As I disengaged my primary subjective from the splinter covering this event I let my mind wander off. Nancy was still talking about how it had all come from the childhood game flitter tag that we used to play. She was gushing on and on, and it was beginning to annoy me.
Flitter tag may have been the king of pssi-kid games, but my favorite had always been rag-dolling. It had been my own personal addition to our repertoire.
One day, Ms. Parnassus, our human teacher back at the pssi-kid Academy, had asked each of us to come and demonstrate a special trick or skill. Each child had gotten up in turn to show off something they could do. One inflated into a balloon and floated up to bounce around on the ceiling. Nancy showed off holding a dozen conversations at once with everyone around the classroom. Bob of course took us surfing, and then my turn had come.
“Come on Jimmy,” our teacher encouraged, “show everyone what you showed me.”
She gently rotated me into the center of everyone’s attentional matrix. I nervously looked at my classmates- an arrayed collection of fantastical little creatures floating impatiently around in my display spaces.
Fidgeting, I looked down at my feet. They uncontrollably spawned into writhing tentacles that nervously knotted together like cave eels trying to escape sudden sunlight.
Giggles erupted.
“Go ahead,” said Ms. Parnassus, nodding and smiling, prodding me on. She collapsed everyone’s skins into my identity space, morphing us into a shared reality of children standing around the Schoolyard playground, with me at the center. I was now dressed in gray flannel shorts, with a matching sweater and shirt with a little red clip-on tie.
More giggles. Mother had insisted on this ridiculous outfit for my primary identity.
Oak trees arched between the swing sets and jungle gyms of the Schoolyard, reaching high above us like a leafy green cathedral beneath a perfectly blue sky.
“Come on Jimmy, they’ll love it, trust me,” said Ms. Parnassus. I nodded, and set up my trick.
“Everyone, detach and snap into Jimmy. Now hurry up!” she clapped.
There were a few groans, and I could tell the rest of the kids had little hope of anything fun coming from quiet, awkward Jimmy. Still, I felt them all clicking obediently into my conscious perimeter.
I unlocked my pssi-channels, and then felt them all crowding inside me, feeling what I felt, seeing what I saw. The sensation was ticklish as all of them squirmed impatiently inside me, waiting for something to happen.
Not many people had ever ghosted me before that, and I wasn’t popular at flitter tag. Practically the only people that had been inside me before that had been my parents, and then usually only to terrorize me. But that day was different, a shared experience rather than an intrusion. Despite myself, I tingled warmly and smiled.
“See Jimmy, isn’t that nice?” said Ms. Parnassus, noticing me smiling. “Now come on Jimmy, show them what you showed me.”
Screwing up my courage, I took a deep breath and dove down into my body, shrinking, dragging them with me. I could hear their giggles back behind my mind. Down, down we dove, into the tiniest of spaces inside me, past bone and blood, squeezing down past the granular limit of pssi-tech. I stopped for a moment, and then, holding my breath, pushed the limit further.
I squeezed our consciousnesses down to the molecular level, and then stopped inside one of my living cell nuclei to watch a newly hatched protein unfold. The kids were silent, suddenly engrossed. Then I shot back outwards, upwards through my veins. I stopped again, the powerful thump of my heart filling our sensory space. I snapped our tactile arrays to the outside of my aorta, and we felt our skins expanding, contracting, my lifeblood flowing through us.
“Cool!” exclaimed Bob, followed quickly by a chorus of, “Show me how! Show me!”
Ms. Parnassus smiled, watching the kids all snap back into themselves and run to mob me in the middle of the Schoolyard.
Flitter tag was the undeniable king of games at the pssi-kid Academy, but for a while, rag dolling became all the rage as I taught them to open up individual body parts and snap people into them. And then to move the body around, each person controlling only their part, the net effect much like a drunken sailor trying to get home. For a short time in my childhood I had been popular.
This was the start of my journey into the security of conscious systems.
12
Identity: Patricia Killiam
“So how does it feel, Adriana, or, rather, Ormead?”
I looked out at the view from our perch in the hills above Napa Valley. The lush greens of a late summer harvest were staked out into the blue-shifted distance along perfectly ordered rows in the vineyards below. Swallows chased invisible insects in the sapphire sky that hung above us, weaving and darting in a silent dance.
I motioned to the waiter for another glass of Chablis.
Adriana had recently chosen to composite with two of her friends, Orlando and Melinda. Compositing was a new process I was promoting that created virtual private pssi networks to tie peoples’ nervous systems together. It was like two or more people continuously ghosting each other, but more intimate-much more intimate. Compositing amounted to fusing the neural systems of the organisms involved.
“It’s wonderful!” she replied with a glow in her eyes. Their partner had decided to composite as well. “The combination of Michael, Denzel and Phoenix-Mideph-is everything we wanted in a mate-sporty, funny, a good listener and passionate and artistic.”
Composites were fitting nicely into the evolutionary chain as a new form of deep social bonding to help protect individual psyches from becoming overwhelmed in the multiverse. The cultural aspect of the human social animal was managing to adapt to pssi, but it was still falling behind. I sighed. We were moving too fast.
Compositing, in general, was a positive evolutionary step forward, but at the same time a countervailing form of self-compositing was becoming a problem.
Before the shock of losing his body, Willy McIntyre had been well on his way to self-compositing himself into a social cocoon made up of only copies and splinters of himself. Now, from what I’d seen, he’d begun working his way back out, but only because he’d lost his body-not everyone would be so lucky.
Adriana, on the other hand, was part of a class of composites that formed spontaneous holobionts to symbiotically form a protective barrier against their social networks devolving into isolated clumps within the multiverse.
The history of evolution was more about symbiotic organisms evolving into new groups than simply a slow accumulation of new traits. In evolutionary terms, today’s individuals were yesterday’s groups.
They’d inhabited Adriana’s body today, and it still threw off my pssi as it posited her personal details in my display space. We’d have to fix it. I’d planned on making composites as much a part of the launch protocol as I could, but time was running out.
“And we are everything he really wanted,” she continued, “a responsible, motherly woman who is career oriented but also zany and spontaneous. I don’t think this could have happened any other way.”
These little victories were what made it all worthwhile. Love was still that most powerful of emotions, as it magically found ways to fill the cracks that pssi had fissured open in Atopian culture.
“So I heard you’re going to have children?” I asked. “That’s wonderful news!”
Without them reforming as a composite, offspring by any of them separately would have probably never happened. Post-pssi fertility rates on Atopia were approaching zero, but then again, that was counting fertility in the old, biological sense.
If we began counting synthetic and bio-synthetic beings, such as proxxi, fertility rates were actually skyrocketing. It all depended on your point of view.
Adriana-Ormead smiled even wider, if that was possible.
