Wide eyed, I shook my head.

"Okay then, good. So can we add him to the monitoring system?"

Silence.

"Patricia, we've been over this a thousand times before with the Solomon House staff. We have our right to privacy. This is my family, and I'm happy to be here, but there are limits!" Mother cried out, overreacting theatrically.

Despite the histrionics, she had a valid point. Atopia was founded on strict liberal principles, and with the advent of pssi, stringent security requirements had been baked into the foundations of law and electronic systems governing it.

Individuals, and by extension families, had an absolute right to their privacy, unless there was some good reason otherwise.

"Is there anything wrong with Jimmy?" asked Mother. "Is he healthy?"

Patricia sighed. "He is perfectly healthy. His mind is distracted and there is some unusual neurological activity, but physically, he's perfect."

"Well then..."

Patricia thought for a moment, and then stood and walked to our side of the table and sat down on the couch next to us. She put her arm around me.

"Well then, I'd like to take a more active role in Jim's development, if that's okay with you. As a teacher, if you see what I mean. I don't want to intrude on your mothering, of course."

Mother eyed her for a moment, weighing the situation.

"Oh don't be silly, that would be an honor, of course," she replied brightly after a moment. "Wouldn't it Jimmy?"

Mother told me more than asked me, her eyes locking onto mine.

I just sat dumbly between the two of them, unable to say anything, cringing, thinking that Patricia was about to become part and parcel of some new awfulness in my little life. Fearful of what horrors awaited me, I dug in deeper and deeper, building my sh.e.l.l.

As Patricia got up and left, I slipped off quickly away to hide, sliding away into tiny worlds within tiny worlds.

Mother gave chase, eventually finding and cornering me in the Little Great Little, past fields of glowing jellies, under a thunderfall whose white sensory noise I often hid behind.

"I know you hide here, little worm," said Mother, her voice oozing venom. "Don't think I don't know where you go."

Then she appeared, finding me cowering in a corner. Hate distorted her features here, her skin flaking red and crimson and her hands turning into fearsome claws that she gripped and squeezed me with.

Pulling down a tight security blanket around us, she squeezed me until I thought I would pop. I squirmed and whimpered.

"Not a word to Aunt Pattie, little worm, do you understand? If you say anything to anyone, I will tell them all about you and your daddy? Do you want that?"

Smiling at me, she laughed from a fanged and fearsome mouth.

"No mummy," I squealed out, "not a word, of course not." I began to cry.

"Such a little cry baby," Mother taunted. "None of this is real."

She waved her claws around at the purple canyon walls. With that she was gone, popping out of the Little Great Little and into another one of her soapstim fantasies to burrow away from her own pain.

Dad must have known something was going on, because he appeared just after Mother left, looking pale and dejected.

"Don't say anything about you and me, Jimmy. It's secret, you know? They would put me away in the farms if you told anyone, Jimmy. Do you want to do that to your dad?"

I shook my head. Samson, who had remained quiet, emerged smoothly from his hiding place in the thunderfall to take my hand, and we sat down together holding hands. I cried. Dad just left us there without saying another word.

My fascination with pain began very early. I can remember the rare moments when we would get pa.s.ses to go above, and while my parents would sun themselves on the beach, I would hang at the edge of the palms and palmettos nearby.

At the fringes of the dark forest, I would summon little creatures to venture forth into my hands. Taking great care in their delicate capture, I'd stimshare into them to feel their squirming pain as I slowly pulled off their legs, one by one.

When all of their legs were gone, I would gradually squeeze them between my chubby fingers, flitting into them to feel their spasming agony, as I crushed their legless little bodies. Feeling the pain of killing these creatures helped me cleanse my own pain.

And perhaps, I enjoyed it a little too.

20.

Ident.i.ty: Bobby Baxter "SID!" I YELLED out into our private emergency channels.

"Jesus, Bob, what?" he replied as his reality instantly merged with mine.

I watched him before me, engrossed in some data mining blitz as he searched through reams of multiverse worlds. Even with the storms threatening, he was still on the hunt for w.i.l.l.y's body, his dozens of phantom hands dancing through the hypercontrol s.p.a.ces around him.

"You know, if you play with your phantoms too much, you'll grow hair on the palms of your hands," I couldn't help joking as I watched him and Vicious working their magic.

"No more Humungous Fungus this week, I've had enough, buddy." They gave me several fingers. I silently watched them fiddle around some more.

"So what has your hair on fire?" he asked after a pause.

"No more Humungous Fungus for us, I agree," I replied. "Something is seriously wrong with this place, and we are going to find out what."

This stopped them in their tracks. Sid looked at me.

"Now you're finally talking turkey."

He cracked a smile.

"Sid, drop everything."

All his phantoms immediately dropped to the ground.

"We're getting the band back together."

"Jimmy too?" asked Sid. Vicious was already shaking his head.

"No, I think we'd better let Jimmy sit this one out."

Jimmy had bigger fish to fry right now. Not only that, but something about him made me very uneasy.

"But I'm going to ping him and tell him that we're going to mount a search of our own, to try and help figure out the situation. That way we won't raise any alarms if we scan the perimeter."

I thought about that for a second.

"Plus, I want him to know what we're doing."

I wasn't sure why. It was just intuition.

"Sure," said Vicious carefully, "but just don't tell him too much."

That wasn't a problem. I didn't know too much.

"I think we should get Vince in on this too," added Sid.

Nodding, I pinged Jimmy and shifted my primary subjective into a tight and secure channel s.p.a.ce he immediately opened up to me.

Now I was sitting in a small, pristine white room at a white interview table. Jimmy was sitting before me, his hands clasped on the table, staring directly into my eyes.

"Did you find Wally yet?" said Jimmy as I fully arrived, cracking the faintest of smiles. "What's going on? No surfing today?"

Ident.i.ty: Jimmy Jones "No," replied Bob, "even I couldn't handle what's going on out there right now."

That was the truth. The storms had converged, and the winds were beginning to tear at the forests as our beaches were pounded mercilessly by an angry ocean. Surface access would be shut off soon as we finished stowing everything and everyone below decks.

As we entered American territorial waters, their air force and navy had scrambled to surround us, battling their own way through the storms. Despite that we were close allies, the prospect of suddenly having a wholly independent country slide across the map to invade their s.p.a.ce had raised some hackles, even if they understood we had absolutely no choice in the matter.

The world was already a dangerous enough place from their point of view, and they weren't too happy about us invading their s.p.a.ce. Of course, the prospect of two giant hurricanes simultaneously slamming into one of America's most populated coasts had them occupied with their own typically belated emergency preparations.

Communications were strangely incoherent. It may have just been the storms, but we seemed to be getting contradictory diplomatic messages from one moment to the other.

And, of course, the storms were getting worse. As they neared the coast, and each other, they defied all physics and were gaining in strength, progressing into Category 5 and still intensifying. Unless we could do something about it, we would be beached on the continental shelf just south of Los Angeles, and the prospect of a fully energized fusion core running aground in America had raised the diplomatic tension bar just that much higher.

I had a plan of how we could escape, and was running phutures of it right at the moment Bob had pinged me. As busy as I was, Bob's primary subjective calling me on an emergency channel was unusual enough to warrant the attention of a splinter.

"So what can I do for you?" I asked, not bothering to explain how busy I was. Bob was many things, but he wasn't stupid.

Bob took a deep breath. "Look, I'd like to help out. I think I may be able to find a way to see what is happening."

"Really?" I asked, raising my eyebrows. "And just how do you propose to do that?"

"I know how busy you must be so I won't waste time on details," he said looking down at his feet, "but you know I have special abilities, from all the time we spent together. Just trust me, Jimmy, is what I'm asking, and open up some ports for me to scan the multiverse."

I looked at Bob. Memories flashed from our long past childhood friendship, and memories more recently as my adopted brother. Maybe he could help somehow.

"Okay Bob, go ahead," I replied, "you have our cooperation. Just feed us back anything you find."

In all cases, I'd keep a close eye on them.

"You got it Jimmy."

I closed the connection and returned to the simulation underway. A giant fireball filled my primary mind.

"Seems like it will work," said Samson, my proxxi. We were going over my plan for escaping from the hurricanes, which we were scheduled to explain to the Council within the hour. "Why don't you take a quick break and decompress before we present?"

That seemed like a good idea. The fireball slipped away and I relaxed, letting my mind wander back to the meeting with Bob. I was surprised he had any interest I helping out, but then again, the last time he had helped me out had been the biggest catastrophe of my life growing up. I dispatched several agents to watch what he was up to.

I'd secretly thought of Bob as my big brother, as a kid, and in another twist of fate, that's exactly what he'd become when his family had adopted me at Patricia's suggestion.

I'd always had a hard time fitting in. The easy way that the other pssi-kids socialized and made friends had always escaped me, but Bob had often tried to be there for me, and had done his best to help me fit in when others had ignored me.

My special skills in conscious boundary systems had quickly brought me to the attention of the Solomon House Research Center, so academically my life had taken off from an early age, but my interpersonal skills had floundered hopelessly, and pssi-kids could be mercilessly cruel.

As I got older and gained in pssi power, my only relief was that I finally managed to escape from under the oppression of my parents. I began to easily slip past their every attempt to corner me and I gained my own freedom.

Nancy Killiam's thirteenth birthday party was the defining disaster for me as a kid. My own thirteenth birthday was just around the corner, and I was worried that n.o.body would come to my party, most especially Cynthia, the girl I'd developed my first crush on.

While girls had generally ignored me, Cynthia had magically started to talk with me one day, asking about my research work at the Solomon House. I had no idea how to react or what to do, so I went to the only person I knew to talk to.

"Look," said Bob back then, "you just gotta stop acting so weird."

Bob was squinting into the slanting sunshine as we walked across the beach at the end of the day. He raised one hand to shade his eyes. We were walking towards the large blue and yellow circus tent where Nancy's party was being held. Waves broke softly and rhythmically in the background and the air was filled with the smell of cotton candy and the sound of children at play.

I shrugged. "What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean. All that snooping around, hiding where you're not supposed to be," he answered, looking me square in the eyes.

My face flushed red. The other pssi-kids had already begun their tentative s.e.xual explorations of each other, not just rag dolling or flitter switching, but taking a real interest in their blooming, newly adolescent bodies.

I had watched all this happening, awkwardly, hanging from the shadows. Sometimes, unknown, I would slip in between and into them as they kissed, sharing sensations and stimswitching with each other.

Pain was my childhood specialty, but these new, tender emotions and sensations intrigued me.

"Everyone is talking about you, you know," continued Bob, scratching his head as we pa.s.sed into the shadow of the tent and moved towards the entrance.

My dad had come ahead of me, the only one dragging a real gift under his arm, which I found embarra.s.sing.

I saw him off in a corner under a glade of palms talking with some other adults, patting his prize affectionately. More kids and parents were quickly arriving, through portals near the entrance, in ones and twos; here a furry argumentative little Minotaur being dragged by his mother, and there two screaming pink teddies trailing fluorescent silvery balloons.

Everyone's reality skins fused and melted together as they entered, producing a confusing kaleidoscopic mash-up around the entrance as they stopped and looked around before fanning out inside.

Some parents were arguing with their kids to merge their realities with everyone else properly, arguments that were erupting into tantrums from both sides.

Bob looked around for somewhere quiet to talk. Organ grinder music had started up, somewhat macabrely, and little monkeys dressed in evening suits appeared, scuttling between the a.s.sembled guests, handing out information packs for the evening. Drinks and snacks floated and bobbed in refreshment islets between everyone. Bob took my arm and led me to a bench off to one side, under the shade of some saw palmettos.