The next morning Brigitte dropped the expected warning shot. “You didn’t ping me last night when you got back from camping with the boys.”
She tried to say it lightly, but I could tell. We’d been together for two years, and I could sense her moods coming like winds approaching in the treetops.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” I replied, attempting to deflect the looming storm. “You know I have this big meeting with Nancy today.”
She didn’t say anything and I paused, deciding on my plan of defense: feint or full retreat?
“We were preparing for the meeting,” I added defensively. “And,” I quickly noted, “we did some stock picks, too.”
My job at Infinixx paid okay, but I’d been brought in as an outside contractor and wasn’t on their stock option dream ticket. The real reason I’d gunned so hard for the job was that it gave me access to the distributed consciousness platform they were developing. Being able to be in a dozen places at once gave me an edge nobody else in the market had right now. And in the market, any edge equaled an opportunity to make money.
Brigitte pouted. A beautiful pout if there ever was one.
Her full lips and petite nose under a beautiful tangle of laissez-faire auburn hair that women of a lesser pedigree would kill for, set her firmly in irresistible, somewhere between beautiful and beautifully cute. Even when her deep brown eyes flashed angrily at me, as they did now, it was hard to resist the urge to simply scoop her up into my arms and kiss her.
So I did.
“William,” she said patiently, pushing me away. She was laughing, but when she used my full name, she always had a serious point to make. I looked at her in my arms. “Vraiment, money isn’t everything. Look around you, chérie.”
I looked around.
We were having breakfast in our pajamas, her in her bunny slippers, atop a Scottish Highlands mountain ridge. Our small white table and chairs sat against the backdrop of a blossoming sunrise amid rolling fog and boulders and grass and sheep—it was surreal to say the least, but she liked it, and that was all that mattered.
“We’re in the most amazing place on Earth. We can travel anywhere we want, do anything we like. I make more than enough money to support both of us, and anyway, look where we’re having breakfast! What do we need more money for?”
I tried not to roll my eyes. This was well-trodden ground. She was a senior administrator for a medical services company headquartered on Atopia, and she made more than double my salary. No matter how I tried to convince myself that it didn’t matter—it did. It would be nice to be able to afford more sub-proxxi; as it was, I could hardly afford to have Wally show up at more than one event at a time. It would be nice to be able to afford to expand my Phuture News Network; right now, it was an immense effort just to stay ahead of the game.
Even accessing the wikiworld at this resolution cost us more than I could afford, but this wouldn’t cut any ice with her. When it came right down to it, everyone else I knew was better off than me, and frankly, it pissed me off.
No end was in sight for the multigenerational mortgage my dad had taken out for our family to get a berth on Atopia. It was a shrewd move on his part, entering the lottery—the value of the berth had more than quadrupled—but the size of the mortgage was crippling to a regular family like ours. We struggled under the debt. It didn’t help, of course, that I’d made some bad stock picks lately and was far in the hole.
“You’re right, pumpkin, you’re right.” It was no use arguing with her.
My metasenses were tingling, and that meant a hot stock move. I’d remapped my skin’s tactile array from the nape of my neck and down my back, like a fish’s lateral line sensors, to sense eddy currents in market phuturecasts. Even the slightest pressure trends in the markets tickled my backside. It was a surefire way to get my attention. Right now, a stiff wind was buffeting my buttocks as I buttered my toast.
“I gotta go,” I told her hurriedly, getting up and leaning over to peck her on the cheek. “Something for work. Sorry, I really have to run.”
She rolled her eyes.
I stepped away and bolted upward through the sky, the world disappearing away below me as I arrived at my workworld. This was my favorite way to get going—it gave me that Superman start to the day.
Wally was already there, and I turned on, tuned in, and dropped out into the multiverse, splintering my mind to assimilate what was happening. One splinter was already tuned into the press conference that my boss, Nancy, had just started, so I let my mind hover over this for a moment.
2
Identity: Nancy Killiam
“Economic growth is only possible through enhanced productivity and the clustering of talent,” I roared to an approving audience.
The world population was declining and fertility rates were collapsing, I didn’t have to add, not to mention failing prospects for the Yen and greenback as bitcoin-derivatives gained ground. While declining populations equaled better prospects for the planet, it was bad news for economics—and for once, today was all about business.
“Atopia isn’t simply about being green,” I pointed out, “but about boosting business productivity, and profits, to provide the basis for a whole new surge in the world economy.”
Closest to me were mostly familiar reporters. Beyond that, millions of faces filled my display spaces into the blue-shifted distance. This was a well-worn speech for me, like a rutted track down an old country road. Maybe “rutted track” wasn’t the best analogy, I chuckled to myself.
I stopped and looked at the crowd. The pause was well rehearsed, and I was enjoying it. I let a confident smile spread across my many faces.
“And the Infinixx distributed consciousness platform is the solution that will carry business into the twenty-second century!”
The masses before me burst into applause. I shook my head and looked down at the stage, trying to convey that I didn’t deserve such adulation.
“So…questions?” I asked, looking back into the crowd. I saw Tammy from World Press with her arm up. She was always a friendly starter. I pointed at her and nodded.
“Could you characterize for the audience what exactly distributed consciousness feels like?” she asked. “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 jargon that left them feeling like they knew less than what they started with. This time, I made an effort to keep it simple.
“Good question. The easiest way to describe it is like speed reading. When you’re speed reading, you don’t read every word, you only 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?”
Good question, but hard to answer simply. Our Infinixx “distributed consciousness” system wasn’t really distributing the conscious mind. It created an estimate of a mind’s cognitive state at one point in time, then tagged this with as much personal background data, such as memories, as it thought relevant and were available. The system then started up a synthetic intelligence engine and sent it out to canvas whatever the user wanted to look at.
From time to time this “splinter,” as we called it, would report back with compressed sensory data that would be understandable only to the user.
When I explained it to reporters, I often used the “best friend” explanation: Imagine your best friend winking at you when you asked about someone you both knew. Based on 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. It worked better with pssi-enabled humans, but even with regular ones, it worked well enough.
“You are getting the whole picture,” I responded to Tammy after reflection, “but just not every detail. Speed reading comes down to the unconscious skill the reader has in scanning the right parts on which to focus.” 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 even for novices to begin distributing their consciousness into the cloud within a few hours.”
I scanned the upturned faces. They were nodding, but that last sentence brought a slightly glazed look into their eyes.
“For instance,” I continued quickly, “that last meeting you attended, how much of that was just an excuse for a coworker to ramble on about something that had nothing to do with you?”
This earned some 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.”
“How long does it take to understand how to use all this?” another reporter cut in.
“Even you’ll be able to use it right away, Max,” I joked, winking. This earned more laughs. I tried to maintain a steady smile at Max. To fully realize the benefits of this technology, one needed to grow up with it, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. So I continued: “We’re ready to go if you are!”