Complete Atopia Chronicles

Prologue

In the thin air at the edge of space, I could feel more than hear the steady beat of the UAV’s massive propeller dragging me onwards towards my death. I’d been able to see this moment coming for a long time. The tight compartment I was in had never been meant to fit a human. I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the cold metal pressing against me through the thin pressure suit of the improvised life support system I’d rigged.

I shouldn’t have tried to escape.

Alarms signaling the start of the slingshot weapons test firing rang out across the multiverse spectrum. They would have canceled the test if they knew I was hidden up here in this thing, but in my desperate bid to erase my tracks I’d cut myself off entirely from the communications networks, concealing what I was doing, even why I was doing it.

It was a gamble that hadn’t paid off as the UAV’s control system signaled the system malfunction that I always knew was coming. It lurched sickeningly off to the left, cutting and sliding through empty space, turning inexorably back towards my doom.

In the near distance, the boom of the slingshot began, its thundering inferno blossoming as it demonstrated its fearsome power to the world. My heart was racing, my breathing ragged and shallow. For days, weeks even, I had been able to see this exact moment arriving, and yet here I was.

The awful growl of the slingshot built in power and began rattling the delicate cage of the UAV’s body. The cold metal pressing against me warmed, and then turned hot as the acrid stench of molten plastic burned into my lungs. I gagged, shrinking up into myself, terrified.

Engulfed in roaring flames the UAV pitched over, its metal and plastic skin coming apart in great fiery gobs as it disintegrated, offering me up into the emptiness. In seconds I was incinerated like Icarus flying too close to the firestorm of knowledge, spinning, falling, and burning as my wings fell away.

In my last instants of life, I caught a distant glimpse of Atopia, a cool green speck between the flames, her Siren song calling me back towards the endless seas below.

1 Identity: Vince Indigo

The last dregs of the night drained sleeplessly away, and despite the world’s best efforts, my life had filled with yet another new day. More dreams of death, but they weren’t just dreams. Or were they? I felt nauseous. You’d have thought that life would be easy as one of the world’s richest men living on the island colony of Atopia, the most sought after zip code on the planet, but the universe was frustrating my expectations.

It was still early morning. From beneath the sheets, my blurry eyes could just glimpse the dawning sky regaining its composure while the roar and flame of the slingshot test began to die down. Dread filled me as I watched stiletto tipped fishnet stockings stalking towards me from the living area. Then the lights flipped on as Hotstuff tore the sheets off me.

“Aw, come on!” I whimpered, weakly fumbling to grab back the covers.

Hotstuff was all done up in a bad schoolgirl outfit today, complete with a checked miniskirt and a starched men’s dress shirt. The shirt was done up from the bottom in a knot to expose her belly ring, and unbuttoned far enough down from the top to reveal hints of something naughty underneath. She knew I was depressed and was doing her part to keep me alert and in the game. What I didn’t immediately notice was the riding crop in her hand.

“Ouch!” I cried out as she whacked me with it.

She just giggled and wound back up to smack me again.

“What the heck?” I screeched, and jumped up out of bed to chase her across the room. She squealed, running away from me, and my bedroom morphed into the battle room we’d created to track my looming future death threats.

Hotstuff had already transitioned into wearing army fatigues. She playfully menaced me with the riding crop as I stood naked and rubbed my stubble with one hand and defended myself with the other.

Absentmindedly, I admired myself in a mirror on the opposite wall. Nearly seventy years old, yet with all the gene therapy I barely looked forty. A thick shock of graying hair still hung playfully, if listlessly, over tired eyes that stared back at me.

“Two things before we get started, sir,” announced Hotstuff, snapping smartly to attention and giving me a salute with the riding crop. “Commander Strong’s proxxi asked for some flowers for his wife—which I provided from our private gardens—and Bob just pinged you to go surfing.” She raised her eyebrows as if to tell me that surfing obviously wasn’t an option today.

“Patch him through,” I replied groggily. Sensing Hotstuff hesitating I added, “Now Hotstuff!”

Bob immediately materialized before me, holding his yellow long board, smirking. He looked stoned already.

A great mop of blond hair lived a life of its own above his twinkling blue eyes, and while he had all the appearances of the uber-surfer, there was a persistent and unmistakable intelligence underpinning it all—the philosopher king of wave hunters. What a great kid, it was just too bad.

“So…surfing today?” asked Bob lazily.

Yeah, he was high. Sizing up Hotstuff’s outfit, he grinned appreciatively.

“No, sorry, Bob. Can’t make it. Something has popped up.”

“Popped up, huh?” laughed Bob, looking back at Hotstuff again. He’d begun projecting some nicely curling waves into my display spaces. “Come on, dude! It’s going to be monster out there today!”

“I really can’t,” I reiterated weakly. Jealously I watched the waves. My nerves were frazzled. Honestly, I could use a little relaxation, and I hadn’t been out surfing in weeks.

“What could you possibly have to do?” asked Bob. “I thought you were like the richest guy in the world? Get someone else to do it!”

“I wish I could...”

I looked pleadingly towards Hotstuff. She rolled her eyes and wagged the riding crop at me.

“Hey it’s your life mister,” she scolded, sensing I was going to do what I wanted anyway. “I suppose an hour couldn’t hurt, we don’t have anything imminent I can’t handle right now. But only one hour, right? After that it could get dangerous.”

I was already halfway out the door to get my wetsuit by the time she’d finished the sentence. Bob gave me a goofy thumbs-up before flitting away to rejoin his body in the hunt for waves. I’d catch up with him in a minute.

Bob and I were sitting on our boards and waiting for waves just inside the edge of the kelp forest, near the western inlet and not far from my habitat.

Atopian kelp, the base of our ecological chain, had been bioengineered to grow inverted with its holdfast now a gas filled bladder floating on the surface with the kelp blades spreading downwards hundreds of feet into the depths. It sprouted outwards at fantastic rates like a watery mangrove, beginning just at the edge of the underwater extremity of Atopia and stretching outwards from there to about two miles out through the water.

My wealth afforded me the luxury of my own private habitat, a household that was attached to one of the passenger cannon supports, sprouting up out of the water and into the sunshine. Most of the million-plus inhabitants here lived below decks in the seascrapers stretching out into the depths. Atopia was the ultimate in dense, urban city planning, but then that was the whole idea: with access to limitless synthetic reality, Atopians didn’t need much in the way of real space.

I’d been one of the earliest converts to the Atopia marketing program, pulling up stakes from my wandering existence around the Bay Area to move onto the original Atopian platform in the early 40’s.

America just wasn’t what it used to be anymore, with constant cyber attacks pushing into an insular downward spiral and the Midwest returning to the dustbowl of more than a hundred years earlier. No good end was in sight, and entanglements in the Weather Wars were squeezing the last drops of blood from a country already gone dry.

For me, in my rich, insular world, the kicker had really been the surfing. Floating free in the Pacific, Atopia was exposed to huge, open ocean swells. When they caught just right, these would break and curl into pipes that broke for miles as they swept around its perfectly circular edge.

Atopia was a magnet for the best surfers in the world, but it was hard for them to compete with residents who used pssi—poly-synthetic sensory interface—technology. There was a kind of religion to surfing, and outsiders thought that with pssi we were cheating the gods, but really, the gods were jealous.

These days, those gods seemed to be having a particular issue with me.

Bob was waiting for the ultimate wave, and while I’d managed to catch one good one, I didn’t have his attuned water-sense and was having a hard time relaxing into it. Time was pressing down heavily.

“Bob!” I yelled out across the water, interrupting a conversation I could see he was having with his brother-of-sorts, Martin. “Bob, I need to get going!”

“Already?”

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

My promised hour wasn’t even up, yet Hotstuff was flooding me with things we needed to get done. It was impossible to enjoy the surfing, perhaps even dangerous. I’d better get on with it.

“I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do,” declared Bob, shrugging. “Anyway, ping me if you change your mind. Hey, you should check out all that stuff on the news!”

“Thanks, Bob.”

With a wave goodbye I flitted off back to my habitat, leaving Hotstuff to guide my body home.

2

I checked out the news Bob had sent me as I returned to the top deck of my habitat. There’d been a rash of UFO sightings in the Midwest last night, and he knew I was something of a paranormal fan boy. Today, though, more important things were on the agenda.

I strode back and forth like a caged animal, my mind racing, and then stood still as I made a decision, looking out towards the breaking waves.

“Ready for business?” demanded Hotstuff.

She was sitting and waiting for me on a stool at the deck bar, drinking a latte and going over the morning’s business news, impatiently tapping her high heels against the polished blue marble floor. Behind her, my carefully curated collection of some of the world’s rarest whiskeys and cognacs sparkled invitingly in the midmorning sunshine. It was about the time I’d usually be waking up, but I’d already been up since dawn.

“Do we have to?” I asked uselessly, thinking of how a little taste of the Aberlour would be nice.

“Some kind of action is required,” she observed. “Even inaction is an action, and perhaps the only kind of action you seem to enjoy lately.”

Hotstuff raised her eyebrows in disdain while she scanned the European financial reports.

“Okay then, summon the council,” I sighed, scratching my stubble.

Portals to my homeworld opened up off the deck, and I walked into our main conference room, shifting my attire into a navy sport coat with a stiff collared, open necked white shirt. Hotstuff strode in behind me, her braided bun of hair and short skirted business suit radiating efficiency and purpose.

One by one my councilors materialized around the long cherry wood conference table that glistened under the bioluminescent ceiling. About half of them appeared dull eyed, awakening to instantly patch in from whatever time zone they were in for this surprise meeting. The other half weren’t humans, but our trusted synthetics, and they appeared brightly and cheerfully, their smiles following me around the room towards the head of the table.

Then again, perhaps I had them mixed up, the dull eyed ones now looking like my synthetics. I had a hard time telling the difference anymore.

Everyone around the table, however, was most definitely female, and not just your run-of-the-mill varietals, but, like Hotstuff, more like a twelve year old boy’s fantasy. They posed casually but intently around the table as if a fashion shoot could be announced at any instant, with the long conference table springing into action as a catwalk.

My calling a sudden meeting like this was unusual, to say the least, and they all watched me cautiously. Information packets were dispersed and appeared on the table in front of them as I sat down.

“No need for pleasantries.” This wasn’t a social call after all. “Just have a look at your instructions. We’re going to be liquidating everything.”

A pause while they assimilated the data downloads.

“Questions?”

“No questions regarding the details, sir,” chimed one of them, Alessandria. “But, it may help to understand the motivation. Some of the assets you are seeking to liquidate, are, um, well, they’re not what you want people to know you’re in a hurry to sell.”

The motivation, now that was a good question. There were only two things I really knew; first, that I had no idea what I was trying to escape from, just that whatever it was, it was trying to kill me, and second, just sharing the idea that something was trying to hunt me down made my situation even more dangerous. To minimize risk I had to pretend nothing was happening.

“No reason,” I replied as casually as I could, “just the whim of a bored trillionaire. I don’t want to raise suspicion, so keep this on the down low, right?”

Perhaps this was the wrong choice of words.

“On the down low?” demanded Roxanne carefully, my resource manager for the Asia Pacific region. “You want me to just dump all the yachts, the islands, the racetracks…?”

“Yes.”

I said this with a twinge of remorse. The baubles of Indigo Entertainment, my latest and ill-fated attempt at a new foray into the business world, still held some sparkle in my eye. While I could lay claim to being super-wealthy, I couldn’t say the same about being super-intelligent.

Success in the business world was more about luck, and luck was hard to replicate. My luck had been helped along by a team of incredibly smart people, and born from a single-minded obsession with the future, or perhaps, just one future in particular.

“Don’t go out and dump it,” added Hotstuff. “Don’t attract attention, be subtle, go out there and do what we pay you for. Anyway, most of the Indigo Entertainment stuff is a waste of time.” Hotstuff looked towards me. I shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll need to explain ourselves very much.”

Roxanne considered this, shifting around in her chair.

“I may have someone who could be interested,” she said after a moment.

Then the paranoia set in. Perhaps liquidation was what whoever who was messing with me wanted, and was it possible that Roxanne was in on the fix? I looked carefully at her. Hotstuff sensed what I was thinking and headed me off before I could say anything.

“Very good,” Hotstuff replied to Roxanne. “Get to work then. Any more questions?”

Nobody objected, and one by one, just as they’d appeared, my councilors faded from the conference room.

When they’d all gone, Hotstuff looked towards me sympathetically.

“You’re going to need to trust your team,” she said slowly. After a pause she added, “You’re going to need to trust me.”

Visions of Kurt Gödel, the famous Austrian mathematician, sprang to mind. Suffering from deep paranoia, he’d only accepted food prepared by his wife to eat. When she fell ill one day and was sent to hospital, he refused to eat food given to him by anyone else. He died of starvation just shortly before his wife had returned.

“I just hope nothing happens to you,” I replied. “I’m not sure I could starve myself.”

While proxxi had full access to our memories and sensory systems and could usually guess what we were thinking, they couldn’t read our minds. Not yet, anyway. Hotstuff gave me a funny look.

I shrugged and smiled.

3

I was up at sunrise the next day as well, my dreams again filled with nightmares, but nightmares that were spilling from dreamland into reality. The darkness was smearing into light, unconsciousness into consciousness, dream life into waking life; they were all becoming barely distinguishable from each other. Hotstuff was waiting patiently for me in our war room while I dragged myself into the bathroom for a shower to wake up.

I stared into the mirror, deep into my bloodshot eyes. Condensation from the hot shower fogged over my image as I inspected the angry blood vessels ringing my irises.

“Can we take a short break for surfing again this morning?” I asked Hotstuff, reaching down into a drawer below the sink to get my eye drops.

“I don’t think that is a good idea,” she replied immediately, shouting over the noise of the shower. “We have a lot to do, things are getting more dangerous.”

I sighed, unscrewing the bottle cap and holding it between my teeth. I leaned back, pulling back the lid of my left eye and depositing a drop into it. I sighed again, rubbing the eye, and then switched to the other one.

“Come on,” I grunted from between clenched teeth, holding the bottle cap in place as I lined up the dropper above my right eye. “A half an hour out on the…”

I suddenly gagged. The bottle cap had popped like a cork from between my teeth to lodge itself into my windpipe. My body convulsed as I tried to pull some air into my lungs. Hotstuff was immediately beside me, and had already alerted the emergency services. Panic exploded into my veins and I clawed at the bathroom walls, doubling over onto the floor, my chest heaving and vision fading away.

“See what I mean?”

I was standing back at the sink, staring back into my bloodshot eyes, but Hotstuff was there with me, holding out her hand to take the bottle cap from me.

That had been close.

I’d barely escaped that event, less than five seconds away in the future on an alternate timeline. I handed Hotstuff the bottle cap, and then after a split second of contemplation, handed her the whole eye dropper bottle. My eyes weren’t that bloodshot.

“Yeah,” I replied, “I guess surfing can wait.”

Whatever it was that was hunting me down, it had infected the very personal and immediate realities surrounding me.

“Forget the shower,” I added. “Let’s just get to work.”

The bathroom immediately morphed into my battle room. Hotstuff splintered a hyper-dimensional graphic into my display spaces that plotted several thousand alternate future worlds of my life. Many of the lifelines terminated abruptly, and therein laid the problem with going surfing—I had to save my own life today, and not once, but many dozens of times over.

Yesterday there had been over a hundred ways I could have died in the millions of future simulations that we had running for me as we tried to pick a safe path forward for my primary lifeline. My plan of trying to escape in the UAV, the one that was destroyed in the slingshot test yesterday morning, was one of my futures that I’d barely avoided.

I picked out and watched one of today’s more gruesomely predicted terminations playing itself out before me. A three-dimensional projection hung in the middle of the room that started with me being cut in half and then being burnt to a crisp in some freak accident outside the passenger cannon. I watched with a morbid curiosity. My planned trip on the passenger cannon was definitely off the list of things to do today.

The problem had originally surfaced some months ago, and it was accelerating at a worrying pace.

One morning a few months back, Hotstuff had announced to me that there was a high probability of being killed in a stratospheric HALO jump I had planned. My future prediction system that morning had told us that, due to inclement weather and the likelihood of my skydiving partner being intoxicated the evening before from a probable incident with his wife, there was a very large chance of an accident occurring. No problem, I had happily announced over my morning coffee, just cancel the jump.

A few days later I received another prediction informing me that there were a half a dozen scenarios involving my death. It had been a fairly simple task then to engineer a path through them all, but from that point the solution to my ‘non death’ had started to become increasingly bizarre and rarified. On top of it, I couldn’t tell anyone, or ask any help to navigate these future arcs—the solution sets became unstable unless I kept it to myself.

I suddenly began to find myself running around Atopia asking people to do odd jobs for me and flittering off to the four corners of the multiverse on inane assignments just to keep myself alive. Things had begun spinning out of control like a surreal and twisted joke.

We’d managed to rout almost all of the incoming threats yesterday by sending out bots and synthetics, and in critical cases myself personally, to nudge the advancing future timeline of my world this way or that. Today, however, some of the future death threats were beginning to creep into the hours and minutes just ahead. What had started out a few months ago as the odd warning of some low probability events to be carefully avoided had steadily progressed into a constant stream that signaled my impending death, and we had no idea how or why it was happening.

“Most of the bases are covered for today,” Hotstuff explained, summoning up a probability scatter grid that sprouted outwards from a few critical nexus points. “There are just a few events that you need to handle personally, starting with this one in New York.”

She pointed to the nexus closest to me, and the future reality of that event spun out around us. I nodded, trying to take it in.

Someone with lesser resources than me would’ve just died, without fanfare, and that would have been that. In my unique position and with my almost limitless resources, however, I could literally see everything coming and dodge and weave my way through it.

You’d have thought that someone edging up on seventy would’ve accepted their mortality with a little more grace, but here on Atopia I was still a spring chicken. I wasn’t ready to accept a trip on the ultimate voyage just yet.

Sensing my mind wandering, Hotstuff decided to summon up another particularly gruesome termination. She growled playfully, swatting at me again with her riding crop while I watched myself being liquefied in the bio-sludge facilities. I felt like I was being stalked by the army of darkness with Betty Boop as my sidekick. Just how many ways could a person die? Her tactic was successful however, and I refocused on the New York project.

“You just need to steal a pack of cigarettes,” she explained while I watched the simulation play itself through.

“Sounds good,” I sighed. “Time to get ready for work.”

Sitting on the rooftop deck of my habitat, I took one longing look towards the breaking surf and grumpily got up from my chair to begin the day’s activity list to keep me alive. How exactly stealing a pack of cigarettes from some woman in New York would help me out was impossible to understand, but there it was.

Resisting the almost uncontrollable urge to procrastinate, I heard myself say, “Okay Hotstuff, let’s get this show on the road.”

The deck of my habitat faded away to reveal the grimy walls of a convenience store in New York. My consciousness had been implanted into a robotic surrogate—a robody—that Hotstuff had set into position. Even through the tinny sensory input, the overpowering odor and seediness of the place hit me like a wave of virtual sewage, as the pristine lines of Atopia disappeared from my sensory frames. I felt dirty, even in this robotic body, and had to fight back an urge to go and wash myself.

The target in question was yelling at the cashier behind the counter in front of me. In fact, she looked like she was about to hit him.

“Lady!” I shouted above her, raising my spindly metal arms in the cashier’s defense. “Lady, take it easy!”

She didn’t even notice me as she fumbled around in her purse, entirely engrossed in whatever it was she was trying to do. Her face registered deep disgust; she looked like she was having an even worse day than I was.

Eventually, after more theatrics, she managed to negotiate getting the pack of cigarettes from the cashier. I hung back, following her out the door, but at a distance.

She stopped outside to light up, standing under a wobbly holographic advertisement. After a few moments I saw my chance. I moved in quickly, taking her by surprise, pinning her against the wall. Terrified, she froze up, and I fumbled at her, trying to grab the pack of cigarettes. Quickly I pried it out of her hands.

“Get off me!” she screamed.

I jumped back, my prize in hand, and looked at her. Wanting to apologize, I stared for a moment into her green eyes, sensing anger and fear, but also a deeper anxiety, like I was looking at someone standing on the edge of a cliff.

Explaining myself wasn’t an option, however, so after an instant of contemplation I just shrugged halfheartedly at her and melted backwards into the pedestrian flow, leaving her there, shaking.

Somehow my stealing this pack of cigarettes would collapse a whole stream of dangerous alternate futures for me, so my job there was done.

4

Time—Einstein had famously said that it was purely an illusion, just a construct of the conscious mind. A nice idea perhaps, but try having this conversation with someone who had seen theirs ending. Time was something we all desperately wanted more of when it ran short, yet we waste it frivolously when we think we have enough.

I was in a bad mood after a long day of saving my own life dozens of times. Midnight was rolling around, and I’d just finished with the last of it. A full moon was out, and the air calm, as I sat out on the top deck of my habitat and watched glittering waves swell over the kelp. I leaned back in my chair and considered my problem for a moment.

The initial shock had worn off, but the irony was still steamrolling around my brain like a two-day-old hangover. Bob was right about one thing—I did have a hard time with anyone telling me what to do, but somebody seemed to have found a way to get my attention.

I decided I could use a walk to clear my mind.

“Hotstuff, could you drop me into Retiro Park, near the Crystal Palace?”

The surging ocean and the outlines of my deck faded from view, and were replaced with afternoon sunshine and the autumn green and golds of Madrid’s Buen Retiro Park. I was standing on a gravel path beside the Crystal Palace as requested. It was one of my favorite places to take a walk when I was having a hard time with something.

I looked down at my hands, admiring their apparent solidity, and then looked around the park.

It never ceased to amaze me how well this technology worked; I could smell grass being noisily cut by a mower somewhere in the distance. A woman pushing a baby carriage passed by and glanced at me and smiled. I could hear the gravel crunching under the carriage wheels and the soft burble of the baby inside.

Most people took the wikiworld, the collected audiovisual and sensor inputs of all people and networks and cameras spanning the world, for granted. But for those of us who had slaved away to make it a reality, it still carried a certain sense of awe.

I took a deep breath, straightened up, and began walking down the path.

The wikiworld was great, but the thing that had made me really famous was the future—literally.

Science was, at its root, just a hodgepodge of rules for predicting the future. How to achieve the same sort of success science had in the physical domain and replicate this to predict daily human life seemed beyond grasping, until I lit upon a place to start.

As I slumbered one morning in a semi-lucid state, my great idea came to me suddenly, as great ideas tended to do, and that idea was celebrity gossip. As social animals, gossip was something humans couldn’t do without.

I stopped on my walk to smile at a group of people gathered at a crosswalk in the park. They obviously knew each other well, and stood chatting.

As a student of history, I’d noticed that as civilizations became greater, they tended to become greatly interested in the tiny details of famous peoples’ lives. The Romans were the great innovators, but it was modern America that had really taken it to new heights.

When you started with any new technology, you needed to establish a foothold, a niche you could call your own, and I had been struggling to find a niche for synthetic future world predictions, or phuturing as I coined the term. A ‘phuture’ was an alternate future reality that sprouted off from the present moment of time. The future, with an ‘f’, was the actual, single future that you ended up sliding along your timeline into; but the future was only one of many possible phutures.

Weather forecasting and stock markets were well covered with established brands and pundits, but this wasn’t the kind of future I had been interested in. I wanted to know the future of individual people, on the most detailed possible levels. Early in life, I had developed an obsession with it.

A problem with making predictions, the ones involving people was that as soon as they knew about the prediction, they would tend to confound it, and the more people that knew, the more confounding these effects became. My discovery was that celebrities tended to act as a foil to this. Even when they were presented with a prediction concerning them, most enjoyed the attention enough that they would go along with whatever the prediction was.

We soon began to make a name for ourselves by scooping major news outlets to break stories that hadn’t even happened yet, beating entertainment and gossip media to the punch by featuring the celebrity headlines of tomorrow today.

Celebrity gossip had initially set the sails of the Phuture News Network as a commercial success, and we gradually expanded our predictive systems to encompass nearly every aspect of daily life. Advertising revenue had skyrocketed as we began selling ad space for things we could predict people would want tomorrow, but it was nothing compared to the money people were willing to pay for the service itself. Almost overnight we became one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Kicking gravel down the path, I sent up a small cloud of dust and overlaid a visual phuturecast onto it. I watched it as it was carried away by the wind, flowing into its future self as it dissipated and eventually disappeared.

On Atopia, we’d taken Phuture News to the next level and begun constructing perfect, sensory realistic phutureworlds. Some scientists had begun claiming that these weren’t just predictions, but portals into alternate parallel universes further forward along our timeline, and had started to use this as the technical definition of a ‘phuture’.

Not quite what I’d had in mind when I began the whole enterprise into divining tomorrow’s cocktail-dress-du-jour, but in all cases, people had begun to live, ever more progressively, in the worlds of tomorrow.

While the personalized future predictions we generated for people were private to them, as the owner of Phuture News, I had built in one proviso: I could confidentially gain access to any and all phutures generated in order to build my own personal and highly detailed phutureworlds.

To begin with, it had been fascinating to tie everything together; in being able to peer into the collective future of the world. At least, it had been fascinating to begin with, until I could see far enough forward. Then it had just become depressing.

But in all cases, it turned out that the biggest killer application of the future was the future itself, and sitting atop the greatest computing installation the world had ever known, I became the only person on the planet who could literally see into the world of tomorrow.

With great powers, they said, came strange responsibilities, and therein began the problem—for while I could see the future, it seemed that the future now refused to see me. At least, it refused to see me in it.

Hotstuff had already snuggled my body comfortably into bed as I collapsed my subjective away from Retiro park and back home. I sighed and pulled the sheets closer around me. It was time to get some sleep.

I had a feeling I’d need it.

5

“A GREAT EVIL will consume you all!” spat the deranged man from between tangled, yellowing teeth, his mottled face barely restraining a threatened apoplectic fit, as he balanced precariously atop an upturned four-gallon paint can.

Wheezing asthmatically, his eyes rolled up towards the damp skies before returning to earth and hunting through the crowd. His glassy gaze swung around to lock onto me, and I stared back. He trembled slightly, his already distended pupils widening as he peered into me.

“A great evil is already consuming you, sir,” he whispered, directly addressing me as I passed, and then screeched to the crowd, pointing at me, “A GREAT EVIL is upon us!”

I shivered and looked away, but nobody paid much attention.

It was early morning and I was off on another one of my walks to try and clear my mind, today through Hyde Park in London, and I was just passing Speakers’ Corner near Marble Arch. The steady thrum of the automated passenger traffic hummed in the background while the electric crackle of London City center hung just past the peripheries of my senses.

Early morning for me, but it was already well past midday here, halfway around the world from Atopia. The usual collection of crackpots and doomsayers had already installed themselves for the afternoon tourist crowds. I usually enjoyed standing and watching, listening to the passionate ramblings of the desperate men and women on their soapboxes, exhorting us to save ourselves. But today it felt wrong, or perhaps worse, it felt right.

Hunching inwards, I kept my eyes to the ground and wound my way through the crowd, making my escape towards the sanctuary of the park.

Even here in my virtual presence, I had to keep up my guard, a point-of-presence being a potential point of entry into my networks. I had a whole sentry system of future selves walking through the park in the immediate future ahead of me. Threading my way through the periphery of the crowd, my splintered ghosts walked seconds and minutes ahead of me, testing the informational flow through this path and that, dropping data honey pots here and there to pick up straggling invaders, testing for the safest narrow corridor into my future. Salvation for me was threading the eye of a needle, and it felt as if my hands were tied behind my back, or as if my limbs had been amputated.

Taking some deep breaths, I tried to relax.

The sun was bravely fighting its way through the wet skies, and small collections of people had begun to install themselves on the low-slung green and white striped loungers scattered across the grassy expanse at my end of the park. I was heading directly towards the Constabulary near the eastern end of the Serpentine. On my rambles through Hyde Park I always ran a historical skin so that I could enjoy the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and I could see its roof gleaming past a copse of trees in the distance.

It seemed I’d developed a thing for Crystal Palaces.

Right at that moment, however, that same reality overlay was projecting the Tyburn gallows next to a gaggle of old ladies who’d slumped into their loungers in the middle of the field. An execution was in progress, or at least a hanging. The ashen corpse of Oliver Cromwell spun slowly in the breeze, much to the delight of the crowd collected for the spectacle that had ushered London into 1661.

“Old Crommie is dancing the Tyburn jig!” leered an impish woman whose ghost, soiled in sodden rags and rotten teeth, appeared faintly near me amid that long ago crowd.

No matter which way I turned, death seemed to surround me. Quickly I cropped the reality skin into a narrow window of time around the present and 1851, and the crowd and execution dropped away.

Visions of the trail around the Serpentine pond floated into my consciousness as my splinters walked ahead of me, and I collapsed my probable paths to head towards Kensington Road and the entrance of the Crystal Palace, towards the quiet cool of the ancient oaks that stood there, quietly marking their own way through time.

Patricia Killiam had asked to speak with me today. Walking across the edge of the park I summoned up a media feed of her in another of her endless string of press conferences. As an early supporter of much of the deep technology behind the Phuture News Network, Patricia and I had become quite close over the years. In the overlaid visual display, a reporter was just asking her a question.

“Isn’t the world population stable now, even declining?” asked the reporter. “Shouldn’t that help calm the resource shortages?”

“The core problem isn’t population,” explained Patricia, “but that everyone wants to live lives of material luxury. Supporting ten billion middle class citizens on planet Earth was never going to work, and the only solution is to create a simulated reality that is good enough to satisfy our material cravings.”

It was probably the millionth time that Patricia had gone through this, and I could see the fatigue in her eyes, even the synthetic ones projected in the mediaworld I was splintering.

“And why is this proxxi thing such a key part of all this?” asked the same reporter.

“Right now, if you go off into an alternate reality,” she explained, “you just sit there like a potato. If something happens to your body in the real world while you’re away, you have no defense. Do you agree?” The reporters nodded.

“Your proxxi controls a dynamic image of your neural wetware so it can control your physical body when you’re away,” she continued. “This way you can seamlessly drop off into any synthetic space any time you like—even in the middle of a conversation your proxxi can finish it for you. It’s like an airbag for your body and mind, except that this airbag can act as your official representative.”

I could see some light bulbs going on in the audience.

“If you don’t want to go to that meeting or work cocktail tonight,” she finished, “just send your proxxi! Why not? It’s your life!”

This earned a big round of applause.

As the press conference split up, Patricia’s main point-of-presence shifted into my reality and she materialized walking in step beside me in the park. Her tired eyes watched me all the way through her transition. I could feel her weariness.

“So what’s all this about you dying today on Phuture News?” she asked as she appeared.

Now I understood why she’d wanted to chat in person. I tensed up.

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, old friend,” I replied quickly, shaking my head and smiling.

She raised her eyebrows. “At least you seem to have a sense of humor about it.”

Phuture News had begun publishing stories about the death of its founder today. The mounting density of my termination events had pushed my death into reality for everyone living in the world of tomorrow.

“Anyway, I wanted to check up on you in person,” she continued, “see if you needed anything.”

“Thanks, but don’t worry about me. I’m just fooling around with the system.”

A lie, but I had no choice. In my situation admitting anyone into the circle of trust was extremely dangerous. Expanding the network of people who knew what was happening would spread the probability matrices, and I needed razor sharp phutures to effectively head off the threats.

She watched me curiously, almost sadly.

“Playing? Are you sure? This seems like a funny way to have a laugh.”

“Don’t worry,” I reassured her.

She cocked her eyebrows at me.

“Really, don’t worry, and thanks for taking the time to drop in.”

She didn’t believe me.

By now we had reached the edge of the Serpentine. It was filled with small blue paddle boats being industriously driven around by enthusiastic tourists. Views of Kensington Palace crept over the weeping willows in the distance, and despite the brave advances of the sun, a light rain had begun to fall again.

“Is there, well, is there anything I can help with?” she asked. “You can trust me Vince, tell me what’s happening…”

The walls of my future squeezed ever tighter around me.

“No, like I said, everything is fine,” I reiterated. “And I do trust you Pat. I just still have a hard time believing you work for Kesselring now.”

Kesselring had tried to engineer a hostile take-over of Phuture News many years ago, back when it was a start-up, with plans to strip it down and profiteer from the future. He’d used some aggressive and illegal tactics to try and get what he wanted. Patricia had been on our Board back then, and had fought off Kesselring together with us. I had a hard time understanding how she was on his team now.

“A necessary evil,” replied Patricia. She looked off into the distance, and then looked back at me with world-weary eyes. “You promise to ping me if you need anything. I mean it, if you need anything at all.”

“I will.”

She looked at me silently. We’d known each other a long time.

“I mean it, I will,” I laughed. “I promise. Now go on, I know how busy you are.”

Patricia nodded and smiled warmly.

“You take care of yourself, Vince.”

With that, she faded away to leave me alone to finish my walk, or at least, alone with my crowd of future selves arrayed around me.

“It does seem to be getting worse though,” I said to myself glumly when she was gone. I was covering up my issue to the rest of the world as some kind of prank. Most people didn’t seem to think it was very funny, and neither did I.

I kicked some gravel down the winding path as I passed in front of the Crystal Palace. Watching the cloud of dust I’d created drift and settle, I wondered if it felt any regret as it came back to rest again on the earth.

6

“Are you sure that’s right?”

I laughed and pulled the girl closer. “Everything is right when I’m with you.”

She wriggled away, giggling. “Stop it Vince, come on, be serious! Is that the right time?”

I looked up at the curved clock face. It seemed about right.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Come on then, we’re going to be late!”

She pulled me along, and I looked up from the clock at the high vaulted ceiling of New York’s Central Station. This place always inspired a sense of awe in me, or, if not exactly awe, then a deep feeling of history. I felt a certain sense of nostalgia for all the human stories that had passed through this place, or, like me, were dragged through.

Looking up and around as we wound our way through the hustle and bustle across the white marble floors, my eyes came to rest on the news display at one end. She was looking at it as well.

“Carrier Groups set to high alert in Straits of Taiwan,” read the rolling display, “China warns of pre-emptive cyber attacks.”

She let go of me, staring at the news display, and then looked back at me. Her blue eyes shone, twinkling in the station’s lighting. She was so beautiful.

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

I looked briefly up at the news again and then back into her eyes.

“Of course, these things always blow over,” I reassured her.

“Seriously Vince, you’re the expert. You’re sure, right?”

She stood stock still, looking into my eyes.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

We began running for the track again, hand in hand. Soon we were on the train, cuddled up together for the evening ride back into Boston, the soft ka-chunk, ka-chunk of the tracks lulling us into a peaceful slumber as the miles rolled away.

In what seemed like moments later, I awoke with a start, my heart racing. It was dark, much too dark. Somebody was yelling. Sitting upright, I looked out the window into pitch blackness.

Then the screams and the terrible squeal of metal tearing and gnashing into itself as the train car pitched back and forth. I jammed my feet into the seat into front of me, bracing myself for what was to come, holding onto the girl who clutched desperately back onto me.

And then the world exploded.

Sucking in air, I sat bolt upright in bed, looking around, trying to hold onto her, but she was gone. I hadn’t died in that reality, but then, that one was in the past, now an unchangeable part of my timeline. I hadn’t died in the train crash, but she had—Pamela, the love of my young life, back when I was an engineering student at MIT. I calmed my breathing, telling myself that everything was alright, but even now, nearly forty years later, I knew that it wasn’t, and that it never would be.

It was a perpetually recurring dream, dulled only slightly with time, of that nightmare of a night when I’d lost her. It was during the initial attack that had knocked out the power grids, the first shots of what would become known as 2C, the cyber wars of 2022. What had been intended as a warning shot to disable some regional power systems in Connecticut had cascaded uncontrollably, knocking out power grids all the way down the East Coast in the middle of the winter that year.

I’d promised her there was nothing to worry about, and it had cost her life. I’d been in the middle of my master’s degree at the MIT Media Lab, an expert in the cyber realm, and Patricia Killiam had been my thesis professor. I’d been studying the use of predictive systems in social networks, a pursuit which became a passion after the accident. If I’d just been able to see the future a little more clearly, been able to know a little more, I could have saved her. At least, that’s what I could never forgive myself for.

I wiped the sweat off my forehead, rubbing my eyes. Why had she returned to my dreams now? I sighed. It must be the baby shower I was going to later in the day. Family events always made me think of Pamela, of a life I’d lost so long ago, a life I’d filled with senseless fluff but was now defending with everything I had.

Perhaps it wasn’t worth it. Why was I even trying? I could perhaps save my own life, but the future of the world? I knew the future, and it wasn’t something I wished I knew. In fact, I’d been trying my best to forget. I laid back down in the bed and put my heart back away, closing my eyes.

I needed to try and get some sleep.

7

Wasn’t a baby shower supposed to come before a baby was born? Anyway, it didn’t really matter. I was here to congratulate the happy couple.

I’d just materialized in the entertainment metaworld that Commander Strong had created for his family’s coming out party. Well, his sort-of family. Rick waved at me and I smiled and waved back, watching him hand his new simulated baby back to his wife.

Despite being a big believer in Patricia’s synthetic reality program, I couldn’t help feeling that these ‘proxxid’ simulated babies were slightly creepy, and I’d been hearing dark rumors hinting terrible things Dr. Granger had been using them for.

I would have avoided coming entirely, but this event had sprung up on my threat radar today. Convincing Rick that this proxxid, and having many more besides, was a good idea would somehow collapse a whole subset of threat vectors coming my way.

I didn’t like the idea of being so disingenuous, and I’d argued and tried to plan other contingencies all night with Hotstuff, but the alternatives were a lot more dangerous. After a little reflection, though, it didn’t seem a bad thing, and the happy couple seemed to be enjoying it.

“Congrats Commander!” I exclaimed as Rick neared, outstretching my hand. He shook it firmly, looking a little sheepish, and motioned towards the bar.

“Thanks, Vince. Oh, and thanks for those flowers the other day, Cindy really loved them.”

“No problem at all.”

We’d reached the bar. “So, what’ll it be?” he asked.

I surveyed the bottles. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

Right now wasn’t the time for a drink. It would have only been a synthetic drink for me, so I could choose whether to feel intoxicated or not, but the real issue was the interpersonal engagement. Taking a drink would necessitate having a chat, and I felt very uncomfortable about having to lie to my friend.

I shrugged weakly.

“You sure?” he asked, dropping some ice cubes into a cut glass tumbler and topping it off with a more than generous dose of whiskey.

“Yeah, I’m just kind of busy.”

I was struggling with what needed to come next. Rick fidgeted in front of me, taking a big gulp from his drink and smiling awkwardly.

“This thing, it’s just a little game,” he laughed, misinterpreting my discomfort as mockery. Knocking back another big swig from his drink he shook his head, looking towards his wife holding their proxxid. “I’m just doing it to keep her happy, you know how it is.”

The time had come.

“No, no, absolutely this is the best thing,” I said enthusiastically, “you need to do this. This is the way of the future!” I clapped Rick on the back to emphasize the point.

He snorted and took another big swig of his drink, his face brightening.

“I mean it, Rick, you should have as many simulated babies as you can before going on to the real thing.”

“You really think so?”

“I do my friend, I do.” I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it encouragingly. I felt terrible. I had to get out of there as quickly as possible. “Listen, I have to get going, though. Sorry. Give Cindy a kiss for me, okay?”

“I will.” He nodded, smiling.

I hesitated. Maybe I shouldn’t do this. Perhaps I should just come clean, see if he could help me with my problem.

“Go on,” laughed Rick, “get going!”

As much as I was struggling with lying to Rick, there was nothing I could do. I nodded goodbye and faded away from the sensory space of his party.

I needed a little break to think about things, so decided on a walk in one of my private spaces. I materialized walking along a dusty path next to the Crystal Mountain in the middle of the Sahara desert in Egypt, near the border of Libya.

This place held a mystical, almost magnetic, attraction to me, a massive single quartzite crystal that rose up hundreds of feet out of the barren, limestone landscape surrounding it. I’d recently installed my own private sensor network here, in secret, as the open wikiworld version lacked the resolution to really experience it, to enjoy the nuances and stark beauty of the place. It allowed me a place to wander truly alone; to enjoy some peace for short stretches in my newly frightening personal reality.

Night was falling, spreading its indigo carpet across the sky to reveal the cathedral of stars that shone only in the deepest of deserts. The perpetual wind here, the Sirocco, whistled softly, carrying with it the sand that over the aeons had etched the limestone bedrock into fantastical forms that sprang up out of the desert floor like giant gnomes and mushrooms, lending the lifeless place an interior life of its own.

Massive sand dunes sat hunched in the distance, slowly sailing their lonely courses across the bare bedrock, their hulks propelled by the same unrelenting wind that shaped this place. As they moved, they swallowed everything in their paths, but, just as inevitably as they consumed, they would eventually release as they moved on. You just had to stand still long enough, exist long enough, to be released.

I stepped slowly between the ghostly sandstone figures that towered above me, frozen in time in their mad dance together. The Crystal Mountain glowed in an ethereal purple above it all, its interior lit by a million tiny points of starlight.

It was a strange thing not being able to see my future hanging there in front of me. I mean, I could see my phutures, sense the nearness of their reality in the splinters of my distributed consciousness spreading out ahead of me, but now they all terminated abruptly. The fingers of time I’d carefully nurtured over the years had now been painfully amputated.

Where before the future had flowed straight ahead of me, like a train running to known destinations where I could just switch stations on a whim as the rails flowed past. Now all tracks ahead ended in flames. A suffocating fire enveloped me, the future choking the lifeblood out of my present. I felt trapped in the moment.

“Hotstuff, could you pop in for a sec?”

Hotstuff, my proxxi, obediently materialized next to me. In sharp contrast to the dreamlike landscape I had lost myself in, her vitality and energy sizzled into this space. She was looking extremely sharp in tight, striped riding pants and boots with a low cut, high necked red jacket. Her long blond hair fell in waves down her back and across her shoulders.

Some people liked to create some sort of alter ego as their proxxi, which was all fine for them. I preferred to have an attractive woman as my personal assistant. Plus I liked the idea of a woman driving my body around when I wasn’t in it.

“So did you hear what Patricia said the other day?” I asked as she appeared, trying not to dwell on the implications of me enjoying having a woman enter my body when I was away.

“What, that stuff about being concerned about you?”

“No, not that,” I snorted. “That you’re my airbag.”

I felt suddenly better, more protected, sensing the physicality of Hotstuff being near in this reality.

Hotstuff rolled her eyes and laughed, “If anyone here’s an airbag, boss, it’d have to be you.”

I laughed back, but then sighed heavily. I nervously fidgeted my phantoms limbs.

“Stop that,” she commanded.

She’d stopped walking herself, looking up to consider one of the limestone figures. It had a distinctly phallic shape. She turned and winked at me.

“Stop it,” she repeated softly.

“Stop what?”

I’d begun a nervous drum beat with the phantom limb that controlled my future social connectivity.

“Stop playing with your phantoms,” laughed Hotstuff, continuing to walk on, “you’re going to grow hair on them. Seriously, stop it. You’re jiggling your phutures back and forth, muddying up your timeline. Stay focused.”

I stopped and relaxed my phantoms, releasing them back to her. I sighed again. We’d reached a natural stone archway at the end of the limestone menagerie, on an outcropping above a steep drop to the plateau below. Sitting down together on the edge of the cliff, we looked down at the sand dunes spreading out into the distance, disappearing into the gathering gloom.

“Do you think someone is phuture spoofing me?”

Phuture spoofing was growing into a major business as hacking spilled into the worlds of tomorrow and phuture crackers began engineering their own timelines.

“Boss, we’ve been over this a hundred times, and I don’t see how someone could be phuture spoofing you,” replied Hotstuff. “In all cases, I’ve had specialized agents rooting through the Phuture News system and sniffers floating at choke points throughout the open multiverse, and nothing suspicious to report. To manage it on this scale, they’d need almost the same computing infrastructure as the Phuture News Network itself.”

Which would be impossible to hide, she didn’t need to add.

“So summarize where are we again?” I asked, shaking my head. I leaned back and looked up at the stars.

“So the good news is that we have made some progress,” she said brightly. “We’ve managed to plot a path to extricate your physical body from Atopia, which has given us a much larger playing field to work with.”

“Okay, that sounds good,” I replied carefully. “So what’s the bad news?”

“Well, the system is predicting about seven thousand possible outcomes for your, ah, demise in the next few days or so. Being out in the world has also opened up a lot of new possibilities for whatever is chasing us as well.”

“So that’s it then, I’m dead?” I stated sarcastically. The stars shone like steely pins, puncturing the night sky around me.

“No,” she noted, “that is not it. Don’t be so defeatist.”

I shot her a quizzical glance.

“You only have about a dozen more things you need to get done personally today so we can head this thing off,” she added. “Tomorrow is another day, just focus on today. Be in the moment.”

“That’s what you said yesterday,” I complained.

I could be petulant. It was the last redoubt of the rich and aimless, when faced with hard, honest work. After I’d gotten over the initial shock of almost dying day after day, I’d found the urge to beg off and go surfing almost irresistible, and it was annoying to me that I had to save my own life. This was the sort of stuff I was supposed to pay people for. Strangely, though, I was beginning to settle into it now, even secretly enjoying some of the new activity forced onto me. Of course, I wouldn’t ever admit it.

Hotstuff gave me a sidelong glance and raised one eyebrow.

“Hey tough guy, it’s your life. The probability is only about nine in ten you’ll kick the celestial bucket today if you wing it. You could go surfing if you like.”

I sighed.

“You know boss, this may not be an entirely bad thing…”

That stopped me in my tracks. I looked at her.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” I demanded, almost spitting the words out. I was going to point out that proxxi terminated when their owners did, but I held my tongue.

Hotstuff took a moment to choose her words carefully. “I mean, before, well…”

“Well what?”

“Before you were kind of aimless,” she explained. “You’d lost any interest in the future.”

I pondered for a second. “And you think this is better?”

“Well at least you’re up in the mornings,” she replied.

I snorted. “Yeah, to live another day and fight to stay alive.”

She looked at me, letting me consider what I’d just said. “See what I mean?”

I sighed. I was frustrated, but not as scared anymore. Perversely, in a way maybe she was right. I was certainly savoring the little moments of time that I could get to myself now.

“Whatever. Anyway, it’s getting better, right?” I asked hopefully.

“We’re managing it the best we can.”

“The best that you can, huh?” I replied dejectedly, looking up at my task list for the day as it appeared in one of my display spaces. Something popped out immediately. “So I need to short the upcoming Cognix stock?”

“Nobody will know it’s you. Look, I’m setting up defensive perimeters,” explained Hotstuff, “and we’ll drop some intelligent agents into them to look for any cross-phuture scripting. We’ll figure this out, boss, don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry?” Was she serious?

“I didn’t want to get your hopes up, but…”

“But what?”

“I think we’re starting to see a pattern, hidden deep in the probability matrices that connect together whatever is chasing you. A pattern in the future, but that points somewhere far in the past.”

Finally. Perhaps some progress.

“Can you explain a little more?”

“It would be easier to show you…”

8

Dappled sunlight streamed down through the jungle canopy high above, illuminating the hard packed earth below; it was casting a patchwork of light and dark that stitched together scenes of smoke rising from cooking fires, laughing children darting between thatched huts, and women sitting and gossiping together as they stripped the white skins off sweet potatoes, carefully wrapping each one in banana leaves and depositing them into a stone-lined pit.

The men were all off hunting today, chasing pigs that had escaped from neighboring villages in the thunderstorms of the night before. Monkeys barked through the underbrush, their catcalls joining the symphonies of songbirds whose feathers lit up the steaming forest like splashes of flickering paint against a knotted green canvas.

Picking up a smooth stone sitting on the earth, I casually ducked my head as a poison dart snipped past, barely missing me. One of the children cried out to my right. A mother picked the child up by his arm and spanked him. He’d been playing with his father’s blow gun, not knowing what he was doing, probably imitating his dad. Even inhabiting someone else, whatever was hunting me down was trying to kill this body as well.

The mother looked towards me and shrugged, apologizing. I smiled back, returning my attention to the witch doctor. Dodging death was nothing I got excited about anymore.

“In da roond,” explained the tribal elder, speaking in a kind of English-creole-pidgin that was the lingua franca of the Papua New Guinea highlands.

The two most linguistically diverse places left on Earth were also the most culturally and technologically polarized: this place, still barely out of the Stone Age, and New York City, the bustling megalopolis tipping the world into the 22 century. Each retained over a thousand languages, but where almost all in New York were machine translatable, and thus part of the new global lingua franca, almost none of the New Guinea languages were. I was struggling to understand what this elder was equally struggling to explain to me.

“Round, like, like in a circle?” I stuttered back in my best attempt at native Yupno. Speaking through this body was difficult.

A giant tree frog watched me lazily from its perch in the branches nearby. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a frog in the wild. Of course, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in the wild.

To get to this remote and rugged place, we’d had a portable communication base station dropped in, and then we convinced a nun running a nearby mission to come and persuade them to have one of the villagers drink a glass of water laden with smarticles, allowing my subjective to enter and control their body through the communication link.

It was the only way I could speak with this particular elder, the Yupna witch doctor and keeper of holy secrets. The smarticles hadn’t fully suffused into this body, so I felt numb and disconnected, and they would be soon flushed out, so I had to hurry.

The witch doctor shrugged and smiled, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. His eyes sparkled at me. I smiled back, my pssi filtering his body language into a form that made sense to me. My gaze shifted to a break in the jungle that revealed the glacier capped mountain ranges beyond, stretching upwards into the bright sky. He was trying to explain his perception of the shape of time, or rather, its lack of shape.

“Here and now”, “Back in the 20’s”, “Going forward”…the modern world was fixated on spatial metaphors for time, the idea of the past being behind us and the future ahead. Not the Yupno, though. In this remote valley it had forgotten, time had no linear form to its inhabitants. To them, it flowed uphill, backwards, in forms and in shapes. They laughed at our conception of its forward flow. This Stone Age culture experienced directly something Einstein had only glimpsed at through his equations.

The pattern Hotstuff had detected had led us here, and she was sitting on a log across the cooking fire from the elder and I, fetchingly dressed in tight safari shorts with her hair done up in a long single braid that she was playing with, nibbling on, and twirling between her fingers.

“He means time runs forwards and backwards, but not like a stream—more like currents in a lake,” she suggested. “No, like a reservoir, that’s more what he means.”

“Like a reservoir?” I asked the elder.

He nodded. With long arms, he reached up and circled his hands around slowly, finally coming to rest, ending at me. The Yupno had a way of pointing towards doorways when speaking about time, a curiosity I was just beginning to understand.

Inhabiting the body of this tribal member, I was trying to see if time felt any different for me. It didn’t, but something here felt odd.

Amazingly, the elders here hadn’t batted an eye at the idea of one of their own being magically inhabited by an alien spirit, nor the idea that I was conversing with an invisible ghost Hotstuff, in their midst. It seemed perfectly natural to them.

The witch doctor pointed to where Hotstuff was sitting.

“The spirit name?” he asked.

Hotstuff raised her eyebrows.

“Hotstuff,” I replied, shrugging to her.

“HOT stuff,” he repeated, “hot STUFF?”

I nodded, and he smiled ever wider.

“And your name?” I hadn’t thought to ask before.

He pointed at his own chest.

“Nicky,” he said proudly, and then added, “Nicky Nixons.”

I laughed and shook my head—Nicky Nixons the witch doctor.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Nicky Nixons. My name,” I said, pointing to myself, “is Vince Indigo.”

“Yes, in dee go…” he replied, nodding sagely, as if he’d always known, as if my name held a meaning he knew and I didn’t.

“Vince, this is all very touching,” interjected Hotstuff, “but we have to get going. We’re out of time here.”

She splintered some upcoming death events into my display spaces, one of them a bio-electronic Ebola-based retrovirus that ended with my internal organs almost instantaneously liquefying while I was brushing my teeth tomorrow morning. She immediately firewalled off the data tunnel from the jungle we were sitting in, just in case.

“It’s even getting dangerous just being here.”

I nodded.

“Okay, let’s get me going,” I replied. “But you stay a while and see what you can learn from him.”

It was time to get to work again. The sensory frames of the jungle and Nicky Nixons quickly faded away to reveal the confines of a small, sparse apartment, somewhere in the lower levels of the Atopian seascraper complexes. In augmented space, an endless array of workspace cubicles radiated outwards from the apartment, in the New London financial metaworld. The cubicles were busily occupied by thousands of copies of Willy McIntyre, one of Bob’s best friends, and my newly appointed stock trader.

“So I assume business is good?” I asked Willy, sensing the arrival of his primary subjective.

Hotstuff was feeding me a report on Willy’s business, and I could see that these weren’t just bots and synthetics he had working; these were full blown splinters, hundreds of them. I didn’t care what he was up to. I just needed to get in and out. Time was a ticking bomb for me, and I had to go and defuse a dozen other situations right away.

“Business is very, very good,” replied Willy, now standing beside me, and watching me watching his financial army at work below.

He looked like the cat that had just eaten the canary, and about ready to burst and let me in on some secret. In the report from Hotstuff, I could see that Willy had fully paid off the multi-generational mortgage for his family, and was well on his way to amassing a pretty sizeable fortune, but I didn’t have the time or energy to talk . Death was calling.

“Yeah, I’d noticed you’d amped up your Phuture News services pretty dramatically,” I said carefully, “but that’s not why I’m here. I’ll just send you the details of what I need right now. I can see you’re a busy man.”

I immediately uploaded the transaction I needed executed into one of his splinters.

“You want me to what?” he exclaimed. “You know this is going to look suspicious, especially with me working for Infinixx.”

“From what I’ve heard, you don’t work for them anymore.”

Willy stopped fidgeting and stared at me. “Yeah that’s right, but it will still look odd.”

“You wouldn’t be making any profit off this, and nobody will know,” I explained. “I know it seems crazy, but if you could do this for me, and keep it quiet, I can pay you an awful lot of money. I need you to dump all that stock and chalk up a huge loss for me, and I need you to do it from New York.”

I looked at his face. He was watching me watching him.

“And be careful,” I said after a moment, suddenly feeling he was in over his head.

“It doesn’t look like there will be any problems with this transaction, Vince, in fact…” he began, not catching my meaning.

“No, not with that,” I interrupted, “with what you have going on here.”

“There’s nothing going on here.”

We both stood and stared at each other.

I sighed. I needed to get going.

“Just be careful, okay?”

He hesitated, but then smiled.

“No problem, Mr. Indigo.”

This kid was going to get himself in trouble. He offered his hand to shake, and I shook it, but my mind was already elsewhere.

I quickly flitted off to the roof of the Cognix towers.

9

A deep, haunting wail reverberated through the morning air, carrying me upwards, beyond the highest of the Himalayan peaks, but also inwards and backwards, deep into my mother’s womb. A million deaths surrounded me, all threaded outwards from my moment of creation, a cosmic embryo of existence secured by the thin timeline threading through it all that kept me alive.

My body was drenched in sweat under the hot sun that beat down from the Columbian sky. I was making my way across the Plaza de Bolivar, wiping the sweat off the nape of my neck with a t-shirt I’d pulled out of my backpack. Tourists were standing around in small groups, looking around at the grand framed portico walls, sweating together under the same sun that was baking us. Pigeons scattered at my feet.

I had to keep moving. A small security contingent was shadowing me from a distance, but I was trying to stay incognito. Out of the corner of my eye, a Coca-Cola sign called out from under the shade of an awning, and I shifted my path towards it and the small convenience shop at the corner of the plaza.

“Hola!” I announced as I entered, feeling the relief of cool air sweeping over me. I slid open the door to a small refrigerator at the side of the register, pulling out a can of soda, and, parched, opened it and began gulping it down. The shop keeper appeared from the back just as I was about finished it.

“Senor!” he exclaimed, his eyes wide as he stared at me.

“What?”

I put the can down. Was he that upset that I hadn’t paid for it first?

I reached into my pockets, feeling suddenly energized and awake. I fumbled around excitedly for some pesos. A small group of people had appeared in the shop, staring at me, which I knew could only mean one thing. Instead of feeling scared, I felt a rush of adrenaline, now excited about whatever was about to happen, even though I knew it was death.

My heart banged, my chest exploding. I couldn’t breathe. I looked at the shop keeper, now staring in horror at the can of soda in my hand. My vision began to swim as I made for the door, my knees giving way in a euphoric rush. At the edges of my senses, I could hear clapping, in fact, I could hear applause. I waved to my fans as the blackness descended.

The dung-chen horns sounded again, their low, baleful moans awakening my mind fully from its semi-lucid dream state. I blinked and looked out the window of the room I’d been sleeping in. The rising sun was announcing the start of a new day, though Lhasa was still enveloped in shade as the sun fought its way over the towering peaks surrounding the valley.

Still half asleep, I let my mind wander back to the death event in Columbia we’d just averted. They had been smuggling narcotics in the soda cans, and I’d unwittingly downed one before anyone could warn me off. We shifted the path of my walk later today through Bogota away from the Plaza de Bolivar entirely, just in case.

A troubling development was the flash death mobs. The same way that people would mob around an accident on a street corner to gawk, with future prediction technology and the wikiworld, people could now flit to nearly any spot on the planet to witness accidents taking place. They called them flash death mobs.

With so many predicted future deaths, I’d now attracted my own flash death mob fan club, and my future deaths were now small celebrations, with people flitting in to witness the endless sequences of clever deaths that I would narrowly avert. They figured this was a future installation art project of some kind, and I couldn’t afford to tell the world the truth, so I was just rolling with it.

I shook my head.

The patterns had now led us to Lhasa to study the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text dedicated to experiences that lay between life and death. It was maddeningly difficult to understand as most of it was coded in symbols. We had gone there to participate in the Monk Debates, to talk directly with the ones that really understood the text.

A familiar tapping echoed through the wooden doorway, slightly ajar, of the shared room I was sleeping in. I was inhabiting the body of a Buddhist monk from the Sera monastery on the outskirts of Lhasa. In return for borrowing his corporal form, I’d offered the monk a chance for some truly out-of-body meditation sessions using the pssi network, something they didn’t normally have access to here.

Smarticles were an internationally controlled substance. My transport of them outside of Atopia, and especially what I was doing here, was highly illegal.

“Don’t even try it,” I warned Hotstuff.

I pulled the bed sheets off myself. She stood there pouting in the doorway, all done up in a French Maid outfit, but of course still with her riding crop in hand. I stood and quickly pulled my maroon dhonka robe up and around myself.

Weeks had passed and death was closer than ever. I was still here, but barely. The day before there’d been nearly fifty thousand ways I could have died in the millions of phutures we were tracking, and I’d even had to fight off two sequences in real time and real space, an incredibly close call.

While we’d managed to slow down the contagion, we hadn’t been able to stop its spreading. We’d tried simulations of locking my body in a vault, but this made things worse, as the death events piled up, making even the slightest of exposures of my body to the outside disastrously threatening, eventually ending in some kind of terrorist strike against my hiding place.

We had hundreds of thousands of bots and synthetics running around now doing large and small things to sweep the death events back, but I was still the key to many of them. Today was going to be a big day, and by all indications we would be fighting death off more fiercely than ever.

“So what’s the bad news?” I sighed.

The rest of the sleeping mats in my room were empty, the other monks apparently much earlier risers than me, but then again, they were real Buddhist monks. I stretched, yawning, and rubbed my neck, expecting the worst. I needed to get some hot tea into this body before the morning meditation session.

“Good news!” exclaimed Madame Hotstuff, snapping the riding crop against my monk’s ass, urging me awake. She swished the air in front of her with the riding crop to leave it finally pointing towards the door. We began to walk. “Today it seems the threats have begun to recede—or at least, they’ve stabilized in number.”

“Really?”

My constricted future eased ever so slightly. Finally.

We walked out the door and into the hallway, passing a group of monks busily on their way somewhere. Hotstuff sashayed her way past them in her stilettos and knee high stocking, smiling at them appreciatively.

“Really,” she stated, looking back at me and snapping her riding crop against the rough hewn rock wall of the corridor. She smiled and gave a playful little growl. “It looks like the new ring fencing of a perimeter around your phutures has begun to pay off, that combined with this new meditation and awareness stuff.”

“So what was it then?” I asked. If we’d found a way to contain it, then there must be a path to the root source, some forensic process we could use to follow it backwards.

Hotstuff lowered the riding crop.

“Vince, honey, remember what Nicky Nixons said, what Yongdzin is saying. You need to stop thinking in deterministic terms. Remember the reservoir. Expand the reservoir, live in the moment.”

“Right,” I replied. “Live in the moment, effortless action.”

“Exactly.”

“Hotstuff…Hotstuff…” I intoned solemnly, pressing my monk’s hands together in a prayer while we walked.

“I do wish you’d chosen a different word for your mantra than my name.”

I opened my eyes and winked at her. “Hey, it works for me.”

“Well, as long as it works for you,” she sighed, smiling and rolling her eyes. “The patterns are solidifying. Whoever did this has left a trail of Easter eggs behind, we think leading to a back door. Nicky Nixons has been a lot of help.”

“Well remind me to thank him sometime personally,” I replied, now eager to have a look at what was on the agenda today.

We’d arrived in the cafeteria, if one could call it that, in the center of Sera Jey. I grabbed a cup of tea and sat down with Hotstuff at a wooden table in the corner. A list of the day’s activities floated into view over the bench.

“Not so bad for today, mister, not as bad as yesterday.”

By now we’d built up an espionage and counter-espionage network that outstripped any but the wealthiest of corporations and nation states, all with the specific directive of bending the future timeline to my will, to keep me alive. We’d funneled all the money we could from Phuture News and sold off all my assets to fund the program.

One thing in particular floated up through the threat matrices.

“So there’s no way around it?”

In all the long list of things I’d had to do, this one hit closest to home and I was struggling with it.

“No boss, sorry,” replied Hotstuff. “And you’d better take care of it before the morning meditation.”

I felt terrible about sabotaging the launch of the Infinixx distributed consciousness project, but there didn’t seem to be any way around it. A Triad gangster network in Hong Kong would have used it to pinpoint some of my other activities, and disabling the launch was a key vector in keeping my lifeline intact.

I shrugged. Progress was progress. I’d better stick with what was working. Using a communication phantom I punched up Patricia’s networks, requesting an urgent, private meeting with her primary subjective.

A large Chenrezig statue, the Buddha of Compassion, sat at the head of the long chamber I was in. I stared up into its face, and then inspected its dozens of arms stretching out around it like star fire. Immediately above its main face, eleven of its other faces gazed down benevolently. I was struck by how eerily similar its array of outstretched arms resembled what phantom limbs used in the pssi system would look like, if they were visible in real space. Shaking my head, I turned my gaze out of the window to the majestic peaks around us.

The plains surrounding Lhasa were filled with permanent makeshift encampments of international troops that stood as a buffer between the Chinese and Indian bases that lined the opposite sides of the valley. The Americans were there as a part of the UN mission, as well as NATO forces, but the largest contingent was the African Union.

Africa was where many thought hope for the future could be found; where the engine of a new economic powerhouse was beginning to growl. It was closely linked with Terra Nova, the off-shore colonies competing with Atopia, with their own synthetic reality product.

“You want me to what?” asked Patricia, materializing at the seat across from me and pulling my gaze back from looking out the window. A glittering security blanket settled around us. Patricia paused for a moment while the blanket sealed. “Do you have everything you need? What’s this about?”

She’d helped me smuggle the smarticles out of Atopia, even helped me set up my covert communications network, and all this without even asking me what it was for. I hadn’t been able to tell her, it was just too dangerous. Thank God for old friends.

“I’m fine,” I replied in a quiet voice. “I don’t need any more materials. I just need you to come help me right now with something, in your physical form.”

This sounded odd even before it came out, especially coming from the slight frame of my monk, diminutive in front of this world famous scientist.

“There are some things I need some direct help with, and it’s critical to get done right now. I can’t say more than that, except that it needs to be kept a secret.”

Patricia eyed me carefully. “You realize the launch of Infinixx is in less than an hour?”

“I’m not saying you can’t go, just go virtually. Isn’t that what your whole project is about anyway? And what’s the difference? I need your help right now.”

This was definitely weird, but I’d gotten over my squeamishness about these sorts of requests.

She hesitated.

“Look, you said I could rely on you if I ever needed anything right?”

“Yes, I suppose…”

“So I’m asking.”

She sighed. “I guess it won’t make any difference.”

“Perfect,” I replied, sensing this mission accomplished. “I appreciate it, Pat.”

An awkward silence ensued.

“So what’s going on with these storm systems?” I asked casually, changing the topic

I was curious to see if Patricia had anything more to say than what I got through the mediaworlds. I’d been so caught up in my own disasters lately I’d hardly paid attention to the storm systems that were threatening Atopia. With a little more breathing space, I’d started to let my mind assimilate more of what was happening on the outside. These storms were the big news.

“We don’t know,” she replied, shrugging, “but they’re definitely not natural.”

Not natural? I hadn’t heard that before.

“Really?”

“Something is going on, and we’re not sure what,” she replied.

No kidding, I thought to myself, but I just kept quiet.

10

Finally, in longer than I could remember, I was really enjoying my walk through Beun Retiro Park in Madrid. Fall had begun to turn fully to winter, and all the leaves had fallen off the trees to create a beautiful golden carpet underfoot. Perfectly faultless blue skies hung overhead.

In my mind’s eye, I could see myself stepping gracefully to the side as a helicopter crashed down from the heavens, nearly crushing me on a walk through Stanley Park in Vancouver the next day. In another splinter, I could see a car swerve, bouncing into my beach cruiser as I turned into a parking lot in Malibu a few days later. The car clipped the surf board sitting in the back of the cruiser, sending it spinning around. I ducked just before the board would have decapitated me. It was all effortless action, like a ballet with death.

We’d found a solution to my problem. Since we’d stabilized them a few weeks back when I was in Tibet, the density of death events had quickly begun to fall. There were still nearly twenty thousand future fatalities we had to avoid to maintain my healthy timeline, but what had seemed terrifying and unfathomable just a few short weeks before, had become just a walk in the park. Literally.

I strode purposefully forward as I walked around Retiro Park, each step picking out another yellow leaf underfoot to grind into the gravel, imagining each to be a tiny harbinger of doom I was snuffing out with each step. Looking up from my work, I found myself standing in front of the Crystal Palace.

Down the path a little way, a woman leaned over to pick up one of the leaves, and then began laughing, and then crying, completely oblivious to everyone else around her. Not wanting to disturb her, I shifted my walk onto another trail. I glanced back over my shoulder towards the woman, but she was already gone. She’d looked awfully familiar.

To protect myself, I’d developed a kind of temporal immune system, stretching out into the alternate universes connected to me. An army of killer tomorrow-cells spun through the probabilistic spaces surrounding me, neutralizing threats, clotting dangerous portals and pathways both into the future and through the past. This immune system had become a part of me, a part of my living body, a highly attuned death-sense that allowed me to effortlessly thread my way through even the most dangerous of situations.

For once, the conspiracy theorists were right. Some of the tabloid worlds had begun publishing stories about a shadowy force that had been detected, pushing and pulling the future prediction networks. The shadowy force they were referring to was me, but there was something else out there too. That something else that was the thing that was trying to hunt me down, but I was hunting it down as well.

What had more of my attention were the hurricanes that were threatening to pin Atopia between them. In my situation, it was impossible to ignore the idea that perhaps the storms were aimed at me, a final attempt to destroy my power base after attempting to trap me there. Try as I might, the idea just didn’t stick, and though the storms looked like they would damage Atopia, they were no real threat to me.

In my struggle to save myself, I had been reborn. I turned my face up to the morning sunshine, feeling its heat warm my soul. Where my life before had been sliding into apathy, the past few months had led me on a spiritual journey into an almost mystical place. Decoding the hidden pattern had helped us navigate the most stable path through my future, and it was leading us further and further back. A hidden truth I was just beginning to glimpse was buried somewhere in humankind’s history.

The solution, as such, was no solution, but simply to carry on. It was everything and nothing, both the beginning and the end. I was still engaged in a desperate struggle against death, as we all are, whether we saw it that way or not, but it had become more like a dance, with effortless action guiding me through. I’d reached a heightened state of being that I would never have been able to achieve any other way.

As this timeline had worn on, the world had begun filtering the incessant predictions of my death as the attempts of another bored trillionaire at getting attention. The world at large had erased me from their networks as phuture spam, and even the flash death mobs had gotten bored. The man with no future, who existed only in the moment, was invisible to a world fixated on anywhere but where they actually were.

On my end, I’d come to grips with, and even relish, my situation. My death had become a local solution to the universe that, with the massive resources at my disposal, I’d managed to bring under control in a tight but stable spiral, undertaking a list of nearly incomprehensible activities each day.

The irony just made it that much richer.

I was trapped by my own creation, unable to even tell people what was happening. Even more ironic was that I didn’t even know if it all was true. It was possible that I was just running around everyday doing it all for no reason. But then, this was life.

I smiled at that thought.

The existentialists did say that life was all about pulling the victory of meaning from the jaws of senseless absurdity, and in that, I’d discovered a purpose that I’d struggled to find before. That purpose was finding out who was doing this to me, and why, and the trail was leading back to Atopia.

And so, I became a man with no future, but a man that danced happily between the raindrops, or perhaps, between the timedrops.

Epilogue Identity: Patricia Killiam

Sitting and waiting. Perfect the art of sitting and waiting, and you will live a long, long life.

I was in the main Cognix conference room, perched about two thousand feet up in the complex spanning the tops of the farming towers at the center of Atopia. The afternoon sun was shining in hotly through the glass window-walls, and I was sure he was making me wait on purpose, knowing I was here in person.

My mind was circling back to my press conference this morning, about what I’d been telling the reporters. Truths and half truths; I’d been mixing the both of them for so long I hardly knew the difference anymore.

How was pssi going to end up changing the world? To be honest, I really had no idea. The real power of pssi, I wanted to tell them, was harnessing the brain’s natural ability for adaptively rewiring itself to extend the human mind into the multiverse, but this would have earned me blank stares.

The human sensory and motor system had evolved to help us make sense of our environment and fend for ourselves within it, which had worked great when our ancestors were out hunting gazelle on the savannah, but the modern human environment was a massive flow of information and pssi made it possible to plug our nervous systems directly into it.

Explaining that to those reporters was just a bridge too far for me to cross with them. It was easier to let them run into some pssi-kids on Atopia somewhere—they’d get the idea soon enough.

I sighed.

Being present in the flesh was something I’d begun to do more and more lately, sensing my own time growing short. Up here in the conference room the security blankets blocked outgoing and incoming communications, so there was no escaping down a rabbit hole while I waited. However, there was no sense in letting time, illusion or not, go to waste, so I decided to limber up a little.

Taking a deep breath, I straightened up in my chair and clicked on the visual overlays of my phantoms, and they appeared arrayed around me. Concentrating, I began moving the phantom that controlled my spatial point of view. This little phantom was visible, floating disconnected beside my body like a little putty colored finger that I could move around.

Despite working with this technology for more than thirty years, it still felt strangely thrilling to feel this projection as a part of me, its tactiles and kinesthetics wired into my own sensory system so that I could feel it stretch and click through the boundaries of its interface.

The brain had an almost inexhaustible capacity to neuroplastically rewire itself. Learn to play the piano, and the brain devotes more of its motor cortex to your fingers. Cut off an arm, on the other hand, and your brain could adaptively learn to reroute its control of an artificial arm by reworking the way it used various packets of neurons.

Phantoms were just an extension of this. Without removing any existing limbs or digits, we had created virtual fingers and limbs in synthetic spaces using pssi—the poly-synthetic sensory interface—to connect them to the neurons in the motor cortex. It was like having a dozen extra hands to manage controls, directly wired into our brains like a part of our bodies.

The flip side of the coin was feeding data into our senses, whether touch, sight, sound or any of the dozens of other more minor senses humans possessed, to create an unlimited number of metasenses that warned or informed us of what was happening within the informational flow of the multiverse. Of course this included entirely synthetic sensory worlds we could transport ourselves into.

Now we could completely customize our bodies and senses to the way we wanted to interact with real and virtual worlds. Helped along by the neurotrophic growth factors we’d embedded into the smarticles suffusing through our nervous systems, we’d discovered that the brain had a stunning capacity to grow and adapt to the pssi stimulus, far beyond even our wildest imaginings at the beginning of the project.

I latched myself firmly into place at the conference table and connected my primary visual point of view to this spatial control phantom. As I stretched and moved it, my subjective point of view shot back outwards from the conference room to hover outside the building.

Then I dove down into the treetops below, stopping just above the Boulevard. Quickly I cycled this phantom back and forth, limbering it up, and then I unlatched the rest of my phantoms. As I sat in the conference room with my hands resting gently on the polished cherry wood table, my eighteen phantoms danced around me, and I concentrated as I felt each of them sliding through their interface points, coordinating my visual and metasense overlays.

These phantoms weren’t just projections; they were a part of my living, breathing body. It felt like I was dancing, and I leaned back in my chair, my eyes half closed and smiling, enjoying my performance.

With a short characteristic tone announcing his arrival, Kesselring, the principle owner and CEO of Cognix Corporation, materialized opposite me on the other side of the table. I quickly and immediately stowed my phantoms as if sweeping toys back into a toy chest. He smiled as he watched me packing them away, waiting for me to finish before he spoke.

Below a thick head of perfectly groomed black hair, Kesselring’s flecked hazel eyes shone intensely above a salt and pepper beard. The worn creases in his face projected just the right angles of intelligence and sagacity for a man of his stature.

“Great work with the press today, Patricia. You are the best. You looked great!” he announced with some enthusiasm, if perhaps a touch patronizingly.

“I do get tired of lying to them all the time,” I sourly complained.

Maybe I was annoyed at him for making me wait, or perhaps I felt silly being caught playing with my phantoms. Really it was because I couldn’t shake the surreal realization that we were planning a conspiracy of the vastest scale, but, it wasn’t really a conspiracy, as in the end everyone would be complicit. We weren’t just building a better mouse trap here—we were building the best mouse trap of all time.

“We’re not really lying to anyone,” said Kesselring. “We’ve been over this a million times. I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing it up.”

“You’re right,” I sighed.

He was right.

We’d been over it countless times in the years since it’d become clear what we had to do, but as we neared the threshold, things just didn’t feel right anymore.

He changed the topic to what he’d really called this meeting to discuss.

“Do you think he suspects anything?”

I sighed deeply.

“Obviously he suspects something,” I replied, shaking my head, “but no, nothing to do with us, at least, not yet.”

The hamster wheel we had Vince running on hadn’t been my idea, but then again, it was only my deep connections into the Phuture News Network technology that made what we were doing to him possible. I’d also made some modifications to his proxxi, Hotstuff, to keep him where we wanted him. The intention had never been to actually harm Vince, but we couldn’t afford to let him see what we were planning, at least, not until it was too late to stop us.

“Good.”

“But he’ll figure it out eventually,” I pointed out. I was already having a hard time holding off his agents. “He’s already most of the way there.”

“Soon it won’t matter,” shrugged Kesselring. “And nobody would pay any attention to him anyway.”

A pause while I eyed Kesselring, trying to lay blame elsewhere for what I’d done to my friend. I took a deep breath.

“So we’re going to be giving it away for free?”

Kesselring smiled. “Free to install anyway.”

“And it doesn’t worry you that we’re not telling people the full story?”

He rolled his eyes and looked down into the conference table, tapping his fingers.

“Hal’s new work looks promising…”

“Christ, don’t get me started on Hal,” I scowled. I could see Kesselring was hiding something from me.

“I’m just saying…”

“I know what you’re saying.”

Using the problem to fix the problem was a disaster recipe for unintended consequences.

“As you yourself have said many times,” he pointed out, “we need to maximize saturation of the product introduction to maximize networking effects. The Terra Novan’s own synthetic reality system isn’t far behind us. We need to get our product in first and fast to capture the market.”

I sighed, shaking my head.

“That is not the goal of what we’re doing here.”

Kesselring looked at me steadily.

“Perhaps not your goal, but somebody has to pay for all this.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose, feeling the noose tighten around my neck.