“So what’s going on with these storm systems?” I asked casually, changing the topic
I was curious to see if Patricia had anything more to say than what I got through the mediaworlds. I’d been so caught up in my own disasters lately I’d hardly paid attention to the storm systems that were threatening Atopia. With a little more breathing space, I’d started to let my mind assimilate more of what was happening on the outside. These storms were the big news.
“We don’t know,” she replied, shrugging, “but they’re definitely not natural.”
Not natural? I hadn’t heard that before.
“Really?”
“Something is going on, and we’re not sure what,” she replied.
No kidding, I thought to myself, but I just kept quiet.
10
FINALLY, IN LONGER than I could remember, I was really enjoying my walk through Beun Retiro Park in Madrid. Fall had begun to turn fully to winter, and all the leaves had fallen off the trees to create a beautiful golden carpet underfoot. Perfectly faultless blue skies hung overhead.
In my mind’s eye, I could see myself stepping gracefully to the side as a helicopter crashed down from the heavens, nearly crushing me on a walk through Stanley Park in Vancouver the next day. In another splinter, I could see a car swerve, bouncing into my beach cruiser as I turned into a parking lot in Malibu a few days later. The car clipped the surf board sitting in the back of the cruiser, sending it spinning around. I ducked just before the board would have decapitated me. It was all effortless action, like a ballet with death.
We’d found a solution to my problem. Since we’d stabilized them a few weeks back when I was in Tibet, the density of death events had quickly begun to fall. There were still nearly twenty thousand future fatalities we had to avoid to maintain my healthy timeline, but what had seemed terrifying and unfathomable just a few short weeks before, had become just a walk in the park. Literally.
I strode purposefully forward as I walked around Retiro Park, each step picking out another yellow leaf underfoot to grind into the gravel, imagining each to be a tiny harbinger of doom I was snuffing out with each step. Looking up from my work, I found myself standing in front of the Crystal Palace.
Down the path a little way, a woman leaned over to pick up one of the leaves, and then began laughing, and then crying, completely oblivious to everyone else around her. Not wanting to disturb her, I shifted my walk onto another trail. I glanced back over my shoulder towards the woman, but she was already gone. She’d looked awfully familiar.
To protect myself, I’d developed a kind of temporal immune system, stretching out into the alternate universes connected to me. An army of killer tomorrow-cells spun through the probabilistic spaces surrounding me, neutralizing threats, clotting dangerous portals and pathways both into the future and through the past. This immune system had become a part of me, a part of my living body, a highly attuned death-sense that allowed me to effortlessly thread my way through even the most dangerous of situations.
For once, the conspiracy theorists were right. Some of the tabloid worlds had begun publishing stories about a shadowy force that had been detected, pushing and pulling the future prediction networks. The shadowy force they were referring to was me, but there was something else out there too. That something else that was the thing that was trying to hunt me down, but I was hunting it down as well.
What had more of my attention were the hurricanes that were threatening to pin Atopia between them. In my situation, it was impossible to ignore the idea that perhaps the storms were aimed at me, a final attempt to destroy my power base after attempting to trap me there. Try as I might, the idea just didn’t stick, and though the storms looked like they would damage Atopia, they were no real threat to me.
In my struggle to save myself, I had been reborn. I turned my face up to the morning sunshine, feeling its heat warm my soul. Where my life before had been sliding into apathy, the past few months had led me on a spiritual journey into an almost mystical place. Decoding the hidden pattern had helped us navigate the most stable path through my future, and it was leading us further and further back. A hidden truth I was just beginning to glimpse was buried somewhere in humankind’s history.
The solution, as such, was no solution, but simply to carry on. It was everything and nothing, both the beginning and the end. I was still engaged in a desperate struggle against death, as we all are, whether we saw it that way or not, but it had become more like a dance, with effortless action guiding me through. I’d reached a heightened state of being that I would never have been able to achieve any other way.
As this timeline had worn on, the world had begun filtering the incessant predictions of my death as the attempts of another bored trillionaire at getting attention. The world at large had erased me from their networks as phuture spam, and even the flash death mobs had gotten bored. The man with no future, who existed only in the moment, was invisible to a world fixated on anywhere but where they actually were.
On my end, I’d come to grips with, and even relish, my situation. My death had become a local solution to the universe that, with the massive resources at my disposal, I’d managed to bring under control in a tight but stable spiral, undertaking a list of nearly incomprehensible activities each day.
The irony just made it that much richer.
I was trapped by my own creation, unable to even tell people what was happening. Even more ironic was that I didn’t even know if it all was true. It was possible that I was just running around everyday doing it all for no reason. But then, this was life.
I smiled at that thought.
The existentialists did say that life was all about pulling the victory of meaning from the jaws of senseless absurdity, and in that, I’d discovered a purpose that I’d struggled to find before. That purpose was finding out who was doing this to me, and why, and the trail was leading back to Atopia.
And so, I became a man with no future, but a man that danced happily between the raindrops, or perhaps, between the timedrops.
EPILOGUE
SITTING AND WAITING. Perfect the art of sitting and waiting, and you will live a long, long life.
I was in the main Cognix conference room, perched about two thousand feet up in the complex spanning the tops of the farming towers at the center of Atopia. The afternoon sun was shining in hotly through the glass window-walls, and I was sure he was making me wait on purpose, knowing I was here in person.
My mind was circling back to my press conference this morning, about what I’d been telling the reporters. Truths and half truths; I’d been mixing the both of them for so long I hardly knew the difference anymore.
How was pssi going to end up changing the world? To be honest, I really had no idea. The real power of pssi, I wanted to tell them, was harnessing the brain’s natural ability for adaptively rewiring itself to extend the human mind into the multiverse, but this would have earned me blank stares.
The human sensory and motor system had evolved to help us make sense of our environment and fend for ourselves within it, which had worked great when our ancestors were out hunting gazelle on the savannah, but the modern human environment was a massive flow of information and pssi made it possible to plug our nervous systems directly into it.
Explaining that to those reporters was just a bridge too far for me to cross with them. It was easier to let them run into some pssi-kids on Atopia somewhere—they’d get the idea soon enough.
I sighed.
Being present in the flesh was something I’d begun to do more and more lately, sensing my own time growing short. Up here in the conference room the security blankets blocked outgoing and incoming communications, so there was no escaping down a rabbit hole while I waited. However, there was no sense in letting time, illusion or not, go to waste, so I decided to limber up a little.
