EPILOGUE
Identity: Bobby Baxter
Shivering, I pilled my sweater tight around me. San Francisco sure was colder than I’d imagined.
From the vantage point of our camp, across some boulders and a field of grass at the edge of a stand of redwoods, I could dimly make out the top of the Golden Gate Bridge poking out from under a thick blanket of fog rolling into the bay. Night was falling and we’d lit a fire. I extended my hands toward the burning and crackling wood.
So this is what camping is really like. I liked the synthetic version better.
Following encrypted instructions from Marie, we’d gone off the grid as far as possible as quickly as we could manage. The state park above San Francisco was a designated network-free zone, and after collecting up some tents and camping supplies in the city, we’d been dropped off up here. We hiked ourselves to the edge of the forest.
I still couldn’t believe Patricia was gone.
Walking around out here, I had the crushing sensation of being blind and deaf and dumb. Being cut off from the dense communication network on Atopia gave me the feeling we’d been transported back into the Dark Ages. My body sang with the urge to drop it all and get back into the warm, comfortable embrace of the pssi on Atopia, but I resisted it as best I could.
Atopia was the only place I’d ever known. I’d taken for granted feeling the steady thrum of information through my metasenses, as easily as I’d assumed my own breath. My phantoms were still there, arrayed around me in empty hyperspaces, stretching out and away from me, but my metasenses were completely numb.
It felt as if most of my body had been amputated.
It was true what they said—the future was already here, just unevenly distributed. I belonged to that future, yet here I was with the rest of humanity. The world, however, was about change, and people could hardly wait. I laughed to myself. They really ought to be more careful what they wished for.
Vince had come with us. He figured whatever Patricia’s last instructions were, they might offer some key to his problem. Sid had also come, as well as Brigitte and Willy.
Well, Willy sort of came.
Up here in the state park, there was no network connectivity, so we’d had to embed a splinter of him into Brigitte for the trip into the woods. She seemed to enjoy having her own bit of Willy to take everywhere with her, and I doubted he would be getting that splinter back anytime soon.
Martin had elected to stay behind with our parents. All of our proxxi had made the trip as well, embedded as they were in our bodies. So there the nine of us sitting around the campfire—me, Robert, Sid, Vicious, Vince, Hotstuff, Brigitte and her proxxi Bardot, and Willy’s slightly confused splinter.
Nancy hadn’t come with us, despite my pleading, but this was before we’d learned what Jimmy had become. Jimmy had asked her to stay on a while to help with the investigation and preparations for Patricia’s Atopian state funeral, which he had managed to pull off despite the rumors of her working with the Terra Novans. I suppose her gratitude for this kindness in the wake of the scandal left Nancy with some sense of obligation toward him.
She’d insisted she would catch up with us, but it was too late now. A week had gone by since we’d left, and newly passed constitutional changes on Atopia had enabled Jimmy and Rick to maintain its state of emergency, a state of emergency that would never end.
Having barely survived destruction, Atopia’s once-cherished civil liberties—which Patricia was no longer there to defend—were quickly and unceremoniously thrown out the window. Almost overnight, Atopia had transformed itself into a police state, and Jimmy was quickly amassing a private psombie army.
In the ensuing investigation, it had been discovered that the viral skin had been vectored from the Terra Novans through Patricia’s own specialized pssi system. The best guess was that her old student Mohesha had implanted it. Patricia had gone on to infect everyone she’d come into contact with, and it had then spread quickly into everyone on Atopia. Of course, nearly everyone in our group was implicated in one way or another.
Patricia had encoded Marie onto a miniature data cube and had it smuggled off Atopia right before the lockdown of Jimmy’s new police state. We’d picked up the data cube, hidden in what looked like a walking stick, from an antique store in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
After lighting a fire at our campsite, we’d started up a private network to connect us all and awoken Marie. Her ethereal image had risen before us above the fire, wavering in the night air, a ghost that told a truly frightening nighttime tale as we huddled together, explaining the monster that Jimmy had become and the danger we all faced.
I yearned for my lazy days back on the beach.
The good news was that the phutures had stabilized—no apocalyptic wars, at least not in the near future. But pssi wasn’t the only game in town, either. A crush of other transformative technologies was crowding the future, and we’d have to wade our way through this brave new world to find Willy’s body. No matter what, Willy was our friend, and we had to help him, and somehow it also contained a secret about Jimmy—and this secret was the reason it has disappeared.