“Should remain stable? Doubt we’ll sink?” Kesselring fumed. “So best case, we end up beached in American territorial waters?”
“Should we plan on delaying the release?” I asked carefully.
“No,” replied Jimmy, raising some eyebrows.
My question had been addressed to Kesselring.
“The world still sees us as in control,” Jimmy continued. “The public doesn’t perceive Atopia as being in any danger, even with these storms, so the pssi release schedule isn’t in any danger. If we begin delaying the release, we’ll open up a can of worms, and who knows what else Terra Nova has planned.”
“Exactly, we have no idea what whoever planned this has in store,” I argued. “We need to delay!”
“Let’s not go down that path yet,” Jimmy said calmly. “Give me six hours to assemble a special team. I can figure a path through this.”
“My vote is with Jim,” Granger chimed in, looking toward Kesselring.
Jimmy made eye contact with each of the assembled Council members one by one, earning a nod from each. The final nod he received was from Kesselring himself.
As the Security Council meeting broke up, I materialized back in my office under an extremely heavy security blanket. Marie was waiting for me.
“So it seems we may yet be doomed to relive the past,” she said as I arrived. “Atopia, the island-city of the future, filled with magical beasts and people, may slip beneath the waves—legend passing into legend.”
I rubbed my temples. “We need to slow things down.”
Our phutures had destabilized. Everyone’s resolve to keep the program on track, despite the mounting risks, had been the last straw to force me into unilateral action. Things were out of control. I had to act alone.
“Give Sintil8 our authentication key to initiate,” I instructed Marie. The pssi program would suffer in the short term, but it needed to be done. “And did you set up the meeting with the Terra Novans?” The time had come to lay all our cards on the table, for everyone’s benefit.
Marie nodded. If a proxxi could look nervous, she did now.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of this,” I assured her. “I need to talk with Jimmy.”
I pinged an urgent request for him to come down to my office in his first subjective and Marie disappeared. Leaning back in my chair, I tried to think of the right way to broach a new and troubling discovery that Marie had dug up.
A moment later, Jimmy appeared in one of my attending chairs, looking annoyed. This was a new Jimmy, all hard edges, and again I felt uncomfortable.
“I’ve got a lot on my plate right now,” he said. “What’s so important?”
I looked toward the ceiling, and then back at Jimmy, observing him carefully. “I’ve been trying to locate your parents, but I can’t find them anywhere out there.”
“I have no idea where they are. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t care less.”
“No idea?”
I’d taken a huge chance at the meeting, secretly installing invasive pssi-probes into the smarticle cloud during the session to find out if the people I worked with were being honest. As far as my probes could tell, Jimmy was telling the truth.
“The last I heard, they were back in Louisiana. Did you send some bots down there?”
“Yes. I’ve tried everything I can think of to locate them.”
Jimmy’s face darkened. “Just like you can’t find the dolphins, right, Patricia?”
Where did that come from?
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What dolphins?”
Years ago, there’d been an unresolved security incident that had proved the beginning of the end of civil relations with Terra Nova. One of the outcomes had been the revocation of the work permits for our uplifted dolphin friends. We’d had to send them all back to Terra Nova, but they’d all been happy and healthy. I’d even checked in on the beautiful creatures myself on a trip to Terra Nova a few years back.
Looking at Jimmy’s furious expression, I realized something was very wrong.
19
Identity: Jimmy Scadden
I held Patricia’s gaze firmly, feeling anger boil inside me.
I don’t have time for this.
“I don’t know where my parents are,” I replied with finality.
We hadn’t kept in touch after they’d left Atopia, or, more accurately, after they’d abandoned me. I was only fourteen at the time, but Patricia had already begun to take me under her wing by then. When they’d left so abruptly, she’d swooped in like a savior angel, pulling me in tight.
I felt bad about being so short with Patricia now, but lately she’d started to annoy me as I discovered her various hypocrisies. Her loyalty to the cause, her own cause, had become as thin as any pssi illusion.
On the other hand, if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be where I was now.
I remembered the moment when Patricia had first come into my life. Almost involuntarily, a splinter wandered off, back into my inVerse to experience the moment again, perhaps to try to rebuild my bond with Patricia even as I felt it slipping.
Soon after my fourth birthday, Patricia had dropped in for a visit with my parents. Nancy Killiam and I were distant cousins, but our side of the family was where the dark horses ran. Patricia saw an opportunity to bring us back into the fold when Atopia was being planned and had extended a generous offer to my parents to join the project.
It hadn’t exactly worked out as my family had hoped, or at least as my mother had hoped. She thought we were going for a drive down Entitlement Road. The cramped, three-room cell near the bottom of the Atopian seascraper complex, hundreds of feet below the waterline, didn’t live up to her expectations.
Patricia’s visit that day was both rare and uncomfortable.
“We’ve been following Jim,” she said, accepting a hot cup of coffee from my mother’s proxxi. “He’s showing some amazing talents.”
Mother grimaced. “You sure you have the right Jimmy? Little stinker here is only good at hiding from Mommy, aren’t you?”
Patricia watched my mother carefully, then smiled. “He is very good at hiding and evading. He manages to slip through some of our tightest security fences, like a little fish wriggling through our fingers.”
“Yes, a little fish!” my mother exclaimed, holding me close and trying to exude maternal warmth. I flinched like a hand-shy puppy.
“But there’s something else.”
“Nothing serious I hope.”
“At Jimmy’s last checkup, his nociceptive pathways were showing some very unusual activity. We’d like to add his data feed to the child-monitoring network. Would that be all right?”
“His what pathways?”
“His nociceptive pathways, the neural network of his pain receptors.”
“And what’s unusual?”
“It’s just unusual, like they’re in some kind of disarray. He doesn’t complain of any unusual pain does he?”
“Of course not, do you, Jimmy?” Her smile was menacing.
Wide-eyed, I shook my head.
“So can we add him to the monitoring system?”
Silence.
“Patricia, we’ve been over this a thousand times before with the Solomon House staff. We have our right to privacy,” Mother declared theatrically. “I’m happy to be here, but there are limits!”