4
The sense of touch is the most underappreciated of all the senses, at least of the senses the rest of the world has. When the first elemental life ventured out into the primordial goo, it was its sense of touch that kept it safe from danger. Touch is the most ancient of our senses, existing before any sight, sound, taste, or smell existed.
Touch is essential to the sense of things being a part of your body. When playing tennis, nobody thinks about the racquet hitting the ball as they swing. The racquet just becomes a part of us. Tools that begin as extensions of our bodies soon become a part of it—it’s the way the human mind works.
The same process applies to any tools we used, and pssi made it possible to make tools out of the information flow in the multiverse and incorporate it into our bodies in much the same way.
For me, the flow of information was an apt metaphor. As surfing became my obsession at a young age, my innovation had been to remap my tactile sense into the water around me.
Sitting on my surfboard, bobbing up and down between the swells, I could feel the pressure, shape, and temperature of the water’s surface around me through my skin. The thousands of neurons attached to each hair follicle could sense even tiny subsurface eddies and water currents.
After nearly twenty years of dedicated practice, my brain had neuroplastically reformatted to devote a large part of itself to my water-sense, and I now had the most highly attuned tactile array of any pssi-kid, or for that matter anyone else in the world. Sitting with my eyes closed, I could feel the water moving and undulating around me as a perfectly natural and integral part of my body.
I was one with the water, and it was one with me.
Still a little hungover from the previous evening, I opened my eyes to awake from my reverie. Atopia sure was pretty from out here. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move, and a beautiful stag burst forth from the forest underbrush. We eyed each other for a moment, then he disappeared.
Above decks, the floating island of Atopia was covered in forests that were teeming with “wild” animals, but like everything else, their neural systems were loaded down with the smarticles that floated in the air and water around us. Everything here was a part of the pssi network, but I doubted that the animals ever realized they were off in virtual worlds as they stampeded through synthetic savannahs while vet-bots tended to their real bodies during downtime.
Not much wild was left in the world today. It was ironic that tourists now lined up to come to a completely artificial island that was built to perfect synthetic reality, all to enjoy a shred of the old reality by dusting themselves down in smarticles.
Smarticles were the pixie dust that permeated everything on Atopia, a system of nanoscale particles that worked as both a sensor and communication network. They suffused through the bodies of living creatures, lodging into their nervous systems to form the foundation of pssi.
The polysynthetic sensory interface enabled not just the ability to jump off into virtual worlds, but also the sharing of experiences and even bodies. A philosopher had once rhetorically asked what it was like to be a bat, meaning that it was something we could never know. But here on Atopia, you could inhabit a bat, a bear, a fish, a shark, a tree, and even sometimes, yourself.
The beaming sun was drying the saltwater into crystals on my skin, making it itchy as it baked. I scratched my neck and shifted positions on my board. A breeze mixed the sea air with the musty odor of a tangle of seaweed floating nearby. Though the water was cold, my pssi tuned it out, and I was perfectly comfortable. I just had to be careful my muscles didn’t get too sluggish.
Seagulls wheeled in the sky, and otters were playing in the kelp not far away, chattering away about whatever otters chattered about. Some were floating around on their backs, eating a breakfast of clams they’d scrounged from the aquaculture bins below.
Out here I felt a certain peace that escaped me elsewhere, a deep meditative calm outside the madness. Often, I came to think about Nancy, to think about my brother, to think about how I’d messed everything up. Looking up, cirrus clouds striped the blue cathedral of the sky.
Just another day in paradise.
After some fuss, Vince Indigo, the famous founder of Phuture News, had agreed to hit the waves with me this morning. He’d become my regular surf buddy in the past year, but had recently, and without explanation, dropped off the map.
Convincing him to come out had been a major struggle, and even now, he didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. He was just staring into space, uncharacteristically quiet. I was about to call out to him, to see what was bugging him, when I was interrupted.
“Hey.”
I looked down to find a pssi-projection of Martin sitting on the front of my board. We bobbed up and down in the swells together.
“Hey to you, too, buddy,” I responded sheepishly. “Sorry about this morning. I know it was your birthday.”
Martin always kept the same clean-cut, square-jawed image going despite the vagaries of fashion—fashion being so ugly these days that its look had to be changed almost hourly. His pale blue eyes reflected the skies, and I admired the tight buzz cut he was sporting. Buzz Aldrin came to mind, or better, Buzz Lightyear.
“Don’t worry about it. Dad gets worked up, but I don’t care.”
“Thanks for not ratting on me. So—Inuit, huh? No Eskimos left in this world?”
“Not according to me, I guess.”
We laughed together. It was nice.
“I get so tired of him talking about Jimmy all the time,” I added.
Martin nodded. “I know what you mean.”
When we were growing up, I was nearly the only one who’d tried befriending Jimmy. He was an oddball kid, but he shared the same birthday as my brother, and I’d felt some kind of affinity toward him. These days, I almost wished I hadn’t.
When his parents had abandoned Jimmy as a teenager, Patricia Killiam, his godmother and head of the Solomon House Research Center, had asked our family to take him in. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say, and Jimmy’s presence seemed to only accelerate the downward spiral our family had already been in. To our father, Jimmy had become the shining star and savior of our family honor. I suppose I really didn’t have anyone to blame but myself.
“I guess it’s hard to be encouraging if your son’s a stoner,” I laughed sourly. “Anyway, who cares? I’m doing what I love.”
“Then what more could you ask for?”
I smiled, enjoying the soothing sensation of the water rolling through my skin.
“Got some big action today, huh?” Martin asked, changing the topic.
“Huge!” I confirmed.
He must have checked out the big barrels being laid down across the northern crescent. Storm systems were generating some dangerous waves today—just how I liked it.
“Anything interesting?”
One of my phuturecasts was focused on the incoming swells, predicting the shape and size of the break, how the pipe would develop, and a dozen other factors. I could sit there and watch the horizon for waves, but using a dedicated phuturecast, I could track swells coming from miles away and select the perfect one to get set at just the right point.
“A few nice ones, but I’m waiting for the beast.”
Martin laughed. “Perfectionist, huh?”
“With some things.”
“Yeah, with some things.” He smiled and looked away.
“Bob!” came a yell from across the water. It was Vince, waving at us. “Bob, I need to get going!”
“Already?”
“I need to get back to that thing. Hotstuff’s on my back. ”
I wondered again what had his hair on fire. “I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do. But anyway, ping me if you change your mind.”
Both Martin and I waved good-bye as his primary subjective flitted off, leaving his proxxi to guide his body home. We sat silently for a few minutes, enjoying the sea, sky, and silence.
Martin looked at me and then looked down awkwardly, struggling with something. “We need to have a chat. I want to understand what’s going on with you.”
I looked away. “Sure, I’ve wanted to talk to you, too.…” Maybe it’s time to bring up the gorilla in the room, I was thinking, but just then my metasenses started tingling. “But maybe in a few minutes?”
Detaching my primary subjective point-of-view from my body, I spun it far out into the Pacific. This viewpoint coasted in just above the water, following a monster swell making its way toward us. It was huge, at least a dozen feet in height, even in the open ocean. It sprayed and frothed angrily as I followed it, surging powerfully toward the glimmering speck of Atopia in the distance.
I snapped hard back into my body. Using a phantom, I punched up a visual overlay of how the wave would be breaking in a few minutes. “This is the one I’ve been waiting for! I totally want to talk, but could I catch this wave first?”
“No problem,” Martin laughed. He pointed at the simulation. “Oh yeah, that’s gonna be huge!”
The wave would peak at nearly forty feet and generate an almond-shaped pipe that would continuously sweep past the northern crescent for nearly two miles. The system selected an optimal drop-in point, and I quickly plotted some possible surf paths. It was a big wave, and I’d have to travel fast to catch it right. The triangular fin of a shark I’d commandeered appeared, slicing through the water behind me, and I reached out to catch it and began racing across the water.
“Nice,” said Martin, admiring the path I’d decided on in the simulation graphic hanging between us. Skimming the water, the wind barely ruffled his hair. “So you’re going to pull a dead-man stall, switch back to hide in the barrel, and then finish with a rocket Tchaikovsky and back-hang two?”
“That’s the plan,” I replied with a grin. “Can you switch to the back with everyone else, so I can get this show on the road?”
Martin nodded and disappeared, and I let go of the shark’s fin, leaning forward on my board as I began paddling to the drop-in. My social cloud started buzzing about my impending ride, my dimstim stats surging as masses of people stimswitched into me to enjoy it.
It was a funny feeling, knowing that thousands of people were inside my skin. I couldn’t feel anything physically, but I could sense it, and it sent shivers down my spine.
I began quickening, and the world dropped away as my senses sharpened.
With smarticles infused throughout pssi-kids’ nervous systems from birth, we’d quickly picked up on the trick of “quickening” by using smarticles to accelerate the conduction of nerve signals along their axons. We could literally amp up the speed of our nervous systems on command, but only in short bursts as we depleted the stored energy in the smarticles and, more problematically, began to overheat our brains.
Quickening the body was one thing, but quickening the mind was entirely something else. It had to be managed in a very controlled fashion so one didn’t lose conscious coherence in the seat of the mind, where it all came together. Like anything, it took time, patience, and training to build up this capacity, and when it came to quickening, like surfing, I was one of the best.
With each breath, I concentrated on quickening, feeling the world slow down as I sped up. Switching my visual field into surround mode, I closed my eyes as my visual cortex adjusted itself to a 360-degree view.
Accelerating my paddling tempo, I focused on the ripples of water coming through my water-sense, pushing my speed to match the incoming monster. It began to grow behind me, the sensation of it expanding up and into my skin, surging toward and into me.
My board angled forward, skimming faster and faster. With a final stroke, I opened my eyes and grabbed my board, popping up onto it and leaning forward to accelerate. The wave urged me on. It wasn’t really behind me—the wave was me. I felt it swelling through my water-sense, as if my body was expanding and peaking, with little bits of me frothing off the top as it crested.
The wave began to break, and my board sped down its face. Slowing as I neared its base, I stepped to the back of the board, sinking into the water and almost stalling. I smiled, waving to the crowds on the beach, and a collective gasp went up as they watched the monster booming down behind me.
An instant before disaster, I jumped forward and cut the board back into the wave, sailing up its rushing face. As it roared around the northern crescent, I started snapping a series of turns back and forth off its top. Nearing my finale, I finished with an acrobatic turn that dropped me freefalling into its thundering maw.
The crowds on the distant beach squealed with excitement as my silhouette disappeared.
Finally, leaning forward, I accelerated away from the maelstrom at the back of the barrel. A crazily spinning, translucent tunnel opened up ahead of me, revealing bright daylight beyond. Easing further forward, I sensed the final collapse of the wave, so I stood up and walked toward the front of my board and turned around.
Tchaikovsky started playing loudly in my dimstim, and I closed my eyes to begin air conducting for my audience. With just my toes on the nose of the board, back-hanging my heels off it, a powerful jet of water from the collapsing tube shot me backward out of the mouth of the barrel.
Opening my eyes, I lowered the volume on Tchaikovsky and turned around to walk toward the back of the board. Mad applause from the thousands of dimstimmers who’d enjoyed the ride rang out in the multiverse. The world returned to normal time as I released my quickening, and I felt the burning heat within my body begin to ease off.
Sighing happily, I sank into the water, straddling my board to float gently in the swells again.
Martin reappeared on the nose of my board and gave me a little golf clap. “Nice show, buddy. That was awesome!”
“Thank you, thank you very much.” I wiped the water from my face and looked back at Martin and the tourists still clapping on the beach.
I couldn’t resist showing off again.
The water around me began to thicken up as I summoned tens of millions of tiny zooplankton from the depths below. I kept them near me when surfing, as a safety net in case something went wrong. With a few carefully placed kicks, I levitated out of the water, forcing millions of my little friends to treadmill their hardest just at the right point to support each step. I stood up and took a few steps across the water, then bowed to the crowds with a flourish.
This brought gasps and more pointing from the tourists—he can walk on water!
Sinking back down, I grabbed my board and dispersed my little helpers. Martin was shaking his head, grinning widely.
“That was a bit much,” he laughed, but it felt forced. We didn’t get out together much anymore.
“Buddy, you need to lighten up,” I said to him. “Live a little.”
Immediately, I regretted my choice of words, but Martin didn’t notice anything. I slicked back my hair again, trying to stop the saltwater from streaming into my eyes.
“You want to come camping with me, Willy, and Sid later?” I asked after a pause.
“I’m invited?”
“Why else would I ask!”
“That’d be great,” Martin responded brightly, and then his smile faded. “I worry about you sometimes.”
I nodded. “Still want to have that chat?”
“Maybe later.” The moment had passed for him, too. “I’ve got a lot to do. Be careful with those storms brewing out there—could swing in some weird waves.”
“I will, I promise.” I gave him a small salute. “I’ll see you later.”
Martin returned the salute and winked as he signed off and faded from view.