People streamed past us. We seemed lost in the moment, staring at each other. Still the blank stare. Was he about to cry? Ah shit. I fumbled around in my pockets, but I had no change. Anyway, why should I help him? Nobody had ever helped me in my life. I’d always had to fend for myself, for everything.
I felt suddenly angry. In a flash my senses returned and I dismissed this human straggler. Turning away I merged back into the pedestrian flow.
“You should be more careful, life can throw you funny curveballs lady,” I heard him say while I was swept away.
“We’ll be seeing you here with us soon!” he shouted, in the distance, fading away.
I shivered. There was no way I’d let myself fall so far. He was probably lying anyway. That’s what they did. At that moment an incoming ping arrived from Kenny.
“What?” I asked, happy to move onto some new topic.
Kenny materialized walking in step beside me.
“That was close,” he commented.
“What was close?” Was he spying on me?
“That bum that almost knee capped you just now.”
“Kenny, how do you know what just happened?” My anger began brimming from its ambient low boil.
“Your pssi has an automated threat assessment, and since I’m the root user, a security alert popped up on my display,” he said defensively. “You know, there’s an automated collision avoidance system you could activate.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” I shot back. “You’re not watching me with that thing are you?”
“No, no, it’s just an alarm,” protested Kenny, his projection ducking and weaving around the foot traffic as he kept pace with me. “Like I said, as the root user, I get security alerts fed to me automatically. I just thought you may have needed some help.”
I looked at him. “So you managed to get root access to my system? I thought you said the system didn’t allow it?”
It was all the same to me. I hated dealing with that stuff. Having Kenny manage it made my life that much simpler.
“Yeah, someone from the company authorized it as part of the testing procedure. They gave us a backdoor workaround.”
“Good.”
At least something was going my way. Kenny was staring at me as I squinted into the darkness.
“What?” I urged. I could see he had something more to say.
“Well, I could set the pssi to adjust your perceptual brightness, even optimize contrast. That would make it easier for you to see things.”
I wasn’t too keen on the thing controlling my body, but this seemed reasonable.
“Sure, show me,” I replied, my anger fizzling.
Immediately, the scene around me brightened and the edges grew sharper. I knew it was dark out, but I could see everything clearly, in even sharper detail than full daylight.
“Kenny, that is actually…great,” I said after a moment. “Good work.”
He brightened up at my praise like a puppy. Before I could say anything else, Kenny started to speak again, his geek-citement bubbling out.
“Believe it or not, but we could filter out street people too,” he added. “I could also set it so that garbage and dirt is cleaned off the street, or remove graffiti. There are all kinds of reality skins you can set in this thing. We would need to initiate some of the kinesthetic features, though.”
I had turned onto 75by then, my street, and could see a few street people hanging around on the corner up ahead, begging for money. They were more or less invisible to me anyway, the great unseen as it were, but seeing them there irked me.
“Sure, Kenny, let’s try it,” I replied with mildly venomous enthusiasm at the thought of wiping out these street vermin. The instant I said it, the panhandlers up ahead melted away, and the walls of the buildings suddenly washed free of graffiti. The sidewalk beneath me began to glisten as if it was newly laid.
“How’s that?” asked Kenny.
“That is amazing,” I replied.
It actually was amazing. It was my neighborhood, just a better version. Scrubbed clean.
In the distance, I saw a robot walk by.
“Could you also set it to remove all robotics, I mean, unless they directly address me?” They still made me nervous. This gave me another idea. “And remove all couples holding hands as well.”
Perhaps this was a little too much information to share with Kenny, but he just shrugged and nodded.
“All done. So this is the new pssi system that Cognix is going to release, huh?” asked Kenny.
I was busy enjoying myself, looking around and admiring my new neighborhood, but felt some irritation creep back in. Kenny was always looking to pick under the edges.
“I don’t know, Kenny, but they’re going to be giving it away soon so you’ll be able to play with it to your heart’s content, okay?”
“Cool,” he replied.
In an overlaid display space I could see him tuning into a media broadcast from Patricia Killiam. Our marketing program really did seem to be working.
8
New York can make you crazy, but if I’d ever had a bad day at work, this was the worst. I’d spent the past week almost sleeping at the office, preparing reams of new material for the Cognix launch. It was a simultaneous worldwide release, the biggest media campaign of all time, and we were in a fever pitch trying to get everything ready.
Storms were sweeping up the Eastern Pacific towards Atopia. Hurricanes by themselves were nothing unusual, and these weren’t close to threatening the island city, but Atopia had begun inexplicably moving itself much closer towards America. Without any explanation from them we had to somehow cover and spin this positively in addition to everything else going on.
Kenny had managed to install filters in my own pssi system so that Bertram the jerk, and the floosies in the assistant pool, were filtered out of my visual input unless they directly addressed me in some way. That had been great to begin with, but as the days went by, I’d started getting more and more frustrated with almost everyone.
The show stopper had come at the end of the week.
“Olympia,” came the call from my boss, “could you come in here please?”
This was the final decision on the final stage of the Cognix account, and I was nervous. The old school and the new school were facing down, and I felt the future of my career suddenly hanging in the balance.
Flicking off some Phuture News gossip girls, I collected my Cognix materials and sent them over to the conference room, closing down my workstation as I got up to leave. I ran a hand through my hair to straighten it out and absently brushed some lint off my shoulder as I looked out at the wall of the building facing my window, hardly ten feet away.
My reflected image hung thinly over the cold, chipped brick beyond. My heart thumped loudly in my chest, each contraction pushing blood tensely through my arteries, forcing it down into my veins, straining it into the smallest of vessels as the pressure built up. I tried taking a deep breath, but there was nowhere for the air to go.
Sweat beaded upon my forehead.
Shake it off, take the fight to them, I thought to myself. A vision of that bum on the street suddenly crowded my mind, and I looked down and away. “We’ll be seeing you soon,” was what he’d said. What did he mean by that? That will never be me.
My heart began racing.
