“I gotta go,” I told her hurriedly, getting up and leaning over to peck her on the cheek. “Something for work. Sorry, I really have to run.”
She rolled her eyes.
I stepped away and bolted upward through the sky, the world disappearing away below me as I arrived at my workworld. This was my favorite way to get going—it gave me that Superman start to the day.
Wally was already there, and I turned on, tuned in, and dropped out into the multiverse, splintering my mind to assimilate what was happening. One splinter was already tuned into the press conference that my boss, Nancy, had just started, so I let my mind hover over this for a moment.
2
Identity: Nancy Killiam
“Economic growth is only possible through enhanced productivity and the clustering of talent,” I roared to an approving audience.
The world population was declining and fertility rates were collapsing, I didn’t have to add, not to mention failing prospects for the Yen and greenback as bitcoin-derivatives gained ground. While declining populations equaled better prospects for the planet, it was bad news for economics—and for once, today was all about business.
“Atopia isn’t simply about being green,” I pointed out, “but about boosting business productivity, and profits, to provide the basis for a whole new surge in the world economy.”
Closest to me were mostly familiar reporters. Beyond that, millions of faces filled my display spaces into the blue-shifted distance. This was a well-worn speech for me, like a rutted track down an old country road. Maybe “rutted track” wasn’t the best analogy, I chuckled to myself.
I stopped and looked at the crowd. The pause was well rehearsed, and I was enjoying it. I let a confident smile spread across my many faces.
“And the Infinixx distributed consciousness platform is the solution that will carry business into the twenty-second century!”
The masses before me burst into applause. I shook my head and looked down at the stage, trying to convey that I didn’t deserve such adulation.
“So… questions?” I asked, looking back into the crowd. I saw Tammy from World Press with her arm up. She was always a friendly starter. I pointed at her and nodded.
“Could you characterize for the audience what exactly distributed consciousness feels like?” she asked. “I mean, how would you describe it? And not from a technical point-of-view.”
This brought hushed laughter. I was famous for inundating reporters with jargon that left them feeling like they knew less than what they started with. This time, I made an effort to keep it simple.
“Good question. The easiest way to describe it is like speed reading. When you’re speed reading, you don’t read every word, you only read the first and last lines of paragraphs and scan for a few key words in between. It’s sort of like that.”
“Doesn’t that imply you’re not really getting the whole picture?”
Good question, but hard to answer simply. Our Infinixx “distributed consciousness” system wasn’t really distributing the conscious mind. It created an estimate of a mind’s cognitive state at one point in time, then tagged this with as much personal background data, such as memories, as it thought relevant and were available. The system then started up a synthetic intelligence engine and sent it out to canvas whatever the user wanted to look at.
From time to time this “splinter,” as we called it, would report back with compressed sensory data that would be understandable only to the user.
When I explained it to reporters, I often used the “best friend” explanation: Imagine your best friend winking at you when you asked about someone you both knew. Based on shared experiences, huge amounts of information could be encoded in a single binary bit communicated this way. Infinixx was something like this—the ultimate data-gathering, compression, and transmission scheme, tailored exactly to your individual mind at that moment in time. It worked better with pssi-enabled humans, but even with regular ones, it worked well enough.
“You are getting the whole picture,” I responded to Tammy after reflection, “but just not every detail. Speed reading comes down to the unconscious skill the reader has in scanning the right parts on which to focus.” I paused to let them soak in what I was saying. “Infinixx technology provides that attentional context, as well as the sensory and cognitive multiplexing technology to make it easy even for novices to begin distributing their consciousness into the cloud within a few hours.”
I scanned the upturned faces. They were nodding, but that last sentence brought a slightly glazed look into their eyes.
“For instance,” I continued quickly, “that last meeting you attended, how much of that was just an excuse for a coworker to ramble on about something that had nothing to do with you?”
This earned some chuckles.
“However,” I declared, drawing the word out, “there were probably a few bits here and there that you found useful. Infinixx provides the ability to tune a small part of your attention to only those interesting bits, allowing you to ‘be there’ the whole time without actually needing to be there.”
“How long does it take to understand how to use all this?” another reporter cut in.
“Even you’ll be able to use it right away, Max,” I joked, winking. This earned more laughs. I tried to maintain a steady smile at Max. To fully realize the benefits of this technology, one needed to grow up with it, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. So I continued: “We’re ready to go if you are!”
3
Identity: William McIntyre
“It is in our interest to work together and find a way to shape our differences,” droned the Chinese Minister of State. Sure, I thought, in exactly the same way that you’ve shaped all previous differences—in your favor.
The splinter covering the latest round of peace talks between China and India didn’t need to send in very much new information, the tone and character of the meeting having been pretty much the same as every other one in the recent past: nothing positive, and very predictable. Then again, for business purposes, predictability was everything. I pulled the splinter back for more important work elsewhere.
I quickly assimilated that thin conscious stream, then turned my mind to an exploration hike that another of my splinters was on in the Brazilian rain forest.
The wikiworld displayed vast tracts of remote farmland belonging to Greengenics outside of Manos, all sown with a complex matrix of genetically modified plants that was supposed to mimic the biodiversity of the forest surrounding it. I wasn’t buying their story and suspected they were strip-farming the area. I’d hired a local guide to walk in and snoop for me, and this splinter was ghosting in through the guide’s contact-lens display.
Pulling back the last of the dense foliage before the edge of the farm area, we peered in, and my suspicions were confirmed. Long rows of bioengineered farmaceuticals stretched out into the distance. Greengenics was falsifying its wikiworld feeds. This splinter of information at the edges of my attention shattered into a dozen others that went off and used the information to my advantage—shorting the Greengenics stock, buying their competitors stock, alerting authorities of falsified filings, and pinging media outlets with anonymous tips about a possible story.