Complete Atopia Chronicles

“We just give people what they want,” James said, his yellow fangs creeping at the edges of his smile, “and, well, they give us what we want in return. It’s a fair bargain, no?”

I nodded, understanding, my body and mind singing with energy.

“With root control, we have access to all their memories, know their every hope, their darkest fear, and we can synthesize worlds to play all these out, to suit our whims, our needs. They are sinners, Jimmy, they must be cleansed of their sins through their own pain.”

Music had begun to play, a mad litany filled with notes of terror and fear, and the creatures around us began to sway and dance.

“Pain and fear cleanse the mind, Jimmy,” said James as he poured me a glass of wine, “and we need your mind as clear as possible for what is to come.”

He offered me the wine.

“My own special reserve I have been working on just for you,” he said as I took the offered glass. I swilled the contents and leaned in to smell it. “A nice base of pain, with hints of rejection, notes of keen terror… try it.”

The music quickened with my mind, soaking in the sensory orgy of my body connecting into the hundreds of metaworlds holding our trapped sinners, their terror and pain coursing through me. The creatures around us were whipping themselves into a frenzy as the music climaxed, and I leaned my head back to drink in the wine. As I greedily gorged on it, it spilled down and around my face, drenching my ADF Whites in bright, bloody splashes.

James crossed the final inches to embrace me, and I threw my arms skywards, reunited at last with my one true brother. Nobody would ever hurt us again, and together, we would cleanse the world of its sins.

33

Identity: Patricia Killiam

“I THINK THE clinical diagnosis would be sadistic sociopath with multiple personality disorder,” said Marie.

I looked up from my desk at her and nodded. We’d finally managed to piece together what was happening. It was frightening, even more frightening than the news that my own medical systems were on the brink of ultimate failure.

“It’s not what I think you need to think about now,” she added. “I’ll pass this onto Bob.”

“Safely,” I added pointlessly. Marie just nodded back.

Images of Shiva, the great destroyer and creator, floated into my mind. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. He was extremely good at hiding his tracks. We only really had the one incident at Nancy’s birthday party as a window into his mind, and even that was fleeting. Fleeting but infinitely disturbing, and I’d made things worse.

Like a tick in a bear’s fur, he’d burrowed his way into the deepest reaches of the program. He’d pushed all my buttons to get what he wanted, even as a child. More of the problem was that even then, it didn’t all add up.

“Do you think he was really involved in the disappearances of Susie and Cynthia and the others?” I asked Marie. “Why would he attract attention to himself like that with people so close to him?”

“He must be unaware of a part of himself, deceiving himself,” Marie speculated. “It’s the only way he could have passed all our psych tests, but it’s hard to say. Having pssi installed in the developing brain of an unstable sociopathic mind has created something…new, I guess.”

The science of self-deception lay at the heart of modern psychology. The goal of self-deception wasn’t about deceiving the self, but about more effectively deceiving others. Deception was a cognitively demanding activity that left telltale signatures no matter how good the liar. By truly deceiving yourself, on the other hand, you could escape detection, but with the generalized risk of falling out of touch with reality.

This was something we’d compounded with pssi.

Deception of all kinds increased with intelligence. The bigger the neocortex, and the higher the intelligence, the more an organism tended to lie and deceive itself, and Jimmy was about as smart an organism as I’d ever come across. I wasn’t sure it was accurate to say he was even human anymore. Whatever he had become, he was now the master of deception.

“I also think he may have constructed a fantasy world about his own abuse to justify his behavior,” added Marie. “We don’t have any evidence that his parents ever did anything to him.”

I considered this.

“Split personality disorder is almost always the result of abuse as a child. If his parents didn’t abuse him, then who did?”

Marie shrugged.

“If he’s managed to fool himself,” I sighed, “then he’s certainly managed to fool us.”

I wondered about all the ways I’d been fooling myself to arrive at this point.

Self-deception also tracked closely with war and the worst of human evils. Pssi had catapulted human capacity in many ways, but by any measure, Atopia had now become the most deceptive place on earth, and we were about to unleash it on the rest of humanity under the guise of being its savior. The road to hell really was paved with the best of intentions.