“William, I am working late finishing some interviews, and all of a sudden, my interviewee’s breasts start swelling and spilling out onto the table, which is totally distracting and embarrassing.”
Oh shoot, I had forgotten we were sharing realities.
“Ah geez, sorry about that, I was just having a little fun with the boys…” I started to say.
“You’re drunk,” she stated incriminatingly, “and you guys are pigs.”
“…come on…”
“Cochon!” she added, shaking her head.
“Brigitte, please,” I said defensively, “I’m only sharing realities because you asked. This isn’t a big deal…”
“William,” she cut in, “Willy…”
She paused, looking sadly at the floor. I waited.
“You know, I have barely seen you in weeks, months even,” she continued, “and you can’t even take the time to have breakfast with me, and here you are off with…ah…ca fait rien.”
I switched off my end of the shared reality, frustrated.
I hadn’t seen the boys in weeks, and I’d been doing my best to spend any spare time I had with Brigitte. It wasn’t my fault I needed to focus more and more on my moonlighting work. My early gains had quickly been gobbled up after Nancy had restricted my splinter limit, and my bank account was now fast turning into a blank account.
I felt trapped.
We fell into a mutually accusatory silence.
“Willy, I think we need to talk,” she said after studying me.
“I think so too,” was all I replied.
While Brigitte finished up with work, I flitted back to the boys. My mood was ruined, however, so I begged off and tried going back to work for a bit to lose myself.
Soon enough, Brigitte pinged me and appeared briefly in my workspace. Taking a resigned look around at what had replaced her, she took my hand and flittered us off to a quiet corner of the beach for our talk.
The day had settled into a heartbreakingly beautiful evening, and a crescent moonrise was casting a sparkling carpet over inky seas. Waves gently caressed the shore, and she held my hand tightly in hers, walking me through the wet sand at the water’s edge. We slowly left a trail of footprints behind us.
“Willy,” she pleaded, “my heart is breaking, Willy. I love you, but I can’t do this anymore. Please, let’s sit down and fix this. Just tell me what you need.”
“Brigitte, I love you too, but…I just don’t feel like we share the same goals anymore,” I replied. “I need to focus on my business right now.”
And then the pause, that hurtful space of silence between words that shifted worlds.
“Look, I don’t want to hurt you. I think the best thing could be for us to separate for a while so I can figure this out.”
She looked into my eyes while the tears welled in hers. Her feet left the ground, and she floated in front of me as I walked, holding both my hands now. Cast in the soft monochromatic moonlight, she hovered like a ghost before me.
“Willy,” she sobbed, “you want me to leave you?”
I can’t believe that I did it, but I slowly started to nod, looking steadily into her eyes.
Catching her breath sharply, she looked away, her body convulsing as she tried to stop the coming sobs. She let go of my hands. Brigitte floated up and away from me and into the starry sky. Perhaps not like a ghost, but more like an angel.
My footsteps continued alone in the sand awhile before being washed away by the waves. It was as if we had never been there at all.
The Infinixx launch was coming up, and I had to rush to try the idea Jimmy had suggested before the end of the beta program. Brigitte would understand, and once I had everything going we could have the life together that we’d always wanted. What I had planned was going to blow everyone away. I just needed to focus.
I went back to work.
Identity: Nancy Killiam
Itching. Itching desperation. Sweaty visions of bunched up sheets, of desire for release, pain, guilt, of junkies staring with hollow eyes; these all flooded my mind. The desperation gave way to confusion, a mad whispering of ideas that meant something, but didn’t mean anything to me. Then something else, a contained space, I was trapped in a small vehicle that suddenly burst into flames. Just as quickly, I was sitting, combing my hair, and looking back into a face that wasn’t mine.
I closed down my splinter network, collapsing my conscious webwork at the same time.
“It’s some kind of bug,” explained Karen, my technical lead. “The subjective streams are getting crossed somehow, and there’s meme-matching problems, too.”
“Do we know what the problem is?”
Launch time was fast approaching. While building our technology platform, we were at the same time using it to provide for our own proof of concept. The problem was that bugs tended to get cycled back, amplifying their effects.
“We think so. We’re just running some final QA now before letting it out into the eco-system.”
“What caused it?” I asked. We’d been having some speed bumps, but nothing as serious as this.
“It seems like a code change somewhere in the kernel layers. We’re trying to figure it out.”
“You’re sure this will solve it?” Honestly, I didn’t care what caused it, I just needed it fixed. “I have another press event in a few minutes. Tell me the truth.”
“Yes,” confirmed Karen with some conviction, “that’ll solve it.”
I looked around the table. The meeting room pulsed softly and silently in its synthetic reality cocoon. Things didn’t have the feeling of a problem being solved.
“What?”
A few of them looked down at the floor, and Karen just shrugged and hit me with it. The details of a lawsuit splintered into my consciousness.
“Some guy in Minnesota is suing for emotional damages after his sensory stream got crossed with his teenage daughter’s.”
“Oh my God.” The details flowed through my splinter network. The girl had been out with her boyfriend. I shook my head, my mind filling with my own memories of growing up. Never mind the father; it was the girl who would be damaged after this.
“And you’re only bringing this to me now?”
“It was just filed ten minutes ago,” replied our legal counsel, a loaner from Cognix corporate who had now appeared in the meeting.
His slicked back image made me tense up.
“Do you need to be here right now?” I demanded. This was supposed to be a private meeting.
He shrugged. “That depends…”
“On what?”
“On whether you still want to be running this company by the end of the day,” he replied coolly, looking at the ceiling, and then he turned to stare directly into my eyes. “You need to deal with this right now.”
I sighed. Dealing with lawyers was something I didn’t think I’d ever get used to, but running Infinixx didn’t give me much choice.
“Nothing in the media worlds yet?” I asked rhetorically. Cunard had already run a background check in the seconds since we’d learned of the problem. There was nothing so far.
“No,” replied our lawyer, “they’ve agreed to keep it quiet.”
He looked around the room at my technical staff, appearing bored.
“For a settlement I imagine.”
“Yes,” he smiled, looking back towards me, “as you imagine.”
