Complete Atopia Chronicles

He motioned with the knife across to the other side of the table. Martin smiled at me weakly, not wanting to get involved.

“Yeah, look at him,” I shot back, narrowing my eyes at both of them. “Martin and all of you are just the picture of shuper–booper family togatherness. And quit talking about Jimmy all the time, we’re your real sons.”

I aimed for thick sarcasm, emphasizing ‘real’, but I wasn’t sure if my enunciation was clear enough to convey it beneath the drugs. What had I taken again?

“Bob, honey, don’t be so mad. It’s his birthday today, let’s please be nice,” came my mum’s quavering voice. “Forgiveness is the key to life. Forgive yourself, son.”

I sighed. It looked like this was going to be a tag team event. I could see the guy behind my mum in the toga and sandals begin to lean forward as if to add something, but I leaned his way and angrily waved my finger at him to cut short whatever was coming from that corner.

“Not a word from you, okay?” I spat at him.

I was as patient as the next guy, but my mum having her personal Jesus following her around like a puppy dog, so that she could chat to him all the time, was getting on my nerves. It wasn’t so bad if her Jesus just sat there and spoke when spoken to, but it really drove me nuts when he started jumping into conversations.

“Mum,” I asked, turning to her, “what do I have to forgive myself for?”

“I don’t know, son. You have to figure that out for yourself,” she replied softly, in the way that only mothers can. “I know you can son, you have special abilities.”

My dad rolled his eyes, shaking his head at the three of us. He didn’t like it when mum started talking like this.

Our family had something of an unusual history, filled with flashes of brilliance and corners of darkness. My great-great-grandfather had been something of a nut. He claimed to have been able to speak with the dead and move objects with his mind. It was something my dad was ashamed of.

My grandfather had been almost as bad, and he and my father had stopped speaking a long time ago when my father had left New York to accept a job on the Washington beltway. The lunacy tended to skip a generation. My dad was just waiting for me to starting hear voices, and I honestly couldn’t blame him for worrying about me using drugs.

“There is evil in the world, son,” added Jesus for good measure.

I shot him my own evil glance.

“Only the evil that we make,” I replied, feeling suddenly defeated.

“Yes, the evil that we make.”

That stopped everyone in their tracks. I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes, fighting frustration on the one hand and a general sense of not being sure what was happening on the other. Maybe I could try a different tack.

“Look, all this stuff is great, but technology can make you stupid, you know?”

My addled brain was trying to find some way out of these woods I’d wandered it into. All four of them stared at me.

“Like a generation ago, Eskimos didn’t even have a word for ‘lost,’ and now without GPS they can barely find their way out of a frozen paper bag.”

“I believe they’re called Inuit,” suggested Martin. I looked at him hopelessly.

“That’s not the point. Look, I’m stuck in this thing, and I love all you guys,” I said, really thinking that I love most of you guys. “I have kind of a love–hate relationship with pssi right now and I want to use this stuff the way I want to. Okay, dad?”

My dad just shrugged.

“Okay, Bob. Whatever you think is best.”

He clearly didn’t think it was best.

“Just leave me to do stuff the way I want, in the time I want,” I said, grabbing some croissants and a glass of orange juice. “Anyway this was great. I’m going surfing. Is that okay with everyone?”

I was going to check on Vince to see if he wanted to go surfing.

Vince was the man.

4

THE SENSE OF TOUCH was the most underappreciated of all the senses, at least of the senses the rest of the world had. When the first elemental life had ventured out into the primordial goo, it was its sense of touch that kept it safe from danger.

Touch was the most ancient of our senses, existing before any sight, sound, taste, or smell existed. It was essential to the feeling of things being a part of your body. When you played tennis, did you think about the racquet hitting the ball as you swung? No. The racquet became a part of you. Tools that began as extensions of our bodies soon became a part of it.

It was the same with any tool we used, and pssi made it possible to make tools out of information flow in the multiverse and incorporate into our bodies in much the same way.

For me, the flow of information was an apt metaphor. As surfing became my obsession at a young age, my innovation had been to remap my tactile sense into the water around me.