4
Identity: Nancy Killiam
“Ten?”
“That’s it, William. I’m not going to discuss this anymore.”
I looked at a graphic detailing the metaworld Willy had created for his business. A threadbare and kludged-together collection of Phuture News feeds, second-rate synthetics, and metasense overlays that snaked into the hyperspaces surrounding him. The only saving grace was the distributed consciousness network connecting it all together, borrowed illegally from my Infinixx beta labs. It looked like an interesting test case to show what small businesses could do with our technology, but it was just too early in our product development process.
“Can I just keep to the fifteen I have now?” Willy looked desperate. It broke my heart to have to have this kind of conversation with him.
“Ten, and even that’s a stretch. And I know you’re one of Bob’s best friends.…”
“But obviously not yours. I guess forever and ever ends quicker than it sounds.”
“We were children, Willy.”
“And?”
“That was just a silly game.”
“Maybe to you.”
I sighed. Growing up, Bob, Willy, and I had been part of an almost inseparable gang, and we’d promised to always stick together, do whatever we could for each other, no matter what, forever and ever. It was a long time ago.
I shook my head again. “Ten.”
Now he looked angry. I felt myself wavering, but we were at a critical point in our developmental path. We had to stick to the known unknowns, and letting someone splinter their consciousness into more than just a few instances could lead to some unknown unknowns that I couldn’t afford.
He glowered in my display space. I didn’t have to plug into his emotional feeds to feel the heated waves spilling out around him.
“Fine,” he announced from between gritted teeth, and then he summarily blocked me from all his realities.
My primary subjective snapped back into the Infinixx control center, and I leaned back in my chair, trying to think of ways I could try to help my old friend.
I was already feeling more than uncomfortable, pssi-kid or not, being in my early twenties and bossing around people more than twice my age. Explaining to our board of directors that I was putting the program at risk for a childhood friendship just wasn’t a place I was willing to go.
Willy had always had a chip on his shoulder, even when we were kids. He’d arrived on Atopia with his family when he was already six years old, at an age when the rest of us pssi-kids were already amazing the world with our abilities in the virtual worlds where we’d grown up.
Willy had to start from less than nothing, having come from a neo-Luddite commune in central Montana. In the Schoolyard, we’d teased him mercilessly as he’d struggled to come to grips with the pssi system. Bob had been the first to befriend him, bringing him into our gang, and their friendship was one that had survived. This was no mean feat in the churning social space of Atopia.
His young mind, back then, had been forced to leapfrog almost four hundred years, rocketing from a compound stuck somewhere in the eighteenth century straight into Atopia, a place far ahead of the rest of the world. He’d been incredibly determined, though, and within a short time had become the best flitter tag player in the Schoolyard. Willy had always been on an upward climb, always trying to prove himself, and now more than ever.
I sighed again.
I wondered what the world must look like from his perspective, coming from a place so alien to me. It was hard to imagine his childhood.
This made me think of mine.
As a baby girl, my first memories, my first fully formed memories, were of my mother’s face. This wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the detail with which I could remember it. My mother was holding me, cuddling me, and looking down into my eyes, cooing softly.
“Nancy, how are you feeling, my little darling?” My mother’s face was full of love and worry.
It was a very special moment to me. And as the first pssi-kid to pass this threshold, it was a very special moment that was shared with the whole Cognix program. My memories were famous.
That memory was from the first moment my pssi was turned on. It was the beginning of my inVerse, the complete sensory recording of everything I had ever seen, heard, felt, or sensed. I was three months old, and the moment was exactly 7:05 am, Pacific Time, on September 20th of the year my family moved onto the first prototype Atopian platform.
I’d gone back and relived it so many times it was almost embarassing—felt my mother’s hot breath on my blushing cheeks, sensed her holding me tightly, observed every nuance of her pupils dilating and contracting, breathed in the tang of her perfume and the medicinal scent of strong soap, and felt the pull of distraction as I caught glimpses of glowing dust motes floating in the angled sunlight streaming in from the windows. In the corner of the room, my father crouched anxiously over quietly humming machines as he monitored my signals and systems, stealing quick glances toward us from time to time.
Growing up, we hadn’t known anything special was happening around us. Like kids anywhere and anytime, we’d just assumed that life was like this for everyone. But we were special. We were the first generation of children to grow up with seamless, synthetic reality sensory interfaces.
After running out of letters at the end of the alphabet, Time magazine had tried to label us “Generation A,” as in artificial reality, but this expression had died almost as quickly as the magazine. The world then came to refer to us simply as the pssi-kids. We were a part of Cognix Corporation’s phase III clinical trials of early developmental pssi on the island colony of Atopia. We weren’t just making history. As my dad liked to say—we were history.
While Atopia was an amazing place to grow up, we were still just kids, and we did the things that all kids did. We screamed, we dribbled, and we wobbled when we first learned to walk. We did learn to walk much earlier than regular children, using pssi muscle-memory training, but this was just one in a long list of things that we could do that normal human children couldn’t.
Our world was more than just this world—the “physical” world was only a tiny patch of our playground as we quickly learned to flitter across the endless streams of metaworlds that were filled with toys and creatures that sparkled in our sensory display spaces. At first these worlds without end were created for us to play in, but then we began building them ourselves, and we perceived little difference between the real and the virtual. In fact, synthetic worlds felt as real and tangible to us as what the rest of the world called their reality.
Even from a young age, it wasn’t just toys we played with; we also played with making ourselves into toys, altering our bodies to become teddy bears, worms, little flocks of soaring dinosaurs in endless skyworlds, and ever more alien creatures inhabiting ever more impossible spaces as our minds developed a fluid capacity for neuroplasticity. Our proxxi and educational bots were constantly presenting us with an endless barrage of games to master and puzzles to solve as we spun through these worlds, treating every moment as a learning opportunity.
From our point-of-view, our proxxi were simply our playmates during the first few years of our lives. But they weren’t playing. They were constantly correlating the flood of neuronal data traffic through the smarticle networks embedded in our bodies and matching it with our behavior.
We were being analyzed.
It didn’t take that long to learn a human wetware matrix, but our brains and nervous systems were still in development, and they were using our data to continuously redesign the pssi system. We were Cognix’s guinea pigs, part and parcel of our parents’ agreements to participate in the Atopian project.
Almost all of my early childhood was spent with my proxxi—the ultimate tool in familial productivity enhancement. To us, our proxxi were our brothers and sisters, little artificial boys and girls we could play with.
This even became a primary selling feature of the program.
After all, who had the cycles left over in today’s busy world to have even one child, never mind a second one? Proxxi filled this need in the market by creating a kind of digital clone of a child to act as its playmate, babysitter, and educator, or even the child’s twin, depending on your point-of-view and moral framework.
The floodgates opened near our fourth birthdays.
Around this age, one by one, we were gradually given independent access to our own pssi systems. Like quick little fish, we’d disappeared over and through the worlds that our parents understood and began venturing out into the open network. Before that time, we’d been limited to one body, but we soon learned to spawn our minds simultaneously into others.
The reign of the pssi-kids in the multiverse had begun.