Complete Atopia Chronicles

“Uh, yeah, good…hey,” I replied, thinking of what Bob had said. “I could show you some of the stuff I’m doing at Solomon House if you like.”

“Really? Cool!” Her eyes and smile widened. “Can we go now?”

I nodded. Why not?

“Mum!” she yelled, and her mother’s face floated up between the two of us.

“Yes, Cynthia? You don’t need to yell you know,” her mother admonished.

Cynthia just continued unfazed, “I’m just going to flit out with Jimmy for a bit to show me some of the stuff he’s working on at Solomon House.”

Cynthia’s mother looked suitably impressed.

“Work at the Solomon House? But you’re just a baby,” she remarked, looking my way and furrowing her brow. “Anyway, yes, sure, but I’m pinging you back the second Nancy gets here.”

Cynthia grabbed my hand and squealed excitedly, “Let’s go!”

I felt an electric thrill, feeling her touching me, that spread like wildfire to settle hotly in my crotch. An erection immediately sprang to life. Cynthia could sense something going on from my embarrassed, flushed cheeks. She looked at me mischievously.

“Come on Jimmy, let’s go!” she squealed again.

I pulled her back and away and we dropped out from our bodies and into my private work space. I’d never brought anyone here before, and I felt naked. It was thrilling if frightening.

In one layer of my visual field I could see Samson, inhabiting my body back at the beach, holding hands with Cynthia’s proxxi near one side of the blue and yellow tent. They were watched carefully by Cynthia’s mother’s proxxi, and they went off to get some cotton candy. I smiled.

Cynthia and I were standing together in a large, white laboratory with gleaming floors and walls with a view out of smoky glass windows onto Atopia stretched out below, the same view physically as the real Solomon House atop the farming complex.

Above stainless steel tables floated a variety of working models of mirror neuron interfaces I was working on with Dr. Granger. He shared my interest in the physiological basis of emotion and the ability to use it to direct the hive mind, but where he was more interested in happiness, I had taken more of an interest in fear—something the other researchers had mostly passed by.

While we walked, I keyed through some parameters with my phantoms to wash away the tables and structures to be replaced with only one of the models, which then floated in space in front of us, slowly rotating. I was keenly aware of Cynthia’s grip on my sweaty hand.

“Cool,” she said, watching the visually enhanced synaptic firing of the neuron floating in front of us. It was a working model.

“This isn’t just a model,” I declared, “this is actually happening inside me right now.”

After some testing I had installed them in my own developing wetware to see how the models would respond. I started to explain how it worked, how this was an upgrade to what we were doing already, how it provided a more reliable pathway to empathy.

Empathy was something I didn’t understand, or rather, I understood it, but I just didn’t feel it.

While I was nervously trying to explain my project, Cynthia had wandered off, looking around the rest of my work space. I wanted to show her something really special, so I was engrossed in my model, busy burrowing through the cell walls trying to change some protein pathways.

“What’s in here?” she asked, opening a door.

“Oh, ah, nothing!” I cried out, but it was already too late.

As soon as the portal had opened a crack, she’d dropped into the world beyond. I quickly abandoned my model and shot off into that world behind her.

Instantly I was standing beside her in semidarkness. Shafts of light bore down from the blackness above, illuminating a writhing mass of insects and worms and other creatures pinned painfully to the walls of my labyrinthine private universe. An image of my mother’s face hung in space above us, twisted in hate.

“Who’s my little stinker?” she repeated and repeated, her face contorting and distorting.

I came here to heal myself, to reconnect and re-stimulate some of the sensory pain I’d felt. The process seemed to allow me to refocus my mind. I had picked out some particularly nasty moments from my childhood and worked through them bit by bit, simultaneously bathing my sensory system in the pain from the thousands of little creatures I had pinned to the walls. I didn’t understand why, but it helped.

Cynthia shivered and looked around with wide eyes, scared but excited.

“This is way fucking creepy man,” she whispered, looking around at the half illuminated animals pinned to the walls, scraping and clawing futilely, never dying, never free, always trapped and in pain.

Tears began to well up in her eyes looking at the hopeless little creatures.

“I can feel them,” she squeaked, her eyes growing wide. “This is horrible!”

Then, suddenly, she was gone, flitting back to the birthday party.