“You’re in tight with Susie,” Jimmy explained at our lunch later in the day. Apparently he wanted me to set him up with her. She’d been a close childhood friend. “If you help me, maybe I could help you.” He raised his eyebrows.
“I guess.” I paused. “And what do you think you might help me with?” Susie didn’t seem his type, but then, there was no accounting for taste.
“I think I could help you,” said Jimmy, watching me “by getting access to higher-order splintering.”
My heart nearly skipped a beat. Obviously, he knew about my side project, but then again, he’d become head of conscious security systems on Atopia. Of course he’d know.
“Really?” I tried to appear disinterested. “So what, you could double my account settings or something?”
“Much more than that,” he laughed. “I could show you how to fix the system to have almost unlimited splintering. You’ll blow everyone else in the market away.”
I glanced at the glittering blue security blanket around us.
“Nobody else knows what we’re talking about, right?”
I tested the blanket with some of my phantoms, looking for holes, but, of course, this was a waste of time.
Jimmy grinned wolfishly. “I’m the security expert, remember?”
“Right.” I could use his help; this was the opportunity I’d been waiting for. “So what’s the deal then, Mr. Security?”
“If you can get me a date with Susie, but I mean, really set me up with her, you know?” He raised his eyebrows again. I nodded, acknowledging my understanding. “Then I’ll set you up with what you need.”
“You can really pull it off, with nobody else knowing?” I was slightly incredulous. “No risk?”
“Nobody will ever find out. Let me explain.…”
6
Identity: Nancy Killiam
“Olympia,” I whispered to the test subject lying on the pod-bed before me.
No response.
Her mind was still hovering somewhere in the purgatory between consciousness and unconsciousness.
I was inhabiting a robotic body in a doctor’s office in Manhattan to personally attend to the end of the New York clinical trials. After many years, we’d almost reached the end of the process and Cognix was now on the verge of approval by the FDA. Approval here in America would trigger a cascade of approvals in other super-jurisdictions around the world.
It was a critical juncture for the future of Cognix Corporation, and by extension, for Atopia as well.
Aunt Patricia had made it clear that this was a priority, so I was here in person, or at least, a part of me was here in person. The splinter I had controlling this robody was circling at the very peripheries of my consciousness, just a voice in the background of all the buzzing activity that I was dealing with. As Olympia began to stir, the splinter dug deeper into my awareness matrix, prickling my brain, and my attention was drawn toward that one place, my mind automatically load-balancing the other tasks and places and people I was dealing with seamlessly onto my proxxi and other splinters.
“Olympia,” I called out again, louder. She twitched and one of her eyes fluttered, a signal of impending activity that collapsed my awareness firmly into this space.
My mind shivered at the cold, confined reality it found itself in. “Does distributed consciousness really work?” whispered one far away splinter, attending a press conference in Australia. “Yes,” that splinter answered, “even while talking to you I am attending clinical trials in New York.” I was still listening to my other streams of consciousness, but these became faint murmurs in the background of the physicality of being in the doctor’s office in New York.
I glanced up at the lighting panels in the ceiling, feeling my robotic irises focus in and out, adjusting to the brightness, and then looked back down at Olympia as I cradled her head in my plastic hands.
Slowly, her eyes opened, her mind dredging itself up from beneath the sedatives. She wouldn’t see a robot hovering above her, however. Pssi was now installed in her neural pathways, and I’d clipped a reality skin around my robot’s body so that I would appear to her as her own impression of the most caring and loving person she had ever known, an amalgamation of the people the system could figure out that she was closest to.
“Yes?”
She was barely conscious, and I could tell she was already annoyed.
“Seems like someone needs a little more sleepy time,” I purred. “Come on, I’ll get you up and dressed.”
Olympia was something of a special case. She was one of the key external marketing executives setting the groundwork for the commercial release of pssi later this year. Olympia had only been inserted into the program at the last minute by Dr. Hal Granger, one of Cognix’s senior executives and our leading psychologist. Her file indicated acute anxiety, which certainly qualified her, but it was strange that she’d been shuffled in at the last second.
“How long was I out?” asked Olympia irritably, propping herself up on the bed.
“Hmm…,” I replied while my mind assimilated a thin stream of information from the splinter that had been attending her here. “About two hours, I’d say. Everything seems to be working perfectly. In fact, we’ve just activated the system. Your proxxi will explain everything to you once you get home. I would have woken you sooner, but you just seemed so peaceful.”
She grumpily swung her legs off the side of the pod-bed and sat up. I tried to reach over to steady her, but she pushed me off. “I can take it from here, thank you very much.” She waved me away.
I shrugged and leaned over to grab her clothes, handing them to her. I wondered if her aggressive mood had been stimulated by some psychoactive response to the pssi stimulus, but a set of clinical notes floated into view in an overlaid display space. She’s always that way. Everything was fine then; in fact, all of the other reports signaled that this was another perfect pssi installation.
“I’m going to bring you in to speak to the doctor before you leave. He needs to have a final word,” I said as I walked through the door, stopping outside to wait for her to finish dressing.
In a few seconds, she was done and strode out and down the hallway quickly, purposely avoiding looking my way. I watched her carefully, searching for any telltale tremors or jitters that could betray an issue with her motor cortex. She looked smooth, if not graceful, but then, her grace wasn’t my issue.
She stuck her head into the doctor’s office, and I walked over to observe the exchange.
“How do you feel?” I could hear him asking her. “Please, come in.”
“No, no, I’m fine. I mean, I just want to get going. I’ve got things to do. So just tell me quick, what do I need to know?”
“You have a very powerful new tool at your disposal. Be careful with it,” explained the doctor, “and don’t activate any of the distributed consciousness features yet.”
“Distributed consciousness,” snorted Olympia, looking back at me. “Where do they get these ideas?”
I raised my eyebrows. Sensing my job here done, this splinter began to slip back toward the edges of my conscious awareness to become just another voice in my sensory crowd. As it did so, Olympia’s question hung with me, sliding a part of mind off somewhere else, backward in time, into my childhood.