14
Identity: Patricia Killiam
“TEN!.....NINE!...EIGHT!...”
Looking out at the packed crowd in the ballroom, I felt the excitement of the crowd rising. In the background, my splinter network scanned the billion-plus people who’d tuned in to witness the launch of Infinixx.
“Aunt Patty,” said Nancy, turning to look toward me with tears in her eyes, “I’ve decided that I’d like you to throw the switch. Everything here is all because of you!”
The crowd continued to roar the countdown. “SEVEN!…SIX!…”
It was her moment to shine, not mine.
“I’d love to, sweetheart.” But my physical self was back helping Vince on a wild-goose chase in the grow farms. Even if I’d wanted to, there was no way for me to throw this switch without my body here. “But I had a last minute thing come up, and I’m not here kinetically. You go ahead, dear!”
I kept my voice light, but my stomach flipped, realizing something was horribly wrong before I even understood what it was. Switching my pssi into identity mode revealed a completely empty ballroom. Not a soul was here physically, not even Nancy. A disaster was about to unfold, and I shot out a mass of splinters to try and avert it.
“FIVE!…FOUR!…”
“Jimmy, how about you then?” asked Nancy, still unaware. I was desperately trying to come up with a solution before telling her. “Go ahead. I really wanted it to be one of you two.”
She released the switch and encouraged Jimmy to take it.
I couldn’t find a way to reroute the power so I could bypass the switch. I tried unlocking the exterior security perimeter to let someone in, but Nancy and Jimmy had the security keyed into them. I pinged Jimmy for access.
At the same time, Marie queried the proxxi of all the senior executives up on the stage with us. Every one of them also had last-minute reasons for not coming physically. None had thought it would make a difference.
Exactly what I’d thought as well.
“THREE!…TWO!…”
“I’m sorry, Nance, I had something, too. I’m only dialed-in,” replied Jimmy. “You go ahead…quick now!”
Jimmy’s face registered his surprise as my access control request hit his networks and he also understood the position we were in.
“ONE!”
Nancy turned as white as a ghost. Her words now echoed in my mind, “Everything here is because of you.” An audible SNAP rang out in the air as the Chinese and Indians flipped their own switches at their remote locations.
What’s going on?
By now, Jimmy had unlocked the exterior security perimeter, and I could see a psombie guard racing toward the stage.
“Forget it,” I heard echo in a distant splinter. It was Nancy speaking, her primary subjective still standing alone on the stage, utterly destroyed.
Was I a woman who dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamt she was a woman?
The butterfly in me yearned to escape.
My doctors were telling me the immunosuppressant nanobots in my bloodstream were attacking my own red blood cells after the latest round of genetic modification therapy, so I was now anemic, or something to that effect.
Running away from one tiger and leaping toward another.
In another splinter, right at the same time as the Infinixx launch was imploding, I’d been holding a different press conference. The disaster sparked an immediate and destructive media tsunami. Smiles started spreading across the reporters’ faces, their incoming messages pinging, and they looked up at me on the stage.
“In short,” I listened to myself saying, “for things to remain the way they are, things must change.”
A few sniggers followed that comment, obviously related to the Infinixx mess and not something clever I’d said.
“Okay, next question,” I said quickly, wanting to get this over with. Only a small part of my consciousness was there, most of the rest of me was trying to calm Kesselring. We’d had the whole world tuned in for the launch. He was furious.
“The responsibility for Infinixx is yours,” fumed Kesselring. “This has injected serious uncertainty vectors into our phutures. Who knows what the ramifications could be. I’m going to have to remove you from the media circuit. The Killiam name is a joke, now.”
Staring at the floor, I declined to comment. I’d been tired of the media road show for a long time already. He was posturing about the long-range phutures, but I knew he was really annoyed about the declining price of Cognix stock.
“The main timeline is holding steady,” I added after a pause. “It’s nothing to get excited about.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Nothing to get excited about? If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that you were behind this.”
“That I sabotaged my own niece’s project?”
“You don’t think this looks suspicious? Not showing up in person at the last minute, everyone showing up in their virtual selves in the last seconds, even Nancy?”
He glared at me. I looked away.
“I had to. Vince asked me for help. Do you think I could ignore him? After what we’ve done to him? Perhaps this was just a coincidence.”
“A coincidence?” snorted Kesselring. “You expect me to believe that?”
Again I stayed silent.
“It must be the Terra Novans,” he said finally, shaking his head and looking off into space. “You realize we’re going to have to remove Nancy as the head of Infinixx.”
At the same time, I had another splinter busy arguing with Hal—another battle of the happiness brigade—about new test results from the clinical trials on addiction.
“People compensate for a complex world by looking for escape,” Hal explained as my splinter assimilated into that reality. “Look at the rise in reports of paranormal phenomenon. We know it’s not real, even they know it’s not real, but they need the escape.”
It was just at that point that the Infinixx mess climaxed.
“Can we resolve the issue of making the new tests public another time?”
He shook his head. “Always an excuse with you, isn’t there Pat?”
“It’s just—”
He cut me off. “I know, the Infinixx disaster. The whole world knows, my dear.”
My patience was already thin. “Doesn’t it bother you that we’re breeding a generation of lazy, self-absorbed sexual deviants with the pssi-kids? Is this the pursuit of happiness?”
“Deviants?” laughed Hal. “Lazy? Come now, Patricia, listen to yourself—and you’re the head of the pssi-kid program!”
I stopped for a moment and considered this.
“I think you’re just too old,” he added with a nasty twinkle in his eye. “These kids do some amazing things, you know that.”
Maybe he was right, but then I knew a few things he didn’t.
“Forget the pssi-kids then,” I conceded. “What about this disgusting trade in proxxids?”
He arched his eyebrows. “Again, deviants?”
“I for one hadn’t planned on starting a whole new industry in sexual tourism for pedophiles,” I complained. “Maybe that was what some of you had in mind, but I find it disgusting.”
“Sexual tourism is a gross exaggeration.”
I said nothing.
“Is it wrong, Patricia?” he countered coolly. “Is it wrong to have computer-generated models of naked children if they’re not based on any real, specific child? Nobody is being exploited. It’s a critical part of our therapy program for pedophiles.”
“Still.…”
“Your prejudice is blinding you,” he continued, throwing my emotions back in my face. “This is just the way they were made. The pedophiles can’t help it. It wasn’t that long ago that society reviled homosexuals the same way.”
“It’s not the same thing,” I objected.
“Isn’t it? Isn’t it better for them to come here, to find a therapeutic path forward? Technology is leading a cultural advance, bringing this long-maligned minority back into the fold.”
“It’s disgusting. It is absolutely disgusting.”
My mind was past the brink of exhaustion. This is the path to happiness?