A bolt of lightning ripped the sky apart behind them, accompanied by a deafening boom.
Nancy stood and pulled Bob to get up. “Let’s get inside.” Rain started falling. She motioned toward a yellow cabana on the beach.
Bob looked into the pool of water at his feet, the surface rippling in colliding circles as raindrops hit it. A crab scuttled by. Bob felt sluggish, his mind drifting. “I need to go.” He handed Nancy the periwinkle, embedding within it the encrypted data that Patricia had left him. It was a risk—it meant the data was returning into the Atopian ecosystem—but Nancy needed to know.
She took it, and leaned in to kiss his cheek. Bob turned and kissed her, then started shutting down the tunnel to the world, but he was weak. It took nearly all of his energy just to hand the data beacon to Nancy.
The crab he’d seen at his feet inched up on top of the seaweed covered rock next to him. It raised itself up on its hind legs, spreading its arms to the sky. Lightning thundered again, and tendrils of electrostatic discharge snaked across the sky to illuminate the white cliffs.
The crab looked at Bob, its mouthparts gnashing. “You’ll make a nice bounty, my friend.”
Bob’s mind was swimming. He logged into his bio-stats. Something was wrong. He’d been physically poisoned somehow.
Snapping his primary subjective out of the sea-world, he popped his viewpoint back into the passenger pod. The milky film of the atmosphere hung over the curve of the Earth, while steely pinpoints of stars hung above.
Nausea overcame him. He retched.
His vitals were way off, his heart racing. A low rumble began. It was the retrorockets of the pod firing. They shouldn’t be firing now, somewhere a hundred miles in space over the middle of the Atlantic. The pod was being diverted. Data pipes into the multiverse were shutting down, and, fighting to remain conscious, he made another copy of the data he’d given to Nancy and sent it out in a sealed beacon.
If Sid was still out there somewhere, he might find it.
Blackness descended.
17
“I haven’t had any contact with Bob,” Nancy lied.
Jimmy was sitting in a chair behind a huge desk, facing away from her. They were in the palace of his elaborately maintained private universe. He stared down the length of a long reflecting pool which divided his manicured gardens, stretching to the horizon. Ornate moldings, gilt in gold, framed frescoes of angels in the ceilings. Thick velvet curtains draped lead-glass windows. “Did he tell you anything?” Jimmy turned to look at her.
“I told you I haven’t talked to him since he left.” She shifted in her chair. “I’d tell you if I did.”
Jimmy smiled. “I’m just finding out whose side you’re on.” He looked at the ceiling. “Of course you understand it would be treason if you had contact.”
“Treason?”
“And hid the contact, I mean.”
Nancy felt her cheeks flush, but in this projected space her face remained stone-still. “I don’t believe ‘treason’ is an offense described in the Atopian constitution.”
“You know what I mean. Anyway, enough, I was just asking.” His smile grew wider. He turned to Dr. Granger. “Please continue with the summary of operations.”
Dr. Granger was sitting in an attending chair with a pile of reports in his lap. He smiled at Nancy and then began unpacking his presentation. Charts and graphs started filling the shared display spaces above Jimmy’s desk.
“Happiness indices are at all-time highs in places where pssi has spread through the population,” began Dr. Granger. “Crime is dropping, and business productivity and profits are skyrocketing at companies that have adopted the pssi-suite. A complete success.” Dr. Granger stopped and looked at Nancy. “The Infinixx distributed consciousness app is the most downloaded sensory interface.”
This was Nancy’s own creation. She took a deep breath. “I still disagree—”
“The Board’s decision is final,” interrupted Jimmy, staring into his gardens.
Nancy hung her head. Instead of forcing new users to create their own memetic structures, using their own memories, they’d instead adopted a cookie-cutter approach. They were pre-formatting people’s expanding minds. It made it easier to access their thoughts, but the public didn’t seem to mind. Or even notice. They just wanted the endless reality.
Jimmy argued for a backdoor to combat viral reality skins, like the one that nearly destroyed Atopia. Nancy was able to hold him back in the general release, but in each jurisdiction there were secret deals going on, allowing governments to peer into the minds of the population. If people had nothing to hide, then they had nothing to fear, went the line of reasoning that Jimmy kept putting forward. And everywhere that pssi was released, the people were happier than ever—happy, but living in dreamworlds.
“The subsea computing facilities are on track,” continued Dr. Granger, and began detailing the self-replicating data warehouses being constructed under sea floors, using seawater for cooling and powered by geothermal generators. It was a vast computing organism growing into the crust of the Earth to make virtual space for the billions of personal universes being created within the pssi multiverse.
“Any progress on the legal front?” asked Jimmy halfway through Dr. Granger’s run-down on the computing facilities.
More graphics spun into their shared spaces. Anti-trust suits were being brought under control, and key patent litigations against Terra Nova continuing.
“And what happened to Patricia Killiam’s personal research projects. The POND, for instance?”
Dr. Granger shrugged. “She terminated that before she passed.”
Jimmy turned to the two of them. “I was talking to Nancy.”
Nancy’s attention was elsewhere. “Pardon? The POND?”
“The Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector,” Jimmy said. “Don’t tell me you don’t know of it.”
Of course Nancy had heard of it. “But I don’t see how that has any—”
“Everything has relevance, Ms. Killiam. Your aunt shut that project down just before she passed, and the data from it is missing. I’d bet that Baxter took it, and I’d like to know why. He’s a prime suspect in the New York attack, and we need to know what’s going on.”
Jimmy paused. “His terrorist actions were designed to halt the spread of pssi, to incite fear in the consumer population.” Over a thousand people’s minds had been wiped out in the New York attack, a thousand people now vegetative psombies. “He’s continuing your Aunt Patricia’s campaign against us.”
Nancy could sense she was on thin ice. “I don’t believe she was working against us.” And the attack in New York wasn’t what was slowing down the release. Half of the billion new users of pssi were displaying signs of tech-induced schizophrenia, and even the AI-run tech support channels weren’t enough to sort out all the problems.
Jimmy rocked his head back and stared at the ceiling. “Then who was she working against?”
Nancy stopped herself from saying, you. “I don’t know, Jim, you know more than me.”
Jimmy looked at her, squinting, and then slowly returned his gaze to the reflecting pool.
Part 2:
Heresy
1
“Where am I?” Sid was still stuffed in the black sack, his connections to the outside world cut off. After being dragged out of the bar, he’d been thrown over the shoulder of the Grilla. In stops and starts he was carried, pushed, and dragged down one tunnel after another, deep into the bowels of New York.