The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2), Page 4

  Brigitte and Vince walked forward. The aerial plankton opened a path in the perimeter wall, and they continued at a jog, running to meet the driver and cart on the other side.

  A young man, his cheeks ruddy, pulled up the horses. “Wooooah.”

  They all stared at each other.

  “Come on, don’t just stand there.” The young man waved at the clouds and coming rain. “We’ll be soaked in a minute.”

  Vince stepped forward. “And you are . . .?”

  The young man laughed, holding the reins in one hand while he tipped his hat with the other. “Zephyr.” He said it like they should already know him. “Zephyr McIntyre. Didn’t he mention me?”

  Vince and Brigitte exchanged glances.

  “Willy McIntyre’s cousin, Zephyr. You’re his friends, right?”

  5

  JIMMY SCADDEN LEANED back in his chair. “You have a responsibility.”

  Nancy looked out the glass window-walls of the Cognix boardroom. Beyond the glittering blue security blanket, a thousand feet below, the leafy green canopy of the Atopian top-side forests swayed in the breeze. Waves caressed the white sand beaches. A paradise, but one in which she was coming to realize she was trapped.

  “To who, you?” she replied, turning to face her captor.

  “Yes, to me.” Jimmy looked around the conference room at Rick Strong, Commander of the Atopian Defense Forces, and Herman Kesselring, the main shareholder and CEO of Cognix Corporation. Dr. Granger sat at a corner of the table, almost behind Jimmy. “To me, to all of us here, to the entire human race.”

  How easily the words rolled off his tongue. She remembered the awkward Jimmy Scadden of their shared childhood, the one that could barely get a word out. In his struggle to connect, whatever stumbling words he’d managed had at least been honest.

  But no more.

  “I want—no, I need—to go out and find Bob,” Nancy insisted. Had Jimmy noticed her infiltrating one of his meetings? She still hadn’t told anyone else what she’d found out.

  “What we want to do, and we need to do, these are sometimes two different things.” Jimmy looked at Commander Strong. “Isn’t that right?”

  “I agree,” said the Commander. “It’s too dangerous outside Atopia, especially now.”

  Jimmy held no direct authority at Board level, but official positions didn’t mean much anymore. Nancy wondered again what power Jimmy held over the Board. Perhaps it was the same power that he held over her.

  Fear.

  “Too dangerous?” Nancy questioned. “For who?”

  Jimmy smiled. “For you.”

  Just two words, and yet so many ways to interpret them.

  “It wouldn’t look right if you went out and searched for Bob yourself. A bit of a conflict of interest, no?”

  Finally, a glimmer of truth.

  “I don’t need to remind you that he’s stolen sensitive Atopian intellectual property,” continued Jimmy. “And aiding fugitives.”

  “Marie is not your property nor Atopia’s,” replied Nancy. “She was Patricia’s proxxi, her property to do with as she liked. And neither Sid nor Bob or even Vince is a fugitive, despite what the mediaworlds say.”

  “Our agents report Patricia’s data in Baxter’s possession,” Jimmy replied. “We have no proof that she gave it to him. He stole it. Of all people, why wouldn’t she have given it to you? Why did he run off and hide? Have you asked yourself these questions?”

  Nancy nodded. Of course she had. This was a losing battle. “Can we just continue with the situational report?”

  “As you wish.” Jimmy nodded at Kesselring, who in turn gave a nod to Commander Strong.

  Commander Strong glanced at Nancy, and then took control. The primary perspective of the meeting swept into a synthetic space projection.

  “As soon as we opened the Atopian multiverse, we had skirmishes erupting between nation-states and corporation-states in virtual spaces that tracked back to assets in the physical world.” The Commander began detailing worlds that spun through the attendees’ meta-cognition systems, memories, and impressions implanted at required and desired detail in the minds of the observers.

  Atopia’s fight with Terra Nova was polarizing the world, and this fracturing was limiting the spread of pssi in some jurisdictions. There was some commercial success penetrating spaces controlled by India and Russia, but most of Africa was out of their sphere of influence. None of this worried Commander Strong, but Kesselring wasn’t happy.

  The release of pssi into the general population was generating unexpected chaos. Most of it was due to things her Aunt Patricia had restricted when she was in charge, but had been included in the release after her departure: emo-porning and uncontrolled neural fusioning were at the top of the list of problems. The macroeconomic models were proceeding on plan, but the social chaos on specific levels hadn’t been anticipated.

  Nancy stayed quiet while Commander Strong finished his threat report on ownership graphs of corporations controlled by synthetic beings, then a report on a Terra Novan virtual world applying for United Nations sovereign status, but stopped him as he began talking about the disappearances.

  “Why has there been no special investigation?” Nancy asked. It was almost beyond disbelief.

  The biggest problem in the roll-out was customer support, helping people find their way out of virtual worlds they got lost in. Thousands of them were never found, disappeared into the pssi multiverse, their bodies still perfectly healthy, but their minds lost in some inaccessible corner of a virtual world.

  “Over a billion people have plugged into pssi in the past two months,” Kesselring objected. “Less than one in a hundred thousand is reported as ‘disappeared,’ as you call it, and from what I’ve heard, almost all are recovered after a few days. We can’t—”

  “Have a few people off pleasuring themselves in the multiverse stop what we’re doing?” Nancy completed his sentence for him. “How long are you going to stick to that line? From my numbers, the problem is accelerating at an exponential pace.” She turned to Commander Strong. “Don’t you see any connection between this and what happened to your wife?”

  The Commander returned her gaze, but she could see his mind was elsewhere. He spent most of his free time in virtual spaces with reruns of his proxxid children. His wife, Cindy, was still in a vegetative state, trapped inside her own mind. Even in meetings like this, he kept a reality skin of a 1940s-era wikiworld pegged around him that reminded him of her.

  Jimmy pulled on everyone, bending their attentional matrices back to him. “This is a matter for local law enforcement to investigate, isn’t it?” He frowned at Nancy. “And why are you researching this?”

  Nancy frowned back at him. “Because it’s important.”

  “What’s important to resolve at this meeting is the Synthetic Beings Charter of Rights that you’ve been championing. It would destabilize the entire economic structure we’ve worked to build.”

  Nancy had known this was coming. “Even you must admit that glasscutters and hackers terminating our AIs are becoming a problem; we need clearer laws to deal with this.”

  “In civil law, yes.” Kesselring joined the discussion, thumping his hand on the table. “But not international criminal law. What are you trying to do?”

  Nancy was alone in this. It was Patricia’s most treasured legacy, and one she promised to try and protect. “When birthing a new AI, there needs to be some international framework for responsibility. As it is—”

  “There is a framework, and it’s called copyright,” Jimmy interrupted.

  “I am not going to support a retraction of the Synthetic Beings Charter of Rights.”

  “SyBCoR is dead in the water, at least as it stands now.” Kesselring looked out the window. “You need to be practical.”

  Nancy laughed. “Practical?”

/>   “Or at least pragmatic.” Kesselring looked at her. “Push us, and we can push you.”

  Nancy stopped laughing. “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t force us to issue an arrest warrant for Baxter,” Kesselring replied. “This could escalate into a national security issue for our partners if we let them know how much information is now in his hands. We have more important things to worry about, no?”

  So it’s come to threats and blackmail. Nancy looked out the window at the white sand beaches, then at the distant stripe of America’s coastline on the horizon. Where was Bob, why wouldn’t he respond to her messages? Just weeks after Aunt Patricia’s death, and Nancy felt like she was failing her, but what choice did she have?

  Nancy sighed. “Fine. You have my vote to retract SyBCoR, at least for now.”

  6

  BOB STARED AT the Great Seawall of New York at the edge of Battery Park. It was the first time he’d seen it with his naked, natural eyes. If this place wasn’t still the financial capital of the world, they would have given up and moved Manhattan by now. Much of the island was now below sea level, the city guarded by an immense system of dikes and seawalls. Money was holding back the sea, but time was a thief and eventually would steal it all.

  “We need to wait a little bit longer.” Sid slapped Bob on the back. “The glasscutters need to verify us in person.”

  That morning, Deanna had smuggled them into Manhattan on her private turbofan. Her DAD credentials gave her automated passage through the NYC passport controls. In the meantime, Sid had sent digital copies of himself and Bob to random locations all over the world, leaving forensic breadcrumbs that should be enough to cover their tracks for as long as they needed to stay in one place.

  Despite the soggy weather, the Battery was still half-full of tourists, and Bob and Sid wound their way through them. Sid’s identity-theft algorithm was stealing the credentials of people they passed, briefly pasting them as their own into the wikiworld feeds. It was hacking the audio and visual feeds in the area, replacing their images with the image of someone nearby, then hopping to someone else as they moved.

  They were ghosts in the crowd.

  They had come to meet, in person, some members of a glasscutter guild that said it had leads on where Willy’s body might be. Waiting at Battery Park was part of the vetting process. The glasscutters wanted to verify Sid and Bob in person, sample their DNA using a remote sniffer, to make sure they were who they said they were. Bob couldn’t argue with their diligence.

  The twilight at the end of the day was gray as the lights of the city lit up the sky, the concrete and metal and glass of the city the same color as the sky and the sea, all of it indistinct from the other in a precipitation that was neither rain nor mist, but something shifting in between.

  “So this is New York,” Sid laughed, staring into the gray mist. “Been here a million times, but never in the flesh. Can’t say I like it better like this. I should go visit Uncle Avi just to see the look on his face—”

  Bob grabbed Sid’s arm.

  “I know, I know, we can’t talk to anyone.” Grinning, Sid brushed off Bob’s hand.

  Bob shook his head. “You know who you’ve always reminded me of?”

  “Why do I feel like I don’t want to know?”

  “Jimmy.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.” Bob smiled. “You guys are two peas in a pod. It’s why I talked to him way back then.”

  Sid smiled. “So I remind you of a psychopath?”

  “Not the psychopath part, but the hidden nerd, thinking you’re better than everyone else.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “I mean that in the best possible way.” Bob put an arm around Sid, pushing him forward. “Come on, keep moving.”

  Images of Jimmy hung everywhere around them—on billboards and floating holograms at street corners—part of the ubiquitous advertising campaign for the product launch of Atopian pssi. Beside him in many of the advertisements was Nancy.

  Bob didn’t overlay a reality filter to erase the images. Filtering reality here felt dangerous. Instead he augmented it, overloading his senses, searching for threats, always on the hair trigger. Fifty feet in the air a self-propelled NYPD gun platform hovered past, and tiny ornithopter drones buzzed through crowds like insects.

  A news overlay announced that Atopia had withdrawn support for SyBCoR, led by Nancy.

  Sid glanced at Bob, seeing the same news report. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Bob studied the background of the report. There was little detail, apart from an admission that SyBCoR would undermine the financial structure of the modern world. But there was no way Nancy would’ve withdrawn support for that without some intense pressure being applied to her.

  Seeing Nancy’s face hovering above him, worrying about what was happening to her—it felt like a spike was being driven into Bob’s head. He escaped by letting a splinter sweep above the bay, sailing over the top of the Statue of Liberty. She was ringed by her own skirt of concrete to keep out the rising waters. Spinning further out to sea, he turned his point-of-view to look back at the twinkling city under the setting sun, extending his view as wide as he could. The AEC—American East Coast—was now over a hundred million people in an unending metropolis that stretched from Boston to Washington.

  At the start of the twenty-first century, there’d been only thirty nations of the world’s three hundred with declining populations, but now only thirty had ones that were increasing. The humanscape, like the seas and land, was stagnating. Many of the big cities of over a hundred million—Guangzhou, Mumbai, Sao Paulo—had gone feral, their ground levels given over to street gangs. The rich lived in their padded penthouses, part spas and part life-support systems, living out unending twilights in endlessly aging bodies. They said the meek would inherit the Earth, but nobody said anything about the state it would be in when it was time for the handover.

  “Really?” Sid said, interrupting Bob’s thoughts. “Jimmy? I remind you of Jimmy?”

  Bob pulled his main perspective back into his body. “Not happy with that, huh?”

  “No, I mean—”

  “What I really meant was, you both value intelligence and knowledge above everything else. I think that whatever we find out here, maybe we could use that to tweak Jimmy somehow. Get inside his head.”

  Sid walked in silence for a few moments. “Oooh, I see what’s going on.” He turned to face Bob, walking backward. “You want to save Jimmy. You don’t think he’s as bad as Patricia says he is.”

  “I don’t know.” Bob wagged his head back and forth. “Maybe, I just don’t see him doing all this stuff. He’s changed somehow.”

  “People change . . .”

  “I know. But come on, nobody ever thinks they’re really a bad person. They always think they’re doing whatever they’re doing for some good reason. So what’s his reason?”

  “Cause he’s gone bat shit?”

  “I’m serious. Ever think that Jimmy is just mad at the world?” But was he just projecting his own feelings onto Jimmy?

  Sid considered this. “Still doesn’t give you the right to do whatever you want.”

  “Yeah, but it gives you a reason. If he thinks he was abused by his parents, hard to blame him . . .”

  Sid shook his head and laughed. “You’d love a leech if I gave you a sob story about it.” He grabbed Bob and pulled him forward. “Move faster, the identity theft algorithm works better with constant motion.”

  Bob watched the names and details of the people that walked by him pop up into splinters, each one briefly pasting the identity onto Bob. Mr. Brooks, brushing by Bob on his right, had just left his wife and was on his way to his mistress. Peter Lucasis, standing a few feet behind Bob, was probably thinking that he should have never let his girlfriend convince him into getting a cat. All of
this was derived from data that was either publicly available or hacked from databases on the fly.

  New York was refreshing in one sense—Bob’s metasenses felt full again.

  Already half of New Yorkers had started using pssi, and Bob let his secondary subjective spin through the mishmash of childish reality skins they were sporting, flimsy virtual realities he could poke a hole through with his phantoms. The more people that shared a reality, the stronger that reality became, but here they were all stuck in their own. Most of them hadn’t bothered to change their conscious security settings, and he heard their meta-cognition systems chattering around him like an angry beehive.

  Worse were the non-augmented humans. They weren’t pssi-aware, but there were enough smarticles floating in the air of New York already that some suffused into their bodies, passively interacting with the environment. They weren’t supposed to be active, but Sid’s systems could tap into them, sense their nerve impulses to paint a picture of their unprotected minds.

  Bob sensed that the man next to him was about to ask him to take a picture. The words hadn’t yet formed in his mouth, and he hadn’t even really decided yet, not consciously. But the nerve impulses that preceded his decision making were already there. It was fractions of a second perhaps, but the decision had already been made, and the man wasn’t even aware of it yet.

  Bob was. Bob waited.

  Fractions of a second stretched out in time as Bob quickened his nervous systems in a short burst. “Want me to frame a picture for you?”

  The man turned, surprised. “Yeah. Please. Ah, Steve Barker, 06913564.”

  Bob had already stolen Steve’s unique social marker to use as his own identity for the next seconds, but Steve didn’t know that. Bob made a show of entering the USM by typing into the air with one hand. Sid stopped and turned to watch from a few paces away. Gathering up his daughter and wife, Steve took a step toward the Sea Wall. Bob stepped back and smiled, framing some stills from the wikiworld and sending them into the man’s social cloud.