“Could you describe for our audience what, exactly, distributed consciousness feels like?” asked Tammy. “I mean, how would you describe it, and not from a technical point of view.”
This brought hushed laughter. I was famous for inundating reporters with technical jargon that left them feeling like they knew less than what they started with, so I made an effort to make it simple.
“Sure, good question. The easiest way to describe it is like speed reading. When you’re speed reading, you don’t really read every word—you read the first and last lines of paragraphs and scan for a few key words in between. It’s sort of like that.”
“Doesn’t that imply you’re not really getting the whole picture?” asked Tammy.
Good question, but hard to answer simply. Distributed consciousness both was and wasn’t what it described.
It wasn’t really distributing your conscious mind; what it was doing was creating an estimate of your cognitive state at that point in time, and with the particular issue you needed to deal with, then tagging this with as much background data regarding your memories as it thought relevant and available. The system then started up a synthetic intelligence engine and sent it out to canvas whatever you wanted to look at.
From time to time this ‘splinter’, as we called it, would report back with compressed sensory data that would be perfectly understandable only to your frame of reference.
Imagine your best friend winking at you when you asked about someone you both knew—based on your shared experiences, huge amounts of information could be encoded in a single binary bit communicated this way. Infinixx was something like this—the ultimate data gathering, compression and transmission scheme, tailored exactly to your individual mind at that moment in time.
Even without pssi—the poly-synthetic sensory interface developed here on Atopia—we could approximate a lot of the techniques so that first time users could realize some benefits. At first this worked nowhere near as well as it did for long time pssi users, but still, it worked.
“Well, you are getting the whole picture,” I responded to Tammy after reflection, “just not every detail. Speed reading really comes down to the unconscious skill the reader has in scanning the right parts to focus on.”
I paused to let them soak in what I was saying.
“Infinixx technology provides that attentional context, as well as the sensory and cognitive multiplexing technology to make it easy for even a novice to begin distributing their consciousness into the cloud within a few hours.”
I scanned the upturned faces and watched them nodding, but that last sentence had injected a slightly glazed look into their eyes.
“Okay for instance,” I continued quickly, “the last meeting you attended, how much of that was just an excuse for a co–worker to ramble on about something that had nothing to do with you?”
This earned a few chuckles.
“However,” I declared, drawing the word out, “there were probably a few bits here and there that you found useful. Infinixx provides the ability to tune a small part of your attention to only those interesting bits, allowing you to ‘be there’ the whole time without actually needing to be there.”
“So how long does it take to understand how to use all this?” Max cut in.
“Even
I tried to maintain a steady smile on Max. To fully realize the benefits of this technology, I was thinking, you really needed to grow up with it, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. Not right now, anyway.
3
“IT IS IN our interest to work together, to find a way to shape our differences,” droned the Chinese Minister of State. Sure, in exactly the same way that you’ve shaped all previous differences; in your favor.
The splinter covering this latest round of peace talks between China and India didn’t need to send in very much new information, the tone and character of the meeting having been pretty much the same as every other one in the recent past; nothing positive, and very predictable. Then again, for business purposes, predictability was everything. I pulled the splinter back for more important work elsewhere.
I quickly assimilated that thin conscious stream and turned my mind to an exploration hike that another one of my splinters was on in the Brazilian rain forest.
The wikiworld displayed vast tracts of remote farmland belonging to Greengenics outside of Manos, all sown with a complex matrix of plants varietals that was supposed to mimic the diversity of the forest surrounding it. I wasn’t buying their story and suspected they were strip farming the area. I’d hired a local guide to walk in and snoop for me, and this splinter was ghosting in through the guide’s contact lens display.
Pulling back the last of the dense foliage before the edge of the farm area, we peered in, and my suspicions were confirmed. Long rows of bio-engineered farmaceuticals stretched out into the distance. Greengenics had been falsifying its wikiworld feeds. This splinter of information, at the edges of my attention, shattered into a dozen others and then went off and used the information, shorting the Greengenics stock, pushing and pulling information that streamed outwards.
The Shanghai market was about to close its morning session when disaster hit.
“What?”
“Pull out of the short positions right away,” warned Willy. “I’ve already done as much as I can.”
Visions of the peace talks closing splintered into my mind. Interest rates were supposed to be trending a full point lower, but a last second and unexpected announcement between the Chinese and Indians regarding a joint farmaceutical project had injected future uncertainty, pushing expected rates higher. Worse, the Greengenics facility was named as their secret collaboration, sending the stock of this small company soaring. This unusual twist around my strategy suddenly shot everything out of alignment.
“Put in sell orders!” I yelled into my dozen splinters.
The bell chimed signaling the close of Shanghai. Within seconds, the secondary and after markets had kicked in, but by the time we’d managed to unravel my positions, I’d chalked up a huge loss.
I was too highly leveraged, trying to be too clever.
Hovering over the small metaworld that was my financial control center, I closed my eyes and sighed. I needed more splinters to cover more things at the same time. All I’d been able to scrounge up was about fifteen, and half of them were prototypes that were getting called back for updates and re-initializations all the time. A growing headache began to pound behind my eyes, and I focused inwards and back outwards, getting myself ready for the rest of the night’s work.
The day had ended in total, personal financial disaster. Almost everything that could have gone wrong, had gone wrong. Even though I hadn’t said anything, Brigitte could sense my mood and had prepared a special night for us. She’d taken the time to personally reserve a little patch of sidewalk on the side of the Grand Canal in Venice.
The spot was undeniably romantic; a candle set in a green wine bottle atop a red checked tablecloth, the gentle slap of the Adriatic against the canal walls, and the twinkling lights of Venezia under a rising full moon. The strains of an accordion played somewhere nearby, the notes floating together with the smells of fresh cut herbs and tomatoes and seafood.
“Brigitte, this is beautiful,” I managed to say as I arrived, dropping most of my webwork of splinters behind.
Stepping into this one reality I sat down opposite her. I tried to relax and let my foul mood evaporate into the warm night air. I could guess that she and Wally had been speaking, and from the look on her face there was more in store. I sighed.
I was still stewing over a heated argument I’d had with Nancy earlier regarding my splintering limit. I’d tried to explain what a difficult spot I was in, but it hadn’t mattered to her. Atopia was supposed to be this shining
