"It does sound suspicious," I agreed, "but we needed to get regulatory approval as quickly as possible. We couldn't afford to let the process get stuck."

He looked at me with mounting disgust.

"So it was all about getting to market faster?"

"In a way," I admitted, nodding my head slowly. I was so tired.

"Encouraging people to have synthetic babies, living in fantasy worlds or reliving a past they can't accept," he continued furiously, gaining steam again. "If not that, then they're emo-p.o.r.n junkies, living life as parasitic reality vampires."

I felt angry as well. While I'd set this whole thing in motion, once it was going I'd been forced to accept a lot of things I wasn't comfortable with. The synthetic babies, proxxids, had been one of Hal's ideas and central to the program for reducing birth rates. I'd never been comfortable with this and many other things. My own anger made me defensive.

"Fantasy worlds? Are they really, Bob?" I lashed out. "You have your own dimstim, and a very popular one, from what I've heard, and emo-p.o.r.ning is not something I condone. Anyway, since when have people wasting their lives on reality programming been an issue?"

"That's not the point, Patricia," he yelled back, "you've set all this up to turn the world into your junkie!"

We glared at each other.

"You're up on stage every day, touting the benefits of pssi to the world-going green, boosting work productivity, free limitless travel, live forever." Bob was walking around my office now, waving his hands in the air. "And you've got Nancy up on stage pulling for it too! How much does she know, I wonder?"

He looked towards the ceiling and held his arms wide.

"The great Patricia Killiam, G.o.dmother of all synthetic reality, globally renowned and trusted the world over," he cried, "and the biggest drug pusher of all time!"

He looked back down from the ceiling at me accusingly. I sighed again, deeper this time. It was time to come clean. I looked down at my feet.

"What you're saying is true," I observed quietly, "but the benefits are true as well."

"The first dose is free," he snorted, "but then you start paying once hooked. Isn't that what the release plan is? You're giving it away for free?"

"Yes, that is the plan," I sighed, nodding my head in resignation. "You understand what we're doing, but you don't understand why."

"Oh, I understand all right," he countered, "to make money, be powerful, to be more famous. The world is going to h.e.l.l in a hand basket, and you're the vultures ready to pick over its bones."

That stung. I winced, but at least he had arrived at the crux of the issue.

"Yes," I said after a moment, "the world is going to h.e.l.l in a hand basket, as you say, but I'm not sure you understand the extent of it. Come with me, Bob, I need to show you something."

He shook his head.

"Please, just come with me." I nudged him with my phantoms.

Grudgingly he released control to me and we dropped through inner s.p.a.ce to appear on a city street. Not just a city street, but one that was still charred from some cataclysmic event that had incinerated the place. There were bodies strewn everywhere, blackened flesh and bone exposed through shredded clothing.

"Look around Bob," I said sadly. "This is the future without pssi."

I drove our viewpoint around.

"War is horrible," Bob replied, unimpressed. "But this isn't your fault. How are you going to stop war with pssi?"

"We can't stop war, but we discovered we could remove the root cause of it."

I pulled our projection viewpoint back into s.p.a.ce, far above the earth, and we watched as pinp.r.i.c.ks of light erupted and sent tiny shockwaves across its surface.

"You're watching a full scale nuclear war in progress. This is representative of many phutures for the human race."

"But this is just one phuture," Bob objected. "Everyone shifts their timeline when they see bad things coming."

I shifted the viewpoint back, bringing into scope thousands and then millions of alternate future Earths, all burning under some apocalyptic scourge, whether biological, chemical, nanotechnology gone wrong or dozens of others.

"It is possible to navigate the fate of one individual," I explained, "but the combined fate of billions gains momentum like a supertanker on the open ocean. With more than ten billion people on the planet, and all of them craving material luxury, there just aren't enough resources to sustain it all, so, we fight for what's left."

"So it all ends in apocalypse?" he asked, shaking his head. "I find that hard to believe."

"No, you're absolutely right."

I spun our viewpoint even further back, splintering billions of worlds into Bob's sensory frames.

"In most scenarios, in almost all of them, we actually manage to avoid full blown Armageddon."

Apocalypse wasn't the worst fate for humans, and in fact a quick end would have been a blessing when faced with the majority of outcomes-a long, slow grind downwards; shifting populations as the Earth continued to heat, eco-system collapses, famine, pestilence, unending series of wars and genocides.

Over the next fifty years, the human population would drop from nearly ten billion to just a few. It had already started happening. I didn't need to explain. Bob's networks a.s.similated the information and data sets I sent to him.

"But surely," he said quietly, "there must be something we could do?"

I shook my head.

"I was a part of the team that created the first World3 simulations at MIT in the mid-1970's. We've been able to see this coming for a long time."

I opened up another data channel to Bob. This one contained my personal, updated WorldX models. It was hundreds of thousands of nodes in hyper-dimensional s.p.a.ce, connecting everything from rates of persistent pollution to land fertility and their relationships to policy implementation, industrial output and more. Graphs ill.u.s.trating humanity's climb along the pollution, population, energy consumption and other curves glowed in the foreground.

"For the last eighty years, this model has been almost perfectly predicting humanity's path forward," I explained, "and there is no soft landing for human population. Or at least, the soft landings that could have existed would have required threading the eye of a needle."

I waited while Bob took it all in.

"Not that we didn't try," I sighed. "The same phuture spoofing technology we have hunting Vince down was one that I developed to try and nudge the timeline back and forth."

"So you've been manipulating the world as well," said Bob quietly, but he wasn't angry anymore.

"Yes, but too little, too late. As we built Atopia, we tried countless combinations of events. In the end, no matter which way we twisted or turned, eventually billions of humans would have to perish for the planet to rebalance itself."

I paused again.

"The only possibility left through the eye of the needle required a drastic reduction in global material consumption. The only way to do this was to send most of the population off into synthetic reality, and we had to do it quickly. Fertility rates need to plummet to nearly zero. When we understood this, the fledgling pssi program transformed itself from a commercial endeavor into a project of destiny."

I'd returned us back to my office now. Bob was pacing back and forth in front of me.

"But we had to hide what we were doing to keep some stability along the main timeline," I added. "Otherwise everyone would have tried to stop us."

"Don't tell me you were the only ones who could see this," demanded Bob.

"Of course not," I sighed, shaking my head. "Governments have been using futuring of one sort or another for a long time, but they're always plotting paths forward to maximize their own benefit. A giant game of prisoners' dilemma gone wrong."

"And here you have the magical solution that just coincidentally maximizes your own benefit?" he shot back mockingly. "You want me to believe Kesselring and Dr. Granger are just in this to save the planet?"

I shook my head and shrugged.

"What about the United Nations then? What about everyone else?"

"International agencies have been preaching disaster for most of the last hundred years. n.o.body is listening."

"Why not just tell them yourself then?"

"Tell everyone the world is going to end-so buy my product?" I laughed. "If we truly convinced them the world was on the brink of apocalypse, we would have induced ma.s.s hysteria."

A pause while we considered each other.

"These things happened in parallel, Bob, you have to understand. As the options collapsed, we were running the clinical trials. It became obvious we had to suppress some of the results to keep on track with regulatory approval."

"Don't you think it's wrong to lie to everyone?"

I laughed.

"We didn't lie to anyone. We just didn't reveal the full truth. People have an amazing capacity for believing what they want to believe while ignoring the obvious." At least this was the truth.

"And so the plan is to hook billions of people on virtual crack," Bob said sarcastically, c.o.c.king his head at me, "with you as the only supplier. How convenient."

I was getting tired of defending myself.

"We're just giving people what they want, aren't we? People have always wanted to work less, to travel more, to f.u.c.k someone new and exciting every day." I rolled my eyes. "We're giving them exactly what they've always wanted, the unlimited ability to do anything, and to be healthier and live longer while doing it."

Bob said nothing, staring at me in stony silence.

"Do people really want to make the world a better place?" I asked. "Or do they just want to make a better place for themselves within it? Almost everything humans do is self-serving in the end."

"I thought you taught us," objected Bob, "that humans were successful because they'd developed an evolutionary instinct for trust that outstripped selfishness?"

"People have a responsibility to find their own happiness, don't they? Life only has the meaning that you give it, right Bob?" I mocked, knowing this was his own mantra. I was cynical now. "We're just giving people the tools to find their own happiness, in whatever way they choose, and in the process saving untold billions of lives. So, what was the right thing to do?"

"Now you sound like Dr. Granger."

I rubbed the bridge of my nose, slowly. Painfully.

"If Atopia is destroyed, billions will die."

26.

Ident.i.ty: Jimmy Jones THE MOMENT OF truth had arrived.

We were watching projections of the two converging storms, overlaid with a glowing array of plotted future paths of Atopia through them. The phutures were stabilizing as we approached time zero. Everything was coming together and I readied to power up our weapons systems.

"Thanks for everything," said Rick as we waited in the final moments. "Whatever happens, I wanted to thank you for trying to help with Cindy."

I looked at him. How quickly our roles had reversed. He was pathetic now.

"Of course, Commander," I said to him. "We'll find her, get her out somehow."

He nodded, his slightly bloodshot eyes holding my gaze for a moment. He smelled of alcohol.

"You ready for this?" he asked, watching the display.

"As I'll ever be." The high alt.i.tude displays of the storms had a mesmerizing, hypnotic effect. They centered on the pulsing orb of Atopia highlighted near their convergence point. We would only have a window of a few minutes to get this right.

The room was deadly quiet as we sat and watched the storm systems engulf the entire volume of the room. They were all waiting on me. I looked up at Kesselring, Rick, and then at Marie. Patricia hadn't shown up in person, but I knew she was watching through her proxxi.

"On my command, power up the weapons systems," I instructed, waiting, feeling for just the right moment as I fed the information flowing in through my extrasensory splinter network. I could feel the winds ripping at the surface of Atopia, the forests heaving and tearing, the waves pounding against her hull.

"On my mark," I said, raising my hand. "Five...four...three..."

Everyone held their collective breath.

I waited.

Something held me back-something inside me. Someone inside me.

I continued to wait, trying to understand what was going on. Interminable seconds ticked by. Then I understood. It had been sitting there in front of me all the time, but I just hadn't been able to see it.

Until now.

"For G.o.d's sake Jimmy!" screamed Kesselring. "What the h.e.l.l are you waiting for?"

27.

Ident.i.ty: Patricia Killiam "WHAT THE h.e.l.l is he doing?"

Bob stopped his pacing and looked at me. He didn't have access to Command and couldn't see what I saw now. Jimmy was standing motionless as critical seconds slipped by. We all watched in disbelief while Kesselring roared at him again.