Complete Atopia Chronicles

FLOATING UP AT THE EDGE of space, my dad had asked us to get together as a family to see firsthand what was happening. We watched the two converging hurricanes swirling ominously in three dimensions below us. They had suddenly strengthened in the past day, both past category four now, and like two enormous threshing wheels, they now threatened to pin Atopia against the West Coast of America.

Atopia was still holding its own as we backed away, but we were now running out of room and the phuturecasts didn’t see any way around them.  Surface evacuation had just been ordered. Jimmy was right in the thick of the emergency preparations.

Dread filled me realizing the impregnable fortress of Atopia was somehow threatened.

Flitting back to our family habitat to get ready, I clipped back into my body. After a rushed inventory assessment with my proxxi Robert, it seemed I really didn’t need to bring much, so, with some time to spare, I let my mind slip backwards and away, to an early inVerse memory of my family I liked to escape to in times of stress.

§

Blinking in the sunshine, I could feel sand trapped wetly in the crack of my ass. At the time I was having too much fun to notice it as my brother chased me around the beach on his pudgy little legs. We’d just turned four, and I’d just passed the point where my parents had allowed my proxxi, Robert, to fully take over my body, but he hadn’t yet progressed there yet.

Despite being twins, my brother had always lagged behind me.

So as he chased me around the beach, squealing with excitement and waving his bright orange plastic digger, just before he could touch me I would flit out to another spot nearby, disappearing suddenly from in front of him to reappear a few feet away. He hooted with delight each time I did it, and I would stick out my tongue and waggle my hands, thumbs in my ears, and raspberry him. With squeaks of glee, he would change directions and run at my new spot.

I was laughing and laughing.

My mum and dad were sitting together on a beach blanket, my dad’s arm around her and mum with her great big sunglasses on, laughing with us. My mum was almost crying she laughed so hard, pressing her face into my dad’s chest, and this just egged me on as I flittered willy-nilly around the beach, taunting my baby brother.

I hadn’t seen mum laugh in years, and neither my dad for that matter. Quitting the inVerse, I wiped the tears from my eyes.

§

InVersing, going back to relive your own personal universe of stored sensory memories, was a dangerous thing if you let it get its tentacles into you. When you were happy, it didn’t matter, you never seemed to bother with it, but when you felt sad or frightened, sliding back into the past and becoming a person you once were, happy and carefree, was about as addictive as something could get.

ReVersing was worse still, going back and reliving the past, but running new wikiworld simulations from a decision point you’d made, and changing that decision to enable a new world to evolve and spin on from that point—a simulation of how the world could have been, not how it was.

Perhaps these weren’t just simulations, but portals into alternate realities that branched off from our own timeline. Windows into life as it could have been, as it actually was somewhere else. It was hard to tear yourself away when it was something, or someone, you desperately missed.

Many people I knew spent more time inVersing and reVersing, or as glassy eyed emo-porners, than they did living their lives in the present. Dr. Hal Granger said on his EmoShow that going back and reliving the past helped us grow emotionally, helped us to find resolution and happiness—I wasn’t so sure.

What my family had done, though, was much worse. It had made a certain desperate sense at the time as we’d tried to deal with our grief, as I’d tried to deal with mine. In fact, the whole thing had been my idea, and it was an idea I was regretting more than I could bear any longer.

Morning had broken in wet smudges while I thought about all this. I was sitting on the covered deck of our island habitat watching the huge swells generated by the coming storms gathering and slapping together like drunken sailors. Ragged, scudding clouds hung under an ominous and luminous sky.  The air was calm and proverbially quiet.

Waves were coming from every direction, sometimes breaking, sometimes wobbling together and rising up to double their height before awkwardly falling back over.  It was a chaotic and frightening scene, churning up the kelp forests as they sheared away beyond the perimeter.

Even the ocean was confused today.

A steaming cup of coffee, hot and thick enough to stand a spoon in, warmed my hands as I cupped them together. I could feel the heat and strength of the coffee seeping into my veins like a caffeine-pumping life support system. Watching the churning watery tumult, my surfer mind tried to force order from the chaos, tried to find a pattern from here to safety.