I was still rooting for Jimmy, even if he didn’t need it anymore.
When Jimmy’s parents left Atopia, I’d taken him under my wing. His mother, my great-grandniece, had abandoned him here, and I blamed myself for not intervening sooner in that ugly domestic situation. Ultimately, Jimmy had been the one to pay the price, but he was beginning to blossom. He was my star pupil, along with Nancy, of course. In my long life, I never had any children of my own, and these two were as close as I’d come.
I couldn’t have been more proud.
Kesselring eyed me, sensing my protectiveness. “Jimmy’s an excellent choice. He’s the one I have helping me out.”
I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t known Jimmy was working directly for him.
“What are they up to?” I mused under my breath, thinking about the Terra Novans, but now thinking about Kesselring as well.
“I don’t know,” he replied, not catching my full meaning, “but this just proves my point that we need to push ahead as quickly as possible. As you said yourself, we need to maximize the network effects of the product introduction—”
I completed the sentence for him, “To gain the highest saturation throughout the population as quickly as possible. I know.” I stared into his eyes. “So we’re going to be giving it away for free?”
He smiled. “Of course.”
“And it doesn’t worry you we’re not telling people the full story?”
“It worries me,” he said, looking down at the floor, “but again, what choice do we have?” He raised his head and met my gaze. “We need to make sure we stabilize this timeline the best we can.”
As we approached the point of no return, all the careful planning and clever analyses had the feeling of blind faith, and I’d had faith shot out of my skies early in life.
“Patricia,” he said, watching me, “the lives of billions rest in our hands. We cannot fail.”
He was right. What we were doing couldn’t be worse than letting billions of people die.
Could it?
5
Identity: Jimmy Scadden
“At ease, soldier.”
I laughed and relaxed my stance. As one of the newest Command officers, I thought I would strut my stuff for Patricia a little. She’d asked me to come to her office, under a tight security blanket, to discuss something.
“We’d like to nominate you to the Security Council,” she said, getting to the point. “What do you think?”
I wasn’t really surprised, but I put on a show for her. “I’m flattered. I mean, of course I would accept, but I’m so young, so inexperienced.”
“Perhaps young, but you’re our leading expert on conscious security. I know you’re lacking in some areas, and that’s why I want you to stick close to Commander Strong. I think you can learn a lot from him.”
“Me too.”
“Perfect. Then if we’re agreed, I’ll put the wheels in motion.”
Patricia was like the mother I’d always wished for, and in a twist of circumstance, that’s exactly what she’d become. Her love for me was something I wasn’t used to.
I think my own parents must have loved each other, at least at first. But they should have just gotten a divorce rather than fight like they did. Mother always insisted it wouldn’t be Christian.
Coming from the Deep South, my family had a strong religious background, and regular church service figured deeply in my upbringing. In fact, a strong Christian community on Atopia was one of the reasons my mother said she’d agreed to come, and God and sin were never far from her wicked tongue.
A strange communion between Christianity and hacker culture had evolved on Atopia—“hacker” used in its nobler and original sense of building or tinkering with code. The Elèutheros community on Atopia believed that hacking was a form of participation in God’s work of creating the universe. This wasn’t quite what my mother had in mind before she’d arrived, however, and this had just added to her eventual dissatisfaction of the place.
Mother had been a very beautiful woman, a real southern belle, but if she saw you looking at her, a nasty comment was never far behind, mostly especially for my father. All that was left of my parents’ relationship by the time I arrived was a grinding, codependent bitterness that fueled the empty shells of their lives.
I’d guess that my parents had always fought, but having me gave them an audience. After arriving on Atopia to birth me, they could have shielded me from their screaming matches by simply leaving a pssi-block on, and my dad often tried to do just that, but my mother wanted me to hear everything.
One evening in particular, I was sitting in one of my playworlds, stacking blocks with my proxxi, Samson, into fantastic structures in augmented pssi-space. Despite my dad’s attempt to filter out their latest argument with a pssi-block, Mother was having none of it.
“So now you want to protect him!” she screamed, turning off the pssi-block in the middle of their argument. “That’s a joke: you wanting to protect a child. You’re a sick little worm, Phil.”
Their favorite venue for screaming matches was the Spanish Courtyard world, well constructed and away from the prying eyes and ears of outsiders.
“Would you knock it off?” my dad said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t done anything.”
“Oh, that’s right, you haven’t done anything!” she screeched. Once she got going, there was no turning back. “You sure as hell haven’t ever done anything! Why I married you, I have no idea. What a waste of time.”
“I thought we got married because we loved each other,” my dad replied, dejectedly. Fearfully.
“Love don’t pay the bills, now does it, Phil? Does it?”
“No… I mean, so what? We manage.”
“We manage?” Mother yelled “We manage?” She’d been drinking again.
“Yes, we manage,” insisted my dad, not sure what else to say. He wasn’t much good at arguing, or perhaps he’d been the subject of ridicule for so long that he’d given up.
Mother tried her best to include me in the blame game, even at this early point.
“I manage, Phil, it’s me that’s here taking care of that little shit of a son of yours all day while you’re out sunning yourself on the water.”
“Could you not talk like that? He’ll remember everything, you know.”
“Oh, I want him to hear. I want him to hear everything, want him to know that the only reason I agreed to have him was so that we could get on this stinking ship. Otherwise, I would never have let a child into this world so close to you. Maybe I should tell my church group what you’d like to do with children?”
“Gretchen, please, you’re drunk. It’s not what you think.”
“We’re only here because I’m the great-grandniece to the famous Killiam. Not like you’d be man enough to accomplish anything on your own.”
“We’re doing amazing things.… ”
“Amazing? Really? Is that why you pssi-block me all day? I can still see you, you know, sneaking around out there.”
“I need to focus on work during the days. I thought we’d agreed.”
My mother snorted. “I thought we agreed about a lot of stuff, Phil. And you stink like fish, it’s disgusting.” She wrinkled her nose.
“Block it out then. That’s what pssi is for. Anyway, I was trying to take a shower, but you stopped me.”
“I stopped you? So it’s me that’s holding you back? What a joke! Just block it, that’s your answer? Maybe I like to see things for what they are, like what you are.”