“Want some breakfast?” asked Deanna, busy cooking at the stove. She was an old friend of Vince’s, from way back. “I mean, when your body gets down here.” She was still getting used to the way the Atopians flitted around their conscious points-of-view. “And since we have all the masterminds at the table now, could you explain to me what happened to Willy’s body again?”
Bob nodded, and an angular-armed bot on top of the refrigerator opened itself and handed a packet of gro-bacon to Deanna. Communal eating was just one more in a list of things Bob was getting used to. He glanced at Sid, expecting him to answer Deanna, but Sid was already lost to the world again—optimizing the geothermal regulator under the farm, rearranging the drone scheduling, doing a systems analysis of the mixture of crops in the surrounding fields. Like a chameleon he melted into his surroundings; he’d already added cowboy boots to his usual repertoire of ragged jeans and t-shirts. Bob wished he could lose himself so easily.
“It was my fault,” Willy’s avatar offered, glancing at Brigitte. “I was trying to make money by splintering my mind into hundreds of pieces, trying to be everywhere at once in the stock markets.” He looked at the table. “What I was doing was illegal, at least at the time, so I tried to hide it by rerouting my conscious stream through an anonymous connection on Terra Nova.”
Deanna turned to Willy from her cooking and crinkled her nose. “But how did that lead to losing yourself, or I mean, your body?”
Willy forced a grin. “At a certain point I was so widely splintered that I lost track of home base, so to speak, and that’s when my proxxi took off with my body.”
Deanna frowned. “He stole it? I thought your proxxi friends were there to protect you.” She glanced at the table of proxxi—Hotstuff, Robert, Vicious, and Bardot—sitting around an identical table in a virtual projection next to the gang.
“That,” Bob interjected, “is exactly the mystery. We think he was protecting Willy, but we don’t know from what.”
“From myself,” Willy muttered, and Brigitte squeezed his virtual hand.
“And you have family in the Commune?” Deanna asked. “That’s why you want to get in there?”
Willy nodded. “Yeah, my mother. If I hadn’t been so stupid, none of us would be here…”
Bob shook his head. “That’s not true, Willy, there’s bigger things going on.”
“And this has to do with that virus that infected the virtual reality systems on Atopia, those fake storms that nearly wrecked the place?”
Vince held up a hand. “Sorry, Deanna, as I said before, we can’t say more. And we really appreciate your help.”
She arched her eyebrows and returned to the stove. “All those things they’re saying about you in the mediaworlds, you could stop all that just by coming out—”
Vince cut her off. “We just need to get into the Commune.”
Shrugging and smiling, Deanna scooped the bacon and eggs onto a plate.
Bob took a deep breath. Nearly six weeks of waiting, a month and a half of letting the dust settle, and this was where they were—still waiting for approval to enter the Commune. Vince thought it best if they all stayed together. The Commune’s agents liked things to move slowly during their process. Bob shook his head. “This is such a waste of time.” He looked at Willy and Brigitte. “I mean we need to get searching, do something. Not just sit here.”
Sid looked up, dragging his attention away from his virtual workspaces. “Hey, calm down, we’re all a little itchy from switching to the new smarticles, your body is going into withdrawal—”
“What the hell are you doing optimizing the farm’s geothermal pumps?” With his phantom hands, Bob stood up and grabbed Sid’s virtual workspaces and pulled them into primary reality for everyone to see. “Shouldn’t you be trying to find Willy’s body?”
“Hey!” Sid grabbed his workspaces back and filed them away. “I am searching for Willy, but there’s only so much I can do.”
Vince reached out and tried to get Bob to sit back down. “Patience, young man, patience. We have a plan, we’ll stick to the plan.”
Bob shook him off. “And who put you in charge?” Spinning a splinter of his mind into the fields around the farm, he checked a tripped motion sensor, but it was just a stray buffalo calf.
“In charge?” Vince laughed. “Are you kidding? Anyway, isn’t all this what Patricia wanted?”
The poly-synthetic sensory interface—pssi—product release by Cognix had worked as planned. Over a billion users had joined in the first six weeks since its release, but, like many start-ups, operational demands caught up and slowed it down. More important was that it had started to work in its world-saving ambitions. Just two months from release and there’d been no new flare-ups in the Weather Wars, and projected birth rate indicators seemed to be dropping.
“Then why the heck did she send us out here?” Bob shot back. The release of pssi was having the effect that Patricia had created the entire Atopian project for—to push humankind on a new path away from material consumption and into a new world of virtual consumption—but was Jimmy still the threat to the program that she’d imagined?
Bob’s body, inhabited by his proxxi, finally came walking down the stairs, but Bob decided to keep his own point-of-view fixed in his virtual self. As Bob’s body seated itself at the table, Deanna walked over and dropped the plate of fried eggs and toast in front of it, and Robert, Bob’s proxxi, started using Bob’s body to eat it.
“I’m done waiting.” Bob fidgeted and spun his viewpoint out around the farm again, but then in the corner of one eye he saw his body’s hand pick up a strip of bacon. “Hey, none of that!” His body was getting fat from all this sitting around, and bacon wasn’t going to help.
His proxxi, Robert, looked at Bob from his own eyes and smiled. “No need to yell.” He diverted the bacon onto the floor for Deanna’s ever-watchful dog.
“Sometimes, I don’t know why I put up with you,” Bob fumed at his proxxi. It was intended to be rhetorical.
“Ever wonder if I think the same thing?” his proxxi replied without skipping a beat.
Because you have no choice, Bob thought but didn’t say.
“I think we’re all getting a little stir crazy.” Deanna wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “The bots need some help loading lumber, and I need to scan a package in town. How about coming in with me?”
“Sure,” mumbled Bob. “I’ll flit in when you’re on your way.”
Deanna rolled her eyes. “I meant you in your body, Bob.”
3
The pickup truck bounced its way along the gravel road under a clear Montana sky. Bob rolled down his window to get some air, letting his viewpoint escape and spin out above the fields.
Golden fields of summer oats, ready for harvest, swayed in the breeze. Between them, the green shoots of the secondary harvests rose up through their ranks with the winter wheat. Thickets of sunflowers dotted the landscape, alongside clumps of sugar beets in leafy-green patches, barley, and more. The traditional dry land farming of the area had turned wetter and warmer in past years, while much of the southernmost plains had returned to the dustbowl of more than a hundred years earlier.
Swarms of ornithopter beebots hovered between the swaying wheat and oats, while crawlers and mulebots scoured the ground. The robotic harvesting ecosystem was powered by both the sun and waste organic matter that the crawlers brought back to the hives where it was combusted for energy. The harvest was in full swing, but it wasn’t really farming anymore—at least, not like it used to be.