just a coincidence.”
“A coincidence?” snorted Kesselring. “You expect me to believe that?”
Shaking my head I quietly replied, “No, I guess that stretches believability.”
“It must be the Terra Novans somehow,” he said after a pause, shaking his head and looking off into space. “You realize we’re going to have to remove Nancy as the head of Infinixx.”
At the same time, I had another splinter who was busy arguing with Hal. It was another battle of the happiness brigade regarding test results from the clinical trials on addiction.
Hal was in the middle of another of his monologues.
“As the world gets more complex, people begin to compensate by looking for escape,” Hal explained as my splinter assimilated into that reality. “Look at the rise in reports of paranormal phenomenon. We know it’s not real, even they know it’s not real, but they need the escape.”
“Okay Hal, I see your point, but just for instance, what about Cody Chavez?” my splinter demanded. We were in Hal’s new space, his office climbing ever higher in the Solomon House complex.
“Cody Chavez is perfectly happy and healthy,” argued Hal. “So he chooses to spend his days with reality skinned up so everyone looks like Elvis and global warming never happened. Cody knows this isn’t real. He’s just suspended disbelief for a while.”
“I think it’s a little more serious than simply suspending disbelief.”
“Cody was suffering from incurable anxiety, directly linked to the intractable problems he saw in the world. So he’s skinned up something to brighten his days, so what?” Hal shrugged and then wagged his finger in the air. “And all without drugs.”
It was just at that point that the Infinixx mess climaxed. I sighed.
“Can we resolve the issue of making the new tests public another time?” I asked.
He shook his head angrily. “Always an excuse with you, isn’t there Pat?”
“It’s just…”
He cut me off. “I know, Infinixx, disaster. The whole world knows, my dear.” He smiled cruelly.
I began to get angry.
“Fine then,” I said, switching gears, “doesn’t it bother you that we seem to be breeding a generation of lazy, self-absorbed sexual deviants with the pssi-kids? Is this where the pursuit of happiness leads us?”
“Deviants?” laughed Hal. “Lazy? Come now, Patricia, listen to yourself! Isn’t this just the same old accusation of parents about ‘kids these days’ down throughout the ages?”
I stopped for a moment and considered this.
“I think maybe you’re just too old,” added Hal with a nasty twinkle in his eye. “These kids do amazing things too, you know.”
I sighed and rolled my eyes. Maybe he was right, but then I knew a few things he didn’t. The weight bore down ever tighter.
“Forget the pssi-kids, then,” I conceded. “What about this disgusting trade in proxxids?”
He arched his eyebrows. “Again, deviants?”
“I, for one, hadn’t planned on starting a whole new industry in sexual tourism for pedophiles,” I complained. “Maybe this was what some of you had in mind, but I find it disgusting.”
“Sexual tourism is a gross exaggeration.”
I said nothing, shaking my head.
“Is it wrong, Patricia?” he countered coolly. “Is it wrong to have computer generated models of naked children if they’re not based on any real, specific child? Nobody is being exploited. It is a critical part of our therapy program for pedophiles.”
“Still…” I replied with revulsion.
“Again, this is just your own prejudice blinding you,” he continued, sensing my growing emotions and throwing them back in my face. “This is just the way they were made. The pedophiles can’t help it. It wasn’t that many generations ago that society reviled homosexuals the same way.”
“It’s not the same thing,” I objected.
“Isn’t it? Isn’t it better for them to come here and release themselves, to find a therapeutic path forward? Technology is leading a cultural advance and bringing this long maligned minority back into the fold.”
“It’s disgusting,” was all I could think to say. “It is absolutely disgusting.”
My mind was past the brink of exhaustion.
This was the path to happiness?
In yet another splinter, Marie and I were studying the fast evolving weather predictions.
Hurricane Ignacia was definitely crossing over from the Caribbean and into the Eastern Pacific to be renamed Olivia. Hurricane Newton, which had been spinning out into the Pacific as we backed away from it towards the coast, had now stopped and even slightly reversed its trajectory.
My projections soon had the Fujiawara effect taking hold to connect the two storm systems, with the center pivot at just the wrong point, preventing Atopia from escaping into the open Pacific between them.
As I discussed the merits of virtual economies with the reporters, defended myself from Kesselring, argued about the nature of happiness with Hal, and considered the hurricanes rushing towards us-I had a nauseating sensation of vertigo.
My visual fields distorted, ballooning outwards, and the hurricanes and reporters shredded into each other. Kesselring’s shocked face watched me blink suddenly out of his reality.
I abruptly collapsed into a deathly quiet, single subjective point of view. Exactly where or why, I had no idea.
Marie, my proxxi, was standing over me, staring into my eyes. Everything was perfectly still. An impossibly long, incredibly thin rope stretched from the infinite blue void above to wrap itself tightly around my waist. I was suspended above a yawning black pit, set in the middle of an endless green field, all under a flawless sky.
“The news isn’t good I’m afraid,” Marie informed me, shaking her head.
Tell me something I didn’t know.
The rope tightened around my waist, slowly choking out my lifeblood. I could feel the tigers charging across the sky towards me, their silent roars ringing in my deaf ears.
Fascinated, I watched as busy and purposeful nanobots ate away at the thin cord holding me suspended in space. Below me, in the blackness of the pit, an unseen monster grunted and slobbered. This can’t last forever, I thought to myself as I drifted in and out of consciousness.
I can’t last forever.
15
Identity: Jimmy Jones
“I heard that Kesselring put you in charge of Infinixx?”
“Just temporarily,” I sighed to Commander Rick Strong, shaking my head, “someone has to hold down the fort.”
Rick winced. “Sorry, I didn’t mean…I mean, how is Patricia doing?”
After the Infinixx mess, Patricia had suffered some kind of stroke. Not really a stroke. There hadn’t been any physical brain damage, but it had been more of an overload of her pssi system. She was recovering, but they were keeping under surveillance and isolated for the moment.
“She’ll be fine,” I said after a pause. “I spoke to her this morning. She said she’ll be back in the office by tomorrow.”
We both returned our attention to the presentation going on explaining ways someone could be directing the storms.
“There is something very unnatural going on here,” explained our mandroid guest to the assembled Command team. With that statement, she reached down with one slender metallic arm to adjust the jumpsuit hugging her thin, metallic legs. “These storms are definitely being driven by some artificial means.”
It was early Saturday morning, but we’d all been called into Command to review scenarios around the
