6
“Congratulations on the win, Olympia.”
“Thank you, Ms. Mitchell,” I replied quietly. We’d won the first phase of the Cognix account, and I was sitting next to one of the firm’s senior partners, Antonia Mitchell.
It was the biggest contract our company had ever been awarded, and I was something of a hero around the office. Bertram had even been tolerable lately.
Antonia smiled back at me. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, please continue.”
The day’s main event was helping run an online press conference with Patricia Killiam, Cognix’s most famous scientist and primary press presence. The meeting was being held in one of the Atopian conference rooms. Many of the reporters were actually on Atopia with Patricia in the room, but most people, like Antonia and I, were attending remotely.
Atopia was one of the floating city-states, physically located somewhere in the thousands of miles of open ocean in the Pacific off California. The technology they were developing, and we were marketing for them, enabled perfect simulated reality. That meant place and distance ceased to have any real meaning for them. Antonia was participating in the meeting using an older, lens-based virtual reality technology, but I used my new pssi system.
I started up the holographic promo-world for the reporters to get the show started.
“Imagine,” said an attractive young woman, or man, depending on your preference, “have you ever thought of hiking the Himalayas in the morning and finishing off the day on a beach in the Bahamas?”
As she walked along an exotic anonymous beach, she smiled confidently, conveying to us that not only was it possible, but it was something we needed, and needed right away. “Pssionics enables limitless travel with no environmental impact. You’ll be having the most fun, with the lowest combined footprint, of anyone in your social cloud!”
“And you’ll never forget anything again,” she laughed, reminding us of all the things we’d ever thought we’d forgotten. “You’ll never again have to argue about who said what!”
While we all contemplated the things our mates had gotten wrong over the years, her face became more serious.
“Imagine performing more at work while being there less. Want to get in shape? Your new proxxi can take you for a run while you relax by the pool!” she exclaimed, stopping her walk to look directly into each viewer’s eyes. “Look how you want, when you want, where you want, and live longer doing it. Create the reality you need right now with Atopian pssionics. Sign up soon for zero cost!”
The woman faded into the slowly rotating Atopian logo, a pyramid with a sphere balanced at its apex. A short silence settled while Patricia let it sink in. She was the master at this, and she should be after the lifetime she’d spent working on it.
“So how exactly is pssionics going to make the world a better place?” asked an attractive blond reporter from one of the entertainment outlets.
I watched Patricia roll her eyes. She didn’t like the term “pssionics,” too much baggage. The blond reporter’s name floated into view in one of my display spaces: Ginny.
“Well, Ginny, I prefer to use the term ‘polysynthetic sensory interface,’ or just pssi,” Patricia replied, detaching from her body.
A computerized image of Patricia floated up above her body and continued to talk with the reporters while her proxxi walked her body along beneath the projection. Nobody batted an eye. They weren’t easily impressed anymore.
“We’ve been able to demonstrate here on Atopia that people are just as happy with virtual goods as material ones. You just need to make the simulation good enough, real enough.”
Everyone nodded. They’d heard this before—as had I, at least a dozen times, and my mind wandered off to thinking about how pssi had already changed my life. I certainly felt more rested, and I started to consider calling Alex, perhaps just to chat.
“Now, if you’ll allow me,” continued Patricia, “I’d like to take whoever is coming up to watch the slingshot’s test firing.”
Her asking was a formality as they’d all signed off already, but they all nodded just the same. Patricia took control of our collective visual points-of-view and pulled us up through the ceiling of the conference room and out above Atopia with dizzying speed. We shot upward into the sky, while the green dot of Atopia receded into the endless blue of the Pacific below us.
“To answer Ginny’s original question, pssi will change the world by moving it from the destructive downward spiral of material consumption and into the clean world of synthetic consumption.”
Our viewpoint began to slow as we neared the edge of space. The Earth’s curved horizon spread out in the distance, above the oceans far below. The sun was just rising.
“Ten billion people all fighting for their piece of the material dream is destroying the planet, and pssi is the solution that will bring us back from the brink!”
Her finale was punctuated by a growling roar as the slingshot filled the air around us with a fiery inferno. The reporters clapped loudly in the background.
They couldn’t get enough of this stuff.