Down, down I would dive, into the deepest recesses of my body, trying to hide my consciousness in the submolecular gaps between my stinging, screaming neurons while she tortured me, sinking her virtual nails into my pain centers for crimes I didn’t understand.
I never understood what I’d done wrong, but I assumed I must have been bad. Samson would just sit beside me, staring numbly while she abused me.
The learning bots and teachers at the academy had noticed I was falling behind the other children, but they just thought I was slower. In their well-intentioned naïveté, they figured I needed more parental attention.
“Gretchen,” explained Ms. Parnassus during the initial parent-teacher interview that occurred at the end of my first year at the academy, “I think you need to restrict his access to the gameworlds. He’s distracted, like he wants to be somewhere else all the time.”
“I do try,” admitted Mother truthfully. She did do her best to cut me off from everyone.
“I try to take the time for private lessons with him as often as I can,” she added with a sweet, crocodilian smile, “but you know how it is. He can be such a handful.”
Ms. Parnassus smiled reassuringly at us both.
“Isn’t that right, Jimmy?” my mother added, turning to me, flashing her teeth. “You don’t want to Misbehave, do you?”
I sat terrified beside her, a shell hiding inside a shell. I didn’t want to do anything to anger her, and I desperately didn’t want to be snatched off to Misbehave. I shook my head and smiled bravely, holding back tears.
“He’s a bright child,” said Ms. Parnassus. “He scores extremely high in the gaming systems, but he has a hard time socializing.”
I never got on well with the other kids in the Schoolyard, the education-portal balanced halfway between the real and synthetic worlds where young pssi-kids played. Extremely shy, I mostly played by myself, though Bob and Sid sometimes managed to drag me into the occasional game of flitter tag with the rest of the kids. Without escape to my own private worlds, and restricted to the Schoolyard, I found it difficult to focus my mind.
“And he’s a little devil to keep on hand,” added Ms. Parnassus. “He slips and slides away if you don’t watch him every second!”
“That he is,” Mother agreed, nodding, “and that he does.”
“His mind is always somewhere else,” Ms. Parnassus continued. “It’s very hard to keep him focused.”
“Oh, he’s just always been that way, haven’t you, Jimmy?”
Mother fluffed my hair. I was terrified.
“Does he have any special things that you do together? Stuff that just you and he do when you play?”
“Oh, you and your daddy play, don’t you, Jimmy?” laughed my mother, smiling at me cruelly.
“That’s nice,” said Ms. Parnassus. “Is there anything he’s particularly good at when you play together?”
“The little rascal is very good at hiding.” Mother crinkled her nose at me, showing her teeth.
“Like hide-and-seek?”
“Something like that.”
In her lies, my mother was being honest. If there was any game that I was good at, it was hide-and-seek.
I was the master of hiding in plain sight.
18
Identity: Patricia Killiam
Of all the illusions our minds used to support their ephemeral frameworks, time was the most contradictory: both incontrovertible and yet intangible. Time’s arrow was just a slide down entropy hill as the universe tended toward its finale of disorderly conduct. At the end of entropy was the end of change, and thus the end of time, and apparently, I was about to cease changing, too.
“I’m sorry, Patricia,” said my doctor. We were disembodied, floating in black space between millions of phosphorescent dots that raced to and fro, spreading out through the root systems of my basal ganglia.
The doctor and I were examining my brain.
“There’s nothing more we can do?”
“Not with the technology we have. I’m afraid things have taken a turn for the worse,” he explained. “There are some experimental treatments, but I can’t promise anything.”
Watching the dancing dots of light, I tried to fully make the leap of understanding that I was watching myself from inside myself.
The doctor was at a loss to explain what was happening, but I had a growing suspicion I knew what it could be. If I was right, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stop it.
“Please do what you can, doctor.” An illusion perhaps, but time still stubbornly seemed to end for those of us witnessing it in action. “I just need a little more time.”
“Don’t we all,” the doctor replied, watching the neon pulses of my nervous system race around us. “Don’t we all.”
Floating up at the edge of space, the two converging hurricanes swirled ominously in three dimensions below us. We had almost all of Command and Security watching the storms as we ran the simulations. They were building in intensity past Category 4, and like two enormous threshing wheels, they threatened to pin and crush Atopia against the coastline.
The way they were gaining strength, it was obvious we were going to end up taking some damage—the only question now was, how much? All the tourists had already been shipped off via the passenger cannon, but it would be impossible to get everyone off Atopia if the worst happened.
Strangely, none of the Atopians wanted to leave.
“We need to order an evacuation of the outer habitats,” I observed.
Everyone looked at me. Cut off from the Command, perhaps, but I was still a member of the Cognix Board of Directors. I had a right to be there.
“Moving at this speed, the kelp forests are already shearing off,” I added. “No matter which way this goes, we’re going to lose most of it.”
This had serious implications. The kelp forests were the foundation of our ecosystem, and turning to America for help if we ran out of food for our million-plus inhabitants wasn’t an option.
The last time California had sustained a direct hit was over a hundred years ago, when the hurricane of 1939 had slammed into Los Angeles. This time, it would be two at once, and at a far greater magnitude. On top of this, tropical storm John, thought to be dead weeks ago, had somehow regained strength and was reversing direction toward us.
“Whoever’s responsible is going to pay for this act of war,” Kesselring growled, pointing an accusing finger down at the storms below. “It has to be Terra Nova!”
“We don’t know that for certain,” I pointed out, but this was the wrong thing to say.
“Not for certain? Who else could it be?” raged Kesselring. “A bioengineered organism seeded across two oceans, quietly sucking up the sun’s energy and swimming about to pump up and guide these storm systems. Who else could pull this off?”
“What’s more important right now is surviving,” said Jimmy, redirecting Kesselring’s focus. “We have detection systems to stop this from happening again, but right now we need to focus.”
As Jimmy spoke, Kesselring relaxed. “What’s the worst-case scenario?”
I was about to speak up, but Jimmy waved me off.
“Worst case is we’ll be run aground on the continental shelf, just south of Los Angeles. Major damage to the outer habitats, but the main structure is more than strong enough to withstand the storms.”
I shook my head. “The worst scenario is that these progress past Category 5 and crush us. No matter what, our data systems will go offline. The fusion core should remain stable, though, and I doubt we’d sink.”