Soon after, I was sitting in bed, contemplating the view from the window of our pensione. The urge to connect into my work systems was nagging at me, but I was resisting, trying to soak in the moment. A gentle breeze blew in through the window, and Brigitte clung tightly to my side.
We enjoyed sex without any of the messy special effects a lot of the other pssi-kids went for. Not to say we hadn’t experimented with all that stuff. Brigitte was quite the wild child in her day, but as we’d gotten older and found each other, the craziness had lost its appeal.
“Willy,” she purred softly, “can I ask you something? And can you promise not to get mad?”
“Sure, anything, sweet pea.” All of my defenses were down. She could have asked me to jump into the canal and I would have happily complied.
“Do you think we could start sharing our realities? I mean, completely.”
Even as relaxed as I was, this gave me a shock.
“Sweetie,” I replied calmly, “even couples that have been married for years don’t share their realities entirely.”
Right now we were sharing a reality of being in Venice together, which was great, but she wanted to fully share each other’s reality skins, all the little and big ways we filtered and modified real and virtual worlds.
I wasn’t sure I wanted her to see the world the way I saw it.
“I know what other people do, and I don’t want that to be us,” she continued. “It is possible, you know.”
It wasn’t like I walked around with the world skinned-up in as some weird fantasy, but still, sometimes I liked my world to appear the way I liked it to appear. It was hard to deny her, though.
“I want us to take that next step in our relationship,” she added, “to experience the world together in the same way.”
Really it wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t as if we were teenagers and I had something to hide. She really deserved more from me.
“Sure, let’s do it. I’d love to do that with you!” This earned me a big hug and kiss, but I pulled myself away gently. “I love you, sweetheart.”
“I love you, too,” she replied.
I paused, looking at her expectantly. A steady wind that only I could feel had begun to blow.
“Yes, yes, go to work.” She smiled and rolled her eyes. “I know you’re dying to get out there with Wally.”
She hit me playfully with a pillow.
I laughed, grabbing the pillow away and pulling her in for a final kiss.
In a flash, I was rocketing up through the heavens and into my workspace.
The main action for me wasn’t out in the front of my life. The real action was in the backrooms, where Wally and I were working to build my growing hedge fund. My ability to consistently outpace the market using the new Infinixx distributed consciousness platform made it possible to do things nobody else could do. People out there were noticing how this pssi-kid was beating them, and I was starting to get some traction in the market.
But I desperately needed more splinters.
A few months ago, five had been enough, and then I’d expanded to ten. I’d managed to get fifteen by signing up for some beta testing under false credentials, but I wasn’t fooling anybody at Infinixx, and it had me constantly at loggerheads with Nancy. Almost as soon as I launched my splinter-matrix for the evening, she barged in, appearing in an overlaid display while I sat in the middle of my hedge-fund metaworld.
“Nancy, I am just as capable, and probably even more capable, than you at splintering,” I argued immediately, knowing what was coming. “I’ve spent more time stretching the capabilities of Infinixx than anyone.”
“We’ve been over this, Willy.”
“And I can beat the pants off you at flitter tag.”
Nancy rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to disagree, William. I’m just saying, if you were anyone else, I would have fired you already. I can’t ignore it anymore.”
She just didn’t get it. “Can’t you see I’m doing you a favor?”
She said nothing.
“Think of me as an advanced beta tester,” I suggested hopefully.
“William, I can’t,” she said finally. “Your splinter limit will be set at ten. I will allow you to keep using Infinixx to run your side business, but that’s it.”
Ten? My stomach tightened into knots.