I said nothing and sat down on a tree stump.
“Jimmy?” she asked again, more softly this time.
I cued my facial projection to reflect soulful pain. “My friends call me James.”
She nodded. “Okay then, what is it, James?”
“I’ve never shared this with anyone, and I don’t know why I feel like I can share it with you. Can we make this private?”
“Of course.”
I pulled a glittering golden security blanket around us and took a deep breath.
“My mother, she… ,” I said unsteadily, but stopped as I let a tear glisten in my eye.
Susie sat beside me. She put her hand on mine and squeezed it, waiting.
I looked into her eyes. “It would be easier if I showed you.”
She nodded and released her subjective control to me.
In an instant, Susie and I we were sitting in a corner of the Misbehave world my mother had created to punish me in. We were reliving a rendering of my inVerse from when I was barely two, and in front of us, sitting on a chair in the middle of an empty concrete room, was Mother, suspending my tiny two-year-old body in the air by one arm.
“It’s all your fault!” Mother spat in my tiny face, the veins in her forehead swelling.
She fumbled with the pssi controls and then reached inside my body to dig her synthetic nails deep into my nervous system, scraping them down the length of the neural pain receptors in my body. I screamed in agony.
“Shut up, you little bastard. Nobody can hear you in here. Just shut up!” she yelled. I screamed, and screamed, my little face contorted purple in agony.
Susie wrapped her arms around me, horrified, tears welling up in her eyes. “Turn it off, James, please!”
And then, just as quickly, we were back in the forest with the cherry blossoms settling around us, sitting on the tree stump amid the deep grass and swaying flowers.
Susie held me tightly and cried. “I’m so sorry, James. I’ll do anything to help.”
I sat impassively, leaning to kiss the top of her head.
“It wasn’t just my mother,” I said after a moment, letting my voice crack a little.
“What do you mean?”
I looked away.
“Show me.”
Nodding, I grabbed her primary subjective and took us back into another silently screaming night in my small sweaty body, the prison of my childhood world. My dad and I had just returned from fishing with the dolphins, and Mother was off in another one of her never-ending soapstim fantasies. With a security blanket settled around the house for the evening, my dad tucked me into bed and then crawled in beside me to cuddle.
“You had a good time with Samantha and the dolphins today?” he asked, holding me tightly and brushing back a few golden locks of hair from my pale face.
I nodded, my little heart beating faster with creeping terror.
“It’s okay if Daddy holds you, right, Jimmy?” he asked pleadingly. “Daddy gets lonely sometimes, too.”
I nodded, trembling, feeling his hands on me, his hands on places that felt wrong. I loved my dad, and I could sense he needed something from me. He’d been nice with me that day, bringing some joy into my dark and constricted little life.
So I let him touch me while I disappeared down my rabbit hole into the recesses of the pssi system. He touched me all over with his real hands, his phantom hands, enveloping my body while pleasuring himself.
I cowered in the depths with my make-believe friends.
“Don’t tell anybody about these times with Daddy. It’s a secret. If you can do that, I’ll make sure to take you out to play with Samantha, okay?”
And so I hid inside and waited for the bright days of rocketing through the foam and spray.
I snapped us back into real-space where Susie was crying again. I was, too.
She looked into my eyes. “We can tell people, we can punish them. You poor soul.… ”
“That won’t change anything.”
She kissed me between her tears.
“But you can help me.”
“How, James? I’ll do anything to help.”
“I just need you to do something for me.”
16
Identity: Patricia Killiam
It took two full days for me to recover, and in that time a world already spinning out of control had taken a steep descent into chaos.
We were hardening Atopia for a now-inevitable collision with the storms and discussing the possibility of a full-scale evacuation. The rate of unexplained disappearances was spiking, and in the midst of all this, I received a ping that Rick’s wife had committed some kind of reality suicide.
It seemed she hadn’t actually been terminating the proxxids. It wasn’t hard to guess what had happened. Reality suicide was a new phenomenon, tied deeply into the way pssi interacted with our unconscious minds.
“I’m so sorry, Rick. Has there been any change?”
I’d requested this emergency meeting with Rick because my Command communication network had been shut off. No one on the Council was responding to me.
“It’s hard to tell,” he replied unsteadily. “I mean, she looks fine. She looks like she’s asleep. I wish.… ”
“I don’t think blaming yourself is going to help,” I offered. “We cracked the security blankets covering the worlds she was in before this happened, but we don’t know the full story yet.”
Rick wiped his face with the back of one hand, staring down at the floor. We were sitting in my mahogany-walled office. Pictures of ancient, four-masted sailing ships lined the walls.
“We know enough of the story to know how we got here,” he said with a dead voice. Then his mood shifted. “This is your fault. You recommended using the proxxids.” He looked at me with dark eyes. “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”
I recoiled. This was a combat soldier after all.
“I don’t think laying blame is constructive at this point.” I didn’t exactly recommend the proxxids.
“We’re all just lab rats to you, aren’t we?” he growled, venting his anger. “I know what you let people do with proxxids—I’ve looked into the whole thing—it’s disgusting. You disgust me.” His breathing was ragged. “You have no idea what you’re doing to people, do you?
“Rick, I’m sorry.… ”
“Sorry isn’t good enough. The time for experimentation and best efforts is over.” He stood up.
“What does that mean?”
“Getting away from these storms. We’re taking control from here on. This is now a military matter.” He shook his head, avoiding my eyes, and flitted away without another word, disappearing from my office and back to Command. He didn’t even leave a polite splinter behind.
I was stunned.
The storms continued to defy phuturecasting, and we were running out of room to back away from them. It was obvious something was directing their development, but despite all our efforts—swarming the sea with smarticles, launching countless surveillance drones, and everything and anything else we could think to throw at the problem—we couldn’t even begin to stop the storms or understand what exactly was happening.
Usually, two storm systems of this magnitude in one oceanic basin tended to dissipate, one into the other, but these two were actually pumping each other up and expanding.
It was unlikely that we’d sustain core structural damage, even in a direct hit by either or both of them, but that was making the sorts of assumptions that trapped us here in the first place.
Now I understood why my communications had been cut off. Rick was formally taking control, declaring martial law, and putting all civil power in the hands of ADF Command.