Complete Atopia Chronicles

“With his pssi experiment!” I shot back, angry again. “Living in a hundred worlds at once, being here and there and somewhere and someone else all at the same time. Dean just figured, why not, I’ll just remove myself, and you’ll all be able to keep a better version without all the effort.”

I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself.

“In his messed up head he didn’t think he was dying, he figured he was leaving a better version of himself to continue on. That’s what he left in his note, anyway.”

I looked down at the ground, feeling my own tears coming, starting to cry. Why was it I’d been able to be so many things, to be so smart, but I hadn’t been there for him?

Martin looked at me, shaking his head. “But maybe I am him, Bob. I think like him, I look like him, and I remember everything—every memory he ever had.”

“But you’re not him,” I replied, shaking my head.

“So then what makes a person dead?”

A stupid question.

“Dead is dead,” I shot back. “When the doctors say you’re dead.”

“When the heart stops?”

“No, when the brain goes dead, when the memories are lost, the essence of the person…”

“Most of your own memories are in the pssi, Bob, would they be gone if you suddenly were?”

“No…”

“So if a person’s memories aren’t gone, if some essence of them remains, are they truly dead?”

I paused.

“Remember having a bath together in the sink, mum sponging us off and singing in the dark when the first fusion core went offline, remember that?”

I smiled as tears rolled down my cheeks. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Remember throwing our toys over the deck into the ocean when nobody was watching, getting our proxxi to cover for us, and how angry mum was when we went and hid in one of the shark’s mouths when we went swimming for them?”

“That was your idea,” I laughed, nodding.

“We were quite the gang growing up,” he continued. “Us and our proxxi…Bob and Robert, William and Wallace, Sid and Vicious, Dean and Martin, Nancy and Cunard…”

“Yeah, that was quite the gang.”

“Have you talked to Nancy much lately?” asked Martin softly.

“No, I…” I replied. “No, not since, well, since you…”

“You should talk to her Bob.”

He looked at me steadily for a while.

“Hey, do you remember that night? We were sitting on the guard rails to the passenger cannon entrance. We must have been barely teenagers, and we were drinking beer. You had Robert override the security system and we had the whole place to ourselves. It was just you and me, sitting there.”

He paused for a moment before continuing, “We talked about what we would do together when we were old men. You told me how you were good at almost anything, all you had to do was apply yourself and you could do anything you wanted.  I think you were drunk—I think we were drunk.”

“We were,” I whispered between my tears.

“But I remember most of all, I remember thinking how great you were, thinking how I wasn’t that great, how I had so much trouble with everything and wondering why. But most of all I remember thinking how much I loved you, and how proud I was to just be your brother. You were the star of the pssi-kid program back then, even way ahead of Jimmy, I was so proud…”

“Yeah, I remember that night Martin,” I managed to choke out between sobs. I was crying full on now.

“I’m still here, Bob.”

Martin was looking directly into my eyes, his voice soft and full of love.

Have you ever made one of those three-dimensional line drawings of a cube on paper?  Two squares offset from each other with a straight line that joined each corresponding corner to make a three-dimensional looking cube?  If you stared at it, it seemed that one of the faces was closer to you, but if you concentrated and willed it, suddenly the cube flipped and the other face switched to being closer. As I looked hard at Martin right then, my mind performed a similar flip, and suddenly all I saw was my brother, sitting there in front of me in flesh and blood. A wave of love sprang from my scalp to my fingertips, and I got up to go and sit on the couch with him and hold his hand.

“Dean…Martin…I missed you so much, it’s just this place,” I said, shaking my head and squeezing his hand.

“I’ve missed you too,” replied Martin. “You’ve been so nasty to me these past few years. I always thought you hated me for some reason. It hurt so much, and I had no idea why you acted that way.”

Tears streamed down my face, and Martin reached up to wipe them away. Then he rubbed his hand across his own face. His demeanor changed and he sat bolt upright, taking a deep breath. He reached down to squeeze my hands tightly with both of his.

“Bob, stop with all the drugs, will you? And all these women… it’s not going to change anything. Calm down. Talk to Nancy.”

“You’re right,” was all I could think to say. “I’ll stop, I’ll try…”

“Good,” he said, brightening up. “And Bob, if you really believe all that stuff about gameworlds being real…then Dean is out there somewhere still, and I’m your connection to him.”

“This is all messed up.”