As I discussed the merits of virtual economies with the reporters, defended myself from Kesselring, argued about the nature of happiness with Hal, and considered the hurricanes rushing towards us-I had a nauseating sensation of vertigo.

My visual fields distorted, ballooning outwards, and the hurricanes and reporters shredded into each other. Kesselring's shocked face watched me blink suddenly out of his reality.

I abruptly collapsed into a deathly quiet, single subjective point of view. Exactly where or why, I had no idea.

Marie, my proxxi, was standing over me, staring into my eyes. Everything was perfectly still. An impossibly long, incredibly thin rope stretched from the infinite blue void above to wrap itself tightly around my waist. I was suspended above a yawning black pit, set in the middle of an endless green field, all under a flawless sky.

"The news isn't good I'm afraid," Marie informed me, shaking her head.

Tell me something I didn't know.

The rope tightened around my waist, slowly choking out my lifeblood. I could feel the tigers charging across the sky towards me, their silent roars ringing in my deaf ears.

Fascinated, I watched as busy and purposeful nan.o.bots ate away at the thin cord holding me suspended in s.p.a.ce. Below me, in the blackness of the pit, an unseen monster grunted and s...o...b..red. This can't last forever, I thought to myself as I drifted in and out of consciousness.

I can't last forever.

15.

Ident.i.ty: Jimmy Jones "I HEARD THAT Kesselring put you in charge of Infinixx?"

"Just temporarily," I sighed to Commander Rick Strong, shaking my head, "someone has to hold down the fort."

Rick winced. "Sorry, I didn't mean...I mean, how is Patricia doing?"

After the Infinixx mess, Patricia had suffered some kind of stroke. Not really a stroke. There hadn't been any physical brain damage, but it had been more of an overload of her pssi system. She was recovering, but they were keeping under surveillance and isolated for the moment.

"She'll be fine," I said after a pause. "I spoke to her this morning. She said she'll be back in the office by tomorrow."

We both returned our attention to the presentation going on explaining ways someone could be directing the storms.

"There is something very unnatural going on here," explained our mandroid guest to the a.s.sembled Command team. With that statement, she reached down with one slender metallic arm to adjust the jumpsuit hugging her thin, metallic legs. "These storms are definitely being driven by some artificial means."

It was early Sat.u.r.day morning, but we'd all been called into Command to review scenarios around the growing threat of the hurricanes that were beginning to pin Atopia against the coast of America.

"So you think the Terra Novans are involved?" asked Commander Strong. He'd been drinking again. Things were going badly with his wife.

"We're not sure," responded the mandroid.

"So then where is this coming from?" Rick demanded impatiently, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He looked like he had a headache.

"We can't say for certain yet," she repeated, "but there's something too perfect about these storms."

"Jimmy, do you think you could look into this more?" asked Rick, looking away from the mandroid and towards me. "I need to go and see Cindy."

"No problem," I replied. He was about to flit off when I remembered something. "Oh, yeah, I have that date tonight, if you remember."

Rick looked up towards the ceiling. "Susie, right? That's going well, huh?"

He smiled. I shrugged.

"I can cancel if you want."

"No, no, keep the date. You can't let stuff like this stop you from living life," he sighed. "Anyway, I know you'll keep a few splinters around if I need you. I'll be back later."

With that he flitted off, and I returned my focus to the storms and our mandroid guest. More than one thing wasn't right here.

It was my third date with Susie, and for this one, I'd received an invitation to meet in her own private world. It was a sensual, mystical place where the sun was eternally setting. She wanted to go for a walk outside her enclave, to chat, and so I found myself walking through a valley of knotted oaks and blossoming cherry trees that offered hidden glimpses of fantastical canyon walls beyond them. Waterfalls spilled into clouds of mist from high, craggy cliffs, and everything twinkled in shades of silver and gold.

As we walked, she gently brushed aside a patch of yellow orchids that she stepped through as tenderly if they were children at play. The woody atmosphere was perfect and synthetically warm, but slightly cloying under an indistinct vanilla sky. Her long flaxen hair spilled down her back, held in place by a garland of white flowers, and a flowing translucent gown revealing hints of her tiny body beneath.

The breeze swept waves of glittering cherry blossoms and silvery oak leaves around us like a snowstorm, and fireflies sparkled in our wake while we walked through the gathering dusk.

"How is Patricia?" she asked. It was common knowledge we were close.

"She'll be fine," I replied with a smile. "She's very old, these things happen. The doctors say she'll be back good as new tomorrow, or the next day."

"Good." She smiled warmly, but then her eyes clouded over. "And these storms, we're not in any danger are we? I guess it can't be that serious if you're here." Her smile returned.

"Don't worry about the storms," I a.s.sured her. "I wouldn't advise going topside when they get here, but we'll be fine."

"Double good," she laughed. Then she flinched, her side spasming.

It was some event out in the world, some type of disaster that had sparked into her body. She had such an exquisitely tuned neural pain network; it was what had attracted me to her. She smiled at me as the spasm subsided.

"It's nothing," she smiled. "I have this..."

"I know," I interrupted gently. "No need to explain."

I reached down to hold her hand, and she smiled, watching me.

"So, Mr. Jimmy Jones, my friend w.i.l.l.y speaks very highly of you," Susie laughed.

I walked with my hands behind my back, formal, slightly stiff, and was wearing my ADF Whites. There could have hardly been a starker contract between the two of us.

She laughed, and spun out in front of me, reaching up to s.n.a.t.c.h a blossom out of the air. She stopped in front of me, curtsied, and offered me the blossom. Her eyes were full of mischievousness.

"So what would an ADF officer want with me?" she laughed.

"I need your help. It's hard to explain."

"Need my help?" she giggled. "I thought this was a date?" She pouted playfully.

"It is." I looked down and away, trying to appear embarra.s.sed. "I mean, I feel like you're someone who could be really special to me."

She danced away from me, trailing her hands through the flowers.

"Oh I've looked you up, Jimbob Jonesee...that incident with the bugs..." she laughed, and then stopped to turn to look at me. "That was a bit odd, don't you think?"

I winced.

"I was just a kid. I was a kid trying to find a way to deal with my pain," I tried to explain. "You wouldn't understand, n.o.body does...how could you, you grew up with such love."

She considered me for a moment. "What do you mean?"

I was silent.

"Jimmy?" she asked again, softer this time.

My face reflected sorrowful pain. "My friends call me James."

She nodded. "Okay then, what is it, James?"

"I've never shared this with anyone, Susie. I don't know why I feel like I can share this with you. Can we make this private?"

"Of course," she replied, pulling down a glittering golden security blanket around us.

I took a deep breath.

"My mother, well, she..." I tried to say, but stopped as I let a tear glisten in my eye. I sat down on a nearby tree stump. Susie came to sit beside me, and put her hand on mine and squeezed it. She said nothing, but just waited.

"It would be easier if I showed you," I said looking into her eyes. She nodded and released her subjective control to me.

Suddenly Susie and I we were sitting in a corner of the Misbehave world my mother had created to punish me in.

We were reliving a rendering of my inVerse from when I was barely two, and in front of us, sitting on chair in the middle of an empty concrete room was Mother, suspending my tiny two year old body in the air by one arm.

"It's all your fault!" she spat in my tiny face, the veins in her forehead swelling. She fumbled with some pssi controls and then reached inside my body to dig her synthetic nails deep into my nervous system, sc.r.a.ping them down the length of the neural pain receptors in my body. I screamed in unimaginable agony.

"Shut up, you little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. n.o.body can hear you in here. Just shut up!" she yelled at me. I screamed and screamed, my little face purple and apoplectic.

Susie wrapped her arms around me, horrified, and tears welled up in her eyes.

"Turn it off James, please!" she cried, and then, just as quickly, we were back in the forest, with the cherry blossoms gently settling around us, sitting on the tree stump amid the deep gra.s.s and swaying flowers.

She held onto me tightly and cried. I sat impa.s.sively, and leaned to kiss the top of her head.

"I'm so sorry, James," she just kept repeating. "I'll do everything I can to help you."

"It wasn't just my mother," I said after a moment, letting my voice crack a little. I looked away.

"What else?" she asked. "Show me."

So I did. I took her back into another silently screaming night in my small sweaty body, the prison of my childhood world.

It had been a bright and sunny day, and my dad and I had just returned from fishing with the dolphins. Mother was off in another one of her never ending soapstim fantasies, and Yolanda had just finished making us dinner and chatting about the day.

Yolanda liked the dolphins too. I took her on inVerse dives with Samantha, and she would clap her hands and laugh with me.

Later, alone, and with a security blanket settled around the house for the evening, my dad tucked me into bed, and then crawled in beside me to cuddle.

"You had a good time with Samantha and the dolphins today, right, Jimmy?" asked my dad, holding me tight, brushing back a few golden locks of hair from my pale face. I nodded, my little heart beating faster with creeping terror.

"It's okay if daddy holds you for a while, right Jimmy?" he asked, pleadingly. "Daddy gets lonely sometimes too."

I nodded, trembling now, feeling his hands on me, feeling his hands on places that felt wrong. I loved my dad, and I could sense he needed something from me. He had been nice with me that day, bringing some joy into my dark and constricted little life.

So I let him touch me. I disappeared down my rabbit hole and into the recesses of the pssi system. He touched me all over with his real hands, his phantom hands, enveloping my body while pleasuring himself.

I cowered in the depths with my make believe friends.

"Don't tell anybody about these times with Daddy, okay Jimmy? It's a secret between you and me. If you can do that, I'll make sure to take you out to play with Samantha, okay?"

It seemed like a reasonable deal to me at the time, so I hid inside and waited for the bright days of rocketing through the foam and spray.

As I snapped us back into real s.p.a.ce, Susie had begun crying again. I was crying too.

She looked into my eyes. "James, we can tell people, we can punish them...you poor soul..."

"It won't change anything, Susie, but you can help me."

"How James? I'm so sorry. I'll do anything to help."

"I just need you to do something for me."

16.

Ident.i.ty: Patricia Killiam IT HAD TAKEN me two full days to recover, and in that time, a world already spinning out of control had suddenly taken an even steeper descent into chaos.

We'd started hardening Atopia for the now inevitable collision with the storms, and an escalation process was being discussed regarding possible evacuations. The rate of unexplained disappearances was spiking again, and in the midst of all this, I received a ping that Rick's wife had committed some kind of reality suicide.

It seemed she hadn't been terminating the proxxids. It wasn't hard to guess what had happened.

"How is your wife doing, Rick?"