After some fuss, Vince Indigo, the famous founder of PhutureNews, had agreed to come surfing with me this morning. He’d become my regular surf buddy this past year, but had recently, and suddenly, dropped off the map.
Convincing him to come out this morning had been a major struggle, and even then, he didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. He was just staring off into space, not his usual chatty self. I was about to call out to Vince, to see what was bugging him, when I was interrupted.
“Hey.”
I looked down to find Martin sitting on the front of my board. We bobbed up and down in the swells together.
“Hey to you too, buddy,” I responded sheepishly. “Sorry about this morning, I know it was your birthday.”
Martin always kept the same clean-cut, square jawed image going despite the vagaries of fashion-fashion being so ugly these days, apparently, that its look had to be changed almost hourly. I grinned back into his pale blue eyes, a reflection of my own, and admired the tight buzz cut he was sporting today. Buzz Aldrin came to mind, or perhaps better, Buzz Lightyear.
You could hardly have imagined two twins more different.
“Don’t worry about it. Dad always gets worked up about that stuff, I don’t care.”
“Yeah he sure does,” I laughed, “and thanks for not ratting on me. So, Inuit huh? No Eskimos left in this world today?”
“Not according to me, I guess.”
We laughed together. It was nice.
“I just get so tired of him talking about Jimmy all the time,” I added, and Martin nodded.
When we were growing up here, I’d been just about the only one who’d tried befriending Jimmy. He’d been something of an oddball kid, but he shared the same birthday as my brother and I, so I guess I’d felt some kind of natural affinity towards him.
When his parents had abandoned Jimmy as a teenager, Patricia Killiam, his godmother and head of Solomon House Research Center, had asked our family to take him in. No good deed goes unpunished, as they said, and the downward spiral our family had been in, just continued ever steeper. To our father, Jimmy was now the shining star and savior of our family honor.
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” agreed Martin.
“I guess it’s hard to be encouraging if your son is a stoner surfer,” I laughed. “Anyway, who cares? I’m doing what I love.”
“Then what more could you ask for?”
I laughed and shrugged.
“Got some big action today?” he asked, changing the topic.
“Huge.”
I was sure he’d already checked out the big barrels being laid down across the northern crescent. Storm systems were generating some dangerous waves today, and that was just how I liked it.
“Anything interesting coming in?”
One of my phuturecasts was focused on incoming swells as it predicted the shape and size of the break, how the pipe developed and a dozen other factors. I could just sit here and watch the horizon for waves, but this way I could track swells coming from miles out and select the perfect one to get set at just the right point.
“Yeah, there have been a few nice ones, but I’m waiting for the real beast.”
Martin laughed. “Always the perfectionist, huh?”
“Well, with some things anyway.”
“Yeah, with some things.” He smiled and looked away.
“Bob!” came a yell from across the water. It was Vince, waving at us. “Bob, I need to get going!”
“Already?”
“Yeah, I need to get back to that thing.”
“I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do,” I observed.
Vince was one of the richest guys in the world, and lately all he’d be doing was surfing with me. I wondered what had suddenly gotten his hair on fire.
“Anyway, ping me if you change your mind. Hey, you should check out all that weird stuff on the news channels, and good luck!”
“Thanks, Bob,” he replied as his primary subjective flitted off, leaving his proxxi to guide his body home, “and good luck to you to!”
Both Martin and I waved goodbye, and then sat silently for a few minutes, enjoying the sea, sky and silence.
Martin looked down awkwardly. He was struggling with something.
“Bob, we should probably have a chat. I want to understand what’s going on with you.”
I looked down too.
“Yeah, I’ve been wanting to talk to you too…”
Maybe the time was right to bring up the gorilla in the room, but just then my metasenses started tingling.
“… but maybe in a few minutes?” I blurted out.
I detached my primary subjective point of view to spin it far out into the Pacific. My viewpoint coasted in just above the water, following a monster swell that was making its way towards us. It was huge, at least twenty feet deep, even out in the open ocean, and as I followed, it sprayed and frothed angrily, surging powerfully towards the glimmering speck of Atopia in the distance.
“This is the one I’ve been waiting for! I totally want to talk, but could I catch this wave first?”
I snapped hard back into my body and, using a phantom, punched up a visual overlay of how this wave would be breaking in a few minutes.
“No problem,” Martin laughed, pointing at the simulation. “Oh yeah, that’s gonna be huge!”
The wave would peak at nearly forty feet and generate an almond shaped pipe that would continuously sweep past the northern crescent for more than two miles. The system selected an optimal drop-in point and I quickly plotted some possible surf paths from ideas I had. It was a big wave and I’d have to travel fast to catch it right. The triangular fin of a shark I’d commandeered appeared, slicing through the water behind me, and I reached out to catch it and began racing across the water.
“Nice,” said Martin.
We skimmed the waves, the wind barely ruffling his hair. He was admiring my handiwork on the projection floating between us.
“So you’re going to pull a dead man stall, switch back to hide in the barrel and then finish with a rocket Tchaikovsky to back hang two?”
“Yes sir, that’s the plan,” I replied with a grin. “Hey can you switch to the back with everyone else so I can get this show on the road?”
Martin disappeared, and I let go of the shark’s fin and leaned forward on my board to begin paddling to the drop in, taking big, clean strokes. As the social cloud buzzed about the impending ride, my dimstim stats began surging as thousands of people stimswitched into me to enjoy the ride.
It was a funny feeling knowing that thousands of people were inside my skin. I couldn’t feel anything but I could sense it, and it sent shivers down my spine. As I snapped my full water-sense into place, the world dropped away, my senses sharpened and I began quickening.
With smarticles infused throughout pssi-kids’ nervous systems from birth, we’d quickly picked up on the trick of quickening by using smarticles to accelerate the conduction of nerve signals along axons. We could literally amp up the speed of our nervous systems this way on command, but only in short bursts as we depleted energy stored in the smarticles, and, more problematically, began to overheat our brains.
Quickening the body was one thing, but quickening the mind was entirely something else. It had to be managed in a very controlled fashion so as not to lose conscious coherence in the seat of the mind where it all came together. Like anything, it took time, patience and training to build up this capacity, and when it came to quickening, like surfing, I was one of the best.
