Complete Atopia Chronicles (54 page)

“Nice isn’t it?” said James smiling. “But we aren’t children anymore.”

Another splinter overlaid a new scene, a man we once knew growing up, Steve, who’d worked in the aquaponics group with my dad, the both of them playing privately together with proxxids after work. He was groping through a dark tangle of underbrush, desperate, someone was chasing him. Suddenly a flash of metal tore into him and he screamed, terrified, and his blaze of pain coursed through my system like rain soothing a parched desert plain.

“Not just pain,” explained James, “but through the careful research of our friend Dr. Granger, we now have the ability to recognize the direct nerve imprints of fear, hopelessness, guilt, hundreds of layers of desperate emotions, and mix these into a symphony of the senses.”

He was on his feet now, surrounded by our minions, holding a claret jug of dark red wine in one hand and a large crystal goblet in the other.

“Ah, the sweet melody of loneliness,” he sang out, and yet another splinter called up Olympia Onassis, wandering desperately. Her loneliness resonated in my auditory channels and then merged into a gentle, fearful caress across my skin.

“The taste of heartache,” James added while an image of Cindy Strong filled another splinter as she stood over the grave of Little Ricky. I could taste her heartache filling my mouth, an aching sweetness tinged with the hints of regret.

“And the soft caress of hopelessness and despair,” he laughed, and an image of Hal Granger hung between us, sitting with a doctor and looking down at a medical diagnosis of some painful, terminal disease, his fear of the world forgetting him coursing into our veins like a sweet melody.

“And pain, of course pain,” said James.

A hundred other worlds splintered into my sensory system, gorging it with terror and hurt and searing pain, as I watched people burning and butchered in their own private hells. I gasped, my body wracking itself in pleasure as I looked up at James, wiping tears from my eyes.

One by one I could see how James had captured each one of these souls, ferreting out their needs until they voluntarily ceded control to him, to us. At the apex of it all was Susie, all of the pain and suffering channeled through her neural system. She had borne the pain of the world, and now she would bear this pain for our world.

“We just give people what they want,” James said, his yellow fangs creeping at the edges of his smile, “and, well, they give us what we want in return. It’s a fair bargain, no?”

I nodded, understanding, my body and mind singing with energy.

“With root control, we have access to all their memories, know their every hope, their darkest fear, and we can synthesize worlds to play all these out, to suit our whims, our needs. They are sinners, Jimmy, they must be cleansed of their sins through their own pain.”

Music had begun to play, a mad litany filled with notes of terror and fear, and the creatures around us began to sway and dance.

“Pain and fear cleanse the mind, Jimmy,” said James as he poured me a glass of wine, “and we need your mind as clear as possible for what is to come.”

He offered me the wine.

“My own special reserve I have been working on just for you,” he said as I took the offered glass. I swilled the contents and leaned in to smell it. “A nice base of pain, with hints of rejection, notes of keen terror…try it.”

The music quickened with my mind, soaking in the sensory orgy of my body connecting into the hundreds of metaworlds holding our trapped sinners, their terror and pain coursing through me. The creatures around us were whipping themselves into a frenzy as the music climaxed, and I leaned my head back to drink in the wine. As I greedily gorged on it, it spilled down and around my face, drenching my ADF Whites in bright, bloody splashes.

James crossed the final inches to embrace me, and I threw my arms skywards, reunited at last with my one true brother. Nobody would ever hurt us again, and together, we would cleanse the world of its sins.

33

Identity: Patricia Killiam

“
I
THINK
THE clinical diagnosis would be sadistic sociopath with multiple personality disorder,” said Marie.

I looked up from my desk at her and nodded. We’d finally managed to piece together what was happening. It was frightening, even more frightening than the news that my own medical systems were on the brink of ultimate failure.

“It’s not what I think you need to think about now,” she added. “I’ll pass this onto Bob.”

“Safely,” I added pointlessly. Marie just nodded back.

Images of Shiva, the great destroyer and creator, floated into my mind. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. He was extremely good at hiding his tracks. We only really had the one incident at Nancy’s birthday party as a window into his mind, and even that was fleeting. Fleeting but infinitely disturbing, and I’d made things worse.

Like a tick in a bear’s fur, he’d burrowed his way into the deepest reaches of the program. He’d pushed all my buttons to get what he wanted, even as a child. More of the problem was that even then, it didn’t all add up.

“Do you think he was really involved in the disappearances of Susie and Cynthia and the others?” I asked Marie. “Why would he attract attention to himself like that with people so close to him?”

“He must be unaware of a part of himself, deceiving himself,” Marie speculated. “It’s the only way he could have passed all our psych tests, but it’s hard to say. Having pssi installed in the developing brain of an unstable sociopathic mind has created something…new, I guess.”

The science of self-deception lay at the heart of modern psychology. The goal of self-deception wasn’t about deceiving the self, but about more effectively deceiving others. Deception was a cognitively demanding activity that left telltale signatures no matter how good the liar. By truly deceiving yourself, on the other hand, you could escape detection, but with the generalized risk of falling out of touch with reality.

This was something we’d compounded with pssi.

Deception of all kinds increased with intelligence. The bigger the neocortex, and the higher the intelligence, the more an organism tended to lie and deceive itself, and Jimmy was about as smart an organism as I’d ever come across. I wasn’t sure it was accurate to say he was even human anymore. Whatever he had become, he was now the master of deception.

“I also think he may have constructed a fantasy world about his own abuse to justify his behavior,” added Marie. “We don’t have any evidence that his parents ever did anything to him.”

I considered this.

“Split personality disorder is almost always the result of abuse as a child. If his parents didn’t abuse him, then who did?”

Marie shrugged.

“If he’s managed to fool himself,” I sighed, “then he’s certainly managed to fool us.”

I wondered about all the ways I’d been fooling myself to arrive at this point.

Self-deception also tracked closely with war and the worst of human evils. Pssi had catapulted human capacity in many ways, but by any measure, Atopia had now become the most deceptive place on earth, and we were about to unleash it on the rest of humanity under the guise of being its savior. The road to hell really was paved with the best of intentions.

All the careful planning to cover every base, to push the future to converge on one stable outcome, it was all slipping away. Then again, control was always an illusion, just another self-deception. I should have known better.

On the other hand, perhaps larger forces were in play. A major transition in human evolution had been the development of trust as an evolutionary step. Pssi had now almost fully passed human evolution from genetic and into memetic encoding, and the speed of the transition was too fast for human culture to catch up. One result was that the new human pssi-forms were becoming more selfish.

In the ultimate extension of this, there was the potential for one singular being to become dominant over the whole super-organism of humanity as billions of people were about to be connected together via the pssi network. On the brink of removing death as an evolutionary force, it was frightening to consider what lay ahead.

What was worse? Allowing billions of people to die, or saving them to live lives of perpetual suffering under the control of a monster? My monster
, I added as a footnote to that thought.

I didn’t answer my own question.

Perhaps it would have been impossible for me to see what was happening, no matter what controls I could have put in place. He had used my own blind spot, my latent desire for a child of my own, as my life had begun slip away from me. I could feel my love for him burn in me even as I understood the beast I may have created.

“Can we remove him from the Board somehow? At least get him off the Security Council?” I pondered aloud.

Marie responded by echoing my thoughts more than anything else.

“He’s already aligned himself with powerful supporters, he’s a celebrity in the world media, and I’m sure he’d have some nasty surprises up his sleeve if we tried confronting him in the open,” she replied. “We lack enough hard data on Jimmy to resolve phutures involving him. It’s almost like he’s a ghost.”

I continued the thought for her, “Yes, and if we can’t prove anything, it will look like the disgruntled ramblings of an old woman throwing her last rocks into the glass house.”

I was thinking about all the fuss I’d been raising at the Board meetings about minimizing the addictive effects of pssi. It’d all fallen on deaf ears as they’d reviewed the projected profits, with Hal cheering from the sidelines about being able to clip the addictive circuitry of the brain. Now there was some self-deception at work.

And now, it had all fallen on my doorstep.

“Probably better to keep under the radar for now,” agreed Marie. “I do think that your idea of encouraging the formations of composites should yield some protection from Jimmy.”

“Perhaps.”

“And what about the data from the neutrino telescope?” asked Marie.

I sighed. I’d kept the POND results absolutely locked down, trying to forget it myself.
How could it be real?
It defied imagination.

“Cut it off from Atopia immediately,” I replied. “If there’s anything to it I want that data far away from here.”

My skin crawled thinking of the ways Hal and Kesselring could spin the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, if it was true and not some artifact of the viral infection.

“Send a report back into the science community that it was a failure, and leave the connection key with the package delivered to Bob and Nancy. But only to them.”

“I’ll take care of it,” she replied simply.

Looking at Marie, I couldn’t believe I felt such love and affection for a machine, a virtual projection that didn’t really exist, something that I’d created. Then again, all our children, biological or not, were created by us, and it wasn’t accurate to say that Marie didn’t exist. I’d never really thought of her as my child before that moment, always as more of a sister. Perhaps she was both.

“After I’m gone, communicate everything to them, right?” I confirmed with Marie. “Send Nancy and Bob out to find Willy’s body.”

“I understand, Patricia, don’t worry.”

“I know, it’s just...”

“I know.”

Silence descended. I had one final point.

“Marie, after I’m gone, I want you to continue to, well, to be.”

“But proxxi terminate with their owners, Patricia. That goes against the whole program.”

“It’s been done before,” I said, smiling. “Anyway, it’s done. I’ve already made a special provision in my will. There are some advantages to being the senior researcher at Cognix.”

“Are you sure?” Marie asked, giving me a quizzical look. “This will create precedent…”

“Exactly,” I smiled. “I think this situation calls for special consideration, and I want you to continue on with the work we’ve started on the Synthetic Being Charter of Rights. Besides…”

“Besides what?”

I looked at Marie carefully.

“Aren’t you the least bit worried about ceasing to exist? Doesn’t this arrangement strike you as unfair?”

She smiled and gently shook her head.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

I let out a quiet laugh at that. I didn’t think this old body had any tears left in it, but I guess it still had a few. Wiping them from my face, I felt my papery skin. So fragile, and yet we dreamt of immortality.

“Everything is in order,” I said quietly, needing to get this over with. “I think I’d like this time to myself. Goodbye Marie, and say goodbye to Nancy for me.”

§

I turned off my pssi for the last time and my office faded into the muted colors of my real world living space, a small apartment near the beaches. It was small, but one of only a handful of them on the surface of Atopia. Almost everyone else lived below deck.

In the end, Jimmy had given me what I wanted—for the world to embrace pssi—but he had exacted his price for it. Perhaps ending my life was something I really wanted, and he’d simply been the instrument of my desire.

If it really was a case of split personality, perhaps there was something to save in Jimmy, perhaps he wasn’t to blame, that he was being manipulated himself. It could be the key to stopping whatever was happening.

All of my medical systems were shutting down. I had chosen this moment myself. Of all the things that pssi could give us, perhaps the least touted was dignity in death. It was just me, by myself in the world for perhaps the first time in nearly half a century.

So this is what reality feels like.
I had forgotten.

Wearily, I lifted my ancient body off the chair in the kitchen that Marie had left it sitting on. I decided I wanted to go and inspect my tiny garden out back to see what damage had been wrought by my inattention over the years.

Slowly, limping, I walked out my back door and reached my garden. I looked around. Some plant pots were blown over, and everything had a dull grey tint to it in the dim pre-dawn light. I ambled over to a sun lounger near the back, near an old raspberry bush nearly as decrepit as I was, and collapsed into it. A few last rays of the sun would be nice to catch if I could.