“No worries, pumpkin,” I replied, my mind-fog lifting. “It’s me that should be the one apologizing.”
She smiled at me and reached over to hold my hand.
“Enough apologizing, cheri,” she said tenderly. “First we eat, and then off to bed.”
Her smile turned seductive.
My stomach growled. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. Hungry and horny, I thought as I looked at her, and I could see she wanted to make me a happy man. Life didn’t get much better than this. I smiled and dug into dinner.
Perhaps my situation wasn’t as bad as I thought.
Soon after, I was lying on my back in bed amid the mess of sheets and pillows strewn about from our lovemaking. A gentle breeze was blowing in through the window, and Brigitte clung tightly to my side.
We enjoyed sex without any of the messy special effects a lot of the other pssi-kids went for. Not to say we hadn’t experimented with all that stuff. Brigitte was quite the wild child in her day, but as we’d gotten older and found each other, the craziness had lost its appeal.
“Willy,” she purred softly, “can I ask you something? And promise not to get mad okay?”
“Sure, anything, sweet pea,” I replied. All of my defenses were down, and right now she could have asked me to jump into the canal and I would have happily complied.
“Willy, do you think we could start sharing our realities? I mean, completely.”
Even with my defenses down, this gave me a little start.
“Sweetie,” I replied calmly, “even couples that have been married for years don’t share their realities entirely.”
Right now we were sharing a reality of being in Venice together, which was great, but she meant that we’d fully share each others’ reality skins, the little and big ways we filtered and modified real and virtual worlds. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to see the world the way I saw it.
“I know what other people do and I don’t want that to be us,” she continued. “It is possible, you know.”
Now it wasn’t like I walked around the world with it skinned up as some weird fantasy, but still, sometimes I liked the world to appear the way I liked it to appear. It was hard to deny her, though.
“I want us to take that next step in our relationship, to experience the world together in the same way.”
Really it wasn’t that big a deal. It’s not like we were teenagers and I had something to hide. She really deserved more from me. Whenever I knew I was going to jump, I always just jumped.
So I jumped.
“Sure, let’s do it, I’d love to do that with you. It’ll be great!”
This earned me a big hug and kiss. I pulled myself away gently.
“I love you sweetheart.”
“I love you too,” she softly replied.
I paused, looking at her expectantly. A steady wind only I could feel had begun to blow.
“Yes, yes, go to work,” she said, smiling as she rolled her eyes. “I know you’re dying to get out there with Wally.”
She hit me playfully with a pillow.
“Thanks baby!” I laughed, grabbing the pillow away and pulling her in for a final kiss.
In a flash, I was off rocketing up through the heavens and into my workspace.
The main action for me wasn’t out in the front of my life. The real action was in the backrooms where Wally and I were working to build my growing hedge fund.
My ability to consistently outpace the market using the new Infinixx distributed consciousness platform made it possible to do things nobody else could do. People out there were noticing how this pssi-kid was beating them out day by day, and I was starting to get some traction in the market.
I desperately needed more splinters. A few months ago five had been enough, and then I expanded to ten. I’d managed to get fifteen by signing up for some beta testing under a false credential, but I wasn’t fooling anybody. This had me constantly at loggerheads with Nancy, who headed the Infinixx project.
Almost as soon as I launched my splinter matrix for the evening, Nancy barged in. She appeared in an overlaid display while I sat in the middle of my hedge fund metaworld.
“Nancy, I am just as capable, in fact probably even more capable than you at splintering,” I argued immediately, knowing what was coming. “I’ve spent more time out there stretching the capabilities of Infinixx than anyone.”
“We’ve been over this Willy.”
“And I can beat the pants off you at flitter tag.”
She rolled her eyes.
“I’m not going to disagree, William,” Nancy replied. “I’m just saying, if you were anyone else, I would have fired you already. I can’t ignore it anymore.”
She just didn’t get it.
“Can’t you see I’m doing you a favor?”
She said nothing.
“Think of me as an advanced beta tester,” I suggested hopefully.
“William, I can’t,” she said finally. “Your splinter limit will be set at ten. I will allow you to keep using Infinixx to run your side business, but that’s it.”
A splinter limit of ten? My stomach tightened into knots and my mind raced. I desperately needed more, and she was cutting me off.
Identity: Nancy Killiam
“Ten?”
“That’s it, William. I am not going to discuss this anymore.”
I looked at a graphic detailing the metaworld Willy had created for his business. A threadbare and kludged together collection of Phuture News feeds, second-rate synthetics and metasense overlays that snaked out into the hyperspaces surrounding him. The only saving grace was the distributed consciousness network connecting it all together, borrowed illegally from my Infinixx beta labs. It looked like an interesting test case for what small business could do with our technology, but it was just too early.
“Look, I’ll just keep to the fifteen I have now,” he pleaded.
I took a deep breath. He looked desperate, and it broke my heart to have to have this kind of conversation with him.
“Ten, Willy, and even that’s a stretch,” I replied firmly. “I know you’re one of Bob’s best friends…”
“But obviously not yours,” he snorted. “I guess forever and ever ends pretty quickly in Atopian time.”
I shook my head. “We were children, Willy.”
“And?”
“That was just a silly game in childhood worlds.”
“Maybe to you.”
I sighed. As children, Bob, Willy and I had been part of an almost inseparable gang, and we’d promised to always stick together and do whatever we could for each other, no matter what, forever and ever. It was a long time ago. I shook my head again.
“Ten, Willy, that’s it, and even that I wouldn’t do for anyone else but you.”
Now he looked angry. I felt myself wavering, but we were at a critical point in our developmental path. We had to stick to the known unknowns, and letting someone splinter their consciousness into more than just a few instances could lead to some unknown unknowns that I couldn’t afford.
He glowered in my display space. I didn’t have to plug into his emotional feeds to feel the angry waves spilling out around him.
“Fine,” he announced from between gritted teeth, and then he summarily blocked me from his realities.
My primary subjective snapped back into the Infinixx control center, and I leaned back in my chair, thinking of ways I could try and help Willy.
I was already feeling more than uncomfortable, pssi-kid or not, being in my early twenties and bossing
