This place held a mystical, almost magnetic, attraction to me, a ma.s.sive single quartzite crystal that rose up hundreds of feet out of the barren, limestone landscape surrounding it. I'd recently installed my own private sensor network here, in secret, as the open wikiworld version lacked the resolution to really experience it, to enjoy the nuances and stark beauty of the place. It allowed me a place to wander truly alone; to enjoy some peace for short stretches in my newly frightening personal reality.

Night was falling, spreading its indigo carpet across the sky to reveal the cathedral of stars that shone only in the deepest of deserts. The perpetual wind here, the Sirocco, whistled softly, carrying with it the sand that over the aeons had etched the limestone bedrock into fantastical forms that sprang up out of the desert floor like giant gnomes and mushrooms, lending the lifeless place an interior life of its own.

Ma.s.sive sand dunes sat hunched in the distance, slowly sailing their lonely courses across the bare bedrock, their hulks propelled by the same unrelenting wind that shaped this place. As they moved, they swallowed everything in their paths, but, just as inevitably as they consumed, they would eventually release as they moved on. You just had to stand still long enough, exist long enough, to be released.

I stepped slowly between the ghostly sandstone figures that towered above me, frozen in time in their mad dance together. The Crystal Mountain glowed in an ethereal purple above it all, its interior lit by a million tiny points of starlight.

It was a strange thing not being able to see my future hanging there in front of me. I mean, I could see my phutures, sense the nearness of their reality in the splinters of my distributed consciousness spreading out ahead of me, but now they all terminated abruptly. The fingers of time I'd carefully nurtured over the years had now been painfully amputated.

Where before the future had flowed straight ahead of me, like a train running to known destinations where I could just switch stations on a whim as the rails flowed past. Now all tracks ahead ended in flames. A suffocating fire enveloped me, the future choking the lifeblood out of my present. I felt trapped in the moment.

"Hotstuff, could you pop in for a sec?"

Hotstuff, my proxxi, obediently materialized next to me. In sharp contrast to the dreamlike landscape I had lost myself in, her vitality and energy sizzled into this s.p.a.ce. She was looking extremely sharp in tight, striped riding pants and boots with a low cut, high necked red jacket. Her long blond hair fell in waves down her back and across her shoulders.

Some people liked to create some sort of alter ego as their proxxi, which was all fine for them. I preferred to have an attractive woman as my personal a.s.sistant. Plus I liked the idea of a woman driving my body around when I wasn't in it.

"So did you hear what Patricia said the other day?" I asked as she appeared, trying not to dwell on the implications of me enjoying having a woman enter my body when I was away.

"What, that stuff about being concerned about you?"

"No, not that," I snorted. "That you're my airbag."

I felt suddenly better, more protected, sensing the physicality of Hotstuff being near in this reality.

Hotstuff rolled her eyes and laughed, "If anyone here's an airbag, boss, it'd have to be you."

I laughed back, but then sighed heavily. I nervously fidgeted my phantoms limbs.

"Stop that," she commanded.

She'd stopped walking herself, looking up to consider one of the limestone figures. It had a distinctly phallic shape. She turned and winked at me.

"Stop it," she repeated softly.

"Stop what?"

I'd begun a nervous drum beat with the phantom limb that controlled my future social connectivity.

"Stop playing with your phantoms," laughed Hotstuff, continuing to walk on, "you're going to grow hair on them. Seriously, stop it. You're jiggling your phutures back and forth, muddying up your timeline. Stay focused."

I stopped and relaxed my phantoms, releasing them back to her. I sighed again. We'd reached a natural stone archway at the end of the limestone menagerie, on an outcropping above a steep drop to the plateau below. Sitting down together on the edge of the cliff, we looked down at the sand dunes spreading out into the distance, disappearing into the gathering gloom.

"Do you think someone is phuture spoofing me?"

Phuture spoofing was growing into a major business as hacking spilled into the worlds of tomorrow and phuture crackers began engineering their own timelines.

"Boss, we've been over this a hundred times, and I don't see how someone could be phuture spoofing you," replied Hotstuff. "In all cases, I've had specialized agents rooting through the Phuture News system and sniffers floating at choke points throughout the open multiverse, and nothing suspicious to report. To manage it on this scale, they'd need almost the same computing infrastructure as the Phuture News Network itself."

Which would be impossible to hide, she didn't need to add.

"So summarize where are we again?" I asked, shaking my head. I leaned back and looked up at the stars.

"So the good news is that we have made some progress," she said brightly. "We've managed to plot a path to extricate your physical body from Atopia, which has given us a much larger playing field to work with."

"Okay, that sounds good," I replied carefully. "So what's the bad news?"

"Well, the system is predicting about seven thousand possible outcomes for your, ah, demise in the next few days or so. Being out in the world has also opened up a lot of new possibilities for whatever is chasing us as well."

"So that's it then, I'm dead?" I stated sarcastically. The stars shone like steely pins, puncturing the night sky around me.

"No," she noted, "that is not it. Don't be so defeatist."

I shot her a quizzical glance.

"You only have about a dozen more things you need to get done personally today so we can head this thing off," she added. "Tomorrow is another day, just focus on today. Be in the moment."

"That's what you said yesterday," I complained.

I could be petulant. It was the last redoubt of the rich and aimless, when faced with hard, honest work. After I'd gotten over the initial shock of almost dying day after day, I'd found the urge to beg off and go surfing almost irresistible, and it was annoying to me that I had to save my own life. This was the sort of stuff I was supposed to pay people for. Strangely, though, I was beginning to settle into it now, even secretly enjoying some of the new activity forced onto me. Of course, I wouldn't ever admit it.

Hotstuff gave me a sidelong glance and raised one eyebrow.

"Hey tough guy, it's your life. The probability is only about nine in ten you'll kick the celestial bucket today if you wing it. You could go surfing if you like."

I sighed.

"You know boss, this may not be an entirely bad thing..."

That stopped me in my tracks. I looked at her.

"What the h.e.l.l do you mean by that?" I demanded, almost spitting the words out. I was going to point out that proxxi terminated when their owners did, but I held my tongue.

Hotstuff took a moment to choose her words carefully. "I mean, before, well..."

"Well what?"

"Before you were kind of aimless," she explained. "You'd lost any interest in the future."

I pondered for a second. "And you think this is better?"

"Well at least you're up in the mornings," she replied.

I snorted. "Yeah, to live another day and fight to stay alive."

She looked at me, letting me consider what I'd just said. "See what I mean?"

I sighed. I was frustrated, but not as scared anymore. Perversely, in a way maybe she was right. I was certainly savoring the little moments of time that I could get to myself now.

"Whatever. Anyway, it's getting better, right?" I asked hopefully.

"We're managing it the best we can."

"The best that you can, huh?" I replied dejectedly, looking up at my task list for the day as it appeared in one of my display s.p.a.ces. Something popped out immediately. "So I need to short the upcoming Cognix stock?"

"n.o.body will know it's you. Look, I'm setting up defensive perimeters," explained Hotstuff, "and we'll drop some intelligent agents into them to look for any cross-phuture scripting. We'll figure this out, boss, don't worry."

"Don't worry?" Was she serious?

"I didn't want to get your hopes up, but..."

"But what?"

"I think we're starting to see a pattern, hidden deep in the probability matrices that connect together whatever is chasing you. A pattern in the future, but that points somewhere far in the past."

Finally. Perhaps some progress.

"Can you explain a little more?"

"It would be easier to show you..."

8.

DAPPLED SUNLIGHT STREAMED down through the jungle canopy high above, illuminating the hard packed earth below; it was casting a patchwork of light and dark that st.i.tched together scenes of smoke rising from cooking fires, laughing children darting between thatched huts, and women sitting and gossiping together as they stripped the white skins off sweet potatoes, carefully wrapping each one in banana leaves and depositing them into a stone-lined pit.

The men were all off hunting today, chasing pigs that had escaped from neighboring villages in the thunderstorms of the night before. Monkeys barked through the underbrush, their catcalls joining the symphonies of songbirds whose feathers lit up the steaming forest like splashes of flickering paint against a knotted green canvas.

Picking up a smooth stone sitting on the earth, I casually ducked my head as a poison dart snipped past, barely missing me. One of the children cried out to my right. A mother picked the child up by his arm and spanked him. He'd been playing with his father's blow gun, not knowing what he was doing, probably imitating his dad. Even inhabiting someone else, whatever was hunting me down was trying to kill this body as well.

The mother looked towards me and shrugged, apologizing. I smiled back, returning my attention to the witch doctor. Dodging death was nothing I got excited about anymore.

"In da roond," explained the tribal elder, speaking in a kind of English-creole-pidgin that was the lingua franca of the Papua New Guinea highlands.

The two most linguistically diverse places left on Earth were also the most culturally and technologically polarized: this place, still barely out of the Stone Age, and New York City, the bustling megalopolis tipping the world into the 22 century. Each retained over a thousand languages, but where almost all in New York were machine translatable, and thus part of the new global lingua franca, almost none of the New Guinea languages were. I was struggling to understand what this elder was equally struggling to explain to me.

"Round, like, like in a circle?" I stuttered back in my best attempt at native Yupno. Speaking through this body was difficult.

A giant tree frog watched me lazily from its perch in the branches nearby. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen a frog in the wild. Of course, I couldn't remember the last time I'd been in the wild.

To get to this remote and rugged place, we'd had a portable communication base station dropped in, and then we convinced a nun running a nearby mission to come and persuade them to have one of the villagers drink a gla.s.s of water laden with smarticles, allowing my subjective to enter and control their body through the communication link.

It was the only way I could speak with this particular elder, the Yupna witch doctor and keeper of holy secrets. The smarticles hadn't fully suffused into this body, so I felt numb and disconnected, and they would be soon flushed out, so I had to hurry.

The witch doctor shrugged and smiled, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. His eyes sparkled at me. I smiled back, my pssi filtering his body language into a form that made sense to me. My gaze shifted to a break in the jungle that revealed the glacier capped mountain ranges beyond, stretching upwards into the bright sky. He was trying to explain his perception of the shape of time, or rather, its lack of shape.

"Here and now", "Back in the 20's", "Going forward"...the modern world was fixated on spatial metaphors for time, the idea of the past being behind us and the future ahead. Not the Yupno, though. In this remote valley it had forgotten, time had no linear form to its inhabitants. To them, it flowed uphill, backwards, in forms and in shapes. They laughed at our conception of its forward flow. This Stone Age culture experienced directly something Einstein had only glimpsed at through his equations.

The pattern Hotstuff had detected had led us here, and she was sitting on a log across the cooking fire from the elder and I, fetchingly dressed in tight safari shorts with her hair done up in a long single braid that she was playing with, nibbling on, and twirling between her fingers.

"He means time runs forwards and backwards, but not like a stream-more like currents in a lake," she suggested. "No, like a reservoir, that's more what he means."

"Like a reservoir?" I asked the elder.

He nodded. With long arms, he reached up and circled his hands around slowly, finally coming to rest, ending at me. The Yupno had a way of pointing towards doorways when speaking about time, a curiosity I was just beginning to understand.

Inhabiting the body of this tribal member, I was trying to see if time felt any different for me. It didn't, but something here felt odd.

Amazingly, the elders here hadn't batted an eye at the idea of one of their own being magically inhabited by an alien spirit, nor the idea that I was conversing with an invisible ghost Hotstuff, in their midst. It seemed perfectly natural to them.

The witch doctor pointed to where Hotstuff was sitting.

"The spirit name?" he asked.

Hotstuff raised her eyebrows.

"Hotstuff," I replied, shrugging to her.

"HOT stuff," he repeated, "hot STUFF?"

I nodded, and he smiled ever wider.

"And your name?" I hadn't thought to ask before.

He pointed at his own chest.

"Nicky," he said proudly, and then added, "Nicky Nixons."

I laughed and shook my head-Nicky Nixons the witch doctor.

"It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Nicky Nixons. My name," I said, pointing to myself, "is Vince Indigo."

"Yes, in dee go..." he replied, nodding sagely, as if he'd always known, as if my name held a meaning he knew and I didn't.

"Vince, this is all very touching," interjected Hotstuff, "but we have to get going. We're out of time here."

She splintered some upcoming death events into my display s.p.a.ces, one of them a bio-electronic Ebola-based retrovirus that ended with my internal organs almost instantaneously liquefying while I was brushing my teeth tomorrow morning. She immediately firewalled off the data tunnel from the jungle we were sitting in, just in case.

"It's even getting dangerous just being here."

I nodded.

"Okay, let's get me going," I replied. "But you stay a while and see what you can learn from him."