I sighed as I floated in the dimensionless black space and performed the well worn rituaclass="underline" look down to where your chest should be, reach into your chest, punch it, and whammo, I felt myself falling backwards.
Now I was jogging through trees near the eastern inlet. Sunlight was streaming down through the green canopy above.
“Taking me for a jog?”
“Uh huh, you asked me to, remember?” replied my proxxi, Robert, just a voice in my head. “Did you read the latest storm warnings?”
“No…” I replied, disinterested. I knew they were having a hard time steering out of the way of Hurricane Newton and it looked like we might have to battle through the edges of the storm, but what did I care. I’d just be off in the gameworlds anyway.
“Well it’s gotten a lot worse,” Robert explained, “you’d better not get too dug into the gameworlds this afternoon, and stay off the pharmacologicals.”
“In case of what?” I asked, surprised. It was rare Robert would ever ask me to do something.
“Just in case.”
I shrugged. Sure. He seemed worried.
“Do you want to transition control to you?” he asked, apparently satisfied.
“Naw,” I replied, “just take us home, just in case like you said. I’m going for another gameworld session with Martin.” I felt bad now for yelling at him.
“That’s probably a good idea,” replied my proxxi.
For the rest of the day we opted to go old school and return to Mongol battle. We all met up afterwards at a tiki-bar on the beach for some beers. It was well past nightfall, and the place was packed with tourists.
Martin loved the Mongolian battle worlds. He was still hopped up from the fight and was jumping around in the sand, howling away as he aped Bruce Lee style karate moves. Sid, Vicious, Robert and I watched him with amusement.
“Bob, that was awesome, you ducking and diving like that, it was like, superhuman!”
I’d had Sid remap my tactile water-sense for Mongol battle so that I could feel arrows coming at me like eddy currents through my skin. The incoming projectiles had become a part of my body, and as I quickened, I was able to duck and weave away with blinding speed, roaring through the battle as I hacked away at the Tatar scum.
“Yes, it was superhuman. That is perfectly accurate, we have superhuman abilities. We are in fact supermen. At least until the rest of humanity plugs into pssi, at which point…”
I paused to take a swig of my beer.
“We will just be, well, just men again.”
I shrugged and smiled. I could see that Martin wasn’t troubled by existential angst anymore. It was nice to be nice to him for once.
Sid smiled. He liked it when I was nice to Martin. He leaned over and whispered under his breath, “You’re going to talk to him, right? For you, you understand?”
I rolled my eyes but nodded.
“Yeah, yeah, you don’t give up do you?”
The surf had been pounding noisily as we all sat there, but a truly gargantuan wave suddenly thundered in, literally shaking the party lanterns hanging off the tiki-bar. Everyone turned to look out into the blackness. Those were some monster storms brewing out there.
Just then, a system of pssi alert channels began to activate.
7
Floating up at the edge of space, my dad had asked us to get together as a family to see firsthand what was happening. We watched the two converging hurricanes swirling ominously in three dimensions below us. They had suddenly strengthened in the past day, both past category four now, and like two enormous threshing wheels, they now threatened to pin Atopia against the West Coast of America.
Atopia was still holding its own as we backed away, but we were now running out of room and the phuturecasts didn’t see any way around them. Surface evacuation had just been ordered. Jimmy was right in the thick of the emergency preparations.
Dread filled me realizing the impregnable fortress of Atopia was somehow threatened.
Flitting back to our family habitat to get ready, I clipped back into my body. After a rushed inventory assessment with my proxxi Robert, it seemed I really didn’t need to bring much, so, with some time to spare, I let my mind slip backwards and away, to an early inVerse memory of my family I liked to escape to in times of stress.
Blinking in the sunshine, I could feel sand trapped wetly in the crack of my ass. At the time I was having too much fun to notice it as my brother chased me around the beach on his pudgy little legs. We’d just turned four, and I’d just passed the point where my parents had allowed my proxxi, Robert, to fully take over my body, but he hadn’t yet progressed there yet.
Despite being twins, my brother had always lagged behind me.
So as he chased me around the beach, squealing with excitement and waving his bright orange plastic digger, just before he could touch me I would flit out to another spot nearby, disappearing suddenly from in front of him to reappear a few feet away. He hooted with delight each time I did it, and I would stick out my tongue and waggle my hands, thumbs in my ears, and raspberry him. With squeaks of glee, he would change directions and run at my new spot.
I was laughing and laughing.
My mum and dad were sitting together on a beach blanket, my dad’s arm around her and mum with her great big sunglasses on, laughing with us. My mum was almost crying she laughed so hard, pressing her face into my dad’s chest, and this just egged me on as I flittered willy-nilly around the beach, taunting my baby brother.
I hadn’t seen mum laugh in years, and neither my dad for that matter. Quitting the inVerse, I wiped the tears from my eyes.
InVersing, going back to relive your own personal universe of stored sensory memories, was a dangerous thing if you let it get its tentacles into you. When you were happy, it didn’t matter, you never seemed to bother with it, but when you felt sad or frightened, sliding back into the past and becoming a person you once were, happy and carefree, was about as addictive as something could get.
ReVersing was worse still, going back and reliving the past, but running new wikiworld simulations from a decision point you’d made, and changing that decision to enable a new world to evolve and spin on from that point—a simulation of how the world could have been, not how it was.
Perhaps these weren’t just simulations, but portals into alternate realities that branched off from our own timeline. Windows into life as it could have been, as it actually was somewhere else. It was hard to tear yourself away when it was something, or someone, you desperately missed.
Many people I knew spent more time inVersing and reVersing, or as glassy eyed emo-porners, than they did living their lives in the present. Dr. Hal Granger said on his EmoShow that going back and reliving the past helped us grow emotionally, helped us to find resolution and happiness—I wasn’t so sure.
What my family had done, though, was much worse. It had made a certain desperate sense at the time as we’d tried to deal with our grief, as I’d tried to deal with mine. In fact, the whole thing had been my idea, and it was an idea I was regretting more than I could bear any longer.
Morning had broken in wet smudges while I thought about all this. I was sitting on the covered deck of our island habitat watching the huge swells generated by the coming storms gathering and slapping together like drunken sailors. Ragged, scudding clouds hung under an ominous and luminous sky. The air was calm and proverbially quiet.