Not many people had ever ghosted me before that, and I wasn’t popular at flitter tag. Practically the only people that had been inside me up to then had been my parents, and then usually only to terrorize me. But that day was different, a shared experience rather than an intrusion. Despite myself, I tingled warmly and smiled.
“Isn’t that nice?” said Ms. Parnassus, noticing me smiling. “Now show them what you showed me.”
Taking a deep breath, I dove down into my body, shrinking, dragging them with me. I could hear their giggles back behind my mind. Down, down we dove, into the tiniest of spaces inside me, past bone and blood, squeezing past the granular limit of pssi-tech. I stopped for a moment, and then, holding my breath, pushed the limit further.
I squeezed our group of consciousness down to the molecular level, finally stopping inside one of my living cell nuclei to watch a newly hatched protein unfold. The kids became silent, engrossed. Then I shot back outward and upward through my veins and stopped again, the powerful thump of my heart filling our sensory space. I snapped our tactile arrays to the outside of my aorta, and we felt our skins expanding, contracting, my lifeblood flowing through us.
“Cool!” exclaimed Bob, followed quickly by a chorus of, “Show me how! Show me!”
Ms. Parnassus smiled, watching the kids all snap back into themselves and run to mob me in the middle of the Schoolyard.
Flitter tag was the undeniable king of games at the pssi-kid academy, but for a while, rag dolling became all the rage as I taught them to open up individual body parts and snap people into them. Moving the body around, each person controlled only their part, with the net effect being much like a drunken sailor trying to get home.
It was the start of my journey into the security of conscious systems.
12
Identity: Patricia Killiam
“So how does it feel, Adriana, or, rather, Ormead?”
I looked out at the view from our perch in the hills above Napa Valley. The lush greens of a late-summer harvest were staked out into the blue-shifted distance along perfectly ordered rows in the vineyards below. Swallows, weaving and darting in a silent dance, chased invisible insects in a sapphire sky.
I motioned to the waiter for another glass of Chardonnay.
Adriana was one of my test study participants who had recently chosen to composite with two of her friends, Orlando and Melinda. Compositing was a new process I was promoting that created virtual private pssi networks that tied people’s nervous systems together. It was like two or more people continuously ghosting each other, but much more intimate. Compositing amounted to fusing the neural systems of the organisms involved.
“It’s wonderful!” she replied with a glow in her eyes. Their partners had decided to composite as well. “The combination of Michael, Denzel, and Phoenix—Mideph—is everything we wanted in a mate—sporty, funny, a good listener, and passionate and artistic.”
Composites were fitting nicely into the evolutionary chain as a new form of deep social bonding to help protect individual psyches from becoming overwhelmed in the multiverse. The cultural aspect of the human social animal was managing to adapt to pssi, but it was still falling behind.
I took a deep breath.
We were moving too quickly.
Whereas compositing in general was a positive evolutionary step forward, an opposite form of self-compositing was becoming a problem.
Before the shock of losing his body, Willy McIntyre had been well on his way to self-compositing into a social cocoon made up of only copies and splinters of himself. Now, from what I’d seen, he’d begun working his way back out, but only because he’d lost his body—not everyone would be so lucky.
Adriana, on the other hand, was part of a new class of composites that formed spontaneous holobionts to symbiotically form a protective barrier against their social networks devolving into isolated clumps within the multiverse. The history of evolution was more about symbiotic organisms evolving into new groups than simply a slow accumulation of new traits. In evolutionary terms, today’s individuals were yesterday’s groups.
Adriana and two of her girlfriends today were collectively inhabiting Adriana’s body, and it still threw off my pssi because it posited her personal details in my display space. We have to fix that. I’d planned on making composites as much a part of the launch protocol as I could, but time was running out.
“And we are everything he really wanted,” she continued. “A responsible, motherly woman who is career oriented but also zany and spontaneous. I don’t think this could have happened any other way.”
These little victories were what made it all worthwhile. Love was still that most powerful of emotions, magically finding ways to fill the cracks that pssi had fissured open in Atopian culture.
“So I heard you’re going to have children? That’s wonderful news!”
Without them reforming as a composite, offspring by any of them separately would have probably never happened. Post-pssi fertility rates on Atopia were approaching zero, but then again, that was counting fertility in the old, biological sense. If we began counting synthetic and biosynthetic beings, such as proxxi, fertility rates were actually skyrocketing.
It all depended on your point-of-view.
Adriana-Ormead smiled even wider, if that was possible. “Yes, we’re going to use Adriana’s body to gestate triplets,” she gushed. “We’re going to do it the natural way and just mix our six DNA patterns together randomly and see what comes up.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
Composites weren’t just a meeting of minds. It enabled individual neurons in one body to connect with the billions of neurons in the attached composited bodies, using the pssi communication network to replace biological nerve signaling.
While this mimicked the dense connectivity of nerves themselves, it was creating neurological structures that had never existed, could never exist, in the real world, and people had already begun stretching the boundaries. Some had begun compositing with animals, with nano-assemblers, with robotics and artificial minds, even expanding their wetware into entirely synthetic spaces.
As new ecosystems emerged, life constantly evolved to fill them, and pssi had opened not just a new ecosystem, but an endless ecosystem of ecosystems. At the very start of the program, we’d begun experimenting with releasing the nervous systems of pssi-infected biological animals into synthetic worlds, creating rules of nature there to allow them to evolve freely.
The results had been staggering.
What was happening to humans as they released themselves into the pssi-augmented multiverse was an experiment in the making, and one we hadn’t had the luxury of time to understand.
And all this had been just within the controlled and monitored experiment of Atopia, released into a few hundred thousand people living within a relatively homogeneous culture. What would happen when this was freed, unchecked, into the billions of souls in the rest of the world was anyone’s guess.
I felt like I was witnessing the cyber-version of the Cambrian explosion a half-billion years ago, when the first elemental life had burst forth in diversity to cover the earth. Except instead of Earth, life was now flooding into the endless reaches of the cyber-multiverse, and instead of millions of years, evolution was now measured in weeks, days, hours.
“Our plan is to let them decide whether they want to composite themselves or not,” continued Ormead, refocusing my wandering mind, “but it’s hard to imagine why they wouldn’t want to, knowing what we know now.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” was all I could say. She’d started on a journey that I’d set in motion, but to a destination I could scarcely imagine anymore.