Complete Atopia Chronicles

Susie wrapped her arms around me, horrified, and tears welled up in her eyes.

“Turn it off James, please!” she cried, and then, just as quickly, we were back in the forest, with the cherry blossoms gently settling around us, sitting on the tree stump amid the deep grass and swaying flowers.

She held onto me tightly and cried. I sat impassively, and leaned to kiss the top of her head.

“I’m so sorry, James,” she just kept repeating. “I’ll do everything I can to help you.”

“It wasn’t just my mother,” I said after a moment, letting my voice crack a little. I looked away.

“What else?” she asked. “Show me.”

So I did. I took her back into another silently screaming night in my small sweaty body, the prison of my childhood world.

It had been a bright and sunny day, and my dad and I had just returned from fishing with the dolphins. Mother was off in another one of her never ending soapstim fantasies, and Yolanda had just finished making us dinner and chatting about the day.

Yolanda liked the dolphins too. I took her on inVerse dives with Samantha, and she would clap her hands and laugh with me.

Later, alone, and with a security blanket settled around the house for the evening, my dad tucked me into bed, and then crawled in beside me to cuddle.

“You had a good time with Samantha and the dolphins today, right, Jimmy?” asked my dad, holding me tight, brushing back a few golden locks of hair from my pale face. I nodded, my little heart beating faster with creeping terror.

“It’s okay if daddy holds you for a while, right Jimmy?” he asked, pleadingly. “Daddy gets lonely sometimes too.”

I nodded, trembling now, feeling his hands on me, feeling his hands on places that felt wrong. I loved my dad, and I could sense he needed something from me. He had been nice with me that day, bringing some joy into my dark and constricted little life.

So I let him touch me. I disappeared down my rabbit hole and into the recesses of the pssi system. He touched me all over with his real hands, his phantom hands, enveloping my body while pleasuring himself.

I cowered in the depths with my make believe friends.

“Don’t tell anybody about these times with Daddy, okay Jimmy? It’s a secret between you and me. If you can do that, I’ll make sure to take you out to play with Samantha, okay?”

It seemed like a reasonable deal to me at the time, so I hid inside and waited for the bright days of rocketing through the foam and spray.

As I snapped us back into real space, Susie had begun crying again. I was crying too.

She looked into my eyes. “James, we can tell people, we can punish them…you poor soul…”

“It won’t change anything, Susie, but you can help me.”

“How James? I’m so sorry. I’ll do anything to help.”

“I just need you to do something for me.”

16

Identity: Patricia Killiam

IT HAD TAKEN me two full days to recover, and in that time, a world already spinning out of control had suddenly taken an even steeper descent into chaos.

We’d started hardening Atopia for the now inevitable collision with the storms, and an escalation process was being discussed regarding possible evacuations. The rate of unexplained disappearances was spiking again, and in the midst of all this, I received a ping that Rick’s wife had committed some kind of reality suicide.

It seemed she hadn’t been terminating the proxxids. It wasn’t hard to guess what had happened.

“How is your wife doing, Rick?”

It was the end of a long day for everyone as we’d begun planning for possible disaster, but longest of all for Rick. I was at a loss for words. Reality suicide was a new phenomenon, deeply tied into the way pssi interacted with our unconscious minds, and just one more thing we didn’t understand properly yet.

I’d asked for this emergency meeting with Rick because my communication network with Command had suddenly been shut off, and nobody was responding to me.

“It’s hard to tell,” he replied unsteadily. “I mean, she looks fine. She looks like she’s asleep. I wish…”

“I don’t think blaming yourself is going to help,” I offered. “Anyway, we haven’t managed to crack the security blankets covering the worlds she was in before this happened, so we really don’t know what the full story is yet.”

Rick wiped his face with the back of one hand and stared down at the floor. We were sitting in my mahogany walled office. Pictures of ancient, four-masted sailing ships lined the walls.

“We know enough of the story to know how we got here,” he said with a dead voice, on the edge of tears. Then his mood shifted abruptly.

“This is your fault Patricia. You recommended using the proxxids,” he spat out venomously, looking up at me with menacing eyes. “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”

I recoiled slightly. This was a combat soldier after all.

“I don’t think laying blame is constructive at this point,” I began to say. I hadn’t exactly recommended them.