Sintil8 was comfortably draped across from me on a black leather couch, still dressed in blue silk pajamas, wrapped in a velvet house coat, and wearing gray fur slippers, one of which dangled casually off a foot as he crossed his legs. I perched uneasily on the edge of my matching couch.
As we spoke, one of his minions, or disciples, depending how you looked at it, swept smoothly across the landing to hand him another glass of scotch. Her scarred and mottled body was barely a shrunken stump suspended between impossibly spindly metal legs with matching thin metal arms.
Sadly, she wasn’t all that unusual. Mandroids—humans with extensive robotic replacement limbs and parts—were becoming all the more common as entanglements in the Weather Wars continued to spread. Medical technology could stop soldiers in the field from dying from almost any inflicted trauma apart from major brain damage, and so had begun the steady stream of half-human, half-machine patchwork people into societies around the world.
Of course, this one was no soldier; she had done it to herself. Sintil8 was the leader of a grotesque cult that encouraged its closest followers to consume their own bodies, a literal ritualized eating of themselves that was matched with a gradual replacement of their disappearing body parts by robotic ones. Consuming themselves was the path to spiritual and corporal enlightenment—so preached Sintil8.
“Thank you,” said Sintil8 as he accepted the drink.
The woman serving us was so devoted to this ideal that she had consumed her own eyes, I realized with horror as she turned to cast my way what she must have thought of as a smile. Dark caverns yawned out at me from where her eyes should have been. In the depths of the shadows at the backs of her scarred orbitals, I could see the glittering red of photoreceptor arrays.
“Tut, tut,” Sintil8 chided, watching my expression as she walked away, “so quick to judge. And you, you’re not creating any monsters, are you?”
I said nothing.
“No?” he replied, letting this hang in the air as he smiled at me, not bothering to conceal how much he was enjoying this. “And yet, here you are, coming to me for help. What a surprising turn of events this is.”
Sintil8 was perhaps the most powerful and persistent opponent of the pssi program. As one of the greatest purveyors of pleasures in the physical world, not to mention arms dealer to all sides of the Weather Wars, the global organization he represented stood to lose a lot of money when pssi was released.
He’d been lobbying hard to have the brain’s pleasure pathways removed from our pssi protocols, and we’d often been at each other’s throats in closed-room government regulatory meetings around the world. Kesselring had finally won the day by portraying Sintil8 as a modern-day Al Capone–style gangster, lording over the weaknesses of the human animal from his fortresses in Chicago, Moscow, and other cities around the world.
It wasn’t far from the truth.
Despite my suspicions and less than savory opinion of him, using an enemy-of-my-enemy sort of logic, I’d come to Sintil8 to try and help me root out what Kesselring was hiding. Really, it was more of a fallback plan in case I needed an ace up my sleeve, and also to see if I could find out what he was up to. The latest string of disappearances was the sort of thing he’d be capable of orchestrating.
“Look,” I said, turning all this over in my mind, “I may be able to help you, if you help me.”
“Now you’re speaking my language,” he replied with a smile. He scanned the information and data sets I’d just sent him, the details of a deal.
“Ladno. I will find out what I can,” he said finally.
“Good.”
A pause, and his smile grew wider. “How rude of me—would you like to stay for dinner?”
I shook my head. “Thanks, but no.” I was afraid to find out what, or rather who, they would be eating tonight.
We sat and stared at each other. Despite expending considerable resources in Atopia’s tussles with Sintil8, we still didn’t have the full picture of the man. He was probably one of the few people alive older than me, and as far as we could tell, he’d risen up through the ranks of the Russian mafia in the late twentieth century after starting his career in Stalin’s security apparatus.
Some reports hinted that he’d been a tank commander in the Red Army’s defeat of the Nazis outside Leningrad, the battles in which he’d probably lost the first bits of his own body. We suspected he was just a brain in a box somewhere, but exactly where, we didn’t know.
“We drink to our agreement,” Sintil8 commanded as he raised his scotch. An identical glass dutifully materialized in my own hands. “Budem zdorovy,” he intoned.
“Stay healthy indeed,” I replied, raising my glass with his, drinking to seal our bargain.
11
Identity: Jimmy Scadden
In the days and weeks after the announcement of the Infinixx launch date, Nancy’s profile in the Atopian community had increased dramatically. The press couldn’t get enough of her. I’d been asked to help out, and I had splinters strung out in a seemingly endless stream of press events across the multiverse.
“Where did the idea for your distributed consciousness technology come from?” asked a reporter in one event I was canvassing.
The question wasn’t directed at me. Nancy smiled beside me and began explaining how it had all come from the childhood game flitter tag that we used to play. She was gushing on and on, and it was beginning to annoy me. Flitter tag may have been the king of pssi-kid games, but my favorite had always been rag dolling.
It had been my own personal addition to our repertoire.
One day, Ms. Parnassus, our human teacher back at the pssi-kid academy, had asked each of us to come up and demonstrate a special trick or skill. Each child had risen in turn to show off something they could do. One inflated into a balloon, floating up to bounce around on the ceiling. Nancy showed off by holding a dozen conversations at once, with everyone around the classroom. Bob, of course, took us surfing.
Then came my turn.
“Come on, Jimmy,” our teacher had encouraged, “show everyone what you showed me.”
She gently rotated me into the center of everyone’s attentional matrix. I nervously looked at my classmates—an arrayed collection of fantastical little creatures floating impatiently around in my display spaces.
Fidgeting, I looked down at my feet. They uncontrollably spawned into writhing tentacles that nervously knotted together like cave eels trying to escape sudden sunlight.
Giggles erupted.
“Go ahead,” said Ms. Parnassus, nodding and smiling, prodding me on. She collapsed everyone’s skins into my identity space, morphing us into a shared reality of children standing around the Schoolyard playground, with me at the center. I was now dressed in gray flannel shorts, with a matching sweater and a shirt with a little red clip-on tie.
More giggles. Mother insisted on this ridiculous outfit for my primary identity.
Oak trees arched between the swing sets and jungle gyms of the Schoolyard, reaching high above us like a leafy green cathedral beneath a perfectly blue sky.
“Come on, Jimmy, they’ll love it, trust me,” said Ms. Parnassus.
I nodded, gathering my courage, and set up my trick.
“Everyone, detach and snap into Jimmy. Now hurry up!” she clapped.
There were a few groans. The rest of the kids had little hope of anything fun coming from quiet, awkward Jimmy Scadden. Still, I sensed them all clicking obediently into my conscious perimeter.
Unlocking my pssi-channels, I felt them crowding inside me, feeling what I felt, seeing what I saw. The sensation was ticklish as they squirmed impatiently, waiting for something to happen.