Wouldn’t it?
Something had to be wrong with the pssi system; it wasn’t working as it was supposed to. I’d gone to the orphanage in New York where I’d helped out, but it was gone too. I hadn’t been annoyed with them, had I? I wasn’t sure. Perhaps I’d been upset with everyone, angry at the world, but certainly I wasn’t anymore, so shouldn’t people be appearing back in my sensory spaces? Beyond terrified of being alone, I just desperately wanted to see someone, anyone.
11
Was it weeks or months?
It was hard to tell. My psyche was ungluing itself.
How long could this last? My thoughts kept returning to my own marketing campaigns, to pssi’s main selling feature of dramatically stretching the human lifespan. Was it possible that I could be left wandering alone for years or decades? Or even longer?
My mind frantically circled around and around this thought, unable to fathom it, clawing desperately at the edges of this prison without walls. I suspected that the system wouldn’t even let me kill myself. There was no escape.
My wanderings had taken me to Madrid, and I walked around Beun Retiro Park. It was as empty of people as everywhere else my lonely travels had taken me. I walked between rows of skeleton trees, across carpets of golden leaves that they were shedding like tears just for me. It was a beautiful day under a perfect sky as fall settled in.
At least, it would have been beautiful if there’d been anybody else there to share it with.
I thought a lot about Mr. Tweedles. Everywhere I went, I kept imagining I saw him, just up ahead, just passing a lamppost. I’d feel him brushing up against my leg, and then wake up, realizing I was still stuck in this nightmare. I think he’d been about the only creature who’d ever loved me. I hoped someone was taking care of him.
My life hadn’t ended, but without anyone else in it, it had ceased to have any meaning.
Stopping next to the Crystal Palace in the middle of the park, I opened my purse to take out another of the endless cigarettes. I lit up, and then bent down to pick up one of the leaves from the gravel path. I studied it carefully and began to laugh, and then to cry.
It was so peaceful. It was what I’d always wanted, just to be left alone, and I only had myself to blame, or to thank. My sobs of laughter rang out through the empty morning sunshine, under a faultless, empty blue sky.
CHILD PLAY
Part 2:
Commander Rick Strong
1
Identity: Commander Rick Strong
From this altitude, the stars just began to poke their pinpricks of light through the dark blue-violet sky. As the sun rose and morning broke fully, the hazy film of the Earth’s atmosphere painted a milky edge onto the curved horizon.
Looking down, I could just make out Atopia flashing like a distant green gem beneath wisps of stratospheric clouds, almost swallowed in the endless seas below. Zooming in to view it from here, Atopia appeared as a forested island about a mile across fringed by white-sand beaches. The only visible structures on its surface were the ring of the mass driver circling it and the four gleaming farm towers that rose up out of its center.
Returning my focus to the job at hand, I did another sweep of the area. Still nothing. I zeroed in on one of our UAVs, a giant, gossamer-winged creature whose photovoltaics glittered and reflected the morning sunshine back into the emptiness. In my telepresence point-of-view I followed it, watching its massive transparent propeller swing slowly around and around, urging it onward into the edge of space.
“Good enough?” I asked.
“Yeah, I think that’s far enough,” responded Echo, my proxxi.
“No hurry. Let’s make sure nothing is out here.”
I was enjoying the lazy crawl across the top of the world with the UAV. I took a deep breath, watching the sun reflect off the seas. The silence was serene. I should come up more often.
Just then, the new metasense I’d had installed prickled the back of my neck.
Turning my viewpoint around, I could see Patricia Killiam and her gaggle of reporters from the marketing presentation rising up from Atopia. In this augmented display space, each of their points-of-presence blinked and then brightened to a steady glow as they assembled around the test range. They appeared as a halo of tiny stars hanging ninety thousand feet up here with me.
They were waiting for the show to begin.
“Okay, Adriana, let’s light this thing up,” I said to one of my system operators, pushing my focus back to the dot of Atopia below and leaving the UAV to spin off into the distance.
Immediately, the speck of Atopia began pulsing with intense flickers of light, and I waited for the show to begin. I counted—one… two… three… four—and then the first flashes began to glitter in the near distance.
Tiny concentric shockwaves flashed outward and away. The empty space began to shimmer, filling with hundreds, and then thousands, and then tens of thousands of white-hot streaks that pancaked and mushroomed into a wall of flame. The inferno spread and engulfed me in a booming roar. Backpedaling down and away, I watched the sheet of flame envelope the sky.
“Very nice,” I declared, snapping into my body at Atopia Defense Force Command.
Everyone was watching a three-dimensional display of the firestorm hovering over the center of the room, surrounded by the floating control systems of the slingshot battery.
“Would have been nice on that mission back in Nanda Devi, huh?” suggested Echo, standing with folded arms beside me, admiring the show with the rest of the ADF Command team.
I took a deep breath. “That’s just what I was thinking.”
Jimmy, my up-and-coming protégé, laughed, pointing toward his temple. “The wars of the future are going to be fought in here.”
“Wars have always been fought in there,” I chuckled back. “But even so, these babies sure make me feel better.”
The slingshot batteries were rotating platforms that could sling tens of thousands of tiny explosive pellets into the sky at speeds of up to seven miles per second. The pellets were set to disintegrate and spread their incendiary contents at preset distances, creating a shield-effect weapon that could put up an almost impenetrable wall of superheated plasma at ranges of a hundred or more miles away. It could take out incoming ballistic missiles, cruise weapons, aircraft, pretty much anything coming our way.
Heck, if I feel like it, I thought, I could even take out a mean-looking flock of seagulls from two hundred clicks.
And so far, seagulls were all that dared come near us.
Atopia bristled with an array of fearsome weapons, of which the slingshots were just one part. Some of my other toys included the mass driver and the aerial and submarine UAV defense systems, not to mention the offensive and defensive cyberweapons. Everything was dusted down so heavy with smarticle sensor motes that even a flea couldn’t hop out there without me getting a bead on it. We were locked down tighter than a nun’s thighs, and that’s just how I liked it.
All that neo-hippie stuff that Atopia floated on in the waters of the world media didn’t mean that a lot of nasty people out there weren’t eyeing this little piece of heaven with very bad things in mind. Atopia was in international waters, and as one of the first floating sovereign city-states, it had to be able to protect itself from all comers. At some point, the Atopian masters of synthetic reality had to bow to where the rubber met the road in the dirty, physical world, and that was where I came in.