Immediately the pages of the magazine began to morph, shifting and dissolving until the same page appeared before me, but this time with the advertisements in it.
“And, Kenny, now back on please.”
The images and text on the page quickly shape shifted back and the adverts dissolved away. Amazing.
As I considered this, I realized that the news broadcast hadn’t had any ads floating across it either, nor had it been interrupted by any advertising breaks. Really amazing.
I sat bolt upright and listened hard to the noise from outside, paying attention more carefully. I could still hear the traffic and bustle of people, but the baseline clatter of the street hawkers and holo ads was absent.
Nice.
6
WE’D WON THE first phase of the Cognix account. It was the biggest our marketing company had ever been awarded and I was something of a hero around the office. Bertram had even been tolerable lately, but only just.
Today we were helping run an online press conference with Patricia Killiam, Cognix’s most famous scientist and primary press presence. The meeting was being held in one of the Atopian conference rooms. Many of the reporters were actually on Atopia with Patricia in the room, but most people, like me, were attending remotely. I started up the holographic promo-world for the reporters to get the show started.
“Imagine,” said an extremely attractive young woman, or man, depending on your preference, “have you ever thought of hiking the Himalayas in the morning and finishing off the day on a beach in the Bahamas?”
As she walked along an exotically anonymous beach, she began nodding, conveying to us that not only was it possible, but it was something that we needed, and that we obviously needed right away.
“Pssionics now enables limitless travel with nearly zero environmental impact. You’ll be having the most fun, with the lowest combined footprint, of anyone in your social cloud!”
“And you’ll never forget anything again,” laughed the girl, reminding us of everything we’d ever thought we’d forgotten. “You’ll never again have to argue about who said what!”
While we all contemplated the things our mates had gotten wrong over the years, her face shifted into a more serious demeanor.
“Imagine performing more at work while being there less. Want to get in shape? Your new proxxi can take you for a run while you relax by the pool!” she exclaimed, stopping her walk to look directly into the viewer’s eyes.
“Look how you want, when you want, where you want, and live longer doing it. Create the reality you need right now with Atopian pssionics, and sign up soon for zero cost!”
The woman faded into the slowly rotating Atopian logo.
A short silence settled while Patricia let it all sink in. She was the master at this, and she should be after all the years she’d spent punting for it.
“So, how exactly is pssionics going to make the world a better place?” asked an attractive blond from one of the entertainment outlets.
I watched Patricia carefully roll her eyes. She didn’t like the term ‘pssionics’, too much baggage. The blond reporter’s name floated into view in one of my display spaces: Ginny.
“Well Ginny, I prefer to use the term ‘polysynthetic sensory interface’ or just pssi,” replied Patricia, detaching from her body.
A computerized image of Patricia floated up above her body and continued to talk with the reporters while her proxxi walked her body along beneath the projection. Nobody batted an eye. They weren’t easily impressed anymore.
“We’ve been able to demonstrate here on Atopia that people are just as happy with virtual goods as material ones. You just need to make the simulation good enough, real enough.”
Everyone nodded as they’d all heard this before. I’d already heard this speech a dozen times myself, and my mind wandered off to thinking about how pssi had already changed my life. I certainly felt more rested. I began thinking of calling Alex, just to chat.
“Everyone!” announced Patricia, drawing my attention back to her presentation. That’s right. This morning they were going to be doing the weapons demonstration. It was a good marketing stunt to show off that they were serious.
“If you’ll allow me,” continued Patricia, “I’d like to take whoever is coming up to watch the test firing of the slingshot.”
Everyone nodded, and she took control of our visual points-of-view and pulled us up through the ceiling of the conference room and out above Atopia with dizzying speed. We shot upwards into the sky.
“So to answer your question, pssi will change the world by moving it from the destructive downward spiral of material consumption and into the clean world of synthetic consumption.”
Our viewpoint began to slow as we neared the edge of space. The curved horizon of the Earth was spread out in the distance, above oceans far below. The sun was just rising.
“Ten billion people all fighting for their piece of the material dream is destroying the planet, and pssi is the solution that will bring us back from the brink!”
Her finale was punctuated by a growling roar as the slingshot filled the air around us with a fiery inferno. The reporters clapped loudly in the background.
They couldn’t get enough of this stuff.
7
IT HAD BEEN a long day, and a creeping headache was just reaching a roaring finale by the time I finished late at night. After a few weeks of smooth sailing on the Cognix account, today we’d had our first major speed bump with the disaster of a Cognix-related project launch called Infinixx.
We were all in high damage control mode. The spectacle of Bertram in another one of his ridiculous outfits had just topped it all off. While I was slaving away, he’d spent most of the day trolling around the office assistant pool, looking for some ditzy new romantic victim.
Bertram and I had also just had a big argument about whether to use Patricia or some new young pssi-kid, Jimmy, as the main media presence for marketing. I was adamant about sticking with Patricia, but Bertram was just as convinced we should switch to someone newer and younger.
Everything and everyone at the office was getting on my nerves. I had to escape outside for a cigarette nearly every half hour to get away. I just wanted to be left alone.
I’d found out that Alex had started dating Mary. I didn’t care, but their hypocrisy made me angry. Is this what friends did? I was having a hard time getting it out of my mind, and I’d blocked all of their incoming messages and removed them from my social clouds.
Grabbing a handful of anti–inflammatories from my desk drawer, I got up to leave for the night, and downed the pills dry as I exited the giant brass and glass doors of our building out onto 5 Avenue.
I was lost deep in thought about how to spin the Infinixx mess when my senses were shocked by an expectational vacuum. Stopped in my tracks, I blinked out into the collecting dusk, looking out above the sea of people jostling past me.
It was as if a layer of noisy fluorescent dirt had been scraped off the City by the hand of God.
All the advertising was gone, as if it had never been there. I could actually see the buildings around me. The comparative calmness was mesmerizing, and I stepped out and into the quiet flow of pedestrian hubbub, looking up above and around me in wonderment. The flow carried me up 5 and into Central Park, and in a dreamy state I continued to walk around the edge of the park, staring at my City with new eyes.
I’d been using my pssi for a while already, but New York without advertising still had a creepy feel to it. But,
