Book 3:.

Vince Indigo.

PROLOGUE.

IN THE THIN air at the edge of s.p.a.ce, I could feel more than hear the steady beat of the UAV's ma.s.sive propeller dragging me onwards towards my death. I'd been able to see this moment coming for a long time. The tight compartment I was in had never been meant to fit a human. I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the cold metal pressing against me through the thin pressure suit of the improvised life support system I'd rigged.

I shouldn't have tried to escape.

Alarms signaling the start of the slingshot weapons test firing rang out across the multiverse spectrum. They would have canceled the test if they knew I was hidden up here in this thing, but in my desperate bid to erase my tracks I'd cut myself off entirely from the communications networks, concealing what I was doing, even why I was doing it.

It was a gamble that hadn't paid off as the UAV's control system signaled the system malfunction that I always knew was coming. It lurched sickeningly off to the left, cutting and sliding through empty s.p.a.ce, turning inexorably back towards my doom.

In the near distance, the boom of the slingshot began, its thundering inferno blossoming as it demonstrated its fearsome power to the world. My heart was racing, my breathing ragged and shallow. For days, weeks even, I had been able to see this exact moment arriving, and yet here I was.

The awful growl of the slingshot built in power and began rattling the delicate cage of the UAV's body. The cold metal pressing against me warmed, and then turned hot as the acrid stench of molten plastic burned into my lungs. I gagged, shrinking up into myself, terrified.

Engulfed in roaring flames the UAV pitched over, its metal and plastic skin coming apart in great fiery gobs as it disintegrated, offering me up into the emptiness. In seconds I was incinerated like Icarus flying too close to the firestorm of knowledge, spinning, falling, and burning as my wings fell away.

In my last instants of life, I caught a distant glimpse of Atopia, a cool green speck between the flames, her Siren song calling me back towards the endless seas below.

1.

Ident.i.ty: Vince Indigo THE LAST DREGS of the night drained sleeplessly away, and despite the world's best efforts, my life had filled with yet another new day. More dreams of death, but they weren't just dreams. Or were they? I felt nauseous. You'd have thought that life would be easy as one of the world's richest men living on the island colony of Atopia, the most sought after zip code on the planet, but the universe was frustrating my expectations.

It was still early morning. From beneath the sheets, my blurry eyes could just glimpse the dawning sky regaining its composure while the roar and flame of the slingshot test began to die down. Dread filled me as I watched stiletto tipped fishnet stockings stalking towards me from the living area. Then the lights flipped on as Hotstuff tore the sheets off me.

"Aw, come on!" I whimpered, weakly fumbling to grab back the covers.

Hotstuff was all done up in a bad schoolgirl outfit today, complete with a checked miniskirt and a starched men's dress shirt. The shirt was done up from the bottom in a knot to expose her belly ring, and unb.u.t.toned far enough down from the top to reveal hints of something naughty underneath. She knew I was depressed and was doing her part to keep me alert and in the game. What I didn't immediately notice was the riding crop in her hand.

"Ouch!" I cried out as she whacked me with it.

She just giggled and wound back up to smack me again.

"What the heck?" I screeched, and jumped up out of bed to chase her across the room. She squealed, running away from me, and my bedroom morphed into the battle room we'd created to track my looming future death threats.

Hotstuff had already transitioned into wearing army fatigues. She playfully menaced me with the riding crop as I stood naked and rubbed my stubble with one hand and defended myself with the other.

Absentmindedly, I admired myself in a mirror on the opposite wall. Nearly seventy years old, yet with all the gene therapy I barely looked forty. A thick shock of graying hair still hung playfully, if listlessly, over tired eyes that stared back at me.

"Two things before we get started, sir," announced Hotstuff, snapping smartly to attention and giving me a salute with the riding crop. "Commander Strong's proxxi asked for some flowers for his wife-which I provided from our private gardens-and Bob just pinged you to go surfing." She raised her eyebrows as if to tell me that surfing obviously wasn't an option today.

"Patch him through," I replied groggily. Sensing Hotstuff hesitating I added, "Now Hotstuff!"

Bob immediately materialized before me, holding his yellow long board, smirking. He looked stoned already.

A great mop of blond hair lived a life of its own above his twinkling blue eyes, and while he had all the appearances of the uber-surfer, there was a persistent and unmistakable intelligence underpinning it all-the philosopher king of wave hunters. What a great kid, it was just too bad.

"So...surfing today?" asked Bob lazily.

Yeah, he was high. Sizing up Hotstuff's outfit, he grinned appreciatively.

"No, sorry, Bob. Can't make it. Something has popped up."

"Popped up, huh?" laughed Bob, looking back at Hotstuff again. He'd begun projecting some nicely curling waves into my display s.p.a.ces. "Come on, dude! It's going to be monster out there today!"

"I really can't," I reiterated weakly. Jealously I watched the waves. My nerves were frazzled. Honestly, I could use a little relaxation, and I hadn't been out surfing in weeks.

"What could you possibly have to do?" asked Bob. "I thought you were like the richest guy in the world? Get someone else to do it!"

"I wish I could..."

I looked pleadingly towards Hotstuff. She rolled her eyes and wagged the riding crop at me.

"Hey it's your life mister," she scolded, sensing I was going to do what I wanted anyway. "I suppose an hour couldn't hurt, we don't have anything imminent I can't handle right now. But only one hour, right? After that it could get dangerous."

I was already halfway out the door to get my wetsuit by the time she'd finished the sentence. Bob gave me a goofy thumbs-up before flitting away to rejoin his body in the hunt for waves. I'd catch up with him in a minute.

Bob and I were sitting on our boards and waiting for waves just inside the edge of the kelp forest, near the western inlet and not far from my habitat.

Atopian kelp, the base of our ecological chain, had been bioengineered to grow inverted with its holdfast now a gas filled bladder floating on the surface with the kelp blades spreading downwards hundreds of feet into the depths. It sprouted outwards at fantastic rates like a watery mangrove, beginning just at the edge of the underwater extremity of Atopia and stretching outwards from there to about two miles out through the water.

My wealth afforded me the luxury of my own private habitat, a household that was attached to one of the pa.s.senger cannon supports, sprouting up out of the water and into the sunshine. Most of the million-plus inhabitants here lived below decks in the seasc.r.a.pers stretching out into the depths. Atopia was the ultimate in dense, urban city planning, but then that was the whole idea: with access to limitless synthetic reality, Atopians didn't need much in the way of real s.p.a.ce.

I'd been one of the earliest converts to the Atopia marketing program, pulling up stakes from my wandering existence around the Bay Area to move onto the original Atopian platform in the early 40's.

America just wasn't what it used to be anymore, with constant cyber attacks pushing into an insular downward spiral and the Midwest returning to the dustbowl of more than a hundred years earlier. No good end was in sight, and entanglements in the Weather Wars were squeezing the last drops of blood from a country already gone dry.

For me, in my rich, insular world, the kicker had really been the surfing. Floating free in the Pacific, Atopia was exposed to huge, open ocean swells. When they caught just right, these would break and curl into pipes that broke for miles as they swept around its perfectly circular edge.

Atopia was a magnet for the best surfers in the world, but it was hard for them to compete with residents who used pssi-poly-synthetic sensory interface- technology. There was a kind of religion to surfing, and outsiders thought that with pssi we were cheating the G.o.ds, but really, the G.o.ds were jealous.

These days, those G.o.ds seemed to be having a particular issue with me.

Bob was waiting for the ultimate wave, and while I'd managed to catch one good one, I didn't have his attuned water-sense and was having a hard time relaxing into it. Time was pressing down heavily.

"Bob!" I yelled out across the water, interrupting a conversation I could see he was having with his brother-of-sorts, Martin. "Bob, I need to get going!"

"Already?"

"Yeah, I need to get back to that thing."

My promised hour wasn't even up, yet Hotstuff was flooding me with things we needed to get done. It was impossible to enjoy the surfing, perhaps even dangerous. I'd better get on with it.

"I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do," declared Bob, shrugging. "Anyway, ping me if you change your mind. Hey, you should check out all that stuff on the news!"

"Thanks, Bob."

With a wave goodbye I flitted off back to my habitat, leaving Hotstuff to guide my body home.

2.

I CHECKED OUT the news Bob had sent me as I returned to the top deck of my habitat. There'd been a rash of UFO sightings in the Midwest last night, and he knew I was something of a paranormal fan boy. Today, though, more important things were on the agenda.

I strode back and forth like a caged animal, my mind racing, and then stood still as I made a decision, looking out towards the breaking waves.

"Ready for business?" demanded Hotstuff.

She was sitting and waiting for me on a stool at the deck bar, drinking a latte and going over the morning's business news, impatiently tapping her high heels against the polished blue marble floor. Behind her, my carefully curated collection of some of the world's rarest whiskeys and cognacs sparkled invitingly in the midmorning sunshine. It was about the time I'd usually be waking up, but I'd already been up since dawn.

"Do we have to?" I asked uselessly, thinking of how a little taste of the Aberlour would be nice.

"Some kind of action is required," she observed. "Even inaction is an action, and perhaps the only kind of action you seem to enjoy lately."

Hotstuff raised her eyebrows in disdain while she scanned the European financial reports.

"Okay then, summon the council," I sighed, scratching my stubble.

Portals to my homeworld opened up off the deck, and I walked into our main conference room, shifting my attire into a navy sport coat with a stiff collared, open necked white shirt. Hotstuff strode in behind me, her braided bun of hair and short skirted business suit radiating efficiency and purpose.

One by one my councilors materialized around the long cherry wood conference table that glistened under the bioluminescent ceiling. About half of them appeared dull eyed, awakening to instantly patch in from whatever time zone they were in for this surprise meeting. The other half weren't humans, but our trusted synthetics, and they appeared brightly and cheerfully, their smiles following me around the room towards the head of the table.

Then again, perhaps I had them mixed up, the dull eyed ones now looking like my synthetics. I had a hard time telling the difference anymore.

Everyone around the table, however, was most definitely female, and not just your run-of-the-mill varietals, but, like Hotstuff, more like a twelve year old boy's fantasy. They posed casually but intently around the table as if a fashion shoot could be announced at any instant, with the long conference table springing into action as a catwalk.

My calling a sudden meeting like this was unusual, to say the least, and they all watched me cautiously. Information packets were dispersed and appeared on the table in front of them as I sat down.

"No need for pleasantries." This wasn't a social call after all. "Just have a look at your instructions. We're going to be liquidating everything."

A pause while they a.s.similated the data downloads.

"Questions?"

"No questions regarding the details, sir," chimed one of them, Alessandria. "But, it may help to understand the motivation. Some of the a.s.sets you are seeking to liquidate, are, um, well, they're not what you want people to know you're in a hurry to sell."

The motivation, now that was a good question. There were only two things I really knew; first, that I had no idea what I was trying to escape from, just that whatever it was, it was trying to kill me, and second, just sharing the idea that something was trying to hunt me down made my situation even more dangerous. To minimize risk I had to pretend nothing was happening.

"No reason," I replied as casually as I could, "just the whim of a bored trillionaire. I don't want to raise suspicion, so keep this on the down low, right?"

Perhaps this was the wrong choice of words.

"On the down low?" demanded Roxanne carefully, my resource manager for the Asia Pacific region. "You want me to just dump all the yachts, the islands, the racetracks...?"

"Yes."

I said this with a twinge of remorse. The baubles of Indigo Entertainment, my latest and ill-fated attempt at a new foray into the business world, still held some sparkle in my eye. While I could lay claim to being super-wealthy, I couldn't say the same about being super-intelligent.

Success in the business world was more about luck, and luck was hard to replicate. My luck had been helped along by a team of incredibly smart people, and born from a single-minded obsession with the future, or perhaps, just one future in particular.

"Don't go out and dump it," added Hotstuff. "Don't attract attention, be subtle, go out there and do what we pay you for. Anyway, most of the Indigo Entertainment stuff is a waste of time." Hotstuff looked towards me. I shrugged. "I don't think we'll need to explain ourselves very much."

Roxanne considered this, shifting around in her chair.

"I may have someone who could be interested," she said after a moment.

Then the paranoia set in. Perhaps liquidation was what whoever who was messing with me wanted, and was it possible that Roxanne was in on the fix? I looked carefully at her. Hotstuff sensed what I was thinking and headed me off before I could say anything.

"Very good," Hotstuff replied to Roxanne. "Get to work then. Any more questions?"

n.o.body objected, and one by one, just as they'd appeared, my councilors faded from the conference room.

When they'd all gone, Hotstuff looked towards me sympathetically.

"You're going to need to trust your team," she said slowly. After a pause she added, "You're going to need to trust me."

Visions of Kurt G.o.del, the famous Austrian mathematician, sprang to mind. Suffering from deep paranoia, he'd only accepted food prepared by his wife to eat. When she fell ill one day and was sent to hospital, he refused to eat food given to him by anyone else. He died of starvation just shortly before his wife had returned.

"I just hope nothing happens to you," I replied. "I'm not sure I could starve myself."

While proxxi had full access to our memories and sensory systems and could usually guess what we were thinking, they couldn't read our minds. Not yet, anyway. Hotstuff gave me a funny look.

I shrugged and smiled.