Bob took my arm and led me to a bench off to one side, under the shade of some saw palmettos.
“Jimmy, I know you don’t have many friends,” said Bob, his voice hushed now, “and I know it can’t be easy for you.” His voice trailed off as he searched for words.
“Okay, first thing, quit with the splatter skins, those were funny when we were little but it’s a bit odd when people…” he started to say, and then the head of one of the nearest adults suddenly shattered in a gory explosion of brains and skull fragments as if hit by high caliber rifle fire.
The headless, bloody victim continued to pick up a drink that floated by and poured this into its gaping neck wound. I smiled awkwardly. Bob glanced at this and looked back at me, shaking his head. I switched it off.
Bob looked up at the sky and then back at me.
“And I know you’re the king of the rag doll, but nobody wants to play that stuff anymore, get it? Stop asking people if they want to come inside your body with you, it’s starting to get weird.”
I nodded. I knew this but I couldn’t help it. I promised myself right there I’d stop.
“We all know you’re this specialist at finding cracks in the pssi system,” he continued, “but you gotta stop sneaking around. We’re adults now, and adults don’t sneak.”
Of course we weren’t and of course they did. I nodded again, regardless.
“So, you’ll quit sneaking into people’s bodies when they’re not looking right?” He waited for me to nod, and then added, “Look, why don’t you come out and try some surfing with me, whaddya say?”
“Sure Bob, you’re right, I mean, yes of course, I’d like that,” I mumbled, anxious but grateful.
Bob had always been nice to me, but this was the first time he, or anyone, really had had a heart to heart with me. The territory both scared and excited me.
“So you’ll come surfing?” asked Bob, smiling toothily at me now.
“Yeah sure,” I said, and smiled back.
He gave me a little punch in the arm. I guessed we were buddies now.
“Okay cool. So about Cynthia, look, she’s a girl, and girls want you to open up, be sensitive. I mean, I can tell you’re sensitive.” He laughed, looking into my puppy dog face. “Okay forget that.”
“She said she wanted to see something fun,” I suggested helpfully.
He looked up and considered for a moment.
“Yeah, girls like cool stuff. Perfect! Just open up to her a little. Why don’t you show her some of the stuff you’ve been working on at Solomon House? That should impress her. Girls like smart guys.”
“Do you really think so?” I asked. I had some new neural interface models I had been working hard on testing with Dr. Granger, who had taken a keen interest in my abilities.
I kept the models in my personal work space and hadn’t let anyone in there before. My private worlds were very private. After finally escaping from the clutches of my mother and father I hadn’t let anyone near me, emotionally or physically, and spent most of my time alone with my proxxi Samson and our simulated friends.
“Sure, open up a little, she’ll love that.”
Bob laughed, winking at me, and then raised his eyebrows, giving me a little poke with one of his phantoms to indicate something behind me. With a shake of his head he waved me off from turning my head around.
Instead, I snuck a peak behind me without turning my head, overlaying part of my visual channel with a local wikiworld view, and saw Cynthia coming up behind us. She noticed my ghost checking her out anyway.
“Go get ’em Tiger,” Bob said encouragingly as he got up to leave. “I’ve gotta go and catch my own sweetheart.”
Bob and Nancy had been intertwined since they were kids and had grown into the pssi-kid power couple. He walked back to the gathering crowd to leave me and Cynthia alone.
“Hey Cynthia,” Bob said playfully as he walked past her, looking back to wink at me again. Cynthia smiled at him and turned her gaze towards me. I began to sweat profusely.
“Hi Jimmy,” came Cynthia’s singsong voice. She skipped the last few steps up to me. I was dumbfounded for what to say, so I said nothing and smiled weakly. “So, what’s up?”
“Not…not much, how…how are you?” I stammered.
My mind went blank.
“…Cynthia,” I managed to stutter out after a few seconds of agonizing silence.
“I’m great!” she replied brightly, smiling shyly. “How’s your research going?”
“Uh, yeah, good…hey,” I replied, thinking of what Bob had said. “I could show you some of the stuff I’m doing at Solomon House if you like.”
“Really? Cool!” Her eyes and smile widened. “Can we go now?”
I nodded. Why not?
“Mum!” she yelled, and her mother’s face floated up between the two of us.
“Yes, Cynthia? You don’t need to yell you know,” her mother admonished.
Cynthia just continued unfazed, “I’m just going to flit out with Jimmy for a bit to show me some of the stuff he’s working on at Solomon House.”
Cynthia’s mother looked suitably impressed.
“Work at the Solomon House? But you’re just a baby,” she remarked, looking my way and furrowing her brow. “Anyway, yes, sure, but I’m pinging you back the second Nancy gets here.”
Cynthia grabbed my hand and squealed excitedly, “Let’s go!”
I felt an electric thrill, feeling her touching me, that spread like wildfire to settle hotly in my crotch. An erection immediately sprang to life. Cynthia could sense something going on from my embarrassed, flushed cheeks. She looked at me mischievously.
“Come on Jimmy, let’s go!” she squealed again.
I pulled her back and away and we dropped out from our bodies and into my private work space. I’d never brought anyone here before, and I felt naked. It was thrilling if frightening.
In one layer of my visual field I could see Samson, inhabiting my body back at the beach, holding hands with Cynthia’s proxxi near one side of the blue and yellow tent. They were watched carefully by Cynthia’s mother’s proxxi, and they went off to get some cotton candy. I smiled.
Cynthia and I were standing together in a large, white laboratory with gleaming floors and walls with a view out of smoky glass windows onto Atopia stretched out below, the same view physically as the real Solomon House atop the farming complex.
Above stainless steel tables floated a variety of working models of mirror neuron interfaces I was working on with Dr. Granger. He shared my interest in the physiological basis of emotion and the ability to use it to direct the hive mind, but where he was more interested in happiness, I had taken more of an interest in fear-something the other researchers had mostly passed by.
While we walked, I keyed through some parameters with my phantoms to wash away the tables and structures to be replaced with only one of the models, which then floated in space in front of us, slowly rotating. I was keenly aware of Cynthia’s grip on my sweaty hand.
“Cool,” she said, watching the visually enhanced synaptic firing of the neuron floating in front of us. It was a working model.
“This isn’t just a model,” I declared, “this is actually happening inside me right now.”
After some testing I had installed them in my own developing wetware to see how the models would respond. I started to explain how it worked, how this was an upgrade to what we were doing already, how it provided a more reliable pathway to empathy.
Empathy was something I didn’t understand, or rather, I understood it, but I just didn’t feel it.
While I was nervously trying to explain my project, Cynthia had wandered off, looking around the rest of my work space. I wanted to show her something really special, so I was engrossed in my model, busy burrowing through the cell walls trying to change some protein pathways.
“What’s in here?” she asked, opening a door.
“Oh, ah, nothing!” I cried out, but it was already too late.
As soon as the portal had opened a crack, she’d dropped into the world beyond. I quickly abandoned my model and shot off into that world behind her.
Instantly I was standing beside her in semidarkness. Shafts of light bore down from the blackness above, illuminating a writhing mass of insects and worms and other creatures pinned painfully to the walls of my labyrinthine private universe. An image of my mother’s face hung in space above us, twisted in hate.
