Complete Atopia Chronicles

The rash of people disappearing into the multiverse and leaving their bodies behind had gotten worse. It was now even common, but after an initial alarm by friends and family we’d usually find them burrowed deep in some hedonistic fantasy world. Lately, though, cases were sprouting up where we hadn’t been able to find them.

“Do you think that bastard Sintil8 could have anything to do with it?” Kesselring asked. “He’d love to find a way to derail the program. Are you keeping an eye on him?”

“More or less.” I had my own private discussion going on with Sintil8, nothing I wanted Kesselring to know about. Looking at him, I could see he didn’t suspect anything. “Anyway, these new disappearances are different. Their brains are highly stimulated, a sensory overload we don’t understand.”

I took a deep breath and shifted in my seat, drumming my fingers against the conference room table.

The same privacy laws I’d been instrumental in creating now meant that we couldn’t dig any deeper into peoples’ minds without their consent. After the mess of the Cyber Wars, I’d forced Cognix to build ironclad privacy systems into pssi from the ground up to protect the rights of users. Root pssi control was like having access to the soul of a person and was the fundamental building block everything else branched out from.

“We need to figure out what on earth is going on.”

Kesselring sighed.

“I don’t disagree, Pat, but a few people off pleasuring themselves in the multiverse isn’t enough to delay the entire program. This is a massive undertaking we have put in motion.”

The global marketing program to launch pssi commercially was easily one of the biggest promotional campaigns of all time, at least by a private corporation—if this label could really be applied to us anymore.

I considered this for a moment while I watched the glittering cover of the security blanket that had fallen around us when he arrived. Even with security built–in from the ground up, if you wanted to be really sure you were safe from prying eyes, it was best to use a blanket. The one surrounding us now was Kesselring’s personal, impenetrable shield that had an odd and shifting color that was similar to the indistinct bluishness of water in a glacial run–off stream. Maybe that was why it felt so cold to me.

“Do you think the Terra Novans are involved somehow?” I asked.

“They would love to put a stick in our spokes,” he snarled back. “Anyway, I have someone looking into it. We have to be extremely vigilant from this point onwards, Patricia.”

I watched him carefully, wondering how vigilant he was being about me.

“You’ve probably heard, but Rick has agreed with us to nominate Jimmy to the Security Council,” I said. “If anyone can ferret out what is going on, he can.”

I was still rooting for Jimmy even if he didn’t need it anymore.

When Jimmy’s parents had left I had taken him under my wing. He was now my star pupil, along with Nancy of course. In my long life I’d never had any children of my own, and these two were as close as I’d come.

His mother, my great-grand-niece, had abandoned him here, and I blamed myself for not intervening sooner in that domestic situation. In the end, Jimmy had been the one to pay the price, but he was beginning to blossom now. I couldn’t have been more proud.

Kesselring eyed me, sensing my protectiveness.

“Yes, Jimmy is an excellent choice,” agreed Kesselring. “In fact, he’s the one I have helping me out.”

I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t known Jimmy was working directly for Kesselring on anything.

“What are they up to?” I mused under my breath, thinking about the Terra Novans, but now thinking about Kesselring as well.

“I don’t know,” replied Kesselring, not catching my full meaning, “but this just reinforces my point of view that we need to push ahead as quickly as possible. As you said yourself, we need to maximize the network effects of the product introduction…”

“Yes, yes,” I completed the sentence for him, “to gain the highest saturation throughout the population as quickly as possible.”

I paused and stared directly into his eyes.

“So we’re going to be giving it away for free?”

He smiled. “Of course.”

“And it doesn’t worry you that we’re not telling people the full story?”

“Of course it worries me,” he said looking down at the floor, “but again, what choice do we have?”

He looked up from the floor and into my eyes. “We need to make sure we stabilize this timeline as best we can.”

As we approached the point of no return, all the careful planning and clever analyses suddenly had the feeling of blind faith, and I’d had faith shot out of my skies early in life.

“Patricia,” he said, watching me intently, “the lives of billions rest in our hands. We cannot fail.”

He was right. What we were doing couldn’t be worse than letting billions of people die.

Could it?

5

Identity: Jimmy Jones

“AT EASE SOLDIER.”