“Yeah,” sighed Bob heavily, “that’s what brothers are for.”
An uncomfortable silence descended, and everyone stared down at the ground, everyone, that is, except Martin. He looked around at us all with wide eyes. “What, did somebody die or something?”
Bob snorted, shaking his head. “Just forget it.”
“Forget what?”
“Just forget it,” snapped Bob. “You will no matter what anyway.”
More uncomfortable silence.
“I can’t believe more people don’t come out into nature to experience this,” Bob said after a while, changing the topic. “It’s amazing. You know, doing things with your own two hands, getting back to the basics.”
Now everyone nodded except Martin, who’d returned to staring blankly into the fire.
“Yeah,” I agreed, but Bob could always read my moods.
“You still worrying?” he asked me.
“Nah.”
“Yeah you are. I can tell. Everything will be fine. It always is.” He smiled. “Even when it isn’t.” He tossed his beer can into the fire.
The wind changed direction and began pushing the smoke from the fire directly into Vicious, Sid’s proxxi.
“Mates, it’s been a real pleasure,” coughed Vicious, “but I’ve ‘ad about enough. This nature shite is not for me.” He held up his hands and willed the wind to shift again, forcing it to blow away from him.
“Come on,” laughed Sid. “We’re having a nice time here! Tough it out a little!”
The spell was broken, however, and the suspension of disbelief cracked, revealing the grainy quality of the fire and the hollow texture of the night. It all began to feel fake, and a heavy weight fell back across my shoulders. “I think I’m going to get going, too.”
“Surfing tomorrow, though, right?” asked Bob.
“Sure thing, wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I lied.
I gave a perfunctory wave to the gang, and without another word, the campsite faded away, replaced by the white, featureless confines of my apartment. Wally was still sitting beside me, though now on the convertible couch of my tiny living space. My digs could, at best, be described as minimalist. Real space on Atopia came at a premium price, one I couldn’t afford.
“Don’t worry so much, Willy,” said Wally.
“Easy for you to say. You don’t live in this pill box.”
“Well, yes and no, Willy,” Wally noted, watching me carefully. “Look, I’ve never said this before, and I’m not sure why I’m saying it now, but.… ”
I waited. “What?” Why is my proxxi getting weird on me? As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.
He looked steadily at me. “William, I just wanted to make sure you know, well, that I love you.”
I was slightly stunned, and he saw it.
“Not in a weird way,” he added quickly. “I mean, as brothers, you know.” He smiled and waited for me to respond.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said slowly, not sure of what to do with this. “Look, I appreciate that, and I like you, too, Wally.”
He kept smiling at me. I have to talk to someone at Cognix technical support about this. I had lot of work to get done. I didn’t need this.
“Look, I’m fine,” I finally told him. “Let’s just focus on the here and now, okay?”
Switching topics to the work at hand, the walls and features of my apartment morphed outward into the sea of displays that were my workspace. I had a busy day tomorrow and wanted to get a jump start on organizing myself for the big meeting with Nancy Killiam, the head of the new tech company, Infinixx, I was contracting with. Wally and I worked well into the night, pulling and pushing masses of financial data through the deep reaches of the multiverse, trying to make sense of the rapidly accelerating world around us.
The next morning Brigitte dropped the expected warning shot. “You didn’t ping me last night when you got back from camping with the boys.”
She tried to say it lightly, but I could tell. We’d been together for two years, and I could sense her moods coming like winds approaching in the treetops.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” I replied, attempting to deflect the looming storm. “You know I have this big meeting with Nancy today.”
She didn’t say anything and I paused, deciding on my plan of defense: feint or full retreat?
“We were preparing for the meeting,” I added defensively. “And,” I quickly noted, “we did some stock picks, too.”
My job at Infinixx paid okay, but I’d been brought in as an outside contractor and wasn’t on their stock option dream ticket. The real reason I’d gunned so hard for the job was that it gave me access to the distributed consciousness platform they were developing. Being able to be in a dozen places at once gave me an edge nobody else in the market had right now. And in the market, any edge equaled an opportunity to make money.
Brigitte pouted. A beautiful pout if there ever was one.
Her full lips and petite nose under a beautiful tangle of laissez-faire auburn hair that women of a lesser pedigree would kill for, set her firmly in irresistible, somewhere between beautiful and beautifully cute. Even when her deep brown eyes flashed angrily at me, as they did now, it was hard to resist the urge to simply scoop her up into my arms and kiss her.
So I did.
“William,” she said patiently, pushing me away. She was laughing, but when she used my full name, she always had a serious point to make. I looked at her in my arms. “Vraiment, money isn’t everything. Look around you, chérie.”
I looked around.
We were having breakfast in our pajamas, her in her bunny slippers, atop a Scottish Highlands mountain ridge. Our small white table and chairs sat against the backdrop of a blossoming sunrise amid rolling fog and boulders and grass and sheep—it was surreal to say the least, but she liked it, and that was all that mattered.
“We’re in the most amazing place on Earth. We can travel anywhere we want, do anything we like. I make more than enough money to support both of us, and anyway, look where we’re having breakfast! What do we need more money for?”
I tried not to roll my eyes. This was well-trodden ground. She was a senior administrator for a medical services company headquartered on Atopia, and she made more than double my salary. No matter how I tried to convince myself that it didn’t matter—it did. It would be nice to be able to afford more sub-proxxi; as it was, I could hardly afford to have Wally show up at more than one event at a time. It would be nice to be able to afford to expand my Phuture News Network; right now, it was an immense effort just to stay ahead of the game.
Even accessing the wikiworld at this resolution cost us more than I could afford, but this wouldn’t cut any ice with her. When it came right down to it, everyone else I knew was better off than me, and frankly, it pissed me off.
No end was in sight for the multigenerational mortgage my dad had taken out for our family to get a berth on Atopia. It was a shrewd move on his part, entering the lottery—the value of the berth had more than quadrupled—but the size of the mortgage was crippling to a regular family like ours. We struggled under the debt. It didn’t help, of course, that I’d made some bad stock picks lately and was far in the hole.
“You’re right, pumpkin, you’re right.” It was no use arguing with her.
My metasenses were tingling, and that meant a hot stock move. I’d remapped my skin’s tactile array from the nape of my neck and down my back, like a fish’s lateral line sensors, to sense eddy currents in market phuturecasts. Even the slightest pressure trends in the markets tickled my backside. It was a surefire way to get my attention. Right now, a stiff wind was buffeting my buttocks as I buttered my toast.