12
Identity: Patricia Killiam
“So how does it feel, Adriana, or, rather, Ormead?”
I looked out at the view from our perch in the hills above Napa Valley. The lush greens of a late-summer harvest were staked out into the blue-shifted distance along perfectly ordered rows in the vineyards below. Swallows, weaving and darting in a silent dance, chased invisible insects in a sapphire sky.
I motioned to the waiter for another glass of Chardonnay.
Adriana was one of my test study participants who had recently chosen to composite with two of her friends, Orlando and Melinda. Compositing was a new process I was promoting that created virtual private pssi networks that tied people’s nervous systems together. It was like two or more people continuously ghosting each other, but much more intimate. Compositing amounted to fusing the neural systems of the organisms involved.
“It’s wonderful!” she replied with a glow in her eyes. Their partners had decided to composite as well. “The combination of Michael, Denzel, and Phoenix—Mideph—is everything we wanted in a mate—sporty, funny, a good listener, and passionate and artistic.”
Composites were fitting nicely into the evolutionary chain as a new form of deep social bonding to help protect individual psyches from becoming overwhelmed in the multiverse. The cultural aspect of the human social animal was managing to adapt to pssi, but it was still falling behind.
I took a deep breath.
We were moving too quickly.
Whereas compositing in general was a positive evolutionary step forward, an opposite form of self-compositing was becoming a problem.
Before the shock of losing his body, Willy McIntyre had been well on his way to self-compositing into a social cocoon made up of only copies and splinters of himself. Now, from what I’d seen, he’d begun working his way back out, but only because he’d lost his body—not everyone would be so lucky.
Adriana, on the other hand, was part of a new class of composites that formed spontaneous holobionts to symbiotically form a protective barrier against their social networks devolving into isolated clumps within the multiverse. The history of evolution was more about symbiotic organisms evolving into new groups than simply a slow accumulation of new traits. In evolutionary terms, today’s individuals were yesterday’s groups.
Adriana and two of her girlfriends today were collectively inhabiting Adriana’s body, and it still threw off my pssi because it posited her personal details in my display space. We have to fix that. I’d planned on making composites as much a part of the launch protocol as I could, but time was running out.
“And we are everything he really wanted,” she continued. “A responsible, motherly woman who is career oriented but also zany and spontaneous. I don’t think this could have happened any other way.”
These little victories were what made it all worthwhile. Love was still that most powerful of emotions, magically finding ways to fill the cracks that pssi had fissured open in Atopian culture.
“So I heard you’re going to have children? That’s wonderful news!”
Without them reforming as a composite, offspring by any of them separately would have probably never happened. Post-pssi fertility rates on Atopia were approaching zero, but then again, that was counting fertility in the old, biological sense. If we began counting synthetic and biosynthetic beings, such as proxxi, fertility rates were actually skyrocketing.
It all depended on your point-of-view.
Adriana-Ormead smiled even wider, if that was possible. “Yes, we’re going to use Adriana’s body to gestate triplets,” she gushed. “We’re going to do it the natural way and just mix our six DNA patterns together randomly and see what comes up.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
Composites weren’t just a meeting of minds. It enabled individual neurons in one body to connect with the billions of neurons in the attached composited bodies, using the pssi communication network to replace biological nerve signaling.
While this mimicked the dense connectivity of nerves themselves, it was creating neurological structures that had never existed, could never exist, in the real world, and people had already begun stretching the boundaries. Some had begun compositing with animals, with nano-assemblers, with robotics and artificial minds, even expanding their wetware into entirely synthetic spaces.
As new ecosystems emerged, life constantly evolved to fill them, and pssi had opened not just a new ecosystem, but an endless ecosystem of ecosystems. At the very start of the program, we’d begun experimenting with releasing the nervous systems of pssi-infected biological animals into synthetic worlds, creating rules of nature there to allow them to evolve freely.
The results had been staggering.
What was happening to humans as they released themselves into the pssi-augmented multiverse was an experiment in the making, and one we hadn’t had the luxury of time to understand.
And all this had been just within the controlled and monitored experiment of Atopia, released into a few hundred thousand people living within a relatively homogeneous culture. What would happen when this was freed, unchecked, into the billions of souls in the rest of the world was anyone’s guess.
I felt like I was witnessing the cyber-version of the Cambrian explosion a half-billion years ago, when the first elemental life had burst forth in diversity to cover the earth. Except instead of Earth, life was now flooding into the endless reaches of the cyber-multiverse, and instead of millions of years, evolution was now measured in weeks, days, hours.
“Our plan is to let them decide whether they want to composite themselves or not,” continued Ormead, refocusing my wandering mind, “but it’s hard to imagine why they wouldn’t want to, knowing what we know now.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” was all I could say. She’d started on a journey that I’d set in motion, but to a destination I could scarcely imagine anymore.
Sitting in my office, I was going over some research notes regarding Hurricane Ignacia. It was mind numbing. I decided to splinter in on a game of rag doll that some of the younger pssi-kids had started up in the Schoolyard. It was one thing to review data, but the data could never quite match the intuitive observations of actually sensing an event in process.
While the flitter tag game the kids played was straightforward from a game-theory point-of-view, rag dolling wasn’t even really a game, and it was dominated by singular personalities. Flitter tag had the organic feeling of birds flocking, a murmuration, the madly fluttering splinters of the children’s minds circling around each other in one body and then the next, in this world and then another. But rag dolling had an entirely different feeling to it, something decidedly uncomfortable. Watching these young pssi-kids at play, I couldn’t help getting the feeling there was something I wasn’t seeing.
The problem was in what exactly I couldn’t see.
It was fairly simple to catalog the changes to the body as people switched from one to the other, added phantoms and metasenses, or switched into entirely synthetic bodies in the metaworlds. We could even track the neurological adaptations going on.
The mind, however, was an emergent property of all this, and more than just a sum of the parts. It was impossible to understand how minds were changing as a result. As Dr. Turing had observed in our conversations a century before, change the body and you change the mind.
Where before this had been a philosophical point, here on Atopia it had a very immediate and tangible effect. All of humanity had previously shared the same physical morphology, and therefore, more or less, the same mind.
But no more.
The human mind was not just the brain.
Our nervous systems extended throughout our entire bodies, including the ancient brain in our gut that was connected to our heads via the vagus nerve. When we said something was the result of gut thinking, it was truer than most people imagined.
By extension, human abstract thought was intimately tied to the entire human body: “she gave me the cold shoulder,” “my hands were full,” “I couldn’t swallow it,” and so on. When we changed the body, we began to change the way our mind conceived of abstract thoughts, even the way it constructed thoughts themselves.
Almost as soon as they could communicate with us, pssi-kids began to use a lexicon of abstract expressions that we couldn’t properly understand, such as splintered-out, tubered, slivering, cloudy, and many more that developed as they did. But where we’d introduced pssi into our wetware as adults and knew the difference between real and synthetic, the pssi-kids had grown up with the stimulus embedded. Most of the distinction was lost to them. Their brains and nervous systems had developed together with pssi, and their minds had started to become something different.
They had become something different.
Changing the body was one thing, but changing the mind, now this was something else. As I watched these pssi-kids playing rag doll, I now had the eerie sensation of watching alien creatures before me.
The rag doll collective stopped and looked straight at the point from where I was observing it. I hadn’t appeared in their sensory spaces nor flagged my presence, so it couldn’t have known that I was watching, or even that I was there. And yet it stopped and stared intently at where I would have been, as if they knew what I was thinking.
As if they were staring straight into my soul.
Quickly, I clicked out and into the safe space of my office.
I shivered.