“Some guy in Minnesota is suing for emotional damages after his sensory stream got crossed with his teenage daughter’s.”
“Oh… my… God.” The details flowed through my networks. The girl had been out with her boyfriend. I shook my head, my mind filling with my own memories of growing up. Never mind the father; it was the girl who would be damaged after this. “And you’re only bringing this to me now?”
“It was only filed ten minutes ago,” replied our legal counsel, a loaner from Cognix corporate who’d materialized at our table.
“Do you really need to be here right now?” I demanded. This was supposed to be a private meeting.
He shrugged. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you still want to be running this company by the end of the day,” he replied coolly, looking at the ceiling, and then turned to stare into my eyes. “You need to deal with this right now.”
I sighed. Lawyers were a part of the job I hated, but running Infinixx didn’t give me much choice.
“Nothing in the media worlds yet?” Cunard had already run a background check in the seconds since we’d learned of the problem. There was nothing we could see so far.
“No,” replied our lawyer, “they’ve agreed to keep it quiet.” He looked around the room at my technical staff, appearing bored.
“For a settlement I imagine.”
“Yes,” he smiled, looking back toward me, “as you imagine.”
“Even though they signed off on a hold-harmless clause with the beta testing?”
“This sort of thing could get, well, it could be pretty media friendly.” The lawyer looked even more bored as he said it. “Or unfriendly, depending on which side of the fence you sit.”
This was exactly the reason why I couldn’t let Willy increase his splinter limit—unexpected repercussions and technical glitches like this. We couldn’t afford the risk.
“Make the deal,” I sighed. The lawyer nodded and faded away.
“And Karen,” I added, just before flittering off to the next press event, “fix this problem. I don’t care what it takes, but get it fixed.”
9
Identity: William McIntyre
“Willy!”
Whole scaffolds of my conscious webwork collapsed as Bob forced his way in using one of Sid’s viral skins. Sid was going to get in trouble with his little sidelines one day, but then, who was I to talk?
The last time I’d seen Bob was when we were surfing, when Brigitte and I had split, and that was already a few weeks ago. Work was absorbing me, and to focus I’d been filtering all of my communications straight to my proxxi.
“Willy!” yelled Bob at maximum volume across my full audio spectrum. “Wiiiillllly!”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m here!” I released most of my splinter network into autopilot and distilled a good chunk of myself back into a private workplace where I pulled Bob.
Bob smiled goofily as we both materialized in each other’s sensory spaces. We were sitting across from each other in one of my offices. I sat straight up in a chair at one end of the room dressed in a blazer and slacks while he draped himself over a leather couch facing me, wearing only his swimming shorts and a baseball cap.
“How’s it going, Mr. Rockefeller?”
“It’s going really well.” I smiled uncomfortably. “I’ve had a gale force wind blowing up my back almost all week.”
Bob didn’t quite share my enthusiasm.
“As long as you’re happy.” He sat up on the couch. “I heard you quit Infinixx.”
“I was tired of dealing with Nancy.” I didn’t mention the investigation into my tinkering with the Infinixx code. Nothing came of it, and I’d gotten what I’d wanted.
Bob raised his eyebrows. The three of us had been inseparable as kids, but I’d been the third wheel to their intense romantic relationship, one that everyone but them realized wasn’t over yet.
“You’re not mad at me, are you?” he asked. “I mean, that Brigitte thing. Sid and I were just messing around.”
I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it.”
Thinking of Brigitte made my stomach tighten into knots, and my patience evaporated. I have a lot to get done. Bob watched me in silence. “Who are you hanging out with these days?”
“Ah, just work people, you know.… ” It wasn’t as if he worked, so why should I bother explaining? Maybe accepting his ping was a bad idea. I balled my fists.
Right at that moment, Wally warned me that Vince Indigo was waiting. I don’t remember taking a meeting with Vince. Wally noted that he’d alerted me not five minutes before about it, but I’d been so deeply splintered.…
“Listen, I have Vince Indigo waiting in person, a last minute meeting.” I was happy for a reason to cut our chat short. “Big client, I’d better go.”
“Yeah, okay, sure.” Bob squinted and cocked his head to one side. “Do you think you could ask Vince if he’s okay? That stuff on Phuture News is weirding me out.”
“I’m not comfortable doing that.” I began drumming my fingers against my leg. “I don’t know him very well. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
“He doesn’t answer my pings anymore.”
I shouldn’t either. “Sorry, this is business.”
Bob looked down. “Right. Anyway, let’s hang out soon? We should talk about all this stuff, your work changes, Brigitte.… ”
“Sure, sure, gotta go.” I waved good-bye, leaving a wafer-thin splinter behind. I flitted back into real-space at my apartment, where Vince was already waiting. Visions of an unimpressed Bob watching me go persisted in several of my visual channels.
“So I assume business is good?” Vince asked. He wandered around the periphery of my apartment, staring outward at the projected spaces of my growing business in the multiverse world of New London.
My new offices had been designed by one of the most sought-after interior metaworld designers. The glass-walled space floated in air, suspended above an almost endless array of cubicles housing renderings of my splintered parts, sub-proxxies, and other synthetic beings and bots that were spawned outward from my own cognitive systems. It was thousands of me working for me.
“Business is very, very good.” I grinned widely. I’d found a back door to Infinixx, and could now splinter as much as I liked, but I couldn’t tell him that. I couldn’t tell anyone. With that hack, I’d already paid off our family mortgage and was well on my way to amassing a sizable personal fortune.
Vince had an air of desperation. It flattered my ego that one of the richest people in the world would make a personal house call for a favor from me, but his nervousness made me nervous. I didn’t like the way he was looking at all the activity below us, and I wondered what could be making him so jumpy—he had all the money in the world to burn, as far as I could tell.
“I noticed you amped up your Phuture News services,” he said carefully, “but that’s not why I’m here. I’m sending the details of what I need, right now.”
A description of a series of financial transaction he wanted me to carry out was uploaded to one of my splinters. In an instant they had analysed it.
“You want me to what?” I replied. “You know this is going to look suspicious, especially with me working for Infinixx.”
“From what I’ve heard, you don’t work for them anymore.”
I wondered how much he really knew. “Sure, but it’ll still look odd.”
Vince had ulterior designs afoot, and that was fine with me. He was offering a princely sum for almost no work. So this is what it’s like to be with the big boys. I didn’t care what he was up to, and it didn’t look illegal—at least, my end didn’t.