It was the end of a long day for everyone as we'd begun planning for possible disaster, but longest of all for Rick. I was at a loss for words. Reality suicide was a new phenomenon, deeply tied into the way pssi interacted with our unconscious minds, and just one more thing we didn't understand properly yet.

I'd asked for this emergency meeting with Rick because my communication network with Command had suddenly been shut off, and n.o.body was responding to me.

"It's hard to tell," he replied unsteadily. "I mean, she looks fine. She looks like she's asleep. I wish..."

"I don't think blaming yourself is going to help," I offered. "Anyway, we haven't managed to crack the security blankets covering the worlds she was in before this happened, so we really don't know what the full story is yet."

Rick wiped his face with the back of one hand and stared down at the floor. We were sitting in my mahogany walled office. Pictures of ancient, four-masted sailing ships lined the walls.

"We know enough of the story to know how we got here," he said with a dead voice, on the edge of tears. Then his mood shifted abruptly.

"This is your fault Patricia. You recommended using the proxxids," he spat out venomously, looking up at me with menacing eyes. "You have no idea what you're doing, do you?"

I recoiled slightly. This was a combat soldier after all.

"I don't think laying blame is constructive at this point," I began to say. I hadn't exactly recommended them.

"We're all just lab rats to you, aren't we?" he growled, venting his anger. "I know what you let people do with proxxids-I've looked into the whole thing in more detail-it's disgusting. You disgust me." His breathing was ragged now. "You have no idea what you're doing here, what you're doing to people, do you? We're just guinea pigs to you."

He gathered himself and looked down at the floor, containing his emotions. I didn't know what to say.

"Rick I'm sorry..."

"Sorry just isn't good enough. Time for experimentation and best efforts is over," he stated flatly. He stood up.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Getting away from these storms, we'll be taking control from here on. This is now a military matter."

He shook his head, averting my eyes, and without another word flitted off to disappear out of my office and back to Command, not even leaving a polite splinter behind.

I was stunned.

The storms had continued to defy phuturecasts and we were running out of room to back away from them. It was obvious something was directing them, but despite swarming the seas with smarticles and drones and everything else we could throw at it, we couldn't even begin to stop them or understand how it was happening.

Usually two storm systems of this magnitude, in one oceanic basin, tended to dissipate, one into the other, but these two were pumping each other up and expanding.

It was unlikely that we'd sustain core structural damage even in a direct hit by either or both of them, but that was making the sorts of a.s.sumptions that trapped us here in the first place.

Now I understood why my communications had been cut off. Rick was formally taking control and declaring an emergency. All civil power was now in the hands of ADF Command.

"Marie, could you splinter me that latest report?"

I reached down to smooth out a wrinkle in my skirt, trying to regain my composure. Marie looked up at me from some files she was studying from the chair she was sitting in at the side of my office.

"We've had something of a breakthrough," she responded excitedly. "The high surface temperatures seem to be caused by migrations of dinoflagellate blooms. Someone out there has been planning this for a long time."

She splintered me all the data sheets before continuing.

"It looks like they seeded the ocean surface with iron dust to grow some bioengineered plankton and they're now directing huge swarms of the little creatures, basically sucking energy from one part of the ocean and into another. Definitely bioengineered and directed."

"Can we stop it? Can we find out who's doing it?" I asked. She shook her head. "Was Sintil8 able to find anything for us?"

"He was some help," she replied with a nod. "What we're looking at could be a new addition to the Weather Wars a.r.s.enal."

I sighed. Directed cyclone warfare could add a whole new wonderful chapter to the ongoing book of human conflict. Of course, weather had always been a decisive factor in war.

My personal favorite, a story my father had told me as a child, had been the defeat of the Spanish Armada by England five hundred years ago. The British victory had less to do with the genius of Sir Francis Drake than simply a week of wind that had pinned the Armada against the French side of the English Channel. The wind had held the Spanish in place, giving the British 'weather gage' to float fire ships into the hapless Spaniards, destroying the fleet before it even had a chance to attack.

The defeat of the Armada had halted the Habsburg invasion of land forces, at that moment poised to cross over from the Netherlands. The direction of wind for a few short days had dictated the outcome of the next five hundred years of global geopolitics, even the rise of America itself as a superpower.

What we faced now was far more than simply a wind in the wrong direction.

"We can't fire weapons at blooms of microorganisms, nor at hurricanes," added Marie. "We're just going to have to stay out of their way as much as possible. If you want more of a run down, you're better off speaking with Jimmy."

Even that was going to be difficult now, given the state Rick was in. And the list of possible suspects behind these storms was worryingly thin.

"Or perhaps Bob?" I suggested, thinking about who may be able to provide some fresh insight. "He has a curious relationship with directing little creatures like you're describing. Why don't you talk with him?"

Marie nodded. "I'll see if I can get some input from him."

She paused.

"What?" I asked. I could see she had something else on her mind.

"It's strange," Marie answered. "Yes, we can see how they're doing it, but the numbers don't quite add up. Even with what we've discovered, they shouldn't be able to direct weather as severe as this."

I didn't understand. "Could you be more precise?"

"It just doesn't add up," was all she could say, shaking her head.

"It sure doesn't."

Too many things were unexplained, too many loose ends were acc.u.mulating, and Rick was right-we didn't know what we were doing anymore. I was going to have to stop this freight train, even if it meant risking everything.

"Well, keep on it," I told her. "I'm going to see about talking with Jimmy."

I sent him an emergency ping. I needed to collect as much information as I could.

To my surprise, Jimmy accepted right away, and my office faded out as my primary subjective was channeled into a private deprivation s.p.a.ce, surrounded by a heavy security blanket. Jimmy wasn't there, but his communication network was open to me.

I felt ill at ease.

"Jimmy," I called out into the dimensionless emptiness, "what can you tell me?"

17.

Ident.i.ty: Jimmy Jones I HELD PATRICIA carefully in the anonymous security blanket. Rick wouldn't be happy finding me talking to her right now.

"Things are under control at Command," I replied. "Preparing for a state of emergency is just a precaution, and having the tourists leave is the sensible first step."

"I don't disagree. What I mean is-do you know who's doing this?" Patricia rephrased.

"Isn't it obvious?"

She took a deep breath. "So you really think it's the Terra Novans? Do you have proof?"

"No," I admitted, "but who else could it be?"

Everyone knew they wanted to slow down the pssi program to give their own program a chance in the market. The commercial stakes were huge.

"We need proof, Jimmy...it doesn't make sense. The risk of an offensive like this completely exceeds the potential returns. I need you to find out what's going on."

"I'm on it, Pat," I replied, now a little exasperated.

"And keep an eye on Rick, please Jimmy, he's shut me out now. I know you understand. And please, put your energy into finding out where this is coming from."

This began to feel like nagging.

"I will Pat, I promise."

"I love you Jimmy. You take care, okay?"

"I will," was all I responded. She looked hurt. "Bye for now."

I cut off the channel. She knew how busy I was.

It was hard to concentrate on her needs with my mind so widely splintered. Samson and I were spread far and wide throughout the multiverse now, trying to find clues as to how someone had targeted us like this without us getting advance notice.

I knew Rick's wife had been depressed, we'd all been very concerned, but this reality suicide had taken things on a new and disturbing path.

It was, however, something I could relate to. My own mother had been a drunk and a soapstim junkie. It was bad enough to be disinterested enough in your own life to just patch into someone else's, but Mother didn't even go that far.

Her favorite pastime had been to patch into synthetic soaps, an endless universe of autonomously generated and farcically campy dramatic romance worlds.

Mother hadn't even bothered to give up her life for someone else's experience-she'd given it up for an empty, soulless simulation. I guess it was like a gameworld for her, but instead of facing down some challenge, she just sensed it all pa.s.sively while the soapstim told her that her ex-husband wasn't dead, but had actually been in a coma for twenty years and was now in love with her step-sister's boyfriend, or some other such nonsense.

Living in pa.s.sive fantasy worlds had made my mother's return to her lacking life, that much more painful. Being out for so long all the time, her brain's wetware lost much of its neural connectivity with her body.

When she returned, she had to drive her body around using her proxxi Yolanda as an interface to her intentions. It gave her a jerky, unnatural way of moving, which just fuelled her frustration and empty anger. They called people like Mother soapstim junkies.

"You little worm!" she would scream at me as she settled back into her body after a particularly long session, already a few drinks into calming her nerves.

Mother wasn't very technical, but she had figured out, even back then, how to use the security blankets to screen her sessions with me from the outside wikiworlds.

"It's all your fault!" she would slur out accusingly. "That dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

As a parent she had full access to my pssi, and I had no way of blocking her out until I gained full control of it myself, which only my parents had the right to grant me when they felt I was ready.

Even as a toddler, I began to learn ways to hide and crawl into the cracks of the pssi system, deep down into the darkest corners away from others. I slowly began to find ways around the blocks and cages Mother tried to keep me in, sliding past the pssi controls to hide. Samson would crawl in with me, along with all the friends we'd created to hide together with us.

In her worst moods she would amp up my pain receptors and reach into me virtually to squeeze, pinch and pull on my tiny nervous system. It left no physical marks, but it was excruciatingly painful, and I would squeal and scream in the private Misbehave world she'd created for that form of punishment.

Down, down I would dive, into the deepest recesses of my body, trying to hide my consciousness in the sub-molecular gaps between my stinging, screaming neurons as she tortured me mercilessly, sinking her virtual nails into my pain centers for crimes I didn't understand.

I never understood what I'd done wrong, but I a.s.sumed I must have been bad. Samson would just sit beside me, staring numbly while she abused me.

The learning bots and teachers at the Academy noticed I was falling behind the other children, but they just thought I was slower. In their calculations they figured I needed more attention from Mother.

"Gretchen," explained Ms. Parna.s.sus, our only human teacher, at the first parent teacher interview near the end of my first year at the Academy, "I think you need to restrict his access to the gameworlds. He seems distracted, like he wants to be somewhere else all the time."

"I do, I try," admitted Mother truthfully. She did try her best to cut me off from everyone else.

"I try to take the time for private lessons with him as often as I can," she added with a sweet, crocodilian smile, "but you know how it is. He can be such a handful."

Ms. Parna.s.sus smiled at the both of us.

"Isn't that right, Jimmy?" Mother added, turning to me, flashing her teeth. "You don't want to Misbehave do you?"

I sat terrified beside her, a sh.e.l.l hiding inside a sh.e.l.l. I didn't want to do anything to anger her, and I desperately didn't want to be s.n.a.t.c.hed off to Misbehave, so I shook my head and smiled bravely, holding back tears.

"He's a bright child," said Ms. Parna.s.sus. "He scores extremely high in the gaming systems, but he seems to have a hard time socializing."

I'd never really gotten on well with the other kids in the Schoolyard, the education portal world balanced halfway between real and synthetic where pssi-kids played growing up. I was extremely shy, and mostly played by myself, but Bob and Sid sometimes managed to drag me into the occasional game of flitter tag with the rest of the kids.

Without escape to my own private worlds, and restricted to the Schoolyard, I found it extremely difficult to focus my mind.

"And he's a little devil to keep on hand," added Ms. Parna.s.sus, "he slips and slides away if you don't watch him every second!"

"That he is," agreed Mother, nodding, "and that he does."

"His mind seems to be always somewhere else," continued Ms. Parna.s.sus. "It's very hard to keep him focused."

"Oh, he's just always been that way, haven't you Jimmy?"

Mother fluffed my hair. I was terrified.

"Does he have any special things that you do together? Stuff that just you and him do when you play?"

"Oh, you and your daddy play, don't you Jimmy?" laughed my mother gaily, smiling at me cruelly.

"That's nice," said Ms. Parna.s.sus, "is there anything he's particularly good at when you play together?"