Dad called himself a lowly greenhouse gas exterminator, but he’d made enough doing it to approach the threshold of being noticed by the truly wealthy. Mom was a garbage designer; it was her genius at optimizing the wastes of one industrial process so that you could sell them as inputs to another that had ultimately made possible the colonizing of Sedna. Nobody else could have built the superefficient resource management system that was the key to the colony’s success. Toby’s parents had skills that were perfect for settlers taking on a hostile environment at the edge of the solar system. But they had never planned to go there.
If Dad had become just wealthy enough to be noticed by the more condescending of the trillionaires, he’d also become just wealthy enough to be noticed by those who preyed on them.
So one bright spring day, Toby came home to find the front door of their mansion smashed in. The nanny was dead on the kitchen floor. Toby spent a long time staring at the blood matted in her long blond hair, how it stuck to the tiles, until he suddenly realized that Peter was missing.
All he could clearly remember now was that he’d run through the house, shouting Peter’s name. Later, policemen and detectives had shown up—lots of them. Mom and Dad were there, and Evayne, too. Evayne had tightly clutched her plush toys, peering over their heads as they (minor robots as they were) also peered around. The toys had known something was wrong, and they’d gone into trauma-counseling mode as soon as the police arrived. Evayne had spent the next month listening to their soothing voices and talking to them, and with that and the right kind of pills, she’d come out of the whole thing just fine.
For Toby, the only thing that kept him from screaming himself awake at night was full participation in the investigation. He had to know everything that was being done, had to go with Dad to the police station to hear the latest updates. He learned all about the kidnapper culture that had developed out of the unholy marriage of interplanetary organized crime and a highly polarized society where you were either rich and independent, or destitute and indentured.
He remembered whole days of the search, entire conversations with his parents and with Evayne. But like the kidnapping itself, he could barely recall the day Peter had come home.
The kidnappers were dead. Peter had seen them go down in a spray of gunfire. By the time that had happened, he’d been with them long enough that he’d started to bond with them, or so the psychiatrists said. Even though his captors promised to kill him if his parents didn’t pay the ransom, Peter had begun to trust them, even grudgingly agree with their claim that they were justified in kidnapping him. The husband-and-wife team was poor, after all—deeply and irrevocably poor. There was no hope for them ever climbing out of that by legal means. Society was at fault here, not them, Peter insisted.
The kidnappers hadn’t told Peter that they’d killed the nanny. Toby remembered the moment in the interview room when Peter found out. He’d been sitting there defiant, tears in his eyes, after screaming insults at the detectives. They’d murdered his friends, he accused. They were the monsters here.
“How can you say that?” the lead detective had burst out. “They killed Maria Teresa.”
Peter had just blinked at him.
“Your nanny,” the detective said. “They killed your nanny when they took you.”
“Stop it, he’s only eight years old,” Dad said.
It was too late. Toby could see it in Peter’s eyes, like a sudden crumbling. He’d gotten very quiet after that.
The quiet stretched for days, then weeks. Psychiatrists came and went. Mom and Dad had been distraught during the kidnapping, but now that it was over, a deeper despair seemed to be settling on them. Peter no longer smiled, and so neither did they.
Evayne was okay. She had her trauma-counselor toys. They tried these on Peter, and they helped a little. But nothing really worked, and Toby knew it even if Mom and Dad didn’t. Somebody had to do something for Peter, and whatever it was, it would have to be just as huge as the kidnapping itself had been.
It took him four months of hard work before he was ready to bring Peter in. Toby had pressed Dad to buy him the very best sim-building software. Its distant ancestors had been a whole raft of game engines, 3-D modeling programs, and moviemaking packages. You could build entire universes with this stuff. But Toby had decided to start small.
“It’s the house,” Peter said. It was his first visit to Toby’s world. For weeks he’d been practically climbing the walls from impatient curiosity. He’d known Toby was up to something, but his older brother wouldn’t say what. Now he’d finally donned the link glasses (he wasn’t old enough for direct implants) and had flipped into the virtual world Toby had made—and here was the very last thing he’d expected to find there.
They’d sold the house, of course. There was no going back to that place for any of them—and yet Toby had recreated it, in as perfect detail as he could remember. It sat alone on a gray plane under an equally gray sky. He and Peter were also standing on that plane, about thirty meters from the house.
“Why’d you do that?” Peter whined. “Why is that here?”
“Don’t worry, we’re not going in,” Toby told him. He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “You and I are going to build something.”
“What?” Peter was still staring at the house, eyes wide.
“We,” said Toby, “are going to build a world around this house. It’s going to be a world where nothing bad could ever happen in this place. It’s not going to be the world we’ve got now. It’s going to be the world we wish we had.”
Despite all his efforts, he hadn’t thought this would work. Truth be told, he’d built the virtual house mostly to work through his own bad memories. Toby fully expected Peter to rip off the interface and not speak to him for the remainder of the week.
Instead, Peter said, “We need a wall.”
“Maybe,” Toby admitted grudgingly. “But what if we built a world where we didn’t need a wall?”
Peter had looked at him, startled. Toby knew he had him hooked.
So Consensus was born.
TOBY’S FIRST RUN WITH Nissa and Casson netted him enough money to live for three days. He spent the time looking for more work and exploring the town. He felt vaguely guilty at avoiding Corva and her friends, but he also felt inexplicably angry at them, like it was their fault that he had to feel guilty at all. It was confusing.
He’d lucked out and discovered a little bed-and-breakfast in the midlevels of the continent. It was a house, of sorts, reminiscent of the dwellings he’d seen once on the island of Santorini, before the family had left Earth. Narrow lanes and stairways led up the steepening curve of the sphere where apartments and condominiums piled up overtop one another. The bed-and-breakfast was at the end of a flight of steps that rose between two high walls. There was a little landing, and opposite the notch that led to the steps was a doorway surrounded by tangled vines. The proprietors looked like a pair of young, fit newlyweds—but they assured Toby they were both in their eighties, having immigrated to the lockstep from the inner solar system some six thousand (real) years before. They had led him to a very nice bedroom that looked out on the storm-ridden sky, told him supper would be at six, and left him and Orpheus alone.