“Bob, honey, don’t be so mad. It’s his birthday today, let’s please be nice,” came my mum’s quavering voice. “Forgiveness is the key to life. Forgive yourself, son.”
I sighed. It looked like this was going to be a tag team event. I could see the guy behind my mum in the toga and sandals begin to lean forward as if to add something, but I leaned his way and angrily waved my finger at him to cut short whatever was coming from that corner.
“Not a word from you, okay?” I spat at him.
I was as patient as the next guy, but my mum having her personal Jesus following her around like a puppy dog, so that she could chat to him all the time, was getting on my nerves. It wasn’t so bad if her Jesus just sat there and spoke when spoken to, but it really drove me nuts when he started jumping into conversations.
“Mum,” I asked, turning to her, “what do I have to forgive myself for?”
“I don’t know, son. You have to figure that out for yourself,” she replied softly, in the way that only mothers can. “I know you can son, you have special abilities.”
My dad rolled his eyes, shaking his head at the three of us. He didn’t like it when mum started talking like this.
Our family had something of an unusual history, filled with flashes of brilliance and corners of darkness. My great-great-grandfather had been something of a nut. He claimed to have been able to speak with the dead and move objects with his mind. It was something my dad was ashamed of.
My grandfather had been almost as bad, and he and my father had stopped speaking a long time ago when my father had left New York to accept a job on the Washington beltway. The lunacy tended to skip a generation. My dad was just waiting for me to starting hear voices, and I honestly couldn’t blame him for worrying about me using drugs.
“There is evil in the world, son,” added Jesus for good measure.
I shot him my own evil glance.
“Only the evil that we make,” I replied, feeling suddenly defeated.
“Yes, the evil that we make.”
That stopped everyone in their tracks. I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes, fighting frustration on the one hand and a general sense of not being sure what was happening on the other. Maybe I could try a different tack.
“Look, all this stuff is great, but technology can make you stupid, you know?”
My addled brain was trying to find some way out of these woods I’d wandered it into. All four of them stared at me.
“Like a generation ago, Eskimos didn’t even have a word for ‘lost,’ and now without GPS they can barely find their way out of a frozen paper bag.”
“I believe they’re called Inuit,” suggested Martin. I looked at him hopelessly.
“That’s not the point. Look, I’m stuck in this thing, and I love all you guys,” I said, really thinking that I love
My dad just shrugged.
“Okay, Bob. Whatever you think is best.”
He clearly didn’t think it was best.
“Just leave me to do stuff the way I want, in the time I want,” I said, grabbing some croissants and a glass of orange juice. “Anyway this was great. I’m going surfing. Is that okay with everyone?”
I was going to check on Vince to see if he wanted to go surfing.
Vince was the man.
4
The sense of touch was the most underappreciated of all the senses, at least of the senses the rest of the world had. When the first elemental life had ventured out into the primordial goo, it was its sense of touch that kept it safe from danger.
Touch was the most ancient of our senses, existing before any sight, sound, taste, or smell existed. It was essential to the feeling of things being a part of your body. When you played tennis, did you think about the racquet hitting the ball as you swung? No. The racquet became a part of you. Tools that began as extensions of our bodies soon became a part of it.
It was the same with any tool we used, and pssi made it possible to make tools out of information flow in the multiverse and incorporate into our bodies in much the same way.
For me, the flow of information was an apt metaphor. As surfing became my obsession at a young age, my innovation had been to remap my tactile sense into the water around me.
Sitting on my surfboard, bobbing up and down between the swells, I could feel the pressure and shape and even the temperature of the water’s surface around me through my skin, and the thousands of neurons attached to each hair follicle could sense tiny subsurface eddies and water currents.
After nearly twenty years of dedicated practice, my brain had neuroplastically reformatted to devote a large part of itself to my water-sense, and I now had the most highly attuned tactile array of any pssi-kid, or for that matter, anyone else in the world. Sitting with my eyes closed, I could feel the water moving and undulating around me as a perfectly natural and integral part of my body.
I was one with the water, and it was one with me.
Still a little hung-over from the previous evening, I opened my eyes to awake from my reverie. Atopia sure was pretty from out here, with its thick forests rising up from white sandy beaches. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move and a beautiful stag suddenly burst forth from the forest underbrush. We eyed each other for a moment, and then he disappeared.
Above decks, the floating island of Atopia was covered in forests that were teaming with ‘wild’ animals, but like everything else out there, their neural systems were loaded with the smarticles that floated in the air and water around us. Everything here was a part of the pssi network, but I doubted that the animals ever realized they were off in virtual worlds as they stampeded through synthetic savannahs while vet-bots tended to their real bodies in downtime.
Not much wild was left in the world today. It was ironic that tourists now lined up to come to a completely artificial island built to perfect synthetic reality, all to enjoy a shred of the old reality hiding inside it by dusting themselves down in smarticles.
Smarticles were the pixie dust that permeated everything on Atopia, a system of nanoscale particles that worked as both a sensor and communication network, floating everywhere in the air and water. They suffused through the bodies of living creatures to lodge into their nervous systems to form the foundation of pssi.
Pssi enabled not just jumping off into virtual worlds, but also the sharing of experiences and even bodies. A philosopher had once rhetorically asked what it was like to be a bat, meaning that it was something we could never know, but out here on Atopia, you could inhabit a bat, a bear, a fish, a shark, a tree, and even, sometimes, yourself.
The beaming sun was drying the salt water into crystals on my skin, making it itchy as it baked, and I scratched my neck and shifted positions on my board. A breeze mixed the sea air with the musty odor of a tangle of seaweed floating nearby.
While the water was cold, my pssi tuned it out and I was perfectly comfortable. I just had to be careful my muscles didn’t get too sluggish when it came time for action.
Seagulls squawked and wheeled in the sky, and otters were playing out in the kelp not far away, chattering away about whatever otters chattered about. Some were floating around on their backs, eating a breakfast of clams they had scrounged from aquaculture bins below.
Out here I felt a certain peace that escaped me elsewhere, a deep meditative calm outside the madness. I came out here often to think about Nancy, to think about my brother, to think about how I had messed everything up. Looking up, I could see nimbus clouds striping the blue cathedral of the sky.
It was just another day in paradise.
