3
Identity: Jimmy Scadden
“I think that’s a good idea, Commander,” I said once Patricia had faded from view. “I mean about going to see your wife. I can handle this.”
Rick glanced up at me from the slingshot controls. “Thanks.” Standing up from his workstation, he walked over as he shifted his command authorizations to me. “You have a pretty special bond with Dr. Killiam, don’t you?”
I smiled. “We do.”
An alert signaled that some security protocols had been breached during the weapons test. Somebody was poking around up there and had destroyed the drone.
“It hasn’t been easy moving here,” he continued. “At least, it hasn’t been easy for Cindy.”
I filed the breach report and made a note to look into it later.
“It’s a huge change for her,” I replied. “And for you, for that matter.”
Rick nodded, pulling a security blanket down around us. The other Command staff glanced up from their workstations, curious.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “I heard that you had it rough growing up here.”
I didn’t say anything.
“If you ever need anyone to talk to, I had a bit of a tough time as a kid, too.”
“Thanks…,” I replied, surprised at his sudden intimacy.
“I’m just saying, any time…and, of course, entirely confidentially.”
“I appreciate that, Commander,” I answered more confidently. “And I will, but I’m fine.”
I pulled down the security blanket, feeling self-conscious with all the rest of the staff there.
“Why don’t you get on to seeing your wife?”
He smiled. “You just remember, any time, right?”
“Right.”
A pause while I smiled at him, but it was difficult to sense what was going on inside his head. I decided to let it go.
“See you later, Jimmy.”
While Atopia was marketed as this amazing place and the tabloid worlds were constantly spinning stories about the fantastic pssi-kids that grew up here, my experience on Atopia was a special sort of hell I had to drag myself through. As an adult, I had the perspective to view it, even appreciate it, as a part of the fire that had forged me, but back then, pssi could be cruel.
And, of course, I remembered it all. For pssi-kids, not remembering wasn’t an option.
“Look at him, isn’t that cute?” said my mother, back when I was an infant, just after my parents had arrived on Atopia. “He just shat himself again, and he’s looking around wondering what smells so bad.”
She was laughing at a shared rendering of my inVerse, even sharing the smell with the guests. I was ten months old, and Mother was at it again. Drunk, of course.
“Smell that?” she laughed. “Can you believe something so small could make such a terrible smell?”
My parents had another couple over for coffee, and Mother had turned our cramped apartment into a synthetic-space projection that was decked out like a Spanish palace for the evening. We were sitting in the middle of an open courtyard under a deep blue sky, surrounded by a three-story terracotta-faced palazzo, the walls decorated with intricate murals inlaid with tiny blue, white, and gold tiles.
I was playing between potted ferns next to a small pool filled with colorful koi. Dragonflies buzzed at the water’s edge, holding my attention as I reached toward them. I still hadn’t learned to walk yet, so I sat on my haunches in my own excrement, eyes on the dragonflies, curiously sniffing the air around me.
“Don’t you think you should change him?” asked Steve uncomfortably. He worked in the aquaponics group with my dad, and they spent a lot of time together, both at work and off hours. It was a source of friction between my parents.
“It’s all that fish protein in his little diet,” said Mother. “Phil thinks it’ll help his brain development, grow him big and strong, but it doesn’t seem to be working.” She laughed again, louder this time, shrugging her shoulders. The guests politely tried to smile.
“Yolanda!” she yelled. “Change Jim, please?”
Mother smiled at the guests as her image flickered. She detached while her proxxi, Yolanda, took over control of her physical body. The pssi functioned somewhat less than flawlessly at that prototype stage back then, and the net effect was that a ghost of Mother seemed to remain in place while Yolanda materialized into view and morphed away with her body to stand up.
Yolanda smiled at the guests and walked over to pick me up. She cradled me as she scurried me aside to change my diaper.
“Isn’t it just the best thing?” my mother gushed, referring to the pssi, still a new toy to them. This was the first time Steve and his wife, Arlene, had paid a social call with my parents. Our family didn’t have many guests over. We weren’t what you’d call popular.
“I was skeptical at first when Patricia Killiam—my great aunt,” she emphasized, stopping for effect, “offered us a berth, but really, it’s made my life so relaxing.” She smiled drunkenly.
“It is amazing,” Steve agreed, happy to have gotten off the topic of diapers. “All the build-up wasn’t just hype.” He looked around the room for confirmation.
“Absolutely.” My mother nodded. “I mean, who would have thought? I modeled my proxxi after my own nanny, and little Jimmy has hardly put a dent in my lifestyle.”
“We’re still learning new ways to use it,” added Steve’s wife. “It is nice to have real face-time with people, though. Synthetics do lack a certain…something.”
Everyone around the table nodded except my mother, who crinkled her nose a little.
No one around the table quite knew where to take the conversation next.
“Well!” exclaimed my mother, never one to let an awkward moment derail her. “Who would have imagined that we’d end up in the most technologically advanced place on Earth and I’d be a fishmonger’s wife!” she tittered, looking toward my father.
He stared down into his coffee. “We manage the aquaculture program—we’re not exactly fishmongers.” He stole a tiny hateful glance her way but smiled to the guests.
Steve raised his cup of coffee. “And we farm kelp, too!”
Mother pinched her face in a tight-lipped smile that I was all too familiar with. “That’s nice. Call it what you like. We’re here, and that’s all that matters!”
Yolanda walked back over offered me back to my mother, who took me on her knee and smiled into my little face.
“How’s my little stinker?” she laughed, shaking me more than lightly.
4
Identity: Patricia Killiam
“There’s something very odd about this latest string of disappearances,” I stated, getting to the reason I’d requested this private meeting with Kesselring.
The rash of people disappearing into the multiverse and leaving their bodies behind had gotten worse, even common. After an initial alarm by friends and family, we’d usually find them burrowed deep in some hedonistic cyber-fantasy world, but lately cases were sprouting up in which they were nowhere to be found.
“Do you think that bastard Sintil8 could have anything to do with it?” Kesselring asked. “He’d love to find a way to derail the program. Are you keeping an eye on him?”
“More or less.” I had my own private discussions with Sintil8, but nothing I wanted Kesselring to know about. “But these disappearances are different. Their brains are highly stimulated, a sensory overload of some sort.”
I took a deep breath and shifted in my seat.
The strict privacy laws—that I’d created—now meant I couldn’t dig any deeper into people’s minds without their consent. I’d forced Cognix to build ironclad privacy systems into pssi from the ground up to protect the rights of users. Root pssi control was like having access to the soul of a person. It was the fundamental building block from which everything else branched.
“We need to figure out what’s going on.”
Kesselring sighed.
“I don’t disagree, but a few people off pleasuring themselves in the multiverse isn’t enough to delay the entire program. This is a massive undertaking we’ve put in motion.”
The global marketing push to launch pssi commercially was easily the biggest promotional campaign of all time, at least by a private corporation—if this label could be applied to us anymore.
I watched the glittering cover of the security blanket that had fallen around us when he arrived. Even with security incorporated from the ground up, if you wanted to be really sure you were safe from prying eyes, it was best to use a blanket.
The one surrounding us now was Kesselring’s personal, impenetrable shield. It had an odd and shifting color that was similar to the indistinct bluishness of water in a glacial runoff stream. Maybe that was why it felt so cold.
“Do you think the Terra Novans are involved?” I asked. “It’s still possible this is Sintil8 together with the Cartels, or even some fragmented group from Allied Command.”
Kesselring eyed me. “I have someone looking into it. We need to be extremely vigilant from this point.”
I watched him, wondering how vigilant he was being about me. “You’ve probably heard, but Rick agreed with us to nominate Jimmy to the Security Council,” I said. “If anyone can ferret out what is going on, he can.”
I was still rooting for Jimmy, even if he didn’t need it anymore.
When Jimmy’s parents left Atopia, I’d taken him under my wing. His mother, my great-grandniece, had abandoned him here, and I blamed myself for not intervening sooner in that ugly domestic situation. Ultimately, Jimmy had been the one to pay the price, but he was beginning to blossom. He was my star pupil, along with Nancy, of course. In my long life, I never had any children of my own, and these two were as close as I’d come.
I couldn’t have been more proud.
Kesselring eyed me, sensing my protectiveness. “Jimmy’s an excellent choice. He’s the one I have helping me out.”
I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t known Jimmy was working directly for him.
“What are they up to?” I mused under my breath, thinking about the Terra Novans, but now thinking about Kesselring as well.
“I don’t know,” he replied, not catching my full meaning, “but this just proves my point that we need to push ahead as quickly as possible. As you said yourself, we need to maximize the network effects of the product introduction—”
I completed the sentence for him, “To gain the highest saturation throughout the population as quickly as possible. I know.” I stared into his eyes. “So we’re going to be giving it away for free?”
He smiled. “Of course.”
“And it doesn’t worry you we’re not telling people the full story?”
“It worries me,” he said, looking down at the floor, “but again, what choice do we have?” He raised his head and met my gaze. “We need to make sure we stabilize this timeline the best we can.”
As we approached the point of no return, all the careful planning and clever analyses had the feeling of blind faith, and I’d had faith shot out of my skies early in life.
“Patricia,” he said, watching me, “the lives of billions rest in our hands. We cannot fail.”
He was right. What we were doing couldn’t be worse than letting billions of people die.
Could it?