Complete Atopia Chronicles

“You only have about a dozen more things you need to get done personally today so we can head this thing off,” she added. “Tomorrow is another day, just focus on today. Be in the moment.”

“That’s what you said yesterday,” I complained.

I could be petulant. It was the last redoubt of the rich and aimless, when faced with hard, honest work. After I’d gotten over the initial shock of almost dying day after day, I’d found the urge to beg off and go surfing almost irresistible, and it was annoying to me that I had to save my own life. This was the sort of stuff I was supposed to pay people for. Strangely, though, I was beginning to settle into it now, even secretly enjoying some of the new activity forced onto me. Of course, I wouldn’t ever admit it.

Hotstuff gave me a sidelong glance and raised one eyebrow.

“Hey tough guy, it’s your life. The probability is only about nine in ten you’ll kick the celestial bucket today if you wing it. You could go surfing if you like.”

I sighed.

“You know boss, this may not be an entirely bad thing…”

That stopped me in my tracks. I looked at her.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” I demanded, almost spitting the words out. I was going to point out that proxxi terminated when their owners did, but I held my tongue.

Hotstuff took a moment to choose her words carefully. “I mean, before, well…”

“Well what?”

“Before you were kind of aimless,” she explained. “You’d lost any interest in the future.”

I pondered for a second. “And you think this is better?”

“Well at least you’re up in the mornings,” she replied.

I snorted. “Yeah, to live another day and fight to stay alive.”

She looked at me, letting me consider what I’d just said. “See what I mean?”

I sighed. I was frustrated, but not as scared anymore. Perversely, in a way maybe she was right. I was certainly savoring the little moments of time that I could get to myself now.

“Whatever. Anyway, it’s getting better, right?” I asked hopefully.

“We’re managing it the best we can.”

“The best that you can, huh?” I replied dejectedly, looking up at my task list for the day as it appeared in one of my display spaces. Something popped out immediately. “So I need to short the upcoming Cognix stock?”

“Nobody will know it’s you. Look, I’m setting up defensive perimeters,” explained Hotstuff, “and we’ll drop some intelligent agents into them to look for any cross-phuture scripting. We’ll figure this out, boss, don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry?” Was she serious?

“I didn’t want to get your hopes up, but…”

“But what?”

“I think we’re starting to see a pattern, hidden deep in the probability matrices that connect together whatever is chasing you. A pattern in the future, but that points somewhere far in the past.”

Finally. Perhaps some progress.

“Can you explain a little more?”

“It would be easier to show you…”

8

DAPPLED SUNLIGHT STREAMED down through the jungle canopy high above, illuminating the hard packed earth below; it was casting a patchwork of light and dark that stitched together scenes of smoke rising from cooking fires, laughing children darting between thatched huts, and women sitting and gossiping together as they stripped the white skins off sweet potatoes, carefully wrapping each one in banana leaves and depositing them into a stone-lined pit.

The men were all off hunting today, chasing pigs that had escaped from neighboring villages in the thunderstorms of the night before. Monkeys barked through the underbrush, their catcalls joining the symphonies of songbirds whose feathers lit up the steaming forest like splashes of flickering paint against a knotted green canvas.

Picking up a smooth stone sitting on the earth, I casually ducked my head as a poison dart snipped past, barely missing me. One of the children cried out to my right. A mother picked the child up by his arm and spanked him. He’d been playing with his father’s blow gun, not knowing what he was doing, probably imitating his dad. Even inhabiting someone else, whatever was hunting me down was trying to kill this body as well.

The mother looked towards me and shrugged, apologizing. I smiled back, returning my attention to the witch doctor. Dodging death was nothing I got excited about anymore.

“In da roond,” explained the tribal elder, speaking in a kind of English-creole-pidgin that was the lingua franca of the Papua New Guinea highlands.

The two most linguistically diverse places left on Earth were also the most culturally and technologically polarized: this place, still barely out of the Stone Age, and New York City, the bustling megalopolis tipping the world into the 22 century. Each retained over a thousand languages, but where almost all in New York were machine translatable, and thus part of the new global lingua franca, almost none of the New Guinea languages were. I was struggling to understand what this elder was equally struggling to explain to me.

“Round, like, like in a circle?” I stuttered back in my best attempt at native Yupno. Speaking through this body was difficult.