“Marie, could you send me the latest reports?”
I reached down to smooth out a wrinkle in my skirt, trying to regain my composure. Marie looked up at me from some files she was studying.
“We’ve had something of a breakthrough,” she responded. “The high surface temperatures seem to be caused by migrations of dinoflagellate blooms. Someone out there has been planning this for a long time.”
She splintered me all the data sets before continuing. “Someone seeded the ocean surface with iron dust to grow bioengineered plankton, and they’re now directing huge swarms of the tiny creatures, sucking energy from one part of the ocean and into another.”
“Can we stop it? Can we find out who’s doing it?”
She shook her head. “We can see what’s happening, but nothing more than that so far.”
“Was Sintil8 able to find anything?”
“He was some help,” she replied with a nod. “What we’re looking at could be a new addition to the Weather Wars arsenal.”
Directed cyclone warfare would add a whole new chapter to the ongoing book of human conflict, but, of course, weather had always been a decisive factor in war.
Five hundred years before, the British victory over the Spanish Armada had less to do with the genius of Sir Francis Drake and more to do with a week of wind that pinned the Armada against the French side of the English Channel. The wind had held the Spanish in place, giving the British the opportunity to float fire ships into the hapless Spaniards, destroying the fleet before it even had a chance to attack.
The defeat of the Armada had halted a Habsburg land invasion by forces at that moment poised to cross over from the Netherlands. The direction of wind, for a few short days, dictated the outcome of the next five hundred years of global geopolitics, even the rise of America as a superpower. What we faced now was far more than simply a breeze blowing in the wrong direction.
“We can’t fire weapons at blooms of microorganisms, nor at hurricanes,” added Marie. “We’re just going to have to stay out of their way as much as possible. If you want more detail, you’re better off speaking with Jimmy.”
That was going to be difficult, given the state Rick was in.
“Or perhaps Bob?” I suggested, considering our possibilities for fresh insight. My Command communications were cut off, but there were a lot of other people who might be able to provide some additional input. “He has a lot of experience directing little creatures like you’re describing. Why don’t you talk with him?”
Marie nodded, but then paused.
“What?”
“It’s strange,” she replied. “Yes, we can see how they’re doing it, but the numbers don’t quite add up. Even with what we’ve discovered, they shouldn’t be able to direct weather as severe as this.”
I didn’t understand. “Could you be more precise?”
“It just doesn’t add up,” was all she could say, shaking her head.
“It sure doesn’t.”
Too many things remained unexplained, too many loose ends were accumulating, and Rick was right—we didn’t know what we were doing. I was going to have to stop this freight train, even if it meant risking everything.
“I’m going to try talking with Jimmy.”
I sent him an emergency ping on a personal channel, outside of the Command network. To my surprise, Jimmy accepted immediately, and my office faded away as my primary subjective was channeled into a private deprivation space surrounded by a heavy security blanket. His communication network was open to me, but Jimmy’s primary presence wasn’t there.
“Jimmy,” I called nervously into the void, “what can you tell me?”
17
Identity: Jimmy Scadden
I held Patricia carefully in the anonymous security blanket. Rick wouldn’t be happy finding me talking to her right now.
“Things are under control at Command,” I said. “Preparing for a state of emergency is just a precaution, and having the tourists leave is the sensible first step.”
“I don’t disagree. What I mean is—do you know who’s doing this?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” The list of possible suspects was thin.
She took a deep breath. “You really think it’s the Terra Novans? You have proof?”
“No,” I admitted, “but who else could it be?”
Everyone knew they wanted to slow down the pssi program, to give their own product a chance in the market. The commercial stakes were huge.
“We need proof. It doesn’t make sense. The risk of an offensive like this completely exceeds the potential returns. I need you to find out what’s going on.”
“I’m on it,” I replied, a little exasperated.
“And keep an eye on Rick—he’s shut me out.”
This was beginning to feel like nagging. “I will, Patricia, I promise.”
“I love you, Jimmy. You take care, okay?”
“I will,” was all I said. She looked hurt. “Bye for now.”
I cut off the channel. She knew how busy I was.
It was hard to concentrate on her needs with my mind so widely splintered. Samson and I were spread far and wide throughout the multiverse, trying to figure out how someone had managed to target Atopia like this without us getting advance notice.
Patricia was right in one thing—we had to keep an eye on Rick. Despite declaring himself in charge, he wasn’t much use anymore. I knew Rick’s wife had been depressed. We’d all been concerned, but this reality suicide had taken things on a new and disturbing path.
It was, however, something I could relate to.
My own mother was a hopeless soapstim junkie in addition to being a drunk. It was bad enough to be disinterested enough in your own life to patch into someone else’s, but Mother didn’t even go that far. Her favorite pastime had been patching into synthetic soaps, an endless universe of autonomously generated and farcically campy dramatic-romance worlds.
Mother hadn’t even bothered to give up her life for someone else’s experience—she’d given it up for an empty, soulless simulation. It was like a gameworld for her, but instead of facing down some challenge, she just sensed it passively while the soapstim told her that “her” ex-husband wasn’t dead, but had been in a coma for twenty years and was now in love with her stepsister’s boyfriend, or some other nonsense.
Living in passive fantasy worlds made for a painful reinstatement when she returned to her real life. Being out for so long all the time, her brain’s wetware lost much of its neural connectivity with her physical self, so when she came back, she had to drive her body around using her proxxi, Yolanda, as an interface to her intentions. It gave her a jerky, unnatural way of moving, which only fueled her constant frustration.
“You little worm!” she would scream at me as she settled back into her body after a long session, already a few drinks into calming her nerves. Mother wasn’t very technical, but she was an expert in using security blankets to screen her sessions with me from the outside world.
“It’s all your fault!” she would slur. “That dirty bastard.”
As a parent, she had full access to my pssi, and I had no way of blocking her out until I was granted full control of it myself. In her worst moods, she would amp up my pain receptors and reach into my nervous system virtually to squeeze, pinch, and pull on it. It left no physical marks, but it was excruciatingly painful, and I’d squeal and scream in the private Misbehave world she’d created for this special form of punishment. Even as a toddler, I began to learn ways to hide and crawl into the cracks of the pssi system, deep into the darkest corners, away from anyone else. I slowly found ways around the blocks and cages Mother tried to keep me in, sliding past the pssi-controls to hide. Samson would crawl in with me, along with all the friends we’d created to hide together with us.