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 strange not being able to see my future hanging in front of me. I mean, I could see my phutures, sense the nearness of their realities spreading out ahead of me, but now they all terminated abruptly. The fingers of time I’d carefully nurtured over the years had been painfully amputated.
Where before the future had flowed straight ahead of me, like a train running to known destinations, now all its 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?”
She obediently materialized walking 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, boots, and a 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 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.
I felt better with Hotstuff near, but I was still nervously fidgeting my phantoms’ limbs.
“Stop that,” she commanded.
She stopped walking, looking up to consider one of the limestone figures.
“Stop it,” she repeated softly.
“Stop what?”
I’d begun a nervous drumbeat 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. 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,” Hotstuff replied. “In all cases, I’ve had specialized agents rooting through the Phuture News system and sniffers floating at choke points throughout the open multiverse with 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 the situation?” I leaned back and looked up at the stars.
“The good news is that we’ve made some progress,” she said brightly. “We’ve plotted a path to extricate your physical body from Atopia, giving us a much larger playing field to work with.”
“That sounds good,” I replied. “So what’s the bad news?”
“The bad news is that the system is predicting about seven thousand possible outcomes for your, ah, demise in the next few days.”
“So that’s it, I’m dead?” The stars shone like steely pins, puncturing the night sky around me.
“Don’t be so defeatist. You only have a dozen things to get done personally today, so we can head this thing off. Tomorrow is another day. Just focus, be in the moment.”
“That’s what you said yesterday,” I complained.
I was being petulant. It was the last redoubt of the rich and aimless when faced with hard 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 me that I had to save my own life. This was the sort of stuff I was supposed to pay people for. Secretly, though, I was beginning to settle into it, even enjoying some of the new activity forced onto me, but 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 nine in ten you’ll kick the celestial bucket today if you wing it. Go ahead, go surfing.”
I nodded, digging my fingers into the sand.
“You know, boss, this may not be an entirely bad thing.… ”
That stopped me in my tracks.
“What the hell do you mean by that?” I almost spat the words out, nearly deciding to point out that proxxies terminated when their owners did, but held my tongue.
Hotstuff took a moment to choose her words. “I mean, before, well.… ”
“What?”
“Before, you were kind of aimless—you’d lost any interest in the future.”
“You think this is better?”
“At least you’re up in the mornings.”
I snorted. “Yeah, to live another day, to fight to stay alive.”
She let me consider what I’d just said. “See what I mean?”
I sighed. I was frustrated, but not as scared anymore. As perverse at it sounded, maybe she was right. I was certainly savoring the little moments of time that I could get to myself.
“Whatever. Anyway, it’s getting better, right?”
“We’re managing 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. “So I need to short 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?” Is she serious?
“I don’t want to get your hopes up, but 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 one that points somewhere far in the past.”
Finally, some progress.
“Can you explain a little more?”
“It would be easier to show you.”
9
Dappled sunlight streamed down through the jungle canopy high above, illuminating the hard-packed earth below. It cast 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 hunting today, chasing pigs that 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 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 blowgun, not knowing what he was doing, probably imitating his dad. Even as I inhabited someone else, whatever was hunting me down was trying to kill this body as well.