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.
8
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.”
“Even though they signed off on a hold harmless clause with the beta testing?”
“This sort of thing could get, well, it could be pretty media friendly,” explained the lawyer, looking even more bored as he said it, if that was possible, “or pretty unfriendly, depending on how you look at it.”
This was exactly the reason why I couldn’t let Willy increase his splinter limit, unexpected repercussions and technical glitches like this. We just couldn’t afford the risk.
“Make the deal,” I sighed. The lawyer nodded and faded away.
“And Karen,” I added, “fix this problem. I don’t care what it takes, but get it fixed.”
The Infinixx platform had been designed to enable even regular humans to manage the trick of distributing their consciousness. For us pssi–kids, who grew up with the knack for doing this, the Infinixx platform was an amplifier that multiplied what we could already do, but learning the trick was a little more difficult for the general population than we’d imagined.
Our slogan was ‘Everyone. Everywhere. Everytime.’ or E3. The ‘E’ and the ‘3’ were stylized in the logo, facing each other to form an infinity symbol above the Infinixx name. It was all very clever branding.
“What exactly does it mean?” I was asked at the press conference immediately following the tech meeting.
We were announcing the slogan and unveiling our marketing program. The media people were very proud of it and were hanging in the wings of the presentation space, egging me on to nail their positioning.
“E3 represents the infinite possibilities of the future that we’re bringing to life,” I rolled out breathlessly. “E3 is the idea that anyone can be everywhere and anywhere at any time they like—while still never needing to be anywhere they don’t want.”
I paused before my finale, catching my breath.
“For the first time, people will be free to be nowhere and everywhere at the same time—E3 represents total freedom!”
Applause rang out as I raised my hands to the crowd. I managed to say all of this without the slightest of smiles, even though I wasn’t sure I understood what it meant. All that mattered was that the marketing department was in love with it.
While distributing consciousness was a nice trick, what had the business world so excited were the implications for productivity. Synthetic intelligences and phuturing had been able to push the needle a long way, but lately they’d been stalled in their revenue enhancing capabilities, and distributed consciousness was the new buzzword in investor circles. Many groups were pursuing something like it, but with our intimate link to Cognix and our unique abilities as pssi–kids, we had an edge nobody else could match. The investments had just poured in.
The explosive growth was an adrenaline rush.
We’d begun synthesizing intermediate management as splinter constructs, their personalities and experiences amalgamated from the team members they would be managing. Our managers thus became a little bit of everyone they managed, but despite this, people still hated them for some reason.
Even with these innovations, it was a grind, especially the constant need to bring in new talent. Picking new staff became a Herculean task with each new staff member counting as ten—the productivity multiplier goal we
