2
The last dregs of the night drained sleeplessly away, and despite the world’s best efforts, my life filled with yet another new day. More dreams of death—but then, they weren’t just dreams.
Or were they?
I felt nauseated.
It was still early morning. From beneath the sheets, I could just glimpse the dawning sky regaining its composure as the roar and flame of the slingshot test began to die down. Dread filled me as I watched stiletto-tipped, fishnet-clad legs stalking toward me from the living area.
The lights flipped on as Hotstuff tore the sheets off me.
“Aw, come on!” I whimpered, weakly fumbling for the covers.
Hotstuff was done up in a bad-schoolgirl outfit today, complete with a checked miniskirt and a starched men’s dress shirt. The shirt was knotted at the bottom to expose her belly ring, and unbuttoned far enough 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!”
She giggled and wound back up to smack me again.
“Hey!” I screeched, grabbing some sheets to protect myself and jumping 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 tight-fitting army fatigues. She menaced me with the riding crop as I stood, rubbing my stubble with one hand and defending myself with the other.
Spinning my point-of-view into Hotstuff’s, I took a look at myself. Disheveled and still cowering from the riding crop, I looked ridiculous. I straightened up and dropped the sheets. With all the gene therapy, I looked barely forty, though we both knew it wouldn’t be long before I was twice that. A thick shock of graying hair still hung playfully, if listlessly, over the bleary eyes that stared back at me. I clicked back into my own point-of-view.
“Two things before we get started, sir,” announced Hotstuff, snapping smartly to attention and giving me a salute with her 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.
“Patch Bob through,” I replied groggily. Sensing Hotstuff hesitating, I added, “Now, Hotstuff!”
Bob immediately materialized before me, holding his yellow longboard, smirking. He looked stoned already.
What a great kid; it was just too bad.
“So… surfing today?” asked Bob lazily. Sizing up Hotstuff’s outfit, he grinned.
Yep, he’s high. “Sorry, Bob. Can’t make it. Something’s popped up.”
“Popped up, huh?” he laughed, looking 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.”
Jealously, I watched the waves. My nerves were frazzled, and I hadn’t been out surfing in weeks.
“What could you possibly have to do? I thought you were, like, the richest guy in the world?”
“I wish I could.… ”
I looked pleadingly toward Hotstuff. She rolled her eyes and wagged the riding crop at me.
“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. But only one hour, right? After that it could get dangerous.”
I was already halfway out the door, getting my wetsuit, by the time she finished the sentence. Bob gave me a goofy thumbs-up before flitting away to rejoin his body in the hunt for killer waves. I’d catch up with him in a minute.
Bob and I sat on our boards and waited for a decent set of waves just inside the edge of the kelp forest near the Western Inlet, not far from my habitat.
Atopian kelp, the base of our ecological chain, had been bioengineered to grow inverted, with its holdfast becoming a gas-filled bladder floating on the surface and the kelp blades spreading hundreds of feet down into the depths. It sprouted outward at a fantastic rate like a watery mangrove, beginning near the edge of the underwater extremity of Atopia and stretching from there to about two miles out across the water.
From here I could just see my personal habitat bobbing in the distance. My wealth afforded me the luxury of my own private living space, a household attached to one of the passenger cannon supports, sprouting up out of the water and into the sunshine. Most of the million-plus inhabitants lived below decks in the seascrapers stretching into the depths. Atopia was the ultimate in dense, urban planning.
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 nearly thirty years ago. Of course, some of my closest friends were founders of the Atopian program, so it hadn’t really surprised anyone.
America just wasn’t what it used to be anymore, with constant cyberattacks pushing it 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, the kicker had 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. 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. “I need to get going!”
“Already?”
“Yeah, I need to get back to that thing. Hotstuff is on my back. ”
My promised hour wasn’t 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. “Anyway, ping me if you change your mind.”
With a wave good-bye I flitted off back to my habitat, leaving Hotstuff to guide my body home.
3
I checked out some news Bob sent me as I returned to the top deck of my habitat. There’d been a rash of UFO sightings in the Midwest the night before, and he knew I was a paranormal fan-boy. On this day, though, more important things were on the agenda.
I strode back and forth like a caged animal, my mind racing, and then made my decision. I looked out toward the breaking waves. There was really no option.
“Ready for business?” Hotstuff was waiting for me on a stool at the deck bar, drinking a latte and going over the morning’s news, 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 in the midmorning sunshine. It was about the time I’d usually be waking up, but I’d already been up since dawn.