The Atopia Chronicles

Nothing more than a simple panic attack.” The doctor’s bald pate reflected the overhead panel lighting like a shimmering, sweaty halo above his radiantly clean lab coat. A stethoscope hung uselessly around his neck. He leaned forward over his desk and clasped his hands, bringing them up to support his chin in what I assumed was his thoughtful pose. “Are you still smoking?

The existentialists did say that life was all about pulling the victory of meaning from the jaws of senseless absurdity

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 dreamt of babies with blue eyes, alive but never living, their blue eyes filling blue seas with blue pain.

Any technology that was sufficiently advanced seemed like magic to someone unfamiliar,

Sometimes I guess you really did have to lose yourself to find yourself.

The man with no future, who existed only in the moment, was invisible to a world fixated on anywhere but where they actually were.

My life hadn’t ended, but without anyone else in it, it had ceased to have any meaning.

Time—Einstein famously said that it was purely an illusion, just a construct of the conscious mind. A nice idea, but try having this conversation with someone who sensed theirs ending. Time was something we all desperately wanted more of when it ran short, yet we wasted it frivolously when we thought we had enough.

Live in the moment, effortless action.

As I was thinking this, the new news reported that the offensive was delayed and then quickly canceled. Suddenly, a report came in that a tactical nuclear weapon would be launched against a target in Kashmir, but this was aborted at the last instant. All sides were already at the negotiating table. Accurate futuring technology was bringing out random behavior—phuturecasting meant everyone could see you coming, so being unpredictable and random had its advantages, usually at the expense of lacking strategic intent. The irony that “knowing the future” seemed to make things even less predictable didn’t escape me, but the serious strategists on the topic said that this perception was just the result of our primary subjectives being stuck in a single timeline. I sighed.

Our nervous systems extended throughout our entire bodies, including the ancient brain in our gut that was connected to our heads via the vagus nerve. When we said something was the result of gut thinking, it was truer than most people imagined.

She nudged me with a phantom for a stimshare.

He adjusted the frilly white cuffs of his tunic and then his blond wig, which fell in tight curls to frame his white-painted face and bright, red-painted lips.

These people judged their bodies to be without enough value to even warrant leaving their proxxi to inhabit them. They’d effectively given up their physical selves. “We’d

For me, the flow of information was an apt metaphor. As surfing became my obsession at a young age, my innovation had been to remap my tactile sense into the water around me. Sitting on my surfboard, bobbing up and down between the swells, I could feel the pressure, shape, and temperature of the water’s surface around me through my skin. The thousands of neurons attached to each hair follicle could sense even tiny subsurface eddies and water currents. After nearly twenty years of dedicated practice, my brain had neuroplastically reformatted to devote a large part of itself to my water-sense, and I now had the most highly attuned tactile array of any pssi-kid, or for that matter anyone else in the world. Sitting with my eyes closed, I could feel the water moving and undulating around me as a perfectly natural and integral part of my body. I was one with the water, and it was one with me.

Without removing any existing limbs or digits, we created virtual fingers and limbs in synthetic spaces using pssi to connect them to neurons in the motor cortex. It was like having a dozen extra hands to manage controls that were directly wired into our brains like a part of our bodies.

Even with languages going extinct faster than frogs, I’d read that the city still had nearly a thousand spoken throughout its many boroughs. What a mess.

if you can’t be with the one you love, then you love the one you’re with.

Imagine performing more at work while being there less. Want to get in shape? Your new proxxi can take you for a run while you relax by the pool!” she exclaimed, stopping her walk to look directly into each viewer’s eyes. “Look how you want, when you want, where you want, and live longer doing it. Create the reality you need right now with Atopian pssionics. Sign up soon for zero cost!

That’s your job, Rick, to help scare the world into respecting us. Mine is to help scare it into saving itself. Good work.

With great powers, they said, came strange responsibilities,

to take a swig of my beer. “We’ll be, well, just men again.” Sid smiled. He leaned over and whispered under his breath, “You’re going to talk to him, right? For you, you understand?” I rolled my eyes, but nodded. “You

It’s possible to navigate the fate of one individual,” I explained, “but the combined fate of billions gains momentum like a supertanker, and at a certain point you can’t stop it anymore. 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 over what’s left.

We were locked down tighter than a nun’s thighs, and that’s just how I liked it.

Some said we were just teaching people to fool themselves, but then again, when were people ever not fooling themselves?

Pain and fear cleanse the mind,

People spent their lives searching for peace by chasing idle dreams, addictions, money, religion, and even other people, hoping to fill some gap. Now, for the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt at peace. All this time, it had been right inside me. I’d just never slowed down enough to look within.

In the struggle to save myself, I’d been reborn.