The Atopia Chronicles

Prologue

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

Grinning, I 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 the 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 there.

“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 toward the breaking surf below. “You always want to explain it to my proxxi.”

“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.

“Come on. Don’t exaggerate. You’re the funniest guy I know. That’s a gift!”

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

“That’s not true.”

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

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

1 Identity: Bobby Baxter

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

Opening my eyes slowly, listening to the crisp snap of our banners flapping in the breeze, I 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 flowed and pulsed with the power of my ancestors.

The day would end in victory, or in glorious death.

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

While my brother always posted impressive scores in logic and linguistics, he just as consistently bottomed out 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 our mother’s urging, but I was starting to realize I’d live, or die, to regret the decision. A sinking feeling settled into my gut.

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

I studied him, considering 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 as he looked skyward. “So how can I be sure that you’re not just some gameworld zombie?”

“You can’t, but 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 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 the proxxi of my best friend, Sid. He looked comical—a seventies British punk rocker, all pasty whiteness and knobby knees poking out from under Mongol battle armor.

A smile spread across my face.

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

Robert, my own proxxi, rode up behind him. Wisely, he said nothing as he tossed me the reins to my horse that followed behind him, but just looked toward Vicious and smiled. Vicious scowled, 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 know this is a gameworld,” said Martin over the top of his horse, “but seriously, don’t you ever get the sensation, 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 started 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, creating portals into parallel universes?

Perception was reality. Was reality, therefore, equivalent to perception? A slippery slope if there ever was one. Thus the question of this world being real or not was more troubling than it may have at first 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 saddle and putting 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 toward him as I swung up onto my horse.

“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. “But it still doesn’t answer my real question.”

I settled onto my horse and we started off. The Mongolian saddle was designed to allow the horse to find 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 were 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 it often did 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 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 anticipation of the coming bloodshed. I raised my fist in a show of power and victory to those that turned to watch us pass, feeling suddenly angry. “Do you know how stupid it is for you to believe in God?”

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

It wasn’t his fault. “That’s not it. Sid’s different. And don’t drag mum into this.… ”

Our mother was disappearing deeper and deeper into her religion, even as the technology here 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 where my mother was involved.

Honestly, I didn’t quite understand it all.

“You treat everyone like they’re stupid,” complained Martin. “Anyway, religion doesn’t really answer anything; it’s just replacing one nonstarter for another.” He shrugged. “It’s kind of giving up, isn’t it?”

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

“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.”

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

I checked my dimstim stats—my fans weren’t exactly digging the philosophical talk.

Best to 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.”

Bouncing up and down in our saddles, 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, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.”

Nonplussed, Martin considered this 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 toward 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.”

He shrugged in amiable 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 in the air and wagged my finger. “So to answer your original question Martin, this is real.”

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

“This is not just an escape my friends, not just a game or 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?!” Raising my saber and bow, I reached skyward into the morning sunshine. A flock of birds took wing far in the distance. “Are you going to kick some existential ass with me today?”

“I’m with you, Bobby!” he screamed back.

The warriors around us roared, and with that, we galloped off toward 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—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.

A sense of relaxation began to soak through my membranes, and my consciousness slipped backward and sideways through time and space.

Another blob—smaller, 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.

Reaching out to the other blobs nearby, I discovered I could swim through the goo, sweeping them aside or toward me with phantom telekinesis, and tasting them as I went. And so began the game of collecting the tastiest blobs toward 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. The tiny blobs tickled all over as they floated up past me and I shivered.

Wait, these aren’t blobs—they’re bubbles!

Everything smelled so intensely salty that I realized I was actually in the ocean.

Shafts of sunlight stabbed down from the airy world above, fading into the watery blackness below. Looking down at myself again, I jiggled some newly hatched tendrils. In an excited rush, I began wriggling off at full steam toward a mass of phosphorescent creatures dancing nearby in the voluminous darkness.

A translucent worm popped into view beside me, and I halted, 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. “Hey buddy! Is that you?”

Yes, I thought, I am Bob.

“Yeah, I’m Bob. I mean, yeah, it’s me,” I replied, a little dazed.

“It’s me, Sid. Where have you been? It’s been crazy down here. That last set was freaking intense. Things got a little weird for a while there, and then I thought, ‘Jeez, where’s Bobby?’ 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 had come 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 was sinking in. Most of our friends were emo-porning their way down from their highs, but I preferred keeping it natural.

“That was intense!” glowed Sid-worm. We were floating through a patch of dimensionless deprivation-space in an attempt 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, I feel like it’s not going to make a difference anyway.”

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

“I guess so,” I replied, unconvinced.

My sense of wonder at the world around me began to lose its fizziness, and my tendrils were going limp. Blinking, I 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. “I gotta 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. “I love you, buddy, and maybe it’s not for me to say.… ”

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

“Maybe you should slow down a bit. You’re wasted all the time. I understand, but—”

I laughed. “If that’s not the space-pot calling the kettle black.”

“I’m just saying.… ”

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

An urgent ping from Robert, my proxxi, arrived.

“My dad’s already complaining about me being late,” I added, looking at the message.

“Okay. Let’s head.”

With that, we began to surge upward toward the light, leaving the dancing creatures below. I remembered when it wasn’t Sid, but my brother dancing beside me in Humungous Fungus 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 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 also great for hiding the fact that I was stoned.

Still buzzing from my excursion into Humungous Fungus, I had Robert filtering my body 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.

Coming out onto the sun deck of our habitat overlooking the ocean, Robert nimbly handled seating me at the place opposite my dad. Martin was sitting to my left, my mom to my right, and sitting behind my mom on a chair was a guy wearing a toga and weather-beaten leather thongs.

It was a beautiful morning, and a slight breeze was just offsetting the unseasonably hot weather we’d been having. 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. “The least you could have done was be on time for your brother’s birthday breakfast.”

Although we’d only been born minutes apart, I’d been born at 11:58 pm and my brother the next day—so technically, our birthdays were on different days. I’d already suffered through a birthday dinner the night before with everyone.

Martin glanced at me from across the table. He knew I’d been out partying all night. I smiled back at him apologetically.

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

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

This, of course, didn’t sound at all like anything I’d say, and 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. He used my voice while I sub-vocalized to Sid who was ghosting in on this. “Wouldn’t you be with a family like this?” Sid snorted.

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 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, then just shook his head and went 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’s taking care of.”

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 more than tired of it. I sighed and angrily shook my head.

“Bob,” complained my dad, “you’re twenty-one years old. When are you going to find some direction? 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 the expletives when he responded for me.

“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 in all of Atopia.”

It was true.

I was a professional vacationer, and thousands of people at a time paid 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. “You have such an opportunity, Bob. What’s 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.

“I’m also one of the best surfers in the world,” I pointed out, something any parent would be proud of. My imagined ranking wasn’t entirely fair, since the rest of the world’s surfers didn’t have pssi—yet—but it wasn’t nothing.

My dad shrugged this off as well. “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 butter 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 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, clicking off my proxxi filter. I’ll handle this myself, but I slurred out half the words. “A lot of stuff has happened shince then, wooden you say?”

My dad sighed and looked skyward. “Yes it has.” He motioned with the knife across the other side of the table. “And look how well Martin is doing.”

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 your brother’s birthday today, let’s please be nice,” came my mom’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. The guy in the toga and sandals behind my mum began to lean forward as if he were about to add something. Before he could, I waved one finger at him. “Nodda word from you, ’kay?”

I was as patient as the next guy, but my mom 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 wouldn’t be so bad if her Jesus just sat there and spoke when spoken to, but he was always jumping into conversations, sharing his wisdom.

“Mom,” I asked, turning to her and tuning my proxxi filter back up so I’d stop slurring, “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, you have special abilities.”

My dad rolled his eyes, shaking his head at the three of us. He didn’t like it when she 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 on my mother’s side 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—my mother’s father—was almost as bad, and my dad could barely stand speaking to him. The family lunacy tended to skip a generation. My dad was just waiting for me to start hearing voices, and I 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 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 should 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 that I’d wandered 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. I’m stuck in this thing, and I love all you guys,” I said, really thinking I love most of you guys. “I have a kind of a love-hate relationship with pssi right now, and I just want to use this stuff the way I want to. Okay, Dad?”

My dad shrugged, giving up. “Sure. 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 grabbed some croissants and a glass of orange juice. “Great talk. I’m going surfing. Is that okay with everyone?”

4

The sense of touch is the most underappreciated of all the senses, at least of the senses the rest of the world has. When the first elemental life ventured out into the primordial goo, it was its sense of touch that kept it safe from danger. Touch is the most ancient of our senses, existing before any sight, sound, taste, or smell existed.

Touch is essential to the sense of things being a part of your body. When playing tennis, nobody thinks about the racquet hitting the ball as they swing. The racquet just becomes a part of us. Tools that begin as extensions of our bodies soon become a part of it—it’s the way the human mind works.

The same process applies to any tools we used, and pssi made it possible to make tools out of the information flow in the multiverse and incorporate it 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, shape, and temperature of the water’s surface around me through my skin. The thousands of neurons attached to each hair follicle could sense even 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 hungover from the previous evening, I opened my eyes to awake from my reverie. Atopia sure was pretty from out here. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move, and a beautiful stag burst forth from the forest underbrush. We eyed each other for a moment, then he disappeared.

Above decks, the floating island of Atopia was covered in forests that were teeming with “wild” animals, but like everything else, their neural systems were loaded down 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 during 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 that was built to perfect synthetic reality, all to enjoy a shred of the old reality 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. They suffused through the bodies of living creatures, lodging into their nervous systems to form the foundation of pssi.

The polysynthetic sensory interface enabled not just the ability to jump 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 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 saltwater into crystals on my skin, making it itchy as it baked. 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. Though 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.

Seagulls wheeled in the sky, and otters were playing 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’d scrounged from the aquaculture bins below.

Out here I felt a certain peace that escaped me elsewhere, a deep meditative calm outside the madness. Often, I came to think about Nancy, to think about my brother, to think about how I’d messed everything up. Looking up, cirrus clouds striped the blue cathedral of the sky.

Just another day in paradise.

After some fuss, Vince Indigo, the famous founder of Phuture News, had agreed to hit the waves with me this morning. He’d become my regular surf buddy in the past year, but had recently, and without explanation, dropped off the map.

Convincing him to come out had been a major struggle, and even now, he didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. He was just staring into space, uncharacteristically quiet. I was about to call out to him, to see what was bugging him, when I was interrupted.

“Hey.”

I looked down to find a pssi-projection of 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 that its look had to be changed almost hourly. His pale blue eyes reflected the skies, and I admired the tight buzz cut he was sporting. Buzz Aldrin came to mind, or better, Buzz Lightyear.

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

“Thanks for not ratting on me. So—Inuit, huh? No Eskimos left in this world?”

“Not according to me, I guess.”

We laughed together. It was nice.

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

Martin nodded. “I know what you mean.”

When we were growing up, I was nearly the only one who’d tried befriending Jimmy. He was an oddball kid, but he shared the same birthday as my brother, and I’d felt some kind of affinity toward him. These days, I almost wished I hadn’t.

When his parents had abandoned Jimmy as a teenager, Patricia Killiam, his godmother and head of the Solomon House Research Center, had asked our family to take him in. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say, and Jimmy’s presence seemed to only accelerate the downward spiral our family had already been in. To our father, Jimmy had become the shining star and savior of our family honor. I suppose I really didn’t have anyone to blame but myself.

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

“Then what more could you ask for?”

I smiled, enjoying the soothing sensation of the water rolling through my skin.

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

“Huge!” I confirmed.

He must have checked out the big barrels being laid down across the northern crescent. Storm systems were generating some dangerous waves today—just how I liked it.

“Anything interesting?”

One of my phuturecasts was focused on the incoming swells, predicting the shape and size of the break, how the pipe would develop, and a dozen other factors. I could sit there and watch the horizon for waves, but using a dedicated phuturecast, I could track swells coming from miles away and select the perfect one to get set at just the right point.

“A few nice ones, but I’m waiting for the beast.”

Martin laughed. “Perfectionist, huh?”

“With some things.”

“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?”

“I need to get back to that thing. Hotstuff’s on my back. ”

I wondered again what had his hair on fire. “I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do. But anyway, ping me if you change your mind.”

Both Martin and I waved good-bye as his primary subjective flitted off, leaving his proxxi to guide his body home. We sat silently for a few minutes, enjoying the sea, sky, and silence.

Martin looked at me and then looked down awkwardly, struggling with something. “We need to have a chat. I want to understand what’s going on with you.”

I looked away. “Sure, I’ve wanted to talk to you, too.… ” Maybe it’s time to bring up the gorilla in the room, I was thinking, but just then my metasenses started tingling. “But maybe in a few minutes?”

Detaching my primary subjective point-of-view from my body, I spun it far out into the Pacific. This viewpoint coasted in just above the water, following a monster swell making its way toward us. It was huge, at least a dozen feet in height, even in the open ocean. It sprayed and frothed angrily as I followed it, surging powerfully toward the glimmering speck of Atopia in the distance.

I snapped hard back into my body. Using a phantom, I punched up a visual overlay of how the wave would be breaking in a few minutes. “This is the one I’ve been waiting for! I totally want to talk, but could I catch this wave first?”

“No problem,” Martin laughed. He pointed 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 nearly two miles. The system selected an optimal drop-in point, and I quickly plotted some possible surf paths. 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, admiring the path I’d decided on in the simulation graphic hanging between us. Skimming the water, the wind barely ruffled his hair. “So you’re going to pull a dead-man stall, switch back to hide in the barrel, and then finish with a rocket Tchaikovsky and back-hang two?”

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

Martin nodded and disappeared, and I let go of the shark’s fin, leaning forward on my board as I began paddling to the drop-in. My social cloud started buzzing about my impending ride, my dimstim stats surging as masses of people stimswitched into me to enjoy it.

It was a funny feeling, knowing that thousands of people were inside my skin. I couldn’t feel anything physically, but I could sense it, and it sent shivers down my spine.

I began quickening, and the world dropped away as my senses sharpened.

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 their axons. We could literally amp up the speed of our nervous systems on command, but only in short bursts as we depleted the stored energy 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 one didn’t 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 quickening, feeling the world slow down as I sped up. Switching my visual field into surround mode, I closed my eyes as my visual cortex adjusted itself to a 360-degree view.

Accelerating my paddling tempo, I focused on the ripples of water coming through my water-sense, pushing my speed to match the incoming monster. It began to grow behind me, the sensation of it expanding up and into my skin, surging toward and into me.

My board angled forward, skimming faster and faster. With a final stroke, I opened my eyes and grabbed my board, popping up onto it and leaning forward to accelerate. The wave urged me on. It wasn’t really behind me—the wave was me. I felt 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 crested.

The wave began to break, and my board sped down its face. Slowing as I neared its base, I stepped to the back of the board, sinking into the water and almost stalling. I smiled, waving 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, sailing up its rushing face. As it 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 its thundering maw.

The crowds on the distant beach squealed with excitement as my silhouette disappeared.

Finally, leaning forward, I 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. Easing further forward, I sensed the final collapse of the wave, so I stood up and walked toward the front of my board and turned around.

Tchaikovsky started playing loudly in my dimstim, and I closed my eyes to begin air conducting for my audience. With just my toes on the nose of the board, back-hanging my heels off it, a powerful jet of water from the collapsing tube shot me backward out of the mouth of the barrel.

Opening my eyes, I lowered the volume on Tchaikovsky and turned around to walk toward the back of the board. Mad applause from the thousands of dimstimmers who’d enjoyed the ride rang out in the multiverse. The world returned to normal time as I released my quickening, and I felt the burning heat within my body begin to ease off.

Sighing happily, I sank into the water, straddling my board to float gently in the swells again.

Martin reappeared on the nose of my board and gave me a little golf clap. “Nice show, buddy. That was awesome!”

“Thank you, thank you very much.” I wiped the water from my face and looked back at Martin and the tourists still clapping on the beach.

I couldn’t resist showing off again.

The water around me began to thicken up as I summoned tens of millions of tiny zooplankton from the depths below. I kept them near me when surfing, as a safety net in case something went wrong. With a few carefully placed kicks, I levitated out of the water, forcing millions of my little friends to treadmill their hardest just at the right point to support each step. I stood up and took a few steps across the water, then bowed to the crowds with a flourish.

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

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

“That was a bit much,” he laughed, but it felt forced. We didn’t get out together much anymore.

“Buddy, you need to lighten up,” I said to him. “Live a little.”

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

“You want to come camping with me, Willy, and Sid later?” I asked after a pause.

“I’m invited?”

“Why else would I ask!”

“That’d be great,” Martin responded brightly, and then his smile faded. “I worry about you sometimes.”

I nodded. “Still want to have that chat?”

“Maybe later.” The moment had passed for him, too. “I’ve got a lot to do. Be careful with those storms brewing out there—could swing in some weird waves.”

“I will, I promise.” I gave him a small salute. “I’ll see you later.”

Martin returned the salute 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?

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

Rick smiled back and shook my hand, rolling his eyes slightly. “Thanks, Bob. Is Jimmy coming?”

“You’d know more than me, Commander.” Turning to his wife, I said, “And, of course, congratulations to the lovely new proxxid mother.” I laughed and reached over to kiss her on the cheek, looking down at the baby in her arms.

“And this lovely lady is?” asked Commander Strong, looking toward my date.

“Oh, ah,” I mumbled, turning to introduce my newish girlfriend. “This is Nicky.”

Nicky graciously introduced herself to the Strongs. I nodded, smiling, and then left them to it, wandering off toward the alcohol stand. I doubted Nicky wanted a drink, but I sure did.

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.

Just another great day in the world of Bobtopia.

Grabbing a drink, I walked over and sat down on a couch. We were waiting for some last person to show up to sing the birthday song, a crazy ritual someone had started for proxxid births.

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 are we doing?

I guessed we were waiting, but we all knew exactly how long we had to wait. There’s a difference, no? Perhaps we’d reached the end of waiting, and we were now experiencing some new verb that defined what waiting was, when we all knew exactly how long we had to wait.

I decided, right then and there, that I was going to call it phwaiting. Immediately, I published my 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.”

Wait: transitive verb—to stay in place in expectation of.

This seemed to amount to what we were already doing. I guess we don’t need a cool new word. Already, my proxxi was splintering me over four thousand variations on the idea of waiting from the remaining distinct human languages. The inspiration was hollowed, and 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 last landed men on the moon—on their best guess of Mao’s birthday one holiday season—but their plans for a permanent moon base had fizzled when the water deposits there had proven harder to extract than imagined. Now their new grand plans 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 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 we are.

Bored, I collapsed most of my displays and opened up an overlay to watch a new game my friends had started. Sid, Vicious, Martin, and my own proxxi, Robert, were hot into an apocalyptic otherworld battle, pinned down in a cave by an android army and 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. That annoyed me, but 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 to experience it.

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 guessed that the “Bieb Bill” had passed allowing nonnatives to run for the highest office.

In another feed, Manchester United had just scored in a Premier League game, and they were 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. Sensory broadcast technology was still in its infancy outside Atopia, but all that would be fixed soon with the release of pssi.

Flicking off the news feeds, I focused back on the battle the boys were in. Someone had just blown Martin’s head off. I sighed. 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 bio-stats, I could see my heart rate was hovering in the mid-forties, my cortisol was a little high, my insulin low, but all systems go. Those stats would be moving around as soon as the MDMA hit. Looking good, Bob, I told myself. If your heart rate was any lower, you’d slip into a coma, and that sounds pretty good about now.

The room was crowded with people milling around, getting drinks, engaging in small talk, and 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.

While I waited for the drugs to hit my bloodstream, sulking seemed like a good option, 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 toward the hapless little creature. It looked up, confused, and then squealed as the fireball engulfed it, crisping it into a pile of ash. 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 my 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 and I thanked him. 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 and balding little man who affected a shocked look.

Serves him right if that’s the best he can project. Someone should tell him he could look any way he wants.

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

That feels better. I took another gulp of my drink, feeling refreshed as my own senses connected me to the world, everything taking on a colorful sheen. On the other hand, that could be the ecstasy kicking in. The few people who remained in the small room were mostly in a corner near Nicky, still chatting with Cindy Strong, who was 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 compelled me to click my pssi back on, and the hubbub of party re-saturated my senses. Luckily, what I’d felt before was the MDMA, so I felt much happier about everything, on the whole.

By that point, Nicky was completely pissed. She grabbed me by the arm, pulling me around the corner and into the hallway where we could be alone. Sort of alone—my dimstim stats instantly shot up as the social cloud sensed my mood and the coming fight.

“I thought you said you wanted to come here! 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. “How can you call that stupid dimstim work? And this thing with your brother.… ”

With a hidden phantom, I dialed up a Dragon skin when she wasn’t looking. “My dimstim’s how we met. Don’t knock it, and don’t bring my brother into this!” Narrowing my eyes, I added, “And at least I work.”

She’d annoyed me now, so I was purposely pushing Nicky’s biggest 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.

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.

“At least I make my own money,” I pointed out.

At that moment, I couldn’t help letting out an enormous yawn right in her face, which really set her off. What else had I taken? It couldn’t have been the ecstasy—that didn’t usually make me yawn. Or wait, had I taken 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, barely containing herself.

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

“The only reason your stupid dimstim makes any money 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.

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

Holy smokes. The Dragon skin was amazingly scary when you were stoned. I shook my head and started laughing.

“STOP cutting me off!” she screamed.

She always had quite the temper. Her eyes had now bulged outward into huge melon-sized orbs with slatted cat pupils, and her head was bobbing side to side on a long neck that grew outward 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 spewed from her mouth.

And 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.”

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 was watching. He laughed and shook his head.

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

“Ah, she wasn’t the one, and 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 skin closet 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 anytime soon.

Sid shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

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

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.” My head wobbled on my neck. “What have you got that’s new?”

He looked us up and down. “You looking to skin up, or to 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 our eyes.

“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 frowned. “What are you getting at?”

“Nothing at all. How about this then?” He pointed to some animals charging across a grassy plain. “We have a great new Skins of Asia line. The Snow Leopard is all the rage.… ”

“Nah, 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.”

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

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

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

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

“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. “And how does that work?”

“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,” Smarmsworth 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.

“Uh huh.”

“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 the soles of my Converse. Hot rubber mixed with the smell of burned 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, sunglasses glinting, and cracked a smile as he pressed his back harder against the side of the car. He was soaked in sweat, too, but looked 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.

“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, let’s do this.”

A voice came over a loudspeaker from the roadblock down between the derelict buildings and burned-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 anemic-feeling .357 into the breast pocket of my leather jacket. Reaching for the door handle, I squeaked the passenger side 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, “you ready?”

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!”

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 as I 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 hitting the car, punching through the windshield and shattering the glass, which rained over me. Sid was on his back, kicking upward with his feet, trying to knock out the sunroof.

We accelerated rapidly. I risked a peek over the dash through the destroyed windshield. An officer was walking out to crouch in the middle of the street, hoisting something onto his shoulder.

“Sid! 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, sending it 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 ridiculously oversized weapons, he began blasting away. Peeking out over the dash again, I saw the head of the cop holding the rocket launcher explode in a mist of red.

The rest of them ducked for cover.

The bullets were coming fast and furious as we neared the point of impact with the barricade. Sid rotated his body backward, 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 an explosion 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 the worst of the blow. Sid grunted in pain, but managed to lift himself upright as he swiveled around to face the gauntlet ahead of us.

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

The metallic tang of blood seeped into my mouth, and I looked down to see I was bleeding. I’d been hit, but the shock of the fight was staving off the pain, at least for now. This gameworld didn’t allow turning down your pain receptors—you just 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 from behind the other cruisers, screaming in flames, wildly shooting their weapons. Sid picked them off as another cruiser exploded and incoming automatic-weapon 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. 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 push some of the remains of the smashed windshield out of the way.

It was all about style points now, and Sid did a beautiful job double-fisting shots off both sides of the car. One after the other, he blew away police officers with geometric precision as he looked skyward and let loose with a deranged cackle.

Our audience stats started to spike 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, 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 peeled off and followed 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 cops chasing us down as we tried to leave the city.

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 and wincing. My finger found a small hole on the side of my ribcage. “Not too bad. A through-and-through I think. Could you wrap me?”

He grunted. “Sure.”

I glanced back at him. “You hit?”

“I think my ear got blown off.” He held one hand to a bloody mess on the side of his head, doubled over in pain. “But the real problem is the gut shot.”

“Bad?”

It looked bad.

“Hurts like hell, but it’ll bleed out slow. I should live 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, something walked into our way up ahead.

A pedestrian? I squinted, trying to make out who it was. Not cops, anyway.

It was someone in a green suit, hunched over, and then there were dozens 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 as flashing lights started coming at us from all angles. Up ahead, it looked like a herd of little green men directly in our way.

What the hell?

I jammed on the brakes and we skidded, squealing to a halt as we plowed into the first couple of greenies, bumping over them. The other car skidded to a stop behind us. Furious, I threw open my driver-side door with weapon in hand to confront whatever was going down.

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.

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

“What?” Then it dawned on me. “Sid!” I yelled. “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 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 connect into this world anonymously, which was fine if all you wanted to do was 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 motherlode 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 our gameworld 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 the 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 troll. “We’re just trying to get out of here. There were no trolls in Los Angeles in 1988, and no vampires either.” On closer inspection, those were Forum Vampires he had with him. They might be useful. “Okay, maybe there were vampires. But 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, smelling bad with some butt-ugly, oily pimples going on.

“Master,” he growled at me.

At least he’s playing in character and not a total asshole. Maybe there’s an opportunity.

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

I nodded my head.

“Sure, this an open gameworld, but only if you’re coming to get laid and get paid,” I explained in a singsong tone, smiling to expose my two gold-capped front teeth and holding a West Side finger salute near my chest. “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.”

The troll frowned. It was hideous. “Who are you to tell me what to do?”

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

Curiously, it didn’t result in his brains blowing out the back of his head, as I’d intended. The bullet only glanced off his thick skull, ricocheting in a splatter of oily blood and hairy flesh. I’d never tried shooting a troll in the head at point blank range with a .357 before.

As I was musing on 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’d been in the process of lifting up to give the lead Comment Troll the finger with.

Blood spurted from my wrist, and I quickly backpedalled away from the threatening horde, blasting indiscriminately with the gun still in my right hand. Sid covered 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 fire that Vicious and Willy laid down as we ran back.

Breathlessly, we rallied behind the GTO. I ripped off my T-shirt and mashed my 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-16s.

“Where the hell is Martin?” I panted.

He should have been manning the rocket launcher. That would give these assholes something to think about.

Sid ducked up to look inside the car. “Aw man, I think Martin’s dying.” 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 turned back to Sid. “Those guys were miles away, they had tons of cover. How the hell 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, Bobby, I didn’t mean to.… ”

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

Sid stared at me disapprovingly, shaking his head. “Dude, you shouldn’t be so mean to him all the time. You going to talk to him?”

I said nothing, but then nodded.

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

“Yes, yes, I promise. But let’s get out of this first, okay?”

Looking back up over the GTO, the trolls were reassembling and advancing by holding up their bloodied comrades in front of them as shields. They were fast.

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 when, all of a sudden, a massive burst of gunfire erupted from both sides of us.

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

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

I didn’t have long—I could feel the lifeblood ebbing away from this body. Propping myself up on the hood of the GTO, I leaned against its bullet-riddled windshield to get a look around. Martin had died some time ago.

“Dude, that was actually pretty cool!” I admitted to the lead Comment Troll, taking the cigarette he offered. 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.”

As he said this, an LAPD officer burst from the bushes, disheveled and bloody but intact, and ran up to me. “Mother of God, please help me, please,” he whimpered, his hands pressed together in prayer position.

Raising my eyebrows, I shrugged and gave the smoke back to my new buddy. The officer looked at the two of us and began backing away, shaking his head and making small, pathetic noises. At that moment, a giant 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 with his hands help up defensively.

The troll began methodically hacking away 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 raised eyebrows.

He smiled back at me and nodded.

“Hey, 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 pouted and frowned, 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. Fred skulked off.

My vision was swimming. “Sid? You ready?”

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

“Yep!” he waved, picking up his gun and sticking 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 backward into space, and suddenly, I was floating in blackness.

I’m dead.

At least in that universe.

It was a funny thing. We could now die a hundred, a thousand, even a million times out in the synthetic worlds we traveled through, but in our identity world—the real world—death still meant death. Just one place out of millions where it held true, but one that remained stubbornly important.

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 who or when or where you were, or even how to get back into your own being.

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 in your own body, you punched it. You just had to remember that it was there.

Floating in dimensionless black space I 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 backward. An instant later, I was jogging through some trees near the eastern inlet.

Sunlight streamed down through a green canopy above me.

“Taking my body for a jog?”

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

“Nah.” 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.

“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.… ”

“In case of what?”

I was surprised. It was rare Robert ever asked me to do something.

“Just in case.”

I shrugged. Sure. He seemed worried.

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

“Naw, if it’s getting bad, just take us home. I’m going for one more game session with Martin.” I felt bad for yelling at him, but that was just how he was. He couldn’t help it.

For the rest of the day we opted to go old school, returning to the Mongol battle. We all met up afterward 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, jumping around in the sand and howling 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!”

Sid had remapped 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 became a part of my body, and as I quickened, I could duck and weave with blinding speed, roaring through the battle as I hacked away at the Tatar scum.

“Yeah, superhuman. That’s perfectly accurate.” I was already drunk. “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’ll be, well, just men again.”

Sid smiled. 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. “You don’t give up, do you?”

The surf was pounding noisily as we sat there, but a truly gargantuan wave thundered in, literally shaking the party lanterns hanging off the tiki bar. We turned to look out into the blackness. Those are monster storms brewing out there.

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

7

Floating at the edge of space, we watched two massive hurricanes converging, swirling ominously in three dimensions below. My dad had asked us to get together as a family to see firsthand what was happening. The storms had strengthened in the past day, both past Category 4, and were threatening to pin and crush Atopia against the west coast of America.

Atopia was still holding its own as we backed away, but it was running out of room. The phuturecasts didn’t see any way around them, and a complete surface evacuation had been ordered. The impregnable fortress of Atopia was under threat.

Jimmy was right in the thick of the emergency preparations, of course.

Flitting back to our family habitat to get ready, I clipped back into my body. After a rushed inventory assessment with my proxxi, it seemed I really didn’t need to bring much. With some time to spare, I let my mind slip backward and away to an early inVerse memory of my family that I liked to escape to when I felt stressed.

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 passed the point where my parents had allowed Robert to fully take over my body, but he hadn’t progressed there yet.

Though we were twins, my brother had somehow always lagged behind me.

He chased me around the beach, squealing with excitement and waving his bright orange plastic digger, and just before he could touch me, I would flit out to another spot nearby, disappearing 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 couldn’t stop laughing.

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

I hadn’t seen my mom laugh in years. My dad either 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—becoming a person you once were, happy and carefree—was about as addictive as something could get.

But reVersing was worse still—not just 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.

Some people believed that 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. Granger said on his EmoShow that going back and reliving the past helped us grow emotionally, that is was a part of a process that helped us to find resolution and happiness.

I wasn’t so sure.

What my family had done, though, was worse than all that. It 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. 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. Despite the surging surf, the air was eerily still—the proverbial calm before nature’s big show. Ragged, scudding clouds hung under an ominous and luminous sky.

A steaming cup of coffee, hot and practically thick enough to stand a spoon in, warmed my hands as I cupped them together. 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, watching myself watching the waves. Robert took a sip of coffee for me and waved. I just stared back.

Our habitat looked small and vulnerable from here against the backdrop of the ocean. Dark, wicked-looking clouds were stealing quickly across the horizon, piling up in the sky in an enormous approaching wall. Swinging my gaze around to stare inward toward Atopia, it looked muted and small beneath the roiling clouds.

From this perspective, the huge incoming swells were rising up toward the beach, almost 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 upward 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 began to scan a list of what needed to get finished for the evacuation.

“Bobby, 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 glanced at the list again before I answered. “Sure, come meet me in my room.”

I could at least start to organize my stuff while we talked. Crossing the deck, I 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 go in there much these days. Accessing the room controls, I faded the glass walls to transparency while opening some vents to let a bit of fresh air in. The fusty, closed-in smell of the room gave way to brisk 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 with the fabric on his pant leg as he flopped himself down onto the couch, his hoodie obscuring his face.

“What’s up, bud?”

“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 splintered in a dozen places, fighting for control of the public relations situation and trying to put a positive spin on Atopia being crushed by the two giant storms. He wouldn’t have had time to consider the manifests.

I shrugged and lied, “I have no idea. Must be some kind of clerical error. Who cares? Let’s just get a move on, huh?”

Martin didn’t stir or say a word. He just sat and wrung his hands, cracking his fingers.

I couldn’t take it anymore.

I snapped.

“Martin, look.” 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.… ”

“What?”

“Martin, look… ,” I repeated.

He looked at me.

“You know you’re dead, right? At least some part of you must know.… ” I trailed off, unsure of what to say next.

There was silence—anxious silence—before his furious response. “Are you stoned again?”

“I’m not stoned.” I paused, trying to find a way through this. “I’m angry, but not at you. I don’t know.”

If I didn’t get this out now, he would just forget. A cognitive blind spot was at work on his memories and perception. It was sort of as 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 went along. There were a few steps that you could still see behind you, but beyond that there remained just a general impression of where you had been, or more appropriately, who you had been.

“So I’m dead? Very funny, asshole. You’re messed up, man. Stop with the drugs, they’re screwing with your head. Just tell Dad to get me on the evacuation list. I’m outta here.”

He got up to leave.

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

I moved all my phantoms to block his paths outward into the multiverse and pulled a 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, Bobby. I’m right here, talking to you.” Martin smiled awkwardly. He wasn’t telling me as much as asking me.

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

“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 upward. “What about that time that you and I went surfing and you crashed into that—”

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

“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 looked at the floor, burrowing his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, rocking back and forth slightly.

Meanwhile, my own frustration was boiling over. I could feel my cheeks flushing.

I had to blame someone.

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

I was full-on venting now, the words coming out before I even knew what I was saying. The world shifted red as blood surged in 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 as he took them out of his hoodie pockets and held them up. “What’s wrong with you?”

I had ahold of myself now. “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 started crying, 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. You—his proxxi. You were still attached to him, your network intimately wired into his dead body and holding all his memories. When we switched off the machines and his body died, we transferred you entirely into the pssi network.”

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

Martin 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!”

“You’re not,” I said sadly, shaking my head. “We had Dr. Granger install a cognitive blind spot in your systems, so you couldn’t see what was front and center but saw everything around it. One day, they pulled a linchpin somewhere in there, and you just thought you were him. We left the blind spot active to sweep away anything that didn’t fit.”

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

With the anger having blown through, my sails deflated. Closing my eyes, I exhaled and stretched my neck from side to side, taking a moment before looking back at him.

“At the time, I couldn’t take it, and Mom 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, this was 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… your situation… as another application of pssi.” I paused to take a deep breath. “How much will people be willing to pay to never lose a loved one? 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 Mom 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?”

“For impersonating my brother?” I snorted, but immediately regretted it, seeing more pain flash in his eyes. I let my last sparks of anger fizzle. “I think that Dean just felt like you, his proxxi, was a better version of him, that Mom 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.’ 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, my own tears coming. 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 thoughtfully. “But maybe I am him, Bobby. I think like him, I look like him, and I remember everything—every memory he ever had.”

“But you’re not him.”

“What makes a person dead?”

Stupid question.

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

“When the heart stops?”

“When the brain goes dead, when the memories are lost, the essence of the person.… ”

“Most of your own memories are in the pssi. 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?”

He paused. I said nothing.

“Remember having a bath together in the sink, Mom 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. “I remember.”

“Remember throwing our toys over the deck into the ocean when nobody was watching, getting our proxxies to cover for us, and how angry Mom 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. Us and our proxxies… Bobby and Robert, William and Wallace, Sid and Vicious, Dean and Martin, Nancy and Cunard.… ”

“That was quite the gang.”

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

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

“You should talk to her.” He looked at me steadily for a while. “Hey, do you remember that night? We were sitting on the guardrails to the passenger cannon entrance. We must have been barely teenagers, and we were drinking that fermented seaweed? You had Robert override the security systems, and we had the whole place to ourselves. It was just you and me sitting there.”

I nodded.

He paused 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 I was pretty drunk.”

“I was drunk, too,” 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 just to be your brother. You were the star of the pssi-kid program, even way ahead of Jimmy, I was so proud.… ”

“I remember that night,” 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.

I remembered drawing three-dimensional line drawings of cubes and other objects on paper back when we were starting in school—two squares offset from each other with a straight line that joined each corresponding corner to make a three-dimensional-looking cube. I found it fascinating because when I 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 with sudden clarity, 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.

“Dean… Martin… I missed you so much, it’s just this place.” I reached out to hold his hand.

“I’ve missed you, too,” replied Martin. “You’ve been so nasty to me these past years. I always think you hate me for some reason that I don’t understand. It hurt so much.”

Tears streamed down my face, and Martin reached up to wipe them away, and then he rubbed his hand across his own face. His demeanor changed, and he sat bolt upright, taking a deep breath. He grabbed both of my hands tightly with his. “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 replied. “And Bobby, if you really believe all that stuff about gameworlds being real, then Dean is still somewhere out there, and I’m your connection to him.”

“This is messed up.”

I was staring at the floor. Nothing made any sense. 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 and get out of this daze I’d slid into.

“Bobby?” asked Martin.

“Yeah?”

“Why are you crying?”

Oh no. The blind spot had caught up. I wiped away my tears.

I lied. “It’s nothing. I’m just worried about the storms and Nicky dumping me.”

His face brightened. “Don’t worry, big brother, I’ll take care of you. Like I was saying, could you get Dad to add me to the evacuation list? I don’t know what’s going, but I have a lot to do, so I’d appreciate it.”

“Consider it done,” I replied with a sigh.

“Thanks.”

Martin got up off the couch and prepared to leave.

“Hey, Martin.… ”

“Yeah?”

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to say 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.”

He looked away quickly, catching his breath, and brought up a hand to wipe the corner of one eye. “I love you, too, Bobby. That is so good to hear.”

“Okay, good—now get!” I laughed.

He grinned back at me, shaking 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?