Complete Atopia Chronicles

Atopia was the only place I’d ever known, and I’d taken for granted, like breathing, feeling the steady thrum of information through my metasenses. My phantoms were still there, arrayed around me in empty hyperspaces, stretching out and away from me, but my metasenses were completely numb. It felt as if most of my body had been amputated.

It was true what they said—the future was already here, just unevenly distributed, and while I belonged to the future, there I was, suddenly in the past with the rest of humanity. The world, however, was about to receive the gift of the future we’d been working on so hard for them, and they could barely wait to get their hands on it.

I laughed silently to myself. People had to be more careful about what they wished for.

Vince had come with us. He figured whatever Patricia’s last instructions were, they might possess some key to his own problem. Sid had come, as well as Brigitte and Willy.

Well, Willy had sort of come. Up here in the state park, there was no network connectivity so we’d had to embed a splinter of him into Brigitte for the trip into the woods. Brigitte seemed to enjoy having her own bit of Willy to take everywhere with her, and I doubted Willy would be getting that splinter back anytime soon.

Martin had elected to stay behind, to stay with our parents, something I’d thought sensible as well at the time. All of our proxxi had made the trip as well, embedded as they were into our bodies. So there the nine of us sat around the campfire—me, Robert, Sid, Vicious, Vince, Hotstuff, Brigitte and her proxxi Bardot, and Willy’s slightly confused splinter.

Nancy hadn’t come with us despite me pleading with her, but this was before we’d learned what Jimmy had become. I should have tried harder, should have forced her to come along with us right away as Patricia had asked. Nancy had insisted she would catch up with us, but it was too late.

Jimmy had asked her to stay on a while to help with the investigation and all the preparations for the Atopian state funeral for Patricia, despite the rumors of her working with the Terra Novans. Jimmy had been the one that had sponsored the state funeral, despite resistance from the Council, so Nancy had felt some obligation towards him. With a sense of dread, I realized Jimmy was keeping her there on purpose.

A week had passed since we’d left, and newly passed constitutional changes on Atopia had enabled Jimmy and Rick to maintain the state of emergency, a state of emergency that would never end.

Having barely survived destruction, the once cherished civil liberties that Atopia had been founded upon, and without Patricia there to defend them, were quickly and unceremoniously thrown out the window. Almost overnight Atopia had transformed itself into a police state, and Jimmy was quickly amassing a private psombie army—for protection, of course.

In the ensuing investigation, it’d been discovered that the viral skin had been vectored from the Terra Novans through Patricia’s own specialized pssi system. The current best guess was that it had been her old student Mohesha who had implanted it. As a novel zero-day infection, Patricia had gone on to infect everyone she’d come into contact with, which had then spread quickly into everyone on Atopia.

Command and control of the virus had been regulated by leaking data back and forth through Willy’s persistent conscious connection from Terra Nova and into Atopia. Worse still, ripping apart the code, they’d revealed a lot of similarities with the viral skins Sid had been creating. To top everything off, secret communications between Patricia and the Terra Novans, and even Sintil8, were discovered, although the content of these were unknown.

All in all, it’d cast a dark shadow on our group.

Patricia had kept secret her decision to not terminate Marie when she’d died. She had encoded Marie onto a miniature data cube and smuggled it off Atopia right before the lockdown had started. We’d picked up the data cube containing Marie from an antique store in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, the cube hidden in what looked like a walking stick.

After lighting a fire at our campsite, we’d started a private network to connect us all, and awoken Marie from the data cube. Her ethereal image had risen before us above the fire, wavering in the night air, a ghost that told us a truly frightening nighttime tale as we huddled together, explaining the monster that Jimmy had become and the danger we all faced.

I yearned for my days back on the beach.

Within days, hundreds of millions of people would be fusing their bodies and minds into the pssi network. While the rate of change had already been hurtling forward, it would now take an even dramatically steeper upward trajectory.

With conscious transference at the brink of reality, most humans alive today would achieve an immortality of sorts. Our souls were about to go from the stuff of legend into the stuff of hard and fast reality.

That was the big picture.