He was with Sibeal and Zoraster in the White Horse. It was their meeting place. On the other side of a fused augmented reality were Vince and Connors in the barn in the Louisiana bayou, sitting on peeling wooden chairs. Now that he knew where Bob ended up, Sid was able to retrace his path through parts of the accessible wikiworld. Sid bought bits and pieces of the data path that weren’t publicly available. He’d already contacted the paramilitaries that had taken him up the Yoba River.
Connors stared at Sibeal through the augmented reality display. “Explain to me again these crystals you found?”
After some haggling, Vince had convinced Sid to allow her into the meeting. Understandably, Sid wasn’t comfortable including in their discussions a member of the same police forces that were trying to hunt him down. He only allowed it on the condition that her memories of the discussion would be externally stored, where they could be wiped if needed.
The shared meeting space blossomed into a visualization of atomic orbitals, shared valence bonds, and crystalline structuring graphs. “Quasi-crystals don’t occur naturally on Earth. The only ones found outside a lab were discovered in the Koryak Mountains and Indus Valley.”
The viewpoint zoomed to sub-atomic detail, zeroing in on the wave pattern of a single electron. “At each point that Willy’s proxxi stopped in the undergrounds of cities, we found traces of these same formations.”
“Meaning either it was looking for them, or it implanted them there,” Connors said.
Nodding, Sibeal dove into technical details about the resonance of spin between quarks in the crystals’ sub-atomics and power dissipation curves from a surrounding matrix of uranium.
Sid had been researching the quasi-crystals for hours already. Deciding to take a break, he opened a private world to chat with Vince. They morphed away from their physical bodies to sit down at another table in the White Horse, their conversation protected by a glittering security blanket. “So you’re telling me you were possessed by a voodoo spirit?”
“I don’t know, it all happened pretty fast. It felt the same as sharing sensory channels in a synthetic world.” Vince smiled. “But, you know, some of us just can’t help having fun no matter what we’re doing.”
“Figures you would be inhabited by… who was it? Papa Ougan, the voodoo spirit of boozing and womanizing?”
Vince laughed. “Yeah, that’s what they say.”
“And I see you’re going all Stockholm syndrome.” Sid motioned at the image of Connors, already up to her elbows in schematics with Sibeal. “The woman kidnaps you, loses you”—Sid checked the latest mediaworlds on the Phuture News meltdown—“about a trillion dollars, threatens you with jail, and you want to make her a part of our gang?”
“What can I say?” Vince laughed again. “I’ll get it all back, and it wasn’t personal. She’s just doing her job. I respect that.”
Sid shook his head in wonderment. “You’re one special kind of guy.”
Vince’s smile faded. “Seriously, though. She’s a straight shooter, wants to do the right thing, and more than anything, she wants to make her mark, prove herself. I think she could be a big asset.”
“If you say so.” Sid switched topics. “So you want details on where we tracked Willy’s body?”
Vince nodded.
“It stopped at each of these cities in the continental United States”—the room faded into a view of the entire Earth, with New York, Chicago, and Washington highlighted—“and then moved on to Europe and the Middle East.”
“Where did it end up?”
Sid spun the globe. “We think we saw traces in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, but that’s where the trail ends.”
“Anything else?”
There wasn’t much else to go on. Something tweaked in the back of Sid’s mind. “There was one other thing that didn’t make sense, or at least, I couldn’t fit it in.”
Vince nudged him. “What?”
“This might seem ridiculous, but I was reading some of the religious texts you sent me—the ones Willy’s proxxi was reading in the Commune in Montana.”
“Been reading a lot of those myself. So what is it?”
“There was one phrase that I couldn’t find any other reference to, something scrawled into the notes you sent me: The beginning of man, where time stops in a thousand tongues.”
“That sounds like pretty standard Gnostic nonsense,” Vince said after a pause. He frowned. “Wait a second. Where time stops…”
Sid looked at him. “What?”
“I met with that gangster Patricia told us to find.”
“Sintil8?”
“Yeah, that’s his stage name. Real name Mikhail Butorin. He gave me a copy of some Gnostic texts that he dug up in the Egyptian deserts a hundred years ago, the Book of Pobeptoc. There was a passage in there that popped out at me.” He shared it with Sid. “Wal lie body is where the flesh eaters live.”
“That’s just a translation coincidence,” Sid said. “Or maybe Butorin is having a bit of fun with you. Doesn’t he encourage his followers to eat their own flesh? That’s one sick—”
“Where did you say the trail ended, Jakarta?”
Sid nodded.
“Where time stops,” Vince whispered. He laughed, and then collapsed their private meeting space and grabbed everyone’s attention from the lecture on quantum computing Sibeal was giving.
“Did you say some of those quasi-crystals were found in the wild up in the New Guinea highlands?”
Everyone stared at Vince.
Sibeal nodded. “Yeah, New Guinea. Why?”
Sunlight streamed down through the jungle canopy, and a lime-green parrot fluttered overhead. Pushing back the last of the foliage before the village, Vince peered in. Smoke rose from cooking fires between thatched huts, and children chased each other, squealing, while their mothers prepared sweet potatoes in stone-lined pits.
Vince was projecting himself into the village through the base station repeater that he dropped here months ago, just about the time Willy’s body disappeared. It was when the future death threats were peaking, hunting him down, forcing him on a goose chase around the world to try to protect himself. This part of the world was still remote and wild; there were no networks, no wikiworld feeds, barely any technology beyond what humans had a thousand years ago. The perfect place to hide, it was still in a primal state… the beginning of man.
It was here that Vince had met the Yupno witch doctor, Nicky Nixons. The Yupno didn’t perceive time in the same way the rest of the world did. They didn’t just see it as going forward, but also as going backward, sideways and in circles… where time stops.
If it was primitive, it was also one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth. The New Guinea highlanders spoke a thousand tongues.
Vince remembered that it had seemed like Dr. Nicky Nixons was able to see his proxxi, Hotstuff, even though, without any smarticles in his system, it would have—should have—been impossible.
Hunched over one of the cooking fires, Vince saw a man, naked save for a loin skin, covered in chalky paint the witch doctors applied to those searching the spirit worlds. He was arranging sweet potatoes in the cooking pits. The villagers here wouldn’t be able to sense Vince’s virtual presence unless they were loaded with smarticles and connected to the base station repeater. Vince walked over and put a hand on the man’s shoulder.
The man turned and looked up—and smiled.
“Hey, Mr. Indigo,” said Willy’s proxxi.
27
The turbofan transport was on its way to Terra Nova.
Bob felt a swarm of medbots scouring his body as he lay in an emergency pod. The symbol of Terra Nova, a thick circle with a square cross through its center, was imprinted on the ceiling of the passenger compartment his body was in.