around people more than twice my age. Explaining to our Board of Directors that I was putting the program at risk for a childhood friendship just wasn’t a place I was willing to go.
Willy had always had a chip on his shoulder, even when we were kids. He’d arrived on Atopia with his family when he was already six years old, at an age when the rest of us pssi-kids were already amazing the world with our amazing abilities in the virtual worlds where we’d grown up. He’d had to start from less than nothing, having come from a Luddite community in central Montana. In the Schoolyard we’d teased him mercilessly as he’d struggled to come to grips with the pssi system.
Bob had been the first one to befriend him, bringing him into our gang, and their friendship was one that had survived. This was no mean feat in the churning social space of Atopia.
His young mind, back then, had been forced to leapfrog almost 400 years of time, starting from a place stuck somewhere in the eighteenth century and straight into Atopia, a place far ahead of the rest of the world. He’d been incredibly determined, though, and within a short time had become the best flitter tag player in the Schoolyard.
Willy had always been on an upward climb, always trying to prove himself, and now more than ever.
I sighed.
I wondered what the world must look like from his perspective, coming from a place so alien to me. In a way he straddled these worlds, and it was hard for me to imagine his childhood. This made me think of mine.
As a baby girl, my own first memories, my first fully formed memories, were of my mother’s face. This wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the detail with which I could remember it. My mother was holding me, coddling me, and looking down into my eyes, cooing softly.
“Hello Nancy, how are you feeling my little darling?” my mother had said to me. She had a slightly worried look on her face, full of love.
I’ve gone back and relived it so many times it’s almost embarrassing. It was a very special moment to me, and as the first pssi-kid to pass this threshold, it was a special moment that was shared with the whole Cognix program. My memories were famous.
This memory was from the first moment my pssi was turned on. It was the beginning of my inVerse-the complete sensory recording of everything I had ever seen, heard, felt or sensed. I was three months old, and the moment was exactly 7am, Pacific Time, on September 20on the year my family had just moved onto the first prototype Atopian platform.
I’ve gone back and relived it all many times; felt my mother’s hot breath on my blushing cheeks, sensed her holding me tightly, observed every nuance of her pupils dilating and contracting, breathed in the tang of her perfume and strong soap, and felt my small eyes suddenly distracted away to catch glimpses of glowing dust motes floating in the angled sunlight streaming in from the windows. In the corner of the room my father crouched anxiously over the quietly humming machines as he monitored my signals and systems, stealing quick glances towards us from time to time.
As pssi-kids growing up, we hadn’t known anything special was happening around us. Like kids anywhere and anytime, we’d just assumed that life was like that for everyone. But we were special. We were the first generation of children to grow up with seamless synthetic reality sensory interfaces.
After running out of letters at the end of the alphabet, TIME Magazine had tried to label us ‘Generation A’, as in artificial reality, but this expression had died almost as quickly as the magazine. The world quickly came to refer to us simply as the ‘pssi-kids’. We were a part of Cognix Corporation’s phase III clinical trials of early developmental pssi on the island colony of Atopia. We weren’t just making history. As my dad liked to say-we were history.
While Atopia was an amazing place to grow up, we were still just kids and we did the things that all kids did. We screamed, we dribbled, and we wobbled when we first learned to walk. We did learn to walk much earlier than regular children, using pssi muscle-memory training, but this was just one in a long list of things we could do that human children couldn’t.
Our world was more than just this world-this world was just a tiny patch of our playground as we quickly learned to flitter across the endless streams of metaworlds that were filled with toys and creatures that sparkled in our sensory display spaces. We perceived little difference between the real and the virtual, in fact synthetic worlds felt more real and tangible to us than what the rest of the world would call reality.
Even from a young age, it wasn’t just toys we played with, we also played with making ourselves into toys, altering our bodies to become teddy bears, worms, little flocks of soaring dinosaurs in endless sky-worlds and ever more alien creatures inhabiting ever more impossible spaces as our minds developed a fluid capacity for neuroplasticity. Our proxxi and educational bots constantly presented us with an endless barrage of games and puzzles to solve as we spun through these worlds, treating every moment as a learning opportunity.
From the first few years of our lives, from our point of view, our proxxi were simply our playmates. But for their part, though, they weren’t playing. They were constantly correlating the flood of neuronal data traffic through the smarticle network embedded in our bodies and matching it with our behavior.
It didn’t take long to learn a human wetware matrix, but our brains and nervous systems were still in development, and they were using our data to continuously redesign the pssi system. We were Cognix’s Guinea pigs, part and parcel of our parents’ agreement to participate in the Atopian project.
Almost all of my early childhood was spent with my proxxi-the ultimate tool in familial productivity enhancement. To us, our proxxi were our brothers and sisters, little artificial boys and girls we could play with.
This even became a primary selling feature of the program. After all, who had the cycles left over in today’s busy world to have even one child, never mind a second one? Proxxi filled this need in the market by creating a kind of digital clone of your child to act as playmate, babysitter, and educator, or even your child’s twin depending on your point of view.
The floodgates were opened near our fourth birthdays. Around this age, one by one, we were gradually given independent access to our own pssi systems. Like quick little fish, we’d disappeared over and through the worlds that our parents understood, and began venturing out into the open network. The reign of the pssi-kids in the multiverse had begun.
Before then, we’d been limited to one body, but we learned to spawn our minds simultaneously into others. This was the beginning of my journey into the discovery of distributed consciousness.
Leaning forward in my chair, I focused my mind on several key events unfolding in the worlds my consciousness was spread out into, all the while fine tuning the parameters of some phuturecasts that tied them all together. A high-dimensional correlation matrix floated through my display spaces, and I watched it growing, pulsing and fading as predictions grew or fell in their interconnectedness.
“So what do you think?” I asked.
“You know what I think,” responded Cunard, my proxxi, and I did.
While we were talking, I was holding forth on dozens of splintered conversations in other virtual worlds while keeping an eye on reports coming in from a platoon of sub-proxxi and bots out collecting and spreading data with trusted, and not trusted, parties. I could sense a coalescing cascade in the mood of billions of humans out there, and subtle shifts in the goings on in the billions more worlds they wandered about.
The timing felt about right.
Distributing my consciousness that wide and thin was tiring, and I’d been at it constantly for nearly forty hours straight, even while arguing with Willy. An aching pressure was building up behind my collective eyeballs from the lengthy act of forced concentration. The Sleep-Over tabs worked great up to a point, but I was feeling sluggish after a long week. It was just beginning to pay off as I could feel the ebb and flow of the world’s opinion around the Infinixx project. Just a little more certainty was all I needed, so I gritted my teeth, rubbed my many eyeballs and focused inwards and back outwards.
“Nancy!” someone called out, intentionally overriding my sensory dataflow using an emergency channel. The interruption jolted me and my conscious webwork partially collapsed. It was David, of course, I realized after a split second of hang time. I sighed but smiled as his face floated into view.
“C’mon Nance, come to Davey-boy. Enough is enough.”
He was smiling too, but I could see concern worrying the corners of his mouth.
“Just a little longer. I’m sorry.”
I had a splinter ghosting him but I’d lost track of it. Visions of him cooking up a storm in the kitchen floated
