He tried to dismiss the feeling, telling himself it was just his mind making patterns from noise, but the more he read into the old religious texts of the Commune, the stronger the feeling became, the stronger the images burned into his mind of creatures with six wings, eyes inside and out, of the eleven-headed Buddha he’d seen in a Chenrezig monastery with dozens of arms.
But it couldn’t be possible.
He pushed it into the back of his mind and focused on assimilating his waiting splinters. “Himalayas overtaking Greenland as second-largest reserve of frozen water after Antarctica,” went one phuture broadcast, with temperatures in Europe projected to plummet as the Gulf Stream continued to slow.
Part of the mystery around how Willy’s body had made it inside the Commune was that the smarticle network inside it should have shut down, and communication in and out should have been impossible. But, somehow, someone had kept the technology working, hiding it from the Commune’s sensors. The Reverend said he had no idea how. Vince believed him.
At least one important mystery had been solved.
Vince queried Elspeth about things she talked about with Willy’s imposter, intimate details that whomever was inhabiting Willy’s body shared with her. Outside the perimeter, Vince uploaded and correlated the information with Willy. Everything matched, down to the last detail. The only entity that would have that level of correct information about Willy had to be his proxxi, Wally—without a doubt, it was Willy’s proxxi that stole his body.
Vince felt a new presence bloom into being in the local multiverse. Elspeth. She sat beside Brigitte, now lit by a glowing pssi-halo, her newly-minted metatags hanging in overlaid display spaces around her. The smarticles had infused into her neural system. She was pssi-aware.
“Just relax, breath slowly,” Brigitte instructed, holding her hand.
Elspeth’s eyes darted back and forth. Her white-knuckled hands gripped the blanket as her perceptions grew sharper and deeper, the informational flow of the multiverse connecting into her sensory systems for the first time. “I’m okay,” she replied. “Could you get Willy?”
She didn’t need to ask.
“Hey, Mom.” Willy appeared from behind a copse of trees nearby. His virtual image glowed alongside a patch of bioluminescent kale.
“Willy?” Tears sprang into Elspeth’s eyes. “My baby, what have they done to you?” Forgetting the illusion, she sprang up and ran to her son, embracing him.
Vince looked away, hiding his own tears. He looked at Zephyr, sitting on the wagon, watching the whole strange scene. Zephyr couldn’t see Willy, he couldn’t even hear the words Elspeth was speaking to Willy in the pssi audio channel, but he watched her jump up and run toward the trees, crying and embracing thin air.
Zephyr didn’t bat an eye, his stoic expression speaking volumes—the outside world was just strange.
Vince returned his attention to the phuture splinter competing for his attention: Newlandia’s application to the UN as the first sovereign virtual nation looked like it was going to happen, while civil rights protests raged in San Francisco from a continued ban on mind uploading research. “Immortality is God’s domain,” complained the Christian Democrats of America.
A whirring began in the sky and Vince spun his point-of-view into the space above them, zooming in to track Deanna’s electric turbofan. It was time for them to get to New York.
“I’m not coming.” It was Brigitte, a virtual splinter of her standing beside him in a private communication space, while her body remained sitting on the blanket with Willy and Elspeth. “My place is here, at least for now.”
Vince was going to argue, but then looked at Willy and his mother, Elspeth, gripping Brigitte’s hands.
“Let me talk to Sid and Bob.” Vince started up a virtual meeting space, pinging Sid and Bob, but there was no response. He knew they were at an underground club in New York meeting the glasscutters. He pinged again. Still nothing. Why weren’t they answering? Then the realization: He’d let Bob and Sid go by themselves to a rave club in New York. I knew I shouldn’t have left those two alone.
He had to make a decision. His gut said no, splitting up even more was a bad idea, but looking at Elspeth gripping Brigitte’s hand swayed his emotions back. It might be useful to have someone inside the Commune, and it seemed like the right thing to do. For them, at least.
The turbofan growled, leaves and grass blowing past them as it hovered. Vince sent instructions for it to land next to him. He looked into Brigitte’s eyes. “Okay, but you stay in regular contact?”
She nodded.
With a final blast, the turbofan settled into the grass. Brigitte’s virtual presence retreated into her body and she waved at Vince. He smiled back, then looked toward Zephyr. “You take care of them.”
Zephyr nodded, tipping his hat. He didn’t ask any questions.
Gripping the rungs of the turbofan’s access ladder, Vince wondered if he was making a mistake. Grumbling, he swung himself into the cushioned front seat and reached around to strap in the webbing. The clear plastic cockpit enclosure closed and the turbofan began cycling up again, roaring underneath him. With a final wave he bid Brigitte goodbye. The turbofan lurched into the sky and Vince settled into the harness, letting his alpha and theta waves settle his brain for a short sleep on the way into Manhattan.
12
The methane storm on Titan raged, the world a thrashing kaleidoscope before Bob’s senses, but he felt something more troubling than Sid’s sudden disappearance: other pssi-kids from Atopia were in Hell, and they were searching. The fabric of the local multiverse bent under their psychic weight as Bob sensed them scraping against his identity-theft algorithms. They might be good enough for the world out here, but pssi-kids would make short work of ripping through the thin veil Sid built to hide them.
Bob had to get out of Hell, and soon.
The music roared around and inside Bob. He steadied himself, trying to inhibit the drug coursing through his digital neurons, cursing that he’d let Sid rope him into it. How could I be so stupid?
Even before the thought I need to escape had fully formed, he left his body behind, jacking his primary subjective past the security systems and into the Purgatory entranceway. He stopped and looked around—the Grilla was gone, and there was no sign of Sid.
While his mind searched for channels out into the open multiverse, his body quickened, flooding itself with smarticles, darting through the dancers back to the physical entrance of Hell. Across the full sensory spectrum of Hell a sharp keening began, a knife that cut through the assembled meta-cognition systems.
Bob sensed it coming.
He threw up walls, started splitting his personalities, splintering himself to hide in every corner he could find.
And then it happened.
Time stopped.
Bob’s mind filled with white noise. His sensory channels mushroomed, sliding out of control, squeezing together, blending into each other. The pressure built, vibrating, shaking, and just as the needles began piercing, he heard the screams of the thousands of people in Hell, their minds shredding around him.
Bob threw off one layer after another of his meta-cognition framework like throwing up a stack of bullet-proof vests to stop incoming machine gun fire. He retreated backward in time, and then sideways into any confined information space that wasn’t burning. Like bubbles of paint, parts of his mind started exploding in wet pops. He gathered himself inward. What little remained kept probing for escape routes. Finally he slid up the network of the pneumatic tubes and outward to the surface.