But there was nothing.
This was definitely an instantiated Bob he was talking to, all the background checks proved it beyond a doubt, but he was barely registering any emotions. Had something happened in the cross-over?
Bob’s projection shrugged its shoulders when Vince sympathized about his parents being killed.
“Sometimes sacrifices have to be made,” said Bob, looking at Vince. “For the greater good, you know?”
Vince opened a private channel to Sid. “This is creeping me out.”
“Me too,” replied Sid.
“Maybe he’s just shell-shocked,” Vince suggested.
“Maybe.” Sid wasn’t convinced. Bob’s face looked sad, withdrawn. It both was and wasn’t the Bob he knew.
“Should we bring up the POND data?”
Sid took a deep breath. They hadn’t had the time to bring this up yet. When they decoded the POND signal, Terra Nova and the Commune had been on the edge of destruction, in a final fight for existence. In almost the next instant, it was over, the fight was won, and an intense flurry of activity started to gain control over the situation. What was in the POND message was mysterious, but it was hardly mission critical.
Or was it?
“We need to tell him,” Sid replied. “Maybe he can answer the mystery, and it’s his own sensory streams in the POND data. He’ll be able to decode what’s in there way faster than me.”
“And you’re not worried that his main message to himself was, Don’t let me kill myself ?”
In the background, all over the world, the disappeared were reawakening. It was messy. People were awakening not just in their stasis pods, but in virtual worlds and in augmented space, coming to their senses to find themselves walking the streets like ghosts outside of their bodies.
“Of course I’m worried,” Sid replied. “But we shouldn’t wait. Bob can help us.”
Vince shrugged.
Dropping from their private conversation, Sid put an arm on Bob’s shoulder. “We decoded the POND signal.” He forwarded the decryption tags to Bob. “I don’t know what to make of it, but it seems like you sent yourself a message.” Sid watched his friend’s face carefully.
Bob accepted the key. His face creased up. “This is my own sensory data, what in the heck?”
So Bob didn’t know. “I don’t know, buddy, we were hoping—”
But Sid was cut off midsentence.
“Sidney?”
It was a familiar voice, but one Sid hadn’t heard in years. It pinged long forgotten memories. “One second,” he said to Vince and Bob as he shifted his primary subjective to have a look.
In a newly formed world, in their old family home back in Hoboken, New Jersey, Sid’s grandmother stood before him. He’d never even been there before. His grandmother had visited them once on Atopia, when he was four, just before she’d died. She motioned for him to sit down.
“Grandma?”
“Sit down, Sidney, it’s time to eat,” she insisted, waving a spoon at him. She was cooking.
Sid obeyed and sat at the kitchen table. He began testing the metatags of the world he was in, but there were none. His mother appeared through the living room door.
“Sid,” said his mother, “what are you doing here?” She pointed behind her. “Did you see in the living room?” There were more people in there. He recognized his grandfather, and through a portal from this world to another, he could see more, all connected together in a string that stretched back in time.
“Vince,” Sid called out in alarm, bringing his mind back into the corridor. “I just—” He wasn’t sure what to say.
“I just met my mother,” said Vince, stopping walking in the corridor and staring at Sid. “She died forty years ago. What the hell is happening?”
“They’re being released.” It was Bob speaking. Sid and Vince turned to him. “All of them, they’re being released.”
“Who?”
“Everyone.”
Sid grabbed Bob’s shoulders. “Every who?”
“Every human, everyone who reached the threshold of self-aware intelligence.”
And in an instant Sid understood. His splinter network spread out from his grandmother’s kitchen, back through the portals and into the other worlds connected to it. Each generation of his family had come back to life, each one of them seeing just the generation or two that it knew. Parts of their cognition and memories were resurrected. Enough for them to be aware, but not fully cognizant. Vince grabbed Sid’s hand and shared what was happening inside his networks.
It was the same thing.
“Who’s that?” asked Sid’s grandmother.
Sid looked up into the corner of her kitchen. It was an image of Bob, but not the Bob walking with him in the corridor, nor the version of Bob talking with Tyrel and Mohesha. It was Bob on the top level of Atopia, sitting with Nancy. A man in flowing robes stood before them.
“That’s my friend Bob, Grandma,” Sid replied.
But if that was Bob, who was walking with him in the corridor? He checked and rechecked the metatags. “Bob, what the hell’s going on? Is that one of your splinters?” Sid directed Bob’s attention to the image of him on the rooftop of Atopia. “And who’s that you’re talking to?”
For the first time since Bob’s return, his face registered something more than mild emotion. “I think we’ve got a problem, Sid.”
“No kidding.”
Sid sensed both the Terra Novan and Atopian synthetic reality systems flaring in a massive spike of activity. Behind it all, the space power grid continued to cycle back and forth. It wasn’t damping down, but intensifying.
“That’s me, too,” Bob replied after a pause. “Another copy of me. It must have happened when I died.”
This was getting worse and worse. “And who’s that you’re talking to?” Sid asked again.
“The priest.”
“Who?”
“The priest,” Bob repeated. “Mohesha told you about him, didn’t she? Didn’t I mention him?”
Sid shook his head. “No, you didn’t.” He tried raising Mohesha on a private channel, but there was no response. Global communication systems were overloading. A sinking feeling settled into Sid’s gut. He began pinging his friends, and the sinking feeling solidified into a hard ball of fear.
What was happening to Vince and Sid seemed to be happening to everyone with whom he could get in touch.
Tens of billions of human minds were being resurrected somehow, each of them in places they remembered, speaking their own language, everything translated and intermediated by the Terra Novan and Atopian synthetic reality platforms. All the other synthetic worlds were being displaced by these new realities.
And all of them were watching Bob on the roof of the Atopian towers.
“Sid?”
“Yeah?” He turned to face Bob.
“I’ve had a look at the POND data.”
Sid didn’t need to ask Bob what was happening. He knew what was happening. It was happening everywhere, in every time, and to everyone.
“And?”
“I think something very bad is about to happen.”
30
Bob looked down at the farming towers of Atopia, a thousand feet of steel and glass reflecting the blue of the ocean around them. He squeezed Nancy’s hand again. It felt like he was holding a dead fish.
Jimmy had released the disappeared, and in a flood, James had released everyone else. In his mind’s eyes, Bob saw them, the millions and then billions of minds that were being recreated, their awarenesses blossoming back into the multiverse. He looked into Nancy’s eyes beside him. She smiled vacantly.
The knuckles of his hand holding Nancy’s were white. She flinched.
“Life is suffering,” said the priest, looking to the horizon.