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 passed the point where my parents had allowed Robert to fully take over my body, but he hadn’t progressed there yet.
Though we were twins, my brother had somehow always lagged behind me.
He chased me around the beach, squealing with excitement and waving his bright orange plastic digger, and just before he could touch me, I would flit out to another spot nearby, disappearing 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 couldn’t stop laughing.
My mom and dad were sitting together on a beach blanket, my dad’s arm around her, and Mom with her great big sunglasses on, laughing with us. She laughed so hard that she was almost crying, pressing her face into my dad’s chest, which just egged me on as I flittered willy-nilly around the beach, taunting my younger-by-a-few-minutes baby brother.
I hadn’t seen my mom laugh in years. My dad either 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—becoming a person you once were, happy and carefree—was about as addictive as something could get.
But reVersing was worse still—not just 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.
Some people believed that 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. Granger said on his EmoShow that going back and reliving the past helped us grow emotionally, that is was a part of a process that helped us to find resolution and happiness.
I wasn’t so sure.
What my family had done, though, was worse than all that. It 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. 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. Despite the surging surf, the air was eerily still—the proverbial calm before nature’s big show. Ragged, scudding clouds hung under an ominous and luminous sky.
A steaming cup of coffee, hot and practically thick enough to stand a spoon in, warmed my hands as I cupped them together. Watching the churning, watery tumult, my surfer-mind tried to force order from the chaos, tried to find a pattern from here to safety.
I flitted out of my body and into the local wikiworld to a point about fifty feet off the deck right in front of me, watching myself watching the waves. Robert took a sip of coffee for me and waved. I just stared back.
Our habitat looked small and vulnerable from here against the backdrop of the ocean. Dark, wicked-looking clouds were stealing quickly across the horizon, piling up in the sky in an enormous approaching wall. Swinging my gaze around to stare inward toward Atopia, it looked muted and small beneath the roiling clouds.
From this perspective, the huge incoming swells were rising up toward the beach, almost obscuring it as they surged and broke on their ride around Atopia. Instead of their usual rhythmic thumping, the waves were breaking at different points, choppy, bewildered.
Massive clouds of spray were sent booming upward from the collapsing waves, hanging the beaches in veils of misty white fog. As I watched, a sharp wind began to blow and gain in strength within seconds, snapping the flags to attention on top of our habitat.
The storms were upon us.
Clipping fully back into my body, I began to scan a list of what needed to get finished for the evacuation.
“Bobby, do you have a minute?” asked Martin, pinging me on a dedicated family channel.
I’d turned off all the other channels, even my dimstim, as I tried, for once, to focus on the here and now. I glanced at the list again before I answered. “Sure, come meet me in my room.”
I could at least start to organize my stuff while we talked. Crossing the deck, I made for the lower levels, dropping down a set of stairs and opening the door to my room. It was dark inside with the shades drawn. I didn’t go in there much these days. Accessing the room controls, I faded the glass walls to transparency while opening some vents to let a bit of fresh air in. The fusty, closed-in smell of the room gave way to brisk ocean air. I heard a knock.
“Come on in,” I called out.
Martin materialized near the couch set against the glass wall to the open ocean. His eyes were downcast, and he fidgeted with the fabric on his pant leg as he flopped himself down onto the couch, his hoodie obscuring his face.
“What’s up, bud?”
“I was looking at the evacuation manifest, and, well, I’m not on it. I tried pinging Dad about it, but he’s ignoring me for some reason. Could you try to reach him? Do you know why?”
The words froze me in my tracks. Of course the evacuation list was an ADF function, and not a part of the Solomon House research project. Their personnel manifests would be different. Dad must be splintered in a dozen places, fighting for control of the public relations situation and trying to put a positive spin on Atopia being crushed by the two giant storms. He wouldn’t have had time to consider the manifests.
I shrugged and lied, “I have no idea. Must be some kind of clerical error. Who cares? Let’s just get a move on, huh?”
Martin didn’t stir or say a word. He just sat and wrung his hands, cracking his fingers.
I couldn’t take it anymore.
I snapped.
“Martin, look.” I’d been thinking about doing this for a long while now, and I let some anger swell my courage. “I don’t know the best way to say this, but.… ”
“What?”
“Martin, look… ,” I repeated.
He looked at me.
“You know you’re dead, right? At least some part of you must know.… ” I trailed off, unsure of what to say next.
There was silence—anxious silence—before his furious response. “Are you stoned again?”
“I’m not stoned.” I paused, trying to find a way through this. “I’m angry, but not at you. I don’t know.”
If I didn’t get this out now, he would just forget. A cognitive blind spot was at work on his memories and perception. It was sort of as if you were walking in the desert, and there was a hovercraft following a dozen paces behind you that dusted away your footprints as you went along. There were a few steps that you could still see behind you, but beyond that there remained just a general impression of where you had been, or more appropriately, who you had been.