Below him, the screaming had stopped, but so had the collective awareness.
As Bob’s body raced out of the maze of tunnels, everywhere sagging bodies stared out from blank eyes. Bob spread his identity metatags onto everyone he passed, jacking into their bodies, starting them running in random directions to hide his escape. He began spinning alternate realities, layering and fusing them into the sensory systems of the others, the pssi-kids, slippery eels that slid through the data systems of Purgatory.
Retreating through one world and then another, he found himself running through a burnt and barren landscape with the stakes of tree stumps stabbed into its smoking earth. Ash was falling from a ravaged sky.
“We know you’re here,” hissed the Hunter, a neural fusion of a gang of pssi-kids he’d known growing up, Daxter and Axel and Gunner. Now they weren’t kids anymore. It seemed they were working for Jimmy, and they were hunting for him.
Bob tried to focus, the world swimming before his eyes. He kneeled down behind a tree stump and began dialing up all the worlds connected to the battle gameworld. One thought remained in the stunted awareness he had left: Get to the passenger cannon. In the real world, a thin slice of his digital awareness skimmed through the wet streets of New York, dragging his physical body behind it like a rag doll on a string.
13
The twenty-four leaders are returning, said Zephyr. Lightning crackled across the sky behind him. What do you think happened to Willy? asked Vince. He was possessed by a demon, replied Zephyr. Don’t you believe in demons, Mr. Indigo?
A jolt woke Vince up.
“It’s just the refueling drone.” Hotstuff was riding shotgun beside him in the turbofan.
Through the canopy, in the soft glow of the instrumentation lights, Vince watched a drone’s articulated arms pull out the main battery pack of their turbofan and replace it with a fresh one. The hop from Montana to New York required an in-air battery drop. The American government didn’t use the African space power grid and couldn’t refuel via microwave burst in flight like most of the rest of the world.
Vince shook his head and closed his eyes.
The drone held the turbofan like an insect in its legs. The night sky slid by above. Finished, the drone disengaged with a jolt, and the whir of the turbofan ratcheted up a notch. It started climbing back to cruising altitude.
A garbled message from Bob popped up on Vince’s messaging systems: “Where’s Sid? I can’t find Sid.” Vince latched onto Bob’s message stream, but it was cut off in an eruption of network traffic. Vince’s phutures slid sideways. The mediaworlds erupted: A terrorist attack in the Purgatory Entertainment District, Atopian splinter group responsible. Authorities hunting for suspects.
The refueling drone cut through the air above them.
Vince shot up in his harness. “What the hell?”
“Don’t know, boss.” Hotstuff dispatched agents into the New York networks. “Some kind of pssi-weapon was unleashed in central New York, right on top of Bob and Sid’s last known location.”
Vince’s phuturing network was still set in high avoidance mode. Nothing major should have been able penetrate the protective web surrounding him and his friends, not without some advance notice. “How did this get past us?”
Hotstuff grabbed Vince’s primary presence and dragged it into their war room. She spun out a series of scenarios, graphing their interconnectedness. “Being in Commune’s black hole generated discontinuities in our future timeline.”
Another jolt.
The drone was re-attaching itself. In a secondary display space Vince frowned, watching the drone’s insect-legs wrapping themselves around the turbofan.
Hotstuff looked at him, her eyes growing wide. “Vince, watch out…”
And then she was gone.
Vince’s main point-of-presence snapped from the war room back into his body in the pod of the turbofan. The only sound was the rush of the air past the canopy and the whine of the engine.
The stars slid by overhead.
“Mr. Vincent Damon Indigo,” announced a voice over the comms channel of the turbofan. “I am Special Agent Sheila Connors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You are under arrest for breach of future confidentiality.”
14
Three gees of acceleration squeezed Bob into the aerogel of the passenger cannon pod seat, then five gees, then briefly six as it angled up from its subterranean launch tube. His pod launched into free space with a thudding concussion, the air ionizing around it in a blistering tunnel as it bored through the lower atmosphere. His body popped out of the foam seat in the shift to near-zero gravity, the sheen of ionization sputtering out as the pod gained altitude, clearing the densest layers of air on its ballistic flight path across the Atlantic on its way to Lagos.
Escaping New York had been a game of capture the flag, with his body and physical brain as the prize. He started by ducking it into the aging subway system, then a VTOL pick-up and drop-off to the other side of town and quick succession of self-driving taxi exchanges and sprints up and down building staircases while he scattered decoys in his wake. Bob used the predictive policing models of the city to figure out where patrolling drones would be. It was a lot like the games of flitter tag he used to play with the other pssi-kids on Atopia, but this time with life-threatening stakes.
In the twenty minutes it took him to reach and clear the passenger cannon security checkpoints, the NYPD joined the chase. With only seconds to spare, his pod was in the last batch of launches—even in this ultra-modern metropolis, it took time to lock a city down.
Bits and pieces of his mind reassembled themselves at random—secure back-ups of memories and ideas floating back into his brain on the thin data stream. The capsule gained altitude into space. Bob’s cognitive frameworks were still fighting off the shimmer of the drug Sid had infected him with. He created a virtual world, shielded beneath an onion skin of encryption, to have a talk with the reassembling bits of his intellect.
Alone, was the first thought that mushroomed into his mind, you’re alone.
Turning inside himself, in a panic he checked the data cube Patricia entrusted him with. It was still there, embedded in the center of his mind. The world he created solidified in his visual channels. A hexagonal chamber appeared with a copy of himself seated against each of six yellow walls. The data cube sat in the middle of the room, a faceted ruby that glittered darkly.
“Should we tell her?” the main part of his mind asked. “Is that what I really look like?” He stared at the copies of himself staring back at him, blue eyes beneath blond dreadlocks tied back in a ponytail.
“It’s too dangerous,” replied his cautious self. “You just want an excuse to talk to her.”
“An excuse?” roared his emotional self, a vein popping out in his neck. “You call this an excuse?”
“I agree, we should wait,” said his lazy side.
His emotional self shook its head. “You’re the reason we’re in this mess. Taking drugs? Idiot. The same reason that Martin—”
“Hey, stop that.” Bob’s inspirational side held up his hands. “This is a mess, but it’s not our fault. We’re out here trying to help. We’ll get out of this, but we need to plan for the worst. So we should tell her.”