9
Identity: William McIntyre
“Willy!”
Whole scaffolds of my conscious webwork collapsed as Bob forced his way in using one of Sid’s viral skins. Sid was going to get in trouble with his little sidelines one day, but then, who was I to talk?
The last time I’d seen Bob was when we were surfing, when Brigitte and I had split, and that was already a few weeks ago. Work was absorbing me, and to focus I’d been filtering all of my communications straight to my proxxi.
“Willy!” yelled Bob at maximum volume across my full audio spectrum. “Wiiiillllly!”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m here!” I released most of my splinter network into autopilot and distilled a good chunk of myself back into a private workplace where I pulled Bob.
Bob smiled goofily as we both materialized in each other’s sensory spaces. We were sitting across from each other in one of my offices. I sat straight up in a chair at one end of the room dressed in a blazer and slacks while he draped himself over a leather couch facing me, wearing only his swimming shorts and a baseball cap.
“How’s it going, Mr. Rockefeller?”
“It’s going really well.” I smiled uncomfortably. “I’ve had a gale force wind blowing up my back almost all week.”
Bob didn’t quite share my enthusiasm.
“As long as you’re happy.” He sat up on the couch. “I heard you quit Infinixx.”
“I was tired of dealing with Nancy.” I didn’t mention the investigation into my tinkering with the Infinixx code. Nothing came of it, and I’d gotten what I’d wanted.
Bob raised his eyebrows. The three of us had been inseparable as kids, but I’d been the third wheel to their intense romantic relationship, one that everyone but them realized wasn’t over yet.
“You’re not mad at me, are you?” he asked. “I mean, that Brigitte thing. Sid and I were just messing around.”
I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it.”
Thinking of Brigitte made my stomach tighten into knots, and my patience evaporated. I have a lot to get done. Bob watched me in silence. “Who are you hanging out with these days?”
“Ah, just work people, you know.…” It wasn’t as if he worked, so why should I bother explaining? Maybe accepting his ping was a bad idea. I balled my fists.
Right at that moment, Wally warned me that Vince Indigo was waiting. I don’t remember taking a meeting with Vince. Wally noted that he’d alerted me not five minutes before about it, but I’d been so deeply splintered.…
“Listen, I have Vince Indigo waiting in person, a last minute meeting.” I was happy for a reason to cut our chat short. “Big client, I’d better go.”
“Yeah, okay, sure.” Bob squinted and cocked his head to one side. “Do you think you could ask Vince if he’s okay? That stuff on Phuture News is weirding me out.”
“I’m not comfortable doing that.” I began drumming my fingers against my leg. “I don’t know him very well. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
“He doesn’t answer my pings anymore.”
I shouldn’t either. “Sorry, this is business.”
Bob looked down. “Right. Anyway, let’s hang out soon? We should talk about all this stuff, your work changes, Brigitte.…”
“Sure, sure, gotta go.” I waved good-bye, leaving a wafer-thin splinter behind. I flitted back into real-space at my apartment, where Vince was already waiting. Visions of an unimpressed Bob watching me go persisted in several of my visual channels.
“So I assume business is good?” Vince asked. He wandered around the periphery of my apartment, staring outward at the projected spaces of my growing business in the multiverse world of New London.
My new offices had been designed by one of the most sought-after interior metaworld designers. The glass-walled space floated in air, suspended above an almost endless array of cubicles housing renderings of my splintered parts, sub-proxxies, and other synthetic beings and bots that were spawned outward from my own cognitive systems. It was thousands of me working for me.
“Business is very, very good.” I grinned widely. I’d found a back door to Infinixx, and could now splinter as much as I liked, but I couldn’t tell him that. I couldn’t tell anyone. With that hack, I’d already paid off our family mortgage and was well on my way to amassing a sizable personal fortune.
Vince had an air of desperation. It flattered my ego that one of the richest people in the world would make a personal house call for a favor from me, but his nervousness made me nervous. I didn’t like the way he was looking at all the activity below us, and I wondered what could be making him so jumpy—he had all the money in the world to burn, as far as I could tell.
“I noticed you amped up your Phuture News services,” he said carefully, “but that’s not why I’m here. I’m sending the details of what I need, right now.”
A description of a series of financial transaction he wanted me to carry out was uploaded to one of my splinters. In an instant they had analysed it.
“You want me to what?” I replied. “You know this is going to look suspicious, especially with me working for Infinixx.”
“From what I’ve heard, you don’t work for them anymore.”
I wondered how much he really knew. “Sure, but it’ll still look odd.”
Vince had ulterior designs afoot, and that was fine with me. He was offering a princely sum for almost no work. So this is what it’s like to be with the big boys. I didn’t care what he was up to, and it didn’t look illegal—at least, my end didn’t.
In a few seconds, we were finished with the details of the transaction.
Vince looked at me. “And be careful.”
“It doesn’t look like there will be any problems—”
“Not with that. I mean with whatever you have going on here.” He motioned at my office.
“There’s nothing going on here.”
He looked away. “Just be careful.”
“No problem, Mr. Indigo,” I replied, shrugging, and I offered my hand to shake. He shook it, smiling weakly, and then flitted off without another word.
Wally materialized facing me on the white couch in my apartment. A dense security blanket shimmered around us like a sparkling neon plastic wrap.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
Wally knew both as much and as little as I did. He shook his head.
“Listen, Wally, I’m feeling very nervous. We have a great thing going here, but we need to protect ourselves.”
Being splintered into a hundred pieces was great for business, but it was taking a toll on my mind. Focusing on the market all the time left me stunned when I returned to real space, and I was letting details slip.
On the other hand, I felt like I was approaching some new kind of state of being, a perfectly self-sufficient and self-contained human being. I spent all day talking with various parts of myself, and held forth on meetings of mind with dozens of my splinters at a time. The only distinctly different entity I spoke with was Wally, who was more or less a copy of me anyway. Vince and Bob were the first real humans I’d spoken to in days, perhaps even weeks.
“When I’m off in the cloud, I need you to protect us here. I need you to make sure we’re safe, okay?”
Wally looked at me steadily. “Sure thing, boss.”
With that, I flitted off to New York to get working on Vince’s project. If I didn’t need anyone else’s help anymore, I definitely didn’t want anyone interfering.
More than anything, though, I absolutely didn’t want to get caught.
10
Identity: Nancy Killiam
The last few weeks had been a compressed explosion of activity at Infinixx. Our hundred employees managed to output the workload of a thousand—and then two thousand—workers compared with levels of productivity in the outside world. We touted our accomplishments almost hourly as the launch date neared, and the world’s business community couldn’t wait to get their hands on it.
A bigger struggle than building the technology, however, was the Atopian politics. Since I was pushing to have my own launch before the Cognix release of pssi, we needed to embed some pssi technology into our systems, and this meant a messy cross-licensing arrangement. I had Aunt Patricia on my side, but it was still a fierce fight.
“Give me one good reason we should let this happen!” Dr. Baxter had fumed at the Cognix meeting when we were trying to get final approval. Infinixx was stealing some of his thunder as the first Atopian-platform product release.
“You’ve seen all the phutures Nancy presented. Every scenario pushes the Cognix stock higher as we establish Infinixx as early adopters,” countered Patricia. “You’re only annoyed because it’s not under your thumb.”
“That has nothing to do with it,” replied Dr. Baxter, and the arguing continued.
Kesselring had just sat quietly, watching, sighing.
We’d been at a stalemate when Jimmy magically produced the trump card.
“Everyone!” he’d called out, standing up and raising his hands. He winked at me. “I will give you one very good reason.”
Until recently, I hadn’t spoken to Jimmy in years, ever since the incident at my thirteenth birthday party. I felt responsible for what had happened, and it was too awkward to talk about. But since he’d been nominated to the Security Council, we were reintroduced on a professional level. It was as if nothing had ever happened. Jimmy and I had struck a close working relationship, and he was my biggest supporter—after Aunt Patty, of course.
I had no idea what he was going to say. We all waited in anticipation.
“I’ve managed to secure an agreement with both India and China to launch simultaneously with us.”
Gasps rose around the table.
Getting India and China to agree on anything was impossible with new Weather War skirmishes breaking out almost daily. Details of the negotiations sprang into everyone’s workspaces the moment Jimmy spoke. Everyone dropped a splinter to have a look. This wouldn’t just be a commercial coup, but a major political one for Atopia as well.
“How in the world…?” Dr. Baxter’s voice trailed off as his mind assimilated the backstory.
“Jimmy, why didn’t you tell me?” I asked breathlessly in a private world I opened to him.
This was it. This was what would make my dreams a reality.
“I didn’t want to get your hopes up,” replied one of Jimmy’s splinters. “It was a long shot, but hey, it worked.”
“You’re giving up a lot here,” said Kesselring, back in the conference space, speaking for the first time as he reviewed the details, “But the payoff is worth it, and it’ll keep the media’s attention off those damn storms.”
He looked toward Jimmy and smiled, nodding his approval.