Releasing him, she leaned back to look in his eyes. “Good.”
“I’m here.”
“What?” She frowned. “Here?”
“Atopia.”
She backed up. “Bob, it’s too dangerous. I unpacked your data beacon. We’re trying to contain Jimmy. We have supporters inside.”
Lightning lit up the clouds in the distance. It was always storming in this world now.
“And that’s why I need your help.”
Nancy wiped her small hands against the frilly edge of her polka-dot one-piece, nodding. Their networks merged in the background, the familiar sensation of their phantoms and synthetic bodies feeling each other close.
“Isn’t this touching?”
Nancy and Bob spun toward the voice.
“You know I never trusted you, Nancy.” Jimmy towered above them. “And Bob, did you really think you could just waltz in here?” He danced a half-step, mocking them.
Bob looked at Nancy. “Run.” He initiated the tunnel linking Atopia and Terra Nova, and unleashed the first barrage. The sky turned to fire, their childhood world exploding into flames.
Jimmy laughed.
But Bob didn’t run.
He watched.
16
Nancy tried to hold her mind on the beach as long as she could, but the splinter snapped off. Bob closed the connection. The last thing she saw was young Bob’s face fade from her visual channels. He didn’t look scared.
And that scared her.
But she didn’t have long to dwell.
Already Jimmy’s networks were swarming hers, overriding her automated defenses. Her physical body was in the labs of Farm Tower Two, just below the Solomon House. She was going over some research notes with one of her staff. “We’re going to have to look at this again later,” she heard herself saying, just as psombie guards slammed open the doors.
Someone screamed, glass crashing to the floor, as the guards shoved people aside and advanced toward Nancy. She reached into synthetic space with her phantoms, worming her way into the psombies’ controls to click them off. One by one, each of the attacking guards dropped like a sack of potatoes to the floor. Horrified faces turned toward Nancy as she sprinted out.
Escaping wouldn’t ordinarily have been that easy, but Jimmy was distracted, busy protecting himself. A vortex opened in the shared mindspace of Atopia, a virtual black hole that was ripping the fabric of pssi-space apart. Bob was the Trojan who penetrated Atopia’s perimeter. He opened a tunnel straight to Terra Nova and unleashed their entire cyber-arsenal against Jimmy.
Running through the corridors, Nancy flooded the realities around her with security blankets while she keyed into Kesselring’s networks. His face floated into her displays.
“I’ve locked down Solomon House,” Kesselring said immediately. “Come up top to my level, we’ll coordinate from here.”
Nancy nodded and clicked off, watching a protective corridor open up and lead into the upper levels. Safe for the moment, she let her primary presence slide off into the hundreds of splinters her distributed consciousness was monitoring at key locations around the globe.
In a spasm, the world had erupted.
She watched the protective dome of the Commune in Montana blaze as Allied forces attacked. The battle platforms hammered the defenses of Terra Nova in a hundred-mile perimeter that stretched into the stratosphere above the southern Atlantic. Psombie armies flooded city centers around the world.
In counter-attack, the Ascetics launched offensives in Manila, Hong Kong, and Sao Paulo, but it wasn’t much.
In Boston, Nancy was ghosting through a bot stationed in Faneuil Hall market. She watched a man leaning over to inspect a basket of tomatoes. He picked up one of them, turning it over, while all around him rained small weapons fire in a battle between the Irish Ascetics and local police forces. The stall behind him burst into flames while he smiled and put the tomato in a bag. The person standing next to him exploded in a mist of red. The man reached down to select another tomato.
The reality blackout was almost complete in metropolitan areas.
Anyone that had pssi installed in their nervous systems, nearly half the planet now, was having evidence of the conflict erased from their realities. A reality filter spanning the globe connected most of it into a world where none of it was happening. Half of the world was being destroyed while the other half didn’t even notice.
The physical world was just the tip of the iceberg. In millions of virtual worlds connected to Atopia, the battle had also begun. Some worlds just winked out of existence, others tried to resist, and some fought back. The struggle for existence had begun.
Nancy ran down the corridor and jumped into a service elevator. Kesselring’s complex was on the upper level. She stared at the manual controls, and then reached out and pushed a mid-level address.
She’d been saving one last wild card.
17
Pulling his feet underneath him, Bob stood, feeling his feet sink into the sand. He raised himself out of the water and splashed the last few steps to dry land. A couple on beach towels looked at him, and he waved them away. “Get out of here!” he yelled, but all along the beach the screaming had already begun as the drones descended.
A projection of Jimmy materialized in front of him. “Come back for a little surfing, Bob? Have a nice swim?”
“Just hold on.” Bob staggered forward. The swim weakened him more than he thought it would. He leaned over to get his breath, slicking the water off his body. “I just want to talk.”
“So talk.”
It was the moment of truth. Would Jimmy just kill him? It was a possibility. Even with the swarming attack Bob unleashed into the informational structure of Atopia, Jimmy could destroy this section of Atopia with an untargeted kinetic bombardment. Overwhelmingly blunt, but it would get the job done. Bob waited, holding his breath.
“I’m not going to kill you, Bob.” Jimmy’s projection frowned. “What, are they telling you I’m some kind of monster?”
Bob slowed his breathing. Jimmy might just be buying time. Bob’s surprise attack ripped the Atopian networks wide open, far more than Bob anticipated. Bob and Jimmy stood facing each other on the beach, but they were also grappling in the background, reality shattering from reality, as they tried to insert themselves into each other’s networks. The hyperspaces around them blazed. Bob stayed silent.
Jimmy laughed. “Come on, you don’t believe in monsters, do you? I’ve heard the fairy tales Terra Nova is spinning about me.”
Bob stood up straight. “I don’t know. I don’t even know who I’m talking to.”
Jimmy stopped laughing. “They tried to destroy us, Bob. They would have killed you, Nancy, everyone here. Based on what? Some religious fable about the end of days? Religious extremism is a dangerous thing, and they’re about as extreme as they come.”
Already Bob’s attacks in the cyber-infrastructure were slowing. The tide was turning. Nancy was in Farm Tower Two. His parents were in their habitat. In a splinter Bob watched Commander Rick Strong’s face in the Atopian Command center. His team had isolated most of the viral threads Bob let loose. The Commander was always a big believer in boots in the mud, of the need to keep low-tech solutions on hand. His reserve platoon of his staff, humans with their minds sealed from pssi-space, were on their way to the beach.
Bob began planning escape routes, pinging their networks.
“Who do you think this is?” Jimmy thumped his chest and threw his arms wide. “This is me, Jimmy. We grew up together. And don’t think I don’t appreciate everything you did for me. It’s the only reason you’re standing here. You know that, don’t you?”