“Well, I think I could help you,” Jimmy answered, watching me carefully, “by getting access to higher order splintering.”
That both surprised and excited me. He obviously knew about my side project, but then again, he was now head of conscious security systems on Atopia.
“Oh yeah?” I tried to appear disinterested. “So what, like you could double my account settings or something?”
“Much,” he laughed, “much more than that Willy. I could show you how to fix the system to have almost unlimited splinters. You’ll blow everyone else in the market away.”
I glanced at the glittering blue security blanket around us.
“So nobody else can know what we’re talking about, right?”
I tested the security blanket with some of my phantoms, looking for holes, but of course this was a waste of time.
“Absolutely, Willy,” Jimmy replied with a wolfish grin. “I’m the security expert, remember?”
“Right.”
I paused.
“So what’s the deal then, Mr. Security?”
“If you can get me a date with Susie, but I mean, really set me up with her, you know?” He paused, raising his eyebrows again. I nodded, acknowledging my understanding. “Then, I’ll set you up with what you need.”
“You can really pull it off, with nobody else knowing?” I asked, slightly incredulous. “No risk?”
“I sure can,” he responded, smiling. “Nobody will ever find out. Let me explain…”
Identity: Nancy Killiam
“Olympia,” I whispered to the test subject, lying out on the pod before me. No response. Her mind was still hovering somewhere in the nether regions between consciousness and unconsciousness.
I’d inhabited a robotic body, now in a doctor’s office in Manhattan, to personally attend to the end of the New York clinical trials.
After many years we’d almost reached the end of the process and Cognix was now on the verge of approval by the FDA. Approval here in America would trigger a cascade of approvals in other super-jurisdictions around the world. It was a critical juncture in the future of Cognix Corporation, and by extension, for Atopia as well.
Aunt Patricia had made it clear to make this a priority, so I was here in person. At least, a part of me was here in person. The splinter I had controlling this robody was circling at the very peripheries of my consciousness, just a voice in the background of all the buzzing activity that I was dealing with. As Olympia began to stir, the splinter dug deeper into my awareness matrix, prickling my brain, and my attention was drawn towards that one place, my mind automatically load balancing the other tasks and places and people I was dealing with seamlessly onto my proxxi and other splinters.
“Olympia,” I called out again, louder now. She twitched and one of her eyes fluttered, this signal of impending activity collapsing my awareness firmly into this space.
My mind shivered at the cold, confined reality it suddenly found itself in. “Does distributed consciousness really work?” whispered one far away splinter, attending a press conference in Australia. “Yes,” that splinter answered, “even while talking to you I am attending clinical trials in New York.” I was still listening to my other streams of consciousness, but these were now faint murmurs in the background of the physicality of this place.
I looked up at the lighting panels in the ceiling, feeling my robotic irises focus in and out, adjusting to the brightness, and then looked back down at Olympia as I gently cradled her head in my plastic hands.
Slowly, her eyes opened, her mind dredging itself up from beneath the sedatives. She wouldn’t see a robot hovering above her, however. The pssi was now installed in her neural pathways, and I’d clipped a reality skin around my robot’s body so that I would appear to her as her own impression of the most caring and loving person she had ever known, an amalgamation of the people the system could figure out that she may have been closest to.
“Yes?” Olympia replied.
Barely conscious, and I could tell she was already annoyed. She obviously didn’t have much in the way of loving people in her life.
“Seems like someone needs a little more sleepy time,” I purred softly. “Come on, I’ll get you up and dressed.”
Olympia was something of a special case. She was one of the key external marketing executives setting the groundwork for the commercial release of pssi later this year. Olympia had been inserted into the program at the last minute by Dr. Hal Granger, one of Cognix’s senior executives and our leading psychologist. Her file indicated acute anxiety, which certainly qualified her, but it was strange that she’d been shuffled in at the last second like this.
“How long was I out?” asked Olympia irritably, propping herself up on the bed.
“Hmm…” I replied while my mind assimilated a thin stream of information from the splinter that had been attending her here, “about two hours I’d say. Everything seems to be working perfectly. In fact we’ve just activated the system. Your proxxi will explain everything to you once you get home. I would have woken you sooner but you just seemed so peaceful.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for that,” she said grumpily, swinging her legs off the side of the pod-bed and sitting up.
I tried to reach over to steady her, but she just pushed me off. I shrugged and leaned over to grab her clothes and hand them to her.
“I can take it from here, thank you very much,” she stated flatly and aggressively, waving me away.
I stared at her with concern, wondering if her intensely aggressive mood had been stimulated by some psycho-active response to the pssi stimulus, but a set of clinical notes floated into view in an overlaid display space. She was always that way. Everything was fine, then, in fact all of the other reports coming in signaled that this was another perfect pssi installation.
“I’m going to bring you in to speak to the doctor before you leave okay? He needs to have a final word,” I said, walking out the door and stopping outside to wait for her to finish getting dressed.
In a few seconds she was done, and strode quickly out the door and down the hallway, purposely avoiding looking my way. I watched her carefully, looking for any tell-tale tremors or jitters that could betray an issue with her motor cortex. She looked smooth, if not graceful, but then, her grace wasn’t my issue.
She hung her head around into the doctor’s office, and I walked over to observe the exchange.
“So how do you feel?” I could hear him asking her. “Please, come in.”
“No, I’m fine. I mean, I just want to get going. This was supposed to be under an hour, I’ve got things to do,” she complained to the doctor. “So just tell me quick, what do I need to know?”
“You have a very powerful new tool at your disposal now Olympia, just be careful with it okay?” explained the doctor. “I don’t think you should activate any of the distributed consciousness features for now.”
“Distributed consciousness,” snorted Olympia, looking back at me, “where do they get these ideas?”
I raised my eyebrows. Sensing my job here done, this splinter began to slide back towards the edges of my conscious awareness again to become just another voice in my sensory crowd. As it did, Olympia’s question resonated, sliding a part of mind off somewhere else, backwards in time, into my childhood.
Infinixx had really begun as a pssi-kid game we’d invented called flitter tag. In the forested yards of the Schoolyard at recess, we used to have huge games of it, jumping and chasing after each other in what seemed to the adults as completely nonsensical behavior.
More than just using pssi to venture off into virtual worlds, as pssi-kids we were the first to really master the art of body snatching-sneaking into each others’ sensory channels and taking control of each others’ bodies. Sharing bodily control was chaperoned by our proxxi that allowed the visitor to do what they liked as long as they didn’t hurt our bodies or do something we wouldn’t do or say ourselves. Proxxi also managed the transition, the handing off and receiving of control, so it all went smoothly and safely.
Sometimes it could get confusing, but then that was a part of the fun. If it ever became too much, whenever
