announced to everyone the adventure we’d embarked upon. We would have made it, except that halfway there, after a week at sea, our smarticles reserves had begun to deplete. Physically we were perfect, and the weather had been good, but the itchy, desperate feeling of our smarticle supply running low had convinced us to turn around.
My mind hovered back onto Atopia itself, to the million and more Atopians packed in below decks, waiting for the coming hurricanes. Thousands of tourists had been shipped off in a matter of hours when the order had come through, yet none, not even one, of the native Atopians had opted to leave. Even in the face of potential destruction they stayed, wrapped in the warm embrace of pssi. They were afraid of leaving, but why?
I’d only been out about an hour when it finally dawned on me.
It was so obvious it was shocking, and yet so close that it had been impossible to see the forest for the trees. In fact, none of the trees even wanted to see it, never mind the animals in the forest who were lustily eyeing the leaves and branches.
“Sid, I have it, I know what’s going on!” I shot up out of the water in my eureka moment.
Snapping back into my body, I began collapsing the millions of nodes of my collective mind with Nancy. She gasped, our minds and nervous systems shredding apart, and sat up with me. Her breathing was hard and ragged, and she gripped me tightly. I held back onto her.
“And?!” yelled Sid. The gang was all sitting around the tub Nancy and I were in.
“Don’t keep us waiting, son!” added Vicious.
I shook my head.
“Sorry, I can’t tell you yet. I need to talk to Patricia first. This doesn’t make sense. Or maybe it does. I don’t know. I thought I knew her better than this.”
“Aw, come on man!” yelled Vicious. “You can’t be serious!”
“Just let me talk to Patricia first, please, okay?” I asked. “Please, just a tiny bit more patience.”
Wide eyed and on the edge of their seats, they all stared at me in disbelief. Giving Nancy a kiss, I immediately flitted out, sending a high priority request into Patricia’s networks. What was she thinking?
§
Patricia accepted my ping on the first bounce and opened her sensory channels to me. I appeared in her private wood paneled office, sitting in one of her attending chairs. She was sitting across from me behind her desk, and looked like she’d been expecting me.
I just blurted it out. “I know what you’re doing!”
It was foolhardy, perhaps even dangerous, to drop this bomb, but I felt like I knew Patricia. This made it all the more perplexing.
“You’re trying to kill Vince,” I added breathlessly. “The pssi weapons programs, I know about all of it. Are you behind all these disappearances as well, did you steal Willy’s body? Did you sabotage Infinixx? Why are you doing this?”
She sighed and tipped her cigarette into an ornate crystal ashtray, considering me carefully.
“We weren’t trying to kill Vince,” she admitted softly. “I just wanted to keep him occupied. But I had nothing at all to do with the disappearances or what happened to Willy, and certainly nothing to do with Infinixx.”
I stared at her in disbelief.
“I want to say, what happened with your brother,” she continued, grimacing. “I was against all that, but it was what your family wanted at the time. Of course, Hal snapped it up as an opportunity to demonstrate yet another way pssi could remove unhappiness.”
She tapped her cigarette into the ashtray again, and took a sip from her never ending scotch.
I shook my head. Was she trying to bring me into the circle of blame?
“That was a real killer application, all right,” I shot back at her angrily. “Why are you doing this?”
“Since you came to me, why don’t you tell me what we’re doing, Bob?”
She smiled thinly.
I looked at her, shaking my head.
“You’re hooking the world on virtual crack is what you’re doing!”
25
Identity: Patricia Killiam
Silence hung in the air. I paused, waiting for Bob to calm down.
“Yes, pssi can have very addictive side effects in an uncontrolled environment,” I admitted, taking another sip from my drink, “but it leaves the body very healthy. The drug you’re referencing ends up killing most people, whereas those on pssi will live immensely long lives.”
Bob shook his head angrily. “Yeah, perfect, keep them alive as long as possible to suck out as much money as you can, right?”
I stared at him without saying anything. It was surprising he’d managed to discover the pssi weapons programs. This was something I hadn’t even known about, one of the things Kesselring had been hiding from me. I’d only just found out myself through Sintil8.
“People directly stimulating their pleasure centers,” continued Bob heatedly, “ramping up their dopamine output. Forget about sex, just plug into my pleasure broadcast. Of course it’s addictive.”
“Quite frankly, I’m surprised at this sudden bout of prudishness,” I replied. “As far as I can remember, you were one of the ones who enjoyed all of this stuff the most.”
“I don’t care what people do. Be happy, do what you want.” He shrugged. “My problem is how you’re hiding how incredibly addictive it is.”
I shared his concern, but as chief scientist, it was my responsibility to defend what we were doing.
“Dr. Granger has found ways to short circuit the addition pathways.”
“Sure you have,” he replied sarcastically. “Using the problem to fix the problem, sounds perfect. And I’ll bet you’ll charge a nice fee for it too.”
This was exactly what I’d said when Kesselring and Hal had suggested it to me. I sighed.
“It does sound suspicious,” I agreed, “but we needed to get regulatory approval as quickly as possible. We couldn’t afford to let the process get stuck.”
He looked at me with mounting disgust.
“So it was all about getting to market faster?”
“In a way,” I admitted, nodding my head slowly. I was so tired.
“Encouraging people to have synthetic babies, living in fantasy worlds or reliving a past they can’t accept,” he continued furiously, gaining steam again. “If not that, then they’re emo-porn junkies, living life as parasitic reality vampires.”
I felt angry as well. While I’d set this whole thing in motion, once it was going I’d been forced to accept a lot of things I wasn’t comfortable with. The synthetic babies, proxxids, had been one of Hal’s ideas and central to the program for reducing birth rates. I’d never been comfortable with this and many other things. My own anger made me defensive.
“Fantasy worlds? Are they really, Bob?” I lashed out. “You have your own dimstim, and a very popular one, from what I’ve heard, and emo-porning is not something I condone. Anyway, since when have people wasting their lives on reality programming been an issue?”
“That’s not the point, Patricia,” he yelled back, “you’ve set all this up to turn the world into your junkie!”
We glared at each other.
“You’re up on stage every day, touting the benefits of pssi to the world-going green, boosting work productivity, free limitless travel, live forever.” Bob was walking around my office now, waving his hands in the air. “And you’ve got Nancy up on stage pulling for it too! How much does she know, I wonder?”
He looked towards the ceiling and held his arms wide.
“The great Patricia Killiam, godmother of all synthetic reality, globally renowned and trusted the world over,” he cried, “and the biggest drug pusher of all time!”
He looked back down from the ceiling at me accusingly. I sighed again, deeper this time. It was time to come
