26
Identity: Patricia Killiam
Silence hung in the air as I waited for Bob to calm down.
“You’re right. Pssi can be very addictive in an uncontrolled environment,” I admitted, taking another sip from my drink. “But it leaves the body very healthy—pssi users will live immensely long lives.”
“Keeping them alive to suck out as much money as possible, right?”
It was surprising that he had managed to discover the pssi weapons programs. I hadn’t even known about it until recently, one of the things Kesselring was hiding from me. I’d only just found out through Sintil8.
Bob gestured angrily. “People directly stimulating their pleasure centers, ramping up their dopamine output, plugging themselves into pleasure broadcasts. Of course it’s addictive.”
“Quite frankly, I’m surprised at your sudden prudishness,” I replied. “As far as I can remember, you made the most of all that yourself.”
“That’s not the issue. The problem is that you’re hiding how addictive it is.”
“Granger found ways to short circuit the addiction pathways—”
“Sure you have,” he sneered. “I bet that’ll work great, and I’ll bet you’ll charge a nice fee for it.”
I sighed. “I know how it must seem, but we needed to get regulatory approval as quickly as possible. We couldn’t afford to let the process get bogged down.”
“So it was all about getting to market faster?”
I nodded my head slowly. “Basically, yes.”
“Encouraging people to have synthetic babies, living in fantasy worlds,” he continued furiously, gaining steam. “If not that, then they’re emo-porners or soapstim junkies, living lives as parasitic reality vampires. Anything to get them hooked on your virtual dope?”
Bob wasn’t the only one who was upset. I was angry, too. While I was responsible for setting this thing in motion, once it got going, I’d been forced to accept a lot of things I wasn’t comfortable with. The synthetic babies, the proxxids, had been one of Granger’s ideas, central to the program for reducing birth rates. While that original idea was good, what they ended up allowing people to use the proxxids for was disgusting. I’d never been comfortable with this, or many other things.
My own anger made me defensive.
“Fantasy worlds? Are they really, Bob?” I lashed out. “You have your own dimstim—a very popular one—and emo-porning is not something I condone. Anyway, since when has people wasting their lives on reality programming been an issue?”
“That’s not the point. You’ve set all this up to turn the entire world into your junkie!” His eyes burned into me. “You’re up on stage every day, touting the benefits of pssi—going green, boosting work productivity, free and limitless travel, living forever—and you’ve got Nancy out there hyping it, too! How much does she know, I wonder?”
He held his arms wide. “The great Patricia Killiam, godmother of all synthetic reality, globally renowned and trusted…In the end, nothing but a drug pusher.”
He glared at me.
“What you’re saying is true,” I observed quietly, “but the benefits are real as well.”
“The first dose is free, but then you start paying. Isn’t that the plan? You’re giving it away for free for the first few months?”
“That is the plan,” I admitted, nodding my head in resignation. “You might understand what we’re doing, but you don’t understand why.”
“Oh, I understand,” he countered. “Money, power—the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and you’re the vultures picking over its bones.”
I let his statement sit for a few seconds. “The world is going to hell in a handbasket, as you say, but I’m not sure you understand the extent of it. Come with me, I need to show you something.”
He scowled.
“Please.” I nudged him with my phantoms.
Grudgingly, he released control to me, and I pulled us through inner space to appear on a city street. Not just a city street, but one that was still charred from some cataclysmic event that had incinerated the place. Bodies were strewn everywhere, blackened flesh and bone exposed through shredded clothing.
“Look around,” I said. “This is the future without pssi.”
He was unimpressed. Daily images of the horrors of the Weather Wars had desensitized everyone. “So you plan to stop war with pssi?”
“We can’t stop it directly, but we might be able to remove the root cause.”
I pulled our projection viewpoint into space, far above the Earth, and we watched as small bursts of light erupted and sent tiny shockwaves across its surface. “You’re watching a full-scale nuclear war in progress. This is representative of many phutures for the human race.”
“But this is just one phuture.”
I shifted the viewpoint back, bringing into scope thousands, and then millions, of alternate future Earths, all burning under some apocalyptic scourge.
“It’s possible to navigate the fate of one individual,” I explained, “but the combined fate of billions gains momentum like a supertanker, and at a certain point you can’t stop it anymore. With more than ten billion people on the planet, and all of them craving material luxury, there just aren’t enough resources to sustain it all, so we fight over what’s left.”
“So it all ends in apocalypse?” He frowned. “I find that hard to believe.”
“No, you’re absolutely right.”
I spun our viewpoint even further back, splintering billions of future worlds into Bob’s sensory frames. “In most scenarios, in almost all of them, we manage to avoid full-blown Armageddon.”
But apocalypse wasn’t the worst fate for humanity. A quick end would be a blessing when faced with the majority of outcomes—a slow, downward grind over decades—shifting populations as the earth continued to heat, ecosystems collapsing, famine, pestilence, and an unending series of wars and genocides.
Over the next fifty years, the human population was going to drop from ten billion to just a few. It had already started to happen, the world population was already dropping fast; the Weather Wars were just the beginning. Billions of people were going to suffer and die horribly.
Bob’s networks assimilated the data sets I sent to him. “But surely,” he said quietly, “there must be something we could do?”
I shook my head. “I was part of the team that created the first Club of Rome simulations in the mid-1970s. We’ve been able to see this coming for a long time.
I waited while Bob took it all in.
“Not that we didn’t try,” I sighed. “The same phuture-spoofing technology we have hunting Vince down was one that I developed to try and nudge the timeline back and forth.”
“So you’ve been trying to manipulate the world?” said Bob, but he wasn’t angry anymore.
“But too little, too late. As we built Atopia, we tried countless combinations of events. In the end, no matter which way we twisted or turned, eventually billions of humans would perish in order for the planet to rebalance itself. There is no soft landing for the human population. Or at least, the soft landings that existed would have required threading the eye of a needle.”
I paused.
“The only way to avoid this fate required a massive and drastic reduction in global material consumption. We needed to send most of the world’s population off into synthetic reality, almost like a virtual coma, so that their material consumption in the ‘real’ world would drop to nearly zero. And we had to do it quickly. Fertility rates need to plummet. When we understood this, the fledgling pssi program transformed itself from simply a commercial endeavor into a project of destiny.”
I’d returned us back to my office now. Bob sat back in the chair, stunned.
“But we had to hide what we were doing to keep stability along the main timeline,” I added. “Otherwise, everyone would have tried to stop us.”
“Don’t tell me you were the only ones who could see this.”
“Of course not,” I sighed. “Governments have been using futuring, of one sort or another, for a long time, but they use it to plot paths forward that maximize their own benefit. A giant game of prisoners’ dilemma gone wrong.”
“And here you have the magical solution that just coincidentally maximizes your own benefit? You want me to believe that Kesselring and Granger are just in this to save the planet?”
“Sometimes deals need to be made for the common good.”
“What about the UN?”
“International agencies have been preaching disaster for the last hundred years. Nobody’s listening.”
A pause while we considered each other.
“These things happened in parallel, Bob, you have to understand. As our alternate possible phutures collapsed, we were running the clinical trials. It became obvious we would need to suppress some of the results on addiction to keep on track with regulatory approval.”
“Don’t you think it’s wrong to lie to everyone?”
I laughed. The sound was sharp and bitter. “We didn’t lie to anyone. We just didn’t reveal the full truth. People have an amazing capacity for believing what they want to believe while ignoring the obvious.”
“So the plan is to hook billions of people on pssi, with you as the only supplier.”
I was tired of defending myself.
“We’re just giving people what they want, aren’t we? People have always wanted to work less, to travel more, to fuck someone new and exciting every day.” I rolled my eyes. “We’re giving them exactly what they’ve always wanted, the unlimited ability to do anything, have everything, and to be healthier and live longer while doing it.”
Bob stared at me in stony silence.
“Do people really want to make the world a better place?” I asked. “Or do they just want to make a better place for themselves within it? Almost everything humans do is self-serving in the end.”
“I thought you taught us,” objected Bob, “that humans were successful because we developed an evolutionary instinct for trust that outstripped our selfishness?”
“People have a responsibility to find their own happiness, don’t they? Life only has the meaning that you give it, right Bob?” I snapped, knowing this was his own personal mantra. “We’re just giving people the tools to find their own happiness, in whatever way they choose, and in the process saving untold billions of lives. You tell me, what was the right thing to do?”
“Now you sound like Dr. Granger.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose, slowly. I was getting a headache. “If Atopia is destroyed, and the release of pssi stopped, billions will die.”