Complete Atopia Chronicles

Prologue

The police station loomed before me at the base of the vertical farming complex, and I was gingerly making my way towards it.

The Boulevard was the only real street we had, a wide pedestrian thoroughfare that crossed from the eastern to western inlets, crossing between the four gleaming vertical farm towers that center-pinned the island of Atopia.

Glamorous palms lined both sides of the street, bordering the tourist shops, restaurants, and bars whose terraces spilled out into the kaleidoscopic melee between them. Even with the storms threatening and the evacuations announced, the atmosphere was still carefree and festive.

It had been ages since I’d been above, and I hadn’t been to these parts since I was a tween. I blinked in the sunshine and confusion around me and tried to think my way through what was happening.

I felt so alone and exposed. Here I was, stuck in the middle of something clearly illegal, but what else could I do? I looked up at the towers and imagined myself as one of the psombies inside. Out of options, I just shrugged and opened the police station doors.

Cool, administrative air swept over me and the clerk at the desk, an attractive young woman, smiled at me synthetically.

“Can I help you, sir?” she asked, as sweet as a police officer could be.

“Yes, I’d like to file a missing person report,” I replied, walking towards her as calmly as I could.

Her face registered just the proper amount of seriousness before she queried, “And who is the missing person, sir?”

I paused for a moment.

“Me,” I answered.

1 Identity: William McIntyre

A brilliant carpet of stars hung above us on the moonless night, somewhere in the Adirondacks of upper New York State. Our campsite was nestled between tall, majestic firs at the side of a quiet lake. We’d barely finished the canoeing and portage to get here before nightfall, and we were all spent. A deep silence settled upon the hissing and popping of the campfire. It was nice to hang out with friends and not feel the need to say anything. I almost felt completely relaxed for once—almost.

“It’s so peaceful out here,” I said, leaning forward to pick up a stick and poke the embers of the dying fire. I could feel a breeze blowing across my backside, but I let it go for now.

“You got that right, Willy,” replied Bob, slumped comfortably in his folding camp chair and balancing a beer on his knee.

“Yes sir,” added Wally, my proxxi.

“Willy, do you want another beer?” he asked, seeing me toss my empty can into the fire.

Wally was sitting to my right, Bob and Martin to my left, and Sid and Vicious opposite me on the other side of the fire.

“Naw. I’m good, Wally. Thanks.”

Poking the embers I watched their hot orange and red sparks dance around like tiny demons escaping from the charred wood. I extended my hands toward the coals to warm them and rubbed them together. It was going to be a cold night. A loon called out from the blackness above the lake with a haunting wail. It was time to go soon, but not yet.

“This is amazing,” drawled Bob.

We all sat entranced around the fire.

“This is so relaxing,” he continued. “Hey Willy, did you catch the slingshot tests this morning?”

I watched him smiling and taking another swig from his beer, grinning at me. He was usually smiling, the lucky bum. Then again, he didn’t have it that easy.

“I saw them, it was kind of impossible to miss,” I replied. “Were you with your family?”

He laughed. “Naw, Sid and I were out in Humungous Fungus watching the mash-up version.”

I grinned back. “I bet that was a lot of fun.”

“It was, but my dad gave me a lot of trouble.”

Wally pinged me with an alert. Oh shoot, I’d forgotten.

“Oh, ah, Martin,” I blurted out awkwardly, “happy birthday, by the way.”

Martin smiled, looking up at me from the fire.

“Thanks Willy,” he laughed, and then looked at Bob, “and dad wasn’t really mad, you know, he’s under a lot of pressure.”

“I know,” replied Bob. “I’m sorry I was late. Thanks for covering for me.”

“That’s what brothers are for,” chuckled Martin, shaking his head. “Right?”

“Yeah,” sighed Bob heavily, “that’s what brothers are for.”

An uncomfortable silence descended and everyone stared down at the ground, everyone, that was, except Martin. He looked around at us all with wide eyes.

“What, did somebody die or something?” he laughed out.

Bob snorted, shaking his head. “Naw, just forget it.”

“Forget what?”

“Just forget it,” snapped Bob. “You will no matter what anyway.”

Martin stared at Bob and shrugged, but Bob looked away.

More uncomfortable silence.

“I can’t believe more people don’t come out into nature to experience this,” said Bob after a while, changing the topic. “It’s just amazing. You know, doing things with your own two hands, getting back to the basics.”

Now everyone nodded, except Martin who’d returned to staring blankly into the fire.

“Yeah,” I agreed, but Bob could always tell my moods.

“Are you still worrying?” he asked me.

“Naw.”

“Yes you are. I can tell. Just forget about it, okay? Everything will be fine. It always is,” he declared, smiling sadly, “even if it isn’t.”

He tossed his beer can into the fire. Vicious, Sid’s proxxi, started coughing as the wind moved his way and pushed the smoke into him.

“Mates, it’s been a real pleasure,” coughed out Vicious, “but I I’ve ‘ad about enough. This nature shite is not for me.”

“Come on,” laughed Sid, “we’re having a nice time here! Tough it out a little, old boy!”

The spell was broken, though, and the suspension of disbelief cracked, revealing the grainy quality of the fire and the hollow texture of the night. It all suddenly felt very fake.

“Yeah, anyway, I think I’m going to get going too.” A heavy weight fell back across my shoulders.

“Surfing tomorrow, right, buddy?” asked Bob.

“Sure thing, Bob, wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I lied.

I gave a perfunctory wave to the gang, and without another word the campsite faded away and was replaced by the white, featureless confines of my apartment.

Wally was still sitting beside me, though now on the convertible couch of my tiny living space. My digs could, at best, be described as minimalist. Real space on Atopia came at a premium price, and one I couldn’t afford.

“Don’t worry so much, Willy,” said Wally.

“Easy for you to say. You don’t live in this pill box.”

“Well, yes and no, Willy,” Wally noted, watching me carefully. “Look, I’ve never said this before and I’m not sure why I’m saying it now, but ...”

I waited.

“Yes?” I asked.

Why on earth was my proxxi getting weird on me now? That’s all I needed, as if I didn’t have enough to worry about.

He took a deep breath and looked at me. “William, I just wanted to make sure you know, well, that I love you.”

I was slightly stunned, and he saw it.

“Not in a weird way,” he added quickly. “I mean, as brothers, you know.” He smiled at me, waiting for me to respond.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said slowly, not sure of what to do with this. “Look, I appreciate that, and I like you too, Wally.”

He just kept smiling at me earnestly. Geez, I’m going to have to talk to someone at Cognix technical support about this. I had lot of work to get done and I didn’t need this.

“Look, I’m fine,” I finally told him. “Let’s just focus on the here and now, okay?”

Switching topics to the work at hand, the walls and features of my apartment morphed outwards into the sea of displays that were my workspace. I had a busy day tomorrow and wanted to get a jump start on organizing myself for the big meeting with Nancy Killiam, who was heading the new tech company Infinixx I was working for.

Wally and I worked well into the night, pulling and pushing masses of financial data through the deep reaches of the the multiverse, trying to make sense of the rapidly accelerating world around us.

The next morning Brigitte, my girlfriend, dropped the expected warning shot, “So, you didn’t ping me last night when you got back from camping with the boys.”

She tried to say it whimsically, but I could tell. We’d been together a long while now and I could sense her moods coming like winds approaching high in the treetops.

“Pumpkin,” I said, attempting to deflect the approaching storm, “sweetheart, look, you know I have this big meeting I am trying to prepare for with Nancy.”

“Pumpkin my ass,” she proclaimed, “I bet you and Wally were up picking stocks all night.”

I paused, deciding on my plan of defense; feint or full retreat?

“We were preparing for the meeting,” I stated defensively, “and,” I added quickly, “we did do some stock picks too.”

My job at Infinixx paid alright, but I’d been brought in as an outside contractor and wasn’t on their stock option dream ticket. The real reason I had gunned so hard for the job was that it gave me access to the distributed consciousness platform they were developing. Being able to be in a dozen places at once gave me an edge nobody else had in the market right now, and in the market any edge equaled an opportunity to make money.

Brigitte pouted. A beautiful pout if there ever was one. Her full lips and petite Parisian nose, under a beautiful tangle of laissez-faire auburn hair that women of a lesser pedigree would kill for, gave her an impossibly irresistible look that hovered somewhere between beautiful and beautifully cute. Even when her deep brown eyes flashed angrily at me as they did now, it was hard to resist the urge to simply scoop her up into my arms and kiss her. So I did.

“William,” she laughed in her little French accent, pushing me away. She was laughing, but when she used my full name she always had a serious point to make. I looked at her in my arms. “William, vraiement, money isn’t everything. Look around you, cheri.”

I looked around. We were having breakfast on top of a Scottish Highlands mountain ridge. The small, white table and chairs with us in pajamas, and her in bunny slippers, set against the backdrop of a blossoming sunrise amid rolling fog and boulders and grass and sheep—it was surreal to say the least, but she liked it and that was all that mattered.

“We’re in the most amazing place on earth. We can travel anywhere we want, do almost anything we like. So what if we have a small apartment? Look where we’re having breakfast! What do we need more money for?”

I tried not to roll my eyes. This was well-trodden ground. It would be nice to be able to afford more sub-proxxi; as it was I could hardly afford to have Wally show up at more than one event at a time. It would be nice to be able to afford to expand my Phuture News Network; right now, it was an immense effort just stay ahead of the game. Just accessing the wikiworld at this resolution to have breakfast here cost us dearly, but this wouldn’t cut any ice with her. Everyone else I knew was better off than us, and frankly, it pissed me off.

No end was in sight for paying off the multi-generational mortgage my dad had taken out for my family to get a berth on Atopia. It was a shrewd move on his part, entering the lottery for a spot here—the value of the berth had more than quadrupled since we’d won it. The size of the mortgage, however, was crippling to a regular family like ours, and we struggled under the debt. It didn’t help, of course, that I’d made some bad stock picks of late and was far in the hole.

“You’re right, pumpkin, you’re right,” was all I could think to say.

I could feel my metasenses tingling and that meant a hot stock move. I’d remapped my skin’s tactile array from the nape of my neck and down my back, like a fish’s lateral line sensors, in order to pick up eddy currents in market phuturecasts. I could feel even the slightest pressure trends in the markets tickling across my back, a sure-fire way to get my attention. Right now a stiff wind was buffeting my buttocks as I was buttering my toast.

“I gotta go,” I told her hurriedly, getting up and leaning over to peck her on the cheek. “Something for work. I really have to run. Sorry.”

She rolled her eyes.

I stepped away and bolted upwards through the sky, the world disappearing away below me as I arrived at my workworld. This was my favorite way to get going—it gave me that Superman start for the day.

Wally was already there, and I rapidly turned on, tuned in, and dropped out into the multiverse, splintering my mind to assimilate what was happening. One splinter was already tuned into the press conference my boss, Nancy, had just started, so I let my mind hover over this for a moment.

2 Identity: Nancy Killiam

“Economic growth is only possible through enhanced productivity and the clustering of talent,” I roared out to an approving audience.

The world population was declining and fertility rates were collapsing, I didn’t have to add the failing prospects for the Yen and greenback, as bitcoin derivatives gained ground. While declining populations equaled better prospects for the planet, it was bad news for economics, and for once, today was all about business.

“Atopia and Cognix aren’t simply about being green,” I pointed out, “but about boosting business productivity and profits to provide the basis for a whole new surge in the world economy.”

I could see the faces closest to me, reporters that were mostly familiar. Beyond that, faces upon faces filled my display spaces into the blue-shifted distance. This was a well worn speech for me, like a rutted track down an old country road. Maybe not the best analogy, I chuckled to myself.

I stopped and looked up and around at the crowd. The pause was well rehearsed and I was enjoying this. I let a confidence inspiring smile spread across my many faces.

“And the Infinixx distributed consciousness platform is the solution that will carry business into the 22 century!”

The masses before me burst into applause. I shook my head and looked down at the stage, trying to convey that I didn’t deserve such adulation.

“So...questions?” I asked, looking back up into the crowd. I saw Tammy from World Press with her arm up. She was always a friendly starter. I pointed at her and nodded.

“Could you describe for our audience what, exactly, distributed consciousness feels like?” asked Tammy. “I mean, how would you describe it, and not from a technical point of view.”

This brought hushed laughter. I was famous for inundating reporters with technical jargon that left them feeling like they knew less than what they started with, so I made an effort to make it simple.

“Sure, good question. The easiest way to describe it is like speed reading. When you’re speed reading, you don’t really read every word—you read the first and last lines of paragraphs and scan for a few key words in between. It’s sort of like that.”

“Doesn’t that imply you’re not really getting the whole picture?” asked Tammy.

Good question, but hard to answer simply. Distributed consciousness both was and wasn’t what it described.

It wasn’t really distributing your conscious mind; what it was doing was creating an estimate of your cognitive state at that point in time, and with the particular issue you needed to deal with, then tagging this with as much background data regarding your memories as it thought relevant and available. The system then started up a synthetic intelligence engine and sent it out to canvas whatever you wanted to look at.

From time to time this ‘splinter’, as we called it, would report back with compressed sensory data that would be perfectly understandable only to your frame of reference.

Imagine your best friend winking at you when you asked about someone you both knew—based on your shared experiences, huge amounts of information could be encoded in a single binary bit communicated this way. Infinixx was something like this—the ultimate data gathering, compression and transmission scheme, tailored exactly to your individual mind at that moment in time.

Even without pssi—the poly-synthetic sensory interface developed here on Atopia—we could approximate a lot of the techniques so that first time users could realize some benefits. At first this worked nowhere near as well as it did for long time pssi users, but still, it worked.

“Well, you are getting the whole picture,” I responded to Tammy after reflection, “just not every detail. Speed reading really comes down to the unconscious skill the reader has in scanning the right parts to focus on.”

I paused to let them soak in what I was saying.

“Infinixx technology provides that attentional context, as well as the sensory and cognitive multiplexing technology to make it easy for even a novice to begin distributing their consciousness into the cloud within a few hours.”

I scanned the upturned faces and watched them nodding, but that last sentence had injected a slightly glazed look into their eyes.

“Okay for instance,” I continued quickly, “the last meeting you attended, how much of that was just an excuse for a co-worker to ramble on about something that had nothing to do with you?”

This earned a few chuckles.

“However,” I declared, drawing the word out, “there were probably a few bits here and there that you found useful. Infinixx provides the ability to tune a small part of your attention to only those interesting bits, allowing you to ‘be there’ the whole time without actually needing to be there.”

“So how long does it take to understand how to use all this?” Max cut in.

“Even you’ll be able to use it right away, Max,” I joked as I winked at him. This earned some laughs. “We’re ready to go if you are!”

I tried to maintain a steady smile on Max. To fully realize the benefits of this technology, I was thinking, you really needed to grow up with it, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. Not right now, anyway.

3 Identity: William McIntyre

“IT IS IN our interest to work together, to find a way to shape our differences,” droned the Chinese Minister of State. Sure, in exactly the same way that you’ve shaped all previous differences; in your favor.

The splinter covering this latest round of peace talks between China and India didn’t need to send in very much new information, the tone and character of the meeting having been pretty much the same as every other one in the recent past; nothing positive, and very predictable. Then again, for business purposes, predictability was everything. I pulled the splinter back for more important work elsewhere.

I quickly assimilated that thin conscious stream and turned my mind to an exploration hike that another one of my splinters was on in the Brazilian rain forest.

The wikiworld displayed vast tracts of remote farmland belonging to Greengenics outside of Manos, all sown with a complex matrix of plants varietals that was supposed to mimic the diversity of the forest surrounding it. I wasn’t buying their story and suspected they were strip farming the area. I’d hired a local guide to walk in and snoop for me, and this splinter was ghosting in through the guide’s contact lens display.

Pulling back the last of the dense foliage before the edge of the farm area, we peered in, and my suspicions were confirmed. Long rows of bio-engineered farmaceuticals stretched out into the distance. Greengenics had been falsifying its wikiworld feeds. This splinter of information, at the edges of my attention, shattered into a dozen others and then went off and used the information, shorting the Greengenics stock, pushing and pulling information that streamed outwards.

The Shanghai market was about to close its morning session when disaster hit.

“What?”

“Pull out of the short positions right away,” warned Willy. “I’ve already done as much as I can.”

Visions of the peace talks closing splintered into my mind. Interest rates were supposed to be trending a full point lower, but a last second and unexpected announcement between the Chinese and Indians regarding a joint farmaceutical project had injected future uncertainty, pushing expected rates higher. Worse, the Greengenics facility was named as their secret collaboration, sending the stock of this small company soaring. This unusual twist around my strategy suddenly shot everything out of alignment.

“Put in sell orders!” I yelled into my dozen splinters.

The bell chimed signaling the close of Shanghai. Within seconds, the secondary and after markets had kicked in, but by the time we’d managed to unravel my positions, I’d chalked up a huge loss.

I was too highly leveraged, trying to be too clever.

Hovering over the small metaworld that was my financial control center, I closed my eyes and sighed. I needed more splinters to cover more things at the same time. All I’d been able to scrounge up was about fifteen, and half of them were prototypes that were getting called back for updates and re-initializations all the time. A growing headache began to pound behind my eyes, and I focused inwards and back outwards, getting myself ready for the rest of the night’s work.

The day had ended in total, personal financial disaster. Almost everything that could have gone wrong, had gone wrong. Even though I hadn’t said anything, Brigitte could sense my mood and had prepared a special night for us. She’d taken the time to personally reserve a little patch of sidewalk on the side of the Grand Canal in Venice.

The spot was undeniably romantic; a candle set in a green wine bottle atop a red checked tablecloth, the gentle slap of the Adriatic against the canal walls, and the twinkling lights of Venezia under a rising full moon. The strains of an accordion played somewhere nearby, the notes floating together with the smells of fresh cut herbs and tomatoes and seafood.

“Brigitte, this is beautiful,” I managed to say as I arrived, dropping most of my webwork of splinters behind.

Stepping into this one reality I sat down opposite her. I tried to relax and let my foul mood evaporate into the warm night air. I could guess that she and Wally had been speaking, and from the look on her face there was more in store. I sighed.

I was still stewing over a heated argument I’d had with Nancy earlier regarding my splintering limit. I’d tried to explain what a difficult spot I was in, but it hadn’t mattered to her. Atopia was supposed to be this shining beacon of libertarian ideals, a place that wouldn’t stoop to the base realities of the rest of the world. In actuality, it was just another country club for rich snobs like the Killiams to lord over us commoners. She had no idea what it was like for a family like ours here.

Almost every American had lost someone in 2C, the cyber attacks of ‘22, but our family had been particularly hard hit. We came from working class roots in South Boston, and with a name like McIntyre, living in Southie had never been easy. But when the first cyber strikes had hit in the middle of a cold snap of February of that year, triggering the power grid shutdowns, something not easy had turned into something terrifyingly deadly. When the lights had come back on over a month later, we’d lost nine of our family to the cold, starvation and riots.

Deep suspicion of technology had driven my grandfather, along with a big chunk of the rest of the world, literally into the hills.

Hiding from the world had made for a hard life, and one my own father had desperately wanted to escape. A huge fight had erupted when my dad had announced plans to move to Atopia, to start anew and break with the Luddite community my grandfather had founded in the foothills of Montana.

It had been a huge gamble, a gamble for a better life for me and my mother, and it was one that had cut my dad off from the rest of our family. It was a gamble whose burden to make good I felt had now fallen on my shoulders.

While my dad and I had managed the transition, my mother hadn’t been able to cope, and after a few years had returned to the commune. I remembered being furious at her, refusing to leave, and I barely spoke to her afterwards. I wasn’t mad at her anymore, but the commune forbade modern communication technology.

I’d been planning a trip to see her for years now, but was always finding excuses for staying, a trip on foot into the mountains not being something I was comfortable with, but it was more than simply that. I wanted to make good first, to prove that my dad had been right, and that she’d made the right decision in leaving me with him.

“William?” said Brigitte, catching my attention. I shook my head, casting out the memories. She was standing now in front of me, her hand on my head, and looking into my eyes.

She’d dressed up for our evening, her hair falling in luxurious waves over her shoulders, dressed in a glittering black slip that barely covered her petite frame. Her perfume was powerful and seductive, working some pssi magic, and I felt myself getting horny. Whatever it was, definitely zeroed my attention onto her. I collapsed the rest of my conscious splinters into the here and now, and centered my full attention on her soft brown eyes.

She deserved better. I would do better.

“Yes?”

“Are you here with me now?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” I sighed. “It’s just, well, it’s complicated.”

She watched me quietly.

“Not everything needs to be complicated, you know.” She moved her hand down to my cheek, and then pulled my chin up so I was looking directly into her eyes. “Come on, let’s eat.”

Waiters immediately floated in around us with plates of food.

“I want to apologize for giving you a hard time about money and everything,” she said, leaning over to kiss my forehead and then returning to sit down opposite me. I’d almost forgotten about all that.

“No worries, pumpkin,” I replied, my mind-fog lifting. “It’s me that should be the one apologizing.”

She smiled at me and reached over to hold my hand.

“Enough apologizing, cheri,” she said tenderly. “First we eat, and then off to bed.”

Her smile turned seductive.

My stomach growled. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. Hungry and horny, I thought as I looked at her, and I could see she wanted to make me a happy man. Life didn’t get much better than this. I smiled and dug into dinner.

Perhaps my situation wasn’t as bad as I thought.

Soon after, I was lying on my back in bed amid the mess of sheets and pillows strewn about from our lovemaking. A gentle breeze was blowing in through the window, and Brigitte clung tightly to my side.

We enjoyed sex without any of the messy special effects a lot of the other pssi-kids went for. Not to say we hadn’t experimented with all that stuff. Brigitte was quite the wild child in her day, but as we’d gotten older and found each other, the craziness had lost its appeal.

“Willy,” she purred softly, “can I ask you something? And promise not to get mad okay?”

“Sure, anything, sweet pea,” I replied. All of my defenses were down, and right now she could have asked me to jump into the canal and I would have happily complied.

“Willy, do you think we could start sharing our realities? I mean, completely.”

Even with my defenses down, this gave me a little start.

“Sweetie,” I replied calmly, “even couples that have been married for years don’t share their realities entirely.”

Right now we were sharing a reality of being in Venice together, which was great, but she meant that we’d fully share each others’ reality skins, the little and big ways we filtered and modified real and virtual worlds. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to see the world the way I saw it.

“I know what other people do and I don’t want that to be us,” she continued. “It is possible, you know.”

Now it wasn’t like I walked around the world with it skinned up as some weird fantasy, but still, sometimes I liked the world to appear the way I liked it to appear. It was hard to deny her, though.

“I want us to take that next step in our relationship, to experience the world together in the same way.”

Really it wasn’t that big a deal. It’s not like we were teenagers and I had something to hide. She really deserved more from me. Whenever I knew I was going to jump, I always just jumped.

So I jumped.

“Sure, let’s do it, I’d love to do that with you. It’ll be great!”

This earned me a big hug and kiss. I pulled myself away gently.

“I love you sweetheart.”

“I love you too,” she softly replied.

I paused, looking at her expectantly. A steady wind only I could feel had begun to blow.

“Yes, yes, go to work,” she said, smiling as she rolled her eyes. “I know you’re dying to get out there with Wally.”

She hit me playfully with a pillow.

“Thanks baby!” I laughed, grabbing the pillow away and pulling her in for a final kiss.

In a flash, I was off rocketing up through the heavens and into my workspace.

The main action for me wasn’t out in the front of my life. The real action was in the backrooms where Wally and I were working to build my growing hedge fund.

My ability to consistently outpace the market using the new Infinixx distributed consciousness platform made it possible to do things nobody else could do. People out there were noticing how this pssi-kid was beating them out day by day, and I was starting to get some traction in the market.

I desperately needed more splinters. A few months ago five had been enough, and then I expanded to ten. I’d managed to get fifteen by signing up for some beta testing under a false credential, but I wasn’t fooling anybody. This had me constantly at loggerheads with Nancy, who headed the Infinixx project.

Almost as soon as I launched my splinter matrix for the evening, Nancy barged in. She appeared in an overlaid display while I sat in the middle of my hedge fund metaworld.

“Nancy, I am just as capable, in fact probably even more capable than you at splintering,” I argued immediately, knowing what was coming. “I’ve spent more time out there stretching the capabilities of Infinixx than anyone.”

“We’ve been over this Willy.”

“And I can beat the pants off you at flitter tag.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I’m not going to disagree, William,” Nancy replied. “I’m just saying, if you were anyone else, I would have fired you already. I can’t ignore it anymore.”

She just didn’t get it.

“Can’t you see I’m doing you a favor?”

She said nothing.

“Think of me as an advanced beta tester,” I suggested hopefully.

“William, I can’t,” she said finally. “Your splinter limit will be set at ten. I will allow you to keep using Infinixx to run your side business, but that’s it.”

A splinter limit of ten? My stomach tightened into knots and my mind raced. I desperately needed more, and she was cutting me off.

4 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.

5 Identity: William McIntyre

I’d had another terrible night. With my splinter limit fixed at ten, I’d been forced to funnel more and more of my resources into the Phuture News Network. Combining my natural abilities with the reduced rates I’d managed to get from Vince through Bob, I was still beating the markets, but I wasn’t the star I used to be.

“Are we going to have breakfast together?” asked Brigitte, standing next to me in the bathroom that morning. She was brushing her teeth.

“Pumpkin,” I sighed, “I just don’t have time.”

I was staring at my face, lathering it for a shave. I enjoyed a real shave from time to time. It helped me reconnect with myself after nights spent shattered all over the multiverse.

“You could have Wally shave you,” she suggested meekly. “We haven’t sat down for breakfast together in more than a week.”

She was pouting.

“Jesus Brigitte, you know I just like to shave myself sometimes!” I snapped. Why couldn’t she just leave me be?

Her hurt expression reflected in the mirror. With a quick intake of breath I was about to apologize, but she’d already flitted off without another word. Bardot, her proxxi, sat staring back at me from Brigitte’s body, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. She spat out her mouthful of toothpaste into the sink, handing me the toothbrush, and left as well.

I sighed.

I felt bad, but I really just needed some more time to myself.

Rubbing away the condensation from the mirror, I focused on my face and began to shave. I felt an itch and erratically scratched my shoulder as I held the razor up. With a swipe of the razor across my lathered face, I thought, what the hell am I going to do? Things were just starting to work out for me, and now Nancy is ruining it all.

Goddamn it! My hand shot under my armpit to scratch something. What the hell? My neck was itchy too. I dropped the razor into the sink with a clatter and began to madly scratch at myself.

It felt like ants were crawling under my skin.

I managed to stop scratching for a second to inspect my arm, and was shocked to see a small bump under the skin. What was going on? Then it moved. I wildly scraped at it, ripping open the skin and blood oozed out. Looking into the mirror in horror, I saw my face seething and roiling with boils. My hands shot to my face, feeling a crawling mass under my skin.

“Waaallly!” I cried out.

A burst of laughter erupted from behind the shower curtain. Immediately I knew what was happening.

“You assholes!” I exclaimed, turning to rip open the curtain, my face dripping and oozing worms, millipedes and other hideous creeping and crawling little creatures.

Hoots of laughter exploded from Bob, Martin, Sid, and Vicious as they held onto each other, crowded into the small shower stall.

“You should have seen your face, mate!” laughed Vicious, tears now streaming down his face as he gripped onto Sid, who was doubled over and laughing hard too. Bob was grinning widely, his arms around the others, shaking his head. I couldn’t help joining in laughing as well, despite it all.

“Fine,” I declared, “you got me. Okay Sid, make it stop.”

Immediately the itching stopped and the beasties quit wriggling. I absentmindedly rubbed my hand across my now smooth face, feeling the remains of the lather and my stubble.

“Sorry man,” said Sid, still wiping away tears, “when you asked Vince for a Phuture News upgrade, I slipped a skin in and you authorized it. You gotta pay more attention to what you’re doing!”

They all laughed some more.

“Hey it was Martin’s idea,” added Vicious, giving Martin a little shot in the shoulder.

“Oh yeah?” I replied, shaking my head and smiling at Martin. He smiled back timidly. I was glad him and Bob were hanging out.

I didn’t even remember authorizing that transaction, but I had already called it up on my inVerse. I really did need more sleep.

“Anyway,” added Bob, “the real reason for this escapade was to get the attention of our hardest working friend to ask him out for a surfing date.” He raised his eyebrows to make the point.

Smiling, I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Yeah okay, sure, how about the end of the day? I could use a break.”

“Outstanding!” replied Bob. “Okay guys, let’s leave our buddy to finish whatever he was starting.”

With that they were off and I was standing alone again in my bathroom. Well, apart from Wally now sitting on the toilet.

“I just didn’t see any harm in it,” he said before I could say anything. “I figured you and Bob could use a good laugh together. You hardly see him anymore.”

I rolled my eyes but smiled, and got back to shaving.

Just then, Jimmy pinged me for lunch.

I stopped shaving, calling up a display space for more information on the request, but there was none. I’d hadn’t seen or talked to Jimmy in years, so it was unusual that he’d just call me like this out of the blue.

Jimmy was Bob’s adoptive brother. He’d always been a bit of oddball as a kid, never quite fitting in, or perhaps, never quite understanding how to fit in. He’d had a tough time growing up, though, and being left behind by a parent was something I could relate to. I’d tried hanging out with him back then, until the incident at Nancy’s birthday party. After that, we’d barely spoken.

Some kids were just ugly ducklings, however, and as an adult he’d more than recovered. He was now the star of the pssi-kid program, and a minor celebrity in his own right. He’d risen far up the ranks, and had a lot of powerful friends. He’d be a good person to reconnect with, and maybe could even help me out.

“Well, you’re in tight with Susie,” explained Jimmy at our lunch table.

He wanted me to set him up with someone. Susie and I had been close childhood friends, even perhaps my first girlfriend, although at nine years old I hadn’t really understood the idea.

“If you help me,” he explained, “maybe I could help you.” He raised his eyebrows.

“Sure,” I replied cautiously, shrugging. Pretending it was an afterthought I added, “And what would you help me with?”

I smiled, wondering what on earth Jimmy would want with Susie. She just didn’t seem his type, but then there was no accounting for taste.

“Well, I think I could help you,” Jimmy answered, watching me carefully, “by getting access to higher order splintering.”

That both surprised and excited me. He obviously knew about my side project, but then again, he was now head of conscious security systems on Atopia.

“Oh yeah?” I tried to appear disinterested. “So what, like you could double my account settings or something?”

“Much,” he laughed, “much more than that Willy. I could show you how to fix the system to have almost unlimited splinters. You’ll blow everyone else in the market away.”

I glanced at the glittering blue security blanket around us.

“So nobody else can know what we’re talking about, right?”

I tested the security blanket with some of my phantoms, looking for holes, but of course this was a waste of time.

“Absolutely, Willy,” Jimmy replied with a wolfish grin. “I’m the security expert, remember?”

“Right.”

I paused.

“So what’s the deal then, Mr. Security?”

“If you can get me a date with Susie, but I mean, really set me up with her, you know?” He paused, raising his eyebrows again. I nodded, acknowledging my understanding. “Then, I’ll set you up with what you need.”

“You can really pull it off, with nobody else knowing?” I asked, slightly incredulous. “No risk?”

“I sure can,” he responded, smiling. “Nobody will ever find out. Let me explain…”

6 Identity: Nancy Killiam

“Olympia,” I whispered to the test subject, lying out on the pod before me. No response. Her mind was still hovering somewhere in the nether regions between consciousness and unconsciousness.

I’d inhabited a robotic body, now in a doctor’s office in Manhattan, to personally attend to the end of the New York clinical trials.

After many years we’d almost reached the end of the process and Cognix was now on the verge of approval by the FDA. Approval here in America would trigger a cascade of approvals in other super-jurisdictions around the world. It was a critical juncture in the future of Cognix Corporation, and by extension, for Atopia as well.

Aunt Patricia had made it clear to make this a priority, so I was here in person. At least, a part of me was here in person. The splinter I had controlling this robody was circling at the very peripheries of my consciousness, just a voice in the background of all the buzzing activity that I was dealing with. As Olympia began to stir, the splinter dug deeper into my awareness matrix, prickling my brain, and my attention was drawn towards that one place, my mind automatically load balancing the other tasks and places and people I was dealing with seamlessly onto my proxxi and other splinters.

“Olympia,” I called out again, louder now. She twitched and one of her eyes fluttered, this signal of impending activity collapsing my awareness firmly into this space.

My mind shivered at the cold, confined reality it suddenly found itself in. “Does distributed consciousness really work?” whispered one far away splinter, attending a press conference in Australia. “Yes,” that splinter answered, “even while talking to you I am attending clinical trials in New York.” I was still listening to my other streams of consciousness, but these were now faint murmurs in the background of the physicality of this place.

I looked up at the lighting panels in the ceiling, feeling my robotic irises focus in and out, adjusting to the brightness, and then looked back down at Olympia as I gently cradled her head in my plastic hands.

Slowly, her eyes opened, her mind dredging itself up from beneath the sedatives. She wouldn’t see a robot hovering above her, however. The pssi was now installed in her neural pathways, and I’d clipped a reality skin around my robot’s body so that I would appear to her as her own impression of the most caring and loving person she had ever known, an amalgamation of the people the system could figure out that she may have been closest to.

“Yes?” Olympia replied.

Barely conscious, and I could tell she was already annoyed. She obviously didn’t have much in the way of loving people in her life.

“Seems like someone needs a little more sleepy time,” I purred softly. “Come on, I’ll get you up and dressed.”

Olympia was something of a special case. She was one of the key external marketing executives setting the groundwork for the commercial release of pssi later this year. Olympia had been inserted into the program at the last minute by Dr. Hal Granger, one of Cognix’s senior executives and our leading psychologist. Her file indicated acute anxiety, which certainly qualified her, but it was strange that she’d been shuffled in at the last second like this.

“How long was I out?” asked Olympia irritably, propping herself up on the bed.

“Hmm…” I replied while my mind assimilated a thin stream of information from the splinter that had been attending her here, “about two hours I’d say. Everything seems to be working perfectly. In fact we’ve just activated the system. Your proxxi will explain everything to you once you get home. I would have woken you sooner but you just seemed so peaceful.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for that,” she said grumpily, swinging her legs off the side of the pod-bed and sitting up.

I tried to reach over to steady her, but she just pushed me off. I shrugged and leaned over to grab her clothes and hand them to her.

“I can take it from here, thank you very much,” she stated flatly and aggressively, waving me away.

I stared at her with concern, wondering if her intensely aggressive mood had been stimulated by some psycho-active response to the pssi stimulus, but a set of clinical notes floated into view in an overlaid display space. She was always that way. Everything was fine, then, in fact all of the other reports coming in signaled that this was another perfect pssi installation.

“I’m going to bring you in to speak to the doctor before you leave okay? He needs to have a final word,” I said, walking out the door and stopping outside to wait for her to finish getting dressed.

In a few seconds she was done, and strode quickly out the door and down the hallway, purposely avoiding looking my way. I watched her carefully, looking for any tell-tale tremors or jitters that could betray an issue with her motor cortex. She looked smooth, if not graceful, but then, her grace wasn’t my issue.

She hung her head around into the doctor’s office, and I walked over to observe the exchange.

“So how do you feel?” I could hear him asking her. “Please, come in.”

“No, I’m fine. I mean, I just want to get going. This was supposed to be under an hour, I’ve got things to do,” she complained to the doctor. “So just tell me quick, what do I need to know?”

“You have a very powerful new tool at your disposal now Olympia, just be careful with it okay?” explained the doctor. “I don’t think you should activate any of the distributed consciousness features for now.”

“Distributed consciousness,” snorted Olympia, looking back at me, “where do they get these ideas?”

I raised my eyebrows. Sensing my job here done, this splinter began to slide back towards the edges of my conscious awareness again to become just another voice in my sensory crowd. As it did, Olympia’s question resonated, sliding a part of mind off somewhere else, backwards in time, into my childhood.

Infinixx had really begun as a pssi-kid game we’d invented called flitter tag. In the forested yards of the Schoolyard at recess, we used to have huge games of it, jumping and chasing after each other in what seemed to the adults as completely nonsensical behavior.

More than just using pssi to venture off into virtual worlds, as pssi-kids we were the first to really master the art of body snatching—sneaking into each others’ sensory channels and taking control of each others’ bodies. Sharing bodily control was chaperoned by our proxxi that allowed the visitor to do what they liked as long as they didn’t hurt our bodies or do something we wouldn’t do or say ourselves. Proxxi also managed the transition, the handing off and receiving of control, so it all went smoothly and safely.

Sometimes it could get confusing, but then that was a part of the fun. If it ever became too much, whenever you were ‘out of body’ and lending it to someone or off in another world, you could always punch the Uncle Button and snap back into yourself, so you were never really far from home.

Flitter tag worked as we all jumped willy-nilly from each other’s bodies into the next. Whoever was ‘it’ was flittering their consciousness from this body to that, trying to reach out and touch someone else as we squealed and shrieked and jumped about from one body to another, randomly forcing resets as we punched our Uncle Buttons. It was disorienting, completely mad and completely fun and there was nothing else quite like it when one was growing up as a pssi-kid on Atopia.

What started off as a simple game became ever more complex over time and we began to invent more and more rules. Of course we played not just in this world, but also jumping off into the endless multiverse worlds we played in. It was during these advanced games of flitter tag that we first began to really experience distributed consciousness, working to keep track of new bodies we spawned, madly rushing through worlds of fire, water, ice, and skies and inhabiting creatures and bodies and physics of worlds unrecognizable to the experiential space of normal humans. We didn’t realize what we were doing at the time. It was just natural.

As we grew older, many of my peers dropped off into what could only be described as self-indulgent gratification. I was the only one to seriously think about what had happened to us, to dissect how it had happened. This was the beginning of Infinixx.

It was my aunt Patricia who’d nurtured my ideas and given them the space and light to grow. Really, she was my great-great-great-aunt. To everyone else she was the famous Dr. Patricia Killiam, the godmother of synthetic reality and right hand of Kesselring, but to me she was always just Aunt Pattie.

“So you can really hold five conversations at once?” she had asked me at the end of my eventful thirteenth birthday party.

After my naming ceremony, we’d decided to take a walk together in Never Ever Land, across a lavender field amid floating daisies. We held hands, Aunt Pattie brushing the blushing blooms from our path as we tried to walk just so, in synch, so we wouldn’t float too far up or down but would stay just right. It was a game, as almost all things were.

“I’m doing it right now,” I giggled, and broke away from her and ran, rising up above the field as I did, but not too high so the circling Levantours couldn’t catch me.

I stopped and turned to watch her coming, sinking slowly back down. I was also chatting with my friend Kelly in the Great Beyond about boys, about Bob of course, and also with Willy about how he managed to control an entire combat battalion simultaneously in a Normandy invasion, and also trying to console Jimmy after the frightful incident at my party.

“It’s easy, and I can do way more than that. I can do a hundred if I really wanted,” I boasted.

“Come on Nancy, don’t tease your old Auntie, please tell the truth.”

“Okay, maybe not a hundred, but a lot, you just have to think about it the right way,” I explained, and went on describing just how it happened to happen.

7 Identity: William McIntyre

I sighed, but happily now. Sitting belly-deep in the water on our boards, a dark mass moved smoothly underneath us. The Great Whites had begun their nightly garbage collection sweep of the undersea ledge. Bob noticed them too and smiled.

“This was great,” beamed Bob. “I’m really glad you made it out today.”

“Well I said I would, didn’t I?” I laughed back.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t always mean it’ll happen,” observed Bob, shaking his head but smiling, “at least, not lately.”

The setting sun was painting a picture-perfect end to the day in pink and azure clouds hanging high in the sky. We bobbed around in the water for a bit in silence, and then another one of the Great Whites slid silently past. It was time to get in.

“I guess that’s fair,” I replied. “Work has just been such a grind lately.”

We both leaned forward and began a lazy paddle back to the beach.

“I’m sure it has been. Well at least you look more relaxed today.”

It was true. After my talk with Jimmy I could finally see a way out, perhaps even a means to really break through. It would require a huge amount of work, but at least I could see a crack of opportunity to crawl through.

Bob, slightly ahead of me now, smiled back at me. I smiled at him too, and his grin widened.

“See you on the beach!” he called out and then turned abruptly. I was wondering what the heck he was smiling about when my board suddenly angled up, spilling me forward. In my daydreaming, I’d lost track of my water-sense.

“Thanks a…” was all I managed to get out before I swallowed a big mouthful of foamy saltwater and my world crashed into a watery tumult as a large wave broke over me.

Surfing at the end of the day had been legendary. The coming storms out in the Pacific had generated amazing incoming swells, and we’d spent the late afternoon riding twenty foot monsters to the delight of the crowds watching from the beach.

Bob had picked up a few female tourists, and taken them out for some tandem surfing, a sport he had almost single handedly resuscitated. We’d only just managed to disentangle ourselves from them by the end of the day, after I’d made it clear I wanted to make it a boys’ night out.

Darkness had fallen as we sat at a tiki-hut beach bar under an awning of palms fringing the powdery sands of the beach. Bob and Sid were already stoned, and I was well into my sixth beer, a large mouthful of which I had just spat out, projectile fashion, trying to hopelessly contain a burst of laughter.

An elderly woman, obviously a tourist, was walking past us as we slouched on our stools against the bar. Her breasts were undulating back and forth near her knees, complemented by a grotesquely protruding rear end, both spilling out of her modest bikini as they swung back and forth in a counterbalancing rhythm.

Sid had started up a new reality skin he’d created called Droopy. It grossly magnified the physical characteristics of women we looked at, scaled by the intensity of their attention towards us.

He’d just pointed out this new victim who was making her way towards the bar, and she had given us such a scowl that her tits had literally mushroomed out of her chest to bounce off the beach.

“Jesus, Sid, you’re killing me!” I choked out, wiping spittle from my mouth and desperately averting my eyes from the glare of the scowling matriarch.

She just made things that much worse, and was practically engulfed by her now gargantuanly distended mammary glands as she slowly dragged her expanding bottom through the sand.

“It’s the blob!” screeched Vicious, pointing with eyes wide in mock fear. “Run! Run away now!”

To make his point, Vicious ran helter-skelter into the jungle behind the bar.

I doubled over, howling with laughter and just not caring. The swollen, rolling subject of our consideration had now turned sharply on her heel, and was slugging off through the sand away from us, apparently not needing a drink anymore. As she retreated, she slowly returned to normal proportions.

“Oh,” I gasped, rubbing the tears from my eyes, giggling, “we should do this more often.”

“We do this every day, son. What you mean is, you should do this more often,” pointed out Vicious, peering out carefully from the bushes at our retreating victim. He was right.

Vicious returned to the bar, now that the coast was clear. He sat back down on his stool in his punkish best, with his black jeans rolled up to his knobby knees, sporting a ripped t-shirt, his eternally spiked black hair contrasting nicely with his pasty white complexion. The rest of us comfortably lounged in our swim shorts. Sid eyed me merrily, and then spat the remainder of a mouthful of beer onto me and laughed.

We all laughed.

“William!” someone screeched into my emergency audio channel.

Wally popped in beside me. “You’d better take this right away, she’s pissed.”

He took control of my body, and I detached quickly to respond to Brigitte.

“Yes my splinter winky?” I answered, my face radiating innocence as I dropped into my workspace to take the call. She stood scowling in front of me.

“William, I am working late finishing some interviews, and all of a sudden, my interviewee’s breasts start swelling and spilling out onto the table, which is totally distracting and embarrassing.”

Oh shoot, I had forgotten we were sharing realities.

“Ah geez, sorry about that, I was just having a little fun with the boys...” I started to say.

“You’re drunk,” she stated incriminatingly, “and you guys are pigs.”

“…come on…”

“Cochon!” she added, shaking her head.

“Brigitte, please,” I said defensively, “I’m only sharing realities because you asked. This isn’t a big deal...”

“William,” she cut in, “Willy...”

She paused, looking sadly at the floor. I waited.

“You know, I have barely seen you in weeks, months even,” she continued, “and you can’t even take the time to have breakfast with me, and here you are off with...ah…ca fait rien.”

I switched off my end of the shared reality, frustrated.

I hadn’t seen the boys in weeks, and I’d been doing my best to spend any spare time I had with Brigitte. It wasn’t my fault I needed to focus more and more on my moonlighting work. My early gains had quickly been gobbled up after Nancy had restricted my splinter limit, and my bank account was now fast turning into a blank account.

I felt trapped.

We fell into a mutually accusatory silence.

“Willy, I think we need to talk,” she said after studying me.

“I think so too,” was all I replied.

While Brigitte finished up with work, I flitted back to the boys. My mood was ruined, however, so I begged off and tried going back to work for a bit to lose myself.

Soon enough, Brigitte pinged me and appeared briefly in my workspace. Taking a resigned look around at what had replaced her, she took my hand and flittered us off to a quiet corner of the beach for our talk.

The day had settled into a heartbreakingly beautiful evening, and a crescent moonrise was casting a sparkling carpet over inky seas. Waves gently caressed the shore, and she held my hand tightly in hers, walking me through the wet sand at the water’s edge. We slowly left a trail of footprints behind us.

“Willy,” she pleaded, “my heart is breaking, Willy. I love you, but I can’t do this anymore. Please, let’s sit down and fix this. Just tell me what you need.”

“Brigitte, I love you too, but...I just don’t feel like we share the same goals anymore,” I replied. “I need to focus on my business right now.”

And then the pause, that hurtful space of silence between words that shifted worlds.

“Look, I don’t want to hurt you. I think the best thing could be for us to separate for a while so I can figure this out.”

She looked into my eyes while the tears welled in hers. Her feet left the ground, and she floated in front of me as I walked, holding both my hands now. Cast in the soft monochromatic moonlight, she hovered like a ghost before me.

“Willy,” she sobbed, “you want me to leave you?”

I can’t believe that I did it, but I slowly started to nod, looking steadily into her eyes.

Catching her breath sharply, she looked away, her body convulsing as she tried to stop the coming sobs. She let go of my hands. Brigitte floated up and away from me and into the starry sky. Perhaps not like a ghost, but more like an angel.

My footsteps continued alone in the sand awhile before being washed away by the waves. It was as if we had never been there at all.

The Infinixx launch was coming up, and I had to rush to try the idea Jimmy had suggested before the end of the beta program. Brigitte would understand, and once I had everything going we could have the life together that we’d always wanted. What I had planned was going to blow everyone away. I just needed to focus.

I went back to work.

8 Identity: Nancy Killiam

Itching. Itching desperation. Sweaty visions of bunched up sheets, of desire for release, pain, guilt, of junkies staring with hollow eyes; these all flooded my mind. The desperation gave way to confusion, a mad whispering of ideas that meant something, but didn’t mean anything to me. Then something else, a contained space, I was trapped in a small vehicle that suddenly burst into flames. Just as quickly, I was sitting, combing my hair, and looking back into a face that wasn’t mine.

I closed down my splinter network, collapsing my conscious webwork at the same time.

“It’s some kind of bug,” explained Karen, my technical lead. “The subjective streams are getting crossed somehow, and there’s meme-matching problems, too.”

“Do we know what the problem is?”

Launch time was fast approaching. While building our technology platform, we were at the same time using it to provide for our own proof of concept. The problem was that bugs tended to get cycled back, amplifying their effects.

“We think so. We’re just running some final QA now before letting it out into the eco-system.”

“What caused it?” I asked. We’d been having some speed bumps, but nothing as serious as this.

“It seems like a code change somewhere in the kernel layers. We’re trying to figure it out.”

“You’re sure this will solve it?” Honestly, I didn’t care what caused it, I just needed it fixed. “I have another press event in a few minutes. Tell me the truth.”

“Yes,” confirmed Karen with some conviction, “that’ll solve it.”

I looked around the table. The meeting room pulsed softly and silently in its synthetic reality cocoon. Things didn’t have the feeling of a problem being solved.

“What?”

A few of them looked down at the floor, and Karen just shrugged and hit me with it. The details of a lawsuit splintered into my consciousness.

“Some guy in Minnesota is suing for emotional damages after his sensory stream got crossed with his teenage daughter’s.”

“Oh my God.” The details flowed through my splinter network. The girl had been out with her boyfriend. I shook my head, my mind filling with my own memories of growing up. Never mind the father; it was the girl who would be damaged after this.

“And you’re only bringing this to me now?”

“It was just filed ten minutes ago,” replied our legal counsel, a loaner from Cognix corporate who had now appeared in the meeting.

His slicked back image made me tense up.

“Do you need to be here right now?” I demanded. This was supposed to be a private meeting.

He shrugged. “That depends…”

“On what?”

“On whether you still want to be running this company by the end of the day,” he replied coolly, looking at the ceiling, and then he turned to stare directly into my eyes. “You need to deal with this right now.”

I sighed. Dealing with lawyers was something I didn’t think I’d ever get used to, but running Infinixx didn’t give me much choice.

“Nothing in the media worlds yet?” I asked rhetorically. Cunard had already run a background check in the seconds since we’d learned of the problem. There was nothing so far.

“No,” replied our lawyer, “they’ve agreed to keep it quiet.”

He looked around the room at my technical staff, appearing bored.

“For a settlement I imagine.”

“Yes,” he smiled, looking back towards me, “as you imagine.”

“Even though they signed off on a hold harmless clause with the beta testing?”

“This sort of thing could get, well, it could be pretty media friendly,” explained the lawyer, looking even more bored as he said it, if that was possible, “or pretty unfriendly, depending on how you look at it.”

This was exactly the reason why I couldn’t let Willy increase his splinter limit, unexpected repercussions and technical glitches like this. We just couldn’t afford the risk.

“Make the deal,” I sighed. The lawyer nodded and faded away.

“And Karen,” I added, “fix this problem. I don’t care what it takes, but get it fixed.”

The Infinixx platform had been designed to enable even regular humans to manage the trick of distributing their consciousness. For us pssi-kids, who grew up with the knack for doing this, the Infinixx platform was an amplifier that multiplied what we could already do, but learning the trick was a little more difficult for the general population than we’d imagined.

Our slogan was ‘Everyone. Everywhere. Everytime.’ or E3. The ‘E’ and the ‘3’ were stylized in the logo, facing each other to form an infinity symbol above the Infinixx name. It was all very clever branding.

“What exactly does it mean?” I was asked at the press conference immediately following the tech meeting.

We were announcing the slogan and unveiling our marketing program. The media people were very proud of it and were hanging in the wings of the presentation space, egging me on to nail their positioning.

“E3 represents the infinite possibilities of the future that we’re bringing to life,” I rolled out breathlessly. “E3 is the idea that anyone can be everywhere and anywhere at any time they like—while still never needing to be anywhere they don’t want.”

I paused before my finale, catching my breath.

“For the first time, people will be free to be nowhere and everywhere at the same time—E3 represents total freedom!”

Applause rang out as I raised my hands to the crowd. I managed to say all of this without the slightest of smiles, even though I wasn’t sure I understood what it meant. All that mattered was that the marketing department was in love with it.

While distributing consciousness was a nice trick, what had the business world so excited were the implications for productivity. Synthetic intelligences and phuturing had been able to push the needle a long way, but lately they’d been stalled in their revenue enhancing capabilities, and distributed consciousness was the new buzzword in investor circles. Many groups were pursuing something like it, but with our intimate link to Cognix and our unique abilities as pssi-kids, we had an edge nobody else could match. The investments had just poured in.

The explosive growth was an adrenaline rush.

We’d begun synthesizing intermediate management as splinter constructs, their personalities and experiences amalgamated from the team members they would be managing. Our managers thus became a little bit of everyone they managed, but despite this, people still hated them for some reason.

Even with these innovations, it was a grind, especially the constant need to bring in new talent. Picking new staff became a Herculean task with each new staff member counting as ten—the productivity multiplier goal we were trying to demonstrate—so a mistake picking out any new employee tended to magnify itself. We were constantly having endless rounds of human resources meetings in our main conference room, discussing the merits of new candidates.

“Did you hear about Cynthia, that new administrative girl we hired?” asked my VP of Human Resources, at the start of one of those meetings. My VP of Synthetic Resources rolled her eyes and looked towards me, as if I-told-you-so.

Cynthia has been a great hire, but had recently dropped off the radar without any warning. People disappearing off into cyber hedonistic fantasy worlds weren’t uncommon, but Cynthia had been my pick. She’d seemed a little more reliable than that.

“Yeah, I heard about that. So her neural functions are off the charts, but they can’t find her and she’s off in the multiverse somewhere?” asked Kelly, my co-founding business partner.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with us, does it?” I suddenly exclaimed, pulling the splinter for this meeting into the center of my consciousness.

“No, nothing to do with us,” confirmed Kelly, “but speaking of strange, how about Vince Indigo. Have you seen the flash death mobs he’s attracting?”

There were a few laughs around the table. I stayed quiet. I had a feeling Vince and Patricia were up to something, but didn’t want to say anything. Cunard pinged me right then for the start to yet another press event.

“The Security Council has taken over Cynthia’s file now,” said Brian, our Chief Technical Officer, bringing the discussion back. “Let’s keep moving. Speaking of the Security Council, what does everyone think of Jimmy getting nominated?”

“I think Jimmy is great,” I replied.

“Of course you would,” snorted Kelly. “More of the Killiam clan in charge, but then what’s good for the goose…”

“Hey!” I said defensively. “That’s not fair. Jimmy’s family is barely related to mine.” My cheeks blushed.

They all rolled their eyes.

Jimmy was related to me, but only distantly. Our great-grandfathers had been cousins, whatever that made us. All of that didn’t make any difference to me, and the awkwardness I felt now was because Patricia had asked Bob’s family to adopt Jimmy when he’d been left in her care.

I’d been dating Bob at the time, and in fact we’d been inseparable as children. From that point on, though, I’d been teased for dating what amounted to my cousin, if only cousin-in-law. Childhood taunts had a way of sticking with you in life.

“Gang, I have to get to the next press event,” I added, happy for a reason to exit-stage-left, and flitted off for the next press conference.

9 Identity: William McIntyre

“Willy!”

Whole scaffolds of my conscious webwork collapsed as Bob forced his way in using one of Sid’s viral skins. Sid was going to get in trouble with his little sidelines one day, but then again, who was I to talk?

I hadn’t seen Bob in weeks, maybe longer. Work had totally absorbed me, and to focus I’d begun filtering all of my communications straight into my proxxi.

“Willy!” yelled Bob at maximum volume across my full audio spectrum. “Wiiiillllly!”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m here,” I responded, releasing most of my splinter network into autopilot and distilling a good chunk of myself back into a private workplace where I’d pulled Bob.

Bob smiled goofily as we both materialized into each others’ sensory spaces. We were sitting across from each other in one of my meeting spaces. I was sitting straight up in a chair at one end of the room, dressed in a blazer and slacks, while he had draped himself over a leather couch facing me, wearing only his swimming shorts and a baseball cap.

“How’s it going, Mr. Rockefeller?”

“Actually, it’s going really well,” I laughed, looking at him. “I had a gale force wind blowing almost all week!”

Bob understood what I meant, but he didn’t quite share my enthusiasm. While his metasenses were king in the water, I had my stock portfolio wired into my tactile arrays. It created that spine tingling feeling of money on the move.

“As long as you’re happy,” Bob replied skeptically. He shook his head and sat up on the couch.

The last time I’d seen him was when we were surfing, when Brigitte and I had split.

“I heard you quit Infinixx.”

“Yeah, Nancy is kinda full of herself these days, don’t you think?”

I didn’t mention the investigation into my tinkering with the Infinixx code. Nothing had come of it, and I’d gotten what I’d wanted.

Bob raised his eyebrows.

“Geez, Nancy was always a sweetheart...” he started to say, but was lost for words as he watched me.

“Hey you’re not mad at me are you?” he asked. “I mean, that Brigitte thing. Sid and I were just messing around.”

I shook my head.

“Don’t worry about it,” I sighed.

Thinking of Brigitte made my stomach tighten into knots, and my patience suddenly evaporated. I had a lot of stuff to get done. Bob watched me in silence, unconvinced with my answer, but changed topics anyway.

“So who are hanging out with these days?” he asked.

“Ah, just work people, you know...”

It wasn’t like he really worked anyway, so why should I bother explaining? Maybe accepting his ping had been a bad idea. Now I felt annoyed. Just then Wally warned me that Vince Indigo was waiting. I didn’t remember taking a meeting with Vince. Wally was telling me that he had already alerted me five minutes ago, but I had been so far splintered that it hadn’t registered.

“Listen, I have Vince Indigo waiting in person,” I said, happy for a reason to cut our chat short. “Big client, I’d better go.”

“Yeah, okay, sure,” Bob replied quietly. He squinted and cocked his head to one side. “Do you think you could ask Vince if he’s okay, for me? All this stuff on Phuture News is kind of weirding me out.”

“I’m really not comfortable doing that,” I replied quickly, my annoyance mounting. “I don’t know him very well. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

Bob shrugged. “He doesn’t answer my pings anymore.”

I shouldn’t either. “Look, this is business…”

Bob looked down. “Right. Anyway, let’s hang out soon, yeah? I think we should talk about all this stuff, all your work changes and Brigitte and all.”

“Sure, sure, gotta go,” I said dismissively and waved goodbye, leaving a wafer thin splinter behind.

I flitted back into real space at my apartment where Vince was waiting for me. Unimpressed visions of Bob watching me go persisted in several of my visual channels.

“So, I assume business is good?” asked Vince, noting my arrival.

He was wandering around the periphery of my apartment, staring outwards at the projected spaces of my growing business in the multiverse world of New London.

My new offices had been designed by one of the most sought-after interior metaworld designers. The glass walled space was floating in air, suspended above an almost endless array of cubicles housing renderings of my splintered parts, sub-proxxi and other synthetic beings and bots that were spawned outwards from my own cognitive systems. It was thousands of me working for me.

“Business is very, very good,” I replied, grinning widely. I wanted to tell him I’d found a back door to Infinixx, and could now splinter as much as I liked, but I couldn’t tell anyone that. I’d already paid off our family mortgage and was well on my way to amassing a sizeable personal fortune.

Vince wanted something, I could tell, but had an air of desperation surrounding him. My ego was flattered that one of the richest people in the world would make a personal house call for a favor from me, but his nervousness made me nervous. I didn’t like the way he was looking at all the activity below us.

I wondered what could be making him so jumpy. He had all the money in the world to burn as far as I could tell.

“Yeah, I’d noticed you’d amped up your Phuture News services pretty dramatically,” he said carefully, “but that’s not why I’m here. I’ll just send you the details of what I need right now. I can see you’re a busy man.”

A description of a financial event was uploaded and instantly analyzed by one of my splinters.

“You want me to what?” I exclaimed. “You know this is going to look suspicious, especially with me working for Infinixx.”

“From what I’ve heard, you don’t work for them anymore.”

I stopped fidgeting and stared at Vince, wondering how much he really knew. “Yeah that’s right, but it will still look odd.”

“You wouldn’t be making any profit off this, and nobody will know,” he explained. “I know it seems crazy, but if you could do this for me, and keep it quiet, I can pay you an awful lot of money. I need you to dump all that stock and chalk up a huge loss for me, and I need you to do it from New York.”

I could see Vince had ulterior designs afoot, and that was fine with me. He was offering a princely sum for almost no work. So this was what it was like to be in with the big boys. I didn’t care what he was up to and it didn’t look illegal—at least, my end didn’t.

“You be careful,” said Vince after a moment.

“It doesn’t look like there will be any problems with this transaction, Vince, in fact…”

“No, not with that,” he said simply, stopping me in my tracks, “with what you have going on here.”

“There’s nothing going on here.”

We both stood and stared at each other.

He sighed. “Just be careful, okay?”

“No problem, Mr. Indigo,” I replied immediately, shrugging, and I offered my hand to shake. He shook it, smiling weakly, and then flitted off without another word.

Wally materialized facing me on the white couch in my apartment. A dense security blanket shimmered around us like sparkling neon plastic wrap.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

Wally knew both as much and as little as I did. He shrugged and shook his head.

“Listen, Wally, I’m suddenly feeling very nervous. We have a great thing going here, but we need to protect ourselves.”

Being splintered into a hundred pieces was great for business, but it was taking a toll on my mind. Focusing on the market all the time left me a little stunned when I returned into real space, and I was letting details slip more and more often.

On the other hand, I felt like I was approaching some new kind of state of being, a perfectly self-sufficient and self-contained human being. I spent all day talking with various parts of myself, and held forth on meetings of mind with dozens of my splinters at a time. The only distinctly different entity I spoke with was Wally, who was basically a copy of me anyway. Vince and Bob were the first real humans I’d spoken to in days, perhaps even weeks now.

“Wally, when I’m off in the cloud, I need you to protect us here. I need you to make sure we’re safe, okay?”

He looked at me steadily and replied, “Sure thing, boss.”

We looked at each other for a few seconds. With that I flitted off to New York to get working on Vince’s project.

If I didn’t need anyone else’s help anymore, I definitely didn’t want anyone interfering. More than anything, though, I absolutely didn’t want to get caught.

10 Identity: Nancy Killiam

The last few weeks had been a compressed explosion of frenetic activity at Infinixx. Our hundred or so team members had managed to output the workload of a thousand, and then two thousand, workers compared to outside levels of productivity. We touted our accomplishments almost hourly as the launch date arrived. The world’s business community couldn’t wait to get their hands on it.

Building out the platform itself had been fairly straightforward once we had the core in place. A bigger struggle than the technology had been all the internal Atopian politics.

Since I was pushing to have my own launch before the Cognix release of pssi, and we needed to embed some pssi technology into our systems, the result was a messy cross-licensing arrangement. I had Aunt Patricia on my side, but it had still been a fierce fight.

“Give me one good reason we should let this happen,” fumed Dr. David Baxter at the Cognix meeting when we’d finally gotten it all approved.

He’d been steamed since Infinixx would be stealing some of his thunder as the first Atopian-platform product release, and wouldn’t be under his direct control as PR Director.

“David, you’ve seen all the phutures Nancy presented. Almost every scenario comes out pushing the Cognix stock higher as we establish this with early adopters,” countered Patricia. “You’re just annoyed because it’s not under your thumb.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” replied Dr. Baxter, and the tumult had continued as the assembly argued back and forth while Kesselring sat quietly and watched us all, sighing.

We’d been at a stalemate when Jimmy had magically produced the trump card.

“Okay everyone, I will give you one very good reason,” Jimmy shouted out above the arguing as he stood up, raising his hands to quiet everyone. He winked at me.

Until recently, I hadn’t spoken to Jimmy in years, ever since the incident at my thirteenth birthday party. I felt somehow responsible, and it had been just too awkward to talk about. But since he’d been nominated to the Security Council, however, we’d been reintroduced on a professional level, and it was as if nothing had ever happened. In fact, Jimmy and I had immediately struck a close working relationship, and he’d been a big supporter of my bid from the start.

I had no idea what he was going to say and we all waited in anticipation.

“I’ve managed to secure an agreement with both India and China to launch simultaneously with us.”

Gasps issued forth around the table. Getting India and China to agree on anything these days was close to impossible with new Water War skirmishes springing up almost daily. Details of the negotiations sprang into everyone’s workspaces the moment Jimmy spoke and we all dropped off a splinter to have a look. Having India and China agree to a simultaneous launch wouldn’t just be a commercial coup, but a major political one for Atopia as well.

“How in the world?” said Dr. Baxter, his voice trailing off while his mind assimilated the back-story.

“Jimmy, why didn’t you tell me?” I asked breathlessly in a private world I opened to him.

This was it. This was what would make my dreams come true. Thankful tears streamed out from my eyes.

“I just didn’t want to get your hopes up,” replied one of Jimmy’s splinters in our private world. “It was a long shot. I wanted you to focus on getting it done yourself and not have to rely on me, but, hey, it worked.” He shrugged and smiled.

“You’re giving up a lot here,” said Kesselring back in the conference space, speaking for the first time as he reviewed the details of the deal.

“A lot,” he repeated, “but I can see the balancing act, and the payoff. And this will help to keep the media attention off these damn storms.”

Kesselring looked towards Jimmy and smiled, nodding his congratulations.

“I assume you’re good with this Nancy?” asked Kesselring, and of course I agreed.

Approving murmurs began to circulate. With a proud look, Aunt Patricia squeezed my hand hard, beaming at both me and Jimmy.

11 Identity: William McIntyre

A dense gray fog hung around me. No dampness, though, no heaviness—in fact I couldn’t feel anything. In the distance, a light approached and began filling the space around me with a soft radiance that was growing and alive. Curious, I moved towards the light. It grew brighter and brighter, surrounding and enveloping me, and then swallowed me whole, painlessly, soundlessly.

I awoke with a start in my bed, blinking, breathing quickly, looking around and trying to calm myself down. The image of the fog was fading. Was I just in a fog, on the water? What was that about? I must have been dreaming again. I tried pinging Bob, Sid, Brigitte, but nobody answered—weird. I felt lightheaded. Maybe I’d better go and get something to eat to shake out the cobwebs a bit.

I got out of bed and walked over to the fridge, and pulled out an apple, some bread to toast, and after a moment of thought, reached into the cupboard to pull out some instant oatmeal. I shook out the oatmeal into a bowl, poured some water over it and watched the water start to steam and boil as it soaked into the thermo-reactive particles embedded in the oatmeal.

I watched the oatmeal, mesmerized like it was one of my campfires. This is your brain on oatmeal, I thought, watching it bubble and splutter.

Within a few seconds it was done and piping hot. Topping it off with some brown sugar, I sat down at my counter, shining the apple on my pajama pant leg. I smelled burnt toast. Am I having a stroke? The toast popped. Oh right. Calm down.

I wondered what was new in the future this morning, so I flicked on some Phuture News Network and waited for a flood of what was about to happen. Blank. Nothing was about to happen, apparently. All that was playing on Phuture News were images of me watching Phuture News with my oatmeal before me. Must be some kind of screwy trick Sid had going again. Ah well, I wasn’t going to play along. I just sat and quietly ate my oatmeal.

A deep chill passed by me, and a wave of goose bumps shivered across my exposed arms. Suddenly, I was having an out-of-body experience, watching myself as if through a pane of frosted glass. I was there, but not there. I felt calm. All the worries I had a second ago, about work, Brigitte, money—everything was suddenly gone, and I realized how small these worries really were. I was so calm, so cold, and there was that fog again, so familiar and yet so alien. Where was I? And why did I want to know?

My brain snapped out of it, as if wrenched from a bear trap. Whoa, what is going on? I blinked hard and shook my head, looking down at my congealing oatmeal. Phuture News was on now, and apparently the odds were that our friends Orlando and Melinda were going to have a big cat fight soon. I suddenly liked the idea of cats.

Most people had already lined up on team Orlando, so I opted for Melinda. I always liked the undercat, and at least this time is wasn’t Adriana. As I watched, clever taunts were being devised and their viral values sized up by several off-island marketing agencies, eager to reach the Atopian crowd.

The social storm clouds grew as I dug into my cooling oatmeal, watching the action unfold. It reminded me of Brigitte. My stomach tightened.

I put down my spork.

My brain snapped out of it as if wrenched from...a bear trap. Something was very wrong. I blinked hard again and shook my head, looking down at the congealing oatmeal. Didn’t I just eat that? Phuture News was now blank, and back to images of me staring at images of me staring at images of me staring at images of me.

The oatmeal was sputtering and bubbling in the bowl as steam issued forth from it. I was standing back next to the fridge, holding the apple, about to shine it on my pajama leg. Wait a minute. Didn’t this just happen? I was déjà vuing hard, losing my grip. My chest tightened, and my breathing was labored. Jesus. I thought was I having a heart attack, or maybe a stroke. I smelled burnt toast.

“Wally!” I cried out. “Wally! Where the hell are you?”

Where the heck was he when I really needed the guy? Wasn’t he supposed to be watching out for me?

“Willy, calm down, everything is okay,” I heard Wally say, his voice soothing, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. “Don’t worry Willy, everything is fine. Calm down, your vitals are way off the chart. You’re probably feeling chest pain, it’s just anxiety. Your blood stream is flooding with cortisol and adrenalin. Take a deep breath, calm down.”

I took in a deep breath, held it, and slowly let it out. My cheeks were flushed.

“Calm down,” I told myself, “calm down.”

Closing my eyes, I focused myself, and I could feel the stress begin to wash out. Suddenly I was lying down. Maybe Wally had helped me back to bed.

I could see myself lying still, lying absolutely calm. What was I just worrying about? Why worry about anything? Everything was so insignificant in the big picture. My head felt like cotton balls had been stuffed in through my ears, displacing my brain, and I had the curious sensation that I was wrapped in idiot mittens, determined somehow not to hurt myself or get lost.

In my mind’s eye I could see myself with my mother. She was bending over me, the arms of her sweater rolled up as she happily hummed some lullaby, giving me a bath in the chipped porcelain wash basin in our old family kitchen, back on the commune in Montana.

Through streaked windowpanes, I could see trees swaying outside under wet, windy skies. The cows in the field were huddling under the protection of the ponderosa pines that lined one side of our farm. Beyond this, the dense forests stretched up into the foothills, with the snow-capped Rockies solidly framing it all.

It was cold outside, but warm in here. The steaming water was soaking into my little bones. We were so happy together in this small moment of time, so precious. I heard the splash and tinkle of water as she lifted the wash cloth, the sounds echoing through time.

“How’s my silly Willy?” she laughed, tweaking my nose.

“Wally?” I asked, more calmly this time. “Wally, what is happening to me? Where are you?”

I could sense Wally, but I couldn’t see him or hear him. Somehow though, I could feel him speaking to me.

“Willy, everything is okay,” I felt him say. “There’s something I need to tell you, though.”

I should’ve felt worried, but I didn’t.

“What? Go ahead, don’t worry.”

I felt like I already knew, even though I knew I didn’t.

“You’re part of something special, Willy.”

“Yeah, Wally, I know. The Atopia program, I got that.”

“Not just that, something more unique, something much more important.”

“Go on.”

I liked that. I’d always thought of myself as unique, like a small snowflake adrift in the wind, floating painlessly, soundlessly.

“You’re familiar with Schrödinger’s cat?”

“Sure.”

The old quantum physics thought experiment. An object in superposition can exist in more than one state. The cat in the box that is both alive and dead at the same time. For some reason Vince came to mind.

“It’s now possible to enable quantum superposition not just with atoms, but on larger objects. Much larger objects in fact.”

“So what’s this got to do with me?”

Quantum physics needing a conscious observer had always annoyed me. It smacked of God hiring city workers to turn the cranks of the cosmos.

“Willy, you may want to sit down, there is a downside to what I’m about to tell you.”

I was already lying down. What was wrong with him?

“Your living space is contained within a giant quantum trap. You are the first sentient being to be wholly placed in a superposition state, and right now, you are both alive and dead at the same time. In a moment, when you understand what I’m saying, you will also be the first observer to observe themselves in superposition and so fix your own life or death. Before you fully understand what I’m saying Willy, hurry, and tell us what you are feeling.”

So I was in a quantum trap. I was the cat in the box.

I looked down at my hands and looked inward on myself, looking at myself, looking at myself...and I meowed.

I woke up in bed, alone, soaked in sweat with my heart pounding. As the dream faded, I remembered what had happened. Brigitte and I had split up, and Wally was gone now too, but I was still here, which meant that somebody, somewhere out there, was taking care of me.

I was still alive.

Greed had brought me to this place, and they were probably going to put me in jail for it, but I had to do something.

12 Identity: Nancy Killiam

I couldn’t believe the big day had actually arrived, the release of Infinixx to the world.

Although our product worked in the cloud, so to speak, it still needed physical infrastructure on the ground in the form of three dedicated consciousness processing centers. These massive computing installations, all tied together on dedicated communication links, were designed to handle local processing to reduce sensory latencies.

Each hub, for lack of a better description, was like a huge blank mind, and had to be booted up in sequence to maintain a coherent lock between them. Each required a large local power source to drive it, and we’d decided to make an event out of throwing the switches to power them up.

At the same time as launching the Infinixx product, we were simultaneously floating the newly minted Infinixx stock onto the world markets as the Indian, Chinese and Atopian processing centers came online.

The Solomon House Ballroom was packed to the rafters. I’d asked each of our Board and senior executives to be there in person for the launch, and I walked up and down in front of the head table, set up above the floor, shaking each person’s hand in turn and thanking them for their hard work and support.

“Excited, Brian?” I asked my CTO.

I wrung my hands together nervously. In the ceremonial opening, I was going to throw the switch to get everything started. Its power system was routed up here, the junction box set against a wall behind the elevated stage we were sitting at, just above and behind my chair. I’d decided I would bestow the honor of throwing the switch onto either Jimmy or Aunt Patricia. They were sitting up on the stage with me, and I would spring this last minute decision to inject a little surprise and emotion into the event.

“Okay everyone!” announced Kesselring, gracing us with his primary, shouting out at the packed crowd from the podium. Kesselring had gotten on board with the launch in a big way once we’d made the decision. He had a way of stealing the show, but I didn’t mind.

“Okay everyone, quiet down!” he thundered out with a smile.

The huge ballroom was filled to capacity, with people milling about, glasses and table wear clinking amid a beehive of buzzing background conversation. Everyone began settling down and looked towards us.

“Very good!” continued Kesselring as the noise subsided. “We are now bringing in the Indian and Chinese contingents. I would like a hearty Atopian round of applause to welcome them!”

The crowded room erupted in applause as the Chinese and Indian delegations materialized to the left and right of us. It was an incredible photo opportunity with the Chinese and Indian banners appearing on each side of the Atopian flag.

Protocol for the event dictated that the Chinese and Indian head officials would come to the center table to shake my hand at exactly the same time, and this came off perfectly without a hitch, despite my nervousness. In a splinter I was watching the pre-market analysis of the Infinixx stock as the broadcast of the event caught the world, and I could see the anticipated stock price climbing fast on Phuture News.

My heart was in my throat. I was in the dead center of attention and I could feel the gravity and historical importance of the moment pressing down upon me as we got up from our chairs at the banquet table to approach the switch. I had Jimmy to one side of me and Patricia to the other, with the rest of the Board and executive surrounding us. As we stepped to the back wall, I stared at the big green switch.

“It looks like something borrowed from a Russian hydroelectric dam,” I joked with Patricia under my breath. She smiled, and I beamed out at to the assembled crowd.

Reaching out, I held both of their hands in mine, and then let go to reach out and touch the switch. It felt cool and hard and hummed as it coursed with unseen power. The lights dimmed and the countdown began. The whole auditorium joined in as if it were New Year in Times Square.

“Ten!” they all shouted out. “...nine...eight...”

“Aunt Pattie,” I said, turning to look at her with tears in my eyes, “I’ve decided that I’d like it to be you who throws the switch. All this, everything here is all because of you!”

The crowd continued to roar the countdown, “...six...”

“I’d love to sweetheart,” Patricia replied quickly, “but I had a last minute thing come up and I’m not here kinetically. You go ahead dear!”

“…five…”

Ah well, I thought, slightly crestfallen.

“Okay Jimmy, how about you then? Go ahead. I really wanted it to be one of you two,” I said to him. I released the switch and encouraged Jimmy to take it.

“...three...two...”

“I’m really sorry Nance, I had something too. I’m only dialed in as well. You go ahead...quick now!”

“...ONE!”

The blood drained from my face. I could hear an audible ‘snap’ as the Chinese and Indians flipped their own switches at their remote locations. My metasenses felt the cavernous thrum of the Infinixx installations bootstrapping deep in the multiverse.

Okay, keep calm.

Perplexed faces around the room watched us on the stage, waiting for my main connecting switch to be thrown. I quickly queried each of the executives at the table with me, and my worry mounted. Karen had stayed with her kids; Louise, Brian, Cindy—nobody was physically present. They were all dialed in, despite my specific instructions requesting everyone to be here in person.

Then again, I thought as all my blood drained into my shoes and I gazed dreadfully into the audience: I wasn’t there either.

I could feel the switch in my hand, as cool and as hard as if I were standing there and holding it myself. The wikiworld simulated it perfectly, but I couldn’t budge it even a millimeter without having someone or something here physically.

After the disasters of destroyed power grids in the cyber wars, security protocols had been rewritten so that critical nodes in power systems had to be completely disconnected from any communication networks to prevent the ability to hack into them. Despite Atopia being at the center of the cyber world, we had to conform to international security standards, especially for a project like this.

While I hadn’t overlooked this, I had expected at least one of my executive team or Board members to be here in person after specifically requesting all of their physical attendance, even verifying this just minutes before the event.

But of course, even I hadn’t listened to myself.

Staring out at the crowd, I took one last desperate step. I flipped my pssi into identity mode, removing all virtual and augmented objects from my senses. The buzzing, crowded room faded from view, and all I was left with was my own low groan of fear. Not a single person was in sight. The entire voluminous ballroom was as empty and quiet as a morgue.

I stared back at the green switch, now mocking me in humiliation.

Already the assembled crowd and world press had figured out what had happened, and I was being pinged with a Times article trumpeting “Infinixx—Everywhere but Nowhere!”

Lawyers from the Indian and Chinese sides had already filed a lawsuit against us claiming monumental damages, and conspiracy theories were blossoming about connections to the Weather Wars. My executive team unlocked the exterior security perimeters, and I could see a psombie guard racing towards the stage.

“Forget it,” I told him as he got close to the stage.

I closed my eyes. It was already too late. Almost twenty seconds had passed, and the two other systems had already progressed too far into the bootstrap cycle for us to phase lock into them.

Millions of users had already logged into the systems and begun using them. We’d have to negotiate a downtime to reboot and lock all the systems together again at a later date, but for now we’d have to run them as separate domains, which meant users would only be able to distribute their consciousnesses locally. Technically, it wasn’t a total disaster, but it made me look incredibly foolish. Correction, it made us look foolish. Kesselring was furious at the damage done to the Atopian brand.

I painfully withdrew my conscious webwork back into a tight shell around myself like a cyber tortoise retreating from danger.

Already the world media had minted a new term for a Zen-like business failure of being everywhere but nowhere at the same time, a fail on a massive scale using your own sword to kill yourself.

They called it an Infinixx.

13 Identity: William McIntyre

The police station loomed before me at the base of the vertical farming complex, and I was gingerly making my way towards it.

The Boulevard was the only real street we had, a wide pedestrian thoroughfare that crossed from the eastern to western inlets, crossing between the four gleaming vertical farm towers that center-pinned the island of Atopia.

Glamorous palms lined both sides of the street, bordering the tourist shops, restaurants, and bars whose terraces spilled out into the kaleidoscopic melee between. Even with the storms threatening and the evacuations announced, the atmosphere was still carefree and festive—at least for now.

It had been ages since I’d been above, and I hadn’t been to these parts since I was a tween. I blinked in the sunshine and confusion around me and tried to think my way through what was happening.

I felt so alone and exposed. Here I was, stuck in the middle of something clearly illegal, but what else could I do? I looked up at the towers and imagined myself as one of the psombies inside. Out of options, I just shrugged and opened the police station doors.

Cool, administrative air swept over me and the clerk at the desk, an attractive young woman, smiled at me synthetically.

“Can I help you, sir?” she asked, as sweet as a police officer could be.

“Yes, I’d like to file a missing person report,” I replied, walking towards her as calmly as I could.

Her face registered just the proper amount of seriousness before she queried, “And who is the missing person, sir?”

I paused for a moment.

“Me,” I answered.

After reporting my body missing to the police, the first person I turned to was Bob. It was funny how quickly you could go from feeling powerful and invincible to suddenly needing the protective embrace of friends. At least, I hoped they were still my friends.

“Hey there stranger, you take a wrong turn somewhere?” joked Bob as I appeared in one of his regular beach bar haunts. Even with the storm warnings, he was still surfing every day. Taking a swig of his beer, he waggled it towards me, asking if I wanted one. I shook my head.

“So what can I help you with?”

I sighed, casting a thick security blanket around us. We were immediately surrounded by its glittering and softly undulating shell. Bob raised his eyebrows, but just shrugged and took another swig.

“Now you have my interest,” he ventured, and then screwed his eyebrows together as seriously as he could manage. “Are you okay, bud?”

I sighed heavily. “I’ll just lay it out.”

I paused for a moment and we stared at each other.

“I’ve lost my body.”

Another pause while Bob considered what I’d just said.

“What do you mean—you’ve lost your body? Does this have anything to do with what happened at Infinixx?”

“No, I don’t think so. I mean, not really, but sort of,” I replied, tripping over my own words. I took a deep breath. “I can’t find my body. Wally, or someone—I’m assuming it’s Wally—has stolen it.”

Bob began to smile, raising his eyebrows. “Come on, whatever game you’re playing, I’m in.”

His smile slowly disappeared while he studied the serious look on my face.

“Have you been to the police?” he asked, now concerned.

“Yeah I’ve just been there. Only now, not only can I not find my body, but I’ve been charged with a felony crime and I’m under arrest.”

I didn’t mention that I was also under investigation for my trades in Infinixx stock.

“So how come you’re here? Did you post bail?”

“No. It’s complicated.”

“I’d say so.”

I leaned my head back and rubbed my eyes, shaking my head.

“I think we’d better get Sid in here,” suggested Bob.

I sighed.

“Yeah I guess we better,” I reluctantly replied. Bob’s face slackened for an instant as he detached and then was quickly back. Sid and Vicious immediately materialized on barstools inside the security blanket perimeter.

Even before he’d fully appeared, Vicious looked down his nose at me and declared, “Oooh, so the high and mighty has stooped to mix with the lower downs, eh?”

“Knock it off!” snapped Bob. “This is serious. Sid, you had a chance just now to look at Willy’s situation?”

Sid stood the best chance of anyone at figuring out what was going on. We waited a moment while Sid reviewed the scenarios.

“Let me make sure I have this straight,” replied Sid, all business now.

“So, you reprogrammed rules in the Atopian perimeter to allow an outgoing connection to Terra Nova. Then you logged your consciousness network into a secure Terra Novan account, anonymized your signal and sent multiple connections back into Atopia to create the effect of multiple personalities accessing the network?”

“Right.”

“And now your body appears to have left Atopia entirely, without your knowledge, and you can’t contact Wally.”

“Right.”

“And the Terra Novans have absolutely refused to divulge or break the anonymous connection or relay any of the originating account details, and the connection has been paid up fully one hundred years in advance for service.”

“Yeah,” I agreed quietly, sighing.

After a pause, Bob looked at me and tried to summarize, “So, your body is out there somewhere. You’re doing all your thinking in your lost brain, and it’s communicating with you here into your virtual body, but Wally is driving your body around out there and won’t communicate back.”

“That seems to be about it.”

“That’s an interesting pickle, my friend,” offered Vicious.

“So what, has Wally gone nuts? Can’t we just locate and shut him down in the multiverse somehow?” asked Bob.

“No,” answered Sid. “A proxxi isn’t the same as other synthetic beings. He doesn’t exist in the multiverse proper. He exists as a biological-digital symbiote, embedded in Willy’s body. He controls Willy’s body when Willy’s mind is away, and can venture out into the multiverse from there, but if he’s routed through an anonymizer in Terra Nova, then we won’t be able to track him down easily.”

“And my Uncle Button doesn’t work,” I added. “It was never designed to be filtered back this way.”

“So I ask again—has Wally gone nuts?” repeated Bob.

“Well, it’s not as simple as that,” I admitted. “I actually told Wally to take emergency action if it looked like there was trouble. Illegally breaching the Atopia perimeter is a serious offence.”

“So you told Wally to do this?” laughed Sid, rolling his eyes.

“You’re like a bloody one man Zionista, mate!” cut in Vicious. “One man, displaced from his body, wandering the multiverse, hoping to get back to his stolen homeland...”

“Knock it off, please,” I complained. “I didn’t tell Wally to do this. I told him that if it looked like we were in trouble, to take whatever action he deemed necessary to make sure we were okay.”

“And how on Earth did you ignore him when whatever obviously went down, went down?” asked Sid incredulously.

“Ah,” I took in a deep breath, “well, you see, with this new set-up, my mind was shattered into hundreds of splinters and fed through the anonymizer, and sometimes it wasn’t possible for Wally to get my attention. That’s why I made it clear to him to take immediate action right away, without me, if he deemed it necessary.”

“Oh he seems to have taken action alright,” Vicious observed, clearly enjoying himself.

“Enough!” exclaimed Bob. “Enough already. Vicious, you’ve had your fun, and Willy here has been a bit difficult lately, but he’s in trouble and needs our help. Right now.”

I choked back tears, feeling naked and adrift, and not deserving of the loyalty Bob was giving me after the way I’d been treating him lately.

“Sorry, right mate,” mumbled Sid and Vicious.

“Wally, one question,” asked Sid, perking up, the gears of his brain turning now.

“Uh huh?”

“So you’re arrested and charged and convicted, right?”

I nodded. For straightforward crimes it didn’t take a long time—synthetic lawyers and judges weighed in and contested cases within minutes.

“But you’re still with us. So they can’t get your body, but why can’t they restrict your virtual self?”

“The anonymizer randomly logs into Atopia repeatedly if its signal gets restricted. Since my login carries an authenticated Atopian citizen tag, and since it was deemed unconstitutional to restrict access to Atopia for a citizen, they can’t block my access here, but then they can’t contain me either.”

Vicious brightened up visibly at that. “Ah hah, a loophole. So they can’t stop you being here, but they can’t arrest you or stop you either. That makes you one very interesting person to know, my friend.”

I could see where he was going with this.

“Yes, Vicious, but I’m not about to test anyone’s patience on the matter.”

“Still,” he added, shrugging, “but you’re here aren’t you? Why didn’t you voluntarily stay in detention?”

I shrugged back. “Would you, if you’d lost your body? I need to figure out what is going on.”

Bob looked at me.

“How did you figure out how to do all this? It seems a little beyond your area of expertise.”

“Jimmy helped me.”

We all looked at each other.

14 Identity: Nancy Killiam

“I feel so cloudy.”

It was an expression pssi-kids used and one I knew Aunt Patricia had a hard time understanding. It was a feeling we got when we couldn’t understand our own splinters and it felt like our conscious minds were spread outwards from a single point to become an indistinct smudge in time and space. I knew she didn’t quite understand, but I had no other way of explaining how I felt.

We were walking through the Lollipop Forest under a beautiful night sky, lit by a bright, chocolate chip moon with twinkling gumdrop stars.

“Why didn’t you tell me you wouldn’t be there?” I asked Aunt Patricia, finally letting myself ask the question. I didn’t like the idea of blame, but I had to know.

She sighed. “I was there dear, at least my primary subjective was, but I thought that you were the one throwing the switch. We all did.”

“But I checked with you not minutes before and your body was on the way to the Ballroom, what changed?”

Patricia looked up at the gumdrop stars. “Something with Uncle Vince came up.”

I angrily kicked at some lollipop sprouts.

“I’m so stupid.”

Everyone had had some last minute excuse, but in the end, it was my responsibility. It wasn’t like I couldn’t have seen it. Everyone’s physical metatags had properly indicated they were somewhere else, but I’d stopped paying attention to these a long time ago.

“You shouldn’t be beating yourself up so much,” Aunt Pattie said soothingly. “You’ve done a wonderful thing for the world.”

“Yeah—I’ve given them something to never stop laughing at,” I sulked.

The lollipop trees rattled softly as they jostled and bumped on their spindly stalks. Aunt Pattie had suggested coming here for a walk, just like we used to do when I was just a little splinter winky, but the place had lost its magic.

To try and cheer me up, she’d first tried taking me on a walk topside with Teddyskins, a reality skin that turned everyone around you into cute pink teddy bears. It’d been one of my favorites as a child, but I wasn’t a child anymore. Now all these worlds and spaces felt contrived and creepy.

“Don’t be silly,” she said softly, taking my hand pulling my head into her. She always gave herself an ample bosom, with a sturdy frame, in these childhood worlds.

My tears started again.

“You took the first step in bringing distributed consciousness to the world,” she tried to say encouragingly. “You’re still so young. Your whole life is ahead of you.”

I’d begun crying again in great heaving sobs. She let me cry a while, smothered in her chest.

“Have you talked to David?” she asked between my sobs.

“No, that’s over,” I choked out. “David was the reason I stayed at home physically for the launch. I felt so bad for always being away. We had a huge fight afterwards over it. It wasn’t his fault, but anyway, he and I were never really right.”

“I know, I know,” she responded soothingly. “What about Bob? Did you try him?”

I just shook my head as tears streamed down my face. “He dropped me a splinter, but he’s so stoned all the time. What’s the point?”

Aunt Pattie looked at me tenderly and dried my tears, and we continued to walk a while longer, stepping gently through the lollipops.

“I guess he just needs more time to heal as well.”

15 Identity: William McIntyre

“Well you just bloody well better figure out a way to fix it, my friend,” threatened Vicious, right up in Jimmy’s face.

Jimmy just laughed and walked through Vicious to pick up a file he was working on. Vicious sputtered indignantly.

We didn’t exactly make a very threatening package—the four stooges. I got the feeling that Jimmy had accepted to speak with us only as a courtesy to Bob. He didn’t really seem surprised or even to care. Then again, with the storms and him being newly appointed to the Security Council, he had a lot more important things on his plate right now.

“Look, I appreciate your situation, and I honestly feel for you,” Jimmy said after a moment, looking up from the file at me with disinterest, and then looking back to Bob and Sid. “I can’t do anything right now. I’m spread incredibly thin as it is. I just showed Willy where the tools were and, okay, sure I described how he could exploit some vulnerabilities, but so what?”

“Come on Jimmy, this is your fault, you can do better than that,” urged Bob. “We’ve got a real problem here, Willy is in serious trouble.”

“That’s an understatement,” laughed Jimmy, putting down the file. “Look, I’m really sorry about what happened. I was only trying to help Willy, to give him what he wanted.”

“Only to get what you wanted,” emphasized Sid.

Jimmy shrugged. “Aren’t friends supposed to help each other out?” He looked directly at Bob. “I mean, did you help him out? Did you even know how much financial trouble he was in?”

Bob looked away.

“I didn’t think so,” continued Jimmy. “Too caught up in getting stoned and partying with these idiots.” He motioned towards Sid and Vicious with a nod of his head, still looking at Bob. “Too busy having a good time to even pay attention to your family, which includes me now, if you haven’t forgotten.”

“Of course not,” said Bob quietly.

“You think I’m being uncaring?” Jimmy looked around at us all. “Have you seen the way Bob treats Martin?”

Nobody said anything, but the words almost physically impacted Bob. He rocked back on his feet a little.

“We all have problems, Bob,” added Jimmy, looking straight into Bob’s face now. “We all have our pain to deal with. You don’t think I’ve had it hard? I’m dealing with it, trying to become a part of the solution, taking responsibility. Going and laying blame everywhere else isn’t going to solve anything.”

This was starting to get personal.

“Look, this is my own fault okay?” I interjected, waving my hands in the air and stepping between Bob and Jimmy. “We’re not trying to lay blame, I’m just looking for a little help.”

Jimmy shook his head.

“I can’t help you, the situation you’ve created is beyond me right now.”

Bob and I both nodded, but Sid wasn’t buying it.

“Well then maybe we should go and speak with police about your part in this,” he suggested, trying his best to appear intimidating, but it just wasn’t him.

“And maybe I should tell those same police about some of the viral skins you’ve been letting loose in the cyber ecosystem,” replied Jimmy. “I’ve been watching you, my friend.”

“So what if he has?” bluffed Bob, now defending Sid. “Willy’s problem goes way beyond any nuisance Sid’s toys create.”

“Well maybe yes, but maybe no,” replied Jimmy in a threatening tone.

“What do you mean by that?” asked Bob.

“Go ahead and tell the police that I was involved,” replied Jimmy, ignoring Bob’s question, “but I’m the one on the Security Council, and it’s my job to know about the leaks, which I’ve since fixed by the way. And any chats I had with Willy were under tight security blankets, so it would be my word against his.” Jimmy let this settle awhile before adding, “Quite frankly, Willy being plugged through the perimeter and into Terra Nova, and us not being able to close the connection due to some legal nonsense, is a big problem.”

“So what? You’d just cut him off?” demanded Bob. “Where would he end up?”

“I don’t know, but definitely not here. Somewhere in the open multiverse I would guess.”

This was tantamount to exile, and brought cold stares from Bob and Sid. I felt like I was going to throw up.

“Look. I just showed him the tools he asked about. Willy’s a big boy. He’s the one who did it.”

Stony silence.

“Boys, look, I really have to go. We’ll talk later, okay?”

And he closed the connection.

16 Identity: William McIntyre

After the confrontation with Jimmy, the whole gang had dove into my problem, trying to figure out what had happened.

I poked the embers of the dying fire, watching them dance.

The carpet of stars hung back above us like it did before, that day long ago when we were last camping at this spot. An owl hooted softly in the darkness. Bob sat with a beer balanced back on his knee, half illuminated by the fire, grinning at me.

“I told you everything would be fine, Willy,” Bob pointed out with his empty beer can.

I continued to stare into the fire, lost in my own thoughts.

What was it, I wondered, about the embers of a fire that so mesmerized me? I imagined the heat of the sun, warming green leaves of long ago, the leaves soaking up the sunshine, slowly converting this into the lignin and biomass of the tree trunk. Then today, after being stored for decades, that same captured sunshine was radiating back out as heat energy when we burned the wood, heating my hands and face as I watched in silent wonder. Thank you, tree, for giving your body to me.

Since my own consciousness hadn’t winked out, we had to assume that my body was alive and healthy somewhere out there.

We’d sent out a veritable private army to try and to find it, using up almost all of the considerable fortune I’d amassed as Atopia’s hottest stock jock in my brief blaze of glory back when I had a body.

The searching had begun within Atopia itself, a thorough physical search using platoons of pssi-minded cockroaches and rented psombies, followed by a full digital scan using a private cloud dustings of smarticles.

We’d quickly expanded the physical search radius into the watery surroundings and into cities directly connected to our passenger cannon. We sent out and rented time in uncountable bots and synthetics, even human private investigators that scoured this world and the wikiworlds for any hint of my face, my body, in fact any trace of any kind signaling mine or Wally’s presence out there.

We’d found nothing at all.

In the midst of the looming storms, the Atopian foreign office had halfheartedly taken up action against Terra Nova, trying to sue for access to the anonymous connection or to disconnect it, thinking that this would automatically snap me back into my body. Just like Atopia, however, one of Terra Nova’s key industries was acting as a data haven, and this business was protected by the same iron-clad international treaties that protected Atopia.

Terra Nova resisted any action that would weaken the perception of its unconditional stance on secrecy and security of its customers and data. To gain access to the connection, they told us, I would have to log in from my corporal body. With no body, there was no bio-authentication and therefore no access.

At first I was desperate, but bit by bit I gradually came to grips with my situation. Vince had come forward and shared his story with our group, an even more bizarre tale that had left him almost paralyzed. His resolve in dealing with his situation had helped me put mine in perspective.

Sometimes, they said, it took a great loss to realize what was important to you. In my fight to find myself, and in defending me morally, I was humbled by the loyalty and ferocity of my friends and family, even after I’d abandoned them in my own pursuits.

The search had even brought some direction to Bob, shaking him out of the drugged slumber he’d been in for years now, bringing him together with Nancy for the first time in as many years. Vince had put his vast spy network to work on my problem, and Sid and Vicious had worked tirelessly, combing the back ways and alleyways of the Atopian subsystems, trying to figure out how someone had hidden their tracks so well. Even Martin had pitched in.

I poked the coals some more and watched little sparks escape and float back into the sky.

Brigitte and I were back together. She liked to joke that before when we lived together I was never around, so it was like living with a ghost, but now that I was a ghost, it was like I was there with her more than ever. Or something like that. She wasn’t much of a comedian, but she sure was the most beautiful and loving person I’d ever known. I had no idea how I’d let her slip away from me, but I would never let it happen again.

“Alright there William?” asked Vicious, tossing a can into the fire, casting a look my way.

“Yes, Vicious, I am all right, as a matter of fact,” I answered, nodding back. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt perfectly at peace.

I felt a stream of air tickling my behind, and I shivered. The wind was still blowing when a promising stock appeared on the radar, and sometimes it blew hard.

Without Wally or access to my body, I couldn’t reset my sensory mapping, so I was fated to forever feel this tickling in my nether regions. Now though, I began to find it reassuring, like rubbing an old scar from an accident you’d survived.

Only one thing felt really absent in my life, and it had the eerie feeling of a missing limb. I looked towards the empty chair we’d set up in honor of our fallen comrade, where Wally used to sit next to me on our trips. I’d set it up beside me this evening, now sitting conspicuously empty.

I went back often and replayed that last talk I’d had with Wally, and watched his face as he spoke. It was hard to say whether Wally had taken off to save me from the police—they did have a trace going on the security breach and would have found us eventually. Maybe he’d seen them coming and had decided to take off. They’d issued a general notice of clemency on my case now, so even if he was trying to save us from jail then, by now he would have known it was safe to return—but he didn’t.

The more I thought about it, the more I became sure that Wally wasn’t trying to save me from jail. Perhaps he was saving me from a much worse fate, perhaps from myself. At the time, I was so busy digging myself into a deep, isolated hole that I may have never returned from it.

In retrospect, I wasn’t finding happiness, but suffocating myself in an impenetrable layer of avarice and pride, trading friendship and love for money and power. Maybe he knew that I’d be better off this way. I was sure that he’d like to return, in fact I knew there was no place that he’d rather be than right here with us now, but he must have felt it was safer this way, for some reason.

Somehow it felt right, but I could never have gotten to this place on my own. Wally and I had switched places. I’d become him, living as a virtual being, and he’d become me, living out there in the real world in a real body.

Smiling, I remembered that day when we were last camping here, and Wally had told me that he loved me on our return home. I’d thought it was so odd then, but no more. Raising my beer can, I looked towards the empty chair beside me, and toasted my now absent friend.

Sometimes I guess you really did have to lose yourself to find yourself.

Wally, wherever you are out there, I just wanted to tell you one thing: I love you too, Wally.