Complete Atopia Chronicles

In the short term, with pssi released, they were predicting a precipitous drop in consumer goods spending, a large part of which would be redirected into the pssi network. Economies would falter, and more wars would be spawned, and those with entrenched interests in supplying material goods would launch a series of attacks on Atopia itself. All of this had been previewed, and was the reason Atopia had been built with its own defensive weapons.

With a decrease in material consumption, the resource pressures would ease, and gradually, over the years, conflicts would die out. With a growing majority of people getting their every need cared for within the pssi multiverse, the desire to struggle would flame out. Pssi was the great equalizer of the classes.

Of course, there was the darker side.

While on Atopia we’d taken a relatively benign approach in our quest to understand the capabilities of pssi, it was only dawning on me the terrible things that the billions of people in the rest of the world may end up using it for. It was a fair bet that some cheerful souls were already thinking up some fearsome ways of weaponizing it.

And this was exactly what Kesselring had been hiding from Patricia. Cognix had been secretly undertaking weapons programs with several nation states to prepare their readiness for the pssi launch. Jimmy was involved of course.

The good news was that the phutures had stabilized—no apocalyptic wars, at least not in the near future. But pssi wasn’t the only game in town either. A crush of other transformative technologies was crowding the future, and we’d have to wade our way through this brave new world to find Willy’s body.

It had become obvious that Jimmy had killed his own parents, and was behind dozens and perhaps hundreds of disappearances including Cynthia, Susie, and even Commander Strong’s wife. We suspected he had sabotaged Patricia’s medical systems as well, so he had killed not only his own mother, but his godmother as well. He seemed to do it all by giving people what they wanted, and then exacting his price for their desires.

The key to it all was somehow in Willy’s body, wherever that was. It was the key to stopping whatever Jimmy was becoming, my key to getting Nancy back and protecting my family from him as well.

I suspected Jimmy had been involved in killing Dean to get closer to me, or at least involved in Dean’s decision to kill himself.

§

The next morning we all sat back around the embers of the fire. Vince was making cups of coffee and handing them out.

“Did you read the news Willy sent in this morning?” asked Vince as he handed me my cup.

“Yes,” I replied.

Simultaneously with the commercial release of pssi into several major metropolitan areas, Cognix had announced the beginning of construction of seven new Atopia–class floating platforms at strategic physical locations around the globe. They had the cash flow now.

There had even been excited talk on Phuture News about giving Atopia a seat on the United Nations Security Council and appointing Jimmy. He’d begun calling himself Jimmy James.

We’d had to bring our own smarticles. They flushed out of the body if they weren’t topped up, plus we didn’t know how secure the old ones were, so Patricia had created our own secret variant for us. On Atopia, the environment was infused with them so we didn’t have to think about it, but here, we needed our own supply.

I pulled out the bag filled with our new smarticle powder from my backpack, and dipped a twig I’d picked up from the ground into it. I lifted the twig to my nose and inhaled the powder. The easiest way into the body was through the mucus membranes.

“Can’t we just tell people what we know?” mused Vince as he cupped his coffee, blowing the steam off it. I offered him the bag of powder and he took it.

“No, we don’t have enough,” I replied. “After what’s happened, it’d look like more Terra Novan interference. Coming from us, it wouldn’t exactly look reputable, and would probably get us in a lot of trouble. We need to fly under the radar as much as possible.”

“Yeah, I think we need to have a serious chat with Sintil8, wherever he is, before we do anything else,” added Willy’s splinter.

“Hey, don’t believe everything you think, Willy boy!” laughed Sid as he worked away on our private metaworlds. “At least before you check with me!”

Sid was trying to be funny, but he was right. He had hacked into our personal pssi systems and begun hardening them against exposure to Cognix, starting with backups to our memories and our own cognitive intrusion detection systems. We had to make sure our minds remained our own.

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” I asked Vince.

“I’m the perfect person to have along!” he laughed.

It was true. The only place he existed was in the present, and for most of the world this hardly counted anymore.

“Ah yes, the man with no future,” laughed Sid. “Aren’t we a motley bunch to trust for saving the world?”

I wasn’t in a humorous mood.

“Look Sid, we have no choice in this.”