Complete Atopia Chronicles

“Absolutely my friend, I think this is more about you, about your experience. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I replied, unconvinced.

My sense of wonder at the world around me had begun to lose its fizziness, and my tendrils were going limp. As I blinked and looked around, I could still see the bending and patterning of the visual hallucinations, but my head had snapped back into some sort of real space.

I sighed.

“Anyway, time to get back. It’s my brother’s birthday and my dad asked me to come home for a family breakfast.”

“I’m sorry, I forgot,” Sid worm said softly. He looked up into the light, considering something. “Bob, I love you, buddy, and maybe it’s not for me to say…”

“What?” I was still pretty high. Was he asking me a question?

“Well, maybe you should slow down a bit. You’re wasted all the time. I understand, but, well…”

I laughed. “Hey, if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black.”

“I’m just saying…”

“I know what you’re saying,” I admitted after a pause. “Look, I appreciate it, but let’s just get going.”

An urgent ping from Robert, my proxxi, arrived.

“My dad is already complaining about me being late,” I added, looking at the ping.

“Yeah, all right. Let’s head.”

With that we began to surge upwards towards the light, leaving the dancing creatures below. I remembered when my brother and I used to dance in Humungous Fungus together under the lights of the phosphorous jellies. It seemed like just yesterday.

3

Growing up on Atopia was great and all, but for me, pssi-the poly-synthetic sensory interface-was only good for two things; playing the gameworlds and getting stoned. Oh, and I guess it was cool for surfing too, so three things. Or, actually four. It was great for hiding the fact that I was stoned.

I was still buzzing from my excursion into Humungous Fungus, but I had Robert, my proxxi who controlled my body while I was out of it, filtering my movements and speech so that I appeared perfectly normal, or at least close to normal. Robert tended to overdo it in these situations, and if he wasn’t my proxxi I’d swear he did it on purpose.

As I came out onto the sun deck of our habitat overlooking the ocean, Robert nimbly handled seating me at the place open opposite my Dad. Martin was sitting to my left and my mum to my right, and sitting behind my mum was a guy dressed up in a toga with weather beaten leather thongs on his feet.

It was a beautiful morning, with a slight breeze just offsetting the unseasonably hot weather we’d been having lately. Gulls squawked in the distance over the kelp forests while waves swept calmly past on their way into Atopia.

My dad scrutinized me as I sat down.

“Bob, the least you could have done was be on time for your brother’s birthday breakfast.”

Martin smiled at me weakly from across the table. He knew I’d been out partying all night, and I felt suddenly bad. I smiled back at him and shrugged apologetically.

“And your food is cold already,” added my Dad.

Robert was filtering my speech, so when I responded, “So is your heart,” in response to my dad’s predictable dig, it came out of my mouth as, “Yes, sir. Very sorry for being late.”

This, of course, sounding like nothing I’d say, immediately got me in trouble.

“Are you stoned again?”

Robert did a pretty good job of having my face feign surprise. I just giggled away, safely detached inside my head.

“No sir,” responded Robert using my voice, while I sub-vocalized to Sid who was ghosting in on this, “Wouldn’t you be with a family like this?” Sid laughed too.

My dad leaned over and looked deep into my eyes. I burst out laughing on the inside while Robert covered for me.

“Dad, come on, I just didn’t sleep well last night, okay?”

Good one, Robert. That was true. I was out getting high all night and hadn’t slept a wink. My dad narrowed one eye and then just shook his head, straightening up and going back to buttering his toast.

“Anyway, Jimmy isn’t even here yet,” I pointed out, “why are you giving me so much trouble?”

“Jimmy has important things he needs to be taking care of right now.”

Unlike some of the people at this table, he didn’t need to add. It was like Jimmy was more of a son to him than his own sons were. It was always Jimmy did this and Jimmy did that, and I was getting more than tired of it. I sighed and angrily shook my head. It looked like it was going to be another one of those conversations.

“Bob,” complained my dad, “you’re twenty one years old. When are you going to find some direction in your life? You need to move on, son. You should have been here to see the slingshot test fire with us. We were all here. Jimmy was right there in the control room with Commander Strong.”

Here we go again. Robert deleted my expletives when he responded for me.

“Dad, I did watch the slingshots,” Robert replied for me, truthfully, “and I am doing something with my life. I have one of the top rated dimstims out there.”

It was true.

I was a professional vacationer, and thousands of people at a time paid money to stimswitch into me when I was out surfing. It was great money, and when pssi was released into the rest of the world I was going to be huge.

My dad wasn’t impressed at my entrepreneurial ambitions, however, and just ignored what we’d said.

“You have such an opportunity, Bob. What is happening here is a once-in-a-lifetime event and you’re right in the middle of it.”

That’s the problem right there, I thought, but this wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“I’m also one of the best surfers in the world,” I pointed out, something I figured any parent should be proud of. My imagined ranking wasn’t entirely fair since the rest of the world’s surfers didn’t have pssi, yet, which justified my obsessive need to be out there all the time.

My dad continued his ignoring game.

“You were one of the very first pssi-kids. You were top in your class at the Solomon House Academy before you dropped out,” he began to sermonize, wagging his toast-buttering knife at me. “Patricia Killiam was just asking me the other day about you, saying how impressed she was with your work when you were a Class I Freshman. She said there could still be a place at the Solomon House for you.”

He raised his eyebrows impressively as the knife came to rest pointing directly at me. My dad was the director of public relations for the entire pssi project, so it wasn’t just me he was chatting up about all this.

I groaned and rolled my eyes as I clicked off my proxxi filter. I’d handle this myself.

“A lot of stuff has happened shince then, wooden you say?”

I slurred out half the words. This got my Dad’s head shaking again and he looked skyward.

“Yes,” he responded, looking at me and then to Martin, “and look how well Martin is doing.”

He motioned with the knife across to the other side of the table. Martin smiled at me weakly, not wanting to get involved.

“Yeah, look at him,” I shot back, narrowing my eyes at both of them. “Martin and all of you are just the picture of shuper-booper family togatherness. And quit talking about Jimmy all the time, we’re your real sons.”

I aimed for thick sarcasm, emphasizing ‘real’, but I wasn’t sure if my enunciation was clear enough to convey it beneath the drugs. What had I taken again?