“I have to leave, Niels,” said the man. “I need to tell Goering in person.”
Bob nodded. “Margrethe!” he called out. “Could you please fetch Mr. Heisenberg’s cases?”
Bob stared across the Dead Man’s Walk Desert, pulling down goggles to protect his eyes.
A voice echoed from a loudspeaker, “…three… two… one…”
The next instant, a blinding flash enveloped his senses and an intense heat burned into the flesh of his face. An orange fireball leapt into the sky on the distant plain, billowing up into a mushroom cloud. The air was eerily calm. Behind him Bob heard words in a language he hadn’t heard spoken in thousands of years.
“I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,” said a voice in Sanskrit, just as the shockwave roared through their observation point.
“We have arrived,” an automated message announced, waking Bob up. He activated his somatic systems and groaned as he struggled upright. This was as far as the transport network could take them. From here he had to find his own way.
The dreams were more intense.
“They aren’t just dreams,” the priest told Bob when he spoke of them, “these are your past lives. As the nervenet grows stronger, the psychic fabric of the past is weaving itself into this world.”
Memories of the dreams faded like morning fog under a rising sun. Bob only retained fleeting impressions of them. Nothing of the dreams remained in his inVerse, the recording of everything he ever saw or felt, and he couldn’t find any trace of them in his meta-cognition systems.
Bob verified their location. They were in an off-shore docking complex, one the Ascetics assured him they controlled. For a short time they could mask his signature from any sensors. He was close now. Bob could feel it, the thrumming vibration of the Atopian multiverse just past the event horizon of his senses.
More than anything, he felt a craving to get back inside.
The priest was awake and sitting up in his opened bio-containment unit.
“We can go up top,” Bob said to him, swinging his legs onto the floor.
Taking a moment for them both to stretch, Bob led the priest to the service ladder on the wall of the cargo bay. People weren’t supposed to be in here, not awake. Soon it would be crawling with bots loading and uploading. Bob wanted to feed some fresh air into his lungs. Grabbing the first rung, he felt its cold metal. He clipped into the splinters that watched the world while he slept, leaving his body to climb by itself.
His mind exploded into the mediaworlds.
Green-scaled faces filled one visual display. “Bioethics boards reconsider license of recombinant DNA manufacturer Remedica in the wake of discovery of a nest of human-lizard chimeras in Waco, Texas,” said the splinter monitoring the story. “Would you like more?” Bob accepted, and a flood of images around the idea circled his mind; flying human bats and grotesque experiments gone wrong, self-assembling robotics fused with organic layers of living tissue, synthetic reality nervous systems tying it all together in the expanding eco-system of the Atopian stimulus.
“Should we tell them?” asked a newsworld in a splinter circling at the edges of Bob’s awareness. He pulled it closer to his center. “Why would we?” was the answer. The object of discussion was a virtual world filled with synthetic beings, none of them aware that their world was simulated. The man that created it was posing as God to his creatures. He overrode controls forcing external awareness in digital organisms that could pass the Turing-threshold.
“The Destroyer of Worlds is upon us,” rang a shrill voice in another mediaworld. Bob shifted his attention to the ever-expanding sphere of the doomsday cults. “The day of judgment is coming. Two thousand years ago the Kalachakra tantra predicted a future war where the forces of Shambala would arrive in flying ships to begin a new external cycle of time—”
Bob disengaged from the mediaworlds. He stood on the deck of the transport, in the open for the first time in weeks. He clipped into his body to feel the cool wind and taste the sea air. He sensed Atopian smarticles, a dusting of them floating on the breeze from Atopia. His skin tingled. The priest stood beside him, his robe flapping in the breeze.
On the horizon Bob saw something, a glitter that stood out against the deep blue. The twinkling light was the reflection of the sun off the glass-walled farming towers of Atopia, less than five miles away. Nancy was there, his family was there.
All that stood in his way was Jimmy.
Bob turned to the priest. “Thank you for coming this far, without you…” He searched for words.
“It is not just for you that I have taken this journey.” The priest held his arms wide. “But for all of God’s creatures. We must stop this scourge.”
They silently watched the waves.
“From here I go alone,” said Bob. “If you can maintain the connection to Mohesha, make sure that the Terra Novan resources are available when we need them.”
The priest nodded. “I will wait here.”
Stripping out of the coveralls he wore in the hibernation pod, Bob prepared himself. His skin shimmered as his epithelial layers exuded a hydrophobic layer of protection against the water, while he began leaking perfluorocarbons into his lung tissue. Nodding at the priest, Bob dove headfirst from the platform into the frigid waters and began networking into depths.
These waters were his home.
12
Jimmy Scadden stared at the ocean through a break between the trees. He stood in Herman Kesselring’s private gardens at the apex of the farming tower and research centers—the highest point on Atopia, and one that Kesselring kept very private.
Jimmy had been summoned, in person.
“Why did you change the report?” Kesselring asked. He pulled the hood off the peregrine falcon sitting on his gloved hand and began feeding it raw meat.
They were in a grass field dotted with blooming purple heather, several hundred feet across, bordered by pines and yews. In augmented space, the real forests of Kesselring’s private gardens stretched into the Austrian Alps of his home. Set back in the trees at the edge of the space was Kesselring’s retreat, a wood-shingled, two-story chalet with white stucco walls.
“What report, Mr. Kesselring?” Jimmy stood straight, his hands clasped behind his back. “I thought you called me up here to discuss details of the operation.”
Kesselring continued feeding his bird. “The report presented at the board meeting, with the information Colonel Kramer extracted from Mr. Indigo.”
Jimmy frowned and glanced back at the break in the trees. “What do you mean?”
“The original report had details about you being responsible for the disappearance of Commander Strong’s wife and other Atopians.” Kesselring didn’t look up as he said this, but stared into the eyes of his falcon, giving it another chunk of bloody meat that it gobbled back.
Jimmy’s full attention swung to Kesselring. “Where did you hear that?”
“I think you forget who built this place, the resources and connections I have.”
Jimmy looked at the ground. “They were just lies, fabrications by the extremists to try and destabilize the Alliance. I thought that spreading them further would only serve their goals. The Alliance gave us interim command of their forces for the operation against Terra Nova—”
“I know, Jimmy,” interrupted Kesselring. The entire Allied Command staff in Arunchal Pradesh had been killed in a surprise attack. The Alliance had captured a Grilla, Zoraster, in connection with it, and Sidney Horowitz was implicated. It had pushed the Alliance into declaring war on the AU, confirming Jimmy’s terrorist theories. “My problem is that you lied to me.”