Complete Atopia Chronicles Part 39

"Tut, tut," chided Sintil8, watching my expression while she walked away, "so quick to judge. And you, you're not creating any monsters out there, are you?"

"We're not brainwashing people into twisting their lives around."

"No?" he replied, letting this hang in the air as he smiled at me, barely able to conceal his mirth. "And yet, here you are, coming to me for help. What a surprising turn of events this is."

Sintil8 was one of the most powerful and persistent opponents of the pssi program. As one of the greatest purveyors of pleasures in the physical world, not to mention arms dealer to all sides of the Weather Wars, the global organization he represented stood to lose a lot of money when pssi was released.

He had been lobbying hard to at least have the pleasure pathways removed from the pssi protocols, and we'd often been at each others' throats in closed-room government regulatory meetings around the world.

Kesselring had won the day by portraying Sintil8 as a modern-day Al Capone-style gangster, lording over the weaknesses of the human animal from his fortresses in Chicago and Moscow and other cities around the world. It wasn't far from the truth.

Despite my less than savory opinion of him, in an enemy-of-my-enemy sort of logic, I'd come to Sintil8 to try and help me root out what Kesselring was hiding from me. Really, it was more of a fallback plan in case I needed an ace up my sleeve. I also had half an idea of wanting to keep Sintil8 close to my chest to tease out his own intrigues involving us. The latest string of disappearances was just the sort of thing he'd be capable of orchestrating.

"Look," I said, turning all this over in my mind, "I may be able to help you if you help me."

"Now you're finally speaking my language," he replied with a smile. He scanned the information and data sets I'd just sent him, the details of a deal.

"Ladno. I will find out what I can," he said finally, nodding his understanding of my offer.

"Good."

A pause, and his smile grew wider. "How rude of me, would you like to stay for dinner?"

I shook my head. "Thanks, but no," I replied, gruesomely wondering what, or rather who, they would be eating tonight.

We sat and inspected each other again. Despite expending considerable resources in Atopia's tussles with Sintil8, we still didn't have the full picture of him. He was probably one of the few people alive older than me, and as far as we could tell he had risen up through the ranks of the Russian mafia in the late 20th century after starting a career in Stalin's security apparatus.

Some reports hinted that he had been a tank commander in the Red Army's defeat of the n.a.z.is outside Stalingrad, the battles in which he had probably lost the first parts of his own body. We suspected he had become just a brain in a box somewhere, but exactly where we didn't know.

"We drink to our agreement," Sintil8 commanded as he raised his scotch. A gla.s.s of scotch dutifully materialized in my own hands.

"Budem zdorovy," intoned Sintil8.

"Stay healthy indeed," I replied, raising my gla.s.s with his and drinking to seal our bargain.

11.

Ident.i.ty: Jimmy Jones "WHERE DID THE idea for your distributed consciousness technology come from?"

The question wasn't directed at me. Some of the reporters laughed, and Nancy smiled. They'd all heard this before. The question was another opportunity for a sound bite, and Nancy launched into it with a smile.

In the days and weeks after the announcement of the Infinixx launch date, Nancy's star had risen dramatically. The press couldn't get enough of her. I'd been asked to help out, and I had splinters strung out in a seemingly endless stream of press events across the multiverse.

As I disengaged my primary subjective from the splinter covering this event I let my mind wander off. Nancy was still talking about how it had all come from the childhood game flitter tag that we used to play. She was gushing on and on, and it was beginning to annoy me.

Flitter tag may have been the king of pssi-kid games, but my favorite had always been ragdolling. It had been my own personal addition to our repertoire.

One day, Ms. Parna.s.sus, our human teacher back at the pssi-kid Academy, had asked each of us to come and demonstrate a special trick or skill. Each child had gotten up in turn to show off something they could do. One inflated into a balloon and floated up to bounce around on the ceiling. Nancy showed off holding a dozen conversations at once with everyone around the cla.s.sroom. Bob of course took us surfing, and then my turn had come.

"Come on Jimmy," our teacher encouraged, "show everyone what you showed me."

She gently rotated me into the center of everyone's attentional matrix. I nervously looked at my cla.s.smates-an arrayed collection of fantastical little creatures floating impatiently around in my display s.p.a.ces.

Fidgeting, I looked down at my feet. They uncontrollably sp.a.w.ned into writhing tentacles that nervously knotted together like cave eels trying to escape sudden sunlight.

Giggles erupted.

"Go ahead," said Ms. Parna.s.sus, nodding and smiling, prodding me on. She collapsed everyone's skins into my ident.i.ty s.p.a.ce, morphing us into a shared reality of children standing around the Schoolyard playground, with me at the center. I was now dressed in gray flannel shorts, with a matching sweater and shirt with a little red clipon tie.

More giggles. Mother had insisted on this ridiculous outfit for my primary ident.i.ty.

Oak trees arched between the swing sets and jungle gyms of the Schoolyard, reaching high above us like a leafy green cathedral beneath a perfectly blue sky.

"Come on Jimmy, they'll love it, trust me," said Ms. Parna.s.sus. I nodded, and set up my trick.

"Everyone, detach and snap into Jimmy. Now hurry up!" she clapped.

There were a few groans, and I could tell the rest of the kids had little hope of anything fun coming from quiet, awkward Jimmy. Still, I felt them all clicking obediently into my conscious perimeter.

I unlocked my pssichannels, and then felt them all crowding inside me, feeling what I felt, seeing what I saw. The sensation was ticklish as all of them squirmed impatiently inside me, waiting for something to happen.

Not many people had ever ghosted me before that, and I wasn't popular at flitter tag. Practically the only people that had been inside me before that had been my parents, and then usually only to terrorize me. But that day was different, a shared experience rather than an intrusion. Despite myself, I tingled warmly and smiled.

"See Jimmy, isn't that nice?" said Ms. Parna.s.sus, noticing me smiling. "Now come on Jimmy, show them what you showed me."

s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up my courage, I took a deep breath and dove down into my body, shrinking, dragging them with me. I could hear their giggles back behind my mind. Down, down we dove, into the tiniest of s.p.a.ces inside me, past bone and blood, squeezing down past the granular limit of pssitech. I stopped for a moment, and then, holding my breath, pushed the limit further.

I squeezed our consciousnesses down to the molecular level, and then stopped inside one of my living cell nuclei to watch a newly hatched protein unfold. The kids were silent, suddenly engrossed. Then I shot back outwards, upwards through my veins. I stopped again, the powerful thump of my heart filling our sensory s.p.a.ce. I snapped our tactile arrays to the outside of my aorta, and we felt our skins expanding, contracting, my lifeblood flowing through us.

"Cool!" exclaimed Bob, followed quickly by a chorus of, "Show me how! Show me!"

Ms. Parna.s.sus smiled, watching the kids all snap back into themselves and run to mob me in the middle of the Schoolyard.

Flitter tag was the undeniable king of games at the pssi-kid Academy, but for a while, rag dolling became all the rage as I taught them to open up individual body parts and snap people into them. And then to move the body around, each person controlling only their part, the net effect much like a drunken sailor trying to get home. For a short time in my childhood I had been popular.

This was the start of my journey into the security of conscious systems.

12.

Ident.i.ty: 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 blueshifted distance along perfectly ordered rows in the vineyards below. Swallows chased invisible insects in the sapphire sky that hung above us, weaving and darting in a silent dance.

I motioned to the waiter for another gla.s.s of Chablis.

Adriana 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 to tie peoples' nervous systems together. It was like two or more people continuously ghosting each other, but more intimate-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 partner 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 pa.s.sionate 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 sighed. We were moving too fast.

Compositing, in general, was a positive evolutionary step forward, but at the same time a countervailing form of self-compositing was becoming a problem.

Before the shock of losing his body, w.i.l.l.y McIntyre had been well on his way to self-compositing himself into a social coc.o.o.n 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 cla.s.s 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 acc.u.mulation of new traits. In evolutionary terms, today's individuals were yesterday's groups.

They'd inhabited Adriana's body today, and it still threw off my pssi as it posited her personal details in my display s.p.a.ce. We'd have to fix it. 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, as it magically found ways to fill the cracks that pssi had fissured open in Atopian culture.

"So I heard you're going to have children?" I asked. "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 bio-synthetic 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," I congratulated her.

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-a.s.semblers, with robotics and artificial minds, even expanding their wetware into entirely synthetic s.p.a.ces.

Life constantly evolved to fill new ecosystems as they emerged, 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 sometimes 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 h.o.m.ogeneous 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 a billion years ago, when the first elemental life had burst forth in diversity to cover the earth. Except instead of the 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 and hours.

"Our plan is 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 could scarcely imagine.

Sitting in my office, I was going over some research notes regarding Hurricane Ignacia. Needing a break, 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 they 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, 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 exactly what I couldn't see. It was fairly simple to catalogue 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 Alan Turing had observed in our conversations a century before, change the body and you have changed the mind. Where before this had been something of 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 minds, 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 minds conceived of abstract thoughts, even the way it constructed thoughts themselves.

Almost as soon as they could communicate with us, pssikids had begun to use a lexicon of abstract expressions that I couldn't properly understand, like splintered out, tubered, slivering, cloudy and many more that developed as they did.

But where we'd had pssi introduced into our wetware as adults and knew the difference between real and synthetic, the pssikids 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 some alien creatures playing before me.

The rag doll collective suddenly stopped, and then looked straight at the point where I was observing it from. I hadn't appeared in their sensory s.p.a.ces, 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.

Immediately I clicked out of that s.p.a.ce and sat staring numbly at the wall of books in my office.

I shivered.

13.

Ident.i.ty: Jimmy Jones "REGARDING OUR PROJECT, there is something I need you to do for me in return," I said to Dr. Ganger. We were back on another walk through the hydroponics farms. He'd wanted an update and confirmation of our deal to put him first in line for the conscious transference project. "I want to be put into the research groups on memory and addiction."

"Consider it done," he agreed with a smile. Dr. Granger held out a hand to pa.s.s it through the green leaves of a plant we pa.s.sed. He stopped to inspect one large, ripe tomato hanging in its branches.