“I’m with you, Bobby!” he screamed back.
The warriors around us roared, and with that, we galloped off toward the massing Tatars, surging once more unto the breach.
“Today, we ride with God!”
My army thundered across the steppes and into destiny.
2
What was I again?
I felt funny, disconnected, discom-BOB-ulated.
Giggling, I looked down at myself, trying to focus my meandering mind. I had the shape of a giant yellow blob—wait, more like a giant yellow BOB—with plastic skin, floating amid other aimlessly drifting blobs. Taking a deep breath, my blobness expanded and then contracted.
That was very satisfying, I thought, so I did it again.
A sense of relaxation began to soak through my membranes, and my consciousness slipped backward and sideways through time and space.
Another blob—smaller, blue—collided with me, interrupting my introspection. The blue blob took a liking to me, and like two oil drops meeting on a watery surface, it began to merge into me, its blueness fusing with my yellowness to produce a bulging green smudge on my side.
I tasted fresh blueberries.
Reaching out to the other blobs nearby, I discovered I could swim through the goo, sweeping them aside or toward me with phantom telekinesis, and tasting them as I went. And so began the game of collecting the tastiest blobs toward me, generating a flurry of savory color that mottled into my body as I twisted and spun through the rainbow rain.
After frothing things up so much, I couldn’t see anymore, so I stopped to let things settle. The tiny blobs tickled all over as they floated up past me and I shivered.
Wait, these aren’t blobs—they’re bubbles!
Everything smelled so intensely salty that I realized I was actually in the ocean.
Shafts of sunlight stabbed down from the airy world above, fading into the watery blackness below. Looking down at myself again, I jiggled some newly hatched tendrils. In an excited rush, I began wriggling off at full steam toward a mass of phosphorescent creatures dancing nearby in the voluminous darkness.
A translucent worm popped into view beside me, and I halted, frozen amid specks of slowly sinking organic detritus that hung soundlessly in a stop-motion cloud around us. The worm snacked on one of the specks, and then another, watching me sideways.
Curiouser and curiouser.
“Bob,” said the worm. “Hey buddy! Is that you?”
Yes, I thought, I am Bob.
“Yeah, I’m Bob. I mean, yeah, it’s me,” I replied, a little dazed.
“It’s me, Sid. Where have you been? It’s been crazy down here. That last set was freaking intense. Things got a little weird for a while there, and then I thought, ‘Jeez, where’s Bobby?’ And so I came over here to clear my head, and whammo, there you were. Crazy, huh?”
I giggled as my mind seeped into the here and now. That’s right. I had come with Sid out to Humungous Fungus, beyond the Looking Glass. We’d dropped into this chillworld to watch the slingshot test fire as part of the sensorgy party that’d been going on for a few days.
Memories oozed into my amoebic brain.
“Hey Sid, wazzzzzup?” was all I could think to say.
“Not much, man, not much at all,” Sid-worm giggled back. “Hey, they’re about to start the slingshot test. You ready to go?”
“Giddy up.”
The sensorgy transmogrification of the slingshot weapons test was still resonating hard as we relaxed at the peripheries of Humungous Fungus. The fiery might of the weapons demonstration had been funneled into a multisensory party mash-up that all the pssi-boys and pssi-girls had been waiting weeks for, but now it was over, and a post-party depression was sinking in. Most of our friends were emo-porning their way down from their highs, but I preferred keeping it natural.
“That was intense!” glowed Sid-worm. We were floating through a patch of dimensionless deprivation-space in an attempt to cool off our nervous systems.
I munched on some mouth-candy at the edge of the dimensionless space, trying to think of what I was trying to think about, and then: sudden clarity as the lost idea reformed itself. My disembodied mind latched firmly onto the thought like a drowning man at sea finding a life raft, my consciousness pulling itself up for a breath of fresh air.
“Oh yeah, hey, Sid, so do you really think I should talk to him? I mean, I feel like it’s not going to make a difference anyway.”
“Absolutely, my friend, I think this is more about you. You know what I mean?”
“I guess so,” I replied, unconvinced.
My sense of wonder at the world around me began to lose its fizziness, and my tendrils were going limp. Blinking, I looked around. I could still see the bending and patterning of the visual hallucinations, but my head had snapped back into some sort of real space.
I sighed. “I gotta get back. It’s my brother’s birthday, and my dad asked me to come home for a family breakfast.”
“I’m sorry, I forgot,” Sid-worm said softly. He looked up into the light, considering something. “I love you, buddy, and maybe it’s not for me to say.… ”
“What?” Is he asking me a question? I was still pretty high.
“Maybe you should slow down a bit. You’re wasted all the time. I understand, but—”
I laughed. “If that’s not the space-pot calling the kettle black.”
“I’m just saying.… ”
“I know what you’re saying,” I admitted after a pause. “And I appreciate it. But let’s just get going.”
An urgent ping from Robert, my proxxi, arrived.
“My dad’s already complaining about me being late,” I added, looking at the message.
“Okay. Let’s head.”
With that, we began to surge upward toward the light, leaving the dancing creatures below. I remembered when it wasn’t Sid, but my brother dancing beside me in Humungous Fungus under the lights of the phosphorous jellies. It seemed like just yesterday.
3
Growing up on Atopia was great and all, but for me, pssi was only good for two things: playing the gameworlds and getting stoned. Oh, and I guess it was cool for surfing, too, so three things. Or, actually four—it was also great for hiding the fact that I was stoned.
Still buzzing from my excursion into Humungous Fungus, I had Robert filtering my body movements and speech so that I appeared perfectly normal, or at least close to normal. Robert tended to overdo it in these situations, and if he wasn’t my proxxi, I’d swear he did it on purpose.
Coming out onto the sun deck of our habitat overlooking the ocean, Robert nimbly handled seating me at the place opposite my dad. Martin was sitting to my left, my mom to my right, and sitting behind my mom on a chair was a guy wearing a toga and weather-beaten leather thongs.
It was a beautiful morning, and a slight breeze was just offsetting the unseasonably hot weather we’d been having. Gulls squawked in the distance over the kelp forests while waves swept calmly past on their way into Atopia.
My dad scrutinized me as I sat down. “The least you could have done was be on time for your brother’s birthday breakfast.”
Although we’d only been born minutes apart, I’d been born at 11:58 pm and my brother the next day—so technically, our birthdays were on different days. I’d already suffered through a birthday dinner the night before with everyone.