Complete Atopia Chronicles

As this timeline had worn on, the world had begun filtering the incessant predictions of my death as the attempts of another bored trillionaire at getting attention. The world at large had erased me from their networks as phuture spam, and even the flash death mobs had gotten bored. The man with no future, who existed only in the moment, was invisible to a world fixated on anywhere but where they actually were.

On my end, I’d come to grips with, and even relish, my situation. My death had become a local solution to the universe that, with the massive resources at my disposal, I’d managed to bring under control in a tight but stable spiral, undertaking a list of nearly incomprehensible activities each day.

The irony just made it that much richer.

I was trapped by my own creation, unable to even tell people what was happening. Even more ironic was that I didn’t even know if it all was true. It was possible that I was just running around everyday doing it all for no reason. But then, this was life.

I smiled at that thought.

The existentialists did say that life was all about pulling the victory of meaning from the jaws of senseless absurdity, and in that, I’d discovered a purpose that I’d struggled to find before. That purpose was finding out who was doing this to me, and why, and the trail was leading back to Atopia.

And so, I became a man with no future, but a man that danced happily between the raindrops, or perhaps, between the timedrops.

EPILOGUE

Identity: Patricia Killiam

SITTING AND WAITING. Perfect the art of sitting and waiting, and you will live a long, long life.

I was in the main Cognix conference room, perched about two thousand feet up in the complex spanning the tops of the farming towers at the center of Atopia. The afternoon sun was shining in hotly through the glass window-walls, and I was sure he was making me wait on purpose, knowing I was here in person.

My mind was circling back to my press conference this morning, about what I’d been telling the reporters. Truths and half truths; I’d been mixing the both of them for so long I hardly knew the difference anymore.

How was pssi going to end up changing the world? To be honest, I really had no idea. The real power of pssi, I wanted to tell them, was harnessing the brain’s natural ability for adaptively rewiring itself to extend the human mind into the multiverse, but this would have earned me blank stares.

The human sensory and motor system had evolved to help us make sense of our environment and fend for ourselves within it, which had worked great when our ancestors were out hunting gazelle on the savannah, but the modern human environment was a massive flow of information and pssi made it possible to plug our nervous systems directly into it.

Explaining that to those reporters was just a bridge too far for me to cross with them. It was easier to let them run into some pssi-kids on Atopia somewhere—they’d get the idea soon enough.

I sighed.

Being present in the flesh was something I’d begun to do more and more lately, sensing my own time growing short. Up here in the conference room the security blankets blocked outgoing and incoming communications, so there was no escaping down a rabbit hole while I waited. However, there was no sense in letting time, illusion or not, go to waste, so I decided to limber up a little.

Taking a deep breath, I straightened up in my chair and clicked on the visual overlays of my phantoms, and they appeared arrayed around me. Concentrating, I began moving the phantom that controlled my spatial point of view. This little phantom was visible, floating disconnected beside my body like a little putty colored finger that I could move around.

Despite working with this technology for more than thirty years, it still felt strangely thrilling to feel this projection as a part of me, its tactiles and kinesthetics wired into my own sensory system so that I could feel it stretch and click through the boundaries of its interface.

The brain had an almost inexhaustible capacity to neuroplastically rewire itself. Learn to play the piano, and the brain devotes more of its motor cortex to your fingers. Cut off an arm, on the other hand, and your brain could adaptively learn to reroute its control of an artificial arm by reworking the way it used various packets of neurons.

Phantoms were just an extension of this. Without removing any existing limbs or digits, we had created virtual fingers and limbs in synthetic spaces using pssi—the poly-synthetic sensory interface—to connect them to the neurons in the motor cortex. It was like having a dozen extra hands to manage controls, directly wired into our brains like a part of our bodies.