The day had settled into a heartbreakingly beautiful evening, and a crescent moonrise was casting a sparkling carpet over inky seas. Waves caressed the shore, and she held my hand in hers, slowly walking me through the wet sand at the water’s edge. We left a trail of footprints behind us.
“Willy,” she pleaded, “I love you, but I can’t do this anymore. Please, let’s fix this. Just tell me what you need.”
“I love you, too, but… I just don’t feel like we share the same goals,” I replied. “I need to focus on my business right now.”
And then the pause, that hurtful space of silence between words that shifted worlds.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I continued. “Maybe the best thing would be for us to separate for a while, so I can figure this out.”
She looked into my eyes while tears welled in hers. Her feet left the ground, and she floated in front of me as I walked, holding both my hands now. Cast in the soft, monochromatic moonlight, she hovered like a ghost before me.
“Willy,” she sobbed, “you want me to leave you?”
I couldn’t believe I was doing it, but I slowly started nodding, looking steadily into her eyes.
Catching her breath she looked away, her body convulsing as she tried to fight back the tears. She let go of my hands and floated up and away from me and into the starry sky. Perhaps not like a ghost, but more like an angel.
My footsteps continued alone in the sand awhile before being washed away by the waves. It was as if we had never been there at all.
The Infinixx launch was coming up, and I had to rush to implement Jimmy’s suggestion before the end of the beta program. Once I had everything going full steam, we could have the life together that we’d always wanted. What I had planned was going to blow everyone away. I just needed to focus.
I went back to work.
8
Identity: Nancy Killiam
“Everyone—everywhere—every time.”
Silence.
“So what does it mean?” a reporter finally asked from the front row of the press conference.
We were unveiling our new marketing program—E3—the “E” and the “3” stylized in the logo to face each other and form an infinity symbol above the Infinixx name. It was all very clever.
“E3 represents the infinite possibilities of the future that we’re bringing to life,” I rolled out breathlessly. “E3 is the idea that anyone can be everywhere and anywhere at any time they like—while still never needing to be anywhere they don’t want to be.”
I paused before my finale, catching my breath.
“For the first time, people can be nowhere and everywhere at the same time—E3 represents total freedom!”
Applause rang out as I raised my hands to the crowd. I wasn’t sure I even understood what it meant, but I managed to deliver the pitch without cracking a smile. All that mattered was that the marketing department was in love with it.
While distributing consciousness was a nice trick, what had the business world so excited were the implications for productivity. Synthetic intelligences and phuturing pushed the needle a long way, but lately they’d been stalled in their revenue-enhancing capabilities, and distributed consciousness was the new buzzword in investor circles.
Many groups were pursuing something like it, but with our intimate link to Cognix and our unique abilities as pssi-kids, we had an edge nobody else could match. The investors were pouring in.
The press conference was complete, so I let the splinter in attendance slip away and pulled in a splinter that was minding a staff meeting we were having in our Infinixx boardroom.
Karen, my technical lead, jumped me into experiencing a technical glitch we were having. My mind quickly filled with visions of bunched up sheets, of pain and guilt, of junkies staring with hollow eyes. The anxious desperation gave way to confusion, a mad whispering of ideas that must have meant something, but didn’t mean anything to me. Then something else, a contained space, I was trapped in a small vehicle that suddenly burst into flames. Just as quickly, I was sitting, combing my hair, and looking back into a face that wasn’t mine.
I closed down the splinter network, collapsing my conscious webwork at the same time.
“It’s some kind of bug,” explained Karen. “The subjective streams are getting mixed up, and there are meme-matching faults as well.”
“Do we know what the problem is?”
Launch time was fast approaching. While building our technology platform, we were at the same time using it ourselves, in the office and in meetings with people, to provide for our own proof of concept. The problem was that bugs tended to get cycled back, amplifying their effects.
“We think so. We’re running some final QA before letting it out into the ecosystem.”
“What caused it?” We’d been having some speed bumps, but nothing as serious as this.
“Seems like a code change somewhere in the kernel layers. We’re trying to figure it out.”
“You’re sure this will solve it?” I just needed it fixed. “I have another press event in a few minutes. Tell me the truth.”
“Yes,” confirmed Karen with some conviction, “that’ll solve it.”
My VP of Human Resources glanced at us. “Did you hear about Cynthia, that new administrative girl we hired?”
Cynthia was a great hire, but had recently dropped off the radar without any warning. People disappearing off into hedonistic cyber-fantasy worlds wasn’t uncommon, but Cynthia had been my personal pick. She’d seemed more reliable than that.
“Yeah, I heard about that. So her neural functions are off the charts, but they can’t find her and she’s off in the multiverse somewhere?” asked Kelly, my business partner.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with us, does it?” I pulled the splinter for this meeting into the center of my consciousness.
“Nothing to do with us,” confirmed Kelly. “But speaking of strange, how about Vince Indigo. Have you seen the flash death mobs he’s attracting?”
There were a few laughs around the table. I stayed quiet, not wanting to reveal any suspicions I had.
“Anyway, the Security Council has taken over Cynthia’s file now,” said Brian, our Chief Technical Officer, bringing the discussion back. “Let’s keep moving. Speaking of the Security Council, what does everyone think of Jimmy getting nominated?”
“I think Jimmy is great,” I said.
“Of course you would,” snorted Kelly. “More of the Killiam clan in charge, but then what’s good for the goose.… ”
“Hey!” I exclaimed. “That’s not fair. Jimmy’s family is barely related to mine.” My cheeks blushed.
They all rolled their eyes.
Jimmy was related to me, but only distantly—our great grandfathers had been cousins, so whatever that made us. Patricia had asked Bob’s family to adopt Jimmy when he’d been left in her care. I’d been dating Bob at the time; we’d been inseparable as children. From that point on, though, I’d been teased for dating what amounted to a distant cousin, if only cousin-in-law. Childhood taunts had a way of sticking with you.
Cunard pinged me for yet another press event starting in a few minutes, and I was happy to escape. “Guys, I have to move this splinter back. Anything else?”
I looked around the table. The meeting room pulsed silently in its synthetic reality cocoon. There was something they weren’t telling me—something they didn’t want to tell me. “What?”
A few of them looked down at the floor. Karen hit me with it, and the details of a lawsuit splintered into my consciousness.