Complete Atopia Chronicles

“That last part was a bit much,” he laughed, but I could sense a certain glumness.

“Buddy, you have to lighten up…live a little.”

I immediately regretted my choice of words, but Martin didn’t notice anything. I slicked back my hair again, trying to stop the water from streaming down into my eyes.

“Are you going to come out camping with me and Willy and Sid and the boys later?” I asked after a little reflection.

“Am I invited?”

“Of course,” I laughed.

“And you’re going to continue surfing today, even with the storm warnings in effect?”

“Come on, Martin…”

“Okay, anyway, I’ll see you later, camping will be great,” Martin responded brightly. “I just worry about you sometimes.”

I nodded.

“Are we still going to have that chat?”

“Maybe later.”

The moment had passed for him too.

“I have a lot of stuff to get done. You be careful with those storms brewing out there, could swing in some weird waves.”

“I will, I promise, and I’ll see you later,” I replied with a small salute.

With that, Martin nodded and winked as he signed off and faded from view.

5

HOW IN THE WORLD did I get roped into attending a baby shower for a proxxid?

It seemed everyone was having a simulated baby these days, but Nicky had somehow convinced me to come to this event. Anyway, wasn’t a baby shower supposed to be before the baby was born? This and many other questions filled my mind as we arrived in the entertainment metaworld created for the event. I was immediately dragged over to the Strong family for the obligatory salutations.

“Congratulations Commander Strong!” I said enthusiastically, smiling as I reached out to pump his hand.

Rick smiled back and shook my hand vigorously, rolling his eyes slightly.

“Thanks Bob.”

“And of course congratulations to the lovely new proxxid mother,” I laughed, reaching over to kiss his wife Cindy on the cheek, looking down at the baby in her arms.

“…and this lovely lady is?” asked Commander Strong, looking towards my date.

“Ah shit, ah, I mean, oh shoot,” I mumbled, turning to introduce my newish girlfriend. “This is Nicky. Hey do you want a drink?”

Nicky shot me a tight lipped smile, shaking her head, and turned to graciously introduce herself to the Strongs. I nodded and smiled, leaving them to it, and wandered off towards the alcohol stand. Maybe she didn’t want a drink, but I sure did.

I sighed.

A baby shower. How did I let these things happen to me?

Any party was, however, a great reason to get stoned. With that thought, I popped a tab of MDMA from my pocket into my mouth. Virtual drugs weren’t bad, but they weren’t quite the authentic experience, and I liked to style myself as a retro abuser. Ah, now I was rolling with the champions. Just another great day in the world of Bobtopia.

I grabbed a drink and walked over to sit down on a couch. We were now waiting for some last person to show up to sing the birthday song. Actually, we weren’t really waiting, since everyone everywhere knew exactly where everyone else was at any moment.

We were just, well, what the hell were we doing? I guessed we were waiting, but we all knew exactly how long we had to wait. There was a difference, wasn’t there? Or perhaps we had reached the end of waiting, and were now embodying some new verb that defined what waiting was when we all knew exactly how long we had to wait.

I decided then and there I was going to call it phwaiting and immediately published this inspiration into my social cloud. With my creative work done for the day, I scanned some Phuture News flowing across the bottom of my display spaces. More celebrities were about to drop dead or start doing tons of drugs or stop doing them and go into rehab.

Boring.

Flicking my phantoms, I opened an overlay and researched the definition of ‘wait’: transitive verb—to stay in place in expectation of. I guess we didn’t need a cool new word as this seemed to amount to what we were doing. Already, my proxxi Robert was splintering me over four thousand variations on the idea of waiting from the remaining distinct human languages.

The character of my inspiration suddenly hollowed. I posted an announcement regarding the death of phwaiting back into my social cloud and watched the meme explode and die.

At the same time, a fast trending news report splintered that the Chinese were talking about sending a manned mission to Mars. It had been about thirty years since China had landed men on the moon again, on their best guess of Mao’s birthday one holiday season, but their plans at a permanent moon base had fizzled when water deposits had proven harder to extract than imagined. Now their new grand plans just seemed ludicrous, even if Mars and half of the rest of our solar system seemed to be practically teeming with life.