“Put in sell orders!” I yelled into my dozen splinters.
The bell chimed signaling the close of Shanghai. Within seconds, the secondary and after markets had kicked in, but by the time we’d managed to unravel my positions, I’d chalked up a huge loss.
I was too highly leveraged, trying to be too clever.
Hovering over the small metaworld that was my financial control center, I closed my eyes and sighed. I needed more splinters to cover more things at the same time. All I’d been able to scrounge up was about fifteen, and half of them were prototypes that were getting called back for updates and re-initializations all the time. A growing headache began to pound behind my eyes, and I focused inwards and back outwards, getting myself ready for the rest of the night’s work.
The day had ended in total, personal financial disaster. Almost everything that could have gone wrong, had gone wrong. Even though I hadn’t said anything, Brigitte could sense my mood and had prepared a special night for us. She’d taken the time to personally reserve a little patch of sidewalk on the side of the Grand Canal in Venice.
The spot was undeniably romantic; a candle set in a green wine bottle atop a red checked tablecloth, the gentle slap of the Adriatic against the canal walls, and the twinkling lights of Venezia under a rising full moon. The strains of an accordion played somewhere nearby, the notes floating together with the smells of fresh cut herbs and tomatoes and seafood.
“Brigitte, this is beautiful,” I managed to say as I arrived, dropping most of my webwork of splinters behind.
Stepping into this one reality I sat down opposite her. I tried to relax and let my foul mood evaporate into the warm night air. I could guess that she and Wally had been speaking, and from the look on her face there was more in store. I sighed.
I was still stewing over a heated argument I’d had with Nancy earlier regarding my splintering limit. I’d tried to explain what a difficult spot I was in, but it hadn’t mattered to her. Atopia was supposed to be this shining beacon of libertarian ideals, a place that wouldn’t stoop to the base realities of the rest of the world. In actuality, it was just another country club for rich snobs like the Killiams to lord over us commoners. She had no idea what it was like for a family like ours here.
Almost every American had lost someone in 2C, the cyber attacks of ‘22, but our family had been particularly hard hit. We came from working class roots in South Boston, and with a name like McIntyre, living in Southie had never been easy. But when the first cyber strikes had hit in the middle of a cold snap of February of that year, triggering the power grid shutdowns, something not easy had turned into something terrifyingly deadly. When the lights had come back on over a month later, we’d lost nine of our family to the cold, starvation and riots.
Deep suspicion of technology had driven my grandfather, along with a big chunk of the rest of the world, literally into the hills.
Hiding from the world had made for a hard life, and one my own father had desperately wanted to escape. A huge fight had erupted when my dad had announced plans to move to Atopia, to start anew and break with the Luddite community my grandfather had founded in the foothills of Montana.
It had been a huge gamble, a gamble for a better life for me and my mother, and it was one that had cut my dad off from the rest of our family. It was a gamble whose burden to make good I felt had now fallen on my shoulders.
While my dad and I had managed the transition, my mother hadn’t been able to cope, and after a few years had returned to the commune. I remembered being furious at her, refusing to leave, and I barely spoke to her afterwards. I wasn’t mad at her anymore, but the commune forbade modern communication technology.
I’d been planning a trip to see her for years now, but was always finding excuses for staying, a trip on foot into the mountains not being something I was comfortable with, but it was more than simply that. I wanted to make good first, to prove that my dad had been right, and that she’d made the right decision in leaving me with him.
“William?” said Brigitte, catching my attention. I shook my head, casting out the memories. She was standing now in front of me, her hand on my head, and looking into my eyes.
She’d dressed up for our evening, her hair falling in luxurious waves over her shoulders, dressed in a glittering black slip that barely covered her petite frame. Her perfume was powerful and seductive, working some pssi magic, and I felt myself getting horny. Whatever it was, definitely zeroed my attention onto her. I collapsed the rest of my conscious splinters into the here and now, and centered my full attention on her soft brown eyes.
She deserved better. I would do better.
“Yes?”
“Are you here with me now?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” I sighed. “It’s just, well, it’s complicated.”
She watched me quietly.
“Not everything needs to be complicated, you know.” She moved her hand down to my cheek, and then pulled my chin up so I was looking directly into her eyes. “Come on, let’s eat.”
Waiters immediately floated in around us with plates of food.
“I want to apologize for giving you a hard time about money and everything,” she said, leaning over to kiss my forehead and then returning to sit down opposite me. I’d almost forgotten about all that.
“No worries, pumpkin,” I replied, my mind-fog lifting. “It’s me that should be the one apologizing.”
She smiled at me and reached over to hold my hand.
“Enough apologizing, cheri,” she said tenderly. “First we eat, and then off to bed.”
Her smile turned seductive.
My stomach growled. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. Hungry and horny, I thought as I looked at her, and I could see she wanted to make me a happy man. Life didn’t get much better than this. I smiled and dug into dinner.
Perhaps my situation wasn’t as bad as I thought.
Soon after, I was lying on my back in bed amid the mess of sheets and pillows strewn about from our lovemaking. A gentle breeze was blowing in through the window, and Brigitte clung tightly to my side.
We enjoyed sex without any of the messy special effects a lot of the other pssi-kids went for. Not to say we hadn’t experimented with all that stuff. Brigitte was quite the wild child in her day, but as we’d gotten older and found each other, the craziness had lost its appeal.
“Willy,” she purred softly, “can I ask you something? And promise not to get mad okay?”
“Sure, anything, sweet pea,” I replied. All of my defenses were down, and right now she could have asked me to jump into the canal and I would have happily complied.
“Willy, do you think we could start sharing our realities? I mean, completely.”
Even with my defenses down, this gave me a little start.
“Sweetie,” I replied calmly, “even couples that have been married for years don’t share their realities entirely.”
Right now we were sharing a reality of being in Venice together, which was great, but she meant that we’d fully share each others’ reality skins, the little and big ways we filtered and modified real and virtual worlds. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to see the world the way I saw it.
“I know what other people do and I don’t want that to be us,” she continued. “It is possible, you know.”
Now it wasn’t like I walked around the world with it skinned up as some weird fantasy, but still, sometimes I liked the world to appear the way I liked it to appear. It was hard to deny her, though.