The Dystopia Chronicles
by Matthew Mather
For Julie, and the memory of Ash House, where much of this was written. And for the boys and girls at the White Horse. You know who you are.
Prologue
Seeing his dead mother making tea in microgravity, a hundred million miles from where he’d buried her in Idaho, was the first thing that ever struck fear into Commander Stockard during his thirty-year career as a space jockey. Even seeing the world flicker like a candle just moments before—the lights of the entire night side of the Earth winking on and off as if someone was flicking a switch—hadn’t fazed him.
Startled perhaps, but not scared.
Not like this.
It’s just a hallucination, he tried telling himself, cabin fever from being stuck in this tin can for two months. It’s not real. Keep calm. Panic is the enemy. His dead mother smiled, wagging a teapot in the air—did he want some? He shook his head. No, thank you.
It had to be the stress. Parking a hundred billion tons of comet ice in Earth orbit was a project of destiny. Seven years ago, when the deep space monitoring network picked up comet Wormwood-P/2058D12, it was heralded as humanity’s opportunity to finally—really—begin colonization of near-Earth space.
Commander Deng looked at him and frowned. “Still no comms from Earth. What do you think, solar flare?”
Stockard breathed deep. Maybe, but their instruments would have picked up a magnetic disturbance. “Probably more to do with the fight between Atopia and Terra Nova.” In the two months since the Comet Catcher mission left Earth, the struggle between these two colonies had climaxed into a full-blown kinetic conflict.
The engine burn had been going on for a minute already. The ship rumbled.
Bits of debris from weeks of zero gravity fell as the ship decelerated. A pencil Stockard left wedged next to a display unit bounced off his suit. He tried to grab it, swearing as he missed.
Glancing at Commander Deng, he could see something was wrong. “Everything all right?” Stockard yelled above the roar of the engines.
She blinked and shook her head. “It’s just… I think I’m hallucinating…”
“Burn complete,” announced the system computer. “On target for Wormwood.”
Stockard gazed at her steadily. Should he tell her? Fear was contagious. Out of the corner of his eye, in the reflection of the cockpit glass, Stockard’s dead mother waved at him from just down the access tunnel. Goose bumps rippled across his arms under the thick layers of his spacesuit.
His mother was waiting for him.
Part 1:
Limbo
1
A dozen arched doorways lined each side of the great hall, each twenty feet high and topped with sparkling colored glass. Bright light streamed in. Between the doorways, gold-veined marble columns rose from polished floors to a ceiling frescoed with cherubic angels. An image of God hung over the middle of the room, reaching down to the world below.
It was a virtual projection, one of Jimmy Scadden’s private worlds, and it was the first time Nancy Killiam had seen it with her own eyes. She’d heard rumors, but getting into this space had been difficult. You had to be invited. Nancy wasn’t, but she’d infiltrated the virtual sensory channels of someone who was.
She was spying from a front-row-center seat.
“Join me if you believe in everlasting peace,” Jimmy thundered from a pulpit in front of her, shining in his white military uniform. “Join with me, and you shall never grow old, you shall never die.”
It was a psombie recruitment session.
Row upon row of young men and women sat at attention, all of them attending the meeting virtually through pssi—the Atopian poly-synthetic sensory interface. Their eyes and minds were focused on Jimmy. In exchange for unlimited and unfettered access to the Atopian synthetic reality multiverse, Jimmy was bargaining for use of their physical bodies in the real world, disconnecting their minds with a body-lease contract, turning themselves into psombies.
What was he up to? Nancy squirmed to stay hidden behind the consciousness of the observer in whom she was hiding. A part of her wanted to burst out and announce to Jimmy that she’d discovered him, but she’d never been good at confrontation, and what Jimmy was doing wasn’t illegal. She couldn’t go running back to the Cognix Corporation boardroom or Atopian Council, screaming like a child. Aunt Patricia would have known what to do, but she was dead. She’s gone. You need to figure this out for yourself.
Patricia Killiam’s passing hadn’t just opened up a yawning gap in the fabric of Nancy’s life: having one of the founders of Atopia die had opened a vacuum in the power structure of what’d become one of the most potent forces shaping the world—the release of pssi technology. Nancy stared at Jimmy on stage. Patricia had been a central figure in his life as well, but her death didn’t seem to be affecting him. At least, not in the ways that made sense to Nancy.
“I have chosen each of you personally”—Jimmy nodded to his audience—“to be my representatives in your communities. You are the chosen ones.” He paused and smiled. “If, of course, you choose me.”
The crowd shifted in their seats. They were here. They’d already made up their minds.
Nancy had known Jimmy her whole life, grown up together with him in the pssi-kid program on Atopia, part of the first generation of children born with limitless virtual reality built into their minds. But this man up on stage wasn’t the quiet and efficient Jimmy with whom she’d grown up, the shy boy who had hidden in the labs of the Atopian research centers almost as much as she had.
Jimmy opened his arms to the crowd. “Let me be the one that saves you—saves you from a life of drudgery, from a life of pain, from uncertainty. I can free you from all of this, to a world where your every desire is fulfilled.”
With these words the doors to the great hall flew open, revealing dreamscapes beyond. Nancy could only guess what the rest of the assembled glimpsed. Jimmy was using open access to their memories to project fantasy worlds, a combination of where each attendee had felt safest, and of what they always wanted to be. All Nancy saw was her Aunt Patricia, staring back at her from the grave.
“Give me your bodies,” Jimmy roared, “and in return I offer immortality.”
The reality skin of the hall merged with the fusing realities of the attendees, each of them greeted by a splintered copy of Jimmy who whisked them into their fantasy lands. Nancy released the sensory channels of the person she was ghosting, letting her primary presence settle behind her office desk. Mahogany paneling appeared in her visual sensory frames. Bookcases lined the walls behind her copper-studded leather attending chairs, the Persian carpets underfoot lit softly by green-glass lamps that glowed on the walls.
Cunard, Nancy’s digital symbiote—her proxxi—was sitting in one of the chairs. “We should gather more information before we say anything to anyone.”
Nancy smiled. Cunard, her protector and counselor, more now than ever before, and never any less of a perfectionist. Then again, he was just a reflection of herself. She nodded, agreeing with him. “Good work on getting me into that meeting.”
“What he’s doing might not be strictly illegal, but it’s certainly suspicious, and it’s been hidden from the Atopian Council.”
“Or at least hidden from us.” Nancy wasn’t sure where the fault lines in the newly evolving Atopian power structure were falling. It might just be that she wasn’t on a need-to-know list. She felt like she was drowning, unable to get a firm grasp on anything to hold her up. She needed help. “What I need you to focus on is finding Bob and Sid.”