Complete Atopia Chronicles

A giant tree frog watched me lazily from its perch in the branches nearby. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a frog in the wild. Of course, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in the wild.

To get to this remote and rugged place, we’d had a portable communication base station dropped in, and then we convinced a nun running a nearby mission to come and persuade them to have one of the villagers drink a glass of water laden with smarticles, allowing my subjective to enter and control their body through the communication link.

It was the only way I could speak with this particular elder, the Yupna witch doctor and keeper of holy secrets. The smarticles hadn’t fully suffused into this body, so I felt numb and disconnected, and they would be soon flushed out, so I had to hurry.

The witch doctor shrugged and smiled, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. His eyes sparkled at me. I smiled back, my pssi filtering his body language into a form that made sense to me. My gaze shifted to a break in the jungle that revealed the glacier capped mountain ranges beyond, stretching upwards into the bright sky. He was trying to explain his perception of the shape of time, or rather, its lack of shape.

“Here and now”, “Back in the 20’s”, “Going forward”…the modern world was fixated on spatial metaphors for time, the idea of the past being behind us and the future ahead. Not the Yupno, though. In this remote valley it had forgotten, time had no linear form to its inhabitants. To them, it flowed uphill, backwards, in forms and in shapes. They laughed at our conception of its forward flow. This Stone Age culture experienced directly something Einstein had only glimpsed at through his equations.

The pattern Hotstuff had detected had led us here, and she was sitting on a log across the cooking fire from the elder and I, fetchingly dressed in tight safari shorts with her hair done up in a long single braid that she was playing with, nibbling on, and twirling between her fingers.

“He means time runs forwards and backwards, but not like a stream—more like currents in a lake,” she suggested. “No, like a reservoir, that’s more what he means.”

“Like a reservoir?” I asked the elder.

He nodded. With long arms, he reached up and circled his hands around slowly, finally coming to rest, ending at me. The Yupno had a way of pointing towards doorways when speaking about time, a curiosity I was just beginning to understand.

Inhabiting the body of this tribal member, I was trying to see if time felt any different for me. It didn’t, but something here felt odd.

Amazingly, the elders here hadn’t batted an eye at the idea of one of their own being magically inhabited by an alien spirit, nor the idea that I was conversing with an invisible ghost Hotstuff, in their midst. It seemed perfectly natural to them.

The witch doctor pointed to where Hotstuff was sitting.

“The spirit name?” he asked.

Hotstuff raised her eyebrows.

“Hotstuff,” I replied, shrugging to her.

“HOT stuff,” he repeated, “hot STUFF?”

I nodded, and he smiled ever wider.

“And your name?” I hadn’t thought to ask before.

He pointed at his own chest.

“Nicky,” he said proudly, and then added, “Nicky Nixons.”

I laughed and shook my head—Nicky Nixons the witch doctor.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Nicky Nixons. My name,” I said, pointing to myself, “is Vince Indigo.”

“Yes, in dee go…” he replied, nodding sagely, as if he’d always known, as if my name held a meaning he knew and I didn’t.

“Vince, this is all very touching,” interjected Hotstuff, “but we have to get going. We’re out of time here.”

She splintered some upcoming death events into my display spaces, one of them a bio-electronic Ebola-based retrovirus that ended with my internal organs almost instantaneously liquefying while I was brushing my teeth tomorrow morning. She immediately firewalled off the data tunnel from the jungle we were sitting in, just in case.

“It’s even getting dangerous just being here.”

I nodded.

“Okay, let’s get me going,” I replied. “But you stay a while and see what you can learn from him.”

It was time to get to work again. The sensory frames of the jungle and Nicky Nixons quickly faded away to reveal the confines of a small, sparse apartment, somewhere in the lower levels of the Atopian seascraper complexes. In augmented space, an endless array of workspace cubicles radiated outwards from the apartment, in the New London financial metaworld. The cubicles were busily occupied by thousands of copies of Willy McIntyre, one of Bob’s best friends, and my newly appointed stock trader.

“So I assume business is good?” I asked Willy, sensing the arrival of his primary subjective.

Hotstuff was feeding me a report on Willy’s business, and I could see that these weren’t just bots and synthetics he had working; these were full blown splinters, hundreds of them. I didn’t care what he was up to. I just needed to get in and out. Time was a ticking bomb for me, and I had to go and defuse a dozen other situations right away.