going to be liquidating everything.”
A pause while they assimilated the data downloads.
“Questions?”
“No questions regarding the details, sir,” chimed one of them, Alessandria. “But, it may help to understand the motivation. Some of the assets you are seeking to liquidate, are, um, well, they’re not what you want people to know you’re in a hurry to sell.”
The motivation, now that was a good question. There were only two things I really knew; first, that I had no idea what I was trying to escape from, just that whatever it was, it was trying to kill me, and second, just sharing the idea that something was trying to hunt me down made my situation even more dangerous. To minimize risk I had to pretend nothing was happening.
“No reason,” I replied as casually as I could, “just the whim of a bored trillionaire. I don’t want to raise suspicion, so keep this on the down low, right?”
Perhaps this was the wrong choice of words.
“On the down low?” demanded Roxanne carefully, my resource manager for the Asia Pacific region. “You want me to just dump all the yachts, the islands, the racetracks…?”
“Yes.”
I said this with a twinge of remorse. The baubles of Indigo Entertainment, my latest and ill-fated attempt at a new foray into the business world, still held some sparkle in my eye. While I could lay claim to being super- wealthy, I couldn’t say the same about being super-intelligent.
Success in the business world was more about luck, and luck was hard to replicate. My luck had been helped along by a team of incredibly smart people, and born from a single-minded obsession with the future, or perhaps, just one future in particular.
“Don’t go out and dump it,” added Hotstuff. “Don’t attract attention, be subtle, go out there and do what we pay you for. Anyway, most of the Indigo Entertainment stuff is a waste of time.” Hotstuff looked towards me. I shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll need to explain ourselves very much.”
Roxanne considered this, shifting around in her chair.
“I may have someone who could be interested,” she said after a moment.
Then the paranoia set in. Perhaps liquidation was what whoever who was messing with me wanted, and was it possible that Roxanne was in on the fix? I looked carefully at her. Hotstuff sensed what I was thinking and headed me off before I could say anything.
“Very good,” Hotstuff replied to Roxanne. “Get to work then. Any more questions?”
Nobody objected, and one by one, just as they’d appeared, my councilors faded from the conference room.
When they’d all gone, Hotstuff looked towards me sympathetically.
“You’re going to need to trust your team,” she said slowly. After a pause she added, “You’re going to need to trust me.”
Visions of Kurt Godel, the famous Austrian mathematician, sprang to mind. Suffering from deep paranoia, he’d only accepted food prepared by his wife to eat. When she fell ill one day and was sent to hospital, he refused to eat food given to him by anyone else. He died of starvation just shortly before his wife had returned.
“I just hope nothing happens to you,” I replied. “I’m not sure I could starve myself.”
While proxxi had full access to our memories and sensory systems and could usually guess what we were thinking, they couldn’t read our minds. Not yet, anyway. Hotstuff gave me a funny look.
I shrugged and smiled.
3
I was up at sunrise the next day as well, my dreams again filled with nightmares, but nightmares that were spilling from dreamland into reality. The darkness was smearing into light, unconsciousness into consciousness, dream life into waking life; they were all becoming barely distinguishable from each other. Hotstuff was waiting patiently for me in our war room while I dragged myself into the bathroom for a shower to wake up.
I stared into the mirror, deep into my bloodshot eyes. Condensation from the hot shower fogged over my image as I inspected the angry blood vessels ringing my irises.
“Can we take a short break for surfing again this morning?” I asked Hotstuff, reaching down into a drawer below the sink to get my eye drops.
“I don’t think that is a good idea,” she replied immediately, shouting over the noise of the shower. “We have a lot to do, things are getting more dangerous.”
I sighed, unscrewing the bottle cap and holding it between my teeth. I leaned back, pulling back the lid of my left eye and depositing a drop into it. I sighed again, rubbing the eye, and then switched to the other one.
“Come on,” I grunted from between clenched teeth, holding the bottle cap in place as I lined up the dropper above my right eye. “A half an hour out on the…”
I suddenly gagged. The bottle cap had popped like a cork from between my teeth to lodge itself into my windpipe. My body convulsed as I tried to pull some air into my lungs. Hotstuff was immediately beside me, and had already alerted the emergency services. Panic exploded into my veins and I clawed at the bathroom walls, doubling over onto the floor, my chest heaving and vision fading away.
“See what I mean?”
I was standing back at the sink, staring back into my bloodshot eyes, but Hotstuff was there with me, holding out her hand to take the bottle cap from me.
That had been close.
I’d barely escaped that event, less than five seconds away in the future on an alternate timeline. I handed Hotstuff the bottle cap, and then after a split second of contemplation, handed her the whole eye dropper bottle. My eyes weren’t that bloodshot.
“Yeah,” I replied, “I guess surfing can wait.”
Whatever it was that was hunting me down, it had infected the very personal and immediate realities surrounding me.
“Forget the shower,” I added. “Let’s just get to work.”
The bathroom immediately morphed into my battle room. Hotstuff splintered a hyper-dimensional graphic into my display spaces that plotted several thousand alternate future worlds of my life. Many of the lifelines terminated abruptly, and therein laid the problem with going surfing-I had to save my own life today, and not once, but many dozens of times over.
Yesterday there had been over a hundred ways I could have died in the millions of future simulations that we had running for me as we tried to pick a safe path forward for my primary lifeline. My plan of trying to escape in the UAV, the one that was destroyed in the slingshot test yesterday morning, was one of my futures that I’d barely avoided.
I picked out and watched one of today’s more gruesomely predicted terminations playing itself out before me. A three-dimensional projection hung in the middle of the room that started with me being cut in half and then being burnt to a crisp in some freak accident outside the passenger cannon. I watched with a morbid curiosity. My planned trip on the passenger cannon was definitely off the list of things to do today.
The problem had originally surfaced some months ago, and it was accelerating at a worrying pace.
One morning a few months back, Hotstuff had announced to me that there was a high probability of being killed in a stratospheric HALO jump I had planned. My future prediction system that morning had told us that, due to inclement weather and the likelihood of my skydiving partner being intoxicated the evening before from a probable incident with his wife, there was a very large chance of an accident occurring. No problem, I had happily announced over my morning coffee, just cancel the jump.
A few days later I received another prediction informing me that there were a half a dozen scenarios involving my death. It had been a fairly simple task then to engineer a path through them all, but from that point the solution to my ‘non death’ had started to become increasingly bizarre and rarified. On top of it, I couldn’t tell
