spurted and splattered onto me amid blood curdling screams. I looked at the troll leader, shaking my head with eyebrows raised.
He smiled back at me and nodded.
“Ah, Fred, Fred!” said the troll leader, raising one stumpy green arm.
Dripping in blood, Fred looked up from his whimpering prey. “Yeah?”
“Could you give it a rest, Fred?”
Fred pouted and frowned, and then sighed.
“Fine.”
Grumbling under his breath, he stuck the point of his axe through the police officer’s skull. This ended all the commotion. The troll skulked off.
My vision was swimming.
“Sid? You ready to go?”
True to his assessment, Sid had bled out slowly and hadn’t gotten another scratch. Sitting atop a pile of stinking corpses, he was now chatting up a female troll over near our Mustang.
“Yep!” he waved back, and picked up his gun and stuck it in his mouth.
“Cool.”
I picked up my.357, looked at the head troll and said, “Let’s do this again sometime.”
With a smile I opened my mouth and stuck in the barrel of my gun. Tasting the sharp tang of metal and gunpowder, I pulled the trigger. The last thing I felt was the curious sensation of my head exploding backwards into space and suddenly, I was floating in blackness.
Dead. At least in that universe.
It was a funny thing. We could now die a hundred, a thousand, a million times out in the synthetic worlds we traveled through-we just couldn’t die in our identity world. It was just that one place out of millions where we couldn’t die, it was a solution set approaching zero.
With all the flittering between worlds and bodies, stimswitching with friends, people borrowing your body and your body being driven around by your proxxi, you’d think it would get confusing to figure out where or when you were or how to get back into your own body, and it could be disorienting. That was why a basic feature of pssi, hardwired at the deepest level, was what we affectionately called the Uncle Button-when you gave up and wanted back into your own body, you punched it. You just had to remember that it was there.
I sighed as I floated in the dimensionless black space and performed the well worn ritual: look down to where your chest should be, reach into your chest, punch it, and whammo, I felt myself falling backwards.
Now I was jogging through trees near the eastern inlet. Sunlight was streaming down through the green canopy above.
“Taking me for a jog?”
“Uh huh, you asked me to, remember?” replied my proxxi, Robert, just a voice in my head. “Did you read the latest storm warnings?”
“No…” I replied, disinterested. I knew they were having a hard time steering out of the way of Hurricane Newton and it looked like we might have to battle through the edges of the storm, but what did I care. I’d just be off in the gameworlds anyway.
“Well it’s gotten a lot worse,” Robert explained, “you’d better not get too dug into the gameworlds this afternoon, and stay off the pharmacologicals.”
“In case of what?” I asked, surprised. It was rare Robert would ever ask me to do something.
“Just in case.”
I shrugged.
“Do you want to transition control to you?” he asked, apparently satisfied.
“Naw,” I replied, “just take us home, just in case like you said. I’m going for another gameworld session with Martin.” I felt bad now for yelling at him.
“That’s probably a good idea,” replied my proxxi.
§
For the rest of the day we opted to go old school and return to Mongol battle. We all met up afterwards at a tiki-bar on the beach for some beers. It was well past nightfall, and the place was packed with tourists.
Martin loved the Mongolian battle worlds. He was still hopped up from the fight and was jumping around in the sand, howling away as he aped Bruce Lee style karate moves. Sid, Vicious, Robert and I watched him with amusement.
“Bob, that was awesome, you ducking and diving like that, it was like, superhuman!”
I’d had Sid remap my tactile water-sense for Mongol battle so that I could feel arrows coming at me like eddy currents through my skin. The incoming projectiles had become a part of my body, and as I quickened, I was able to duck and weave away with blinding speed, roaring through the battle as I hacked away at the Tatar scum.
“Yes, it was superhuman. That is perfectly accurate, we have superhuman abilities. We are in fact supermen. At least until the rest of humanity plugs into pssi, at which point…”
I paused to take a swig of my beer.
“We will just be, well, just men again.”
I shrugged and smiled. I could see that Martin wasn’t troubled by existential angst anymore. It was nice to be nice to him for once.
Sid smiled. He liked it when I was nice to Martin. He leaned over and whispered under his breath, “You’re going to talk to him, right? For you, you understand?”
I rolled my eyes but nodded.
“Yeah, yeah, you don’t give up do you?”
The surf had been pounding noisily as we all sat there, but a truly gargantuan wave suddenly thundered in, literally shaking the party lanterns hanging off the tiki-bar. Everyone turned to look out into the blackness. Those were some monster storms brewing out there.
Just then, a system of pssi alert channels began to activate.
7
Floating up at the edge of space, my dad had asked us to get together as a family to see firsthand what was happening. We watched the two converging hurricanes swirling ominously in three dimensions below us. They had suddenly strengthened in the past day, both past category four now, and like two enormous threshing wheels, they now threatened to pin Atopia against the West Coast of America.
Atopia was still holding its own as we backed away, but we were now running out of room and the phuturecasts didn’t see any way around them. Surface evacuation had just been ordered. Jimmy was right in the thick of the emergency preparations.
Dread filled me realizing the impregnable fortress of Atopia was somehow threatened.
Flitting back to our family habitat to get ready, I clipped back into my body. After a rushed inventory assessment with my proxxi Robert, it seemed I really didn’t need to bring much, so, with some time to spare, I let my mind slip backwards and away, to an early inVerse memory of my family I liked to escape to in times of stress.
Blinking in the sunshine, I could feel sand trapped wetly in the crack of my ass. At the time I was having too much fun to notice it as my brother chased me around the beach on his pudgy little legs. We’d just turned four, and I’d just passed the point where my parents had allowed my proxxi, Robert, to fully take over my body, but he hadn’t yet progressed there yet.
Despite being twins, my brother had always lagged behind me.
So as he chased me around the beach, squealing with excitement and waving his bright orange plastic digger, just before he could touch me I would flit out to another spot nearby, disappearing suddenly from in front of him to reappear a few feet away. He hooted with delight each time I did it, and I would stick out my tongue and waggle my hands, thumbs in my ears, and raspberry him. With squeaks of glee, he would change directions and run at my
