had broken in wet smudges while I thought about all this. I was sitting on the covered deck of our island habitat watching the huge swells generated by the coming storms gathering and slapping together like drunken sailors. Ragged, scudding clouds hung under an ominous and luminous sky. The air was calm and proverbially quiet.

Waves were coming from every direction, sometimes breaking, sometimes wobbling together and rising up to double their height before awkwardly falling back over. It was a chaotic and frightening scene, churning up the kelp forests as they sheared away beyond the perimeter.

Even the ocean was confused today.

A steaming cup of coffee, hot and thick enough to stand a spoon in, warmed my hands as I cupped them together. I could feel the heat and strength of the coffee seeping into my veins like a caffeine-pumping life support system. Watching the churning watery tumult, my surfer mind tried to force order from the chaos, tried to find a pattern from here to safety.

I flitted out of my body and into the local wikiworld, to a point about fifty feet off the deck right in front of me, and watched me watching the waves. Robert, my proxxi, took a sip of coffee for me and waved at me. I just stared back.

Our habitat looked small and vulnerable from here against the backdrop of the ocean. Dark, evil looking clouds were stealing quickly across the horizon, piling up in the sky in an enormous approaching wall. Swinging my gaze around to look inwards to Atopia, it looked muted and under threat as the roiling clouds and seas reflected dully off its glassine towers.

From this perspective, the huge incoming swells were rising up towards the beach, almost completely obscuring it as they surged and broke on their ride around Atopia. Instead of their usual rhythmic thumping, the waves were breaking at different points, choppy, bewildered.

Massive clouds of spray were sent booming upwards from the collapsing waves, hanging the beaches in veils of misty white fog. As I watched, a sharp wind began to blow and gain in strength within seconds, snapping the flags to attention on top of our habitat.

The storms were upon us.

Clipping fully back into my body, I quit my procrastinating and began to scan a list of what needed to get finished for the evacuation, sipping my coffee, luxuriating in its hotness.

“Bob, do you have a minute?” asked Martin, pinging me on a dedicated family channel. I’d turned off all the other channels, even my dimstim, as I tried, for once, to focus on the here and now.

I looked at the list again before I answered, “Yeah sure, come meet me in my room.”

I could at least start to organize my stuff while we talked. I crossed the deck and made for the lower levels, dropping down a set of stairs and opening the door to my room. It was dark inside with the shades drawn. I didn’t come in here much these days. Accessing the room controls, I faded the glass walls to transparency while at the same time opening some vents to let some fresh air in. The fusty, closed-in smell of the room almost instantly gave way to fresh ocean air. I heard a knock.

“Come on in,” I called out.

Martin materialized near the couch set against the glass wall to the open ocean. His eyes were downcast, and he fidgeted the fabric on his pant leg as he flopped himself down onto the couch. He looked worried, which was unusual for Martin.

“What’s up, bud?”

“Bob, so, I was looking at the evacuation manifest, and, well, I’m not on it. I tried pinging dad about it but he’s ignoring me for some reason. Could you try to reach him? Do you know why?”

The words froze me in my tracks. Of course the evacuation list was an ADF function, and not a part of the Solomon House research project. Their personnel manifests would be different. Dad must be off splintered in a dozen places fighting for control of the public relations situation, trying to put a positive spin on Atopia being crushed by the two giant storms.

I shrugged and lied, “I have no idea, Martin. Anyway, who cares, let’s just get a move on, huh?”

Martin didn’t move or say a word. He just sat and wrung his hands, cracking his fingers, looking even more worried. He looked about to cry.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I snapped.

“Martin, look,” I said, gathering my thoughts. I’d been thinking about doing this for a long while now, and I let some anger swell my courage. “I don’t know the best way to say this, but...”

Still I hesitated.

“Yes Bob?” he pleaded with perfectly unaware eyes.

“Martin, look...” I repeated.

He looked at me.

“You know you’re dead, right? At least some part of you must know this…” I trailed off, now suddenly unsure where to go.

There was silence, anxious silence, before his angry response. “Bob, are you stoned again?”

“Martin, I’m not stoned, and I’m not upset.” I was shaking my head, trying to find a way through this. “Actually, yes I am angry and upset, but not at you. I don’t know.”

If I didn’t get this out now, he would just forget. They had a cognitive blind spot working on his memories and perception, sort of like if you were walking in the desert and there was a hovercraft following a dozen paces behind you that dusted away your footprints as you walked, so there were a few steps behind you that you could see, but beyond that there remained just a general impression of where you had been, or more appropriately, who you had been.

“What, that I’m dead? Very funny asshole. You’re messed up, man, stop with the drugs, Bob. They’re screwing with your head. Just tell dad to get me on the evacuation list. I’m outta here.”

He got up and made to leave.

“Don’t leave Martin. This is important, and I’m not kidding and I’m not stoned.”

I moved all my phantoms to block his paths outwards into the multiverse, and pulled a heavy glittering security blanket down around us at the same time.

“Look at you! This isn’t even that much of a shock. If someone told me I was dead I’d laugh at them, but you’re getting defensive.”

“I’m not dead, Bob. I’m right here, talking to you,” said Martin, smiling awkwardly. He wasn’t telling me as much as asking me.

“Martin, don’t you find it at all odd that everyone else here has a proxxi but you?”

“I have a proxxi—Dean.”

“Uh huh. And when was the last time you were in your physical body?”

“I don’t know, it’s been a while,” he replied, shrugging as he cocked his head upwards. “What about that time that you and I went surfing and you crashed into that...”

“That was seven years ago, Martin, seven years…”

He just shrugged again and added more angrily, “So what? Maybe I’ve been detached for a while, but that doesn’t prove anything. I know lots of people who hardly spend any time at all in their bodies.”

He shook his head aggressively.

Meanwhile, my own frustration was mounting and boiling over. I could feel my cheeks flushing hot. I had to blame someone.

“It’s your goddamn fault he’s gone, Martin,” I screamed at him, finally letting it go. “Every day I have to look at your goddamn shit eating fucking grinning face and just take it. I just feel like smashing your face in, but what difference would it make?”

I was full on venting now, and the words were coming out before I even knew what I was saying. The whole world shifted red as blood gorged into my veins, and my blood pressure indicator shot off the charts. I took a deep breath and watched it sink back down, trying to calm myself. Screaming wouldn’t accomplish anything.

Martin was silent, pale, his hands shaking a little as he wrung them some more. His voice quavered as he asked, “Bob, what’s wrong with you?”

I was calmer now, and I sighed heavily.

“Martin, it’s not what’s wrong with me. Or maybe it is. I think it’s what’s wrong with this place.”

“You’re not making sense, what are you getting all crazy for?” He was starting to cry now, perched on the edge of the couch.

I took a deep breath.

“Martin, look, my brother, Dean killed himself about six years ago, an intentional drug overdose. Brain dead at first, but they kept his body in stasis, vegetative, but you were still active, his proxxi. You were still attached to him, your proxxi smarticle network intimately wired into his dead body and holding all his memories, his emotions, until we switched off the machines and transferred you entirely into the pssi nervenet.”

My voice cracked as I tried to continue, “It was too much for us. It wrecked our mother, dad as well, and then there you were, but he suddenly wasn’t. Mum took to spending all her time with you, saying how much it helped her. All of us took to spending time wandering back into the inVerse you shared with Dean.”

He looked at me, his world falling away through the floor, trying to make sense of what I was saying.

“What do you mean? I’m your brother!”

“No, no you’re not,” I explained, shaking my head sadly. “We had Dr. Granger install a cognitive blind spot so you couldn’t see what was right front and center, but saw everything around it. One day, we pulled a linchpin somewhere in your mind and then you just thought you were him. We left the blind spot active to sweep away anything that didn’t fit.”

“Bob, Jesus, Bob...” pleaded Martin, tears streaming down his face.

With the anger having blown through, my sails deflated. I suddenly felt very sorry for him. Why was I doing this?

“At the time, I just couldn’t take it, and mum and dad couldn’t either. It was a way of fixing the pain, pretending it didn’t happen. If we just suspended disbelief that little bit more, our own blind spots took over and you became him.”

Watching his face twist up in pain, it was time for me to own up.

“To be honest, Martin, this was mostly my idea to begin with, but now it’s taken on a life of its own, you’ve taken on a life of your own. Now Cognix is using it as another application of pssi.” Never lose a loved one again! “How much will people be willing to pay for that if we can show it works? And it does seem to work, which is the worst of it.”

Martin wiped away his tears with the back of one hand.

“It’s funny, now that you tell me, I can see it all, even remember it all. I guess I always sort of knew it, but I love mum and dad so much...and you too.”

He wiped away more tears.

“But why do you blame me? Why are you so angry at me?”

“What, for impersonating my brother?” I snorted, but immediately regretted it seeing the pain flash in his eyes. I sighed again, letting my last sparks of anger fizzle.

“I think that Dean just felt like you were a better version of him, that mum and dad liked you better, that people were happier when you answered a call than if he did. He was a great guy, not that he didn’t have his issues,” I said smiling sadly. Dean was lazy and irresponsible, amazing and funny. “But he just had so much trouble keeping up with it all.”

“With all what?”

“With his pssi experiment!” I shot back, angry again. “Living in a hundred worlds at once, being here and there and somewhere and someone else all at the same time. Dean just figured, why not, I’ll just remove myself, and you’ll all be able to keep a better version without all the effort.”

I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself.

“In his messed up head he didn’t think he was dying, he figured he was leaving a better version of himself to continue on. That’s what he left in his note, anyway.”

I looked down at the ground, feeling my own tears coming, starting to cry. Why was it I’d been able to be so many things, to be so smart, but I hadn’t been there for him?

Martin looked at me, shaking his head. “But maybe I am him, Bob. I think like him, I look like him, and I remember everything—every memory he ever had.”

“But you’re not him,” I replied, shaking my head.

“So then what makes a person dead?”

A stupid question.

“Dead is dead,” I shot back. “When the doctors say you’re dead.”

“When the heart stops?”

“No, when the brain goes dead, when the memories are lost, the essence of the person…”

“Most of your own memories are in the pssi, Bob, would they be gone if you suddenly were?”

“No…”

“So if a person’s memories aren’t gone, if some essence of them remains, are they truly dead?”

I paused.

“Remember having a bath together in the sink, mum sponging us off and singing in the dark when the first fusion core went offline, remember that?”

I smiled as tears rolled down my cheeks. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Remember throwing our toys over the deck into the ocean when nobody was watching, getting our proxxi to cover for us, and how angry mum was when we went and hid in one of the shark’s mouths when we went swimming for them?”

“That was your idea,” I laughed, nodding.

“We were quite the gang growing up,” he continued. “Us and our proxxi…Bob and Robert, William and Wallace, Sid and Vicious, Dean and Martin, Nancy and Cunard…”

“Yeah, that was quite the gang.”

“Have you talked to Nancy much lately?” asked Martin softly.

“No, I…” I replied. “No, not since, well, since you…”

“You should talk to her Bob.”

He looked at me steadily for a while.

“Hey, do you remember that night? We were sitting on the guard rails to the passenger cannon entrance. We must have been barely teenagers, and we were drinking beer. You had Robert override the security system and we had the whole place to ourselves. It was just you and me, sitting there.”

He paused for a moment before continuing, “We talked about what we would do together when we were old men. You told me how you were good at almost anything, all you had to do was apply yourself and you could do anything you wanted. I think you were drunk—I think we were drunk.”

“We were,” I whispered between my tears.

“But I remember most of all, I remember thinking how great you were, thinking how I wasn’t that great, how I had so much trouble with everything and wondering why. But most of all I remember thinking how much I loved you, and how proud I was to just be your brother. You were the star of the pssi-kid program back then, even way ahead of Jimmy, I was so proud…”

“Yeah, I remember that night Martin,” I managed to choke out between sobs. I was crying full on now.

“I’m still here, Bob.”

Martin was looking directly into my eyes, his voice soft and full of love.

Have you ever made one of those three-dimensional line drawings of a cube on paper? Two squares offset from each other with a straight line that joined each corresponding corner to make a three-dimensional looking cube? If you stared at it, it seemed that one of the faces was closer to you, but if you concentrated and willed it, suddenly the cube flipped and the other face switched to being closer. As I looked hard at Martin right then, my mind performed a similar flip, and suddenly all I saw was my brother, sitting there in front of me in flesh and blood. A wave of love sprang from my scalp to my fingertips, and I got up to go and sit on the couch with him and hold his hand.

“Dean...Martin...I missed you so much, it’s just this place,” I said, shaking my head and squeezing his hand.

“I’ve missed you too,” replied Martin. “You’ve been so nasty to me these past few years. I always thought you hated me for some reason. It hurt so much, and I had no idea why you acted that way.”

Tears streamed down my face, and Martin reached up to wipe them away. Then he rubbed his hand across his own face. His demeanor changed and he sat bolt upright, taking a deep breath. He reached down to squeeze my hands tightly with both of his.

“Bob, stop with all the drugs, will you? And all these women… it’s not going to change anything. Calm down. Talk to Nancy.”

“You’re right,” was all I could think to say. “I’ll stop, I’ll try...”

“Good,” he said, brightening up. “And Bob, if you really believe all that stuff about gameworlds being real…then Dean is out there somewhere still, and I’m your connection to him.”

“This is all messed up.”

I was staring at the floor now. Nothing made any sense anymore. My whole life I’d felt like I was running away from something, fleeing before some unseen danger.

From now on it would stop. Maybe he was right, maybe I could still find Dean out there. I was right in the middle of one of the most amazing places on earth, where the impossible was becoming possible almost daily. I just needed to apply myself, get out of this daze I’d slid into.

“Bob,” asked Martin.

“Yeah?” I answered.

“Bob, why are you crying?”

Cripes. The blind spot had caught up . I wiped away my tears.

“Nothing, Martin, nothing. I’m just worried about the storms and Nicky dumping me and all that crap,” I lied.

His face brightened up.

“Don’t worry big brother, I’ll take care of you. Anyway, like I was saying, could you get dad to add me to the evacuation list. I don’t know what’s going on there, but I have a lot to do, so I’d appreciate it if you could help me.”

“No worries Martin, consider it done,” I replied with a sigh.

“Cool. Thanks.”

Martin got up off the couch and prepared to leave.

“Martin,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Martin, I haven’t told you something lately.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

I smiled, pausing, and the world clicked back into sense for me.

“Martin, I love you. I love you a lot, and I haven’t told you in a while.”

He looked away quickly, catching his breath. Bringing up a hand to wipe the corner of one eye, he looked back and replied, “I love you too, Bob, that is so good to hear.”

“Okay good—now get!” I laughed.

He laughed back and shook his head as he disappeared.

This place, all of it, felt abruptly wrong. Like a switch being thrown, I suddenly knew something wasn’t right here anymore, and that this same something had swallowed Dean in its path. Blind spots—we all had them. So what was it that they were hiding from us, what was it we weren’t seeing?

I decided I was going to find out.