The music stopped and the space filled with a pink mist of ionized vanilla. Bob frowned. Where was Sid? He was pretty sure it had been more than “a minute”. The caressing hands of the couch slackened, and applause filled the room.
In the fog Bob saw a familiar shape, standing out of place, but he couldn’t focus his mind.
The general announcement channel sounded in Bob’s auditory channels. “Let’s hear it for SJ Sanjeeve!”
The applause grew louder.
Who was that? The shape became more distinct.
“And now what you’ve all been waiting for, Atopia’s own Kid Psssssssi–cho!”
A cheer went up through the crowd, and the room dropped into blackness.
“That’s Jimmy,” Bob said aloud, ripping himself up from the couch’s embrace. Or was it? Bob’s mind had congealed under the influence of the drugs.
The pink mist faded into a red-orange grayness, and a sub-audio vibration shook Bob’s flesh. The ground transmogrified itself into a rippling lake with tenuous wisps of vapor clinging to its surface. As the dancers around Bob shuffled their feet, they sent out waves like they were walking on water. A few of them laughed and began kicking up splashes at each other.
The fog lifted and craggy terra cotta mountains appeared ringing the distant horizon beneath a burnt orange, star-speckled sky. The bone-shaking vibrations of the music mounted in urgency. Through the dissipating fog, the rings of Saturn appeared suspended in the sky, stretching impossibly far up above the dance floor that was perched precariously on its edge. A methane storm cloud was rolling quickly across the horizon, roiling across the mountain ridges as it descended on the crowd.
The dance hall had been patched into the sensor-mote network on Titan, at Kraken Mare near its north pole.
Bob reached out into the familiar hyperspaces that connected him with Sid, but he felt nothing. He tried pinging Robert for help, but realized his proxxi channels were locked down. He sloshed through the methane lake, squinting into the crowd.
The audio wound itself into a keening shriek, and the first globs of methane rain started falling onto the crowd, splashing into the lake, sending vapor shooting upward. On cue, the music dropped into a planet-shaking bass rhythm that sent waves through the lake, toppling boulders down the mountainsides in the distance. The crowd went crazy, bursting into dance, jamming all of Bob’s sensory channels.
Where was Sid?
“No use trying to get any outgoing, mate.” The man in front of Sid slapped the smooth bedrock wall to make his point. “No signals get through this.” He reached a hand out. “Shaky.”
Sid clicked off the synthetic-K coursing through his pssi. The world came into focus. Who was this guy? He studied the close-cropped gray stubble atop the little man’s head and reached out to take his hand. No data on him appeared in Sid’s displays, no future prediction models, no nerve conduction potentials he could tap into to figure out what was coming. “ ‘Shaky?’ ” Sid asked. “You mean like ‘shaky hands?’ ”
The man pumped Sid’s hand, smiling and crinkling his nose. “No, mate, my name is Shaky.”
The guy next to Shaky put out his hand too. “Bunky.”
Sid let go of Shaky’s hand and shook Bunky’s. “Sid.”
The girl Sid had made contact with in the main hall, Sibeal, strode into the communal bathroom. “We need to go now!” She shifted out of her reality skin into worn cargo pants, a black tank top, and a grim expression.
A second ago the bathroom had been filled with partygoers, but they’d all exited as if on cue.
Shaky and Bunky’s smiles had disappeared as well.
They were the only ones there.
One instant was all it took for Sid’s world to change. It took just fractions of a second to realize it was a trap, but it was fractions too late. Sid unleashed a barrage of jamming across all radio frequencies, sending splinters out to hack into the digital infrastructure around him. He logged into the bathroom taps, the hand dryer, the sensory transponders above the sinks, the advertising hologram hanging behind Sibeal, but it was no use.
They had him cold. Flooding his gray matter with smarticles, he quickened, dropping to the floor as Bunky and Shaky reached for him.
There was no way into the open multiverse.
He tried contacting Bob, tried to find a path out to send out emergency beacons, to deactivate Bob’s synthetic-K. Sid jumped sideways and bounced off a wall around his attackers. The world slowed down. He twisted and spun. The path to the entrance in front of him cleared. He just needed one… more… step… and then the entrance filled with the hulking shape of the Grilla.
It grabbed him like a rag doll.
Held by the Grilla, the music around Sid transformed into a deep animal growl, his mind filling with images of steaming jungles, splashing blood, and twitching flesh. Sid tried hacking into their smarticle networks, but they were battle-hardened.
Sibeal pulled a shiny black sack out of her backpack. Lifting her arms high she pulled it over Sid’s head. He squirmed without effect. Its fabric was laced with metal wires. A Faraday blanket that stopped electromagnetics. The Grilla pulled the sack around him, and Sid felt his connections to the outside world cut off. A black hole opened in the wall of the bathroom, and the Grilla stepped into it, dragging Sid along.
11
Vince looked at the night sky. A thick carpet of stars hung like a bowl atop the mountaintops ringing the Commune; the bright smudge of the comet was just disappearing behind a peak. Zephyr drove him and Elspeth and Brigitte out past the perimeter again, this time for Elspeth to talk to Willy.
A few weeks had marked the first time Elspeth had seen her son in the fifteen years since she had to leave him on Atopia. Back then, she’d been overcome with fear, unable to stay, but it was a decision that haunted her. Meeting Willy, holding and kissing and hugging him, had been an incredibly emotional reunion. But now Vince and Brigitte were telling her that it hadn’t been Willy at all. It was incomprehensible that the person she’d met and shared tears with just days before had been an impostor, and worse, a thief who had stolen her son’s body.
Vince was caught up in her shock, shaken out of his emotional slumber. So he made a simple suggestion—why not just come outside the perimeter and meet the “real” Willy in his virtual presence?
He hadn’t anticipated the Reverend’s swift acceptance of the idea, given their strict stance against synthetic reality technology, but then again, it was his daughter. What were rules if not things to be bent?
Zephyr sat in the cart stoically. Vince could only imagine how all of this was reinforcing Zephyr’s ideas of the wickedness of the outside world. Three trips to the perimeter in one day was about as much as the kid could take. He wasn’t used to this much contact with the outside world, but it was on the Reverend’s strict orders. Vince was taking a walk while Brigitte and Elspeth sat on a blanket in the wet grass under the stars.
Brigitte dropped a packet of smarticle powder into a canteen of water, swirling it around, and handed it to Elspeth. “Drink it,” Vince heard Brigitte whisper to Elspeth. “Don’t worry, I’ll guide you.”
What Vince was feeling didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t one thing or the other, nothing he could put his finger on. It was a combination of things, a perspective that brought the elements of his mind together to create an image that looked familiar—a nagging sensation that one thing fit into another, a square peg that should be a round one if he could just hold it the right way.