I decided then and there I was going to call it phwaiting and immediately published this inspiration into my social cloud. With my creative work done for the day, I scanned some Phuture News flowing across the bottom of my display spaces. More celebrities were about to drop dead or start doing tons of drugs or stop doing them and go into rehab.
Flicking my phantoms, I opened an overlay and researched the definition of ‘wait’: transitive verb-to stay in place in expectation of. I guess we didn’t need a cool new word as this seemed to amount to what we were doing. Already, my proxxi Robert was splintering me over four thousand variations on the idea of waiting from the remaining distinct human languages.
The character of my inspiration suddenly hollowed. I posted an announcement regarding the death of phwaiting back into my social cloud and watched the meme explode and die.
At the same time, a fast trending news report splintered that the Chinese were talking about sending a manned mission to Mars. It had been about thirty years since China had landed men on the moon again, on their best guess of Mao’s birthday one holiday season, but their plans at a permanent moon base had fizzled when water deposits had proven harder to extract than imagined. Now their new grand plans just seemed ludicrous, even if Mars and half of the rest of our solar system seemed to be practically teeming with life.
Why spend any time or effort moving a physical body around when you could just flit anywhere in an instant using sensor networks? Everything that was happening in the outside world seemed so amazingly wasteful and nonsensical to those of us who lived on the inside of Atopia-but then again, soon everyone would be as blessed as us.
Bored, I collapsed most of my displays and opened up an overlay to watch a new game the boys had started. Sid, Vicious, Martin and my own proxxi Robert were already hot into some apocalyptic other-world battle, pinned down in a cave by an android army, flanked by giant armored worms. It looked like a lot more fun than what I was doing, so I tried to splinter in but Sid blocked me. He was right. Either I had to be there fully or not at all. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of them. Anyway, I could just joyride in Robert if I wanted.
The rest of my displays held forth on a multitude of other live wikiworld feeds. The Bieb was just delivering his inaugural address as the 52nd President of the United States, and in an interesting first was singing the first few lines of his speech. I guess the Bieb Bill had passed.
In another feed, Manchester United had scored in a Premier League game, and they’d begun replaying the goal with a stimcast of the hapless LA goalie that ended with him crashing face first into one of the goalposts, breaking his nose in a bloody explosion of pain. What they managed to broadcast was a pale reflection of what his pain would have really felt like.
Nervenet sensory broadcast technology was still in its infancy outside Atopia, but all that would be fixed with the release of pssi. Flicking off the news feeds, I focused back on the pitched battle the boys were in. Someone had just blown Martin’s head off. I shook my head. Martin was hopeless.
I checked my dimstim stats, and a few dozen people were still logged into my body. Christ, I was bored out of my head and there were still people who would prefer to be me than do whatever boring shit they could be doing on their own.
Glancing at my biostats, I could see that my heart rate was hovering in the mid-forties, my cortisol was a little high, my insulin low, but all systems go and things would be moving around soon as the MDMA hit.
The room was crowded, with people milling about industriously, getting drinks, engaging in small talk, doing whatever tiring stuff adults did at a baby shower. One side of the room was lined with retro-modern impressionists to match the sleek, minimal decor of the world they’d created for the event. The other side was a terrace, open to the outside, looking down from a few stories up onto the leafy beach promenade of east Atopia.
Sulking seemed like a good option at this point while I waited for the drugs to hit my bloodstream, so I opened up Bunnies and sent a sub-proxxi to get me another drink. Innocent little rabbits appeared floating in space in front of me, exiting their underground warrens, sniffing the ground for food.
I flicked my finger at one of them, and a fireball magically issued forth, flaming towards the hapless little creature. It looked up, confused, and then squealed as the fireball engulfed it, spasming in agony and squeaks as its fur incinerated. The other rabbits ducked for cover, and then slowly crawled back out to sniff at their erstwhile compadre.
My eyes narrowed as I lined up the next victim.
“Bob, what are you doing?” came a subtext from Nicky. “Could we just be a
I grumbled and shut off Bunnies.
Lucky little bastard didn’t know how close he came to the big ticket.
The sub-proxxi was back with my drink by now and I thanked him, taking the proffered drink for a sip. Turning off my kinetic collision subsystems, I rolled out of the couch’s embrace and stood up to stride purposefully through one of the remote guests, a round, balding little man who affected a shocked look. Served him right if the best he could do was project a round, balding image; someone should tell him he can look anyway he wanted.
My brazen etiquette violation earned some raised eyebrows, but it felt way too crowded in here, so I decided on further anti-social behavior and flipped my pssi off at everyone. The lush environment of the entertainment world immediately disappeared as I slipped into identity mode, and the featureless confines of the small, rectangular room we were actually in appeared around me.
I felt better, taking another gulp of my drink, feeling refreshed as my own senses connected me to the world, when things took on a suddenly colorful sheen. On the other hand, that could be the Ecstasy kicking in.
The few people that remained in the small room were mostly in a corner near Nicky, who was still chatting with Cindy Strong, now cradling empty space in her arms.
Nicky looked over, her eyes flashing at me. I imagined knives shooting forth from her, pinning me helplessly and gorily to the wall before a crushing shockwave of disappointment finished me off in a splatter of social distortion. The ferocity of the image forced me to click my pssi back on, and the hubbub and space of party re- saturated my senses.
Luckily, what I’d felt before was in fact the MDMA, so I now felt much happier about everything on the whole.
Of course, by that point, Nicky was completely pissed. She grabbed me by the arm to pull me around the corner and into the hallway where we could be alone. Well, sort of alone. My dimstim stats instantly shot up as the social cloud sensed my mood and the fight coming on.
“You know Bob,” hissed Nicky, “we just don’t communicate. I thought you said you wanted to come here and now you’re embarrassing me. Can I ask you a question? Are you stoned again? Can you shut off your fucking dimstim for a minute please?”
“That’s two questions,” I shrugged, “and no to both of them. Sweetie, my dimstim is my work, my bread and butter, and good or bad I can’t just shut it off.”
I tried to smile winningly at her.
She stared at me in silence.
“Okay, yes, I am a little stoned,” I admitted.
She rolled her eyes. “And how can you call that stupid dimstim work? And this thing with your brother…”
I shrugged again, but then dialed up a Dragon skin with a phantom when she wasn’t looking.
“Hey, my dimstim is how we met. Don’t knock it. And don’t bring my brother into this!”
Narrowing my eyes, I added, “At least I work.”
She’d annoyed me now, so I was purposely pushing Nicky’s ‘piss me off’ button. This was going to be good. She didn’t like being reminded she was daddy’s little girl.
“Bob, all you do is sit around all day playing games or simulating vacation time for a bunch of meta-perves,” she snarled as her voice gathered momentum and the Dragon skin began to take hold. Her eyes flashed at me while her face and upper body began to morph into a cartoonish and slightly frightening form in my display space.
“Well, I mean, I make my own money,” I pointed out, shaking my head.
At that moment, I couldn’t help letting out an enormous yawn right in her face, which really set her off.
