Complete Atopia Chronicles

“I could ask you the same thing.”

I let out a quiet laugh at that. I didn’t think this old body had any tears left in it, but I guess it still had a few. Wiping them from my face, I felt my papery skin. So fragile, and yet we dreamt of immortality.

“Everything is in order,” I said quietly, needing to get this over with. “I think I’d like this time to myself. Goodbye Marie, and say goodbye to Nancy for me.”

§

I turned off my pssi for the last time and my office faded into the muted colors of my real world living space, a small apartment near the beaches. It was small, but one of only a handful of them on the surface of Atopia. Almost everyone else lived below deck.

In the end, Jimmy had given me what I wanted—for the world to embrace pssi—but he had exacted his price for it. Perhaps ending my life was something I really wanted, and he’d simply been the instrument of my desire.

If it really was a case of split personality, perhaps there was something to save in Jimmy, perhaps he wasn’t to blame, that he was being manipulated himself. It could be the key to stopping whatever was happening.

All of my medical systems were shutting down. I had chosen this moment myself. Of all the things that pssi could give us, perhaps the least touted was dignity in death. It was just me, by myself in the world for perhaps the first time in nearly half a century.

So this is what reality feels like. I had forgotten.

Wearily, I lifted my ancient body off the chair in the kitchen that Marie had left it sitting on. I decided I wanted to go and inspect my tiny garden out back to see what damage had been wrought by my inattention over the years.

Slowly, limping, I walked out my back door and reached my garden. I looked around. Some plant pots were blown over, and everything had a dull grey tint to it in the dim pre-dawn light. I ambled over to a sun lounger near the back, near an old raspberry bush nearly as decrepit as I was, and collapsed into it. A few last rays of the sun would be nice to catch if I could.

So, I won’t last to see pssi spread into the world.  Maybe that was for the best. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with the pace of change anymore, and not sure I wanted to be around and responsible for what might be coming.

My own end, I thought to myself, it had to come, but I’d always managed to suspend disbelief about it. Now there was something we all had a talent for. I laughed and thought of Cody Chavez, living in a world of Elvis impersonators. Maybe Hal was right, maybe Cody was happiest in his suspension of disbelief. Maybe that’s what his life meant to him. Who was I to say otherwise?

“Marie,” I called out, “I have one last story to tell you.”

I couldn’t see or feel Marie anymore, but I knew she was with me. In fact, I knew she would be surrounding and cradling me like a baby right now, and that was a comforting thought. As I began to understand my end was coming, I had begun telling Marie stories of my earlier life, before machines had begun to record memories, before digital trails tracked our pasts out behind us while we blindly forged ahead.

Telling Marie my memories, my stories, made me feel like a part of me would survive on, as well as a part of some of the people in them. I had saved my most important, my most cherished and hidden story, for last.

Memories of the spring of 1940 flooded me now as I spoke, remembering the evacuation of my sisters and I, and all the rest of the children, from London in advance of the bombing campaigns that would signal the start of the Battle of Britain.

We’d been sent to live in the countryside with a nice family, just outside the village of Andover. It was hard to believe at the start, living in such an idyllic setting, that the world was tilting towards war. And spring wasn’t just blooming in the flowers that year, but also in my young heart—my God, to be sixteen again, to see the world through such trusting and naïve eyes.

In practically the next field over from us, they had hastily assembled the new Over Whallop RAF station and airfield, and as the spring gave way to summer we were suddenly overrun by gangs of handsome young men on their way to their missions into the sky.

Visions came to me of the daring young men and their flying machines, sitting carelessly about outside their flapping khaki tents, smoking cigarettes, and with a sudden wail of alarms they would spring off bravely into the sky.

My young man was Aaron Adair, as fitting a name for a flying man as there ever was. I remembered cautious, furtive glances over hedgerows, quiet talks on quiet walks on moonlit nights, a first kiss, the fervor of first love and the squeals of laughter with my sisters in our attic bedroom as I shared it all. And then the dreaded sirens, the fearful waits and joyous returns, the smells of oil and sweat and gunpowder mixed with passionate nights and declarations of undying love.

And then…