3.

I WAS UP at sunrise the next day as well, my dreams again filled with nightmares, but nightmares that were spilling from dreamland into reality. The darkness was smearing into light, unconsciousness into consciousness, dream life into waking life; they were all becoming barely distinguishable from each other. Hotstuff was waiting patiently for me in our war room while I dragged myself into the bathroom for a shower to wake up.

I stared into the mirror, deep into my bloodshot eyes. Condensation from the hot shower fogged over my image as I inspected the angry blood vessels ringing my irises.

"Can we take a short break for surfing again this morning?" I asked Hotstuff, reaching down into a drawer below the sink to get my eye drops.

"I don't think that is a good idea," she replied immediately, shouting over the noise of the shower. "We have a lot to do, things are getting more dangerous."

I sighed, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the bottle cap and holding it between my teeth. I leaned back, pulling back the lid of my left eye and depositing a drop into it. I sighed again, rubbing the eye, and then switched to the other one.

"Come on," I grunted from between clenched teeth, holding the bottle cap in place as I lined up the dropper above my right eye. "A half an hour out on the..."

I suddenly gagged. The bottle cap had popped like a cork from between my teeth to lodge itself into my windpipe. My body convulsed as I tried to pull some air into my lungs. Hotstuff was immediately beside me, and had already alerted the emergency services. Panic exploded into my veins and I clawed at the bathroom walls, doubling over onto the floor, my chest heaving and vision fading away.

"See what I mean?"

I was standing back at the sink, staring back into my bloodshot eyes, but Hotstuff was there with me, holding out her hand to take the bottle cap from me.

That had been close.

I'd barely escaped that event, less than five seconds away in the future on an alternate timeline. I handed Hotstuff the bottle cap, and then after a split second of contemplation, handed her the whole eye dropper bottle. My eyes weren't that bloodshot.

"Yeah," I replied, "I guess surfing can wait."

Whatever it was that was hunting me down, it had infected the very personal and immediate realities surrounding me.

"Forget the shower," I added. "Let's just get to work."

The bathroom immediately morphed into my battle room. Hotstuff splintered a hyper-dimensional graphic into my display s.p.a.ces that plotted several thousand alternate future worlds of my life. Many of the lifelines terminated abruptly, and therein laid the problem with going surfing-I had to save my own life today, and not once, but many dozens of times over.

Yesterday there had been over a hundred ways I could have died in the millions of future simulations that we had running for me as we tried to pick a safe path forward for my primary lifeline. My plan of trying to escape in the UAV, the one that was destroyed in the slingshot test yesterday morning, was one of my futures that I'd barely avoided.

I picked out and watched one of today's more gruesomely predicted terminations playing itself out before me. A three-dimensional projection hung in the middle of the room that started with me being cut in half and then being burnt to a crisp in some freak accident outside the pa.s.senger cannon. I watched with a morbid curiosity. My planned trip on the pa.s.senger cannon was definitely off the list of things to do today.

The problem had originally surfaced some months ago, and it was accelerating at a worrying pace.

One morning a few months back, Hotstuff had announced to me that there was a high probability of being killed in a stratospheric HALO jump I had planned. My future prediction system that morning had told us that, due to inclement weather and the likelihood of my skydiving partner being intoxicated the evening before from a probable incident with his wife, there was a very large chance of an accident occurring. No problem, I had happily announced over my morning coffee, just cancel the jump.

A few days later I received another prediction informing me that there were a half a dozen scenarios involving my death. It had been a fairly simple task then to engineer a path through them all, but from that point the solution to my 'non death' had started to become increasingly bizarre and rarified. On top of it, I couldn't tell anyone, or ask any help to navigate these future arcs-the solution sets became unstable unless I kept it to myself.

I suddenly began to find myself running around Atopia asking people to do odd jobs for me and flittering off to the four corners of the multiverse on inane a.s.signments just to keep myself alive. Things had begun spinning out of control like a surreal and twisted joke.

We'd managed to rout almost all of the incoming threats yesterday by sending out bots and synthetics, and in critical cases myself personally, to nudge the advancing future timeline of my world this way or that. Today, however, some of the future death threats were beginning to creep into the hours and minutes just ahead. What had started out a few months ago as the odd warning of some low probability events to be carefully avoided had steadily progressed into a constant stream that signaled my impending death, and we had no idea how or why it was happening.

"Most of the bases are covered for today," Hotstuff explained, summoning up a probability scatter grid that sprouted outwards from a few critical nexus points. "There are just a few events that you need to handle personally, starting with this one in New York."

She pointed to the nexus closest to me, and the future reality of that event spun out around us. I nodded, trying to take it in.

Someone with lesser resources than me would've just died, without fanfare, and that would have been that. In my unique position and with my almost limitless resources, however, I could literally see everything coming and dodge and weave my way through it.

You'd have thought that someone edging up on seventy would've accepted their mortality with a little more grace, but here on Atopia I was still a spring chicken. I wasn't ready to accept a trip on the ultimate voyage just yet.

Sensing my mind wandering, Hotstuff decided to summon up another particularly gruesome termination. She growled playfully, swatting at me again with her riding crop while I watched myself being liquefied in the bio-sludge facilities. I felt like I was being stalked by the army of darkness with Betty Boop as my sidekick. Just how many ways could a person die? Her tactic was successful however, and I refocused on the New York project.

"You just need to steal a pack of cigarettes," she explained while I watched the simulation play itself through.

"Sounds good," I sighed. "Time to get ready for work."

Sitting on the rooftop deck of my habitat, I took one longing look towards the breaking surf and grumpily got up from my chair to begin the day's activity list to keep me alive. How exactly stealing a pack of cigarettes from some woman in New York would help me out was impossible to understand, but there it was.

Resisting the almost uncontrollable urge to procrastinate, I heard myself say, "Okay Hotstuff, let's get this show on the road."

The deck of my habitat faded away to reveal the grimy walls of a convenience store in New York. My consciousness had been implanted into a robotic surrogate-a robody-that Hotstuff had set into position. Even through the tinny sensory input, the overpowering odor and seediness of the place hit me like a wave of virtual sewage, as the pristine lines of Atopia disappeared from my sensory frames. I felt dirty, even in this robotic body, and had to fight back an urge to go and wash myself.

The target in question was yelling at the cashier behind the counter in front of me. In fact, she looked like she was about to hit him.

"Lady!" I shouted above her, raising my spindly metal arms in the cashier's defense. "Lady, take it easy!"

She didn't even notice me as she fumbled around in her purse, entirely engrossed in whatever it was she was trying to do. Her face registered deep disgust; she looked like she was having an even worse day than I was.

Eventually, after more theatrics, she managed to negotiate getting the pack of cigarettes from the cashier. I hung back, following her out the door, but at a distance.

She stopped outside to light up, standing under a wobbly holographic advertis.e.m.e.nt. After a few moments I saw my chance. I moved in quickly, taking her by surprise, pinning her against the wall. Terrified, she froze up, and I fumbled at her, trying to grab the pack of cigarettes. Quickly I pried it out of her hands.

"Get off me!" she screamed.

I jumped back, my prize in hand, and looked at her. Wanting to apologize, I stared for a moment into her green eyes, sensing anger and fear, but also a deeper anxiety, like I was looking at someone standing on the edge of a cliff.

Explaining myself wasn't an option, however, so after an instant of contemplation I just shrugged halfheartedly at her and melted backwards into the pedestrian flow, leaving her there, shaking.

Somehow my stealing this pack of cigarettes would collapse a whole stream of dangerous alternate futures for me, so my job there was done.

4.

TIME-EINSTEIN HAD famously said that it was purely an illusion, just a construct of the conscious mind. A nice idea perhaps, but try having this conversation with someone who had seen theirs ending. Time was something we all desperately wanted more of when it ran short, yet we waste it frivolously when we think we have enough.

I was in a bad mood after a long day of saving my own life dozens of times. Midnight was rolling around, and I'd just finished with the last of it. A full moon was out, and the air calm, as I sat out on the top deck of my habitat and watched glittering waves swell over the kelp. I leaned back in my chair and considered my problem for a moment.

The initial shock had worn off, but the irony was still steamrolling around my brain like a twodayold hangover. Bob was right about one thing-I did have a hard time with anyone telling me what to do, but somebody seemed to have found a way to get my attention.

I decided I could use a walk to clear my mind.

"Hotstuff, could you drop me into Retiro Park, near the Crystal Palace?"

The surging ocean and the outlines of my deck faded from view, and were replaced with afternoon sunshine and the autumn green and golds of Madrid's Buen Retiro Park. I was standing on a gravel path beside the Crystal Palace as requested. It was one of my favorite places to take a walk when I was having a hard time with something.

I looked down at my hands, admiring their apparent solidity, and then looked around the park.

It never ceased to amaze me how well this technology worked; I could smell gra.s.s being noisily cut by a mower somewhere in the distance. A woman pushing a baby carriage pa.s.sed by and glanced at me and smiled. I could hear the gravel crunching under the carriage wheels and the soft burble of the baby inside.

Most people took the wikiworld, the collected audiovisual and sensor inputs of all people and networks and cameras spanning the world, for granted. But for those of us who had slaved away to make it a reality, it still carried a certain sense of awe.

I took a deep breath, straightened up, and began walking down the path.

The wikiworld was great, but the thing that had made me really famous was the future-literally.

Science was, at its root, just a hodgepodge of rules for predicting the future. How to achieve the same sort of success science had in the physical domain and replicate this to predict daily human life seemed beyond grasping, until I lit upon a place to start.

As I slumbered one morning in a semi-lucid state, my great idea came to me suddenly, as great ideas tended to do, and that idea was celebrity gossip. As social animals, gossip was something humans couldn't do without.

I stopped on my walk to smile at a group of people gathered at a crosswalk in the park. They obviously knew each other well, and stood chatting.

As a student of history, I'd noticed that as civilizations became greater, they tended to become greatly interested in the tiny details of famous peoples' lives. The Romans were the great innovators, but it was modern America that had really taken it to new heights.

When you started with any new technology, you needed to establish a foothold, a niche you could call your own, and I had been struggling to find a niche for synthetic future world predictions, or phuturing as I coined the term. A 'phuture' was an alternate future reality that sprouted off from the present moment of time. The future, with an 'f', was the actual, single future that you ended up sliding along your timeline into; but the future was only one of many possible phutures.

Weather forecasting and stock markets were well covered with established brands and pundits, but this wasn't the kind of future I had been interested in. I wanted to know the future of individual people, on the most detailed possible levels. Early in life, I had developed an obsession with it.

A problem with making predictions, the ones involving people was that as soon as they knew about the prediction, they would tend to confound it, and the more people that knew, the more confounding these effects became. My discovery was that celebrities tended to act as a foil to this. Even when they were presented with a prediction concerning them, most enjoyed the attention enough that they would go along with whatever the prediction was.

We soon began to make a name for ourselves by scooping major news outlets to break stories that hadn't even happened yet, beating entertainment and gossip media to the punch by featuring the celebrity headlines of tomorrow today.

Celebrity gossip had initially set the sails of the Phuture News Network as a commercial success, and we gradually expanded our predictive systems to encompa.s.s nearly every aspect of daily life. Advertising revenue had skyrocketed as we began selling ad s.p.a.ce for things we could predict people would want tomorrow, but it was nothing compared to the money people were willing to pay for the service itself. Almost overnight we became one of the world's most valuable companies.

Kicking gravel down the path, I sent up a small cloud of dust and overlaid a visual phuturecast onto it. I watched it as it was carried away by the wind, flowing into its future self as it dissipated and eventually disappeared.

On Atopia, we'd taken Phuture News to the next level and begun constructing perfect, sensory realistic phutureworlds. Some scientists had begun claiming that these weren't just predictions, but portals into alternate parallel universes further forward along our timeline, and had started to use this as the technical definition of a 'phuture'.

Not quite what I'd had in mind when I began the whole enterprise into divining tomorrow's c.o.c.ktail-dress-du-jour, but in all cases, people had begun to live, ever more progressively, in the worlds of tomorrow.

While the personalized future predictions we generated for people were private to them, as the owner of Phuture News, I had built in one proviso: I could confidentially gain access to any and all phutures generated in order to build my own personal and highly detailed phutureworlds.

To begin with, it had been fascinating to tie everything together; in being able to peer into the collective future of the world. At least, it had been fascinating to begin with, until I could see far enough forward. Then it had just become depressing.

But in all cases, it turned out that the biggest killer application of the future was the future itself, and sitting atop the greatest computing installation the world had ever known, I became the only person on the planet who could literally see into the world of tomorrow.

With great powers, they said, came strange responsibilities, and therein began the problem-for while I could see the future, it seemed that the future now refused to see me. At least, it refused to see me in it.

Hotstuff had already snuggled my body comfortably into bed as I collapsed my subjective away from Retiro park and back home. I sighed and pulled the sheets closer around me. It was time to get some sleep.

I had a feeling I'd need it.

5.

"A GREAT EVIL will consume you all!" spat the deranged man from between tangled, yellowing teeth, his mottled face barely restraining a threatened apoplectic fit, as he balanced precariously atop an upturned four-gallon paint can.

Wheezing asthmatically, his eyes rolled up towards the damp skies before returning to earth and hunting through the crowd. His gla.s.sy gaze swung around to lock onto me, and I stared back. He trembled slightly, his already distended pupils widening as he peered into me.

"A great evil is already consuming you, sir," he whispered, directly addressing me as I pa.s.sed, and then screeched to the crowd, pointing at me, "A GREAT EVIL is upon us!"

I shivered and looked away, but n.o.body paid much attention.

It was early morning and I was off on another one of my walks to try and clear my mind, today through Hyde Park in London, and I was just pa.s.sing Speakers' Corner near Marble Arch. The steady thrum of the automated pa.s.senger traffic hummed in the background while the electric crackle of London City center hung just past the peripheries of my senses.

Early morning for me, but it was already well past midday here, halfway around the world from Atopia. The usual collection of crackpots and doomsayers had already installed themselves for the afternoon tourist crowds. I usually enjoyed standing and watching, listening to the pa.s.sionate ramblings of the desperate men and women on their soapboxes, exhorting us to save ourselves. But today it felt wrong, or perhaps worse, it felt right.

Hunching inwards, I kept my eyes to the ground and wound my way through the crowd, making my escape towards the sanctuary of the park.

Even here in my virtual presence, I had to keep up my guard, a point-of-presence being a potential point of entry into my networks. I had a whole sentry system of future selves walking through the park in the immediate future ahead of me. Threading my way through the periphery of the crowd, my splintered ghosts walked seconds and minutes ahead of me, testing the informational flow through this path and that, dropping data honey pots here and there to pick up straggling invaders, testing for the safest narrow corridor into my future. Salvation for me was threading the eye of a needle, and it felt as if my hands were tied behind my back, or as if my limbs had been amputated.

Taking some deep breaths, I tried to relax.

The sun was bravely fighting its way through the wet skies, and small collections of people had begun to install themselves on the low-slung green and white striped loungers scattered across the gra.s.sy expanse at my end of the park. I was heading directly towards the Constabulary near the eastern end of the Serpentine. On my rambles through Hyde Park I always ran a historical skin so that I could enjoy the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and I could see its roof gleaming past a copse of trees in the distance.

It seemed I'd developed a thing for Crystal Palaces.

Right at that moment, however, that same reality overlay was projecting the Tyburn gallows next to a gaggle of old ladies who'd slumped into their loungers in the middle of the field. An execution was in progress, or at least a hanging. The ashen corpse of Oliver Cromwell spun slowly in the breeze, much to the delight of the crowd collected for the spectacle that had ushered London into 1661.

"Old Crommie is dancing the Tyburn jig!" leered an impish woman whose ghost, soiled in sodden rags and rotten teeth, appeared faintly near me amid that long ago crowd.

No matter which way I turned, death seemed to surround me. Quickly I cropped the reality skin into a narrow window of time around the present and 1851, and the crowd and execution dropped away.

Visions of the trail around the Serpentine pond floated into my consciousness as my splinters walked ahead of me, and I collapsed my probable paths to head towards Kensington Road and the entrance of the Crystal Palace, towards the quiet cool of the ancient oaks that stood there, quietly marking their own way through time.

Patricia Killiam had asked to speak with me today. Walking across the edge of the park I summoned up a media feed of her in another of her endless string of press conferences. As an early supporter of much of the deep technology behind the Phuture News Network, Patricia and I had become quite close over the years. In the overlaid visual display, a reporter was just asking her a question.

"Isn't the world population stable now, even declining?" asked the reporter. "Shouldn't that help calm the resource shortages?"

"The core problem isn't population," explained Patricia, "but that everyone wants to live lives of material luxury. Supporting ten billion middle cla.s.s citizens on planet Earth was never going to work, and the only solution is to create a simulated reality that is good enough to satisfy our material cravings."