It was a critical juncture for the future of Cognix Corporation, and by extension, for Atopia as well.
Aunt Patricia had made it clear that this was a priority, so I was here in person, or at least, a part of me was here in person. The splinter I had controlling this robody was circling at the very peripheries of my consciousness, just a voice in the background of all the buzzing activity that I was dealing with. As Olympia began to stir, the splinter dug deeper into my awareness matrix, prickling my brain, and my attention was drawn toward that one place, my mind automatically load-balancing the other tasks and places and people I was dealing with seamlessly onto my proxxi and other splinters.
“Olympia,” I called out again, louder. She twitched and one of her eyes fluttered, a signal of impending activity that collapsed my awareness firmly into this space.
My mind shivered at the cold, confined reality it found itself in. “Does distributed consciousness really work?” whispered one far away splinter, attending a press conference in Australia. “Yes,” that splinter answered, “even while talking to you I am attending clinical trials in New York.” I was still listening to my other streams of consciousness, but these became faint murmurs in the background of the physicality of being in the doctor’s office in New York.
I glanced up at the lighting panels in the ceiling, feeling my robotic irises focus in and out, adjusting to the brightness, and then looked back down at Olympia as I cradled her head in my plastic hands.
Slowly, her eyes opened, her mind dredging itself up from beneath the sedatives. She wouldn’t see a robot hovering above her, however. Pssi was now installed in her neural pathways, and I’d clipped a reality skin around my robot’s body so that I would appear to her as her own impression of the most caring and loving person she had ever known, an amalgamation of the people the system could figure out that she was closest to.
“Yes?”
She was barely conscious, and I could tell she was already annoyed.
“Seems like someone needs a little more sleepy time,” I purred. “Come on, I’ll get you up and dressed.”
Olympia was something of a special case. She was one of the key external marketing executives setting the groundwork for the commercial release of pssi later this year. Olympia had only been inserted into the program at the last minute by Dr. Hal Granger, one of Cognix’s senior executives and our leading psychologist. Her file indicated acute anxiety, which certainly qualified her, but it was strange that she’d been shuffled in at the last second.
“How long was I out?” asked Olympia irritably, propping herself up on the bed.
“Hmm… ,” I replied while my mind assimilated a thin stream of information from the splinter that had been attending her here. “About two hours, I’d say. Everything seems to be working perfectly. In fact, we’ve just activated the system. Your proxxi will explain everything to you once you get home. I would have woken you sooner, but you just seemed so peaceful.”
She grumpily swung her legs off the side of the pod-bed and sat up. I tried to reach over to steady her, but she pushed me off. “I can take it from here, thank you very much.” She waved me away.
I shrugged and leaned over to grab her clothes, handing them to her. I wondered if her aggressive mood had been stimulated by some psychoactive response to the pssi stimulus, but a set of clinical notes floated into view in an overlaid display space. She’s always that way. Everything was fine then; in fact, all of the other reports signaled that this was another perfect pssi installation.
“I’m going to bring you in to speak to the doctor before you leave. He needs to have a final word,” I said as I walked through the door, stopping outside to wait for her to finish dressing.
In a few seconds, she was done and strode out and down the hallway quickly, purposely avoiding looking my way. I watched her carefully, searching for any telltale tremors or jitters that could betray an issue with her motor cortex. She looked smooth, if not graceful, but then, her grace wasn’t my issue.
She stuck her head into the doctor’s office, and I walked over to observe the exchange.
“How do you feel?” I could hear him asking her. “Please, come in.”
“No, no, I’m fine. I mean, I just want to get going. I’ve got things to do. So just tell me quick, what do I need to know?”
“You have a very powerful new tool at your disposal. Be careful with it,” explained the doctor, “and don’t activate any of the distributed consciousness features yet.”
“Distributed consciousness,” snorted Olympia, looking back at me. “Where do they get these ideas?”
I raised my eyebrows. Sensing my job here done, this splinter began to slip back toward the edges of my conscious awareness to become just another voice in my sensory crowd. As it did so, Olympia’s question hung with me, sliding a part of mind off somewhere else, backward in time, into my childhood.
Infinixx really began as a pssi-kid game we’d invented called flitter tag. In the forested yards of the Schoolyard at recess, we used to have huge games of it, jumping and chasing after each other in what seemed to the adults as completely nonsensical behavior. But to us, it was a highly competitive and structured game.
More than just using pssi to venture off into virtual worlds, as pssi-kids we were the first to really master the art of body snatching—sneaking into each other’s sensory channels and taking control of each other’s bodies.
It wasn’t nearly as dangerous as it sounds. Our proxxies chaperoned sharing bodily control. They would allow a visitor to do what they liked as long as they didn’t hurt our bodies or do something we wouldn’t do or say ourselves. Proxxies also managed the transition, the handing off and receiving of control, so it all went smoothly and safely.
Sometimes it could get confusing, but then that was a part of the fun. If it ever became too much, whenever we were out of body lending it to someone or off in another world, we could always punch the Uncle Button and snap back into ourselves.
So we were never really far from home.
In flitter tag, whoever was “it” would flitter their consciousness from this body to that, trying to reach out and touch someone else as we squealed and shrieked and jumped about from one body to another, randomly forcing resets as we punched our Uncle Buttons. It was incredibly disorienting, completely mad, and absolutely fun, and there was nothing else quite like it when one was growing up as a pssi-kid on Atopia.
What started off as a simple game became ever more complex over time as we began to invent more and more rules. Of course, we played not just in this world, but also by jumping off into the endless multiverse worlds we traveled through. It was during these advanced games of flitter tag that we first began to really experience distributed consciousness, working to keep track of all the new bodies we spawned as we rushed through worlds of fire, water, ice, and skies, inhabiting creatures and bodies and dealing with physics unrecognizable to the experiential space of normal humans.
We didn’t realize what we were doing at the time. It was just natural.
As we grew into teenagers, many of my peers dropped off into what could only be described as self-indulgent gratification. I was the only one to consider the deeper issues of what had happened to us, and to dissect how it had happened.