Connors weighed her options. “And where on Earth were you thinking of trying to take me?”
Grabbing her hand, Vince angled them into a fresh slice of the future. “Someplace safe.”
15
“Jimmy, hey Jimmy!” Bob called out.
There was no response.
Hesitating, Bob looked at the lollipop trees and chocolate chip moon of the Little Great Little, and then walked into the thunderfall, a wall of sensory white noise. It enveloped him, crushing his senses, and he edged forward, afraid, but also determined. He knew this was where Jimmy hid.
The thunderfall fell away and his senses returned. Behind was a cave, and Jimmy sat in a corner, his eyes cast down, surrounded by his play creatures and guarded by his proxxi Samson, who stared at Bob.
“Jimmy, hey, I didn’t know,” Bob pleaded. He was replaying sections of his inVerse, going over every interaction—every word—he had with Jimmy when they were growing up. This scene had been just after Nancy’s thirteenth birthday party. “I’m sorry.”
“Leave us alone,” Samson growled.
Bob allowed a respectful pause. Jimmy was crying.
“I was just trying to help.” Bob moved a little closer, and Samson grew a little larger. “Listen, stuff like this happens all the time, they’ll forget in a week.”
Jimmy’s face twisted. “It doesn’t happen to you! And no they won’t!” He wiped his tears away and didn’t look Bob in the eye.
Back then, Bob had just tried setting Jimmy up with Cynthia, a girl Jimmy had a crush on. The results were disastrous. Bob had suggested that Jimmy should take Cynthia into Jimmy’s private worlds, where he was doing research for Solomon House, but somehow Cynthia discovered a very private world—one where Jimmy tortured little creatures. It also contained some private memories where Jimmy’s mother was ridiculing him.
Cynthia copied it all and broadcast it to the other pssi-kids. It was cruel fun, and now all the pssi-kids were making fun of Jimmy—whole worlds constructed for the sole purpose of mocking him. Jimmy was awkward, never quite understanding how to interact with the other kids. With Bob’s encouragement, this party had marked the first time Jimmy opened up a little, and now all this had happened.
It was a disaster.
“Hey, I’m not perfect either,” said Bob. Even as he said it he realized how it must sound. Bob was popular, everyone wanted to be his friend. He sighed. “But I’ll tell you something, just between you and me.”
Jimmy sniffled, still staring at the floor, but Samson retreated a pace.
Bob took a step closer. “I lose my temper. I yell at my brother all the time. I feel bad, but I can’t help it sometimes.”
Wiping back more tears, Jimmy took a deep breath. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” Bob took another step toward Jimmy and sat down, cross-legged. “We all have stuff about us we can’t control.”
“Everybody hates me,” sniffled Jimmy, his face snotty, eyes bloodshot. More tears streamed down his face.
“Jimmy,” said Bob softly. “Hey, Jimmy…”
The scared little boy looked back at Bob. “What?”
“Not everybody.”
Spitting out a mouthful of water, Bob stopped to swim in place, regaining control of his body from autopilot. The glittering farm towers of Atopia hung in the sky before him. It wasn’t much farther now. Already he was at the outermost edges of the kelp forest, their air-filled hold-fast bladders sitting like fat green goblins in the rolling swells. He reached out and grabbed one to rest.
His body had been fit as an Olympian’s when he left Atopia, but the trek across the desert drained and damaged him. Even so, swimming these few miles wasn’t much of a challenge. The cold water was draining his reserves, but the hydrophobic shell covering his skin was doing its job. Leaving his body in low-power autopilot swim mode, eking every fraction of fluid-dynamic efficiency it could, he plotted paths through the waves and current and stayed away from drone patrols.
The sensor networks of Atopia were keyed to cyber and mechanical-kinetic intrusions on the wide-angle side, and pathogenic and microbiologicals from a small-angle view. Macrobiologicals were lower on the threat scales. He maintained a small alternate reality clipped around himself as he swam, a cloaking filter that would be enough to keep any alerts below the thresholds for escalation. As powerful as Jimmy was, Sid and Bob had been his equals, even surpassing him in some areas.
This was Bob’s house, too.
Moving up and down in the swells, holding onto the gas bladder, Bob took a deep breath and closed his eyes, opening them to take in the blue cathedral of the sky overhead. Cirrus clouds streaked the heavens above. He felt the familiar surge of the surf pounding on the beaches like an old heartbeat—not far away now—and he was reconnecting with his friends in the water, the smarticle-infused phytoplankton, the fish, the sharks.
He was thinking about what Tyrel had said in the Terra Novan Council meeting.
This thing they were facing, if it was all-powerful, it would have just risen up and destroyed them. Whatever it was, it wasn’t supernatural, it was of this world. It needed their technology to do whatever it was trying to do. Otherwise, it would have just done whatever it wanted. It was a virus that was infiltrating their social and technical networks, but it still needed them.
And if it was something that needed, then it was also something that had weaknesses.
But what were they?
But the more essential question, and one the Terra Novans weren’t able to answer, was why was it doing whatever it was doing? Did it want to subjugate humans, make them suffer, hold them in thrall? Or did it just want to destroy? Bob shook his head. He was anthropomorphizing, trying to apply human desires and traits onto this thing. They really had no idea what this thing was. Did it even really want something? If it was just an echo, then it was just repeating a pattern. There might be no conscious intent. The apocalypse legends all talked about a day of judgment, but why would this thing want to judge us?
He looked up at the looming towers of Atopia. He had to figure it out.
Soon.
Releasing the gas bladder, Bob set his body into swim-mode again and left it to pick its way through the thickening kelp. He was close enough to start projecting some private network tunnels. He had all of Terra Nova’s resources, funneled through the darknets, at his disposal when the time came. Once opened, though, he wouldn’t have long to make his attack before those connections were found and choked off.
He could use some inside help. He was close enough now.
Seagulls yelped under wet skies framed by white chalk cliffs. The portal of Durdle Door stood above the beach. Bob leaned down to pick up his red plastic bucket, then ran toward the girl with blond hair who was turning over rocks in a tidal pool.
“Nancy!” he squeaked in a tiny voice. He was only four in this secret world.
She looked up, her eyes growing wide as her primary subjective filled the placeholder they each always left for each other here. “Bob? Is that you?”
“It’s me.” He closed the last few feet, splashing through the shallow water. He offered his bucket for the squirming crab she held daintily between two fingers.
She dropped it into the bucket and leaned in to hug him. “What are you doing here? Are you still on Terra Nova? I’m terrified, they’ve started a kinetic attack. I’m trying to get Kesselring to call it off.”
Bob hugged her back. “No, I’m not there.”