She was walking along one of our own beaches, a beautiful stretch of white sand near the Eastern Inlet.
“Pssionics now makes limitless travel possible with zero environmental impact!”
The girl paused to let us think about all the places we wished we could visit.
“You’ll never forget anything again,” she continued, forcing people to remember everything they thought they’d ever forgotten. “And you’ll never again have to argue about who said what!”
I looked out at the reporters, seeing their eyes narrow as they remembered some argument they’d recently had with their spouses.
“Imagine performing more at work while being there less. Want to get in shape? Your new proxxi can take you for a run while you relax by the pool!” she exclaimed, stopping her walk to look directly into the viewer’s eyes.
“Create the reality you need right now with Atopia pssionics. The promise of a better world and the life you’ve always wanted. Join up soon for zero cost!”
A short silence settled while I let it all sink in.
“So, how exactly is pssionics going to make the world a better place?” asked a stick-thin blond from the front row.
I carefully rolled my eyes. I’d never really liked ‘pssionics’-the baggage it carried created a constant battle to separate fact from fiction when talking to reporters, but then again, when had that ever mattered? The blond reporter’s name floated into view in one of my display spaces: Ginny.
“Well Ginny, I prefer to use the term ‘polysynthetic sensory interface’ or just pssi,” I replied, detaching and floating upwards out of my body to get their attention as my proxxi walked my body along beneath my projection. Nobody batted an eye. They weren’t easily impressed anymore.
“We’ve been able to demonstrate here on Atopia that people are as happy-even happier, in fact-with virtual goods as material ones. You just need to make the simulation good enough, real enough.” Everyone nodded as they’d all heard this before.
“I’ll give you an example.” I floated down and snapped back into my body, and a bright red apple popped into existence in my hand. “So here we have an apple, right?”
There was a general murmur of agreement.
“Since pssi also controls my neuromotor system, not only can I see the apple,” I explained as I tossed it into the air and caught it with a satisfying thwap, “but I actually feel like I’m holding it. It feels perfectly real to me.”
“But perhaps even better,” I continued, taking a loud bite, “I can eat it too.”
As I munched away, I could feel its juices running down my chin. It was a good simulation of biting into an apple, but still had room for improvement, I thought as I chewed, contemplating the appleness of my experience.
“The ultimate no calorie snack,” I joked, taking another bite. This got some laughs.
“Seriously, though,” I continued, raising the apple and smiling, “with pssi installed, you can eat and drink whatever you like as much as you like with zero caloric intake-for this afternoon’s activity we’ll be lounging in Pompeii at a Roman feast while your proxxi takes your body to the gym.” This earned some more hushed laughter.
“Describe a proxxi again?” asked Ginny, cocking her head and fishing for a sound bite. I obliged.
“Proxxi are biological-digital symbiotes that attach to your neural system, sharing all your memories and sensory data as well as control of your motor system.”
The proxxi program was my life’s work in creating the basis for synthetic intelligence. Where previous research had tried to create artificial intelligence in a kind of vacuum by itself, my contribution had been to understand that a body and mind didn’t exist separately but could only exist together.
We’d started by creating synthetic learning systems attached to virtual bodies in virtual worlds that gradually became intelligent by feeling their way through their environments. The proxxi program had taken this one step further when we’d integrated them intimately into peoples’ lives, to share in their day to day experiences.
They were still artificial intelligences, but ones that now shared our physical reality to seamlessly bridge the gap between the worlds of humans and machines.
Ginny screwed up her face and asked, “And why would we want to attach something to our neural systems?”
“And just why wouldn’t you want to get attached to me?” asked Marie, my own proxxi, materializing to walk beside me. She smiled at everyone.
This earned a round of laughs. With the flick of a phantom I removed the apple from existence, my taste buds going blank as it flashed away. The hair on the back of my neck had begun to stand up which meant the slingshot test must be about to start. I’d better wrap this up.
“Everyone,” I announced, reaching out to encircle the group of reporters with my phantoms, “if you’ll allow me, I’d like to take whoever is coming up to watch the test firing of the slingshot.”
We’d ensured almost everyone had signed up for a front row seat to the demonstration. We needed to show we weren’t just serious about cyber, but also had a committed kinetic program.
“To finally answer your original question Ginny,” I said as I grabbed them all and we shot through the ceiling of the conference room, accelerating up into space and earning a few gasps, “pssi will change the world by beginning to move it from the destructive downward spiral of material consumption and into the clean world of synthetic consumption. It’s about the only viable solution we have left with nearly ten billion people all struggling for their own piece of the material dream.”
I slowed and stabilized our flight path, bringing us to a stop about ninety thousand feet up. Dispersing the reporters’ subjective points of view across a wide radius surrounding the target zone, I motioned down at the oceans below and then towards the rising sun on the horizon.
“The fact that we have to face is that the eco-crunch is destroying the planet while the fight over dwindling resources is fueling the Weather Wars, and pssi is the solution that will bring us all back from the brink!”
On cue, the slingshot began to fill the space around us with an ear-splitting roar and fiery inferno. I left the reporters’ visual subjectives in the thick of it while retreating to view from a distance, backing away several miles, and then several more. What had seemed so awe inspiring moments ago now appeared as just a bright smudge in the sky, and miles below shimmered the green dot of Atopia.
My mind clouded with sudden doubt.
Our imagined power dwindled to nothing when viewed with a little perspective, dwarfed by unseen forces operating on much larger scales. Just then I was enveloped in a fast moving cloud, and, as if responding to my thoughts, a strong wind sprang up. The thunderstorm was coming.
The blaze of the slingshot test was still dissipating on the main display in the middle of the Atopia Defence Command center. I lit up a smoke as I arrived, gently fading my image in next to Commander Rick Strong, my own pick as head of our newly formed Atopian Defence Forces.
He’d had an exemplary career in the US Marines, demonstrating repeated bravery rescuing men under his command. His first deployment had been in Nanda Devi, in the terrible fighting over dams high in the Himalayas that had sparked the Weather Wars. His psych profile indicated latent post-traumatic stress disorder, but just enough to make him think twice before starting a fight. With the fearsome weapons we’d installed on Atopia, I didn’t want some trigger-happy wingnut’s finger over the button if things got hairy.
A battle-hardened veteran, Rick brought a direct, and sometimes violent, experience of the realities from the outside world that helped ground the team here. We were masters of synthetic reality, but I had a feeling our created realities could be blinding us to the real dangers out there. Rick was the perfect antidote.
Kesselring, the CEO of Cognix and main benefactor behind Atopia, had been the first to begin speaking about the need to have defensive weapons. To begin with, the suggestion had seemed completely antiethical to the cause, Atopia having been born from a free-minded spirit to escape the cluttered corner the rest of the world had led itself into. I’d been against it to begin with, but as time wore on, I began to get the feeling that we may need them before all this was over.
