Growing up, we hadn’t known anything special was happening around us. Like kids anywhere and anytime, we’d just assumed that life was like this for everyone. But we were special. We were the first generation of children to grow up with seamless, synthetic reality sensory interfaces.
After running out of letters at the end of the alphabet, Time magazine had tried to label us “Generation A,” as in artificial reality, but this expression had died almost as quickly as the magazine. The world then came to refer to us simply as the pssi-kids. We were a part of Cognix Corporation’s phase III clinical trials of early developmental pssi on the island colony of Atopia. We weren’t just making history. As my dad liked to say—we were history.
While Atopia was an amazing place to grow up, we were still just kids, and we did the things that all kids did. We screamed, we dribbled, and we wobbled when we first learned to walk. We did learn to walk much earlier than regular children, using pssi muscle-memory training, but this was just one in a long list of things that we could do that normal human children couldn’t.
Our world was more than just this world—the “physical” world was only a tiny patch of our playground as we quickly learned to flitter across the endless streams of metaworlds that were filled with toys and creatures that sparkled in our sensory display spaces. At first these worlds without end were created for us to play in, but then we began building them ourselves, and we perceived little difference between the real and the virtual. In fact, synthetic worlds felt as real and tangible to us as what the rest of the world called their reality.
Even from a young age, it wasn’t just toys we played with; we also played with making ourselves into toys, altering our bodies to become teddy bears, worms, little flocks of soaring dinosaurs in endless skyworlds, and ever more alien creatures inhabiting ever more impossible spaces as our minds developed a fluid capacity for neuroplasticity. Our proxxi and educational bots were constantly presenting us with an endless barrage of games to master and puzzles to solve as we spun through these worlds, treating every moment as a learning opportunity.
From our point-of-view, our proxxi were simply our playmates during the first few years of our lives. But they weren’t playing. They were constantly correlating the flood of neuronal data traffic through the smarticle networks embedded in our bodies and matching it with our behavior.
We were being analyzed.
It didn’t take that long to learn a human wetware matrix, but our brains and nervous systems were still in development, and they were using our data to continuously redesign the pssi system. We were Cognix’s guinea pigs, part and parcel of our parents’ agreements to participate in the Atopian project.
Almost all of my early childhood was spent with my proxxi—the ultimate tool in familial productivity enhancement. To us, our proxxi were our brothers and sisters, little artificial boys and girls we could play with.
This even became a primary selling feature of the program.
After all, who had the cycles left over in today’s busy world to have even one child, never mind a second one? Proxxi filled this need in the market by creating a kind of digital clone of a child to act as its playmate, babysitter, and educator, or even the child’s twin, depending on your point-of-view and moral framework.
The floodgates opened near our fourth birthdays.
Around this age, one by one, we were gradually given independent access to our own pssi systems. Like quick little fish, we’d disappeared over and through the worlds that our parents understood and began venturing out into the open network. Before that time, we’d been limited to one body, but we soon learned to spawn our minds simultaneously into others.
The reign of the pssi-kids in the multiverse had begun.
Leaning forward in my chair, I focused my mind on several key events unfolding in the worlds my consciousness was spread out into, all the while fine tuning the parameters of some phuturecasts that tied them all together. A high-dimensional correlation matrix floated through my display spaces, and I watched it growing, pulsing, and fading as predictions grew or fell in their interconnectedness.
“So what do you think?” I asked.
“You know what I think,” responded Cunard, my proxxi, and I did.
While we were talking, I was holding forth on dozens of splintered conversations in other virtual worlds while keeping an eye on reports coming in from a platoon of sub-proxxi and bots out collecting and spreading data with trusted, and not trusted, parties. I could sense a coalescing cascade in the mood of billions of humans, as well as subtle shifts in the goings on in the billions more worlds in which they wandered.
The timing felt about right.
Distributing my consciousness this wide and thin was tiring, and I’d been at it constantly for nearly forty hours straight, even while arguing with Willy. An aching pressure had built up behind my eyeballs. The Sleep-Over tabs worked great up to a point, but I was feeling sluggish after a long week.
I sensed it was just beginning to pay off, as I could feel the ebb and flow of the world’s opinion around the Infinixx project. Just a little more certainty was all I needed, so I gritted my teeth, rubbed my many eyeballs, and focused inward and back outward.
“Nancy!” someone called out, intentionally overriding my sensory dataflow using an emergency channel. The interruption jolted me, and my conscious webwork partially collapsed. It was David, of course, which I realized after a split second of hang time. I sighed but smiled as his face floated into view.
“C’mon, Nance, come to Davey-boy. Enough is enough.” He was smiling, too, but I could see concern worrying the corners of his mouth.
“Just a little longer. I’m sorry.”
I had a splinter ghosting him, but I’d lost track of it. Visions of him cooking up a storm in the kitchen floated into view as I retrieved that conscious stream. Most of my awareness was still hovering in countless minds and bodies scattered throughout dozens of worlds. I checked the pulsating correlation matrix one last time. Things looked good, and that was good enough for me.
I initiated a wrap to the session, and like a shockwave, streams of information flowed outward from me into my agents across the multiverse. Collapsing my cognitive webwork, it felt like a brick was being lifted off my brain.
The relief was palpable.
“All done, sweetie,” I responded to David. “And I have some wonderful news.”
“And I have some wonderful food getting cold,” he said playfully.
I was more than late for dinner.
With a final flurry of gestures, I released my agents to autopilot and left the rest in the care of Cunard. My workspaces faded out, and the outlines of a dinner setting sharpened into view.
David had chosen a romantic setting. A small fire crackled and popped in a marble fireplace, each side set with a dramatic arrangement of exotic flowers. In fact, the entire living room was decked out in white marble and tropical flowers. Through the open doors, neoclassical columns graced a grand terrace, and a breeze was billowing in through satin curtains. Sea air mixed with burning incense, and I caught a glimpse of what I was sure was the Amalfi coast in the distance.
Italy, of course. I could see where this was going.