Complete Atopia Chronicles

Too many things were unexplained, too many loose ends were accumulating, and Rick was right—we didn’t know what we were doing anymore. I was going to have to stop this freight train, even if it meant risking everything.

“Well, keep on it,” I told her. “I’m going to see about talking with Jimmy.”

I sent him an emergency ping. I needed to collect as much information as I could.

To my surprise, Jimmy accepted right away, and my office faded out as my primary subjective was channeled into a private deprivation space, surrounded by a heavy security blanket. Jimmy wasn’t there, but his communication network was open to me.

I felt ill at ease.

“Jimmy,” I called out into the dimensionless emptiness, “what can you tell me?”

17

Identity: Jimmy Jones

I HELD PATRICIA carefully in the anonymous security blanket. Rick wouldn’t be happy finding me talking to her right now.

“Things are under control at Command,” I replied. “Preparing for a state of emergency is just a precaution, and having the tourists leave is the sensible first step.”

“I don’t disagree. What I mean is—do you know who’s doing this?” Patricia rephrased.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

She took a deep breath. “So you really think it’s the Terra Novans? Do you have proof?”

“No,” I admitted, “but who else could it be?”

Everyone knew they wanted to slow down the pssi program to give their own program a chance in the market. The commercial stakes were huge.

“We need proof, Jimmy…it doesn’t make sense. The risk of an offensive like this completely exceeds the potential returns. I need you to find out what’s going on.”

“I’m on it, Pat,” I replied, now a little exasperated.

“And keep an eye on Rick, please Jimmy, he’s shut me out now. I know you understand. And please, put your energy into finding out where this is coming from.”

This began to feel like nagging.

“I will Pat, I promise.”

“I love you Jimmy. You take care, okay?”

“I will,” was all I responded. She looked hurt. “Bye for now.”

I cut off the channel. She knew how busy I was.

It was hard to concentrate on her needs with my mind so widely splintered. Samson and I were spread far and wide throughout the multiverse now, trying to find clues as to how someone had targeted us like this without us getting advance notice.

I knew Rick’s wife had been depressed, we’d all been very concerned, but this reality suicide had taken things on a new and disturbing path.

It was, however, something I could relate to. My own mother had been a drunk and a soapstim junkie. It was bad enough to be disinterested enough in your own life to just patch into someone else’s, but Mother didn’t even go that far.

Her favorite pastime had been to patch into synthetic soaps, an endless universe of autonomously generated and farcically campy dramatic romance worlds.

Mother hadn’t even bothered to give up her life for someone else’s experience—she’d given it up for an empty, soulless simulation. I guess it was like a gameworld for her, but instead of facing down some challenge, she just sensed it all passively while the soapstim told her that her ex-husband wasn’t dead, but had actually been in a coma for twenty years and was now in love with her step-sister’s boyfriend, or some other such nonsense.

Living in passive fantasy worlds had made my mother’s return to her lacking life, that much more painful. Being out for so long all the time, her brain’s wetware lost much of its neural connectivity with her body.

When she returned, she had to drive her body around using her proxxi Yolanda as an interface to her intentions. It gave her a jerky, unnatural way of moving, which just fuelled her frustration and empty anger. They called people like Mother soapstim junkies.

“You little worm!” she would scream at me as she settled back into her body after a particularly long session, already a few drinks into calming her nerves.

Mother wasn’t very technical, but she had figured out, even back then, how to use the security blankets to screen her sessions with me from the outside wikiworlds.

“It’s all your fault!” she would slur out accusingly. “That dirty bastard.”

As a parent she had full access to my pssi, and I had no way of blocking her out until I gained full control of it myself, which only my parents had the right to grant me when they felt I was ready.

Even as a toddler, I began to learn ways to hide and crawl into the cracks of the pssi system, deep down into the darkest corners away from others. I slowly began to find ways around the blocks and cages Mother tried to keep me in, sliding past the pssi controls to hide. Samson would crawl in with me, along with all the friends we’d created to hide together with us.

In her worst moods she would amp up my pain receptors and reach into me virtually to squeeze, pinch and pull on my tiny nervous system. It left no physical marks, but it was excruciatingly painful, and I would squeal and scream in the private Misbehave world she’d created for that form of punishment.