An intense, burning anger beyond my searing humiliation filled me. All the years of containing my fear, my frustration, my hiding and cowering, it all boiled over the edges of my psyche. I could kill her, right now. The world turned a bloody red in front of my eyes, and demons shifted somewhere deep inside me.
Cynthia shrank back into the protective knot of her friends, all of them still laughing.
Gathering myself, I focused on her, channeling my voice through the pssionics and amplifying it beyond deafening.
“Why did you do that?!” I bellowed, my body growing into a grotesque, monstrous caricature.
A shockwave of pure hatred burst from me, almost knocking over the assembled guests. I felt as if I were about to physically explode when I caught myself and stopped. My anger imploded back into me, and the bottle corked back up.
The laughter stopped. In fact, it was deathly quiet, except for whimpers from some of the smaller children. Shocked faces turned toward me, watching me warily.
Someone started crying.
It was Cynthia.
At that moment, Nancy Killiam opened the portal door and announced, “I’m heeeere!”
I began to run, tears streaming down my face, shoving my way past Bob.
“Jimmy, hey Jimmy… ,” he tried to say as I ran past him, almost knocking down Nancy.
I ran and ran, trying to escape the blinding glare of their judgment. By that point, I was already gone, detached, and it was Samson taking over my body to hide it somewhere safe.
I was already back in my private world and it was burning. Great flames were consuming the walls and rooms and corridors, all the nooks and crannies of my childhood. The countless little creatures trapped there squealed in a high, keening agony as the blaze devoured them.
I watched impassively as the inferno consumed itself and flamed out.
Never again, I promised myself, never again.
They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. On that day, I felt myself shatter and schism. But then I began to reform, to heal and grow, becoming an adult perhaps, but certainly becoming something different.
The developing child inside me, my personality until then free-floating, coalesced and hardened. Invisible things fell into place, the pain stopped, and the shell finally finished closing around me, opaque, and powerful.
Impenetrable.
A few days later, I was studying for the Solomon House entrance exams at home.
My mother had just arisen from the dead—quite literally from being dead in one of her soap-stims—and was making her way clumsily toward me. She had a fresh drink in hand.
“Hey, stinker, I saw you embarrassed yourself at that Killiam party. What the hell were you thinking?” she half-slurred, half-laughed at me. “Some security expert you are.” She sniggered, taking a swig from her drink.
I watched her blankly.
“They killed the dolphins you know,” she added, cruelly recalling a major security breach that had been the start of the end with Terra Nova. “Dirty, smelly fish, serves them right.”
Still I said nothing.
“I guess nobody is coming to your party, huh, stinky Jimmy?”
She was right. No one was coming to my upcoming birthday party, not anymore.
Mother was behind me, turning away to refill her drink. I slowly closed the interface to my notes and twisted around to face her, pulling down a dense security blanket that enveloped us in a glittering glacial blue.
She turned back to me. “What?” she barked. “Something to say, little worm?”
“If you ever talk to me again, Mother, if you ever so much as lay a hand on me, or utter one more word to me from that trashy, dirty mouth of yours,” I said, slowly and evenly, “I will make sure that you regret your very existence.”
I smiled to make the point, opening up her pssi channels and filling her emotional inputs with pure hatred. She stared at me, about to say something, but then stopped herself. Terrified, she turned and shuffled away, and I released the security blanket with a flick of a phantom.
“Enjoy the soapstim, Mom!” I called gaily after her and returned to my notes.
I’m going to ace this test.
22
Identity: Patricia Killiam
The winds whipped and howled, churning the surface of the ocean into a frothing maelstrom. Gigantic waves surged and crested, propelled by the driving storms. The collision of two Category 5 hurricanes was a once in a mega-annum event, and Atopia was a seed about to be crushed between these two grinding wheels.
And then, bright pinpoints of light appeared, flashing through the sheets of dark, whipping rain. More pinpoints flared through the downpour and began illuminating the heaving seas. They multiplied, glittering and flashing into a sheet of superheated plasma that vaporized the rain, sending plumes of mist rocketing up through the atmosphere.
We were all in Command, watching this on a projection in the middle of the room.
“The slingshots weren’t designed to be used this way,” Jimmy explained as we watched the growing inferno begin to notch a tiny gap between the colliding storms. “Usually, they’re only used in sustained operation for a few minutes to take out incoming kinetic threats, but we’ve made some modifications to sink away the heat. We should be able to operate them continuously for at least a few hours, maybe more—long enough to get the job done.”
The viewpoint on the projection swept away and upward, zooming backward into space until we could see most of the colliding hurricane systems with Atopia highlighted on the seas between them. Jimmy accelerated the simulation speed, and we watched as a narrow gap between the storm systems appeared and Atopia was sucked through it.
“We’ll use the slingshots to blaze a super-high-pressure system through the middle of the two colliding storm systems. Then we’ll drive Atopia at maximum speed straight into it. The relative vacuum we create will literally suck us through as we burn a path forward with the slingshots.”
Jimmy smiled as the highlighted pinpoint of Atopia popped through to the other side of the storms in the simulation.
A singular, loud clapping punctuated the room. It was Kesselring, beaming at Jimmy, and everyone joined in.
“You’ve saved us!” Kesselring cried out. “Brilliant, simply brilliant!”
Relief that we would escape destruction in the storms almost overwhelmed me. I couldn’t help but join in the applause. It was ingenious, and it looked like it would work.
“It will be a bumpy ride through,” added Jimmy, “but not too bad.” He waved away our applause.
Kesselring leaned over to me confidentially. “Excellent work in bringing Jimmy onto the Command team.”
“Thanks,” I replied, nodding, but my clapping trailed off as I spied Rick standing off to the side, his expression vacant. “Looks like it will work,” I agreed, “but if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to something.”
I collapsed my primary subjective away from Command. Marie had already poured me a scotch, and I sat down behind my desk and put my feet up.
“Through the storms we go,” said Marie gravely.
I took the drink from her and stood. Unconsciously I began pacing back and forth.
Marie brought up the phutureworlds we’d been working on for so many years now, their projections floating in my display spaces, staggered from the most critical to least, filling my eyes with death and destruction. She was bringing them up to make a point.
“None of this makes any sense,” I complained, taking a sip from my drink.