“There’s nothing going on here.”
We stared at each other.
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 and I shook it, but my mind was already elsewhere.
I quickly flitted off to the roof of the Cognix towers.
10
A deep, haunting wail reverberated through the morning air, carrying me upward, beyond the highest of the Himalayan peaks, but also inward and backward, deep into my mother’s womb. A million deaths surrounded me, all threaded outward 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. Making my way across the Plaza de Bolivar, I wiped the sweat off the nape of my neck with a T-shirt I’d pulled out of my backpack. Tourists stood around in small groups, looking at the grand framed-portico walls, perspiring together under the same sun that was baking me.
Pigeons scattered at my feet, but 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 toward it and the small convenience shop beneath it at the corner of the plaza.
“Hola!” I announced as I entered, feeling the relief of air-conditioning sweeping over me. I slid open the door to a refrigerator at the side of the register, pulling out a can of soda, and, parched, opened it and began gulping it down. The shopkeeper appeared from the back, just as I was about finished with it.
“Señor!” he exclaimed with eyes wide, staring at me.
“What?”
I put the can down. Was he that upset I didn’t pay for it first?
Reaching into my pockets, I felt 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.
My heart banged in my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I looked at the shopkeeper, who stared 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 applause. I waved to my fans as blackness descended.
The dungchen horns sounded again, their low, baleful moans awakening my mind from its semilucid 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’d been smuggling narcotics in the soda cans, and I would have unwittingly downed one before anyone could warn me off. We shifted the path of my walk later in the day through Bogota, away from the Plaza de Bolivar entirely, just in case.
The FDMs were a troubling development. 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 FDMs—flash death mobs.
With so many predicted future deaths, I’d now attracted my own FDM fan club, and my future deaths became 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.
The patterns Hotstuff had detected had 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 since most of it was coded in ancient symbols. We’d gone there to participate in the Monk Debates, to talk directly with those who really understood it.
A familiar tapping echoed through the slightly ajar wooden door 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 with what I was doing here, was highly illegal.
“Don’t even try it,” I warned Hotstuff.
She stood pouting in the doorway, done up in a French maid outfit, but, of course, still with her riding crop in hand. I pulled the bed sheets off before she could get to me. I stood and pulled my maroon dhonka robe around me.
Weeks had passed, and I was still here, but barely. The day before there’d been fifty thousand ways I could have died in the millions of phutures we were tracking, and I’d had to fight off two sequences in real time and real space—an incredibly close call.
While we’d slowed down the contagion, we hadn’t been able to stop it spreading. We tried simulations of locking my body in a vault, but this made things worse. 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.
Hundreds of thousands of bots and synthetics were running around doing large and small things to sweep the death events back, but I was still the key to many of them. This was going to be a big day. 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 across my ass, urging me awake. She swished the air in front of her with the crop, ending by pointing toward the door. We began to walk. “The threats are receding, or at least, they’ve stabilized.”
“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 stockings, smiling at them.
“Really,” she stated, looking back at me and stopping to lean against the rough-hewn rock wall of the corridor. “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?” 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 backward.
Hotstuff lowered the riding crop. “Vince, honey, remember what Nicky Nixons said, what Yongdzin, your Buddhist master, is saying. You need to stop thinking in deterministic terms. Live in the moment.”
“Right. 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 wish you’d chosen a different word for your mantra than my name.”