While distributing consciousness was a nice trick, what had the business world so excited were the implications for productivity. Synthetic intelligences and phuturing pushed the needle a long way, but lately they’d been stalled in their revenue-enhancing capabilities, and distributed consciousness was the new buzzword in investor circles.
Many groups were pursuing something like it, but with our intimate link to Cognix and our unique abilities as pssi-kids, we had an edge nobody else could match. The investors were pouring in.
The press conference was complete, so I let the splinter in attendance slip away and pulled in a splinter that was minding a staff meeting we were having in our Infinixx boardroom.
Karen, my technical lead, jumped me into experiencing a technical glitch we were having. My mind quickly filled with visions of bunched up sheets, of pain and guilt, of junkies staring with hollow eyes. The anxious desperation gave way to confusion, a mad whispering of ideas that must have meant something, but didn’t mean anything to me. Then something else, a contained space, I was trapped in a small vehicle that suddenly burst into flames. Just as quickly, I was sitting, combing my hair, and looking back into a face that wasn’t mine.
I closed down the splinter network, collapsing my conscious webwork at the same time.
“It’s some kind of bug,” explained Karen. “The subjective streams are getting mixed up, and there are meme-matching faults as well.”
“Do we know what the problem is?”
Launch time was fast approaching. While building our technology platform, we were at the same time using it ourselves, in the office and in meetings with people, to provide for our own proof of concept. The problem was that bugs tended to get cycled back, amplifying their effects.
“We think so. We’re running some final QA before letting it out into the ecosystem.”
“What caused it?” We’d been having some speed bumps, but nothing as serious as this.
“Seems like a code change somewhere in the kernel layers. We’re trying to figure it out.”
“You’re sure this will solve it?” I just needed it fixed. “I have another press event in a few minutes. Tell me the truth.”
“Yes,” confirmed Karen with some conviction, “that’ll solve it.”
My VP of Human Resources glanced at us. “Did you hear about Cynthia, that new administrative girl we hired?”
Cynthia was a great hire, but had recently dropped off the radar without any warning. People disappearing off into hedonistic cyber-fantasy worlds wasn’t uncommon, but Cynthia had been my personal pick. She’d seemed more reliable than that.
“Yeah, I heard about that. So her neural functions are off the charts, but they can’t find her and she’s off in the multiverse somewhere?” asked Kelly, my business partner.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with us, does it?” I pulled the splinter for this meeting into the center of my consciousness.
“Nothing to do with us,” confirmed Kelly. “But speaking of strange, how about Vince Indigo. Have you seen the flash death mobs he’s attracting?”
There were a few laughs around the table. I stayed quiet, not wanting to reveal any suspicions I had.
“Anyway, the Security Council has taken over Cynthia’s file now,” said Brian, our Chief Technical Officer, bringing the discussion back. “Let’s keep moving. Speaking of the Security Council, what does everyone think of Jimmy getting nominated?”
“I think Jimmy is great,” I said.
“Of course you would,” snorted Kelly. “More of the Killiam clan in charge, but then what’s good for the goose.…”
“Hey!” I exclaimed. “That’s not fair. Jimmy’s family is barely related to mine.” My cheeks blushed.
They all rolled their eyes.
Jimmy was related to me, but only distantly—our great grandfathers had been cousins, so whatever that made us. Patricia had asked Bob’s family to adopt Jimmy when he’d been left in her care. I’d been dating Bob at the time; we’d been inseparable as children. From that point on, though, I’d been teased for dating what amounted to a distant cousin, if only cousin-in-law. Childhood taunts had a way of sticking with you.
Cunard pinged me for yet another press event starting in a few minutes, and I was happy to escape. “Guys, I have to move this splinter back. Anything else?”
I looked around the table. The meeting room pulsed silently in its synthetic reality cocoon. There was something they weren’t telling me—something they didn’t want to tell me. “What?”
A few of them looked down at the floor. Karen hit me with it, and the details of a lawsuit splintered into my consciousness.
“Some guy in Minnesota is suing for emotional damages after his sensory stream got crossed with his teenage daughter’s.”
“Oh…my…God.” The details flowed through my networks. The girl had been out with her boyfriend. I shook my head, my mind filling with my own memories of growing up. Never mind the father; it was the girl who would be damaged after this. “And you’re only bringing this to me now?”
“It was only filed ten minutes ago,” replied our legal counsel, a loaner from Cognix corporate who’d materialized at our table.
“Do you really need to be here right now?” I demanded. This was supposed to be a private meeting.
He shrugged. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you still want to be running this company by the end of the day,” he replied coolly, looking at the ceiling, and then turned to stare into my eyes. “You need to deal with this right now.”
I sighed. Lawyers were a part of the job I hated, but running Infinixx didn’t give me much choice.
“Nothing in the media worlds yet?” Cunard had already run a background check in the seconds since we’d learned of the problem. There was nothing we could see so far.
“No,” replied our lawyer, “they’ve agreed to keep it quiet.” He looked around the room at my technical staff, appearing bored.
“For a settlement I imagine.”
“Yes,” he smiled, looking back toward me, “as you imagine.”
“Even though they signed off on a hold-harmless clause with the beta testing?”
“This sort of thing could get, well, it could be pretty media friendly.” The lawyer looked even more bored as he said it. “Or unfriendly, depending on which side of the fence you sit.”
This was exactly the reason why I couldn’t let Willy increase his splinter limit—unexpected repercussions and technical glitches like this. We couldn’t afford the risk.
“Make the deal,” I sighed. The lawyer nodded and faded away.
“And Karen,” I added, just before flittering off to the next press event, “fix this problem. I don’t care what it takes, but get it fixed.”