The Complete Atopia Chronicles

Identity: Nancy Killiam



“TEN?”

“That’s it, William. I am not going to discuss this anymore.”

I looked at a graphic detailing the metaworld Willy had created for his business. A threadbare and kludged together collection of Phuture News feeds, second-rate synthetics and metasense overlays that snaked out into the hyperspaces surrounding him. The only saving grace was the distributed consciousness network connecting it all together, borrowed illegally from my Infinixx beta labs. It looked like an interesting test case for what small business could do with our technology, but it was just too early.

“Look, I’ll just keep to the fifteen I have now,” he pleaded.

I took a deep breath. He looked desperate, and it broke my heart to have to have this kind of conversation with him.

“Ten, Willy, and even that’s a stretch,” I replied firmly. “I know you’re one of Bob’s best friends…”

“But obviously not yours,” he snorted. “I guess forever and ever ends pretty quickly in Atopian time.”

I shook my head. “We were children, Willy.”

“And?”

“That was just a silly game in childhood worlds.”

“Maybe to you.”

I sighed. As children, Bob, Willy and I had been part of an almost inseparable gang, and we’d promised to always stick together and do whatever we could for each other, no matter what, forever and ever. It was a long time ago. I shook my head again.

“Ten, Willy, that’s it, and even that I wouldn’t do for anyone else but you.”

Now he looked angry. I felt myself wavering, but we were at a critical point in our developmental path. We had to stick to the known unknowns, and letting someone splinter their consciousness into more than just a few instances could lead to some unknown unknowns that I couldn’t afford.

He glowered in my display space. I didn’t have to plug into his emotional feeds to feel the angry waves spilling out around him.

“Fine,” he announced from between gritted teeth, and then he summarily blocked me from his realities.

My primary subjective snapped back into the Infinixx control center, and I leaned back in my chair, thinking of ways I could try and help Willy.

I was already feeling more than uncomfortable, pssi-kid or not, being in my early twenties and bossing around people more than twice my age. Explaining to our Board of Directors that I was putting the program at risk for a childhood friendship just wasn’t a place I was willing to go.

Willy had always had a chip on his shoulder, even when we were kids. He’d arrived on Atopia with his family when he was already six years old, at an age when the rest of us pssi-kids were already amazing the world with our amazing abilities in the virtual worlds where we’d grown up. He’d had to start from less than nothing, having come from a Luddite community in central Montana. In the Schoolyard we’d teased him mercilessly as he’d struggled to come to grips with the pssi system.

Bob had been the first one to befriend him, bringing him into our gang, and their friendship was one that had survived. This was no mean feat in the churning social space of Atopia.

His young mind, back then, had been forced to leapfrog almost 400 years of time, starting from a place stuck somewhere in the eighteenth century and straight into Atopia, a place far ahead of the rest of the world. He’d been incredibly determined, though, and within a short time had become the best flitter tag player in the Schoolyard.

Willy had always been on an upward climb, always trying to prove himself, and now more than ever.

I sighed.

I wondered what the world must look like from his perspective, coming from a place so alien to me. In a way he straddled these worlds, and it was hard for me to imagine his childhood. This made me think of mine.

§

As a baby girl, my own first memories, my first fully formed memories, were of my mother’s face. This wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the detail with which I could remember it. My mother was holding me, coddling me, and looking down into my eyes, cooing softly.

“Hello Nancy, how are you feeling my little darling?” my mother had said to me. She had a slightly worried look on her face, full of love.

I’ve gone back and relived it so many times it’s almost embarrassing. It was a very special moment to me, and as the first pssi-kid to pass this threshold, it was a special moment that was shared with the whole Cognix program. My memories were famous.

This memory was from the first moment my pssi was turned on. It was the beginning of my inVerse—the complete sensory recording of everything I had ever seen, heard, felt or sensed. I was three months old, and the moment was exactly 7am, Pacific Time, on September 20 on the year my family had just moved onto the first prototype Atopian platform.

I’ve gone back and relived it all many times; felt my mother’s hot breath on my blushing cheeks, sensed her holding me tightly, observed every nuance of her pupils dilating and contracting, breathed in the tang of her perfume and strong soap, and felt my small eyes suddenly distracted away to catch glimpses of glowing dust motes floating in the angled sunlight streaming in from the windows. In the corner of the room my father crouched anxiously over the quietly humming machines as he monitored my signals and systems, stealing quick glances towards us from time to time.

As pssi–kids growing up, we hadn’t known anything special was happening around us. Like kids anywhere and anytime, we’d just assumed that life was like that for everyone. But we were special. We were the first generation of children to grow up with seamless synthetic reality sensory interfaces.

After running out of letters at the end of the alphabet, TIME Magazine had tried to label us ‘Generation A’, as in artificial reality, but this expression had died almost as quickly as the magazine. The world quickly came to refer to us simply as the ‘pssi-kids’. We were a part of Cognix Corporation’s phase III clinical trials of early developmental pssi on the island colony of Atopia. We weren’t just making history. As my dad liked to say—we were history.

While Atopia was an amazing place to grow up, we were still just kids and we did the things that all kids did. We screamed, we dribbled, and we wobbled when we first learned to walk. We did learn to walk much earlier than regular children, using pssi muscle-memory training, but this was just one in a long list of things we could do that human children couldn’t.

Our world was more than just this world—this world was just a tiny patch of our playground as we quickly learned to flitter across the endless streams of metaworlds that were filled with toys and creatures that sparkled in our sensory display spaces. We perceived little difference between the real and the virtual, in fact synthetic worlds felt more real and tangible to us than what the rest of the world would call reality.

Even from a young age, it wasn’t just toys we played with, we also played with making ourselves into toys, altering our bodies to become teddy bears, worms, little flocks of soaring dinosaurs in endless sky-worlds and ever more alien creatures inhabiting ever more impossible spaces as our minds developed a fluid capacity for neuroplasticity. Our proxxi and educational bots constantly presented us with an endless barrage of games and puzzles to solve as we spun through these worlds, treating every moment as a learning opportunity.

From the first few years of our lives, from our point of view, our proxxi were simply our playmates. But for their part, though, they weren’t playing. They were constantly correlating the flood of neuronal data traffic through the smarticle network embedded in our bodies and matching it with our behavior.

It didn’t take long to learn a human wetware matrix, but our brains and nervous systems were still in development, and they were using our data to continuously redesign the pssi system. We were Cognix’s Guinea pigs, part and parcel of our parents’ agreement to participate in the Atopian project.

Almost all of my early childhood was spent with my proxxi—the ultimate tool in familial productivity enhancement. To us, our proxxi were our brothers and sisters, little artificial boys and girls we could play with.

This even became a primary selling feature of the program. After all, who had the cycles left over in today’s busy world to have even one child, never mind a second one? Proxxi filled this need in the market by creating a kind of digital clone of your child to act as playmate, babysitter, and educator, or even your child’s twin depending on your point of view.

The floodgates were opened near our fourth birthdays. Around this age, one by one, we were gradually given independent access to our own pssi systems. Like quick little fish, we’d disappeared over and through the worlds that our parents understood, and began venturing out into the open network. The reign of the pssi–kids in the multiverse had begun.

Before then, we’d been limited to one body, but we learned to spawn our minds simultaneously into others. This was the beginning of my journey into the discovery of distributed consciousness.

§

Leaning forward in my chair, I focused my mind on several key events unfolding in the worlds my consciousness was spread out into, all the while fine tuning the parameters of some phuturecasts that tied them all together. A high–dimensional correlation matrix floated through my display spaces, and I watched it growing, pulsing and fading as predictions grew or fell in their interconnectedness.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

“You know what I think,” responded Cunard, my proxxi, and I did.

While we were talking, I was holding forth on dozens of splintered conversations in other virtual worlds while keeping an eye on reports coming in from a platoon of sub–proxxi and bots out collecting and spreading data with trusted, and not trusted, parties. I could sense a coalescing cascade in the mood of billions of humans out there, and subtle shifts in the goings on in the billions more worlds they wandered about.

The timing felt about right.

Distributing my consciousness that wide and thin was tiring, and I’d been at it constantly for nearly forty hours straight, even while arguing with Willy. An aching pressure was building up behind my collective eyeballs from the lengthy act of forced concentration. The Sleep–Over tabs worked great up to a point, but I was feeling sluggish after a long week. It was just beginning to pay off as I could feel the ebb and flow of the world’s opinion around the Infinixx project. Just a little more certainty was all I needed, so I gritted my teeth, rubbed my many eyeballs and focused inwards and back outwards.

“Nancy!” someone called out, intentionally overriding my sensory dataflow using an emergency channel. The interruption jolted me and my conscious webwork partially collapsed. It was David, of course, I realized after a split second of hang time. I sighed but smiled as his face floated into view.

“C’mon Nance, come to Davey-boy. Enough is enough.”

He was smiling too, but I could see concern worrying the corners of his mouth.

“Just a little longer. I’m sorry.”

I had a splinter ghosting him but I’d lost track of it. Visions of him cooking up a storm in the kitchen floated into view as I retrieved that conscious stream. Most of my awareness was still hovering in countless minds and bodies scattered throughout dozens of worlds. I checked the pulsating high–dimensional correlation matrix one last time. Things looked good, and that was good enough for me.

I initiated a wrap to the session, and like a shockwave, streams of information flowed outwards from me into my agents across the multiverse. Collapsing my cognitive webwork, it felt like a brick was being lifted off my brain. The relief was palpable.

“All done sweetie,” I responded to David. “I’m all done now, and I have some wonderful news.”

“Great—and I have some wonderful food getting cold. C’mon back, my hard working gal,” he said playfully.

I was more than very late for dinner.

With a final flurry of gestures I released my agents to autopilot and left the rest in the care of Cunard. My workspaces faded out and the outlines of a dinner setting faded into view. I could see David had picked out a romantic setting for dinner tonight—a small fire was crackling and popping in a marble fireplace, set on each side with a dramatic arrangement of exotic flowers. In fact, the entire living room was decked out in white marble and tropical flowers tonight. Neo-classic columns graced the open terrace doors and a breeze was billowing in through satin curtains. Sea air mixed with burnt incense, and I caught a glimpse of what I was sure was the Amalfi coast through the open doors.

Italy, I thought to myself, of course. I could see where this was going. Cunard was sitting next to David at the table, and it looked like they’d been playing cards. A bottle of wine was half finished. Before I fully clipped back into my body, Cunard took me to one side in a private one-on-one channel.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I dressed you in that little black thing you love so much,” explained Cunard. “It just seemed appropriate given his state of mind, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

I looked down at my body. Sexy, if I did say so myself.

“No, that’s great Cunard, thank you very much. You can leave us now and please, pay attention to that correlation matrix and have a talk with the editors at the Financial Times. I left all the notes and instructions...”

“Go on girl,” laughed Cunard, “have a nice evening. I’ll take care of all that. Stop thinking for once.”

With that he popped out of view and I snapped firmly into my body. The clarity and immediacy of being in only one place after being splintered for so long shocked my proprioceptive sense. I felt like little bits of me wanted to scuttle into the corners to get out of the glare of hard and fast reality, or at least, this single point-of-presence.

I tried to shake it off, blinking as I did.

David was smiling intently at me. The long, richly polished table was beautifully set for dinner with gleaming silverware, glowing candles and lace embroidered napkins. With a phantom flick, the playing cards disappeared from the table, and he reached across to hold my hand. I squeezed and smiled back.

“Well, look who’s here,” he said, smiling.

“Yes, and look who’s there,” I replied, returning the smile.

He looked like some kind of Italian swashbuckler, in tight beige linen pants and a laced white cotton shirt undone almost to the waist. He was tanned today, with two-day old stubble. I laughed lightly, looking at him.

“Okay stud, give me a minute? I think I need to down a glass of wine to begin the unwinding process.”

“Your wish is my command, senorita.”

Grinning, he reached with his other hand for the glass of wine, already filled, and handed it to me.

I let go of his hand to take the glass, and brought it to my lips. An earthy Cabernet flooded my mouth, and I could feel some of my tension washing away in its spicy wake. I tossed my head back to take a big gulp, and shifted my ass forward to slouch backwards into the chair, my legs apart.

David wagged a finger in the air.

“Did you check your inVerse? Vince and Patricia both dropped in when you were busy. Vince had some odd requests…anyway, I dropped it with Cunard, and Patricia wanted to speak to you about some announcement?”

“David,” I said excitedly, “it’s time. The timing is perfect for putting Infinixx onto the stock markets.”

I knew he was in the mood for love, but I couldn’t help myself. I was practically bursting at the seams. One of the reasons I was with David was that he had an infinite patience with me, and I abused it all too often. Perhaps, though, perhaps he could sense our relationship was living on borrowed time, and he made allowances he shouldn’t have to try and keep it going.

The gleam in his eye diminished, but still he responded enthusiastically, “Wow! Are you sure? You’re going to do it before the commercial launch of pssi? Can you do that?”

“We sure can. I’ve checked and rechecked everything—we can only stand to win if we go now. When Cognix goes ahead with pssi, we’ll get a double bump up the hill. Jimmy’s been helping me out. I do need to chat with Patricia quickly though, is that okay?”

David nodded glumly as he looked at the place settings. I squeezed his hand and pinged Patricia. Her head appeared a moment later floating in one of my display spaces, and she pulled me into her reality. Out of the corner of one multiplexed eye I could see David sulking and taking a sip of his wine. He got up to add more logs to the fire.

“So you’re sure you want to go ahead with this?” Patricia asked immediately.

“Absolutely!” I almost yelled out before noticing where I was.

Everyone in the pub turned and looked at me. I’d materialized sitting on what appeared to be a small, worn out church pew tucked in the corner of an old English pub. The crowd turned back to what they’d been doing and the hubbub returned.

“Okay, good. Well, I will press on ahead on my side, then. You’re keeping on top of the New York trials?”

“Yes, Aunt Killiam,” I responded, feeling like a child. “Of course I am.”

I smiled at Alan, one of Patricia’s old mentors, who was sitting across from me. He nodded back and smiled.

“Okay,” she replied, “perfect. I’ll start a campaign with the Board then.”

I was hardly able to contain my excitement, but I was now nervous as well. I realized that this was actually going to happen, that all my dreams were coming true. But there’d been another reason I had asked to speak with her as well.

Squinting slightly, I took a deep breath, not sure how to bring this up.

“There’s something else?” asked Patricia. She could sense me hesitating.

I sighed. “What’s going on with Uncle Vince?”

Reports were flooding in about him dying almost constantly, along with rumors of him selling off chunks of his vast, if haphazard, empire. He wasn’t my real uncle, but I’d known him all my life and he was a close friend of our family.

It was Patricia’s turn to sigh, her face clouding up. I thought she was about to share some terrible secret with me when she just said simply, “Nothing is going on with Vince, nothing at all.”

“What do you mean?” What was happening certainly didn’t count as nothing.

“He’s just, well, he’s just fooling around.”

Aunt Pattie shrugged, as if to say: What could one expect from a bored trillionaire? But her eyes said more. Whatever was going on, she wasn’t going to share it with me now, and I trusted her reasons, whatever they were.

“Okay,” I replied hesitantly, “if you say so. Just tell me what I need to do to help with the Board.”

“I will. Speaking of the Board, will we be seeing you at the Foreign Banquet tomorrow evening?”

“Yes, I’ll be there.”

Patricia hesitated. “Dr. Baxter said he may bring Bob along…”

She let the words hangs in the air.

“Well I think I’m going solo anyway,” I replied with a smile. “It’s an official function and those bore David to death.”

“I just thought I’d mention it.” Patricia smiled back. “Now you get back to your evening!”

My excitement bubbled back up, and I positively squealed as she faded away.

“That’s fantastic, Nance, that’s really good news,” said David on my return to him and dinner. He seemed a little uncertain now, hovering, but his love for me shone out in his eyes. Try as I might, though, my heart could never quite return it.

“Come here, my big bad boy,” I said lustily, trying to hide my uncertainty.

I grabbed his hand and pulled him across the side of the table and towards me. He took my cue, and met my lips with his in a strong, firm kiss, opening my mouth and meeting my tongue. I could feel one of his hands sliding down my back, gripping me, pulling me further into him, and our bodies pressed together.

We both flittered for a stimswitch almost at the same time, and I laughed, my mouth pressed against his, as my point of view switched into his and I felt the heat and strength and urgency in his body. I found myself staring into my own eyes with him staring back out from them into my gaze, our senses shimmering back and forth like two mirrors reflecting an image endlessly into each other.

“What about dinner?” I asked breathlessly as our bodies rocked together in rhythm and slid to the floor while we pulled off our clothes.

“This is dinner,” he gasped back.

He phase-locked our stimswitch so we simultaneously ghosted each other. I was him and he was me, our sensory channels now overlaid into and onto each other as we began our lovemaking.

While most of me was there, perhaps the most important part of me wasn’t. If you can’t be with the one you love, then you love the one you’re with.

At least, you do your best.