“And Vince,” added Cunard.
“Yes, and Vince,” Nancy agreed. She wasn’t sure that they were all together, but they all rushed off just after the fiasco with the altered-reality skin and simulated storms that nearly brought the destruction of Atopia. Terra Nova, a competing off-shore colony in the Atlantic Ocean, admitted to implanting the reality-skin, forcing a closure of the Atopian borders just after Bob and Sid had left with Vince. “Do you think they’re trying to find Willy’s body?”
“Yes, but something else is going on. Why would they have cut off contact?”
Nancy could see Bob running off to help his friend Willy—with Sid, as usual, in tow—but it was odd that Vince went with them. Never mind that he was three times their age and the famous trillionaire founder of PhutureNews, but Nancy had never seen Vince Indigo rush off to do anything in all the years she’d known him when she was growing up. Why now?
“Bob did beg you to go with him,” Cunard reminded her. “I don’t need to tell you, but his anger is always just under the surface. Hard to say what losing Patricia did to him.”
Nancy took a deep breath. Was Bob angry at her? She’d only just caught a glimpse of the old Bob before he left, the one she’d known and loved all those years before his brother had killed himself. For years, Bob had cut himself off behind a veil of drugs, filtering his life through the pain of losing his brother. Nancy rubbed her eyes. I was supposed to be with him, he’d begged me to come, but how could I just take off and leave Patricia’s dream in the hands of Kesselring and Jimmy when she died?
Almost as soon as Bob had left Atopia on the passenger cannon, Nancy lost all connections with him, with everyone in his group. They’d completely disappeared off the grid, which was no easy feat.
They had to be hiding on purpose.
But why? Where was he?
2
“Life is suffering,” said a disembodied voice.
The words floated to Bob through a steaming jungle, and he followed them into a clearing where he found a herd of massive, dorsal-finned creatures. Halfway through mouthfuls of fern and bush, they swung their heads to observe him.
“The cessation of suffering is attainable…”
Bob looked into the sky, and then down at his hands; four fingers webbed with translucent green skin. The landscape, the animals, the vegetation—it was alien.
“Bob,” said another voice, more familiar this time. Bob looked up to find his proxxi Robert standing to the side of the clearing. The animals began lumbering off, crashing through the forest. “Time to get up, Bob.”
His proxxi smiled, offering a cup of coffee, and the jungle behind him shimmered. Replacing it were the familiar outlines of Bob’s bedroom in his family’s habitat on Atopia. Bob shook his head. He didn’t need to be babied. Reaching into the reality skin around him, he ripped it down. Sloping wooden beams appeared, the now-familiar ceiling of the farmhouse bedroom in which he spent the last few weeks sleeping. On a high shelf above the door, long-forgotten trunks stood collecting dust, and for the hundredth time he wondered what was in them. Perhaps today he’d have a look.
This end of the farmhouse was turn-of-the-21st-century: wooden-framed construction with soft mineral walls—gypsum calcium sulfate sandwiched between paper—fastened together with formed-metal nails and screws. Primitive was the word that came into Bob’s mind. The wilderness of reality outside of Atopia was reinforcing the sensation that he’d been cast out of paradise.
On Atopia, his floating island home just off the coast of California, even physical reality was clean, shining, every detail accounted for. The forests up top were perfectly manicured. The corridors below were always polished and shining. Before leaving—before being asked to leave—he had only experienced the rest of the world through wikiworld simulations. Now he was out in the wild, with illicit smarticles embedded in his nervous system, and the limited bandwidth forced him into the dirt and grime and specificity of being in only one place at a time. To say it was a new experience was an understatement.
And the constant barrage of hate media didn’t help.
When he took off from Atopia right after the incident, and then immediately dropped off the grid, the conspiracy nuts were in hot pursuit of Bob and Sid and Vince. It wasn’t just the nutjobs, though. The longer their gang remained hidden and off the radar, the more the mainstream mediaworlds were latching onto the conspiracy theories. People wanted answers.
So did Bob.
Propping himself onto one elbow, he rubbed his eyes. “What was that about?”
His proxxi appeared on a floral-print chaise in front of the fireplace in the small room. “What?”
“The jungle with the dinosaurs.”
“Dinosaurs?”
Connectivity was limited in rural Montana. Bob had a few dozen splinters—synthetic intelligence bots modeled after his own cognition systems—hunting down leads as they searched through the virtual and real worlds for any sign of his friend Willy’s body. Synthesizing all the information they collected in real-time was impossible through the tiny data pipes they had access to, so his splinters were integrating into his meta-cognition systems while he slept.
It made for strange dreaming.
“You were standing in a jungle with me,” Bob continued, sitting upright in bed. “Was it a gameworld? A past construct…?”
Robert shook his head. “You must have been dreaming.”
Bob stretched and felt through the extra-sensory network of smarticles dusted around the peripheries of the farm. Nothing—no danger, no incursions, not yet.
The dream was fading, the giant creatures sliding into mind-fog.
Robert began feeding Bob a summary of the night’s searches. The most significant news was that the Comet Catcher mission had launched from orbit the night before and in two months would be shepherding the Wormwood comet into Earth orbit. Bob scanned the top level of Robert’s reports, but there were no new answers, no resolutions. It was going to be another day of waiting. Bob detached his visual point-of-view to see where everyone else was, leaving a fresh splinter to finish chatting with Robert.
Snapping out of his body, his viewpoint rose up toward the ceiling while he flipped his visual system to scan for warm bodies. A housebot appeared through the bedroom door with Bob’s clothes for the day. The walls faded and through the transparence the red-outlined images of his friends downstairs in the kitchen appeared, their voices rising into his consciousness as he flitted down to them.
“Sidney Horowitz?” laughed Vince as Bob’s virtual presence announced itself, pinging everyone’s networks while he sat his projection down at the head of the breakfast table. Sid and Vince were sitting at the table arguing about something. Willy’s virtual avatar and Brigitte sat across from them, holding hands.
Sid nodded at Bob, acknowledging his arrival, before turning back to Vince. “What’s the big deal? It’s not like it was secret.”
“Horowitz the mastermind scientist!” Vince thumped the table and shook his head. “I just always imagined your surname… ah, never mind. It doesn’t have a bad ring to it, on second thought.”
The main living area, attached to the front of the aging farmhouse, was more of the type of thing Bob was used to on Atopia—lignin-based bio-thermoplastics curving smoothly into an oval dome thirty feet high and fifty feet across, climate controlled as phase-shifting particles in the membrane shell regulated heat and molecular flow across its boundary. Sparrows were nesting at its apex, darting around.