At the last moment, I leaned forward and accelerated away from the maelstrom at the back of the barrel. A crazily spinning translucent tunnel opened up ahead of me, revealing bright daylight beyond, and I eased ever further forward. I began to stand up taller and walked towards the front of my board and turned around.
Tchaikovsky was playing loudly in my dimstim now and I closed my eyes to begin conducting. I shot backwards out of the mouth of the barrel, propelled by a powerful jet from the collapsing tube. I back-hanged my two heels off the front, now with just the tips of my toes on the nose of the board.
Beginning to slow, I opened my eyes and turned around to walk towards the back of the board, listening to the mad applause from the thousands of dimstimmers who had enjoyed the show. The world began to return to normal time as I released the quickening, feeling the burning heat within my body begin to ease off. Sighing happily, I sank back into the water and straddled my board to float again gently in the water.
Martin appeared back on the nose of my board, giving me a little golf clap.
“Nice show, buddy. That was awesome!”
“Thank you, thank you very much,” I said, wiping the water from my face as I looked around happily, and then looked back at Martin and the tourists still clapping on the beach. I couldn’t resist showing off again.
The water began to thicken up around me as I summoned tens of millions of tiny zooplankton up from the depths below. I kept them near me when surfing, just in case.
With a few carefully placed kicks I levitated up out of the water, forcing millions of my little friends to treadmill their hardest just at the right point to support each step, and then I stood right up on the water and took a few steps to bow to the crowds with a flourish.
This brought gasps and more pointing from the tourists—they can walk on water!
Sinking back down, I grabbed onto my board again and dispersed my little helpers. Martin was shaking his head, grinning widely.
“That last part was a bit much,” he laughed, but I could sense a certain glumness.
“Buddy, you have to lighten up…live a little.”
I immediately regretted my choice of words, but Martin didn’t notice anything. I slicked back my hair again, trying to stop the water from streaming down into my eyes.
“Are you going to come out camping with me and Willy and Sid and the boys later?” I asked after a little reflection.
“Am I invited?”
“Of course,” I laughed.
“And you’re going to continue surfing today, even with the storm warnings in effect?”
“Come on, Martin…”
“Okay, anyway, I’ll see you later, camping will be great,” Martin responded brightly. “I just worry about you sometimes.”
I nodded.
“Are we still going to have that chat?”
“Maybe later.”
The moment had passed for him too.
“I have a lot of stuff to get done. You be careful with those storms brewing out there, could swing in some weird waves.”
“I will, I promise, and I’ll see you later,” I replied with a small salute.
With that, Martin nodded and winked as he signed off and faded from view.
5
How in the world did I get roped into attending a baby shower for a proxxid?
It seemed everyone was having a simulated baby these days, but Nicky had somehow convinced me to come to this event. Anyway, wasn’t a baby shower supposed to be before the baby was born? This and many other questions filled my mind as we arrived in the entertainment metaworld created for the event. I was immediately dragged over to the Strong family for the obligatory salutations.
“Congratulations Commander Strong!” I said enthusiastically, smiling as I reached out to pump his hand.
Rick smiled back and shook my hand vigorously, rolling his eyes slightly.
“Thanks Bob.”
“And of course congratulations to the lovely new proxxid mother,” I laughed, reaching over to kiss his wife Cindy on the cheek, looking down at the baby in her arms.
“…and this lovely lady is?” asked Commander Strong, looking towards my date.
“Ah shit, ah, I mean, oh shoot,” I mumbled, turning to introduce my newish girlfriend. “This is Nicky. Hey do you want a drink?”
Nicky shot me a tight lipped smile, shaking her head, and turned to graciously introduce herself to the Strongs. I nodded and smiled, leaving them to it, and wandered off towards the alcohol stand. Maybe she didn’t want a drink, but I sure did.
I sighed.
A baby shower. How did I let these things happen to me?
Any party was, however, a great reason to get stoned. With that thought, I popped a tab of MDMA from my pocket into my mouth. Virtual drugs weren’t bad, but they weren’t quite the authentic experience, and I liked to style myself as a retro abuser. Ah, now I was rolling with the champions. Just another great day in the world of Bobtopia.
I grabbed a drink and walked over to sit down on a couch. We were now waiting for some last person to show up to sing the birthday song. Actually, we weren’t really waiting, since everyone everywhere knew exactly where everyone else was at any moment.
We were just, well, what the hell were we doing? I guessed we were waiting, but we all knew exactly how long we had to wait. There was a difference, wasn’t there? Or perhaps we had reached the end of waiting, and were now embodying some new verb that defined what waiting was when we all knew exactly how long we had to wait.
I decided then and there I was going to call it phwaiting and immediately published this inspiration into my social cloud. With my creative work done for the day, I scanned some Phuture News flowing across the bottom of my display spaces. More celebrities were about to drop dead or start doing tons of drugs or stop doing them and go into rehab.
Boring.
Flicking my phantoms, I opened an overlay and researched the definition of ‘wait’: transitive verb—to stay in place in expectation of. I guess we didn’t need a cool new word as this seemed to amount to what we were doing. Already, my proxxi Robert was splintering me over four thousand variations on the idea of waiting from the remaining distinct human languages.
The character of my inspiration suddenly hollowed. I posted an announcement regarding the death of phwaiting back into my social cloud and watched the meme explode and die.
At the same time, a fast trending news report splintered that the Chinese were talking about sending a manned mission to Mars. It had been about thirty years since China had landed men on the moon again, on their best guess of Mao’s birthday one holiday season, but their plans at a permanent moon base had fizzled when water deposits had proven harder to extract than imagined. Now their new grand plans just seemed ludicrous, even if Mars and half of the rest of our solar system seemed to be practically teeming with life.
Why spend any time or effort moving a physical body around when you could just flit anywhere in an instant using sensor networks? Everything that was happening in the outside world seemed so amazingly wasteful and nonsensical to those of us who lived on the inside of Atopia—but then again, soon everyone would be as blessed as us.
Bored, I collapsed most of my displays and opened up an overlay to watch a new game the boys had started. Sid, Vicious, Martin and my own proxxi Robert were already hot into some apocalyptic other-world battle, pinned down in a cave by an android army, flanked by giant armored worms. It looked like a lot more fun than what I was doing, so I tried to splinter in but Sid blocked me. He was right. Either I had to be there fully or not at all. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of them. Anyway, I could just joyride in Robert if I wanted.