Shivering, I pilled my sweater tight around me. San Francisco sure was colder than I’d imagined.
From the vantage point of our camp, across some boulders and a field of grass at the edge of a stand of redwoods, I could dimly make out the top of the Golden Gate Bridge poking out from under a thick blanket of fog rolling into the bay. Night was falling and we’d lit a fire. I extended my hands toward the burning and crackling wood.
So this is what camping is really like. I liked the synthetic version better.
Following encrypted instructions from Marie, we’d gone off the grid as far as possible as quickly as we could manage. The state park above San Francisco was a designated network-free zone, and after collecting up some tents and camping supplies in the city, we’d been dropped off up here. We hiked ourselves to the edge of the forest.
I still couldn’t believe Patricia was gone.
Walking around out here, I had the crushing sensation of being blind and deaf and dumb. Being cut off from the dense communication network on Atopia gave me the feeling we’d been transported back into the Dark Ages. My body sang with the urge to drop it all and get back into the warm, comfortable embrace of the pssi on Atopia, but I resisted it as best I could.
Atopia was the only place I’d ever known. I’d taken for granted feeling the steady thrum of information through my metasenses, as easily as I’d assumed my own breath. My phantoms were still there, arrayed around me in empty hyperspaces, stretching out and away from me, but my metasenses were completely numb.
It felt as if most of my body had been amputated.
It was true what they said—the future was already here, just unevenly distributed. I belonged to that future, yet here I was with the rest of humanity. The world, however, was about change, and people could hardly wait. I laughed to myself. They really ought to be more careful what they wished for.
Vince had come with us. He figured whatever Patricia’s last instructions were, they might offer some key to his problem. Sid had also come, as well as Brigitte and Willy.
Well, Willy sort of came.
Up here in the state park, there was no network connectivity, so we’d had to embed a splinter of him into Brigitte for the trip into the woods. She seemed to enjoy having her own bit of Willy to take everywhere with her, and I doubted he would be getting that splinter back anytime soon.
Martin had elected to stay behind with our parents. All of our proxxi had made the trip as well, embedded as they were in our bodies. So there the nine of us sitting around the campfire—me, Robert, Sid, Vicious, Vince, Hotstuff, Brigitte and her proxxi Bardot, and Willy’s slightly confused splinter.
Nancy hadn’t come with us, despite my pleading, but this was before we’d learned what Jimmy had become. Jimmy had asked her to stay on a while to help with the investigation and preparations for Patricia’s Atopian state funeral, which he had managed to pull off despite the rumors of her working with the Terra Novans. I suppose her gratitude for this kindness in the wake of the scandal left Nancy with some sense of obligation toward him.
She’d insisted she would catch up with us, but it was too late now. A week had gone by since we’d left, and newly passed constitutional changes on Atopia had enabled Jimmy and Rick to maintain its state of emergency, a state of emergency that would never end.
Having barely survived destruction, Atopia’s once-cherished civil liberties—which Patricia was no longer there to defend—were quickly and unceremoniously thrown out the window. Almost overnight, Atopia had transformed itself into a police state, and Jimmy was quickly amassing a private psombie army.
In the ensuing investigation, it had been discovered that the viral skin had been vectored from the Terra Novans through Patricia’s own specialized pssi system. The best guess was that her old student Mohesha had implanted it. Patricia had gone on to infect everyone she’d come into contact with, and it had then spread quickly into everyone on Atopia. Of course, nearly everyone in our group was implicated in one way or another.
Patricia had encoded Marie onto a miniature data cube and had it smuggled off Atopia right before the lockdown of Jimmy’s new police state. We’d picked up the data cube, hidden in what looked like a walking stick, from an antique store in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
After lighting a fire at our campsite, we’d started up a private network to connect us all and awoken Marie. Her ethereal image had risen before us above the fire, wavering in the night air, a ghost that told a truly frightening nighttime tale as we huddled together, explaining the monster that Jimmy had become and the danger we all faced.
I yearned for my lazy days back on the beach.
The good news was that the phutures had stabilized—no apocalyptic wars, at least not in the near future. But pssi wasn’t the only game in town, either. A crush of other transformative technologies was crowding the future, and we’d have to wade our way through this brave new world to find Willy’s body. No matter what, Willy was our friend, and we had to help him, and somehow it also contained a secret about Jimmy—and this secret was the reason it has disappeared.
The next morning, we sat back around the embers of the fire that we’d resurrected from the night before, grimly sipping mugs of gritty coffee that Vince had made.
“Did you read the news Willy sent in this morning?” he asked as he handed me a cup.
“I did.”
Simultaneously with the commercial release of pssi into major metropolitan areas, Cognix had revealed the existence of seven new Atopian-class floating platforms at strategic physical locations around the globe. They must have been under construction for some time. There was was talk Phuture News about giving Atopia a seat on the United Nations Security Council—they wanted to appoint Jimmy.
Along with the coffee, Vince was handing out some sticky buns and granola bars for breakfast. We didn’t just need to eat, though. Without a steady supply of smarticles in the air around us, we needed to replenish our bodies’ supplies. Smarticles flushed out of the body if they weren’t topped up, and we didn’t know how secure the old ones were, so Patricia had created her own secret variant for us.
Pulling out the container filled with our new smarticle powder from my backpack, I dipped my finger into it, lifted it to my nose and inhaled—an easy way into the body was through the mucus membranes.
“Can’t we just tell people what we know?” mused Vince as he cupped his coffee, blowing the steam off it.
I offered him the bag of powder. “After what’s happened, it would look like more Terra Novan interference. Plus, coming from us, it wouldn’t exactly look reputable. We need to fly under the radar.”
“Aren’t we a motley bunch to trust for saving the world?” laughed Sid.
I wasn’t in the mood to joke.
“But I suppose it all depends on how you look at it,” Sid continued. “Maybe it’s not so bad.”
“What do you mean?”
“So, you and Nancy together being able to see everything, and you can pull those tricks with water.… ”
“So?”
Sid grinned. “Don’t you get it? You’re like some kind of omniscient being who walks on water, trying to save mankind from suffering a monster.”
“I mean, it’s all been done before, mate,” chipped in Vicious, “and so far so good!”
“Tell me that doesn’t sound biblical.” Sid smirked and transformed himself into a talking burning bush, sporting two stone tablets with our names inscribed on them.
I snorted. “Very funny.”