“Open up a little, she’ll love that.” Bob laughed, winking at me, and then raised his eyebrows, giving me a little poke with one of his phantoms to indicate something behind me.
With a shake of his head, he stopped me from looking around. Instead, I snuck a peek behind me without turning my head, overlaying part of my visual channel with a local wikiworld view, and saw Cynthia coming up behind us. She noticed my ghost checking her out anyway.
“Go get ’em, Tiger,” Bob said encouragingly as he got up to leave. “I’ve gotta go catch my own sweetheart.”
Bob and Nancy had been intertwined almost since birth and had grown into the pssi-kid power couple. He walked back to the gathering crowd, leaving Cynthia and me alone.
“Hey, Cynthia,” said Bob as he walked past her, looking back to wink at me again. Cynthia smiled at him and turned her gaze toward me. I began to sweat profusely.
“Hi Jimmy, what’s up?” came Cynthia’s singsong voice. She skipped the last few steps up to me.
“Not… much, how… how are you?” I stammered, my mind going blank. After a few seconds of agonizing silence, I cried out, “Cynthia!”
“I’m great!” she replied brightly, smiling shyly. “How’s your research going?”
“Uh, yeah, good.… ” I thought of what Bob had said. “I could show you some of the stuff I’m doing at Solomon House if you like.”
“Really? Cool!” Her eyes and smile widened. “Can we go now?”
I nodded. Why not?
“Mom!” she yelled, and her mother’s face floated up between the two of us.
“Yes, Cynthia? You don’t need to yell, you know,” her mother admonished.
Cynthia continued unfazed. “I’m going to flit out with Jimmy for a bit. He’s going to show me some of the stuff he’s working on at Solomon House.”
Cynthia’s mother looked suitably impressed.
“Work at the Solomon House? But you’re just a baby,” she remarked, looking my way and furrowing her brow. “Sure, go ahead, but I’m pinging you back the second Nancy gets here.”
Cynthia grabbed my hand and squealed, “Let’s go!”
Feeling her hand on mine sparked an electric shock that spread like wildfire through my body, settling hotly in my crotch. An erection immediately sprang to life. Cynthia sensed something going on from my embarrassed, flushed cheeks. She looked at me mischievously.
“Come on, Jimmy, let’s go!”
I pulled her back and away, and we dropped out from our bodies and into my private workspace. I’d never brought anyone there before and I felt naked.
In one layer of my visual field I could see Samson inhabiting my body back at the beach, holding hands with Cynthia’s proxxi near one side of the blue-and-yellow tent. They were watched carefully by Cynthia’s mother’s proxxi as they went off to get some cotton candy. I smiled.
Cynthia and I were standing together in a white laboratory with gleaming floors and walls. We looked out at a view through smoky windows onto Atopia below, the same view as from the real Solomon House atop the farming complex.
Above stainless steel tables floated a variety of working models of mirror neuron interfaces that Dr. Granger and I were studying. He shared my interest in the physiological bases of emotion and the ability to use it to direct the hive mind, but where he was more interested in happiness, I had taken more of an interest in fear—something the other researchers had mostly passed by.
While we walked, I keyed through some parameters with my phantoms to wash away the tables and structures, replacing them with my current project. A model of the neuron appeared, looking like some kind of deep-sea monster, slowly rotating and floating in space in front of us.
I was keenly aware of Cynthia’s grip on my sweaty hand.
“Cool,” she said, watching my model light up, demonstrating a visually enhanced synaptic firing sequence. It was a working prototype.
“This isn’t just a model,” I explained. “This is actually happening inside me right now!”
After some testing, I’d installed them in my own developing wetware to see how they would respond. I started explaining how it worked, the way this enhanced mirror neuron provided a more reliable pathway to empathy. Empathy was something I was working on. I didn’t understand it, or rather, I understood it, but I just didn’t feel it. This model was my path forward.
As I explained the details, Cynthia wandered off, exploring the rest of my workspace. I wanted to show her something really special, and engrossed myself in my model, burrowing through the cell walls, trying to change some protein pathways.
“What’s in here?” she asked, opening a door.
“Oh, ah, nothing!” I cried out, but it was already too late.
As soon as the portal opened a crack, she dropped into the world beyond. I’d never let anyone in here, so I’d been lax with the security protocols of the worlds it was connected to. I quickly abandoned my model and shot off into that world after her.
Instantly, I was standing beside her in semidarkness. Shafts of light bore down from blackness above, illuminating a writhing mass of insects and worms and other creatures that were pinned painfully to the walls of my labyrinthine private universe.
An image of my mother’s face hung in space above us, twisted in hate.
“Who’s my little stinker?” she repeated over and over again, her face contorting and distorting.
I came here to heal myself, to reconnect and re-stimulate some of the sensory pain I’d felt as a child. The process seemed to allow me to refocus my mind. I would pick out some particularly nasty memories and then work through them bit by bit, simultaneously bathing my sensory system in the pain from the thousands of little creatures I had pinned to the walls.
I didn’t understand why, but it helped.
Cynthia shivered and looked around with wide eyes, scared but excited.
“This is so creepy,” she whispered, staring at the half-illuminated animals scraping and clawing futilely, never dying, never free, always trapped and in pain.
Looking at the hopeless little creatures, tears welled up in her eyes. “I can feel them,” she squeaked, her emotional networks starting to connect into this world’s. “This is horrible!”
Then, she was gone, flitting back to the birthday party.
Shocked, I stood still, the blood draining from my face. I wasn’t sure what to do. I closed down the image of my mother, and the space went dark and quiet, apart from the soft wriggling of the creatures on the walls.
I hadn’t remembered that there was a portal to this place from my workspace. At the time, I was too flustered to think clearly. I began quietly swearing at myself, but then I felt Samson grabbing me, pulling me back to reality.
I snapped back into my body with a sudden sense of vertigo. There was laughter, but I wasn’t back at the party. Somehow, I was in my private space again. The bugs were squirming on the walls as before, but now all the party guests were standing in the middle of it, and the bugs were magnified, giant monsters vainly trying to pull their bodies from the pushpins stuck through them.
Above it all, my mother was venting down on us, “Who’s my little stinker?”
Cynthia had stolen a copy of my world and projected it out here in public. I shrank in horror. All the kids were laughing, with Cynthia in the middle, pointing at me and screeching, “Who’s my stinky Jimmy!”
The adults were dumbfounded as to what was going on. It happened too quickly for them, but someone regained control of the situation, and the big-top tent reappeared with the balloons and monkeys. Everyone turned and looked at me, the kids laughing and giggling, the adults staring without comprehension.
“Why did you do that?” I screamed at Cynthia.