new spot.
I was laughing and laughing.
My mum and dad were sitting together on a beach blanket, my dad’s arm around her and mum with her great big sunglasses on, laughing with us. My mum was almost crying she laughed so hard, pressing her face into my dad’s chest, and this just egged me on as I flittered willy-nilly around the beach, taunting my baby brother.
I hadn’t seen mum laugh in years, and neither my dad for that matter. Quitting the inVerse, I wiped the tears from my eyes.
InVersing, going back to relive your own personal universe of stored sensory memories, was a dangerous thing if you let it get its tentacles into you. When you were happy, it didn’t matter, you never seemed to bother with it, but when you felt sad or frightened, sliding back into the past and becoming a person you once were, happy and carefree, was about as addictive as something could get.
ReVersing was worse still, going back and reliving the past, but running new wikiworld simulations from a decision point you’d made, and changing that decision to enable a new world to evolve and spin on from that point-a simulation of how the world could have been, not how it was.
Perhaps these weren’t just simulations, but portals into alternate realities that branched off from our own timeline. Windows into life as it could have been, as it actually was somewhere else. It was hard to tear yourself away when it was something, or someone, you desperately missed.
Many people I knew spent more time inVersing and reVersing, or as glassy eyed emo-porners, than they did living their lives in the present. Dr. Hal Granger said on his EmoShow that going back and reliving the past helped us grow emotionally, helped us to find resolution and happiness-I wasn’t so sure.
What my family had done, though, was much worse. It had made a certain desperate sense at the time as we’d tried to deal with our grief, as I’d tried to deal with mine. In fact, the whole thing had been my idea, and it was an idea I was regretting more than I could bear any longer.
Morning had broken in wet smudges while I thought about all this. I was sitting on the covered deck of our island habitat watching the huge swells generated by the coming storms gathering and slapping together like drunken sailors. Ragged, scudding clouds hung under an ominous and luminous sky. The air was calm and proverbially quiet.
Waves were coming from every direction, sometimes breaking, sometimes wobbling together and rising up to double their height before awkwardly falling back over. It was a chaotic and frightening scene, churning up the kelp forests as they sheared away beyond the perimeter.
Even the ocean was confused today.
A steaming cup of coffee, hot and thick enough to stand a spoon in, warmed my hands as I cupped them together. I could feel the heat and strength of the coffee seeping into my veins like a caffeine-pumping life support system. Watching the churning watery tumult, my surfer mind tried to force order from the chaos, tried to find a pattern from here to safety.
I flitted out of my body and into the local wikiworld, to a point about fifty feet off the deck right in front of me, and watched me watching the waves. Robert, my proxxi, took a sip of coffee for me and waved at me. I just stared back.
Our habitat looked small and vulnerable from here against the backdrop of the ocean. Dark, evil looking clouds were stealing quickly across the horizon, piling up in the sky in an enormous approaching wall. Swinging my gaze around to look inwards to Atopia, it looked muted and under threat as the roiling clouds and seas reflected dully off its glassine towers.
From this perspective, the huge incoming swells were rising up towards the beach, almost completely obscuring it as they surged and broke on their ride around Atopia. Instead of their usual rhythmic thumping, the waves were breaking at different points, choppy, bewildered.
Massive clouds of spray were sent booming upwards from the collapsing waves, hanging the beaches in veils of misty white fog. As I watched, a sharp wind began to blow and gain in strength within seconds, snapping the flags to attention on top of our habitat.
The storms were upon us.
Clipping fully back into my body, I quit my procrastinating and began to scan a list of what needed to get finished for the evacuation, sipping my coffee, luxuriating in its hotness.
“Bob, do you have a minute?” asked Martin, pinging me on a dedicated family channel. I’d turned off all the other channels, even my dimstim, as I tried, for once, to focus on the here and now.
I looked at the list again before I answered, “Yeah sure, come meet me in my room.”
I could at least start to organize my stuff while we talked. I crossed the deck and made for the lower levels, dropping down a set of stairs and opening the door to my room. It was dark inside with the shades drawn. I didn’t come in here much these days. Accessing the room controls, I faded the glass walls to transparency while at the same time opening some vents to let some fresh air in. The fusty, closed-in smell of the room almost instantly gave way to fresh ocean air. I heard a knock.
“Come on in,” I called out.
Martin materialized near the couch set against the glass wall to the open ocean. His eyes were downcast, and he fidgeted the fabric on his pant leg as he flopped himself down onto the couch. He looked worried, which was unusual for Martin.
“What’s up, bud?”
“Bob, so, I was looking at the evacuation manifest, and, well, I’m not on it. I tried pinging dad about it but he’s ignoring me for some reason. Could you try to reach him? Do you know why?”
The words froze me in my tracks. Of course the evacuation list was an ADF function, and not a part of the Solomon House research project. Their personnel manifests would be different. Dad must be off splintered in a dozen places fighting for control of the public relations situation, trying to put a positive spin on Atopia being crushed by the two giant storms.
I shrugged and lied, “I have no idea, Martin. Anyway, who cares, let’s just get a move on, huh?”
Martin didn’t move or say a word. He just sat and wrung his hands, cracking his fingers, looking even more worried. He looked about to cry.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I snapped.
“Martin, look,” I said, gathering my thoughts. I’d been thinking about doing this for a long while now, and I let some anger swell my courage. “I don’t know the best way to say this, but…”
Still I hesitated.
“Yes Bob?” he pleaded with perfectly unaware eyes.
“Martin, look…” I repeated.
He looked at me.
“You know you’re dead, right? At least some part of you must know this…” I trailed off, now suddenly unsure where to go.
There was silence, anxious silence, before his angry response. “Bob, are you stoned again?”
“Martin, I’m not stoned, and I’m not upset.” I was shaking my head, trying to find a way through this. “Actually, yes I am angry and upset, but not at you. I don’t know.”
If I didn’t get this out now, he would just forget. They had a cognitive blind spot working on his memories and perception, sort of like if you were walking in the desert and there was a hovercraft following a dozen paces behind you that dusted away your footprints as you walked, so there were a few steps behind you that you could see, but beyond that there remained just a general impression of where you had been, or more appropriately, who you had been.
“What, that I’m dead? Very funny asshole. You’re messed up, man, stop with the drugs, Bob. They’re screwing with your head. Just tell dad to get me on the evacuation list. I’m outta here.”
He got up and made to leave.
“Don’t leave Martin. This is important, and I’m not kidding and I’m not stoned.”
I moved all my phantoms to block his paths outwards into the multiverse, and pulled a heavy glittering security blanket down around us at the same time.
“Look at you! This isn’t even that much of a shock. If someone told me I was dead I’d laugh at them, but you’re getting defensive.”
