“I want us to take that next step in our relationship,” she added, “to experience the world together in the same way.”
Really it wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t as if we were teenagers and I had something to hide. She really deserved more from me.
“Sure, let’s do it. I’d love to do that with you!” This earned me a big hug and kiss, but I pulled myself away gently. “I love you, sweetheart.”
“I love you, too,” she replied.
I paused, looking at her expectantly. A steady wind that only I could feel had begun to blow.
“Yes, yes, go to work.” She smiled and rolled her eyes. “I know you’re dying to get out there with Wally.”
She hit me playfully with a pillow.
I laughed, grabbing the pillow away and pulling her in for a final kiss.
In a flash, I was rocketing up through the heavens and into my workspace.
The main action for me wasn’t out in the front of my life. The real action was in the backrooms, where Wally and I were working to build my growing hedge fund. My ability to consistently outpace the market using the new Infinixx distributed consciousness platform made it possible to do things nobody else could do. People out there were noticing how this pssi-kid was beating them, and I was starting to get some traction in the market.
But I desperately needed more splinters.
A few months ago, five had been enough, and then I’d expanded to ten. I’d managed to get fifteen by signing up for some beta testing under false credentials, but I wasn’t fooling anybody at Infinixx, and it had me constantly at loggerheads with Nancy. Almost as soon as I launched my splinter-matrix for the evening, she barged in, appearing in an overlaid display while I sat in the middle of my hedge-fund metaworld.
“Nancy, I am just as capable, and probably even more capable, than you at splintering,” I argued immediately, knowing what was coming. “I’ve spent more time stretching the capabilities of Infinixx than anyone.”
“We’ve been over this, Willy.”
“And I can beat the pants off you at flitter tag.”
Nancy rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to disagree, William. I’m just saying, if you were anyone else, I would have fired you already. I can’t ignore it anymore.”
She just didn’t get it. “Can’t you see I’m doing you a favor?”
She said nothing.
“Think of me as an advanced beta tester,” I suggested hopefully.
“William, I can’t,” she said finally. “Your splinter limit will be set at ten. I will allow you to keep using Infinixx to run your side business, but that’s it.”
Ten? My stomach tightened into knots.
4
Identity: Nancy Killiam
“Ten?”
“That’s it, William. I’m not going to discuss this anymore.”
I looked at a graphic detailing the metaworld Willy had created for his business. A threadbare and kludged-together collection of Phuture News feeds, second-rate synthetics, and metasense overlays that snaked into the hyperspaces surrounding him. The only saving grace was the distributed consciousness network connecting it all together, borrowed illegally from my Infinixx beta labs. It looked like an interesting test case to show what small businesses could do with our technology, but it was just too early in our product development process.
“Can I just keep to the fifteen I have now?” Willy looked desperate. It broke my heart to have to have this kind of conversation with him.
“Ten, and even that’s a stretch. And I know you’re one of Bob’s best friends.… ”
“But obviously not yours. I guess forever and ever ends quicker than it sounds.”
“We were children, Willy.”
“And?”
“That was just a silly game.”
“Maybe to you.”
I sighed. Growing up, Bob, Willy, and I had been part of an almost inseparable gang, and we’d promised to always stick together, do whatever we could for each other, no matter what, forever and ever. It was a long time ago.
I shook my head again. “Ten.”
Now he looked angry. I felt myself wavering, but we were at a critical point in our developmental path. We had to stick to the known unknowns, and letting someone splinter their consciousness into more than just a few instances could lead to some unknown unknowns that I couldn’t afford.
He glowered in my display space. I didn’t have to plug into his emotional feeds to feel the heated waves spilling out around him.
“Fine,” he announced from between gritted teeth, and then he summarily blocked me from all his realities.
My primary subjective snapped back into the Infinixx control center, and I leaned back in my chair, trying to think of ways I could try to help my old friend.
I was already feeling more than uncomfortable, pssi-kid or not, being in my early twenties and bossing around people more than twice my age. Explaining to our board of directors that I was putting the program at risk for a childhood friendship just wasn’t a place I was willing to go.
Willy had always had a chip on his shoulder, even when we were kids. He’d arrived on Atopia with his family when he was already six years old, at an age when the rest of us pssi-kids were already amazing the world with our abilities in the virtual worlds where we’d grown up.
Willy had to start from less than nothing, having come from a neo-Luddite commune in central Montana. In the Schoolyard, we’d teased him mercilessly as he’d struggled to come to grips with the pssi system. Bob had been the first to befriend him, bringing him into our gang, and their friendship was one that had survived. This was no mean feat in the churning social space of Atopia.
His young mind, back then, had been forced to leapfrog almost four hundred years, rocketing from a compound stuck somewhere in the eighteenth century straight into Atopia, a place far ahead of the rest of the world. He’d been incredibly determined, though, and within a short time had become the best flitter tag player in the Schoolyard. Willy had always been on an upward climb, always trying to prove himself, and now more than ever.
I sighed again.
I wondered what the world must look like from his perspective, coming from a place so alien to me. It was hard to imagine his childhood.
This made me think of mine.
As a baby girl, my first memories, my first fully formed memories, were of my mother’s face. This wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the detail with which I could remember it. My mother was holding me, cuddling me, and looking down into my eyes, cooing softly.
“Nancy, how are you feeling, my little darling?” My mother’s face was full of love and worry.
It was a very special moment to me. And as the first pssi-kid to pass this threshold, it was a very special moment that was shared with the whole Cognix program. My memories were famous.
That memory was from the first moment my pssi was turned on. It was the beginning of my inVerse, the complete sensory recording of everything I had ever seen, heard, felt, or sensed. I was three months old, and the moment was exactly 7:05 am, Pacific Time, on September 20th of the year my family moved onto the first prototype Atopian platform.
I’d gone back and relived it so many times it was almost embarassing—felt my mother’s hot breath on my blushing cheeks, sensed her holding me tightly, observed every nuance of her pupils dilating and contracting, breathed in the tang of her perfume and the medicinal scent of strong soap, and felt the pull of distraction as I caught glimpses of glowing dust motes floating in the angled sunlight streaming in from the windows. In the corner of the room, my father crouched anxiously over quietly humming machines as he monitored my signals and systems, stealing quick glances toward us from time to time.