The Dystopia Chronicles

1

The orange glow of sunset faded behind bearded silhouettes of cypress trees lining the bayou. Fireflies began their mating dance as darkness fell, winking between the Spanish moss that draped into the waters, while a symphony of crickets and spring peepers kept rhythm with the wind that swayed the treetops.

Vince and Connors started a fire in the hard-packed earth under cover of the barn roof. There wasn’t much they could do about heat signatures, but avoiding direct overhead visual observation was something.

“So what happened in the meeting?” Connors asked Vince again.

Vince knew she wasn’t happy about being excluded, but then she couldn’t do much about it. Now she wanted answers.

He slid another branch into the fire. It was muggy, but the heat would be soon replaced by a damp chill. Not only that, but they had to eat something. Strips of catfish sizzled on an improvised grill. Trying to avoid Connor’s questions, Vince had gone fishing as soon as his primary subjective returned from the Terra Novan Council meeting. Standing knee-deep in the muck amid lily pads and cattails, he let some of his smarticles loose in the water. A fat catfish had swum obligingly into his hand within a few minutes, after he flitted into its mind and asked it to come.

What happened in the meeting? Vince wasn’t sure how to answer this. The Terra Novans believed there was some ancient technology at work—the nervenet—similar to but more sophisticated than existing synthetic reality systems. They said that when Saint John sat in the cave on Patmos Island and wrote down the Apocalypse, he had connected to this old machine. What he wrote down wasn’t as much a prediction, but a description of what had happened before, and what would happen again, like an echo.

Humans had been connecting into this nervenet for thousands of years, but it took a certain “society of mind” that only religious ascetics, who practiced meditation, managed to achieve. For the Terra Novans this explained why prophets described moving into other worlds, out-of-body-experiences, and talking to gods who were just imprints of ancient intelligences trapped in this nervenet.

They believed the release of the Atopian technology was the last straw that awoke this old machine, that this was why the crystals were appearing and replicating. Hundreds of millions of people connecting into virtual worlds triggered this tipping point with a burst of global neural activity. The old world and new were merging, the realities fusing, and Jimmy was the reincarnation of the Great Destroyer, the White Rider of legend. This was why they tried to destroy Atopia, to stop the release of pssi, to stop the unleashing of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

It felt insane.

He felt insane.

He’d been hoping—praying—when they contacted Terra Nova, that everything would sort itself out, that things would become clearer. Now things were less clear, more frightening whether he believed them or not. Either there was an ancient being let loose that was bent on destroying the Earth. Or, one of the most powerful groups in the world sincerely believed that the Apocalypse was underway and were ready to start a global war over it.

Those were his two options. Both were terrifying.

“There are some crazies operating out there, and we need to stop them,” Vince finally answered. One way or the other, that was true.

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Connors slid a branch into the fire. “What, like terrorists? That was Robert Baxter who appeared in the forest in New Guinea, wasn’t it? What was with the robe and sandals?”

Vince had forgotten that she was ghosting him in the forests of New Guinea when they found Willy’s proxxi. Connors had seen Bob appear at the edge of the forest. Then again, the whole world knew that Bob was in Terra Nova. The mediaworlds were whipping into a frothy conspiracy fever over it. “Yeah, that was Bob. He was in the meeting.” He sighed. “And this goes way beyond terrorists.”

At the meeting, Vince had instantiated a private channel with Bob to say hello, but Bob barely acknowledged him. It wasn’t like Bob. He’d changed. Something happened to the kid. Something bad.

Sid and Bob seemed to swallow the Terra Novan story. Then again, they were pssi-kids: they barely saw any difference between the real world and the imaginary ones they inhabited. If Sid woke up one morning as the Queen of England, he wouldn’t be surprised—he’d just ask for a cup of tea. Bob wanted to get back on Atopia, rescue Nancy and his family away from any danger, and apart from that, he just wanted to make everyone happy. Sid was excited that there might be a new system of realities he could explore. Vince was the only voice of reason.

And he was faltering.

He felt like he was stuck in a mirror maze. Part of the problem was that he’d already been halfway there himself, reading secret codes into ancient manuscripts, half-believing that there was some fantastical explanation for the multi-headed Buddhas. But before this was a kind of intellectual game, good for chatting about over beers. Now it was laid out as fact.

Or, rather, someone was trying to convince him it was fact. Terra Nova could just be another sophisticated institution with a doomsday cult at its center, like countless others around the world—the Communes, even the Catholic Church itself.

“I need answers, but I can wait a bit.” Connors poked at the catfish. “Are you okay?”

Vince smiled, his mind raging in the background. “Yeah, I’m fine. I think those are ready.” He leaned forward with a clean wedge of plastic, and flicked one of the filets onto it. He inspected it. They were done. “Did you ever have anything weird happen to you, that you can’t explain?” He deposited half of the catfish onto an improvised plate for Connors.

“Like what?”

“When I was a kid”—Vince took a tentative bite of the catfish, it was hot—“I was maybe twelve, and we were going on vacation with my family. My dad was driving, and I was dozing in the back with my cousins. But I swear to God, I could hear what they were going to say before they said it. And it wasn’t a fluke, I could do it again and again by getting into this lucid dreaming state.”

“That’s amazing.” Connors picked her fish up with her fingers and took a bite.

“What, the fish or my story?”

Connors’ catfish fell apart, spilling onto her plate. She rolled her eyes at her own clumsiness. “That you were alive when people still drove cars.”

“I’m being serious.”

When they’d talked, Mikhail Butorin claimed he had supernatural powers that came and went, like clairvoyance, invisibility, and more. If Vince connected the dots—and took the Terra Novan explanation at face value—it meant Butorin had been connecting into this ancient nervenet, but just didn’t know it. It sounded nuts.

“No, I’ve never experienced anything like that.” Scooping the bits of fish up on her plate, Connors looked at Vince. Flickering firelight reflected on her face. “The more you tell me, the more I can help. What about those crystals? Is it some kind of alternate pssi technology?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what they think it is.”

“They being the Terra Novans?”

Vince nodded.

“And it’s not theirs?”

He picked up another piece of catfish “Not that they said, anyway.”

“But there are some kind of terrorists at work?”

He stared into her eyes. Terrorists. She always came back to this idea. She would think it was crazy if he said that Jimmy Scadden was the White Horseman of the Apocalypse, that ancient aliens were infiltrating Atopia. Even he thought it was crazy. “Something like that,” he replied.

Sitting there with Connors, listening to the frogs chirping, everything felt surreally calm. Time was always something he’d wanted more of, but it could also be the enemy. It was time for action before he convinced himself out of what he needed to do. Emotions were one thing, and logic was another, but in the end, he had to do the right thing. And for Vince, there was only one option.

“I need you to take me into Washington, as your prisoner. I have information for Allied Command—I need to speak to their most senior person. Then I can tell you everything.”

Connors frowned. “And just how do you propose to do that?”

Out of the darkness, beyond the doorway of the barn, a small bot appeared. Connors reached around to grab anything she could fight back with, but Vince held up one hand to calm her. “It’s okay.”

The bot dropped a pile of mechanical parts onto the grass and disappeared back into the darkness.

“These are the parts we need to fix the turbofan out front,” Vince explained.

Connors rocked forward to her feet. “And you got these how?” She walked over and kneeled to inspect the parts.

“I still have some connections.”

They collected the parts and walked out front, toward the downed turbofan.

“So can you get me in front of a senior Allied commander?” he asked. “Do you think you can do that? It’s important.” They reached the turbofan. Connors opened the access hatch and they both switched to low-light imaging in their optics systems.

“Maybe, but my last attempts to raise comms with my boss didn’t work out too well.”

“Try again.”

Connors paused. “You have dangerous friends, Vince. I’m not sure all your connections and money can protect you anymore.”

“These are dangerous times.”

“I’m being serious. Are you sure you want to go to Washington?” She stuck her head inside the access panel.

Vince smiled. A few days ago, Connors had been in a rush to arrest him and bring him to Washington, and now he wanted to go and she was resisting taking him there. She was so driven to do the right thing. “Can you fix it?”

Connors grunted. “I think so.” She pulled her head out. “You know what they’re going to do to you if you go there? You know, right?”

Vince sighed and nodded.

“This is a national security issue now, not just some jumped-up white-collar crime. They’re going to rip into you.”

“I know.” Vince looked up at the stars. Sooner or later you had to pick sides. “I’m going to tell them everything. Make the call.”

“If you’re thinking this will get you off the hook, get your Phuture News back—”

“That’s not what’s this is about.” Vince looked down into Connor’s eyes. “This is about doing the right thing.”

She met his gaze. “Okay then.” She leaned her head back through the access panel.

“And I want to get you somewhere safe,” he whispered under his breath while her head was deep inside the drone. He glanced at the horizon, at the streak of the comet just rising, then looked up at the stars—but there was nowhere safe to go, not on this world, not anymore.

2

Eight silver capsules hung motionless together, spaced out over a four-kilometer line. The gold and silver webs of city lights crept through nightshade far below. A burst of sunlight illuminated the curve of the Earth, the rising sun blossoming across seas and the wrinkles of snow-capped mountains. Retrorockets fired on the capsules, tiny soundless bursts that slowed them in tandem. One after another they dropped from space, glowing orange and then white as they tore into the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

Sid’s display spaces lit up. “We’ve tripped the Alliance defenses. Wait for my signal.”

On Himalayan mountaintops strung along the Chinese side, batteries of slingshot shield-effect and surface-to-air weapons systems powered up, zeroing in on the incoming threats. The first of them lit up, spreading a blanket of incendiary pellets in the path of the capsules. The pellets exploded and flamed into a wall of plasma.

Sid waited, watching the distance close. “Now!”

The capsules shed their blistering shells, and dozens of fragments rocketed out from each at random angles, hundreds of decoys that zigged and zagged on hard angles, spreading across thousands of cubic kilometers of space.

As one of the world’s best players in tactical combat in the gameworlds, Sid had been given command of the infiltration. He’d never been involved in real combat, but there was barely any difference anymore between the real world and the gameworlds he dominated. When they were planning this, he’d insisted that they didn’t have any better options, that he could execute this better than anyone else they had.

Now he was hoping he was right.

His mind spread out into the future, modeling the incoming flux of defensive strategies in hundreds of phutures that evolved and collapsed in fractions of seconds as their predictions came true or faltered. Latency delays between the battle zone and his meat-mind were too long, so he’d embedded an autonomous splinter of his mind into the attacking capsules. A very thin stream of perceptual data updated his primary consciousness several seconds after the fact.

Electromagnetic cloaking systems bent radio and visual wavelengths around the invaders, rendering them nearly invisible, while darknets descended to disrupt the informational spaces that linked this physical space to the cyber-worlds. Weaving and dodging, dozens of the decoys flamed out in the blazing defenses, but one and then another of them got through, slamming into the mountainsides and foothills of the Langtang Valley in the middle of the Himalayan plateau.

“We made it,” sighed Sid’s splinter to nobody else but itself. It had embedded its primary point-of-presence in the fragment-decoy in which Zoraster’s body was encased.

Blasting its way several feet into the granite of the mountainside, the impact of landing imparted thousands of gees onto the capsule, but the core had remained intact. Sid began the rapid heating sequence, thawing Zoraster’s frozen body while he powered up the bots and exoskeletons.

He fired the explosives to separate the exterior casing.

“Incoming,” alerted another splinter of Sid’s mind. On the tactical maps, hundreds of Alliance drones swarmed outward from their bases in the mountains, descending on the seismic signatures that the impacts created.

Railgun slugs tore into the side of the mountain above them.

Sid had to hurry. With a bang the exterior casing exploded away, opening the interior to the wind and snow of the Himalayan plateau they were still rolling across. His splinter was now totally cut off from the outside world as dense security blankets descended on this new theatre of war. In the outside world, he was filling the mediaworlds with propaganda, trying to create a fog of disinformation around the attack.

Nearly a second had passed since they’d hit the ground. The debris and snow was still settling while they rolled to a stop. Sid engaged the robotic surrogate housing him to begin constructing a local situational report. In his mind’s eyes, the other Grilla units came online, and a tactical display began forming. Seven of them, all ex-commandos from Zoraster’s old special-forces team, had made it through the gauntlet.

One was unaccounted for.

In overlaid display spaces, Sid watched each of the Grillas undergo the rapid thaw-and-heat cycles, their bodies coming back to life. He couldn’t help thinking about resurrection, about the Resurrection. How much of the old texts were true—how to separate fact from fiction? Was Judgment Day coming? Would the unforgotten dead rise, springing from the ancient nervenet’s memory banks?

Zoraster twitched as his body came back to life.

And would it be only humans?

The hollow thud of the railgun slugs grew louder. The Alliance defensive systems had located Sid and Zoraster’s capsule, but they were already away, disappearing into the swirling snow. Behind them the capsule exploded in a crunching explosion.

Zoraster’s meat-mind was coming back to groggy life as his exoskeleton marched him along the mountain ridge. He smiled a toothy grin at the drone Sid’s mind hovered in. “You okay, kid?”

Sid laughed. “I’m not the frozen steak dinner. How are you feeling?”

“Not something I’d like to do every day, but okay.” As a protection against the extreme accelerations, they’d put the Grilla commandos in deep-freeze. It was something they were engineered for. To the Alliance, this would all just look like a failed kinetic attack. “Everyone get through?”

Sid relayed the situational report into Zoraster’s systems. Seven of the capsules carrying his Grilla commandos got through. One was still unaccounted for. Now it was listed as destroyed.

The Grilla sighed. “Damn it, Zane.” He looked at Sid’s drone. “He was a good friend.”

Sid tried to find more information, but there wasn’t any. All of Zoraster’s old army buddies had volunteered for the mission, without asking any questions, when he put out the call. Now one of them was dead. They trudged through the ice and boulders in silence. The first stage was complete. There was a long hike ahead, over the spine of the Himalayas to the plains beyond, but so far, that was all Sid knew.

“Do you have any idea how we’re going to get into Arunchel Pradesh?” Sid asked, texting the question quietly into Zoraster’s secondary channels. Arunchel Pradesh—literally, the “land of the rising sun” in Sanskrit—was the location of the first Sino-Indian wars in the Himalayas over a hundred years before. It was also the flashpoint that started the Weather Wars.

It was now where Allied Command kept their main headquarters.

“We’re heading into Nyingchi first,” replied Zoraster.

Sid waited for him to expand on his plan, but the Grilla just trudged through the snow.

Glancing up at the towering peaks of the Himalayas, the splinter of Sid’s mind hovering in the drone hoped that the Grilla had a plan.

3

“All is lost!” screamed Hezekiah. “And because of what? This boy?” He threw an accusing finger at Bob.

Isaiah placed himself in front of Bob, protecting him. “You are the King of Judah, you cast out the false idols. Yahweh will protect us.”

Bob trembled, the scroll of papyrus balanced on his knees shaking. Night was falling, and the smoke from the cooking fires of the two hundred thousand Assyrian troops camping outside the walls of Jerusalem was drifting in, even into the royal palace.

Hezekiah scowled. “Where is this god you speak of?” He grabbed a smoldering pan of incense and threw it against the wall. The slaves cowered. “The twenty-four cities of Judah have been sacked. It was on this boy’s words that you counseled me not to pay tribute to Sennacherib!”

“He will come,” Bob heard himself saying, leaning forward to look the king directly in the eyes. “Yahweh will lay waste to the legions.”

“Your head will be the first thing I will present to Sennacherib come the first light,” growled Hezekiah, but already there were the screams of life being ripped from thousands of souls beyond the walls. Hezekiah’s head turned to look through the billowing curtains into the screeching night, the expression on his face turning from anger to bewilderment, and then into fear.

The dreams washed from Bob’s mind as he awoke. Australian aboriginals believed that man dreamed the world into existence. What world am I dreaming of?

Bob’s mind flitted into the sensor systems of the transport in which his body was being smuggled. There were no humans aboard except for him and the priest, stowed below decks in a life-support crate. All around was the heaving blue of the oceans, the wind whipping the tips of waves into a froth that skidded across the sea’s surface. He was in an automated oceanic tanker-transport, one of the thousands that mindlessly plowed the watery wilderness.

On Atopia, the ocean was Bob’s friend, his playground. He tried mapping his tactile sense—his water sense—onto the sea’s surface around the tanker, like he used to do at home, but now it felt alien, angry.

Nearly the only things that were alive out here—if that label could be applied—were the machines that roamed the waves, ferrying cargo back and forth to feed the seething mass of humans on the shores. Human biomass now exceeded all wild terrestrial biomass. Overhead in the skies, he could sense the turbofan transport networks, their insides filled with this same human biomass that they ingested and regurgitated at each stop. Dead seas, dead lands, and all creatures enslaved to the human project of pleasuring themselves.

The priest, his body in stasis in the pod next to Bob, was awake as well, and he opened a private communication channel. “Are you feeling ready for the coming fight?” he asked.

Bob mentally shook himself, waking himself up. Such dark thoughts, it wasn’t like him. Then again, his body lay encased in a life-support unit at the bottom of an oceanic transport, an unwilling linchpin in a surreal global conflict. “Not really,” Bob replied. “My mind is filled with such—”

“Fear and doubt is normal in such a situation.”

In such a situation. “You were right.” Right about the end of the world. Bob didn’t entirely trust the Terra Novans, but everything Tyrel said seemed to make sense. Mohesha was the one to suggest that the priest come with him. She contacted the priest to debrief him, and he’d offered to continue on the journey with Bob. The priest was more comfortable with Terra Novan technology than he was, and Mohesha knew Bob trusted him. She knew this would be a rough road.

“The truth comes in many ways to those who seek it,” replied the priest.

Both of them were immobile in the bottom of the transport, speaking through their minds. Bob had renounced Atopian technology—it was too dangerous to connect into it anymore. He was using Terra Novan tech now. Terra Novans didn’t use proxxi, so Bob freed his, creating a set of corporations around the world that Robert could control to establish his identity as a legal person. He missed his old friend, and on this leg of the trip he was in total radio silence.

Once again he was cut off from the world, but now he was on a mission.

“We need you to return to Atopia,” Tyrel had explained to Bob at the end of the Terra Novan Council meeting.

“Return to Atopia?” Where just days before this would have excited him, when Tyrel said it, his stomach had knotted up.

“You are the only one that might be able to get through to Jimmy Scadden. What’s left of him in there still trusts you, even loves you. He spared you. You might be able to drive a wedge of uncertainty into his mind.” Tyrel had paused. “Or obliterate him.”

“Can’t I try talking to him from here?” Bob had complained.

“You need to get inside the Atopian perimeter; it’s the only way we can try to ensure the White Rider won’t intercept you.”

Bob had finally agreed.

But only as it gave him the chance to rescue his family, and to rescue Nancy. But he didn’t know if he’d even be able to convince them to leave. Still, he had to try.

A part of Bob wished he’d managed to speak to Sid more after the meeting, but somehow there hadn’t been time. To be honest, he hadn’t made the time. To be honest, he didn’t really want to talk.

At the meeting, they’d unpacked all the data that Patricia gave to him. It seemed to confirm what the Terra Novans were thinking, but the POND data was unexpected, and nobody had any idea what it meant, or if it was even relevant. Sid was still working on decoding it. The most critical information, though, had been what Willy’s body had been carrying, the information on the identities of the other Horsemen.

It was this that had set the plan in motion.

The Terra Novans had given him nearly unfettered access to all their resources, the ability for him to summon their entire cyber-arsenal if needed. He was the critical node in the fight that had to get through, that might be able to cut the head from the snake.

“How much did Mohesha tell you?” Bob asked the priest. He wasn’t sure what Mohesha had shared.

“Enough. We must decide for ourselves what to believe and what to cast out. The battle between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness began long ago.”

In his mind’s eye, Bob saw a fly crawling on the strip-lighting embedded in the ceiling. The fly crawled around, its only concern finding its next meal, perhaps finding a mate. If he reached up to swat it, it would try to escape, realizing something was trying to kill it. It wouldn’t understand what was trying to kill it. It would only understand that it had to run. Bob had a creeping sensation of the same thing.

Inside his mind, he burned to get back onto Atopia, to take his family and Nancy to safety. He couldn’t fail again.

He was the only one who really knew Jimmy, the only one Jimmy might listen to, and he was the only one who knew the Atopian systems as well as Jimmy did. An image of Jimmy on the beach back at Nancy’s thirteenth birthday party floated into his mind, that young trusting boy looking to Bob for help. Now he needed to use that trust, find the love for Bob that might still exist somewhere inside his old friend.

And use that love against him.

4

Nancy surveyed the hall. It was filled with row upon row of young men and women, healthy young men and women—healthy save one respect. They weren’t aware at all. They were cocooned in life-support units, white pods stacked along the length of the hall like eggs in a hive, ready to hatch. Attending drones hovered and buzzed between them.

The facility she was virtually inspecting was located in an office tower in the middle of San Francisco, but she was finding more of them in nearly every city. They were operated as infirmaries by Cognix Corporation, a spillover from the private health care systems it helped operate around the world.

In the cocoons were the disappeared, the people who’d become lost in the Atopian virtual reality system. They went in, but their awareness never came out. On Atopia, before launch, there were reports of this happening, but they’d been pushed aside. Nancy wished she had paid more attention. Only now did she understand the truth.

Jimmy was stealing souls.

“Some report that over a million people are now among the disappeared,” a Boston Globe reporter said in a mediaworld that Nancy watched in a corner of her mind. “Inquiries at Cognix Corporation go unanswered, yet the FDA refuses to hold an inquest into the issue.”

There were rumors, reports, but nobody seemed too worried. It wasn’t just that people were too busy to care, or too interested in their own selfish pursuits. They honestly didn’t notice, or when they did, they’d forget. The highest rates of disappearances were in areas with the highest penetration of pssi, and there was a collective blind spot operating in the externally stored memories and meta-cognitions systems. The disappeared list Nancy was compiling correlated with people in influential positions. Jimmy was taking control.

Another newsworld caught Nancy’s attention: “UN commission reports happiness rates soaring around the world…”

Something had to be done. She couldn’t wait any more.

“Are you content knowing Jimmy is taking Cognix away from you?” asked Nancy. Cognix was Herman Kesselring’s baby. She turned to look out of the phase-shifting windows of the Cognix Board room onto the forests of Atopia more than a thousand feet below.

Kesselring’s face flushed. “I am still the main shareholder. I’ve got nothing to fear from young Scadden.”

“Is that why you hide up here all the time?” Kesselring had barely left the confines of the upper corporate office complex in weeks. “You’re sure acting scared.”

“Have you seen the stock price of Cognix?” Kesselring blustered. “We’re on track to become the fourth-largest economy on the planet—”

“This isn’t about money anymore, Mr. Kesselring. Do you know he’s amassing a private psombie army?” She didn’t need to specify who they were talking about.

“The body lend-lease program? That’s not a private army—”

“Let’s cut the bullshit right now, Herman.”

That stopped Kesselring in his tracks. In the silence, Nancy stared out the window at the crescent of white sand beaches ringing the floating-island-nation-state, at the waves breaking over the frothy breakwaters. The beaches were empty, where before they’d been packed with tourists. They hadn’t been coming here for the water, however, they’d been coming to experience pssi, and now that pssi was everywhere, the tourists were elsewhere. Nancy used to feel such peace when she looked out at this view—but now when she saw those waves, she always thought of Bob and wondered where he was.

“Aren’t you part of the science team going to the Dallas Commune?” asked Kesselring, trying to shift topics.

The Commune outside of Dallas, Texas, under siege by American internal security forces, had been breached. It was the sister to the much better fortified Montana Commune. Atopia had been asked to send in its head technical team to do a forensic analysis of the Commune’s systems. “I am. My main subjective is there now.”

Kesselring drummed his fingers against the conference room table. Nancy could almost see the gears clicking in his head.

“How do you know you can keep anything secret from him?” he said finally.

“I don’t, but then we’re going to have to take some calculated risks if we’re going to stand up to him.” Implicit in this was the risk she was already taking. She didn’t know that Jimmy didn’t already own Kesselring. She was sure Jimmy was controlling the rest of the Board, starting with Dr. Granger, whose normally vapid expressions had become more sinister.

“We?” Kesselring smiled. “So now we are a ‘we?’ ”

Nancy turned away from watching the waves to face Kesselring. “We are.” She sent some data into Kesselring’s networks, some of the information Bob gave her. Kesselring’s eyes widened. “I need you to call a special, very private meeting of senior shareholders.”

On an overlaid situational display, Nancy watched Alliance battle platforms converging on Terra Nova in the Southern Atlantic. She didn’t reveal everything she knew about Jimmy. She kept secret that Jimmy had stolen Commander Rick Strong’s wife. That needed to be used at the right moment.

Kesselring’s mind raced through the data she gave him. “You received this from Patricia?”

Nancy nodded. Maybe she should attempt to contact Mohesha at Terra Nova. The other option was Bob, but that was far too risky. Jimmy would have sensors waiting to be tripped if she tried anything like that. Even here, she was keeping her memories of this meeting locked away inside the perimeter of Kesselring’s private security blankets. Each part of her mind would have to start to work independently, like cells of an espionage network, each knowing the other existed, but not knowing where or what they were up to.

Not until it came time for them to come together.

At the same time, another part of Nancy’s mind hovered at the peripheries of the Dallas Commune in the scrublands of Texas. Surrounding it on all sides were bipedal bots, the letters “FBI” stenciled on their sides. Overhead, in the clear blue sky, the Dallas Commune’s mile-high electromagnetic shield of aerial plankton shimmered, pulsated, and then a gust of wind washed it away. There were four Communes in America, and all of them were under investigation. The Dallas location was the first whose perimeter had been breached.

“Good to go,” came the all clear command.

In an instant, Nancy’s point-of-view shot across the dirt roads and barns into the center of the Commune, inside the vestry of a small church. She eased her virtual presence inside, slowly materializing her virtual body onto a chair. Already a clouding of Atopian smarticles permeated the space. This Commune’s Reverend was pouring himself a cup of tea.

“You realize it was futile to try and stop us getting inside,” said Jimmy, draping himself across the Reverend’s desk. Jimmy wasn’t just projecting himself here virtually—he’d infected the body of one of the Commune’s residents.

The Reverend finished preparing his tea and turned to Jimmy. “Do you need to inhabit my son’s body?”

“Have to, and want to, are two different things.” Jimmy smiled. “But what I do need is some information.”

“I know what you are.”

“It doesn’t matter what you know anymore. Whatever is in there”—Jimmy pointed at the Reverend’s head—“will soon be in here.” He pointed at his own head.

“The Day of Judgment is soon coming—”

“Oh, I know, I know,” Jimmy interrupted, his smile growing wider. “But your day of judgment has already arrived, and I don’t think your God will help you now.”

Jimmy slid into the Reverend’s cognitive networks. The Reverend’s cup of tea, halfway to his mouth for a sip, slid out of his fingers and tumbled to smash on the wooden floorboards. A wet stain spread around the Reverend’s feet as his body shuddered at the invasion, his mind struggling to resist.

Nancy watched dispassionately. “Can I speak to you privately?”

Smiling back from the Reverend’s face, Jimmy’s eyes narrowed. “About what?” But he instantiated a series of dense security blankets around them.

“You and I have had our differences,” said Nancy, “but we’ve known each other a long time. I think we want the same things.”

“Do we indeed?”

In augmented space, Nancy watched Jimmy crack the Reverend’s mind open like a nut, spilling its contents into a data bucket.

Nancy nodded. “Kesselring approached me today. He’s worried you’re gaining too much power, and he’s convening a meeting of senior shareholders to limit your reach.” It was a gamble. For security reasons she couldn’t connect to the other splinters of her mind. She couldn’t be sure.

Jimmy stopped disgorging the Reverend’s mind. He looked at Nancy.

“Is that right?”

5

“Copy that, DCA, we’re releasing control to you now,” said Connors. Her networks handshaked with the capital city aerial routing system. Up ahead, the spike of the Washington Monument rose above an urban sprawl that spread, twinkling, to the horizon.

Four fighter drones rose up in formation around their turbofan to escort them in.

Vince’s mind was still roiling. How was it possible that the old Russian, Mikhail Butorin, had dug up an ancient text that just happened to explain where to find Willy’s body? It had been the critical clue that led them to him. And yet it came from a two-thousand-year-old manuscript found a hundred years ago, buried in the Egyptian desert. Was the text just random coincidence? Or had Butorin purposely lied? Any other conclusions stretched all believability.

All the things he was obsessing over—ancient carvings on buildings depicting what looked like alien creatures, the Voynich manuscript, images of Buddha with multiple arms and legs, even the Buddha carved from a meteorite—the Terra Novan hypothesis fit all these, but it felt too neat.

“Are you going to tell me why you need to speak to Allied Command?” Connors asked. “You’re not going to be telling them some doomsday nonsense, are you?” She turned to him. “Can I trust you?”

“Yes, you can trust me.” He was going to tell the truth, or at least, he was going to tell most of it.

The Mall hovered into view, that green strip of space in the middle of Washington that stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol Building. Vince remembered family trips to the Smithsonian as a child. The memories were still vivid. For forty years he’d lived on Atopia, but he was still American, and this place held an aura that inspired him.

Why wait till now, though? His mind kept circling back. Why lay dormant for two hundred million years? If these beings existed, they had almost god-like power. Why would they be interested in us? Mindless destruction didn’t make any sense.

The web of turbofan transports in the air grew denser. Below, Vince saw traffic moving like fish in a stream. He was overcome by the idea that he was watching the dying motions of a doomed world, the people going on with their lives as if anything mattered anymore, as if they were still alive.

But was it doomed?

The Potomac River snaked around the city into the distance, and their turbofan dropped down and followed it, accompanied by their drone escorts. It wouldn’t be long until Vince was locked down.

“One thing.” Vince touched Connors’s arm. “I’d like to release Hotstuff. I don’t know if I’m going to get out of this, and it’s not fair for her to be stuck in some hellhole with me.”

A part of her would always stay inside him, but he could release her core identity into one of his shell companies. Bob had already released his proxxi entirely. It felt like the right thing to do, but he needed Connors’s help.

She looked at him, her expression unreadable.

Vince let go of her arm. “I know you could get into a lot of trouble—”

“Go ahead.” Connors opened a channel for Vince to let Hotstuff out.

6

The key to creating convincing synthetic realities was attention to detail, and nobody was better at it than Atopian pssi-kids. And no pssi-kid was better than the legendary Sidney Horowitz. Sid laughed grimly at his own internal monologue. It was the same trash talking he used in the game worlds, but this was no game.

This was real.

The adrenaline felt like holding a mouthful of nails, but he wasn’t in any physical danger. Zoraster was the one who was there physically, but looking at Zoraster, the big monkey looked remarkably calm. Zoraster smiled at the drone Sid was inhabiting.

“Is it working?”

“You wouldn’t be standing there if it wasn’t,” Sid replied, projecting a smile.

This was a one-time shot. Hacking into a hardened military network wasn’t something that you could do on the fly. Mikhail and the Ascetics gave them a collection of back-doors and exploits to get inside the military networks. They said they would work. Soon they’d find out.

The skirmish they started with Alliance forces was blossoming into a full-blown battle. Hundreds of incoming Alliance drones lit up Sid’s situational maps. He hacked into everything he could, even distant command posts and orbiting satellites, burrowing into their sensors, subtly modifying them. Detecting stolen or wrecked systems was much easier than detecting small changes in data flow. The sensors were the eyes and ears of the robot attackers that created their reality, each one feeding into the main situational map of the enemy.

By controlling their reality, Sid controlled the battle and could destroy at will, but he had other goals.

It was a game of misdirection played out in milliseconds using optical and radio cloaking, alternately jamming and releasing communications while he slipped in false sensor readings. The attacking weapons systems just missed their marks as they aimed at shifting ghosts.

Sid launched cyberattacks at the same time as kinetic ones—defusing and exploding ordnance in transit, recognizing patterns that would be forming in the future, splitting the battle into alternate realities, and having the enemy attack itself in bursts of friendly fire. Both sides were layering reality filters with feints and decoys, and it was Sid’s job to see through it and anchor a base reality for his team to fight through.

Sid helped the Grilla commandos dance through the raindrops of incoming fire without getting wet—or not too wet, anyway. He was purposely leaving gaps in their defenses. If the Allied forces decided the battle wasn’t possible to win, they’d carpet-bomb the area. Zoraster’s plan needed the Alliance to send in a transport to mop up, and that was what Sid was trying to engineer.

A nearby explosion rocked the drone Sid’s main point-of-presence was riding in, blinding him. A tank-bot wheeled across the dusty ground, the air buzzing with shrapnel. It took aim.

“You okay, kid?” grunted Zoraster in a private comm channel.

The Grilla bounded from behind Sid’s drone in two loping steps, grabbing and tossing the two-ton tank-bot into the air like a child’s toy. Even a natural mountain gorilla could dead lift a ton, and a raging Grilla in an exoskeleton and battle armor was something fearsome to behold.

“Yeah, I’m—”

Before Sid could finish, another explosion fried his drone. His primary subjective dropped into dimensionless space for a fraction of a second while he latched onto another bot nearby. By the time his senses returned, the comm channels were filled with screams.

“Fall back!” Zoraster yelled across all frequencies.

Directly in front of Sid’s new drone, one of their Grilla commandos was hit, his leg severed. Blood spurted from an artery. As Sid watched, transfixed, the coagulants in the Grilla’s bloodstream kicked in, staunching the flow. At the same time, the Grilla’s exoskeleton arm extended downward and clicked into the damaged leg structure.

Sid’s situational map glowed red. The Alliance had designated it a kill zone. All kill decisions went to automatic, the attacking drones disengaging from their sensors and shifting into a frenzy. There were no humans here, just Grillas. Sid concentrated and threw an invisibility shield down around the injured commando.

“Norrece, you mobile?” Zoraster growled, bounding over and picking his friend up.

Norrece nodded, putting down one arm to support himself. He stood on the improvised leg his exoskeleton had reformed. They ran back under cover of their own drone support. A signal in Sid’s situational display confirmed they’d achieved their goal. A transport was coming in.

“Now we do it my way,” Sid said to Zoraster. “Drop your weapons.”

Zoraster let go of Norrece, letting him run for cover. “What’s next?”

The main Alliance drone force was already taking off to the south, chasing the retreating Grillas, but a swarm of them still circled overhead. Zoraster dropped his MD and dropped a utility belt of detonators and explosives.

“If we carry any weapons, it’ll be harder to mask our presence,” explained Sid. He had the transport on visual. It was dusting the horizon. He looked at Zoraster. “Come on, all of them.”

Frowning, Zoraster reached into his body armor to pull out an old gunpowder-pistol and a knife. He dropped them into the dirt as well.

The transport grew in size until it was hovering above them, its exhaust blasting away the dirt beneath their feet. With a roar it descended, rocking on its landing gear while the whine of its electric turbofans cycled down.

The hatch opened.

“Stay still,” Sid instructed. The Alliance wouldn’t be expecting this. It was as much a technical feat as a magic trick of misdirection. He hardened the reality filters around them.

Bipedal bots climbed out of the transport, oblivious to the presence of Zoraster or Sid’s drone in their midst. They began scavenging through the debris of the battle, looking for any scraps of machines that might be analyzed for data recovery.

Sid powered up the rotors on his drone and hovered, sending up a small cloud of dust. “Don’t worry,” he said to Zoraster. “Just continue straight on, slowly, no sudden movements.”

Zoraster took a deep breath and walked through the knot of Alliance bots to the transport. He grabbed the rung of a ladder on the side and began climbing up. “You better be sure about this, kid.”

Sid watched the Grilla disappear into the hatch of the transport, then he powered up his drone and followed.

7

The orange light of a sodium bulb on a solitary lamppost spread across the cracked concrete sidewalk. Bob floated, searching the blackness. He found what he was looking for in a cinder-block shack, its corrugated-tin roof hung aslant. Slivers of electric light shone through the cracks in its closed wooden shutters.

Bob heard voices within, raised voices. An argument.

He glided from the sidewalk to the side of the shack, across tufts of crabgrass littered with trash, and eased himself up to the door. Reaching forward he pushed it open. Inside, rust stains leaked down the walls onto metal shelves piled high with stacks of graying paper.

The argument stopped. All faces turned to the door.

Toothface, the one who’d captured Bob—hunted him—was sitting at a table. Across from him sat the gaunt-faced paramilitary who had guided Bob up the Yoba River. Two of his men sat on a couch against the far wall, dressed in stained fatigues, slouching with their rifles, smoking cigarettes.

Ignoring them, Bob crossed the room, directly toward Toothface. Bob’s former guide jumped out of his seat, backing away, hesitating, but Bob didn’t hesitate. A blade flashed in his hand, slicing through the air into Toothface’s neck. The table and chairs clattered to the ground as Bob fell onto Toothface, urging the knife deeper, hot blood pooling beneath them onto the concrete.

Freud called dreams the “royal road” into the unconscious, all the forbidden wishes you had but wished you didn’t. Bob wondered what wishes his dreams were yearning for, but this last one wasn’t hard to interpret.

Waking and sleep were becoming hopelessly intermixed while he roamed virtual worlds of his own creation, his body trapped in the life-support unit at the bottom of the oceanic transport. It was refreshing to finally get outside his own mind, into a synthetic external world. The Ascetics controlled this section of the darknet, and the priest bartered to get access.

Squinting, Bob looked across breaking waves caressing a perfect beach. He sat in the shade of palm trees that drooped to the surf, thick with green coconuts. Digging his fingers into the hot sand, he leaned back to stretch his legs. “So Sid’s doing okay?”

“He’s good, mate,” Bunky replied, the underminer’s avatar sat beside him in the sand. “He helped Zoraster infiltrate Allied HQ.”

“That’s good,” said the priest, pacing behind them. “The Red Rider must be stopped.”

“And Vince?”

Bunky scratched his neck. “Haven’t gotten much from him, but he’s gone into Washington. It’s all going to plan, if you can call it that.”

Bob’s body had arrived at a deep-water connection point in Rio de Janeiro. Bunky came in person to oversee the transfer from one oceanic transport to the next. The underminers had close connections with the transportation guilds. More than that, though, Bunky was bringing underminers around the world to the cause.

“So you’ve found these crystals everywhere?” Bob asked.

Bunky nodded. “Once you know what to look for, they’re pretty easy to spot, spreading into the rock strata under the big cities like mold on cheese. Sibeal says it might explain how Atopia is expanding its computing infrastructure so quickly.”

This had been something of a mystery. The computing infrastructure Atopia controlled didn’t seem to add up to the exponential proliferation of virtual worlds that were spawning from it.

“So it’s merging with Atopian pssi?”

Bunky shrugged. “Beyond me, mate.”

“And these other underminer guilds, they’re joining in?”

“Never thought of myself as an evangelist, but yeah, for the most part.” Bunky flashed his broken-tooth grin. “Especially when I show them the stuff. They’re digging it all out now, trying to slow the spread.” An alert lit up in Bunky’s workspace. “I can’t stay in this world much longer.”

They were connected in a darknet pleasure world, part of the Spice Routes that crisscrossed the underside of the multiverse. Bob heard children playing in the distance, laughing. He looked up the beach to see them splashing in the water.

“You’re straight onto the Atopian territorial boundaries on this transport,” Bunky added. “No idea what you’re going to do then.” He cocked his head and looked at Bob. “But that’s why they’re sending you, buddy. I guess you’ll know.”

Bob shook his head. “I hope so.”

“Me too, mate, me too. Listen, I really have to run.” He clapped Bob on the shoulder. “Good luck, and nice to meet you.” Smiling, Bunky faded away, leaving Bob alone with the priest.

Bob watched dark shadows sweep across the ocean. He rose to his feet.

“What do you think?” Bob asked the priest. They began walking together, up the beach toward the children.

The priest hung his head. “It matters little what I think.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that.”

“I think our quest is suicide.” The priest looked into Bob’s eyes. “But not to act is also suicide.”

They walked in silence until they were near the children. No adults were in sight. One of them ran up to Bob, splashing through the water.

“What’s your name?” Bob asked.

The young boy, dressed in swimming shorts and not more than seven or eight, looked into Bob’s eyes. “You can call me what you like.”

Bob reached down and ruffled the boy’s hair. “That’s a strange name. What are you doing here?”

“Whatever you want,” replied the boy.

All of the children were staring at Bob. There were six of them, playing what looked like a game of tag. The thatched roofs of huts stood over the tops of sand dunes lining the beach.

Bob frowned. He checked their metatags. These were proxxids, simulated children derived from copyrights of real human DNA. They shouldn’t be here. Not alone. They were supposed to be with their copyright owners. “Are your parents over there somewhere?” Bob waved a hand toward the huts.

The boy smiled. “No.”

Bob’s smile faded and dread seeped into his veins. “Then why are you here?” But he already knew.

The priest grabbed Bob’s arm. “We should go.”

“We’re here for you,” the boy replied to Bob. He reached to hold Bob’s hand.

Bob hadn’t dug into the structure of this world when they arrived. He’d been happy just to get out of his mind, but now he spun under the fabric of it—hundreds, no, thousands of children, all waiting to please. To pleasure. Bob shrugged off the priest, spinning to face him. “What is this?”

“You wanted a world to escape into, and this was the only one firewalled off deep enough to be safe.”

Bob clenched his jaw, veins popping out in his neck. “Go play with your friends,” he stuttered to the boy.

He’d heard rumors of these worlds. It was disgusting. Even in a virtual body, he felt like he was going to vomit, his skin crawling as he watched the children returning to their game.

“We need to go,” the priest whispered. “The transport had left already. We’re going to lose the connection to this world.”

“And leave them here?”

“This is the only world they know,” replied the priest. “They know no different.”

Proxxids had emotions, if not much in the way of higher cognitive functioning. “We can’t leave them.”

The priest looked into Bob’s eyes. “There’s nothing we can do.”

He looked at the children, playing again, unaware. There was something he could do.

They’d never know.

“Help me,” said Bob to the priest. As the connection faded, Bob flexed his mind, reaching into the fabric of the world, down into its very core. Twisting, he began pulling it apart, ripping it out of the network. In the blink of an eye it ceased to exist, and so had the proxxids.

But then so did their suffering.

Or perhaps, so did Bob’s.

8

Sid watched the spider-bots hovering overhead, darting between hanging orchids while they spooled out high-tensile microfilaments behind them. They were weaving the structure of a protective shell between blossoming boughs in a thicket of tea trees, sending down a rain of white petals as they quivered the branches. Sid turned to look at Zoraster, busy unpacking his rifle and gear that had arrived via a delivery drone.

“You’re being quiet. Anything wrong?”

“Wrong?” Zoraster grunted. “What could be wrong? I spent the worst years of my life fighting my way out of this place.” His huge nostrils flared. “And now I risk my life to get back in.”

Sid swiveled the bot he was inhabiting to get a view down the valley. He could just see Allied headquarters in a straight line-of-sight from their perch on the opposite wall of a valley. Arunchal, sandwiched between China and India, was still a strikingly beautiful place despite the wars that had gripped it for decades. Its valleys were filled with a kaleidoscope of lush tropical forests that rose into the Himalayas.

“Why did you volunteer to come, then?” Sid asked.

“Because I know this place better than anyone.”

An iridescent blue butterfly fluttered past Sid. “And because you believe this apocalypse stuff?”

Throwing a bag of gear onto the ground, Zoraster shook his shaggy head. “Don’t you?” He didn’t look Sid’s bot in the eye. “All of that is human legend—you should try a mile in my shoes. Grillas have no past, no future, just a single generation damned into existence to fight a war we had no stake in. So excuse me if I don’t get shivers when a ghost story about the end of humanity comes up.”

Sid didn’t say anything. For him, the Terra Novan’s background data was convincing. Mohesha had almost decoded the way the quasi-crystals worked. The technology was advanced, but not that much more. For Sid, it was an opportunity to analyze a new system.

“You want to know why I’m here? What I believe in? Is that what you’re asking?” continued Zoraster. “I fight for my friends. The Terra Novans are the only ones who’ve given equal human rights to Grillas. They believe this is happening, and I believe in them. It’s as simple as that.”

Sid nodded. He didn’t need to believe Tyrel or not. Soon Sid would be inside this nervenet thing and could find out what it was for himself.

“Speaking of friends,” Zoraster added, “your friend Bob didn’t seem too friendly.”

Sid had to agree. The Council meeting was the first and only time Sid had a chance to talk with Bob after they lost track of each other, but he’d been evasive. “Yeah, but that’s not like him. He’s usually the friendliest person you’ll ever meet.”

“If you say so,” Zoraster grunted.

“He is.” Sid buzzed his drone down to pick up the gun sight for Zoraster’s rifle. “Even as a stoned surfer, he was an inspiration, doing things nobody else could do, always talking to people. But I introduced you and Sibeal at that meeting, and barely a peep. Something happened to him in that desert.”

Sid tried talking to Bob about what happened in New York, if he knew anything about the pssi weapon that was unleashed, if he was mad at Sid for the synthetic-K. Bob said he didn’t know anything. Sid asked about his escape across the desert, but Bob just mumbled about suffering and redemption. The only thing Bob said, after Tyrel dropped the bomb about the ancient nervenet, was, “Isn’t the White Rider the savior in the Apocalypse?”

It was an odd comment, and one that worried Sid. Was Bob angry at him?

“Your friend is fine.” Zoraster lifted his rifle onto a platform and began sighting down its barrel at Allied headquarters. “He just got a little knocked around. Not sure what he’s going to do when he gets to the Atopian perimeter.” Zoraster looked away from Allied headquarters and at Sid. “But then you’re Atopians. You must have a trick or two up your sleeve.”

Only just. There was a worryingly thin list of options, especially when Jimmy probably knew they’d be coming at him. Sid nodded without conviction.

Sid switched topics. “So Tyrel sent you to New York to get me?” He’d researched Zoraster since they met. In his way he was famous—he’d gone AWOL from Allied forces to rescue his mother, a non-uplifted gorilla, when she’d been scheduled for termination. He’d ended up seeking asylum in the African Union.

“You and Bob, yeah, but I messed that up.” Zoraster laughed. “Sorry about roughing you up a little. Just wanted to see what made you tick.” His smile disappeared. “By some miracle Bob got through, but I’m not going to be counting on miracles this time.” He stared down the barrel of his rifle. It was a precision mass-driver.

“Do you really think you can get into this nervenet? Infect it?”

Sid nodded. “Yeah, I do. To start with we’ll just track the topology, try to pick up network traffic. Then maybe we can slow them down a little.”

Zoraster laughed. “We might be able to slow them down.” He swiveled his head up to look into the sky, using one giant hand up to block the sun. Just at its edge, the comet’s tail was becoming visible again. “But that freight train is on its own schedule.”

Sid switched into a simulated viewpoint a hundred million miles away in space to have a look. The comet had swung around the sun and was heading for Earth. The Comet Catcher mission still hadn’t figured out what was slowing the comet down more than it should be.

“Do you really think that’s the plan?” The deceleration of the comet could just be violent out-gassing, and it was still only projected to swing just inside lunar orbit, but the problem was taking on ominous dimensions. “Not very elegant.”

“Sometimes war isn’t elegant,” replied Zoraster. “Blunt trauma is my personal favorite. Simple and effective.”

And more than one mass extinction in Earth’s past was blamed on comet impacts.

Zoraster returned his gaze to the Allied headquarters. “Just one shot, that’s all I need.” He stared back down the rifle sight. “Payback time, you bastards.”

I guess he was the right choice for this mission. “We’re not killing anyone, right?” Sid confirmed. “Just injecting some of my hotwired smarticles.”

“Not yet,” Zoraster replied, his voice somewhere between grim and enthusiastic.

The idea was to suffuse trace quantities of nerve conduction particles into the target’s biological matrix that would start leaking data back to Terra Nova. They were going to literally infect the head of Allied Command, and watch to see if any unusual network traffic connected with the crystal nodes they collected. The rifle Zoraster was fondling would accelerate a tiny payload, less than the width of a human hair, which would penetrate the walls of the compound and disintegrate itself on impact with the target and release its content.

“When you locate a Trojan infection, especially a virulent one like this”—Sid shared some more examples with Zoraster’s meta-cognition systems—“it’s best to isolate it, learn what it’s doing. If you just wipe it out, it’ll pop up somewhere else and be that much harder to find.”

Zoraster assimilated Sid’s examples. He smiled. “But eventually we wipe it out, yes?”

“I guess.” Sid shrugged. His job was just to get into the network.

Overhead, the spider-bots were nearly finished. The tensile microfilaments bonded together, creating a gossamer shield that the optics and radio cloaking could spread across. Sid sighed with relief. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could maintain the reality filter in place, spoofing the sensors of the Allied base. He started withdrawing his agents.

This whole time, he’d been listening to conversations inside headquarters, monitoring their movements. Sid switched to a visual overlay of the building, and the red outlines of people inside glowed within the three-dimensional frames of its walls.

“You did a good job back there, kid.”

This was surprising enough that Sid withdrew his primary subjective to stare at Zoraster. “Huh?”

“On the drop down. I risked my team in the hands of some kid who’d only ever fought in gameworlds, but you did good.”

Sid didn’t expect this. “Thanks.”

“The second I saw you, I didn’t like you,” continued Zoraster, “but we’re friends now, right, kid?”

“Right,” replied Sid.

“Good, because I only risk my neck for friends.” Smiling, Zoraster pinged Sid to get the visual overlay for the building, and they both dove into the display. “That’s the target?”

“Right.” Sid highlighted the senior Allied Commander.

It was time.

Zoraster nodded and accessed the control systems of the rifle. “Are we go?”

Sid nodded.

Sounding like a hammer hitting a steel plate, the rifle fired. Its projectile, little more than a thousandth of an inch in diameter, shot across the valley at a velocity of several thousands of yards a second to pierce the wall of the Allied compound building like a hot needle through butter. Several feet short of the target, it disintegrated, spraying its payload of neuro-active smarticles onto the target. The building intrusion was detected, the self-healing walls and glass of the building registering an impact at the same time as external sensors picked up the shockwave outdoors, but with no apparent damage and no detected anomalies within the building, the alert threshold was filed as a low priority. No alarm sounded.

Exhaling with relief, Sid opened up the workspace designed to track the network activity. The display blinked then lit up like a fireworks show. “It’s working,” he whispered.

9

.…two… three… four…

Time.

…six… seven… eight…

Time.

…two… three… four…

Time.

Who am I? Vince, I’m Vince. Is this a game? No, it’s not a game. Was it all a dream? That we can’t be sure of. How can we be sure of anything?

…two… three… four…

Time.

…six… seven… eight…

Time. Time to take out the garbage.

In his mind’s eye, Vince watched himself as a young boy, pulling trash bags out back of the old house on Bowen Street in Southie. It was dark, early November, and bitterly cold. “He needs to get a job!” his father shouted. “Don’t yell,” hissed his mother. “Vince doesn’t fit in here, you know how he is…”

Vince dropped the bags on the street and leaned against the red brick wall in the shadows of the streetlights, lighting up a cigarette. It was only a few miles, yet an impossible distance, from there to the halls of MIT, a distance that would forever separate him from his father.

Looking up at the window, listening to them arguing, he yearned for the warm yellow glow of home.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Nobody cares for you, sang a voice in his head. Nobody is waiting for you. This life was wasted, wasted on something that doesn’t exist. The future is a ghost, Vincent…

Colors washed in front of his eyes: greens, golds, shimmering reflections like God’s oysters falling open before his eyes, spilling pearly tears. I wish I could close my eyes. Or open them. Please make this stop.

…two… three… four…

Please.

…six… seven… eight…

Stop.

“Tick tock, said the Ticktock man.”

“Is someone there?”

No response.

I’m suffocating. Drowning in nothingness.

“Tick…”

“Please, is someone there?” Vince said again.

“…tock.”

“Tick tock, tick tock, you are the man of time, are you not, Mr. Indigo?” the voice said. “Or perhaps, the man out of time.” The voice laughed.

“Sensory deprivation is banned,” Vince whispered, “by all international treaties.” He couldn’t hear his own voice, but he knew he was talking.

“You’ll have to take that up with the courts when you get out.” The words flashed in his vision, a bright green that faded like the strobe of a flash. “Of course, that’s if you remember, and you won’t, because your memories are classified now. Allied property. You understand?”

It was indescribable relief to have something to focus on. “Yes,” Vince replied.

“Good.”

A soothing blackness fell across Vince’s senses, the frayed edges of his mind curling together.

“Is that better?” said the voice.

“Yes.”

The blackness fell away, replaced by the nothingness of the void. Vince felt himself falling.

“Tell us about the garbage,” demanded the voice.

Calm, Vince told himself, you know the game. They wanted to access his memories, but they needed to understand the structure. His externally stored data used compression keys tuned to his earliest memories, ones that existed only inside of his gray matter. Ones only his own mind could extract.

“Yes, you know the game,” said the voice, “so give us what we want.”

They could hear him thinking. There was no escape. Think nothing.

“Try thinking nothing of this,” said the voice.

And then came the pain. His body was on fire, his skin stripping away in molten chunks. He screamed. And then nothing.

“It leaves no marks, no trace, and no memories,” menaced the voice. “You can cooperate or not, rot in this hole of your mind. It makes no difference to us.”

“I will only talk to Colonel Kramer,” stuttered Vince, his nerves stinging, his mind a point of nothing in a nothingness space.

“You are in no position to make demands. Tell us about the garbage.”

Vince had to give them something. “It was the moment I decided I needed to leave home.”

The soothing blackness returned.

“See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” In the background he sensed them using this reference point to begin unpacking some of his memories.

“I need to speak to Colonel Kramer,” repeated Vince.

“Why?”

“Because there are leaks in your organization. I need to speak to him. Personally.”

The voice considered this. “You know you cannot lie to us.”

“Then you know I am speaking the truth. I came here of my own free will.”

More silence, but the nothingness gave way to a gray fog. It became deeper, thicker, and then evaporated. Vince found himself sitting on a concrete floor in total darkness. Not total darkness. He could just see a slit of light coming into the solitary confinement cell through the food receptacle. He reached up to feel his face, laughing and crying at the same time. Leaning over, he curled into a ball on the ground.

Click, clack, click, clack—steel balls on Colonel Kramer’s desk circled through empty space before returning to hit the next one in an endless loop—click, clack, click, clack. Twelve-foot glass walls stood behind the desk, framing a gray and rainy view of one wall of the Pentagon from ground level. Leafless trees bent in a sudden gust. A squall of rain hammered down onto the sidewalk, soaking men and women in uniform as they hurried between buildings.

Colonel Kramer sat in his high-backed leather chair, facing away from Vince, staring through the window at the rain. “I’m a busy man, Mr. Indigo.” The balls stopped motionless in the air.

Vince was sitting in a leather chair in front of the Colonel’s desk, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, his hair disheveled and several days of stubble on his face. “This is worth your time.”

There were no guards in the room. They weren’t necessary. Vince’s neural systems were under his captors’ control.

The Colonel swung his chair around to face Vince. “So?”

Vince did his best to verify the metatags of whoever was appearing before his senses. What little network access they granted him seemed to confirm this was Colonel Kramer. There wasn’t any way to be sure, but Vince had few options. “There’s a plot against you.” Vince held the Colonel’s gaze.

Laughing, the Colonel replied, “I hope you have more than that. If I had a dollar for every plot—”

“The Terra Novans think Jimmy Scadden is some kind of reincarnation of the devil that’s dragging the world into an apocalypse.”

The Colonel stopped laughing. He was verifying the feedback loop into Vince’s mind. He knew Vince was telling the truth. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

Vince frowned. “It doesn’t?”

“Just more extremists.” The Colonel shook his head. “What proof do you have?”

“I have information that Patricia Killiam gave to our group.” Reaching inside himself, Vince unlocked a data vault containing a recording of what Patricia had given them. He sent it into the Colonel’s systems.

“Interesting,” the Colonel replied, analyzing the contents. “Tell me more.”

“They think a computing matrix of crystals is forming under cities, connecting into an ancient machine. The Terra Novans have been studying it.”

“An ancient machine?” The Colonel’s eyebrows arched. “Have you seen these”—he paused—“crystals”—he drew out the word—“yourself?”

Vince stared out the window at the winking lights of the turbofan skyways hanging in a small patch of sky that was just visible. “No.”

“So you want me to believe that there is some kind of alien technology—”

“Not alien,” interrupted Vince, “just not human. And no, I’m not asking you to believe anything. I’m just telling you what the Terra Novans think.”

The Colonel nodded. “And where is this leak?”

Vince shook his head. “I just know they think your organization is compromised at some level.”

The Colonel finished assimilating the data Vince sent. “The neutrino detector data, this is new. What else do you know about this?”

“I have no idea, just what Patricia said. The Terra Novans have no idea either.”

“Again, from aliens?” The Colonel smiled.

Vince said nothing, and didn’t return the smile.

The Colonel asked one last question. “And William McIntyre. We know you were searching for his body at the Commune. Did you find him?”

Vince took a deep breath. “No.” He shook his head. “No, we didn’t.”

10

“Do you believe in heaven and hell?” asked Sid.

Sid rotated the viewing lens of the bot he was inhabiting toward the Grilla. Zoraster was splayed out against the trunk of the tea tree in the middle of their enclosure, inspecting the fur on one of his arms.

“Goddamn bugs.” Zoraster picked at his arm, his surprisingly dexterous fingers finding the offending six-legged creature, a brightly-colored beetle. He set it down and watched it scurry off. “Like the human Bible version of heaven and hell, you mean?”

Sid’s bot nodded. “I guess.”

“I’ve seen a lot of pain, kid, and I can tell you, plain and simple, suffering is hell.” Zoraster rocked forward on his haunches and checked down the sight of the rifle again, looking at the Allied headquarters compound on the other side of the valley. “Whether it’s physical, in your head, in this world, or the next—hell is wherever you find suffering.”

Sid-bot didn’t bother reminding Zoraster that he didn’t need to keep doing a visual check. Sid was constantly monitoring the site. “So then a lack of suffering is heaven?”

Leaning against the tree, Zoraster grunted what Sid imagined was a laugh. “I didn’t say that.” He scratched under his exoskeleton. “I don’t think there needs to be an opposite of hell, just a lack of suffering—so I think there’s hell and not-hell.”

“That’s not very optimistic.”

“You wouldn’t be either if someone as messed up as humans designed you.” Zoraster found another insect in his fur and, again, gently removed it to set it free. “Do I have a soul?” he asked rhetorically. “And if I do, did humans create it? On the balance, I’d prefer not to risk it.”

Sid-bot balanced itself on one side to rotate its lower gimbals. “I like to think there’s a heaven.” A breeze ruffled the enclosure, shaking loose a flurry of white-and-yellow tea blossoms that gently settled around the gorilla and robot.

“If what Mohesha is saying is true,” Zoraster ventured, “then you’ve got your heaven. A copy of every human mind that has existed is in that nervenet somewhere. Endless life and meeting of passed loved ones.”

Pushing itself onto its other side, Sid-bot rotated its other gimbals. “Maybe.” It stopped and de-focused its optical lens to stare into infinity. “But if it’s possible that something exists, does it really matter whether it exists here or not? Whether we can actually see it?”

Zoraster frowned. “I don’t follow.”

“I mean, if there are an infinite number of universes, then if it’s possible to imagine something, isn’t it the same as actually existing somewhere?”

The Grilla rolled his eyes. “You have a messed up way of looking at things. Saying everything is true also makes nothing true. There need to be limits.” Zoraster thumped the ground with one giant hand. “How’s the signal doing?”

This splinter of Sid’s mind was connected through a ground-based mesh network of insect-bots that stretched to the border of the African Union. It was low bandwidth, but information was steadily seeping back and forth.

Sid-bot checked the feed. “The network map is really starting to come together.” The plan was working. They were tracking data flow through the crystal network.

“Good,” grunted Zoraster. It was the first indication the plan was working. “So do you believe all this stuff Tyrel is saying?”

Sid-bot nodded, the gears in its neck whirring back and forth, and then wagged its head side to side. “It’s hard to dispute the evidence—”

Zoraster interrupted him. “You Atopians just nearly wrecked yourselves fighting a giant storm that didn’t exist. How can you be sure this isn’t more of the same?”

“You’re right, but we tested for that. There are too many proof points, too many interconnected instances. And in a way it didn’t surprise me.”

The Grilla frowned. “What didn’t surprise you?”

“We’ve found life on Mars and Titan—our solar system is teeming with it—and one in five stars out there have planets in habitable orbits. There’s got to be trillions of eyes staring back at us from out there, but not a single transmission or evidence of any kind?”

“Except for that POND signal,” Zoraster noted.

“Yeah, except for that.” Sid was still working around the clock on that, but nothing yet apart from a repeating nine-element sequence that hinted it was a warning signal. “So we’ve finally been contacted by other life, one way or the other. I’m relieved.”

“Relieved? These things want to kill us.”

“Maybe, but like they say, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. Mohesha thinks nervenets are an example of convergent evolution, that any intelligent organism will eventually develop and integrate into their minds, just like they’d always develop eyes of some kind. I think she’s right.”

Zoraster sat in silence, absorbing this. “You’re a strange kid.”

Sid-bot affected the best smile it could. “Thanks.” He shared more of the network diagram. “You can look at this nervenet like a virus that can infect both people and machines.” The shared display, a geographic map of the world, crisscrossed with glowing lines. “We’re getting a peek at its command-and-control structure. Once we start to locate the nodal points, Mikhail and the Ascetics will hunt them down, begin exorcising them—”

Zoraster nodded. “And if Bob can cut the head off, we might have a chance of stopping it. Why don’t we just kill anyone that’s connected in this map?” He pointed at the nexus nodes that were already lighting up.

“People infected by the nervenet didn’t do anything wrong.”

The smile slid from Zoraster’s face. “You’re right.” He rolled forward to get up onto his knees.

“I could do some cutting off right now,” said Zoraster, leaning to stare down the barrel of the rifle sight. “Just one shot, and boom, no more head on this part of the snake.”

The moment he uttered these words, the Allied compound disappeared in a brilliant flash. His internal systems only just protected his retinas in time to avoid being blinded. Sid-bot jumped up. The monitoring feed coming from the headquarters winked out, and a second later a shockwave ripped through their enclosure, shredding it in a thundering concussion.

“Zoraster, what the hell did you do?” messaged Sid-bot.

The roar was still reverberating through the valley, a mushroom cloud was climbing into the sky above the spot where the Allied buildings had been just seconds before. Shaking his head and coughing, Zoraster pushed himself up from the ground. Tea blossoms were swirling around them in a cloud of dust. “Didn’t do anything,” he groaned, holding his side. Something had hit him.

A swarm of attack drones rose from the roiling clouds on the other side of the valley. They headed directly for the spot where Sid and Zoraster were hiding.

“Zoraster!” pinged Sid-bot across all of the Grilla’s emergency channels. “You gotta get moving!”

The whine of incoming fire rained down around them. Zoraster looked at the advancing drones, then back at Sid-bot and smiled. “Call me Furball, kid, and don’t worry, I’ll—”

The transmission cut.

Sitting in the White Horse Pub in UnderMidTown, Sid put his beer down. “Zoraster? Are you there?”

There was no response.

In a viewpoint from a weather satellite, hundreds of miles above India, a smudge of smoke spread across the Arunchal valley. An alert pinged Sid’s networks, and he opened the channel, expecting to see Zoraster’s face, but instead he found an image of an oceanic tanker.

Bob had arrived at the Atopian perimeter.

11

His chalk squeaked across the blackboard as Bob finished writing out the minimum critical parameters for fissile actinides. His hand ached. The board was filled with equations. With a flourish he underlined the result. The chalk snapped in his fingers, the broken end tumbling onto the threadbare Persian carpet of his study. He turned to his guest. “So, you see?”

A rakish man, his hair slicked back, leaned forward. His freshly pressed suit squeaked against the polished leather of the copper-studded wingback chair he slouched in. “Are you sure?”

Bob stared at the decimal point of his result. Just a mote of calcium carbonate stuck against the sheet of porcelain enamel of the blackboard, but it represented something that would change billions of lives. “Yes.”

In an ornate mirror behind the man in the chair, Bob saw his reflection: an old man stared back at him, a fringe of white hair circling a balding head, bushy black eyebrows above thick jowls, and an unkempt suit. He dusted the chalk dust off the arms of his jacket.

There was a quiet rap on the door. “Would you like some tea?” came the muffled voice of his wife.

“No, Margrethe, but I think we might get some air,” said Bob. “The children could still go and play in Tivoli, why don’t you bring them out?”

Bob glanced at the man in the chair, who nodded. Outside the windows, fluttering yellow leaves fell from bare trees in a gust of wind. Winter was coming.

“Please bring our coats,” Bob called out.

Getting up from the chair, the man walked close to the blackboard.

“I have to leave, Niels,” said the man. “I need to tell Goering in person.”

Bob nodded. “Margrethe!” he called out. “Could you please fetch Mr. Heisenberg’s cases?”

Bob stared across the Dead Man’s Walk Desert, pulling down goggles to protect his eyes.

A voice echoed from a loudspeaker, “…three… two… one…”

The next instant, a blinding flash enveloped his senses and an intense heat burned into the flesh of his face. An orange fireball leapt into the sky on the distant plain, billowing up into a mushroom cloud. The air was eerily calm. Behind him Bob heard words in a language he hadn’t heard spoken in thousands of years.

“I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,” said a voice in Sanskrit, just as the shockwave roared through their observation point.

“We have arrived,” an automated message announced, waking Bob up. He activated his somatic systems and groaned as he struggled upright. This was as far as the transport network could take them. From here he had to find his own way.

The dreams were more intense.

“They aren’t just dreams,” the priest told Bob when he spoke of them, “these are your past lives. As the nervenet grows stronger, the psychic fabric of the past is weaving itself into this world.”

Memories of the dreams faded like morning fog under a rising sun. Bob only retained fleeting impressions of them. Nothing of the dreams remained in his inVerse, the recording of everything he ever saw or felt, and he couldn’t find any trace of them in his meta-cognition systems.

Bob verified their location. They were in an off-shore docking complex, one the Ascetics assured him they controlled. For a short time they could mask his signature from any sensors. He was close now. Bob could feel it, the thrumming vibration of the Atopian multiverse just past the event horizon of his senses.

More than anything, he felt a craving to get back inside.

The priest was awake and sitting up in his opened bio-containment unit.

“We can go up top,” Bob said to him, swinging his legs onto the floor.

Taking a moment for them both to stretch, Bob led the priest to the service ladder on the wall of the cargo bay. People weren’t supposed to be in here, not awake. Soon it would be crawling with bots loading and uploading. Bob wanted to feed some fresh air into his lungs. Grabbing the first rung, he felt its cold metal. He clipped into the splinters that watched the world while he slept, leaving his body to climb by itself.

His mind exploded into the mediaworlds.

Green-scaled faces filled one visual display. “Bioethics boards reconsider license of recombinant DNA manufacturer Remedica in the wake of discovery of a nest of human-lizard chimeras in Waco, Texas,” said the splinter monitoring the story. “Would you like more?” Bob accepted, and a flood of images around the idea circled his mind; flying human bats and grotesque experiments gone wrong, self-assembling robotics fused with organic layers of living tissue, synthetic reality nervous systems tying it all together in the expanding eco-system of the Atopian stimulus.

“Should we tell them?” asked a newsworld in a splinter circling at the edges of Bob’s awareness. He pulled it closer to his center. “Why would we?” was the answer. The object of discussion was a virtual world filled with synthetic beings, none of them aware that their world was simulated. The man that created it was posing as God to his creatures. He overrode controls forcing external awareness in digital organisms that could pass the Turing-threshold.

“The Destroyer of Worlds is upon us,” rang a shrill voice in another mediaworld. Bob shifted his attention to the ever-expanding sphere of the doomsday cults. “The day of judgment is coming. Two thousand years ago the Kalachakra tantra predicted a future war where the forces of Shambala would arrive in flying ships to begin a new external cycle of time—”

Bob disengaged from the mediaworlds. He stood on the deck of the transport, in the open for the first time in weeks. He clipped into his body to feel the cool wind and taste the sea air. He sensed Atopian smarticles, a dusting of them floating on the breeze from Atopia. His skin tingled. The priest stood beside him, his robe flapping in the breeze.

On the horizon Bob saw something, a glitter that stood out against the deep blue. The twinkling light was the reflection of the sun off the glass-walled farming towers of Atopia, less than five miles away. Nancy was there, his family was there.

All that stood in his way was Jimmy.

Bob turned to the priest. “Thank you for coming this far, without you…” He searched for words.

“It is not just for you that I have taken this journey.” The priest held his arms wide. “But for all of God’s creatures. We must stop this scourge.”

They silently watched the waves.

“From here I go alone,” said Bob. “If you can maintain the connection to Mohesha, make sure that the Terra Novan resources are available when we need them.”

The priest nodded. “I will wait here.”

Stripping out of the coveralls he wore in the hibernation pod, Bob prepared himself. His skin shimmered as his epithelial layers exuded a hydrophobic layer of protection against the water, while he began leaking perfluorocarbons into his lung tissue. Nodding at the priest, Bob dove headfirst from the platform into the frigid waters and began networking into depths.

These waters were his home.

12

Jimmy Scadden stared at the ocean through a break between the trees. He stood in Herman Kesselring’s private gardens at the apex of the farming tower and research centers—the highest point on Atopia, and one that Kesselring kept very private.

Jimmy had been summoned, in person.

“Why did you change the report?” Kesselring asked. He pulled the hood off the peregrine falcon sitting on his gloved hand and began feeding it raw meat.

They were in a grass field dotted with blooming purple heather, several hundred feet across, bordered by pines and yews. In augmented space, the real forests of Kesselring’s private gardens stretched into the Austrian Alps of his home. Set back in the trees at the edge of the space was Kesselring’s retreat, a wood-shingled, two-story chalet with white stucco walls.

“What report, Mr. Kesselring?” Jimmy stood straight, his hands clasped behind his back. “I thought you called me up here to discuss details of the operation.”

Kesselring continued feeding his bird. “The report presented at the board meeting, with the information Colonel Kramer extracted from Mr. Indigo.”

Jimmy frowned and glanced back at the break in the trees. “What do you mean?”

“The original report had details about you being responsible for the disappearance of Commander Strong’s wife and other Atopians.” Kesselring didn’t look up as he said this, but stared into the eyes of his falcon, giving it another chunk of bloody meat that it gobbled back.

Jimmy’s full attention swung to Kesselring. “Where did you hear that?”

“I think you forget who built this place, the resources and connections I have.”

Jimmy looked at the ground. “They were just lies, fabrications by the extremists to try and destabilize the Alliance. I thought that spreading them further would only serve their goals. The Alliance gave us interim command of their forces for the operation against Terra Nova—”

“I know, Jimmy,” interrupted Kesselring. The entire Allied Command staff in Arunchal Pradesh had been killed in a surprise attack. The Alliance had captured a Grilla, Zoraster, in connection with it, and Sidney Horowitz was implicated. It had pushed the Alliance into declaring war on the AU, confirming Jimmy’s terrorist theories. “My problem is that you lied to me.”

A whirring noise came from the direction of Kesselring’s chalet, and a swarm of ornithopter bots rose into the sky, darting and weaving. The falcon saw them and its head twitched to the side, flexing its claws into the leather glove covering Kesselring’s hand.

“I don’t know what you mean, sir.” Jimmy shifted from one foot to the other, his head down. “You’ve been like a father to me, even more since Patricia passed. I can’t tell you how grateful I am—”

A bell chimed and Jimmy glanced into the augmented space of the Alps, at a church spire that climbed over the trees in a village nestled high above.

“I think it’s time, Mr. Scadden, that we dispense with the charade.” Kesselring looked at Jimmy, who stopped shifting and looked up to return his gaze. “Do you know anything about falconry?” In the background, Kesselring tensed his phantoms, monitoring the data flow around Jimmy’s networks.

“Not really, no.”

Lifting his arm, Kesselring whistled and set the falcon free. With two quick and powerful beats of its wings, it lifted up and soared across the grass, then sailed into the sky to chase the ornithopters.

“Raptors are not pets,” Kesselring explained, his eyes following the bird. “They are non-affectionate animals. Do you know what this means?”

Saying nothing, Jimmy shook his head. Wheeling overhead, the falcon shrieked as it caught the first robot, pinned it in its talons and dropped to the ground.

“It means they have no ability to deal with dominant or submissive roles. There is no love, no aim to please, just an opportunistic understanding that the falconer affords it the easiest source of food and protection. It’s a matter of convenience, not love.”

The falcon took several stabs at the robot with its beak. Kesselring whistled, and the falcon hopped toward him and then took to the air, the robot still in its grip. It landed back on Kesselring’s gloved hand, the bot clutched in the talons of one foot.

“When it comes down to it,” continued Kesselring, reaching to take the small bot from the bird’s grip. He presented it with another morsel of red flesh. “At most, it’s a matter of trust: the bird trusts the falconer not to steal its food and to provide protection, and the falconer trusts the bird to hunt and return when called.” He lifted his hand and set the falcon free again. “Now which one of us is which?”

Jimmy unclasped his hands from behind his back. His face hardened. “Isn’t this what you wanted, Herman?” He lifted his hands, palms up. “Terra Nova laid down, the world at your feet? Happiness indices are at an all-time high, the populations of the world lulled into a pssi-induced coma while it funnels money into your accounts. Don’t tell me you did this for truth and beauty.”

“These disappearances are becoming problematic—”

“Did you imagine this would be trouble free? There are a lot of people—governments, corporations—that don’t like what’s happening. Don’t tell me that you didn’t think sacrificing a few lives would be necessary to save billions.”

“And Nancy has come to me with concerns,” Kesselring said, “details of a private psombie army, promises of eternal life.”

Jimmy nodded. “So this is coming from Nancy?”

Kesselring shook his head. “Not entirely, but we have concerns.”

“These are not just empty promises,” said Jimmy. “We are on the verge of that promised land that we started all this for, leading the world toward Atopia, the world without borders that has no end.”

The falcon screeched in the sky, trapping another flying bot.

Kesselring stood still. “That Patricia and I started this for, not you.”

“And now she is gone, and here you and I stand.” Jimmy dropped his arms.

Kesselring paused. While they were talking, Jimmy added layers around this reality, sectioning it off from the multiverse. Kesselring’s agents fought for position, but it was difficult to resist Jimmy’s strength. Kesselring was cut off from the outside world now.

“Let’s speak plainly.” Kesselring stood and faced Jimmy. “I am ready to allow your”—he searched for the right words—“indulgences, and to fully protect and support you with my resources, as long as these indulgences serve our common interest. In return, you share with me what you’re doing.”

They watched each other while scenarios played out in the background. Kesselring could feel Jimmy’s networks probing, feinting, as they sized each other up, their private display spaces filled with timelines that spread out from this nexus point.

“Agreed,” Jimmy said finally.

Their networks exchanged access and safeguard requests. Kesselring nodded. “And find Robert Baxter, will you? This is getting embarrassing.”

Jimmy nodded and smiled. “The final battle has begun, Herman, you should be proud of what you’ve achieved. You will soon be getting everything you deserve.” He turned and walked toward the trees, disappearing into them and toward the access tunnel to go below.

Kesselring waited until he felt Jimmy’s presence gone, and then initiated a sweep, cleansing the area. The falcon squawked in the grass, busy ripping the guts of the second bot it had captured. He ignored it and reached out with one of his phantom limbs to open an invisible door. It swung open into blackness, and Nancy stepped through, closing the tunnel behind her.

“You see?” she said. “Do you believe me now?”

13

Humming to himself, Bunky flexed his motor cortex, feeling the thrum of his digger bots eating their way into the bedrock. After weeks of talking with underminers around the world, he was happy to get back to work. Thankfully, Sibeal and the glasscutters handled ongoing communications with the other groups, leaving him to get back to what he was really good at—digging.

It was a busy week, trying to juggle his contract work while working with Sibeal to search out and remove as much of the mystery crystal as possible. He offered to drop the contracts, but she insisted he keep them, saying they needed to maintain normalcy to keep their cover.

He didn’t mind. He liked being busy, and it helped keep him from wondering what happened to Zoraster. They hadn’t heard anything from the big monkey since they lost contact with him. Everyone feared the worst.

“What’s shakin’, Shaky?” he messaged to his partner who controlled the other half of their fleet of diggers. Shaky was two blocks west of him. They were both five hundred feet below Times Square.

“I’m drier than a witch’s tit, mate,” Shaky replied. It was the end of the day, or at least the end of the work day. He forwarded an image of a stallion charging across a grassy plain.

“Yes, I think it’s time for a beer at the White Horse, my friend.”

“One beer?!”

“Oh dear, did I say beer?” Bunky smiled. “I meant beers, my good man. Set those borer bots into a cross-grid…” He stopped mid-sentence and frowned. What the hell is that?

“What did you say, mate? The signal cut off. Hurry up, I’m thirsty!”

Bunky checked his networks. Bringing his awareness back into the pod of his construction mechanoid, he flicked the manual control switch for their largest tunnel-boring machine. It didn’t respond. Was it offline? He began running through a checklist.

“Hey, Bunk,” Shaky said, “I just lost contact with some of my diggers up three and four shafts.”

“Give me a sec.”

Out of the corner of an eye Bunky saw something, and reflexively he lifted one of his mechanoid’s arms. The next instant he was knocked backward as one of his pipe runners came flailing out of the darkness into him. Regaining his senses, he turned on all the lights in the tunnel, then leaned over to pick up the bot that smashed into him.

Before he could grab it, the bot wriggled around and shot straight at his head again.

He gripped the small bot in his mechanoid hand, having barely caught it before it would have brained him. It took him an instant to process. A malfunction? No, not a malfunction. The bot squirmed in his grip. This thing wants to kill me. “Shaky!” yelled Bunky. “Get the hell out of there!”

He crushed the bot and threw it aside.

His entire network of bots dropped from his network. An explosion lit up the tunnel behind him. He logged into the city sensors, and his jaw dropped. The giant boring machine, thirty feet across and half a football field long, reversed direction and was charging back up the tunnel toward them, heading directly for the Midtown den.

“RUN!” he screamed to Shaky as he turned and began sprinting his mechanoid into the blackness.

The seas of the south Atlantic were calm. The Alliance battle platform, its smooth black surface designed to cloak it from both kinetics and electromagnetics, was quiet on the outside, but inside, its slingshot systems were cycling up. Just over the horizon, ten miles away, the glass towers of Terra Nova glistened. A series of small panels, each no thicker than a man’s arm, opened up across the mile-wide surface of the platform.

Even cloaked, this raised alarms on Terra Nova.

The battle platform’s slingshots began unloading, the off-center rotating platform weapons hidden below spitting out thousands of incendiary pellets at several miles per second. The surface of the platform erupted in an inferno of super-heated plasma shockwaves. The ocean around the platform boiled. Three seconds later the island of Terra Nova was immersed in a miles-wide fireball, its own shield weapons staving off the initial attack.

“Sibeal, do you notice anything odd?” Sid asked, sitting in the White Horse.

Bunky and Shaky were supposed to be back for a pint soon, but he’d lost contact with them.

“What do you mean, odd?”

“There haven’t been any security alerts in the past two hours.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” She flashed a part of her mind over his data. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”

It wasn’t that anything was wrong, just an absence of something being wrong—an anomaly. Not getting any security alerts had been soothing for a half an hour, but after an hour it became unusual. When two hours passed, Sid became downright suspicious. He began digging into the sensor logs, but then looked up. Something was roaring down one of the main arteries toward the den. Nothing was showing up on the sensors.

Sid grabbed Sibeal’s arm, pulling her away from the table just as Bunky’s mechanoid launched out of the darkness of the main tunnel, jumping to crash into the opposite wall just beside the pub.

At almost the same moment Shaky came skidding out of another tunnel. “Out of the way!” he yelled as the rock wall behind him crashed down and the boring machine launched itself into space and into the opposite wall. Slabs of rock rained down into the lower levels. The screaming began as people scrambled to get away.

Opening his eyes, Sid found himself face to face with Shaky. He had somehow cradled Sid and Sibeal beneath his mechanoid, protecting them. Grunting, Shaky began to lift himself up, a shower of rock and debris sliding off his back. The rotors of the borer were still going at full speed and it began grinding into the far wall, slowly dragging itself away as it ate into the rock.

An overlaid display opened in Sid’s optic channels. “You need to see this,” said Vicious, Sid’s proxxi. Reports flooded in about mass arrests. Sid watched as the underground den in Rio they worked with erupted in flames. An orbital view of the South Atlantic showed Alliance platforms opening fire on Terra Nova. In Montana the protective shell of the Commune lit up as it was attacked by drones.

A coordinated global attack was underway.

The Ascetics were under assault by police forces across America. Mikhail Butorin chimed in with a report. Sibeal locked into Sid’s workspace and they began plotting escape routes while setting secondary communication channels with their partners.

“Don’t bother,” said a voice from the gaping hole in the wall above them. From the darkness, an army of black-uniformed troops in body armor poured into the den. Their faces were covered by smooth black masks. One of them stood motionless in the middle while the rest flowed around him, and addressed Sid. “It’s been a long time, my friend.”

Sid stared at the masked face. “Do I know you?” he asked. Then the featureless mask morphed into a face that Sid recognized. Fear jangled his fingertips. He pushed Sibeal behind him. “What do you want?”

Jimmy smiled at Sid. One of his splinters was inhabiting the psombie trooper that stared down at them.

“You never were much for social ritual, were you, Sid?” Jimmy’s psombie jumped down and stepped across the ragged pile of rocks onto the patio of the White Horse. “Maybe a nice, hi, how are you? It’s been a long time, my friend.”

“Are we friends, Jimmy?” Sid asked, backing away with Sibeal behind him. He was projecting escape routes into the future, but as fast he could create new scenarios, Jimmy cut them down and overpowered him. Sid was used to fighting in the gameworlds where he was swift and brave. Now his skin prickled at the naked danger. His hands shook.

Jimmy nodded. “I thought we were.”

“Then why did you almost just kill me?” Sid looked around the den. The psombie troops were collecting the survivors. There were crushed bodies under the rocks.

“Not my choice,” Jimmy said, shrugging, “not anymore. This is an Alliance military operation. After what happened in Arunchal—”

“We didn’t do that,” Sid interrupted. Was this the same Jimmy he knew and grew up with? The meeting on Terra Nova flooded his mind. Am I face to face with some ancient evil? He looked into Jimmy’s eyes, but sensed nothing, just a blank emotional wall.

“Then come with me and prove it.” Jimmy edged closer. “Your Grilla friend has been very uncooperative.”

Sibeal pulled Sid aside. “You have Zoraster?”

“We do,” admitted Jimmy, coming another step closer.

“I know you think you’re the fastest gun in the network,” Jimmy laughed. “In fact, it’s one of the reasons I always liked you. But you can’t win this fight.”

“Then why don’t you come get me,” Sid said more bravely than he felt. He still had a few tricks up his sleeve. The other psombie guards formed a circle around them. He might be able to take out one or two.

Jimmy backed up a step and sighed. “We can do this the hard way, or the easy way.” A new wave of psombie troops appeared at the gaping hole in the rock wall.

Sid’s shoulders slumped. Better to wait for another moment. He could use some more time to probe the networks of the psombies, see if he could hack into Jimmy’s connection. Maybe it was an opportunity. “Okay, we’ll come.” He started a private network with Sibeal.

“Good.” Jimmy crossed the last few steps between. “I need to know where Bob is.”

Sid shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I know you know,” sighed Jimmy. “And I know I can’t hack into your networks remotely. But there are other ways.”

Sid backed up, but there was nowhere to go. Psombie guards grabbed them from behind.

“And more important…” Jimmy paused, leaning down to pick up a shard of shattered glass.

“What?”

Jimmy held the sliver of glass up to Sid’s eye. “Where’s Willy, Sid?”

14

Faith wasn’t something that came easily to Vince. He had it once, but it had been ripped from him, replaced with a need to control. Sitting alone in his cell, Vince knew it was this that drove him to build Phuture News—his desire to control, a futile attempt to hold destiny in his hands.

But in the end, his creation had controlled him. He had robbed himself of his own freedom.

Trapped in a jail cell, he felt free for the first time in years. All he had left was faith now. It was a funny thing, to feel free in a jail. He smiled and pulled a woolen blanket around his shoulders, then settled into the metal cot.

There was nothing to do but wait.

After cooperating and giving them his information, Colonel Kramer transferred him into the minimum-security brig at the Anacostia-Bolling base just across the Potomac from the Pentagon. Vince bargained each bit of freedom—for a shave, for a shower, for a cell with a tiny view of blue sky—for every new piece of information.

Soon enough they’d discover the lies, but that wasn’t in Vince’s control.

Not anymore.

He did everything he could. His struggle to believe the Terra Novan story had been replaced by the simple idea of doing the right thing. In his mind, that meant sticking up for people close to you, so he carried out his end of the plan Sid and Bob laid out.

The network map of the nervenet that they recovered from Willy’s proxxi indicated that a senior member of the Alliance military command in Arunchal Pradesh was another nodal point, just like Jimmy. So Sid and Zoraster snuck into Arunchal to infect this nodal point with their own virus. Vince came to Washington to unload the information that Terra Nova discovered this ancient machine. If they were right, then Sid would see the network of crystals light up as the information passed from Colonel Kramer to his senior staff, and from there into the nervenet. He hoped it worked.

And if it didn’t, then he’d just alerted the Alliance of a dangerous new doomsday cult. Either way, there wasn’t much more he could do.

Closing his eyes, Vince drifted off. His mind went back to the voodoo ceremony, to the night on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. In his mind he saw the hulking figure that had risen out of the fires with a star pattern burning in its forehead. Half asleep, Vince opened his eyes. The presence from the fires on Ponchartrain was standing in his cell next to him. Vince wasn’t surprised. He smiled. “Bob,” he whispered. “Is that you?”

The figure moved toward the door, and, silently, it slid open. Swinging his legs off the cot to stand, Vince followed his rescuer out and down the hallway. Other detainees were in their cells, but they all looked away. Vince followed in a dream. At each checkpoint, the guards opened the doors and looked away at just the right moments—chatting to a colleague, dropping a coffee, everyone looking at anything but Vince. Like a ghost he slipped out of the building until he was standing outside next to a dumpster.

Vince woke to find himself standing alone in the alleyway.

He’d thought it was a dream.

Hotstuff stood in front of him, her glowing virtual presence in sharp contrast to the dingy alley. Blond hair fell in waves over her black sweater. “How the hell did you get out here?”

Vince blinked and looked up. The sky was clear and blue, but the air was freezing cold. He shivered. “I don’t know.” No alarms were raised. It was quiet.

“Let’s just get out of here.” Forwarding a set of phutures into Vince’s networks, Hotstuff constructed a set of escape routes. They might not own Phuture News anymore, but they had enough backdoors to last a lifetime.

Wiping the diagrams from his workspaces, Vince shook his head. “No.” He plotted paths to the Federal detention center.

“Seriously?” Hotstuff shook her head in disbelief, but she was already following him out of the alleyway onto a tree-lined street, turning left toward the center of Washington. She frowned at his orange jumpsuit. “At least let’s get you into something a little more fashionable.”

“Come on, let’s go.”

Connors looked up. “Vince?”

He smiled. “Time to get going.”

But she didn’t budge from the cot she was sitting on. The cell looked a lot like the one Vince had been in; rough concrete walls, folding metal cot, gray steel bars. Detention wasn’t the most imaginative of businesses.

Connors frowned. “What do you mean, time to get going? Why are you here?”

“They’ve released us,” Vince replied. “Come on.” He smiled and held out his hand. “Before they change their minds.”

Connors hesitated but then rocked forward onto her feet. She didn’t take his offered hand.

Vince dropped his hand and began leading the way. “Don’t talk to anyone,” he instructed. “Just follow me, strict orders.”

They walked out of the cell block hallway, out past the guard at the desk who just happened to be holding the door open and talking to his wife in a virtual space as they passed. Outside the cellblock section, the rooms were filled with desks, federal agents busy filing reports, standing chatting at coffee machines, all of them looking away from Connors and Vince as they walked past.

“I heard you cooperated,” Connors said, following quickly on Vince’s heels. “I’m glad you did. I told them everything, every detail, about how you asked to come here and give yourself up.”

Vince jogged down the stairs, glancing up at Connors as he turned to the next flight. “Good.”

“I was worried you sided with the terrorists,” continued Connors. The newsworlds were flooded with stories about the attack in Arunchal and the capture of the Grilla linking this all back to Sid and Bob and Terra Nova. “I’m so relieved you kept your head and weren’t so wrapped up in it that you couldn’t see the truth.”

“And what’s that?” Vince asked as he banged open the doors to the ground floor. They walked outside.

“How dangerous these religious extremists are.”

Vince walked without saying anything.

“Hey, slow down.” Connors grabbed his arms and swung him around. “What’s the hurry? Where are we going?”

“I just want to get out of here,” replied Vince. “You can understand that, can’t you?” He tried to reach for her, but she backed away.

“They didn’t release us, did they?”

Pedestrians slid by, sidestepping them as if they weren’t there, and a wind kicked up, driving wet leaves past their feet.

“We need to go.” Vince turned and kept walking.

Connors paused but then ran after him. “You don’t really believe all that stuff, do you?”

Vince said nothing.

“Thoughts can be viruses,” she continued. “You know that, don’t you? Virulent memes can rip through thought-space, half-truths and deceptions can destroy just as violently as kinetics. It almost destroyed Atopia, and now you’re stuck in it again. Why can’t you see it?”

Alarms began sounding. “We need to go.”

“I can’t come with you.”

“You can’t stay here. They’ll think you were a part of this.”

The wind whipped up again, sending leaves spinning into the air. They were hiding between the lines of perception in this reality, but the lines were blurring. The base finally noticed Vince had disappeared from his cell, and it wouldn’t be long till they saw Connors was gone as well. The authorities had all the information they needed. This time the directives going out to the enforcement branches wouldn’t be to capture, but that dangerous terrorists had escaped, shoot to kill.

Connors weighed her options. “And where on Earth were you thinking of trying to take me?”

Grabbing her hand, Vince angled them into a fresh slice of the future. “Someplace safe.”

15

“Jimmy, hey Jimmy!” Bob called out.

There was no response.

Hesitating, Bob looked at the lollipop trees and chocolate chip moon of the Little Great Little, and then walked into the thunderfall, a wall of sensory white noise. It enveloped him, crushing his senses, and he edged forward, afraid, but also determined. He knew this was where Jimmy hid.

The thunderfall fell away and his senses returned. Behind was a cave, and Jimmy sat in a corner, his eyes cast down, surrounded by his play creatures and guarded by his proxxi Samson, who stared at Bob.

“Jimmy, hey, I didn’t know,” Bob pleaded. He was replaying sections of his inVerse, going over every interaction—every word—he had with Jimmy when they were growing up. This scene had been just after Nancy’s thirteenth birthday party. “I’m sorry.”

“Leave us alone,” Samson growled.

Bob allowed a respectful pause. Jimmy was crying.

“I was just trying to help.” Bob moved a little closer, and Samson grew a little larger. “Listen, stuff like this happens all the time, they’ll forget in a week.”

Jimmy’s face twisted. “It doesn’t happen to you! And no they won’t!” He wiped his tears away and didn’t look Bob in the eye.

Back then, Bob had just tried setting Jimmy up with Cynthia, a girl Jimmy had a crush on. The results were disastrous. Bob had suggested that Jimmy should take Cynthia into Jimmy’s private worlds, where he was doing research for Solomon House, but somehow Cynthia discovered a very private world—one where Jimmy tortured little creatures. It also contained some private memories where Jimmy’s mother was ridiculing him.

Cynthia copied it all and broadcast it to the other pssi-kids. It was cruel fun, and now all the pssi-kids were making fun of Jimmy—whole worlds constructed for the sole purpose of mocking him. Jimmy was awkward, never quite understanding how to interact with the other kids. With Bob’s encouragement, this party had marked the first time Jimmy opened up a little, and now all this had happened.

It was a disaster.

“Hey, I’m not perfect either,” said Bob. Even as he said it he realized how it must sound. Bob was popular, everyone wanted to be his friend. He sighed. “But I’ll tell you something, just between you and me.”

Jimmy sniffled, still staring at the floor, but Samson retreated a pace.

Bob took a step closer. “I lose my temper. I yell at my brother all the time. I feel bad, but I can’t help it sometimes.”

Wiping back more tears, Jimmy took a deep breath. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” Bob took another step toward Jimmy and sat down, cross-legged. “We all have stuff about us we can’t control.”

“Everybody hates me,” sniffled Jimmy, his face snotty, eyes bloodshot. More tears streamed down his face.

“Jimmy,” said Bob softly. “Hey, Jimmy…”

The scared little boy looked back at Bob. “What?”

“Not everybody.”

Spitting out a mouthful of water, Bob stopped to swim in place, regaining control of his body from autopilot. The glittering farm towers of Atopia hung in the sky before him. It wasn’t much farther now. Already he was at the outermost edges of the kelp forest, their air-filled hold-fast bladders sitting like fat green goblins in the rolling swells. He reached out and grabbed one to rest.

His body had been fit as an Olympian’s when he left Atopia, but the trek across the desert drained and damaged him. Even so, swimming these few miles wasn’t much of a challenge. The cold water was draining his reserves, but the hydrophobic shell covering his skin was doing its job. Leaving his body in low-power autopilot swim mode, eking every fraction of fluid-dynamic efficiency it could, he plotted paths through the waves and current and stayed away from drone patrols.

The sensor networks of Atopia were keyed to cyber and mechanical-kinetic intrusions on the wide-angle side, and pathogenic and microbiologicals from a small-angle view. Macrobiologicals were lower on the threat scales. He maintained a small alternate reality clipped around himself as he swam, a cloaking filter that would be enough to keep any alerts below the thresholds for escalation. As powerful as Jimmy was, Sid and Bob had been his equals, even surpassing him in some areas.

This was Bob’s house, too.

Moving up and down in the swells, holding onto the gas bladder, Bob took a deep breath and closed his eyes, opening them to take in the blue cathedral of the sky overhead. Cirrus clouds streaked the heavens above. He felt the familiar surge of the surf pounding on the beaches like an old heartbeat—not far away now—and he was reconnecting with his friends in the water, the smarticle-infused phytoplankton, the fish, the sharks.

He was thinking about what Tyrel had said in the Terra Novan Council meeting.

This thing they were facing, if it was all-powerful, it would have just risen up and destroyed them. Whatever it was, it wasn’t supernatural, it was of this world. It needed their technology to do whatever it was trying to do. Otherwise, it would have just done whatever it wanted. It was a virus that was infiltrating their social and technical networks, but it still needed them.

And if it was something that needed, then it was also something that had weaknesses.

But what were they?

But the more essential question, and one the Terra Novans weren’t able to answer, was why was it doing whatever it was doing? Did it want to subjugate humans, make them suffer, hold them in thrall? Or did it just want to destroy? Bob shook his head. He was anthropomorphizing, trying to apply human desires and traits onto this thing. They really had no idea what this thing was. Did it even really want something? If it was just an echo, then it was just repeating a pattern. There might be no conscious intent. The apocalypse legends all talked about a day of judgment, but why would this thing want to judge us?

He looked up at the looming towers of Atopia. He had to figure it out.

Soon.

Releasing the gas bladder, Bob set his body into swim-mode again and left it to pick its way through the thickening kelp. He was close enough to start projecting some private network tunnels. He had all of Terra Nova’s resources, funneled through the darknets, at his disposal when the time came. Once opened, though, he wouldn’t have long to make his attack before those connections were found and choked off.

He could use some inside help. He was close enough now.

Seagulls yelped under wet skies framed by white chalk cliffs. The portal of Durdle Door stood above the beach. Bob leaned down to pick up his red plastic bucket, then ran toward the girl with blond hair who was turning over rocks in a tidal pool.

“Nancy!” he squeaked in a tiny voice. He was only four in this secret world.

She looked up, her eyes growing wide as her primary subjective filled the placeholder they each always left for each other here. “Bob? Is that you?”

“It’s me.” He closed the last few feet, splashing through the shallow water. He offered his bucket for the squirming crab she held daintily between two fingers.

She dropped it into the bucket and leaned in to hug him. “What are you doing here? Are you still on Terra Nova? I’m terrified, they’ve started a kinetic attack. I’m trying to get Kesselring to call it off.”

Bob hugged her back. “No, I’m not there.”

Releasing him, she leaned back to look in his eyes. “Good.”

“I’m here.”

“What?” She frowned. “Here?”

“Atopia.”

She backed up. “Bob, it’s too dangerous. I unpacked your data beacon. We’re trying to contain Jimmy. We have supporters inside.”

Lightning lit up the clouds in the distance. It was always storming in this world now.

“And that’s why I need your help.”

Nancy wiped her small hands against the frilly edge of her polka-dot one-piece, nodding. Their networks merged in the background, the familiar sensation of their phantoms and synthetic bodies feeling each other close.

“Isn’t this touching?”

Nancy and Bob spun toward the voice.

“You know I never trusted you, Nancy.” Jimmy towered above them. “And Bob, did you really think you could just waltz in here?” He danced a half-step, mocking them.

Bob looked at Nancy. “Run.” He initiated the tunnel linking Atopia and Terra Nova, and unleashed the first barrage. The sky turned to fire, their childhood world exploding into flames.

Jimmy laughed.

But Bob didn’t run.

He watched.

16

Nancy tried to hold her mind on the beach as long as she could, but the splinter snapped off. Bob closed the connection. The last thing she saw was young Bob’s face fade from her visual channels. He didn’t look scared.

And that scared her.

But she didn’t have long to dwell.

Already Jimmy’s networks were swarming hers, overriding her automated defenses. Her physical body was in the labs of Farm Tower Two, just below the Solomon House. She was going over some research notes with one of her staff. “We’re going to have to look at this again later,” she heard herself saying, just as psombie guards slammed open the doors.

Someone screamed, glass crashing to the floor, as the guards shoved people aside and advanced toward Nancy. She reached into synthetic space with her phantoms, worming her way into the psombies’ controls to click them off. One by one, each of the attacking guards dropped like a sack of potatoes to the floor. Horrified faces turned toward Nancy as she sprinted out.

Escaping wouldn’t ordinarily have been that easy, but Jimmy was distracted, busy protecting himself. A vortex opened in the shared mindspace of Atopia, a virtual black hole that was ripping the fabric of pssi-space apart. Bob was the Trojan who penetrated Atopia’s perimeter. He opened a tunnel straight to Terra Nova and unleashed their entire cyber-arsenal against Jimmy.

Running through the corridors, Nancy flooded the realities around her with security blankets while she keyed into Kesselring’s networks. His face floated into her displays.

“I’ve locked down Solomon House,” Kesselring said immediately. “Come up top to my level, we’ll coordinate from here.”

Nancy nodded and clicked off, watching a protective corridor open up and lead into the upper levels. Safe for the moment, she let her primary presence slide off into the hundreds of splinters her distributed consciousness was monitoring at key locations around the globe.

In a spasm, the world had erupted.

She watched the protective dome of the Commune in Montana blaze as Allied forces attacked. The battle platforms hammered the defenses of Terra Nova in a hundred-mile perimeter that stretched into the stratosphere above the southern Atlantic. Psombie armies flooded city centers around the world.

In counter-attack, the Ascetics launched offensives in Manila, Hong Kong, and Sao Paulo, but it wasn’t much.

In Boston, Nancy was ghosting through a bot stationed in Faneuil Hall market. She watched a man leaning over to inspect a basket of tomatoes. He picked up one of them, turning it over, while all around him rained small weapons fire in a battle between the Irish Ascetics and local police forces. The stall behind him burst into flames while he smiled and put the tomato in a bag. The person standing next to him exploded in a mist of red. The man reached down to select another tomato.

The reality blackout was almost complete in metropolitan areas.

Anyone that had pssi installed in their nervous systems, nearly half the planet now, was having evidence of the conflict erased from their realities. A reality filter spanning the globe connected most of it into a world where none of it was happening. Half of the world was being destroyed while the other half didn’t even notice.

The physical world was just the tip of the iceberg. In millions of virtual worlds connected to Atopia, the battle had also begun. Some worlds just winked out of existence, others tried to resist, and some fought back. The struggle for existence had begun.

Nancy ran down the corridor and jumped into a service elevator. Kesselring’s complex was on the upper level. She stared at the manual controls, and then reached out and pushed a mid-level address.

She’d been saving one last wild card.

17

Pulling his feet underneath him, Bob stood, feeling his feet sink into the sand. He raised himself out of the water and splashed the last few steps to dry land. A couple on beach towels looked at him, and he waved them away. “Get out of here!” he yelled, but all along the beach the screaming had already begun as the drones descended.

A projection of Jimmy materialized in front of him. “Come back for a little surfing, Bob? Have a nice swim?”

“Just hold on.” Bob staggered forward. The swim weakened him more than he thought it would. He leaned over to get his breath, slicking the water off his body. “I just want to talk.”

“So talk.”

It was the moment of truth. Would Jimmy just kill him? It was a possibility. Even with the swarming attack Bob unleashed into the informational structure of Atopia, Jimmy could destroy this section of Atopia with an untargeted kinetic bombardment. Overwhelmingly blunt, but it would get the job done. Bob waited, holding his breath.

“I’m not going to kill you, Bob.” Jimmy’s projection frowned. “What, are they telling you I’m some kind of monster?”

Bob slowed his breathing. Jimmy might just be buying time. Bob’s surprise attack ripped the Atopian networks wide open, far more than Bob anticipated. Bob and Jimmy stood facing each other on the beach, but they were also grappling in the background, reality shattering from reality, as they tried to insert themselves into each other’s networks. The hyperspaces around them blazed. Bob stayed silent.

Jimmy laughed. “Come on, you don’t believe in monsters, do you? I’ve heard the fairy tales Terra Nova is spinning about me.”

Bob stood up straight. “I don’t know. I don’t even know who I’m talking to.”

Jimmy stopped laughing. “They tried to destroy us, Bob. They would have killed you, Nancy, everyone here. Based on what? Some religious fable about the end of days? Religious extremism is a dangerous thing, and they’re about as extreme as they come.”

Already Bob’s attacks in the cyber-infrastructure were slowing. The tide was turning. Nancy was in Farm Tower Two. His parents were in their habitat. In a splinter Bob watched Commander Rick Strong’s face in the Atopian Command center. His team had isolated most of the viral threads Bob let loose. The Commander was always a big believer in boots in the mud, of the need to keep low-tech solutions on hand. His reserve platoon of his staff, humans with their minds sealed from pssi-space, were on their way to the beach.

Bob began planning escape routes, pinging their networks.

“Who do you think this is?” Jimmy thumped his chest and threw his arms wide. “This is me, Jimmy. We grew up together. And don’t think I don’t appreciate everything you did for me. It’s the only reason you’re standing here. You know that, don’t you?”

Bob didn’t respond. It had been a little too easy to swim in undetected.

Jimmy grimaced. “And I know I have weaknesses, things that I do…” He paused. “And yes, I am taking control of this place, but am I any worse? What do you want me to say?”

Bob stared at him. “Explain the crystals.”

“I have no idea.” Jimmy let his hands fall, slapping his thighs. “How about asking your Terra Novan friends? They seem to know a lot about them.”

Bob didn’t have much time. If he rushed, he could make it, grab Nancy and his parents, get them onto the passenger cannon with him. He’d taken control of enough of the Atopian systems to burrow a path through. He could just make it. He lurched forward but stopped himself.

“Go ahead.” Jimmy moved to one side. “Go and get her. I won’t stop you.”

“Bob?” said another voice, one Bob hadn’t heard in a long time.

He turned. It was his father. His image materialized on the beach next to them.

“Your mother and I just got a message to meet you at the passenger cannon. What are you doing?” His dad frowned and looked at the water still dripping off him. “Were you surfing?”

“Go and get them,” Jimmy offered again. He stepped back further, even clearing a path through the digital infrastructure.

“Bob, stop whatever you’re doing.” His dad was angry. “Be responsible for once in your life. Stop this.”

Bob watched a swarm of bots gathering overhead. It wasn’t just Jimmy, but the entire Atopian Defense Forces Command Center was bringing its weight to bear. They’d been surprised, but had quickly regrouped. Bob’s window of opportunity was closing.

“It doesn’t matter,” continued Bob’s dad, his face contorting. “I don’t understand what you’ve been doing, where you’ve been, I don’t care. I’m sorry for anything I did. Please just stop.”

Jimmy stood beside Bob’s father. “You should listen to him.”

“Dad, I’m sorry, I can’t…”

“You can’t blame yourself for what happened to your brother.” Bob’s dad started crying. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” echoed Jimmy.

Bob took a step forward, but then stopped again. In his mind’s eye he could see Nancy rushing along the corridors high in Farm Tower Two. He could still make it. Not your fault. His father’s words reverberated in his brain. Be responsible. Bob stared up at Farm Tower Two, its glass walls shining before him.

He could save his own heart, but he would be breaking a million others.

He stepped backward.

Don’t do it, insisted the voice in Bob’s head. He struggled inside. Get Nancy, get Mom and Dad, get out of here. We can’t do that. There’s a way we can stop Jimmy. But you can’t leave them, you can’t fail again. We won’t fail. This will work. If we stop Jimmy, then we save everyone. But what if you’re wrong?

Jimmy shook his head. “You know this is hopeless.”

“Bob, stop, please,” begged Bob’s father. “Take responsibility, stop this.”

Tears in his eyes, Bob retreated another step toward the water. “I can’t. And I am.”

Bob took one last look at his dad, then up at Farm Tower Two. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, turning to walk and then run back into the water.

Jimmy’s projection smiled. “There’s nowhere to go.”

Already splashing knee-deep, Bob said, “I know,” and dove headfirst into a wave.

18

An orbital view of the southern Atlantic filled the room, centered on the glittering sphere of the Terra Novan perimeter. Alliance battle platforms encircled it, each highlighted in their own red spheres, and each ringed by battleships. A dusting of red dots orbited above it all, drones weaving in and out, testing the defenses. The display pulsed in time, morphing alternate scenarios the Command team analyzed and modified in real time.

The sudden appearance of Robert Baxter, launching a Terra Novan offensive inside their perimeter, had thrown Commander Strong’s Atopian defensive team into disarray, but his staff regained control quickly. It was already contained with minimal system losses. He was proud that they reacted so well. It was their first real test.

The inside attack was a surprise to his team, but the Commander wasn’t surprised. Looking at the main battle display, it was clear Terra Nova wouldn’t be able to withstand them much longer. He couldn’t blame them for fighting back, but it just emphasized the need to neutralize them as quickly as possible.

The attack on Alliance headquarters in Arunchal had been the final straw. Atopia had been petitioning the United Nations Security Council for international backing to legally remove the leadership of Terra Nova through use of force. The petition was finally granted after the Arunchal attack, giving the Alliance legal grounds to assemble and attack Terra Nova.

Due to mutual protection treaties, attacking Terra Nova would be taken as a declaration of war against the African Union. For months the United Nations had been trying to get weapons inspectors into the African Union, to look at the space power grid. The weapons inspectors were also working to understand the extent that Terra Nova had infected systems worldwide, just as they’d almost destroyed and killed hundreds of thousands of people on Atopia with their reality virus. Terra Nova was spreading dangerous lies, tipping the world toward destruction.

It was now Commander Strong’s job to remove this threat.

“Commander, I need to speak to you.”

He blinked, tearing his attention away from his displays. Nancy Killiam stood in front of him.

“I don’t know how you got in here,” said Commander Strong, glancing at her, “but you need to go, right now.” Most of his mind was plugged into the battle in the Southern Atlantic. He stood in the middle of the battle projection that spanned the room. He stared at the image of the Terra Novan platform displayed in the center.

“I’m here in person,” she replied. “I need to talk to you.”

He hadn’t checked her metatags. So she physically breached the Command entrance. Without looking at her, he shook his head. “You know this is not a good time,” he answered, but he could guess why. A thread of his mind was following Bob as he tried to escape on the beaches below. “I know you and Bob are close, Nancy, but there’s nothing I can do.”

Almost right away, Jimmy had taken over the Terra Novan intrusion into their networks. He specifically asked if he could handle Bob himself. The Commander agreed. He understood. Jimmy and Bob were childhood friends. Jimmy had to try to reason with his friend.

His guards had already grabbed Nancy and were pulling her to the door. “It’s about your wife,” she cried out.

Even in the middle of all this, Commander Strong still kept a good chunk of himself with his wife Cindy, her body in stasis in their apartment. Several months ago she committed what the doctors called “reality suicide”—she was one of the first disappeared, people who went into the multiverse of pssi worlds and never returned.

The Commander distilled his attention into the room. He held one hand up to stop the guards, halfway out the door. “What about her?”

“Privately.” Nancy shook the guards off. “And this is about Patricia, too.”

There was no reason he should listen to her, but he had the greatest of respect for her great-aunt, Patricia Killiam, even after what happened. Nancy was many things—stubborn, obsessive—but she also never wasted his time. That commanded his respect. In a snap decision, he opened a private channel. His primary viewpoint shifted into a white room. They sat face to face, opposite each other across a small rectangular table.

Nancy cut straight to the point. “Jimmy is the one who stole your wife’s mind.”

Commander Strong stared at her. Of course she would do anything, say anything right now. Desperate people did desperate things. “That’s a very serious accusation.”

He felt sorry for her, but lies wouldn’t help.

And yet.

Nancy forwarded the data beacon Bob sent her, details that Patricia Killiam had left: evidence implicating Jimmy in the deaths of his own parents, dozens of disappearances, even the death of Patricia herself. The most damning, though, was evidence that Jimmy stole his wife Cindy’s mind, taken her away to gain control over him.

He assimilated the data. “I’ve seen most of this before.” Jimmy had presented the data recovered from Patricia Killiam at the last Council meeting when they received approval to attack Terra Nova.

“Not all of it.”

She was right. Jimmy had hidden the parts incriminating him. The Commander recognized the digital authentication of Patricia. He verified it with his old keys. It was from Patricia. “What do you want, Nancy? If you knew about this, why did you wait?”

“I had to be sure.” Nancy tried raising Kesselring, opening a channel together with Rick, but Kesselring didn’t answer the ping. “Kesselring is together with me.” She shared her rendering of the meeting Kesselring had with Jimmy, when he’d confronted him.

Veins popped out in Rick’s neck. “If you and Kesselring were discussing this, you should have come to me…”

“I needed to wait.”

Until now, she didn’t have to add. They were about to crack the Terra Novan defenses.

“I can’t prove it more than this,” she added breathlessly, “but have I ever lied to you?”

Rick stared at the data. He’d always been a gut thinker, and the things that happened with Patricia Killiam hadn’t made any sense to him on a gut level.

In the splinter of his mind that was always with his wife, he looked down into her face.

Hell, he thought, is not a place where you burn, but a place where you are frozen—frozen in time, alive and never dying, immobile with your thoughts and regrets. The more you struggle to get out, the more the thoughts dig into you, pulling you deeper. Rick had been living in a frozen hell for the past six months. None of it had made sense.

Until now.

19

“The girl from Ipanema”—Sid was sure that was the muzak being played in the passenger cannon waiting area. This waiting room would normally be packed with businesspeople and tourists, but it was empty. Something was going on in the city, but Sid was disconnected from the networks. Holographic ads played across the wall of palm trees and people winning money in casinos, promises of the womb of warmth and security. He was sitting next to Sibeal, facing Bunky and Shaky seated across from them, surrounded by psombie guards in their black body armor.

“Where are we going?” Sid asked, looking at the guard nearest to him. It seemed like he was the squad leader, but it was hard to tell. They didn’t talk, didn’t make any noise at all except the whisper of the metallic fabric of their uniforms as they merged around each other in a fluid, non-human gait.

Of course there was no response.

The psombie guards’ faces were covered in a reflective black shell, and Sid doubted they even used their own eyes to see. They were just nodes in a network. Tiny ornithopter bots hovered everywhere they moved, coordinating the activity, bees hovering around their mobile hive.

Sid wondered what the owners of these bodies were doing right now. They were still thinking, using the brains inside of these heads, but they were off in virtual gameworlds, or perhaps living in another version of New York, living out a fantasy life with a girlfriend that jilted them or some other situation they weren’t able to come to grips with. Whatever it was, it was enticing enough to lease their bodies to Cognix Corporation. He wanted to get up and shake them awake, ask them if they knew what they were doing, but even if he did, it wouldn’t make any difference.

The public didn’t care anymore. Everyone was too wrapped up in pleasing themselves, which was exactly what the plan had been all along.

Sid could guess where they were going. Atopia was well within the launch energy of the passenger cannon. Everything was resting on Bob being able to get inside, and get inside of Jimmy’s head. If he did, ironically, it might even be a good thing they were being shipped there right now.

A low vibration hummed through their seats, and a two-tone chime sounded. Their passenger pod was here.

“First time I’m getting on one of these,” Shaky said as they all stood. “Will it make me sick? I’m not good with zero gravity.”

“We got more serious things right now,” said Bunky, his face grim.

Shaky looked at him. “You’re the one sitting beside me, mate. Have you ever seen someone vomit in low gravity?”

The waiting area doors slid open, revealing the passenger cannon pod interior of nondescript gray walls with thick g-seats in creamy fake leather. Sid waited for instructions to be fed into his displays, but instead their psombie minders stood back and away from them.

And then something amazing happened: one of them spoke.

“You are free to go,” said the one Sid had imagined as the leader.

Turning on their heels, the psombies marched off, trailing their beebot entourage.

Sid was speechless. He glanced at Bunky and Shaky and Sibeal while “The Girl from Ipanema” played on in the background.

“Did you… what did you do?” stuttered Bunky. He took a step toward the exit, but then reconsidered.

Sid shook his head. “It wasn’t—”

“Come on!” commanded a voice from inside the pod.

Sid turned to look inside the passenger cannon pod. He nearly fell over backwards.

It was Nancy, or at least, a synthetic space projection of her. “Hurry up,” she insisted, motioning for them to get inside.

He checked the encrypted metatags of the projection inside the pod. It was Nancy in front of them, or someone that had stolen all of Nancy’s authentication. She sent him details of a flight plan. “It’s okay, she’s a friend,” Sid said, making a decision. He pulled Sibeal through the doors. Bunky and Shaky followed.

Sid was busy reconnecting his network feeds. His meta-cognition systems flooded with images of battles raging outside. A lot had happened since they were captured. The world had erupted around them.

“Hurry,” Nancy urged as they seated themselves and clipped in their webbing restraints. “Commander Strong and Kesselring are with us now.”

“Did Bob make it through?” asked Sid.

Nancy’s projection shook its head. “He’s here, but it’s not that easy.” She opened a connection.

A splinter opened in Sid’s mind, and he saw an ocean. It was a view from just offshore of Atopia. Someone was in the water. “He’s swimming?” Sid said incredulously. It was Bob, churning through the surf, cutting under a wave as he pulled away from the beach.

The passenger pod jolted and began accelerating, pinning the passengers back into their seats.

“Uh, guys, don’t mean to spoil your reunion,” Bunky said from the seats behind Sid. “But where exactly are we going?”

Sid networked them into the display that was tracking Bob, and then uploaded the flight plan. “We’re going to the only place that’s still safe,” he replied.

“At least for now,” added Nancy.

“And where’s that?” grunted Bunky.

Sid’s face squeezed into a grimace under the growing acceleration. “You’ll see.”

With a muffled roar, the pod exited the cannon, launching into the air. In an instant it was enveloped in a layer of plasma that cut off the data connection. It would burn off in a few seconds as the pod cleared the first tens of miles of the atmosphere, arcing on a ballistic trajectory toward Montana.

“Oh God,” was the last thing Nancy heard from inside the pod. It was Shaky, trying to hold down his lunch.

Nancy smiled and shook her head, then retreated her primary perspective back into her physical body on Atopia. After talking with Commander Strong, she’d made it back to the service elevator. It was already on its way up to the top level, past the Solomon House to Kesselring’s retreat.

The elevator pinged to the top level. The door slid open.

Nancy expected to be greeted by the rolling green fields and trees of Kesselring’s private gardens, ready to start planning the final stages of removing Jimmy from Atopia’s networks and halting the attacks underway. Instead, she found blackened earth, still burning.

Jimmy stood in the middle of it all with a falcon on his arm.

20

Natural humans have two systems for making decisions—the fast-thinking emotional gut reaction, and the slow-thinking logical process. When it comes to decision making, slow-thinking generally comes up with better results, but it is the fast-thinking that makes us human—quick responses that follow the path of least resistance, the potential pain of losing greater than the promise of gaining something else. The human mind is biased and flawed, but in a systematic way.

Humans are irrational, but predictable, and Bob was counting on it.

He was just past the edge of the swells and swimming toward deeper water, filling his lungs with the rest of the perfluorocarbons, networking into the water to find his old friends. He hoped they were still there. Below in the depths, a great white shark turned with a flick of its tail and swam upward into the kelp.

Incoming pings from his mother and father hit his networks, but Bob ignored them. He had to focus. After diving in the water, he lost track of Nancy. He couldn’t pick up her signature anywhere. The last he saw, she was in the Tower Two elevator on the way to the upper levels. Kesselring was inside with them, she’d been able to tell him that much. He hoped they had enough to hold out until he could finish.

Cutting through the water, he saw his family’s habitat in the distance, the deck of his old room just visible. He remembered how Nancy came and cleaned his place up one day when he was out surfing, the frustration he felt when he came home to find his comfortable and carefully arranged mess tidied up. He wished he could come home to that clean room now, be frustrated with her perfection, but the mess of his life was his own alone now.

The white shark breached the surface beside him, exploding up out of the water, and Bob grabbed its dorsal fin, holding on tight as it dove back down again.

“Sacrifice,” said the priest, his projection riding shotgun with Bob into the depths, his robes flowing in the rush of the water, “is the only way to salvation.”

Bob nodded. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he replied, communicating through sub-vocal channels, “but I need to do this alone.”

In seconds, Bob reached the undersea ledge of Atopia, fifty feet down. Through glass window-walls, he watched people flash by, sitting in their apartments, none of them aware of what was going on. The avatar of the priest nodded at Bob and let go, disappearing in a rush of bubbles as Bob reached the edge of the ledge at over a hundred feet. The blue-black of the abyss opened beyond, and Bob urged the shark down into it.

He still couldn’t reach Nancy. There was too much interference in the networks. In the deeper water the smarticle concentration fell off rapidly, reducing bandwidth that could pass through its mesh, but even so, Bob could feel another presence.

“Sid, is that you?”

“I’m here, buddy,” came the reply.

The pressure was building, and Bob urged the last bubbles of air from his lungs. The oxygen he’d stored in the perfluorocarbons would keep him going for at least ten minutes. That should be enough time.

“You’re on your way to the Commune?” Bob messaged. The light from the surface was waning as he dove deeper. Sid sent some information—his passenger pod was over halfway through its journey, sixty miles above Minnesota and arcing downward. “Yeah, we’re almost there.”

The cold was intense. Bob shivered. “Good.”

Looking out of the window of the passenger pod, Sid craned his neck to try and get a view of the Pacific Ocean, where Atopia was, where Bob was. The curve of the Earth was covered in swirls of clouds. “Where are you going?” he asked, but he already knew. Following the external sensors on Atopia, he watched Bob’s body, still clinging to the shark, now three hundred feet down.

“I need to get down to the main trunk,” Bob replied after a pause.

There were external access airlocks built into the length of Atopia. They had manual controls. Bob must be heading for one near the computing core of Atopia, down below the fusion reactor, five hundred feet below the surface.

Sid shared the data feed with Sibeal and Bunky and Shaky. “You sure you want to do that, buddy?”

He watched Bob dive ever deeper.

Bob didn’t reply. Jimmy had to know where he was going, but in the confusion of the initial attack Bob disabled the deep-water kinetic defenses. A part of him knew he was going to do this all along. He amplified his visual system, adjusting for the low-light conditions. The shark slowed and the deep-sea pressure hull of Atopia loomed out of the blackness. Bob released the shark and swam the last few feet, grabbing onto a handhold to steady himself.

“You’ve been a good friend, Sid,” said Bob, twisting the external release mechanism. The cold and pressure were slowly shutting down his biological systems. “Can you do one thing for me?”

“Anything, buddy, you name it.”

“Take care of Nancy—promise me you won’t let anything happen to her.” The door to the underwater airlock opened. He hesitated, but there wasn’t much oxygen left in his system. His cells were dying already.

“Of course I will,” he heard Sid reply, now a faint signal.

Bob swam into the airlock and punched the button to close the door. Pumps banged loudly, pumping air into the chamber. Bob put out a hand to steady himself against the wall, and then leaned over to retch out the perfluorocarbons as the water pumped out below his knees.

“What are you doing down here?” Jimmy’s projection sat cross-legged on the floor of the airlock.

Bob gasped for air. “They’ve stopped the attack. I just want to talk to you.” Standing up, Bob pulled a metal tab from his swimming trunks and began unscrewing an access panel.

“Just a temporary hiccup,” Jimmy replied, smiling. “And we were talking, but you swam away.”

Bob finished unscrewing the panel and reached in to pull out a mass of optical wiring. This was as close to the routing core of Atopia as he could get.

Jimmy watched Bob. “You know, these chambers can be used for more than just pressurizing.”

There was no way he could get anyone or anything down there quickly enough to stop Bob from doing whatever he was doing. The pumps fired up again and a hissing noise began.

Bob found the photonic transducer array. Closing his eyes, he ripped open a cut on his index finger with the metal tab and pressed the cut onto the transducer, sending a flood of smarticles from his bloodstream onto it. He coagulated the blood, forming a hard connection to the machine. He was connected directly into the core now. Even Jimmy wouldn’t be able to track everything. He started flooding the networks.

The noise of the pumps increased in frequency. The air pressure in the chamber was dropping. “Stop it.” Jimmy’s projection stood up and walked next to Bob. “Don’t make me do this.”

Bob wheezed. “I’m not making you do anything.” He felt Jimmy’s networks trying to stem the flow of information gushing from him into the core.

“Stop it,” insisted Jimmy again, banging one hand against the wall of the airlock.

Bob was trying to contain it, but his cellular membranes began shredding in the sudden and massive decompression. He doubled over, coughing, keeping one hand on the transducer while the other came up to his mouth. He brought it away. It was covered in blood.

“Bob!” Jimmy yelled, his eyes growing wide. “Stop!”

Bob’s internal organs began rupturing, and blood ran out of his nose and ears. It was nearing vacuum in the chamber. Still he kept his finger on the photonic array. His body sagged against the wall.

“STOP IT!” Jimmy screamed, but he was now screaming at himself. Nobody else was left in the chamber.

Trailing a streak of red against the wall, Bob’s body slid down to slump into a pool of its own blood.

21

Sid pulled the restraints of his seat, his knuckles white on balled fists. The image of Bob’s inert body lingered in the shared display of the passenger pod. Tears streaked down Sid’s face. The only sound was the low hum of the pod’s life support system recycling the air.

Sibeal reached into the display with a phantom and clicked it off, then reached with her real hands to hold Sid’s. She encouraged him to release the webbing tabs.

Shaking his head, Sid muttered, “Why did he do that?”

“I don’t know,” whispered Sibeal.

“Jimmy didn’t need to kill him.” Sid clenched his teeth and looked at Sibeal. “He could have just left him unconscious. Why did he have to kill him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“And why didn’t Bob try to stop him?” Sid mumbled. “He could have hacked the controls. He didn’t even try…”

“Ah, sorry,” said a quiet voice from the back of the pod. It was Shaky. “But how do we even know that just really happened? Maybe it was a fake.”

Sid began breathing again in shallow breaths. “It seemed real enough to me. None of the connection streams ever switched, it was continuous”—he analyzed the data they received—“and the encryption tags were intact.”

Shaky shrugged. “Even so, you Atopians…”

“I don’t know, is the answer.” It wasn’t something Sid could analyze, wasn’t something he could crunch the numbers on.

Shaky shrank back into his seat. “Sorry.”

The pod cut through space in silence while Sid ran through the connection mechanics again and again, searching for any evidence of tampering.

“Hey.”

Sid glanced over his shoulder while the bulk of his mind focused on the analyzing and replaying the scene of Bob’s death over and over again. Bunky was reaching forward in his seat to reach out and touch Sid’s arm.

“Look, I know this is a shock,” continued Bunky, “but there was no good reason why Jimmy wouldn’t have killed Bob.”

Sibeal turned around. “Bunky this isn’t—”

“Let me finish.” Bunky held up a hand. “We might have to accept this at face value.”

“You don’t understand.” Sid’s voice was ragged.

“No, I don’t. So tell me.”

“Bob was the only one that ever stood up for Jimmy, protected him. We grew up together.”

“So you were mates as sprogs, then?”

It took Sid a second to decode what he meant. Sprog—cockney for child. “Yeah.”

“Sometimes mates kill mates in war, mate.” Bunky gripped Sid’s shoulder. “I know. I was in the British Army when the Troubles rose up again in Ireland. It was why I left.”

Shaky frowned. “I didn’t know that.”

Bunky nodded. “Yeah, and if you want to make whatever he sacrificed himself for to be worth it, you need to get a grip, right now.”

Sid said nothing. The muscles in his jaw flexed.

“Or do I need to remind you,” continued Bunky, “that we’re in a thirty-foot long capsule,”—he checked the altimeter reading—“forty miles in space above enemy territory, in the middle of a war, traveling at six thousand miles an hour straight into an enemy blockade.”

The Commune wasn’t just a Luddite ashram. Its founding fathers, some of the richest people in America, had foreseen a day like this. It had been built with a final battle in mind. There was a fortress under those farms. While it might be safe on the inside, the problem was that Allied forces had encircled it—the Commune’s perimeter was now an enforced no-fly zone.

Nancy knew this, and must have had a plan, but since comms were cut off for twenty seconds in the plasma burst of launch, they hadn’t been able to contact her. They were heading straight into this mess at nearly two miles a second. The heat shield of the capsule was already heating above a thousand degrees as they reentered the thicker layers of the atmosphere. Their chairs swiveled around to take the g-forces in the opposite direction.

“This Nancy girl that Bob spoke of, to take care of—that’s the same one that bundled us into this thing?” Bunky asked.

Sid nodded. “Yes.”

“Try her again—seems the first order of business would be making sure she’s all right.”

Sid tried again. “I have been.” Jimmy was steadily regaining control of the Atopian ecosystem, driving out the Terra Novan tunnel Bob wedged into its perimeter. Sid’s connections were shutting down.

“I think the first order of business,” Sibeal interrupted, “would be making sure we’re not blown to bits by the Allies or the Commune.”

“We should be okay. Did you check the flight plan?” Sid summoned the details Nancy gave them. They had to assume Nancy had a plan. He noticed that Commander Strong had authorized Allied tags for their capsule. He pointed this out to Sibeal. “That should let us straight through, at least until it’s too late to stop us reaching the perimeter. And I assume she contacted the Commune to tell them we’re coming.”

From here, they had no way to communicate with the Commune directly.

Sibeal shook her head as the g-forces of re-entry squeezed her back into her seat. “Assume she contacted them?” The acceleration was piling up, much more than at launch. Their trajectory was taking a steep dive into the Commune.

“And we better hope that those Allied tags are still good.”

The pod ripped down through the atmosphere, blazing a bright tail behind it as the comet rose over the curved horizon. Holding their breath, they breached the Allied no-fly zone. Sid spun a viewpoint out into the surrounding area. The Allied attack on the Commune had stopped. Everything in the Allied networks indicated a stand-down status. What happened? Why’d they stop? The auto-rotating blades of the pod popped out, shifting their capsule from a ballistic into an aerodynamic flight path. It began decelerating hard again, squeezing them into their aerogel seats. They neared the Commune’s shield.

Sid detached from his body to watch from the outside. Like a helicopter, the pod hovered just at the edge of the aerial plankton dome a mile and a half in the air. Then, like magic, an opening appeared underneath them. The plankton parted to allow them through.

“We’re in!” Sid exclaimed inside the capsule.

Flight plans uploaded from the Commune into the pod’s controller, and it slid through the air to land upright on its landing gear, in a field a few hundred yards from a barn on the outskirts of the Commune village. Two people in a horse-driven buggy were coming their way along a dirt road.

Unstrapping himself, Sid motioned for the rest of them to do the same. “Seems we have a welcome party.”

Sid had never been inside the Commune. He wondered what would happen next. The door to the pod slid open just as the buggy arrived. Sid took a deep breath. “Hello, thanks for letting us in, my name—”

One of the men hopped down from the buggy. “I know what your name is,” he said, his face obscured by a large black hat. Sibeal stuck her head out from behind Sid.

“But,” said Vince, taking off his hat, “I don’t believe I’ve been introduced to your friends.”

22

So this is what it feels like to be dead.

Bob pulled back the blinds hanging on the window of his old room and peered out. After his external meta-cognition systems rebooted, he flitted his primary viewpoint into his family’s habitat, one of the few above-ground living quarters on Atopia that sprouted up out of the water just offshore, attached to one of the mass driver legs. The seas were calm, gently rolling, with nothing to hint at the titanic events that had just taken place beneath its surface.

I just died.

And yet.

Here I am.

He looked at his hands, turning them over. He’d inhabited countless virtual bodies before now, but this instance took on a special significance. Now he had no physical body to return to. Did he feel different? Yes. Like a ship that had thrown off its anchor, his mind felt at sea, drifting—but free. There was no meat-mind holding him back, no dead weight.

He laughed grimly at his own joke.

But how to tell if “me” remained “me”?

Mind uploading wasn’t proven, and “mind uploading” wasn’t even the proper term. They still couldn’t copy all of the intricacies of the live brain, but just the external and internal signaling. He was now a black box that mimicked the original in nearly every detail, with “nearly” being the operative word. People had died and kept their externally stored minds active, but the jury was still out whether these were still “people”—no legal courts would uphold the idea. So even if Bob was still Bob, he was technically no longer a person.

Bob walked upstairs and looked around the kitchen. It was empty. A part of him wished his parents were here, but more of him was glad they weren’t. In some corner of his mind he thought that if someone had to tell his mother that he was dead, it would be best that he told her himself. He laughed again, sad now. Dying seemed to have a strange effect on the mind.

Being dead would take some getting used to.

Almost against his will, he moved across the entranceway to the door to his brother’s old room. His brother had been dead for more than six years, after committing suicide. And ultimately so did I. Funny how that worked out. The door slid open, and everything was where it always was. Their mother hadn’t touched a thing in the room since Martin died. She probably wouldn’t touch anything in Bob’s room now. He wondered if this habitat was on its way to becoming a mausoleum.

Perhaps it already was.

Gliding away, he climbed the stairs, out onto the rooftop terrace.

Outside the sky was still blue, the sun still shining, and the beaches of Atopia stood where they always had, just beyond the booming surf. The world always felt unreal to Bob, but before he’d been able to lay his hand on a table, pinch himself when he needed, but not anymore. The dream of existence felt like it had swallowed him.

Through all of life, thought Bob, death was our closest companion. It was always there, just a misstep away, patiently waiting, and always, in the end, winning and bringing us back into its arms—but no more. That constant companion was gone now. Death had become him. Bob breathed deeply, realizing even as he did it that he’d already taken his last one. He didn’t need to breath anymore, but didn’t have the luxury of long reflection either. He had a job to do.

His gambit had worked.

Letting his physical body be killed had drawn Jimmy in close, the human part of Jimmy’s mind going frantic, separating itself from the other. Jimmy didn’t want to kill Bob, not the human part of him. Bob had been counting on it, and with Jimmy’s guard down he found a crack into Jimmy’s inner networks.

Bob had one more trip to complete: a journey into Jimmy’s mind.

His view of the shining towers of Atopia, above the green forests and surging ocean swells, gave way to a voluminous, bright corridor. Not really a corridor, but a long set of huge rooms, connected by archways. At the far end Bob could see Jimmy arguing with another projection of himself, their voices echoing through the hallways.

Bob walked toward them.

Sky-blue frescos of angels and cherubs adorned twenty-foot ceilings bordered in gold carvings. Dark-framed oil paintings of uniformed men on horseback hung across one side of the walls. The other side was floor-to-ceiling lead glass windows that looked onto manicured gardens surrounding a long reflecting pool. Sunlight streamed in between purple drapes tied back with gold sashes.

The place smelled stale. Elaborate furniture was scattered everywhere, much of it filled with sleeping creatures. Bob recognized them, the playmates of Jimmy’s childhood, the ones he once met in Jimmy’s hiding place under the sensory thunderfall. Jimmy sat behind a polished cherry desk set with an antique globe on it. Sitting on the desk was another version of Jimmy. The two of them were deep in discussion. They hadn’t noticed Bob yet.

So this is what the inside of Jimmy’s head looks like. That voice we all had in our heads, now Bob saw Jimmy’s inner voice, incarnate and sitting on the desk. Or perhaps behind it? One of the two. Whether this was some psychosis of Jimmy’s, or an invasive intelligence, was an open question, but either way he had to be stopped.

Bob couldn’t help feeling intrusive. He was in the innermost sanctum of Jimmy’s being, past all the protective barriers. Intruding. He felt like he wanted to apologize, but resisted. He just tried to kill me. He should have felt angry, vengeful, but he didn’t. Looking at Jimmy’s face, still unaware Bob was here, he only felt sorry for him.

Everyone had weaknesses. Bob knew Jimmy’s, had long known them ever since he’d watched Jimmy pick the legs off insects in the topside forests when they were kids. Jimmy had hidden it as they grew older, but now Bob felt like he’d failed Jimmy as well.

“He forced us, we had no choice,” said the Jimmy sitting on the desk. The seated Jimmy had his face in his hands.

One of the creatures stirred, noticing Bob, and Jimmy-on-the-desk turned around. His dark eyes flashed, but any evidence of surprise was replaced with a cruel smile. “See, no harm done. Here’s our friend.” He patted the other Jimmy on the shoulder.

Bob’s feelings of sympathy evaporated in the naked malice he felt filling the room. He might have cheated death, but this Jimmy might kill him again. “I’m no friend of yours,” he said to Jimmy-on-the-desk.

“How cliché,” mocked Jimmy-on-the-desk. “Sacrificing yourself for the sins of man.”

The seated Jimmy looked up. His face registered genuine surprise. “Bob?”

All of the creatures had awoken. Some of them approached, but Jimmy-on-the-desk held up a hand, easing them back from obstructing Bob.

“Not everybody hates you, Jimmy,” Bob said, easing closer. He forwarded some private memories he had, of their talks, the times under the thunderfall—all the memories he shared with Jimmy, ones only Bob would have.

“Hate us?” laughed Jimmy-on-the-desk. He spread his arms wide. “The world loves us.” Smirking, he nodded at Bob. “And you can call me James, I’m Jimmy’s better half. I know you talk to yourself sometimes too. Come join the party.”

“I’m nothing like you,” Bob said to James.

James smiled. “You’d be surprised.”

Bob kept approaching the desk. “The more important question is, do you love yourself, what you’re doing?” he said to Jimmy.

James laughed again, louder. “This is ridiculous.” He laughed, but in the background Bob felt him testing the networks, trying to find the hole that was allowing Bob to be inside their mind.

“What was it you wanted to talk about?” Jimmy asked. “On the beach, you said you wanted to talk.”

“We have no time for this,” James insisted. Now he stood and blocked Bob.

The network traffic in Jimmy’s cognition systems became frenzied as James tried to force him out, but Bob had driven a splinter deep into Jimmy’s mind. The creatures began to converge, but now Jimmy held up his hand, forcing them back. They hung in a menacing circle around Bob.

“This thing”—Bob pointed at James—“is not a part of you. It’s preying on you to get what it wants.”

James confronted Bob, was just inches from his face. “Lies, just lies to try and confuse us.”

The frustration at how difficult it would be to remove Bob’s connection was becoming apparent. James grimaced. Just bringing more force to bear wouldn’t solve it. He couldn’t just destroy Jimmy’s mind. It was where he existed as well.

“I’m not lying, Jimmy,” Bob said. “Did I ever lie to you?”

“I’ve always been a part of you.” James tried pulling Jimmy’s attention away from Bob. “He’s the one that hurt you, made people laugh at you. Do you remember? I’m the one who protected you.”

“I know you have weaknesses, Jimmy.” Bob ignored James. “We all do. This thing knew yours, exploited them. God knows the world is a horrible place, and a lot of people deserve punishment, but you need to let them go.” Them, the disappeared, the ones Jimmy trapped within the pssi-system.

“Let them go?” James was working himself into a fervor. “After what they’ve done?”

Bob knew James needed Jimmy to agree to block out Bob, but Jimmy wasn’t cooperating.

Bob pointed at James. “He is not a part of you, Jimmy.”

“Who’s made you strong?” insisted James, his face distending, staring at Jimmy. “We’ve done this together.”

Bob shook his head. “He’s killed everyone who loved you. He killed your parents, killed Patricia.”

“Lies, all lies!” yelled James, now a grotesque caricature of Jimmy, a monster that towered over the room.

Jimmy cried out. “My parents abandoned me—”

“No, they didn’t.” Bob forwarded copies of the data Patricia Killiam collected before she died. “This thing lured them away and killed them.”

With Bob this far inside their shared mindspace, James had no way of intercepting or adulterating the data. “He’s just trying to trick you, trying to make you weak—”

“Patricia loved you, and this thing killed her, too.”

“She was an old woman,” James insisted, “she gave up, she had no will to live.”

Bob paused to let Jimmy analyze the data. “And I loved you, too, Jimmy. I still do.”

“He doesn’t love you,” growled James, fire burning in his eyes. The creatures encircling Bob morphed into monsters with fangs and claws menacing.

Bob looked straight into Jimmy’s eyes. “And now it’s killed me, too.”

“Lies!” James screamed. “He’s being clever. He let himself die, he swam down there, trapped himself. Get rid of him, Jimmy, we have no time for this. Get rid of him!”

But the little boy Bob had once known, tears streaming his face, stared at the monster towering over him. “No,” Jimmy said quietly.

23

Sid leaned back in his rocking chair and looked into the sky. It was snowing, or at least it was snowing on the outside. High above his head the Commune’s shield deflected the snowflakes, sending them skidding and tumbling across the sky. It seemed like they were in a giant inverted snow globe, the snow churning and dancing outside while the real world inside it watched.

He was sitting on the covered front deck of the Reverend’s church, the floorboards creaking as he rocked back and forth. Vince and Connors sat on a bench beside him. The Reverend leaned against the railing in front of Sid. A man and woman in a buggy, pulled by two horses, clip-clopped past, the man tipping his hat at Sid. Nodding and smiling, Sid waved back.

“So the attacks stopped?” the Reverend asked Tyrel.

Mohesha nodded, her projection appearing with Tyrel’s just beside the Reverend on the deck. “Yes, Commander Strong called a halt to the operation. Beyond that we have no information.”

“Good.” The Reverend bowed his head and glanced at Sid. “Perhaps young Robert Baxter succeeded in his efforts, as great as the cost was.”

It was midday. Even through the snow, Sid saw the tops of the mountains ringing the Commune. To say this place was a fortress was an understatement. It had a near unlimited supply of energy tapped from the magmatic upwelling below, matched with a continuous flow of fresh water from underground aquifers fed in from the mountains.

Using Sid’s network diagrams, the Ascetics had neutralized more than a dozen people identified as nodal points, infected by whatever was flowing through the crystal networks. Everything now rested on what was happening inside Atopia. Sid stopped rocking and leaned forward in his chair. “Did we manage to get in touch with Nancy or Kesselring?” Still nothing from Nancy since she initiated contact with them in the pod.

In fact, nothing at all had come out of Atopia in the past hour. The Atopian reality blackout meant that half of the world was unaware, but governments of the Alliance were clamoring for information. The viral skin that infected Atopia not so long ago was still fresh in people’s minds.

“No.” Tyrel shook his head. “And the access keys to the Terra Novan systems that we gave to Robert Baxter are still active.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Sid saw the couple in the buggy disappear into the mouth of an access tunnel that led underground. The Commune had opened them when the first attack awakened the sleeping behemoth of the Commune’s defensive systems. The smoking remains of Allied drones were scattered high in the hills around them. Above ground was only a small part of the Commune’s infrastructure. The larger part of it stretched below, in the networks of tunnels that stretched under the granite shields of the mountains. This place could withstand a direct nuclear strike.

Sid let out a long sigh. “I’ll see what I can do about that.” He was the most familiar with Bob’s networks and systems. It would be like bringing a part of him home, if he could find anything. “Do we still have any connections into Atopia?”

Mohesha shook her head. “Nothing.”

Sid hoped Nancy and Commander Strong had the situation under control, but the longer this information blackout persisted, the more worried he was.

“Do you know where Willy’s body is?” Mohesha asked after a pause.

Sid looked to his right, at Willy and Brigitte nestled together. Willy shook his head.

“No, we don’t know where Willy is,” replied the Reverend. The people in the Commune were serious about keeping their privacy, and the Reverend had had enough of his grandson being used as a pawn in this game.

Mohesha frowned. “Are you sure?”

Tyrel raised his hand. “If he says they do not know, they do not know.” In the projection from Terra Nova, Mohesha narrowed her eyes, but didn’t push the point.

“Sidney, if you could please look into—”

Tyrel was interrupted by a high-priority broadcast. In an alternate display an image of Jimmy Scadden appeared.

“To our friends and allies, we apologize for the disruption in communications. We would like to reassure our partners that everything is in order and under control.” The viewpoint panned back to reveal the Boardroom of Cognix Corporation at the apex of Atopia. Conspicuously absent was Commander Strong, but Kesselring was there, smiling vacantly. “We discovered internal spies working with Terra Nova, and had to suspend operations pending an investigation.”

“I am happy to report that we have apprehended the suspects.” The viewpoint zoomed in on Jimmy’s face. “With the removal of Commander Strong, Mr. Kesselring and the rest of the Board have placed me in direct command of Allied forces. Operations against Terra Nova and its agents will resume.”

Sid’s splinter network watched the Allied platforms powering up their weapons systems in the southern Atlantic. Jimmy’s broadcast continued on in the background.

His heart sank. What had happened to Nancy?

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to have to speak at a later date,” said Tyrel.

“Shouldn’t we get underground?” Willy asked Sid, leaning over to put a hand on his shoulder.

“Not quite yet.” He looked at Willy and squinted.

“Why?”

Sid frowned at Willy. Why was it that Jimmy was still so intent on finding Willy? By now he must have known that Sid and his friends had gotten the information from him. And Mohesha just asked the same thing. Were they missing something? Sid had extracted all the data available, but maybe he should look at it again.

“What?” Willy was getting uncomfortable with Sid still staring at him. “You’re freaking me out a little.”

“Would it be all right if I checked your body again, see if we missed anything?”

Willy shrugged. “I guess.”

Brigitte giggled. “I’ve already been over every inch.”

Sid smiled. “With your permission of course.”

“Of course,” Brigitte replied.

Alarms sounded.

24

Olympia Onassis awoke with a start. It had been months since she had seen anyone else as she wandered alone across the world, trapped within the Atopian pssi-system she installed in her brain. Her mind had unglued, terror and despair replacing the anger and unhappiness that filled her life before. She traveled the world—on the turbofan transport network, on the passenger cannons—but everywhere, the world she created was empty of people.

Eventually she came home, to the little house in Brooklyn where she grew up. Her mother still lived there, or at least, she did in the real world. Olympia wasn’t sure what world she was in, but whatever it was, it gave her some small comfort to know she might be in the same space as her mother. Each night she would get into the small single bed of her childhood, still in the same room overlooking the oak tree in the Schmidt’s house next door.

And each morning she would awake alone in the world.

This morning, though, something woke her up. A noise. There it was again. Not just a noise, but a human voice singing. Olympia pulled off her bedcovers, her heart in her throat. Of course she’d heard human voices in her lonely travels—in recorded films, old newsworld broadcasts that she spent most of her days watching—but this voice sounded like her mother.

Pulling open the door to her room, she almost fell to her knees.

“Olympia?” said her mother, recoiling slightly, holding a basket of laundry. “What are you doing here?” She frowned. “Where have you been? I stopped at your place and found your cat. He looked like he was starving so I—”

But before she could finish the sentence, Olympia jumped and hugged her. Her mother dropped the laundry and, ever so slowly, reached around to hug her daughter back. “Are you okay?”

“I love you,” gasped Olympia. She felt something brush her leg. Looking down, she found her cat, Mr. Tweedles, staring up at her and purring. “Mr. Tweedles!” Olympia leaned down and picked him up, squeezing him into the hug with her mother.

Her mother stopped protesting and hugged her back.

Opening her eyes, Olympia looked out the large bay windows on the front of the house. Through her tears she could see someone on the front lawn, looking at the house. A young man seemed to be staring at her, and he looked familiar.

Cindy strong woke up with tears in her eyes, still dreaming of her proxxid children. She had wanted to let them go, yearned to release them, but felt compelled to stay, felt the need to stay by their sides as they aged and died before her eyes. It felt like being trapped in a dream. She wanted to get back to her husband, Commander Rick Strong, but always she had been drawn back in, the needs of the proxxids outweighing her own.

She found herself staring at a ceiling, lying on her back. With some effort, she lifted herself up onto her elbows. Looking around, she blinked. It was her apartment, the one she shared with her husband. Her mind had been ripped from the endless replay of the small cottage on Martha’s Vineyard where she lived with her proxxid children.

Where was her husband? Why was she lying in a stasis pod? What happened?

“Rick?” she whispered, her throat dry, and then again and louder, “Rick?!”

“Jimmy’s taken him.”

Cindy turned her head. Sitting on her couch was Bob.

“Or something has taken him,” Bob continued, his expression grim. “I need your help.”

“What are you doing?” roared James, still towering over Jimmy.

“Letting them go,” Jimmy replied.

All around them, the palace crumbled. Cobwebs of cracks ran through the marble walls as they disintegrated, chunks of plaster falling from above. The creatures ran away, the purple curtains bursting into flames, pouring billowing black smoke into the frescoed ceilings.

In the middle of it all stood Bob, staring at Jimmy and James as they fought.

“We need them,” screamed James, “they feed us.”

“I think that they”—Jimmy held up his hands—“feed you.”

He ripped his hands down, and in the same motion, the walls of the palace came away, tearing its reality to shreds. In its place appeared a world from Jimmy’s inVerse, a synthetic-space projection of a different palace, a Spanish palace. The three of them were now standing in the middle of an open courtyard under a deep blue sky, surrounded by a three-story terracotta palazzo. The walls were decorated with intricate murals inlaid with tiny blue, white, and gold tiles. A baby played between potted ferns next to a pool filled with colorful koi fish. A fountain bubbled water into the pond, while dragonflies buzzed at the water’s edge.

“How much of this is a lie?” Jimmy demanded, facing James.

The baby by the pool was Jimmy, and his mother walked over to pick him up. She walked back to the table where she was sitting together with Jimmy’s father and another couple, guests of her parents. They were having coffee. Jimmy’s mother sat him down on her lap and gripped him tight. “Who’s my little stinker?” she growled into his face, shaking him.

The exchange could have been affectionate, but in this rendering Jimmy’s mother looked threatening, gripping Jimmy too tight, her eyes menacing.

Jimmy was transfixed as he watched. “Is this a lie?” he demanded again.

“A lie?” James swept his hand across the scene, pulling it apart. “All of life is a lie, Jimmy.”

Bob was weakening. In the background, James methodically tore through the Atopian networks, rooting out any threads of Bob, erasing any trace of him. He was disappearing from the realities he lodged himself into. Bob fought back, enlisting the help of the disappeared that were awakening, asking them to hide little pieces of him. They were connected into Jimmy’s mind, and some of them were fighting back, but James was powerful. James was killing Bob again.

In the melee, James took control of the military networks. In a splinter of his mind, Bob saw James’s face plastered across the mediaworlds, preaching calm and control while he ranted and raved on the inside. World after world fell away around the three of them, flashes of New York, of Big Ben in London, of places Jimmy and James had trapped souls. And at each stop, more were released.

“You want to release them?” cried James in frustration. “Then release all of them, all of them can witness the end.”

25

“There are no such things as coincidences,” Connors said. “That’s the first rule.”

Sid was looking at the information in Willy’s body again. He instantiated a private space to talk with Connors, to get her input as a professional investigator. Mohesha was the one who interpreted the information they got out of Willy’s body. Sid hadn’t involved himself too deeply out of respect for her seniority and skill. Maybe that was a mistake. Mohesha had given them the first clues to hacking into the machine, but Jimmy was still looking for Willy, and now so was Mohesha.

Why? They must have missed something.

Connors created a diagram of her investigative procedures on the wall of their workspace. “And you need to look at all your background material. It all needs to make sense, to be coherent.”

Vince was with them. “And I want to know why we haven’t been able to speak to any of these creatures in the old machine, if it exists. If the bad guys are here, where are the good guys?”

Sid hadn’t thought of that. “Maybe they’re already helping and you just don’t know it.”

The attacks against the Commune had resumed. In a splinter of his mind, Sid watched a white-hot sheet of plasma burning high over the farm buildings outside. Gobs of it began raining down as the Commune’s dome started to fail in places. The falling plasma ignited the wooden buildings into flames, and then, like the wall of an aquarium shattering, the dome burst. Even through a hundred feet of bedrock Sid heard the thunderous impact that destroyed the ground level of the Commune. A part of Sid was helping in the defense, hacking into the Alliance networks outside, but it was a losing battle.

They were in the underground complex, open caverns with bioluminescent ceilings that glowed blue. The buildings below were nothing like above, rectangular bio-plastic cubicles stacked to the ceilings. Sid and his friends were corralled into a string of buildings directly underneath the Church. Bunky and Shaky were much happier being underground. They’d already gone off to inspect the digging gear.

“So you really want to take this apocalyptic text literally?” Connors asked, looking at Sid and Vince.

They both nodded.

“The legend is true somehow,” Vince replied.

Connors rolled her eyes.

“Or,” Vince added quickly, “whoever is orchestrating this thinks it is. Either way, there should be Four Horsemen out there.”

“Good point.” Connors looked at a diagram hanging in space between them. “So if that’s true, in the analysis, there are two outliers and one big problem.”

“What’s the big problem?” Sid asked.

“If we’re fighting the Four Horsemen, who are they?”

Sid pulled up a network map. “Jimmy’s the center pivot.”

He pointed out the main trunks of data exchange on the nervenet. Most of them routed through either Atopia or Terra Nova, the two competing platforms, but the vast majority centered on the large cloud around the connection point of Atopia.

The Ascetics had neutralized smaller infections, but the large ones, three huge clouds on the network maps, were too diffuse to single out individual people. The big problem was that there were only three large end-point clouds; one around Atopia, one around Allied Command, and one around DAD—the agricultural contractor for the Department of Defense.

“There before me was a white horse, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest,” Vince said, quoting from the sixth verse of Revelations. “The White Rider.”

“That’s one,” Connors said, pointing to the large cloud of data connection points around Atopia. This cloud of activity was at least twice as large as any of the others. They all assumed, by now, that this was Jimmy Scadden. The implication being that he was a kind of anti-Christ. Sid had argued that most historians viewed the White Rider as the savior, not the destroyer, but this was a matter of interpretation.

Connors pointed at another nexus point, this one a clouding of connection around Allied Command. “And there you have the second rider.”

“A fiery red one, its rider given the power to take peace from the Earth,” said Vince, again quoting Revelations. “Yes, sounds like a military reference.”

Connors traced her finger along to the third nexus. “And at DAD we have the third one.”

Vince nodded. “A black horse, holding a pair of scales—the agricultural contractor for the department of defense—DAD—famine and pestilence, makes sense to me.”

“That’s three.” Connors held up three fingers. “So where’s the fourth?”

Sid shrugged. “There isn’t one.”

“I think the fourth is more of a metaphor for what happens next.” Vince accessed more of the Revelations text. “Before me was a pale horse, its rider was Death. They didn’t even give him a color.”

“Actually, they did,” pointed out Sid. “They translated as ‘pale’ from the original ancient Greek of ‘chloros,’ which could also be translated as light green.”

Vince shrugged. “Okay, so the Green Rider. I don’t recall seeing anything referencing green.” He began running searches anyway.

Sid turned to Connors. “So you think we’re missing a node?”

“If you think the Apocalypse is literal for what’s happening out there, then you’re missing one.” She paused. “It wouldn’t make sense that one of them is a metaphor.”

All of the other network traffic was routed through Terra Nova and Atopia. Sid began breaking the traffic down, seeing if he could get any more detail on it.

Connors left him to it and returned to her analysis. “And the two outliers that don’t fit are that POND message, and the hint about where to find Willy’s body.”

Vince nodded. “Keep going.”

“There’s no way that a mysterious message from another universe shows up right when all this starts to go haywire.” She took a deep breath. “And that hint for finding Willy’s body, appearing in a two thousand year old text?”

Vince wagged his head. “So if it’s not real—”

“—then someone faked it.” Sid completed the thought for Vince. “Or it’s just a coincidence.”

Connors held up a finger. “But there are no coincidences. That’s the first rule.” She brought up a new workspace with Mikhail and the Ascetics on it. “So the Willy hint came from Mikhail. How much of that network traffic goes through the darknets? Maybe that POND message was meant to throw us off track?”

“So you’re saying the fourth horseman is in the Ascetics? Mikhail?”

Connors nodded. “It would make sense, wouldn’t it?” She took a deep breath. “In any investigation, you need to step back, usually it’s staring you right in the face.” Connors took a literal step back. “Who’s at the center of all this?”

They stared at each other.

“We’re at the center,” said Sid after a pause, and then after more consideration. “Bob’s at the center.”

Connors nodded. “Okay, so in these two outliers—the POND message and the ancient clue about Willy—have you applied everything you know about all of yourselves to them?”

Sid shook his head. He hadn’t. It seemed like a long shot, but he started running processes, pattern matching everything in their own backgrounds and histories. He also grabbed everything he had on Bob, which was a lot. They’d lived their entire lives together. He had petabytes of Bob.

26

Bob should have left, should have escaped to protect himself, but Jimmy was starting to lose the battle. James was too well entrenched.

So Bob stayed, enlisting the hundreds and then thousands of people who were released from James’s control in the fight. Bob sensed another presence fighting with him. It was the priest, helping support Bob at the fringes. One world crashed into the next. And then as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

Through the sensory whitewash of a thunderfall, Bob regained his senses, the splintered parts of his psyche reintegrating in one place. He found himself standing in the cave that Jimmy used to hide in. Jimmy was sitting on the floor with his proxxi, Samson.

A fearsome monster, clawed and fanged, lurked in the corner.

“It was never my mother,” screamed Jimmy at the monster. “It was always you!”

“I am you,” snarled the monster.

“Did you kill them?”

“Why would you care?” The monster came out from the shadows. It was a distorted version of Jimmy, its skin flaking, hands curled into claws, teeth protruding. “We killed them, Jimmy, you and I together.”

Jimmy shook his head, but he knew the truth. “You used me, just like you used them.”

“And it made us strong.” The monster edged closer to Jimmy.

Despite his struggle to hide parts of himself, Bob was disappearing from existence. James was wiping him out. The image of Jimmy and James faded before his senses.

“I can destroy you,” whispered Jimmy. He stood up to the monster. “Because I can destroy myself.”

In a mind-collapsing thunder, the world around Bob buckled.

27

From a hundred million miles away, the dot of light that was the Earth flickered and dimmed, then grew lighter and darker by turns as the space power grid echoed energy back and forth from one terrestrial power web to another. The bright pinpoint of light that was the battle in the South Atlantic flared and then went dark.

“Whoa!” Sid exclaimed. “Did you guys feel that?” A massive spike in network traffic exploded from Atopia. It lit up the entire multiverse in a wide-spectrum pulse, even creeping below the bombardment assaulting the surface level of the Commune.

Then everything went silent.

The thunder above stopped.

Sid’s main subjective was still in the private space with Vince and Connors, sifting through the masses of pattern matching. Nothing new was coming up. The disruption pulled his attention back into the underground cavern.

Sid looked at Willy. “What happened?”

“The attack stopped again.”

“And?” That was obvious, but what had stopped it?

“I don’t know,” replied Willy.

Sid’s mind jumped from one splinter to another. The Allied forces outside the Commune were standing down again. Energy surged in massive waves back and forth through the space power grid, microwave radiation that was bouncing through the hundreds of power grid satellites in low earth orbit, down to transmitter arrays and back again. Ground potentials around the world spiked. The communication networks filled with noise.

From what he could sense, the attack against Terra Nova had stopped again as well. Tyrel and Mohesha were sending connection signals. He tried to latch onto them, but the heaving electrical interference from the space power grid was too much, saturating even ground-based systems.

Vicious, Sid’s proxxi, materialized in the underground cavern. Sid expected an update on what was going on outside, but he grabbed his attention on a private channel, back to the pattern-matching algorithms running in the background. “You need to see this.”

Sid shook his head. “The attacks just stopped. We need find out what happened on Atopia.” Everything was emanating from there.

“This is more important.” Vicious plugged a data feed into Sid’s mind.

The world shimmered and reformed.

Sid found himself standing in a steaming jungle filled with alien-looking plants. Green monsters with spiny dorsal fins lumbered toward him. In the next instant he watched a mushroom cloud rising into the air over corrugated tin shacks, and a moment later he was watching Assyrian troops amassing outside Jerusalem. His head filled with figures and dates, streams of nearly unconnected meta-data. “What is this?”

“The contents of the POND message.”

His proxxi slowed down the data stream. Sid was now standing next to Bob in Battery Park in New York. A huge Nazi flag draped down the side of one of the old World Trade Center buildings.

“I applied one of the old time-cloaking encryptions you and Bob used to play with as kids.”

He and Bob used to play games, hiding worlds from their friends, interlacing them in time over the top of the ones they were in. Places that were there but not there at the same time. The information they were seeing was Bob’s own sensory data, like thousands of gameworld simulations, but these were streams from Bob’s meta-cognition systems. It was like Bob had lived hundreds of lives.

“Any guess what this means?” Sid asked. The data had to be corrupted somehow, cross-connected on Atopia, or from Bob carrying the data beacon.

“I already checked all that.”

Sid tried to make sense of it. “So Bob sent himself a message encoded in neutrinos? From another universe?”

His proxxi shrugged. “I don’t know what to say.”

Sid brought up some simulations of possible ways to create neutrino bursts. The entire Earth was bathed in the signal that Patricia picked up, a signal that must have literally been sprayed across the cosmos.

Just receiving the message was a stretch with existing technology. Creating it required energy on unimaginable scales, larger than even a supernova. How was it possible? And if Bob sent himself a message somehow, then why wouldn’t he have told them?

Unless he didn’t know himself.

Sid needed to get more eyes on this. Vince and Connors were still in the cavern, trying to establish the connection to Terra Nova. Sid pinged Vince, dragging his attention back into the private space. Vince accepted.

But before Sid could say anything Vince blurted out, “Sid! We have a message from Bob!”

Sid blinked. “How, uh,” he stuttered. “How did you know?”

Vince’s eyes were wide. “Didn’t you hear me? We got a message from Bob. He’s not dead.” He grimaced. “I mean, not exactly dead.” He shook his head. “Just look on the main display.” Bob was connecting into them, his projection already appearing in the cave. “Don’t you want to say hello?”

Vicious was already handling the introductions through Sid’s body in the cave. Bob smiled and started to explain what happened, but Sid resisted.

“You need to see this.” Sid pulled Vince’s attention to what he’d found.

Vince’s expression turned from excitement to confusion. “Bob sent the POND message? Why didn’t he tell us?”

“Maybe he didn’t know about it himself,” ventured Sid, trying to make sense of it. “Should we ask him?”

Vince hesitated as well. “Maybe you should explain to me what’s in the POND message.”

Sid was still sifting through it himself. Not all of it was Bob’s sensory encoding. Some of it was instructions, some of it network diagrams. He couldn’t make sense of much of it yet, but one consistent message came through. He forwarded this part of the message to Vince.

In the cavern, Bob was explaining how he had to sacrifice his physical body to get close to Jimmy, how he let Jimmy kill his physical body to force a wedge into Jimmy’s mind. Jimmy was gone. With the truth revealed, he destroyed the other side of himself. Bob now had control of all the Allied weapons systems.

“So Bob killed himself?” Vince said to Sid. In augmented space, the message that Bob had sent himself in the POND transmission sat in highlighted bold text in front of both Sid and Vince: Don’t let me kill myself.

Sid nodded. Some of the network diagrams in the POND message looked familiar. They matched what they found inside of Willy’s body. He began to see what he couldn’t let himself see before. “That network traffic between Jimmy and Bob on Atopia, I’d discounted it before as an artifact of the volume of traffic going through Atopia.”

Vince understood what Sid was saying. “So the fourth nexus point was inside Atopia.”

Back in the cavern, Vicious asked Bob about Nancy, about his family. His face impassive, Bob replied that James wiped them out, erased their minds, destroyed any traces of them in the networks.

Vince slumped into a chair in the private workspace, squeezing the heels of his hands against his temples. “Usually chloros translates as pale, as in the pale rider, and like you said it also means pale green.”

Sid waited for him to finish his thought.

“But there’s also another meaning of chloros.”

“What’s that?” asked Sid with a mounting sense of dread.

“Chloros can also be translated as recently dead.”

Sid stared at Bob. “There was another translation for that ancient text where you found the clue for Willy. In ancient Greek, Pobeptoc could be literally translated as Robert.”

“The Book of Robert,” said Vince quietly. “So the Fourth Horseman…” He didn’t finish his words.

They both stared into Bob’s smiling face.

“So Bob is Death,” whispered Sid.

28

Smoke was still rising from the blasted top levels of Atopia where Kesselring’s private gardens once stood. The charred remains of Kesselring’s retreat stood at one end, but at the other was a single copse of green trees that remained intact, a small patch of green against the blue of the seas and skies beyond.

Bob sat next to Nancy, holding her hand. Her face was blank.

The priest stood in front of Bob. “Give Tyrel back control of the weapons systems.”

Bob still had full systems access to Terra Novan resources, even access to all of Mikhail’s darknets, and now, with Jimmy gone, he’d taken over control of Allied networks as well. He held the world in his hands.

Looking at Nancy’s blank face, Bob felt rage rising up inside him. “Should I?” She was gone. Bob was sitting next to her body, but it was an empty shell. James had erased her mind and any traces of her in the networks. Bob’s mother and father, as well.

He’d failed them.

“We are not here to inflict more suffering, but to reduce it, ease it,” replied the priest, his long robes flowing in the wind. When the network pyrotechnics had cleared after Jimmy destroyed himself, the priest appeared. He had never been far. “And the longer you hold them, the more they will fear. We don’t need the weapons systems.”

The green trees at the edge of the destruction swayed in the breeze. Nancy sat with her hands in her lap.

“Is it gone?” Maybe Jimmy had destroyed himself, but whatever had infected him, was it gone as well?

“No.”

“Then how do we stop it?”

“Do you want to stop it,” asked the priest, “or do you want to stop the suffering?”

“Nancy?” Bob squeezed her hand. “Nancy!” he yelled, shaking her.

There was no glimmer of recognition in her eyes. No connection in the hyperspaces surrounding them. Just a blank mindspace filled by her body.

Why did I run? I could have saved her. The rage of self-loathing rose in the back of Bob’s mind. Why was it that he could protect everyone but the ones he loved?

“They’re awakening now, all of them,” said the priest.

“All of them?” choked Bob between his tears. “Not just the disappeared?”

The priest nodded.

“Give back the weapons,” insisted the priest. “We don’t need them.”

“Why should I?” Bob snarled from gritted teeth.

“Because”—the priest paused and laid a hand on Bob’s head—“there are better ways to stop the suffering.”

29

“You sure you’re okay?” Sid asked Bob.

Bob’s main subjective was already in a meeting with Tyrel and Mohesha as they tried to coordinate a stand-down of the Allied forces and African Union forces. Sid received a message from Zoraster. He was safe. A splinter of Bob’s mind walked together with Sid and Vince and Willy up the service tunnel toward the central bunker to meet the Reverend. The rest of their gang went ahead, leaving them an opportunity to catch up.

Sid checked and rechecked, querying Bob’s cognition frameworks while Willy and Vince made small talk. He had to make sure this was Bob. So far every test returned a positive result. His friend had cheated death. He felt ridiculous for coming to the conclusion that Bob was the Fourth Horseman when all seemed lost.

In a flash, it all was over.

“Guys, you can stop,” laughed Bob, “it’s me.”

Vince and Sid hadn’t disclosed what they thought they’d discovered to anyone yet. Too much was happening, and anyway, Bob had released all the weapons systems back to Allied and Terra Novan control. Terra Nova was badly damaged, as was Atopia. Mohesha and Tyrel had enough to handle without throwing something else onto the plate, something that didn’t seem to have any bearing.

Even so, with both sides standing down, everything under control, something didn’t feel right. What had they missed? The pieces just didn’t seem to fit. Then again, as Zoraster told him, war wasn’t neat. It was messy. Maybe Sid just had to let it go.

While it had been a happy shock to find Bob standing in front of them, walking and talking, that was only because Sid assumed that all of Bob’s cognition systems would have perished with him. Having his dead friend returned to life wasn’t that all that surprising. The line between physical and digital had long since been blurred for Sid. Talking to the resurrected version of Bob didn’t faze him.

Sid contacted his own mother on Atopia the second normalized channels had opened. She scolded him, told him what a scare it was seeing him on the newsworlds. He told her it was a mistake. The relief that he felt, knowing his family was okay, was intense. He couldn’t imagine what Bob had to be feeling. “I’m sorry about Nancy, about your mother and father,” Sid said to Bob.

Bob kicked some gravel along the floor of the tunnel. “Me too.”

Talking to his dead friend might not disturb him, but Sid was worried. He knew Bob could lash out. Sid was tensed up, waiting for the explosion, waiting for Bob to process what had happened. Sid waited for the screams and tears and anger.

But there was nothing.

This was definitely an instantiated Bob he was talking to, all the background checks proved it beyond a doubt, but he was barely registering any emotions. Had something happened in the cross-over?

Bob’s projection shrugged its shoulders when Vince sympathized about his parents being killed.

“Sometimes sacrifices have to be made,” said Bob, looking at Vince. “For the greater good, you know?”

Vince opened a private channel to Sid. “This is creeping me out.”

“Me too,” replied Sid.

“Maybe he’s just shell-shocked,” Vince suggested.

“Maybe.” Sid wasn’t convinced. Bob’s face looked sad, withdrawn. It both was and wasn’t the Bob he knew.

“Should we bring up the POND data?”

Sid took a deep breath. They hadn’t had the time to bring this up yet. When they decoded the POND signal, Terra Nova and the Commune had been on the edge of destruction, in a final fight for existence. In almost the next instant, it was over, the fight was won, and an intense flurry of activity started to gain control over the situation. What was in the POND message was mysterious, but it was hardly mission critical.

Or was it?

“We need to tell him,” Sid replied. “Maybe he can answer the mystery, and it’s his own sensory streams in the POND data. He’ll be able to decode what’s in there way faster than me.”

“And you’re not worried that his main message to himself was, Don’t let me kill myself ?”

In the background, all over the world, the disappeared were reawakening. It was messy. People were awakening not just in their stasis pods, but in virtual worlds and in augmented space, coming to their senses to find themselves walking the streets like ghosts outside of their bodies.

“Of course I’m worried,” Sid replied. “But we shouldn’t wait. Bob can help us.”

Vince shrugged.

Dropping from their private conversation, Sid put an arm on Bob’s shoulder. “We decoded the POND signal.” He forwarded the decryption tags to Bob. “I don’t know what to make of it, but it seems like you sent yourself a message.” Sid watched his friend’s face carefully.

Bob accepted the key. His face creased up. “This is my own sensory data, what in the heck?”

So Bob didn’t know. “I don’t know, buddy, we were hoping—”

But Sid was cut off midsentence.

“Sidney?”

It was a familiar voice, but one Sid hadn’t heard in years. It pinged long forgotten memories. “One second,” he said to Vince and Bob as he shifted his primary subjective to have a look.

In a newly formed world, in their old family home back in Hoboken, New Jersey, Sid’s grandmother stood before him. He’d never even been there before. His grandmother had visited them once on Atopia, when he was four, just before she’d died. She motioned for him to sit down.

“Grandma?”

“Sit down, Sidney, it’s time to eat,” she insisted, waving a spoon at him. She was cooking.

Sid obeyed and sat at the kitchen table. He began testing the metatags of the world he was in, but there were none. His mother appeared through the living room door.

“Sid,” said his mother, “what are you doing here?” She pointed behind her. “Did you see in the living room?” There were more people in there. He recognized his grandfather, and through a portal from this world to another, he could see more, all connected together in a string that stretched back in time.

“Vince,” Sid called out in alarm, bringing his mind back into the corridor. “I just—” He wasn’t sure what to say.

“I just met my mother,” said Vince, stopping walking in the corridor and staring at Sid. “She died forty years ago. What the hell is happening?”

“They’re being released.” It was Bob speaking. Sid and Vince turned to him. “All of them, they’re being released.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.”

Sid grabbed Bob’s shoulders. “Every who?”

“Every human, everyone who reached the threshold of self-aware intelligence.”

And in an instant Sid understood. His splinter network spread out from his grandmother’s kitchen, back through the portals and into the other worlds connected to it. Each generation of his family had come back to life, each one of them seeing just the generation or two that it knew. Parts of their cognition and memories were resurrected. Enough for them to be aware, but not fully cognizant. Vince grabbed Sid’s hand and shared what was happening inside his networks.

It was the same thing.

“Who’s that?” asked Sid’s grandmother.

Sid looked up into the corner of her kitchen. It was an image of Bob, but not the Bob walking with him in the corridor, nor the version of Bob talking with Tyrel and Mohesha. It was Bob on the top level of Atopia, sitting with Nancy. A man in flowing robes stood before them.

“That’s my friend Bob, Grandma,” Sid replied.

But if that was Bob, who was walking with him in the corridor? He checked and rechecked the metatags. “Bob, what the hell’s going on? Is that one of your splinters?” Sid directed Bob’s attention to the image of him on the rooftop of Atopia. “And who’s that you’re talking to?”

For the first time since Bob’s return, his face registered something more than mild emotion. “I think we’ve got a problem, Sid.”

“No kidding.”

Sid sensed both the Terra Novan and Atopian synthetic reality systems flaring in a massive spike of activity. Behind it all, the space power grid continued to cycle back and forth. It wasn’t damping down, but intensifying.

“That’s me, too,” Bob replied after a pause. “Another copy of me. It must have happened when I died.”

This was getting worse and worse. “And who’s that you’re talking to?” Sid asked again.

“The priest.”

“Who?”

“The priest,” Bob repeated. “Mohesha told you about him, didn’t she? Didn’t I mention him?”

Sid shook his head. “No, you didn’t.” He tried raising Mohesha on a private channel, but there was no response. Global communication systems were overloading. A sinking feeling settled into Sid’s gut. He began pinging his friends, and the sinking feeling solidified into a hard ball of fear.

What was happening to Vince and Sid seemed to be happening to everyone with whom he could get in touch.

Tens of billions of human minds were being resurrected somehow, each of them in places they remembered, speaking their own language, everything translated and intermediated by the Terra Novan and Atopian synthetic reality platforms. All the other synthetic worlds were being displaced by these new realities.

And all of them were watching Bob on the roof of the Atopian towers.

“Sid?”

“Yeah?” He turned to face Bob.

“I’ve had a look at the POND data.”

Sid didn’t need to ask Bob what was happening. He knew what was happening. It was happening everywhere, in every time, and to everyone.

“And?”

“I think something very bad is about to happen.”

30

Bob looked down at the farming towers of Atopia, a thousand feet of steel and glass reflecting the blue of the ocean around them. He squeezed Nancy’s hand again. It felt like he was holding a dead fish.

Jimmy had released the disappeared, and in a flood, James had released everyone else. In his mind’s eyes, Bob saw them, the millions and then billions of minds that were being recreated, their awarenesses blossoming back into the multiverse. He looked into Nancy’s eyes beside him. She smiled vacantly.

The knuckles of his hand holding Nancy’s were white. She flinched.

“Life is suffering,” said the priest, looking to the horizon.

Bob’s mind flashed. A man impaled on a pike in a medieval battle, red and white banners flapping in the breeze; a woman sitting by a garbage heap, haggling for the price of her child with a group of men; a slave pushing his hands up between the floorboards of a ship, its sails heaving in the mid-Atlantic; a hulking Grilla, its eyes glazed over in a drug-induced stupor in a ghetto; the imprint of the digital slaves, the synthetic intelligences that he’d help create inside of the virtual worlds of Atopia. These and countless other impressions crowded his mind.

“But not all life is suffering.”

In another mind he saw a different world, a world without humans. This mind soared above green forests and plains filled with buffalo and seas singing with whales.

“Humans are not evil by nature. The evil is in what causes the suffering, the desire and attachment of the mind.” The priest paused. “Intelligence is the root of attachment. Intelligence is the evil.”

Bob closed his eyes.

The priest kneeled in front of Bob. “There is a path to the cessation of suffering.”

“Yes,” whispered Bob.

He had no physical form here anymore. One universe was as real as the next now. The vastness was suffocating.

“All of reality is created, it is both as real and not real, everything and nothing.” The priest cupped Bob’s chin, trying to get him to raise his head. “How many worlds have you already created and destroyed?”

“Hundreds, thousands…” mumbled Bob, keeping his head down, keeping his eyes closed.

“All things that come to be, come to an end,” said the priest. “Everything tends to disorder until a reordering is due.”

Bob felt Nancy’s dead hand in his.

This suffering was too great.

31

Sid and Vince sprinted the two hundred feet up the access tunnel to the main chamber. There wasn’t much time. Bob ran with them. Like everyone else, their display spaces were forced onto the image of Bob sitting on the bench next to Nancy, the priest kneeling in front of them. The wind whistled through the trees, carrying smudges of smoke that still rose from the burnt grass around them.

The entire present and past of the planet watched—ten billion humans, ten times that many resurrected humans, and at least as many sentient non-human creatures. Whatever languages they spoke, everything was being intermediated so they could understand. All were focused on Bob and the priest.

The priest squeezed Bob’s hand. “Do you want to end this suffering?”

Bob’s head was down. A tear streaked down his face from eyes squeezed shut. “Yes,” he replied.

The split copy of Bob stood in the middle of Sid and Vince, staring at himself on the roof of Atopia. “No,” he whispered.

Sid glanced at him. His psyche must have split when he died, and a part of him—his anger and fear—stayed with the priest on Atopia. The rest of him was here in the Commune. Sid was desperately trying to help Bob reconnect with himself, but Bob didn’t want to speak with Bob anymore. Sid worried that the priest might use Bob’s connections to launch an attack, but all the weapons were dormant. In fact, all of the weapons were disabled.

But it wasn’t the weapons he was after.

The oscillations in the space power grid weren’t just reverberations, not just echoes of the struggle for power in Atopia. The space power grid was steadily cycling power from around the planet, redirecting the energy into the capacitive storage grid outside of Lagos. The only thing connected to this was a supercollider. Mohesha was working to regain control of it, but this had been an afterthought.

Until now.

Sid pulled Vince back in their private workspace. “Have you ever heard of a vacuum meta-stability event?” The supercollider was designed to test extremely high-energy physics, creating miniature black holes, studying the very fabric of space-time. He pulled a graphic, a curved line down with a dip and then a lower dip in it.

Vince shook his head.

“A meta-stability event is an idea that the fabric of our universe is not in its lowest possible energy state.” He pointed at the first dip in the graph. “But that we’re in a dip, a local minimum.” He pointed at another dip in the curve, this one a saddle point lower down. “The problem is that there might be a lower dip nearby.” Between the dips was a small hill.

Vince frowned at him. “Get to the point, please?”

“The problem is that if a part of space—even a teeny, tiny part—manages to get over the energy gap and tunnel through it”—he highlighted the small rise, opening a small gap underneath it from one dip to the other—“then all of this universe will leak out into the other one.”

Vince stared at the small gap between the dips. “And you could use this supercollider to do that?”

“Maybe.” Sid didn’t know. It was just a theory. You could create miniature black holes with the collider, but they winked out as energy dissipated over their event horizons. He couldn’t see any other threat that made sense. Sid urgently messaged Tyrel at Terra Nova, telling them they had to destroy the collider somehow. A ping returned. They had already come to the same conclusion.

Vince and Sid stared at the graph in front of them. Bob was with them as well.

Sid turned to Bob, pulling him aside to sit on a packing crate. “You have to get in there, Bob.”

The mediaworlds roared as they watched the scene playing out on the roof of Atopia. People were questioning the synthetic realities connecting them to their old family, wondering how the system had glitched. Most of them were upset that whatever alternate reality they’d burrowed into had been disrupted.

Very few understood that Judgment was being passed.

On the roof of Atopia, Bob opened his bloodshot eyes. “Make it end.”

32

Bob sat on the crate and stared at Sid while his mind raced through the POND data. It was like he was having a conversation with himself, a self that had lived a hundred lives in a hundred different worlds. There was never any ancient civilization, at least, not one on Earth. It was all just a ploy, a feint to keep their attention elsewhere. Finally, all the pieces fell together. It all fit.

It was always him.

Bob was the fourth nexus. He was the Fourth Horseman. He was Death. And if Bob was Death, then the priest was the Destroyer. Jimmy had just been a pawn in a struggle that stretched across worlds. The priest had used Jimmy, preying on his weaknesses but also using his strengths, and in the same way the priest had used Bob. Used his ability to inspire trust, his emotive intelligence, to gain access at all levels. As if in a game of chess, Bob was moved into the center of events, the priest sacrificing one piece to win the prize.

The other side of the coin was Bob’s anger, his willingness to capitulate to others to solve his problems, his desire to hide behind the pain. He remembered the desert now, when he opened his mind to the priest, let him inside. He should have known. He did know. And yet he wanted someone else to take responsibility. To save him. To stop the suffering.

The priest had never been real, not in the physical world. It was an echo that had infected Bob, co-opted him. Reviewing the sensory stream from the POND data, it was something that was happening again and again, not just in this world, but in all worlds. Bob was never forced. He always invited the Destroyer in, and he always chose the end.

But, perhaps, not all was lost yet.

Bob was trying to connect into himself, but his other self wasn’t responding. When he died, the priest split Bob’s psyche, schisming off the parts it didn’t need. Or perhaps he’d done it to himself. His angry self was sitting on top of Atopia, holding Nancy’s hand, wishing for destruction.

Bob made one last push to get through to himself. To his relief, his other self relented for just a moment, and in the next instant he was sitting on the roof of Atopia, staring into the Destroyer’s black eyes. The priest smiled and released Bob’s hand, then stood and walked away.

Grabbing himself, he dragged both parts of him down to his family’s habitat.

“Stop this!” he said to himself. His emotional side glared at him from across their breakfast table.

“It’s too late,” the other Bob replied. “You had your chance on the beach. I said to stop, to save her, to save them, but you wouldn’t.”

“You need to make it stop.”

“So now you want to stop.”

A seagull sailed by, angling away on the breeze. The slow roll of the swells and setting sun gave the impression of a lazy end to the day. On the other side of the world, the collider powered up.

Less than three minutes remained.

Bob shook his head. “I don’t want to.”

“You have to.”

“Why?”

“You can’t kill all these people.”

“I’m not killing them.” Emotional Bob laughed. “They’re already dead. We haven’t been alive since Martin killed himself six years ago. Getting high, playing games, we’re as bad as they are.” He waved an arm at the waiting billions. “We don’t even exist here anymore.” Both sides of Bob felt the awful void.

Bob stared at himself. “Do you know about the POND data?” He forwarded copies of Sid’s data streams. “The priest used us.”

Angry Bob laughed. “Maybe we used him.”

A wave crashed on the shore. Bob watched himself assimilating their past lives. He paused. It was a moment for truth. Had he pushed his brother over the edge to commit suicide? He looked himself in the eye. “You mean your suffering must end.”

Bob gritted his teeth. “Our suffering.”

“You know he took them away. Your priest, he’s the one that took Nancy and Mom and Dad.” Bob hesitated. “Even our brother.”

“Did he? Are you sure? And anyway,” said Bob, looking at himself and smiling, “if that POND data is true, then Sid and Nancy and everyone here is somewhere else as well. What does it matter if we end this one reality? The game here is lost.”

He was right.

The fragments of the POND signal, streams of Bob’s memories from other universes, contained snippets of conversations with Sid with Nancy in other similar but different places.

Two minutes now, came a warning from Sid. Two minutes until the supercollider could fire.

“This doesn’t need to be over,” Bob said to himself.

“What do you mean?”

Bob forwarded the details of a technical schematic contained in the POND message.

Both of him nodded. He might be angry, but he wasn’t entirely unreasonable.

“We haven’t much time.”

33

“Mom, there’s someone I want you to meet,” said Vince, holding Connors’s hand, pulling her attention into the world he was in.

His mother was watching an ancient cathode-ray television set, sitting in the living room of their old house on Bolton Street in South Boston. It wasn’t really a house. It was the ground level apartment of a triplex, but to Vince it was always home. He wondered how detailed this world was. If he walked outside, would he see the old neighborhood—three-level brick walk-ups with trees struggling up through cracked concrete, beat-up cars lining both sides of the street, his old friends Nick and Tony sitting on the stoop next door?

And was it all just a simulation?

Vince’s mother perked up, straightening her hair. “Oh my, it’s been a long time since you introduced me to anyone.” She leaned forward in her chair to get up.

Vince smiled. “It has been, Mom. It really has been.”

“This isn’t really the time,” hissed Connors under her breath. She was talking to her own dead mother in an alternate world when he jerked her aside.

Ninety seconds.

“This is exactly the time,” soothed Vince. “Bring your mother. We’re going up on the mountain.”

Vince secured a private spot in the wikiworld, on top of a mountain next to the Commune. The view eastward was pristine, and the sensor resolution made it feel like you were there, staring at the stars in the night sky. Vince had seen himself in the streams in the POND data. He’d seen himself through Bob’s eyes, a different version of himself, but still recognizable, living out there, somewhere else in some time and space. He’d also seen Connors. With him.

Connors started up a private world to talk, but Vince dismissed it with a flick of a phantom. “There’s nothing we can do.” Bob was gone. Vince felt that strange sense of freedom he’d felt in the jail cell. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, maybe nothing, maybe everything.”

But in his heart he knew.

From the corner of his eye, back in the cavern, he saw Zephyr smile at him. Vince smiled back. Zephyr stood holding hands with Willy and Brigitte and the Reverend. They were praying. Sid was sitting on a crate, talking to his own family.

Vince returned his attention to his mother. “This is Sheila, Mom.” It was the first time he’d used Connors’s first name.

His mother tottered forward, her smile and eyes wide. “It’s a pleasure.” She looked at Vince. “Did he mention my name’s Sheila, too?” She laughed.

Connors smiled and glanced at Vince. “No, he didn’t.” She had her own mother in tow, pulling her from her own world, their realities merging. “Mom, this is Mrs. Indigo, Vince’s mother.”

Thirty seconds.

“Come on,” said Vince, “there’s somewhere I want take all of you.” Extending his phantoms, he grabbed their attentional matrices and brought them up to the top of the mountain.

The stars spread like a carpet of diamonds above their heads.

“Vince, this is so nice,” said his mom, uncomprehending, but the reconstruction of her mind trusting like a child’s.

Hotstuff stood with them, and Vince’s mother looked at her and smiled. “Who’s this?” she asked.

“That’s a friend,” replied Vince.

Hotstuff winked at Vince, then smiled at his mother.

Thank you, Vince mouthed silently to Hotstuff. She knew what he was thinking anyway. For the first time, Vince wondered what she was thinking. He reached out and embraced her with his phantoms while reaching down to take Connors’ hand and squeeze it. “Can I ask you something?”

“What’s that?” Connors whispered.

Only seconds now.

“Can I kiss you?”

34

A pulse of protons was born, a tiny cloud of millions of hydrogen nuclei stripped down to their cores of three quarks glued together by the strong interaction force. In the intense magnetic field into which they were birthed, their combined magnetic charge accelerated them, pushing them around the thousand-mile circumference of the supercollider. Inside the protons, strong nuclear forces were orders of magnitude stronger than the electromagnetic or weak nuclear forces, each of these orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. Since the birth of this universe, this arrangement was how it had always been, but soon, it would be no more.

Around and around the collider the protons flew, their magnetic fields accelerating them ever faster. First, to ninety-nine percent of the speed of light. Time slowed down as their masses started growing exponentially. Onward toward the ultimate barrier they were pushed, to point-one percent, then to point-zero-zero-zero-one percent of the speed of light. Lights of cities around the world dimmed as the space power grid soaked up their energy and directed it into the collider.

The magnetic fields containing them shifted slightly, peeling off a few protons on each pass into a slightly different path, a path shared with a stream of protons traveling in the opposite direction.

And then it happened.

The smeared wave function of one proton lined up perfectly with a proton heading in the opposite direction. Their collision unleashed a density of energy not seen since a billionth of a billionth of a second after the birth of this universe at the edge of its creation. The burst of energy tunneled the combined proton’s wave function through the fabric of space, pushing it into a lower vacuum-energy state.

The collapse began.

On the mountaintop in Montana, Vince leaned down to kiss Sheila Connors. Vince’s mother was looking at the comet just rising above the horizon. “It’s beautiful,” she said in the instant that the wave front of the expanding lower-energy vacuum-state bubble destroyed them.

The bubble expanded at the speed of light.

In half a hundredth of a second, a fraction of the blink of an eye, the planet Earth was gone. For nearly nine minutes, the crew of the Comet Catcher mission, their space habitat a hundred million miles away, were the only humans remaining in the universe.

Five hundred and forty seconds after the initiation of the collapse, they too were gone.

At the initiation of the bubble, Bob had inserted information about himself into the collapse sequence. Contained in the POND data had been instructions describing how to encode information onto the surface of the space-time nucleation bubble that the meta-stability event would initiate. This universe would collapse, but a new one would reform, carrying with it an echo of the past. That echo would be Bob’s memories, thrown out in patterns of high-energy neutrinos across the fabric of the multiverse.

The bubble was destroying this universe, converting it into another.

All the pain and suffering of the Earth had come to an end.

And within the bubble, all was calm.