I didn"t have long to live and I could feel the lifeblood ebbing away from this body. I propped myself up on the hood and leaned against the bulletridden windshield of the GTO. Martin had already died some time ago.
"Dude, that was actually pretty cool!" I admitted to the lead Comment Troll, taking the offered smoke from him to have a drag.
He was sitting up on the car with me. Most of his b.l.o.o.d.y forehead had been shorn away by my bullet, showing white bone underneath, but he was in a jolly mood.
"That gameworld audience went through the friggin" roof," he agreed. "There are already thousands of copycats going on."
As he said this, an LAPD officer came running out of the bushes, disheveled and b.l.o.o.d.y but intact, running up to me.
"Mother of G.o.d, please help me, please," he whimpered, his hands pressed together in a prayer position.
I just raised my eyebrows and shrugged, giving the smoke back to the troll. The officer looked at the two of us and began backing away, shaking his head and making small pathetic noises. At that moment a large, muscular troll burst through the same bushes the cop had come through.
"Ah ha!" the new troll announced. "There you are!"
He pounced on the officer, who managed to back away a step or two, holding his hands up defensively.
The troll began methodically hacking away at the officer with his axe. I had to close one eye as bodily fluids spurted and splattered onto me amid blood curdling screams. I looked at the troll leader, shaking my head with eyebrows raised.
He smiled back at me and nodded.
"Ah, Fred, Fred!" said the troll leader, raising one stumpy green arm.
Dripping in blood, Fred looked up from his whimpering prey. "Yeah?"
"Could you give it a rest, Fred?"
Fred pouted and frowned, and then sighed.
"Fine."
Grumbling under his breath, he stuck the point of his axe through the police officer"s skull. This ended all the commotion. The troll skulked off.
My vision was swimming.
"Sid? You ready to go?"
True to his a.s.sessment, Sid had bled out slowly and hadn"t gotten another scratch. Sitting atop a pile of stinking corpses, he was now chatting up a female troll over near our Mustang.
"Yep!" he waved back, and picked up his gun and stuck it in his mouth.
"Cool."
I picked up my .357, looked at the head troll and said, "Let"s do this again sometime."
With a smile I opened my mouth and stuck in the barrel of my gun. Tasting the sharp tang of metal and gunpowder, I pulled the trigger. The last thing I felt was the curious sensation of my head exploding backwards into s.p.a.ce and suddenly, I was floating in blackness.
Dead. At least in that universe.
It was a funny thing. We could now die a hundred, a thousand, a million times out in the synthetic worlds we traveled through-we just couldn"t die in our ident.i.ty world. It was just that one place out of millions where we couldn"t die, it was a solution set approaching zero.
With all the flittering between worlds and bodies, stimswitching with friends, people borrowing your body and your body being driven around by your proxxi, you"d think it would get confusing to figure out where or when you were or how to get back into your own body, and it could be disorienting. That was why a basic feature of pssi, hardwired at the deepest level, was what we affectionately called the Uncle b.u.t.ton-when you gave up and wanted back into your own body, you punched it. You just had to remember that it was there.
I sighed as I floated in the dimensionless black s.p.a.ce and performed the well worn ritual: look down to where your chest should be, reach into your chest, punch it, and whammo, I felt myself falling backwards.
Now I was jogging through trees near the eastern inlet. Sunlight was streaming down through the green canopy above.
"Taking me for a jog?"
"Uh huh, you asked me to, remember?" replied my proxxi, Robert, just a voice in my head. "Did you read the latest storm warnings?"
"No..." I replied, disinterested. I knew they were having a hard time steering out of the way of Hurricane Newton and it looked like we might have to battle through the edges of the storm, but what did I care. I"d just be off in the gameworlds anyway.
"Well it"s gotten a lot worse," Robert explained, "you"d better not get too dug into the gameworlds this afternoon, and stay off the pharmacologicals."
"In case of what?" I asked, surprised. It was rare Robert would ever ask me to do something.
"Just in case."
I shrugged. Sure. He seemed worried.
"Do you want to transition control to you?" he asked, apparently satisfied.
"Naw," I replied, "just take us home, just in case like you said. I"m going for another gameworld session with Martin." I felt bad now for yelling at him.
"That"s probably a good idea," replied my proxxi.
For the rest of the day we opted to go old school and return to Mongol battle. We all met up afterwards at a tikibar on the beach for some beers. It was well past nightfall, and the place was packed with tourists.
Martin loved the Mongolian battle worlds. He was still hopped up from the fight and was jumping around in the sand, howling away as he aped Bruce Lee style karate moves. Sid, Vicious, Robert and I watched him with amus.e.m.e.nt.
"Bob, that was awesome, you ducking and diving like that, it was like, superhuman!"
I"d had Sid remap my tactile water-sense for Mongol battle so that I could feel arrows coming at me like eddy currents through my skin. The incoming projectiles had become a part of my body, and as I quickened, I was able to duck and weave away with blinding speed, roaring through the battle as I hacked away at the Tatar sc.u.m.
"Yes, it was superhuman. That is perfectly accurate, we have superhuman abilities. We are in fact supermen. At least until the rest of humanity plugs into pssi, at which point..."
I paused to take a swig of my beer.
"We will just be, well, just men again."
I shrugged and smiled. I could see that Martin wasn"t troubled by existential angst anymore. It was nice to be nice to him for once.
Sid smiled. He liked it when I was nice to Martin. He leaned over and whispered under his breath, "You"re going to talk to him, right? For you, you understand?"
I rolled my eyes but nodded.
"Yeah, yeah, you don"t give up do you?"
The surf had been pounding noisily as we all sat there, but a truly gargantuan wave suddenly thundered in, literally shaking the party lanterns hanging off the tikibar. Everyone turned to look out into the blackness. Those were some monster storms brewing out there.
Just then, a system of pssi alert channels began to activate.
7.
FLOATING UP AT THE EDGE of s.p.a.ce, my dad had asked us to get together as a family to see firsthand what was happening. We watched the two converging hurricanes swirling ominously in three dimensions below us. They had suddenly strengthened in the past day, both past category four now, and like two enormous threshing wheels, they now threatened to pin Atopia against the West Coast of America.
Atopia was still holding its own as we backed away, but we were now running out of room and the phuturecasts didn"t see any way around them. Surface evacuation had just been ordered. Jimmy was right in the thick of the emergency preparations.
Dread filled me realizing the impregnable fortress of Atopia was somehow threatened.
Flitting back to our family habitat to get ready, I clipped back into my body. After a rushed inventory a.s.sessment with my proxxi Robert, it seemed I really didn"t need to bring much, so, with some time to spare, I let my mind slip backwards and away, to an early inVerse memory of my family I liked to escape to in times of stress.
Blinking in the sunshine, I could feel sand trapped wetly in the crack of my a.s.s. At the time I was having too much fun to notice it as my brother chased me around the beach on his pudgy little legs. We"d just turned four, and I"d just pa.s.sed the point where my parents had allowed my proxxi, Robert, to fully take over my body, but he hadn"t yet progressed there yet.
Despite being twins, my brother had always lagged behind me.
So as he chased me around the beach, squealing with excitement and waving his bright orange plastic digger, just before he could touch me I would flit out to another spot nearby, disappearing suddenly from in front of him to reappear a few feet away. He hooted with delight each time I did it, and I would stick out my tongue and waggle my hands, thumbs in my ears, and raspberry him. With squeaks of glee, he would change directions and run at my new spot.
I was laughing and laughing.
My mum and dad were sitting together on a beach blanket, my dad"s arm around her and mum with her great big sungla.s.ses on, laughing with us. My mum was almost crying she laughed so hard, pressing her face into my dad"s chest, and this just egged me on as I flittered w.i.l.l.y-nilly around the beach, taunting my baby brother.
I hadn"t seen mum laugh in years, and neither my dad for that matter. Quitting the inVerse, I wiped the tears from my eyes.
InVersing, going back to relive your own personal universe of stored sensory memories, was a dangerous thing if you let it get its tentacles into you. When you were happy, it didn"t matter, you never seemed to bother with it, but when you felt sad or frightened, sliding back into the past and becoming a person you once were, happy and carefree, was about as addictive as something could get.
ReVersing was worse still, going back and reliving the past, but running new wikiworld simulations from a decision point you"d made, and changing that decision to enable a new world to evolve and spin on from that point-a simulation of how the world could have been, not how it was.
Perhaps these weren"t just simulations, but portals into alternate realities that branched off from our own timeline. Windows into life as it could have been, as it actually was somewhere else. It was hard to tear yourself away when it was something, or someone, you desperately missed.
Many people I knew spent more time inVersing and reVersing, or as gla.s.sy eyed emo-p.o.r.ners, than they did living their lives in the present. Dr. Hal Granger said on his EmoShow that going back and reliving the past helped us grow emotionally, helped us to find resolution and happiness-I wasn"t so sure.
What my family had done, though, was much worse. It had made a certain desperate sense at the time as we"d tried to deal with our grief, as I"d tried to deal with mine. In fact, the whole thing had been my idea, and it was an idea I was regretting more than I could bear any longer.
Morning had broken in wet smudges while I thought about all this. I was sitting on the covered deck of our island habitat watching the huge swells generated by the coming storms gathering and slapping together like drunken sailors. Ragged, scudding clouds hung under an ominous and luminous sky. The air was calm and proverbially quiet.
Waves were coming from every direction, sometimes breaking, sometimes wobbling together and rising up to double their height before awkwardly falling back over. It was a chaotic and frightening scene, churning up the kelp forests as they sheared away beyond the perimeter.
Even the ocean was confused today.
A steaming cup of coffee, hot and thick enough to stand a spoon in, warmed my hands as I cupped them together. I could feel the heat and strength of the coffee seeping into my veins like a caffeine-pumping life support system. Watching the churning watery tumult, my surfer mind tried to force order from the chaos, tried to find a pattern from here to safety.
I flitted out of my body and into the local wikiworld, to a point about fifty feet off the deck right in front of me, and watched me watching the waves. Robert, my proxxi, took a sip of coffee for me and waved at me. I just stared back.
Our habitat looked small and vulnerable from here against the backdrop of the ocean. Dark, evil looking clouds were stealing quickly across the horizon, piling up in the sky in an enormous approaching wall. Swinging my gaze around to look inwards to Atopia, it looked muted and under threat as the roiling clouds and seas reflected dully off its gla.s.sine towers.
From this perspective, the huge incoming swells were rising up towards the beach, almost completely obscuring it as they surged and broke on their ride around Atopia. Instead of their usual rhythmic thumping, the waves were breaking at different points, choppy, bewildered.
Ma.s.sive clouds of spray were sent booming upwards from the collapsing waves, hanging the beaches in veils of misty white fog. As I watched, a sharp wind began to blow and gain in strength within seconds, snapping the flags to attention on top of our habitat.
The storms were upon us.
Clipping fully back into my body, I quit my procrastinating and began to scan a list of what needed to get finished for the evacuation, sipping my coffee, luxuriating in its hotness.
"Bob, do you have a minute?" asked Martin, pinging me on a dedicated family channel. I"d turned off all the other channels, even my dimstim, as I tried, for once, to focus on the here and now.
I looked at the list again before I answered, "Yeah sure, come meet me in my room."
I could at least start to organize my stuff while we talked. I crossed the deck and made for the lower levels, dropping down a set of stairs and opening the door to my room. It was dark inside with the shades drawn. I didn"t come in here much these days. Accessing the room controls, I faded the gla.s.s walls to transparency while at the same time opening some vents to let some fresh air in. The fusty, closed-in smell of the room almost instantly gave way to fresh ocean air. I heard a knock.
"Come on in," I called out.
Martin materialized near the couch set against the gla.s.s wall to the open ocean. His eyes were downcast, and he fidgeted the fabric on his pant leg as he flopped himself down onto the couch. He looked worried, which was unusual for Martin.
"What"s up, bud?"
"Bob, so, I was looking at the evacuation manifest, and, well, I"m not on it. I tried pinging dad about it but he"s ignoring me for some reason. Could you try to reach him? Do you know why?"
The words froze me in my tracks. Of course the evacuation list was an ADF function, and not a part of the Solomon House research project. Their personnel manifests would be different. Dad must be off splintered in a dozen places fighting for control of the public relations situation, trying to put a positive spin on Atopia being crushed by the two giant storms.
I shrugged and lied, "I have no idea, Martin. Anyway, who cares, let"s just get a move on, huh?"
Martin didn"t move or say a word. He just sat and wrung his hands, cracking his fingers, looking even more worried. He looked about to cry.
I couldn"t take it anymore. I snapped.
"Martin, look," I said, gathering my thoughts. I"d been thinking about doing this for a long while now, and I let some anger swell my courage. "I don"t know the best way to say this, but..."
Still I hesitated.
"Yes Bob?" he pleaded with perfectly unaware eyes.
"Martin, look..." I repeated.
He looked at me.