The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2)
Matthew Mather
Also by Matthew Mather
Atopia
The Atopia Chronicles
The Utopia Chronicles (forthcoming)
CyberStorm
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Matthew Mather
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477824535
ISBN-10: 1477824537
Cover design by Jason Gurley
Illustrated by Paul Youll
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014934792
For Julie, and the memory of Ash House, where much of this was written. And for the boys and girls at the White Horse. You know who you are.
Contents
Prologue
Part 1: Limbo
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Part 2: Heresy
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
Part 3: Treachery
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
Epilogue
Glossary of Terms
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Prologue
SEEING HIS DEAD mother making tea in microgravity, a hundred million miles from where he’d buried her in Idaho, was the first thing that ever struck fear into Commander Stockard during his thirty-year career as a space jockey. Even seeing the world flicker like a candle just moments before—the lights of the entire night side of the Earth winking on and off as if someone was flicking a switch—hadn’t fazed him.
Startled perhaps, but not scared.
Not like this.
It’s just a hallucination, he tried telling himself, cabin fever from being stuck in this tin can for two months. It’s not real. Keep calm. Panic is the enemy. His dead mother smiled, wagging a teapot in the air—did he want some? He shook his head. No, thank you.
It had to be the stress. Parking a hundred billion tons of comet ice in Earth orbit was a project of destiny. Seven years ago, when the deep space monitoring network picked up comet Wormwood-P/2058D12, it was heralded as humanity’s opportunity to finally—really—begin colonization of near-Earth space.
Commander Deng looked at him and frowned. “Still no comms from Earth. What do you think, solar flare?”
Stockard breathed deep. Maybe, but their instruments would have picked up a magnetic disturbance. “Probably more to do with the fight between Atopia and Terra Nova.” In the two months since the Comet Catcher mission left Earth, the struggle between these two colonies had climaxed into a full-blown kinetic conflict.
The engine burn had been going on for a minute already. The ship rumbled.
Bits of debris from weeks of zero gravity fell as the ship decelerated. A pencil Stockard left wedged next to a display unit bounced off his suit. He tried to grab it, swearing as he missed.
Glancing at Commander Deng, he could see something was wrong. “Everything all right?” Stockard yelled above the roar of the engines.
She blinked and shook her head. “It’s just . . . I think I’m hallucinating . . .”
“Burn complete,” announced the system computer. “On target for Wormwood.”
Stockard gazed at her steadily. Should he tell her? Fear was contagious. Out of the corner of his eye, in the reflection of the cockpit glass, Stockard’s dead mother waved at him from just down the access tunnel. Goose bumps rippled across his arms under the thick layers of his spacesuit.
His mother was waiting for him.
Part 1:
Limbo
1
A DOZEN ARCHED doorways lined each side of the great hall, each twenty feet high and topped with sparkling colored glass. Bright light streamed in. Between the doorways, gold-veined marble columns rose from polished floors to a ceiling frescoed with cherubic angels. An image of God hung over the middle of the room, reaching down to the world below.
It was a virtual projection, one of Jimmy Scadden’s private worlds, and it was the first time Nancy Killiam had seen it with her own eyes. She’d heard rumors, but getting into this space had been difficult. You had to be invited. Nancy wasn’t, but she’d infiltrated the virtual sensory channels of someone who was.
She was spying from a front-row-center seat.
“Join me if you believe in everlasting peace,” Jimmy thundered from a pulpit in front of her, shining in his white military uniform. “Join with me, and you shall never grow old, you shall never die.”
It was a psombie recruitment session.
Row upon row of young men and women sat at attention, all of them attending the meeting virtually through pssi—the Atopian poly-synthetic sensory interface. Their eyes and minds were focused on Jimmy. In exchange for unlimited and unfettered access to the Atopian synthetic reality multiverse, Jimmy was bargaining for use of their physical bodies in the real world, disconnecting their minds with a body-lease contract, turning themselves into psombies.
What was he up to? Nancy squirmed to stay hidden behind the consciousness of the observer in whom she was hiding. A part of her wanted to burst out and announce to Jimmy that she’d discovered him, but she’d never been good at confrontation, and what Jimmy was doing wasn’t illegal. She couldn’t go running back to the Cognix Corporation boardroom or Atopian Council, screaming like a child. Aunt Patricia would have known what to do, but she was dead. Sh
e’s gone. You need to figure this out for yourself.
Patricia Killiam’s passing hadn’t just opened up a yawning gap in the fabric of Nancy’s life: having one of the founders of Atopia die had opened a vacuum in the power structure of what’d become one of the most potent forces shaping the world—the release of pssi technology. Nancy stared at Jimmy on stage. Patricia had been a central figure in his life as well, but her death didn’t seem to be affecting him. At least, not in the ways that made sense to Nancy.
“I have chosen each of you personally”—Jimmy nodded to his audience—“to be my representatives in your communities. You are the chosen ones.” He paused and smiled. “If, of course, you choose me.”
The crowd shifted in their seats. They were here. They’d already made up their minds.
Nancy had known Jimmy her whole life, grown up together with him in the pssi-kid program on Atopia, part of the first generation of children born with limitless virtual reality built into their minds. But this man up on stage wasn’t the quiet and efficient Jimmy with whom she’d grown up, the shy boy who had hidden in the labs of the Atopian research centers almost as much as she had.
Jimmy opened his arms to the crowd. “Let me be the one that saves you—saves you from a life of drudgery, from a life of pain, from uncertainty. I can free you from all of this, to a world where your every desire is fulfilled.”
With these words the doors to the great hall flew open, revealing dreamscapes beyond. Nancy could only guess what the rest of the assembled glimpsed. Jimmy was using open access to their memories to project fantasy worlds, a combination of where each attendee had felt safest, and of what they always wanted to be. All Nancy saw was her Aunt Patricia, staring back at her from the grave.
“Give me your bodies,” Jimmy roared, “and in return I offer immortality.”
The reality skin of the hall merged with the fusing realities of the attendees, each of them greeted by a splintered copy of Jimmy who whisked them into their fantasy lands. Nancy released the sensory channels of the person she was ghosting, letting her primary presence settle behind her office desk. Mahogany paneling appeared in her visual sensory frames. Bookcases lined the walls behind her copper-studded leather attending chairs, the Persian carpets underfoot lit softly by green-glass lamps that glowed on the walls.
Cunard, Nancy’s digital symbiote—her proxxi—was sitting in one of the chairs. “We should gather more information before we say anything to anyone.”
Nancy smiled. Cunard, her protector and counselor, more now than ever before, and never any less of a perfectionist. Then again, he was just a reflection of herself. She nodded, agreeing with him. “Good work on getting me into that meeting.”
“What he’s doing might not be strictly illegal, but it’s certainly suspicious, and it’s been hidden from the Atopian Council.”
“Or at least hidden from us.” Nancy wasn’t sure where the fault lines in the newly evolving Atopian power structure were falling. It might just be that she wasn’t on a need-to-know list. She felt like she was drowning, unable to get a firm grasp on anything to hold her up. She needed help. “What I need you to focus on is finding Bob and Sid.”
“And Vince,” added Cunard.
“Yes, and Vince,” Nancy agreed. She wasn’t sure that they were all together, but they all rushed off just after the fiasco with the altered-reality skin and simulated storms that nearly brought the destruction of Atopia. Terra Nova, a competing off-shore colony in the Atlantic Ocean, admitted to implanting the reality-skin, forcing a closure of the Atopian borders just after Bob and Sid had left with Vince. “Do you think they’re trying to find Willy’s body?”
“Yes, but something else is going on. Why would they have cut off contact?”
Nancy could see Bob running off to help his friend Willy—with Sid, as usual, in tow—but it was odd that Vince went with them. Never mind that he was three times their age and the famous trillionaire founder of PhutureNews, but Nancy had never seen Vince Indigo rush off to do anything in all the years she’d known him when she was growing up. Why now?
“Bob did beg you to go with him,” Cunard reminded her. “I don’t need to tell you, but his anger is always just under the surface. Hard to say what losing Patricia did to him.”
Nancy took a deep breath. Was Bob angry at her? She’d only just caught a glimpse of the old Bob before he left, the one she’d known and loved all those years before his brother had killed himself. For years, Bob had cut himself off behind a veil of drugs, filtering his life through the pain of losing his brother. Nancy rubbed her eyes. I was supposed to be with him, he’d begged me to come, but how could I just take off and leave Patricia’s dream in the hands of Kesselring and Jimmy when she died?
Almost as soon as Bob had left Atopia on the passenger cannon, Nancy lost all connections with him, with everyone in his group. They’d completely disappeared off the grid, which was no easy feat.
They had to be hiding on purpose.
But why? Where was he?
2
“LIFE IS SUFFERING,” said a disembodied voice.
The words floated to Bob through a steaming jungle, and he followed them into a clearing where he found a herd of massive, dorsal-finned creatures. Halfway through mouthfuls of fern and bush, they swung their heads to observe him.
“The cessation of suffering is attainable . . .”
Bob looked into the sky, and then down at his hands; four fingers webbed with translucent green skin. The landscape, the animals, the vegetation—it was alien.
“Bob,” said another voice, more familiar this time. Bob looked up to find his proxxi Robert standing to the side of the clearing. The animals began lumbering off, crashing through the forest. “Time to get up, Bob.”
His proxxi smiled, offering a cup of coffee, and the jungle behind him shimmered. Replacing it were the familiar outlines of Bob’s bedroom in his family’s habitat on Atopia. Bob shook his head. He didn’t need to be babied. Reaching into the reality skin around him, he ripped it down. Sloping wooden beams appeared, the now-familiar ceiling of the farmhouse bedroom in which he spent the last few weeks sleeping. On a high shelf above the door, long-forgotten trunks stood collecting dust, and for the hundredth time he wondered what was in them. Perhaps today he’d have a look.
This end of the farmhouse was turn-of-the-21st-century: wooden-framed construction with soft mineral walls—gypsum calcium sulfate sandwiched between paper—fastened together with formed-metal nails and screws. Primitive was the word that came into Bob’s mind. The wilderness of reality outside of Atopia was reinforcing the sensation that he’d been cast out of paradise.
On Atopia, his floating island home just off the coast of California, even physical reality was clean, shining, every detail accounted for. The forests up top were perfectly manicured. The corridors below were always polished and shining. Before leaving—before being asked to leave—he had only experienced the rest of the world through wikiworld simulations. Now he was out in the wild, with illicit smarticles embedded in his nervous system, and the limited bandwidth forced him into the dirt and grime and specificity of being in only one place at a time. To say it was a new experience was an understatement.
And the constant barrage of hate media didn’t help.
When he took off from Atopia right after the incident, and then immediately dropped off the grid, the conspiracy nuts were in hot pursuit of Bob and Sid and Vince. It wasn’t just the nutjobs, though. The longer their gang remained hidden and off the radar, the more the mainstream mediaworlds were latching onto the conspiracy theories. People wanted answers.
So did Bob.
Propping himself onto one elbow, he rubbed his eyes. “What was that about?”
His proxxi appeared on a floral-print chaise in front of the fireplace in the small room. “What?”
“The jungle with the dinosaurs.”
“Dinosaurs?”
Connectivity was limited in rural Montana. Bob had a few dozen splinters—synthetic intelligence bots modeled after his own cognition systems—hunting down leads as they searched through the virtual and real worlds for any sign of his friend Willy’s body. Synthesizing all the information they collected in real-time was impossible through the tiny data pipes they had access to, so his splinters were integrating into his meta-cognition systems while he slept.
It made for strange dreaming.
“You were standing in a jungle with me,” Bob continued, sitting upright in bed. “Was it a gameworld? A past construct . . .?”
Robert shook his head. “You must have been dreaming.”
Bob stretched and felt through the extra-sensory network of smarticles dusted around the peripheries of the farm. Nothing—no danger, no incursions, not yet.
The dream was fading, the giant creatures sliding into mind-fog.
Robert began feeding Bob a summary of the night’s searches. The most significant news was that the Comet Catcher mission had launched from orbit the night before and in two months would be shepherding the Wormwood comet into Earth orbit. Bob scanned the top level of Robert’s reports, but there were no new answers, no resolutions. It was going to be another day of waiting. Bob detached his visual point-of-view to see where everyone else was, leaving a fresh splinter to finish chatting with Robert.
Snapping out of his body, his viewpoint rose up toward the ceiling while he flipped his visual system to scan for warm bodies. A housebot appeared through the bedroom door with Bob’s clothes for the day. The walls faded and through the transparence the red-outlined images of his friends downstairs in the kitchen appeared, their voices rising into his consciousness as he flitted down to them.
“Sidney Horowitz?” laughed Vince as Bob’s virtual presence announced itself, pinging everyone’s networks while he sat his projection down at the head of the breakfast table. Sid and Vince were sitting at the table arguing about something. Willy’s virtual avatar and Brigitte sat across from them, holding hands.
Sid nodded at Bob, acknowledging his arrival, before turning back to Vince. “What’s the big deal? It’s not like it was secret.”
