Complete Atopia Chronicles

It was my aunt Patricia who’d nurtured my ideas and given them the space and light to grow. Really, she was my great–great–great–aunt. To everyone else she was the famous Dr. Patricia Killiam, the godmother of synthetic reality and right hand of Kesselring, but to me she was always just Aunt Pattie.

“So you can really hold five conversations at once?” she had asked me at the end of my eventful thirteenth birthday party.

After my naming ceremony, we’d decided to take a walk together in Never Ever Land, across a lavender field amid floating daisies. We held hands, Aunt Pattie brushing the blushing blooms from our path as we tried to walk just so, in synch, so we wouldn’t float too far up or down but would stay just right.  It was a game, as almost all things were.

“I’m doing it right now,” I giggled, and broke away from her and ran, rising up above the field as I did, but not too high so the circling Levantours couldn’t catch me.

I stopped and turned to watch her coming, sinking slowly back down.  I was also chatting with my friend Kelly in the Great Beyond about boys, about Bob of course, and also with Willy about how he managed to control an entire combat battalion simultaneously in a Normandy invasion, and also trying to console Jimmy after the frightful incident at my party.

“It’s easy, and I can do way more than that. I can do a hundred if I really wanted,” I boasted.

“Come on Nancy, don’t tease your old Auntie, please tell the truth.”

“Okay, maybe not a hundred, but a lot, you just have to think about it the right way,” I explained, and went on describing just how it happened to happen.

7

Identity: William McIntyre

I SIGHED, BUT happily now. Sitting belly-deep in the water on our boards, a dark mass moved smoothly underneath us. The Great Whites had begun their nightly garbage collection sweep of the undersea ledge. Bob noticed them too and smiled.

“This was great,” beamed Bob. “I’m really glad you made it out today.”

“Well I said I would, didn’t I?” I laughed back.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t always mean it’ll happen,” observed Bob, shaking his head but smiling, “at least, not lately.”

The setting sun was painting a picture-perfect end to the day in pink and azure clouds hanging high in the sky. We bobbed around in the water for a bit in silence, and then another one of the Great Whites slid silently past. It was time to get in.

“I guess that’s fair,” I replied. “Work has just been such a grind lately.”

We both leaned forward and began a lazy paddle back to the beach.

“I’m sure it has been. Well at least you look more relaxed today.”

It was true. After my talk with Jimmy I could finally see a way out, perhaps even a means to really break through. It would require a huge amount of work, but at least I could see a crack of opportunity to crawl through.

Bob, slightly ahead of me now, smiled back at me. I smiled at him too, and his grin widened.

“See you on the beach!” he called out and then turned abruptly. I was wondering what the heck he was smiling about when my board suddenly angled up, spilling me forward. In my daydreaming, I’d lost track of my water-sense.

“Thanks a…” was all I managed to get out before I swallowed a big mouthful of foamy saltwater and my world crashed into a watery tumult as a large wave broke over me.

§

Surfing at the end of the day had been legendary. The coming storms out in the Pacific had generated amazing incoming swells, and we’d spent the late afternoon riding twenty foot monsters to the delight of the crowds watching from the beach.

Bob had picked up a few female tourists, and taken them out for some tandem surfing, a sport he had almost single handedly resuscitated. We’d only just managed to disentangle ourselves from them by the end of the day, after I’d made it clear I wanted to make it a boys’ night out.

Darkness had fallen as we sat at a tiki–hut beach bar under an awning of palms fringing the powdery sands of the beach. Bob and Sid were already stoned, and I was well into my sixth beer, a large mouthful of which I had just spat out, projectile fashion, trying to hopelessly contain a burst of laughter.

An elderly woman, obviously a tourist, was walking past us as we slouched on our stools against the bar. Her breasts were undulating back and forth near her knees, complemented by a grotesquely protruding rear end, both spilling out of her modest bikini as they swung back and forth in a counterbalancing rhythm.

Sid had started up a new reality skin he’d created called Droopy. It grossly magnified the physical characteristics of women we looked at, scaled by the intensity of their attention towards us.

He’d just pointed out this new victim who was making her way towards the bar, and she had given us such a scowl that her tits had literally mushroomed out of her chest to bounce off the beach.

“Jesus, Sid, you’re killing me!” I choked out, wiping spittle from my mouth and desperately averting my eyes from the glare of the scowling matriarch.