The Atopia Chronicles

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 towering firs at the side of a lake. We’d barely finished the canoe trip and portage to get here before nightfall, and we were all spent. A deep silence settled between us over the hissing and popping of the campfire. I was almost completely relaxed for once—almost.

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

“You got that right,” replied Bob, sitting next to Martin on my left, both of them slumped comfortably in their folding camp chairs. Bob was balancing a beer on his knee.

“Yes, sir,” added Wally, my proxxi, sitting right next to me. He saw me toss my empty can into the fire. “Do you want another beer?”

“No thanks. I’m good.”

Stirring the embers, I watched the sparks dance as they escaped from the charred wood. Rubbing my hands, I extended them toward the warm coals; it was going to be a cold night. A loon called out from the blackness above the lake with a haunting wail. Nearly time to go.

“This is amazing,” drawled Bob. He stared at the fire for a moment. “Hey, Willy, did you catch the slingshot tests this morning?”

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

“Sure, kind of impossible to miss,” I replied. “Were you with your family?”

He laughed, looking up at Sid and Vicious, who were sitting across the campfire from us. “Nah, Sid and I were out in Humungous Fungus, watching the mash-up version.”

I grinned. “Bet that was fun.”

“Sure, but my dad gave me a lot of trouble when I got home.”

Wally pinged me with an alert. Oh shoot.

“Oh, ah, Martin,” I blurted out awkwardly, “happy birthday, by the way.” It always confused me how Bob’s birthday was one day, and Martin’s the next.

Martin smiled, looking up at me from the fire.

“Thanks, Willy,” he laughed, 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. 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 is, except Martin. He looked around at us all with wide eyes. “What, did somebody die or something?”

Bob snorted, shaking his head. “Just forget it.”

“Forget what?”

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

More uncomfortable silence.

“I can’t believe more people don’t come out into nature to experience this,” Bob said after a while, changing the topic. “It’s 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 read my moods.

“You still worrying?” he asked me.

“Nah.”

“Yeah you are. I can tell. Everything will be fine. It always is.” He smiled. “Even when it isn’t.” He tossed his beer can into the fire.

The wind changed direction and began pushing the smoke from the fire directly into Vicious, Sid’s proxxi.

“Mates, it’s been a real pleasure,” coughed Vicious, “but I’ve ‘ad about enough. This nature shite is not for me.” He held up his hands and willed the wind to shift again, forcing it to blow away from him.

“Come on,” laughed Sid. “We’re having a nice time here! Tough it out a little!”

The spell was broken, however, and the suspension of disbelief cracked, revealing the grainy quality of the fire and the hollow texture of the night. It all began to feel fake, and a heavy weight fell back across my shoulders. “I think I’m going to get going, too.”

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

“Sure thing, 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, 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, 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. “What?” Why is my proxxi getting weird on me? As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.

He looked steadily 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 and waited 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 kept smiling at me. I have to talk to someone at Cognix technical support about this. I had lot of work to get done. 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 outward 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, the head of the new tech company, Infinixx, I was contracting with. Wally and I worked well into the night, pulling and pushing masses of financial data through the deep reaches of the multiverse, trying to make sense of the rapidly accelerating world around us.

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

She tried to say it lightly, but I could tell. We’d been together for two years, and I could sense her moods coming like winds approaching in the treetops.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” I replied, attempting to deflect the looming storm. “You know I have this big meeting with Nancy today.”

She didn’t say anything and I paused, deciding on my plan of defense: feint or full retreat?

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

My job at Infinixx paid okay, but I’d been brought in as an outside contractor and wasn’t on their stock option dream ticket. The real reason I’d 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 in the market had 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 nose under a beautiful tangle of laissez-faire auburn hair that women of a lesser pedigree would kill for, set her firmly in irresistible, 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 said patiently, 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. “Vraiment, money isn’t everything. Look around you, chérie.”

I looked around.

We were having breakfast in our pajamas, her in her bunny slippers, atop a Scottish Highlands mountain ridge. Our small white table and chairs sat 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 anything we like. I make more than enough money to support both of us, and anyway, 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. She was a senior administrator for a medical services company headquartered on Atopia, and she made more than double my salary. No matter how I tried to convince myself that it didn’t matter—it did. 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 to stay ahead of the game.

Even accessing the wikiworld at this resolution cost us more than I could afford, but this wouldn’t cut any ice with her. When it came right down to it, everyone else I knew was better off than me, and frankly, it pissed me off.

No end was in sight for the multigenerational mortgage my dad had taken out for our family to get a berth on Atopia. It was a shrewd move on his part, entering the lottery—the value of the berth had more than quadrupled—but the size of the mortgage was crippling to a regular family like ours. We struggled under the debt. It didn’t help, of course, that I’d made some bad stock picks lately and was far in the hole.

“You’re right, pumpkin, you’re right.” It was no use arguing with her.

My metasenses were 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, to sense eddy currents in market phuturecasts. Even the slightest pressure trends in the markets tickled my backside. It was a surefire way to get my attention. Right now, a stiff wind was buffeting my buttocks as I buttered my toast.

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

She rolled her eyes.

I stepped away and bolted upward 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 to the day.

Wally was already there, and I 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 that 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 to an approving audience.

The world population was declining and fertility rates were collapsing, I didn’t have to add, not to mention 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 isn’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.”

Closest to me were mostly familiar reporters. Beyond that, millions of 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 “rutted track” wasn’t the best analogy, I chuckled to myself.

I stopped and looked at the crowd. The pause was well rehearsed, and I was enjoying it. I let a confident smile spread across my many faces.

“And the Infinixx distributed consciousness platform is the solution that will carry business into the twenty-second 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 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 characterize for the audience what exactly distributed consciousness feels like?” she asked. “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 jargon that left them feeling like they knew less than what they started with. This time, I made an effort to keep it simple.

“Good question. The easiest way to describe it is like speed reading. When you’re speed reading, you don’t read every word, you only 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?”

Good question, but hard to answer simply. Our Infinixx “distributed consciousness” system wasn’t really distributing the conscious mind. It created an estimate of a mind’s cognitive state at one point in time, then tagged this with as much personal background data, such as memories, as it thought relevant and were available. The system then started up a synthetic intelligence engine and sent it out to canvas whatever the user wanted to look at.

From time to time this “splinter,” as we called it, would report back with compressed sensory data that would be understandable only to the user.

When I explained it to reporters, I often used the “best friend” explanation: Imagine your best friend winking at you when you asked about someone you both knew. Based on 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. It worked better with pssi-enabled humans, but even with regular ones, it worked well enough.

“You are getting the whole picture,” I responded to Tammy after reflection, “but just not every detail. Speed reading comes down to the unconscious skill the reader has in scanning the right parts on which to focus.” 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 even for novices to begin distributing their consciousness into the cloud within a few hours.”

I scanned the upturned faces. They were nodding, but that last sentence brought a slightly glazed look into their eyes.

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

This earned some 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.”

“How long does it take to understand how to use all this?” another reporter cut in.

“Even you’ll be able to use it right away, Max,” I joked, winking. This earned more laughs. I tried to maintain a steady smile at Max. To fully realize the benefits of this technology, one needed to grow up with it, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. So I continued: “We’re ready to go if you are!”

3 Identity: William McIntyre

“It is in our interest to work together and find a way to shape our differences,” droned the Chinese Minister of State. Sure, I thought, in exactly the same way that you’ve shaped all previous differences—in your favor.

The splinter covering the 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, then turned my mind to an exploration hike that another 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 genetically modified plants that was supposed to mimic the biodiversity 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 bioengineered farmaceuticals stretched out into the distance. Greengenics was falsifying its wikiworld feeds. This splinter of information at the edges of my attention shattered into a dozen others that went off and used the information to my advantage—shorting the Greengenics stock, buying their competitors stock, alerting authorities of falsified filings, and pinging media outlets with anonymous tips about a possible story.

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 some uncertainty into the market, pushing expected rates higher. Worse, the Greengenics facility was named as their secret collaboration, sending the stock of this small company soaring. This unexpected twist shot everything out of alignment.

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

A bell chimed, signaling the close of Shanghai. Within seconds, the secondary and aftermarkets 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 were fifteen of them, and half were prototypes that were getting called back for updates and re-initializations all the time. A growing headache pounded behind my eyes, and I focused inward and back outward, preparing myself for the rest of the night’s work.

The day ended in near financial disaster. Almost everything that could go wrong had. Even though I hadn’t said anything, Brigitte could sense my mood, and she’d 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; 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, tomatoes, and seafood.

“Brigitte, this is beautiful,” I marveled as I arrived, dropping most of my webwork of splinters behind. Stepping into this reality, I sat down opposite her. I tried to relax and let my foul mood evaporate into the warm night air.

I was still stewing over a heated argument I’d had with Nancy earlier regarding my splintering limit. I’d tried to explain to her what a difficult spot I was in, but it hadn’t mattered.

Atopia was supposed to be this shining beacon of libertarian ideals, when in actuality it was just another country club for rich snobs like the Killiams. She had no idea what it was like for a family like mine here.

Almost every American had lost someone in the the first major cyberattacks nearly forty years ago, but our family had been particularly hard hit. We came from working-class roots in South Boston, and life had always been a struggle. But when the first strikes had hit in the middle of a cold snap at Christmas and triggered massive infrastructure failures, something not easy had turned into something terrifyingly deadly. When the power came back on over a month later, we’d lost nine of our family to the cold, starvation, and riots.

Suspicion of technology had driven my grandfather literally into the hills. But hiding from the modern world made for a hard life, and my father hadn’t been able to adjust. A huge fight had erupted when my dad had announced plans to move to Atopia to start anew and break with the neo-Luddite community founded by my grandfather in the foothills of Montana.

It had been a big gamble, a gamble for a different life for my mother and me, and it was one that had cut my dad off from the rest of our family. Now I felt that the burden to make good had 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, she’d returned home to the commune. I remembered being furious at her, and I’d barely spoken to her afterward.

I wasn’t mad at her anymore, but the commune forbade modern communication technology—so if I wanted to speak to her, I needed to physically go there. I’d been planning a trip to see her for years, but I always seemed to find excuses for not going. A trip on foot into the mountains wasn’t something I was comfortable with, but it was more than 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.

She was dressed up for our evening, her hair falling in waves over her shoulders, clothed in a glittering black slip that left little to the imagination. Her perfume was powerfully seductive, undoubtedly working some pssi magic—it zeroed my focus in on 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 deserves better. I would do better.

“Yes?”

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

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

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

Waiters immediately floated around us with plates of food.

“I want to apologize for giving you a hard time,” she said, leaning over to kiss my forehead.

I’d almost forgotten about all that. “No worries, pumpkin,” I replied, my mental fog lifting. “It’s me who should be 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 sitting in bed, contemplating the view from the window of our pensione. The urge to connect into my work systems was nagging at me, but I was resisting, trying to soak in the moment. A gentle breeze blew 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 can you promise not to get mad?”

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

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

Even as relaxed as I was, this gave me a shock.

“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 wanted to fully share each other’s reality skins, all 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.”

It wasn’t like I walked around with the world skinned-up in as some weird fantasy, but still, sometimes I liked my 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,” she added, “to experience the world together in the same way.”

Really it wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t as if we were teenagers and I had something to hide. She really deserved more from me.

“Sure, let’s do it. I’d love to do that with you!” This earned me a big hug and kiss, but I pulled myself away gently. “I love you, sweetheart.”

“I love you, too,” she replied.

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

“Yes, yes, go to work.” She smiled and rolled her eyes. “I know you’re dying to get out there with Wally.”

She hit me playfully with a pillow.

I laughed, grabbing the pillow away and pulling her in for a final kiss.

In a flash, I was 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, and I was starting to get some traction in the market.

But I desperately needed more splinters.

A few months ago, five had been enough, and then I’d expanded to ten. I’d managed to get fifteen by signing up for some beta testing under false credentials, but I wasn’t fooling anybody at Infinixx, and it had me constantly at loggerheads with Nancy. Almost as soon as I launched my splinter-matrix for the evening, she barged in, appearing in an overlaid display while I sat in the middle of my hedge-fund metaworld.

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

“We’ve been over this, Willy.”

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

Nancy rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to disagree, William. 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.”

Ten? My stomach tightened into knots.

4 Identity: Nancy Killiam

“Ten?”

“That’s it, William. I’m 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 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 to show what small businesses could do with our technology, but it was just too early in our product development process.

“Can I just keep to the fifteen I have now?” Willy looked desperate. It broke my heart to have to have this kind of conversation with him.

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

“But obviously not yours. I guess forever and ever ends quicker than it sounds.”

“We were children, Willy.”

“And?”

“That was just a silly game.”

“Maybe to you.”

I sighed. Growing up, Bob, Willy, and I had been part of an almost inseparable gang, and we’d promised to always stick together, 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.”

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 heated waves spilling out around him.

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

My primary subjective snapped back into the Infinixx control center, and I leaned back in my chair, trying to think of ways I could try to help my old friend.

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 abilities in the virtual worlds where we’d grown up.

Willy had to start from less than nothing, having come from a neo-Luddite commune 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 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 four hundred years, rocketing from a compound stuck somewhere in the eighteenth century 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 again.

I wondered what the world must look like from his perspective, coming from a place so alien to me. It was hard to imagine his childhood.

This made me think of mine.

As a baby girl, my 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, cuddling me, and looking down into my eyes, cooing softly.

“Nancy, how are you feeling, my little darling?” My mother’s face was full of love and worry.

It was a very special moment to me. And as the first pssi-kid to pass this threshold, it was a very special moment that was shared with the whole Cognix program. My memories were famous.

That 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 7:05 am, Pacific Time, on September 20th of the year my family moved onto the first prototype Atopian platform.

I’d gone back and relived it so many times it was almost embarassing—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 the medicinal scent of strong soap, and felt the pull of distraction as I caught 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 quietly humming machines as he monitored my signals and systems, stealing quick glances toward us from time to time.

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 this 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 then 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 that we could do that normal human children couldn’t.

Our world was more than just this world—the “physical” world was only 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. At first these worlds without end were created for us to play in, but then we began building them ourselves, and we perceived little difference between the real and the virtual. In fact, synthetic worlds felt as real and tangible to us as what the rest of the world called their 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 skyworlds, and ever more alien creatures inhabiting ever more impossible spaces as our minds developed a fluid capacity for neuroplasticity. Our proxxi and educational bots were constantly presenting us with an endless barrage of games to master and puzzles to solve as we spun through these worlds, treating every moment as a learning opportunity.

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

We were being analyzed.

It didn’t take that 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’ agreements 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 a child to act as its playmate, babysitter, and educator, or even the child’s twin, depending on your point-of-view and moral framework.

The floodgates 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. Before that time, we’d been limited to one body, but we soon learned to spawn our minds simultaneously into others.

The reign of the pssi-kids in the multiverse had begun.

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, as well as subtle shifts in the goings on in the billions more worlds in which they wandered.

The timing felt about right.

Distributing my consciousness this 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 had built up behind my eyeballs. The Sleep-Over tabs worked great up to a point, but I was feeling sluggish after a long week.

I sensed 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 inward and back outward.

“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, which 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 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 outward 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. “And I have some wonderful news.”

“And I have some wonderful food getting cold,” he said playfully.

I was more than 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 sharpened into view.

David had chosen a romantic setting. A small fire crackled and popped in a marble fireplace, each side set with a dramatic arrangement of exotic flowers. In fact, the entire living room was decked out in white marble and tropical flowers. Through the open doors, neoclassical columns graced a grand terrace, and a breeze was billowing in through satin curtains. Sea air mixed with burning incense, and I caught a glimpse of what I was sure was the Amalfi coast in the distance.

Italy, 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 languished 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 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 the 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. 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.

Blinking, I tried to shake it off.

David was smiling intently at me. With a flick of one of his phantoms, the playing cards disappeared, and the long, polished table went from empty to beautifully set for dinner with gleaming silverware, glowing candles, and embroidered napkins. He reached across to hold my hand.

“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, his cheeks dappled with two-day old stubble. I laughed looking at him.

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

“Your wish is my command, signorina.”

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

I let go of his hand to take the glass and brought it to my lips. A well-aged Nebbiolo flooded my mouth, and my body began to relax.

David wagged a finger in the air. “Did you check your inVerse? Vince and Patricia both dropped in with urgent requests when you were busy. Vince had some odd requests… Anyway, I dropped it with Cunard, and Patricia wanted to speak to you about an announcement?”

“David,” I said excitedly, “it’s time. The timing is perfect for putting Infinixx on 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 a seemingly infinite patience with me, and I abused it all too often. Guiltily, I wondered if perhaps he could sense our relationship was living on borrowed time and made allowances he shouldn’t to try to keep it going.

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

“I’ve checked and rechecked everything. We can only 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 need to chat with Patricia quickly though, is that okay?”

David nodded glumly as he stared down 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 cried, 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.

“Good. I’ll press ahead on my side then. You’re keeping on top of the New York trials?”

“Yes, Aunt Patricia.” I always felt like a child with her. “Of course I am.”

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

“Perfect. I’ll start a campaign with the board.”

I was hardly able to contain my excitement, but I was 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’d asked to speak with her.

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

“There’s something else?” asked Patricia, sensing me hesitating.

I let it out. “What’s going on with Uncle Vince?”

Reports were flooding in constantly about him cheating death, 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. He was a close friend of Patricia—she’d been his thesis advisor at MIT nearly fifty years ago, and they’d worked together and stayed in touch ever since.

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

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

“He’s just fooling around.” Aunt Patty shrugged, but her eyes said more.

“Okay… if you say so.” I paused, leaving some room for her to add something, but she didn’t. “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?”

“Of course I’ll be there.”

Aunt Patty hesitated. “Dr. Baxter said he might bring Bob along.… ” She let the words hang in the air.

“I think I’m going solo,” 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 as she faded away.

“That’s fantastic, Nance, that’s really good news,” said David on my return to dinner. He was tentative now, hovering, but his love for me shone 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 toward 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, pressing our bodies 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 strength and urgency in his body. I found myself staring into my own eyes, with him staring back out from them into me, 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, sliding 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 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.

But if you can’t be with the one you love, then you love the one you’re with.

Or 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. 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, toothbrush in one hand.

“Pumpkin, come on, you know I don’t have time today.”

I stared at my lathered face in the mirror. 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.

“Please, Brigitte, you know I just like to shave myself sometimes!” I snapped. Why can’t she just leave me alone?

Her hurt expression reflected beside me in the glass. 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, handed me the toothbrush, and left as well.

I felt bad, but I really needed 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 scratched my shoulder as I held the razor up. What am I going to do? Things were just starting to work out for me, and now Nancy was 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. Then it moved. I scraped wildly 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.

“Wally!” 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 creepy-crawlies.

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 streaming down his face as he gripped onto Sid, who was doubled over and laughing hard, too. Bob grinned widely, his arms around the others, shaking his head. I couldn’t help joining in the laughter as well, despite it all.

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

The itching stopped and the beasties quit wriggling. I rubbed my hand across my restored 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!”

“It was all 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 he and Bob were hanging out.

I didn’t remember authorizing the transaction he was referencing, but Wally had already called it up on my inVerse for me to look at. I needed 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 doing.”

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

“I 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—why on Earth was he calling me now?

Jimmy was Bob’s adoptive brother. He was the golden boy now, but growing up he’d always been an oddball, never quite fitting in, or perhaps, never quite understanding how to fit in. He 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, at least until the incident at Nancy’s birthday party.

After that, we’d barely spoken.

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

“You’re in tight with Susie,” Jimmy explained at our lunch later in the day. Apparently he wanted me to set him up with her. She’d been a close childhood friend. “If you help me, maybe I could help you.” He raised his eyebrows.

“I guess.” I paused. “And what do you think you might help me with?” Susie didn’t seem his type, but then, there was no accounting for taste.

“I think I could help you,” said Jimmy, watching me “by getting access to higher-order splintering.”

My heart nearly skipped a beat. Obviously, he knew about my side project, but then again, he’d become head of conscious security systems on Atopia. Of course he’d know.

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

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

I glanced at the glittering blue security blanket around us.

“Nobody else knows what we’re talking about, right?”

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

Jimmy grinned wolfishly. “I’m the security expert, remember?”

“Right.” I could use his help; this was the opportunity I’d been waiting for. “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 raised 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 was slightly incredulous. “No risk?”

“Nobody will ever find out. Let me explain.… ”

6 Identity: Nancy Killiam

“Olympia,” I whispered to the test subject lying on the pod-bed before me.

No response.

Her mind was still hovering somewhere in the purgatory between consciousness and unconsciousness.

I was inhabiting a robotic body 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 for the future of Cognix Corporation, and by extension, for Atopia as well.

Aunt Patricia had made it clear that this was a priority, so I was here in person, or 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 toward 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. She twitched and one of her eyes fluttered, a signal of impending activity that collapsed my awareness firmly into this space.

My mind shivered at the cold, confined reality it 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 became faint murmurs in the background of the physicality of being in the doctor’s office in New York.

I glanced 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 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. 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 was closest to.

“Yes?”

She was barely conscious, and I could tell she was already annoyed.

“Seems like someone needs a little more sleepy time,” I purred. “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 only 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.

“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.”

She grumpily swung her legs off the side of the pod-bed and sat up. I tried to reach over to steady her, but she pushed me off. “I can take it from here, thank you very much.” She waved me away.

I shrugged and leaned over to grab her clothes, handing them to her. I wondered if her aggressive mood had been stimulated by some psychoactive response to the pssi stimulus, but a set of clinical notes floated into view in an overlaid display space. She’s always that way. Everything was fine then; in fact, all of the other reports signaled that this was another perfect pssi installation.

“I’m going to bring you in to speak to the doctor before you leave. He needs to have a final word,” I said as I walked through the door, stopping outside to wait for her to finish dressing.

In a few seconds, she was done and strode out and down the hallway quickly, purposely avoiding looking my way. I watched her carefully, searching for any telltale 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 stuck her head into the doctor’s office, and I walked over to observe the exchange.

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

“No, no, I’m fine. I mean, I just want to get going. I’ve got things to do. So just tell me quick, what do I need to know?”

“You have a very powerful new tool at your disposal. Be careful with it,” explained the doctor, “and don’t activate any of the distributed consciousness features yet.”

“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 slip back toward the edges of my conscious awareness to become just another voice in my sensory crowd. As it did so, Olympia’s question hung with me, sliding a part of mind off somewhere else, backward in time, into my childhood.

Infinixx really began 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. But to us, it was a highly competitive and structured game.

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 other’s sensory channels and taking control of each other’s bodies.

It wasn’t nearly as dangerous as it sounds. Our proxxies chaperoned sharing bodily control. They would allow a 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. Proxxies 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 we were out of body lending it to someone or off in another world, we could always punch the Uncle Button and snap back into ourselves.

So we were never really far from home.

In flitter tag, whoever was “it” would flitter 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 incredibly disorienting, completely mad, and absolutely 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 as we began to invent more and more rules. Of course, we played not just in this world, but also by jumping off into the endless multiverse worlds we traveled through. It was during these advanced games of flitter tag that we first began to really experience distributed consciousness, working to keep track of all the new bodies we spawned as we rushed through worlds of fire, water, ice, and skies, inhabiting creatures and bodies and dealing with physics 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 into teenagers, many of my peers dropped off into what could only be described as self-indulgent gratification. I was the only one to consider the deeper issues of what had happened to us, and to dissect how it had happened.

This was the beginning of Infinixx.

It was Aunt Patricia who’d nurtured my ideas and given them the space and light to grow. Really, she was my great-great-great-aunt, and 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 Patty.

“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 giant floating daisies. We held hands, Aunt Patty brushing the blushing blooms from our path as we tried to walk just so, in sync, 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, breaking away from her and running, rising up above the field as I did, but not too high for the circling Levantours to catch me.

I stopped and turned to watch her coming, sinking slowly back down to meet her. 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 set of soldiers simultaneously in a combat battalion in the midst of a Normandy invasion, as well as 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.”

I stared at her and smiled. “You just have to think about it the right way.”

7 Identity: William McIntyre

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

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

“I said I would, didn’t I?”

“But that doesn’t always mean it’ll happen,” Bob gently chided, still smiling. “At least, not lately.”

The setting sun was painting a picture-perfect end to the day in pink and orange clouds hanging high in the sky. We bobbed around in the water quietly, and then another great white slid silently past. It was time to get in.

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

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

“I’m sure. At least you look more relaxed today.”

After my talk with Jimmy, I could finally see a way out, perhaps even the means to really break through.

Bob, slightly ahead, grinned over his shoulder at me.

“See you on the beach!” he called out as he abruptly turned. I was wondering what the hell he was smiling about when my board 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 saltwater, tumbling as a large wave broke over me.

The surfing had been legendary. Huge storms out in the Pacific were generating monster swells, and we spent the afternoon riding twenty-footers to the delight of the crowds watching from the beach.

Bob picked up a few female tourists to take out tandem surfing, a sport he’d 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 beach’s powdery sands. Bob and Sid were already stoned, and I was well into my sixth beer, a large mouthful of which I had just lost in a sputter of laughter.

An elderly woman, a tourist, was walking past us as we slouched on our stools against the bar. Her breasts undulated 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 magnified the physical characteristics of women we looked at, scaled by the intensity of their attention toward us. He’d just pointed out this new victim, who was making her way toward the bar, and she gave us such a scowl that her tits had literally mushroomed out of her chest to bounce off the beach.

“Sid, you’re killing me!” I choked out, wiping spittle from my mouth.

Desperately, I tried to avert my eyes from the woman’s suspicious glare. Her irritation made things that much worse, and she was practically engulfed by her now gargantuan 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.

Doubling over, I howled with laughter. The swollen, rolling subject of our consideration turned sharply on her heel and was slugging off through the sand away from us, apparently no longer in need of a drink. As she retreated, she slowly returned to normal proportions.

“Oh,” I gasped, rubbing the tears from my eyes and 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.

“William!” Someone screeched into my emergency audio channel. It was Brigitte.

Wally materialized 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 her.

“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’m 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’d forgotten that we were sharing realities.

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

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

“Come on… ”

“Cochon!” she added, shaking her head.

“I’m only sharing realities because you asked. This isn’t a big deal.”

“Willy,” she said softly, then paused, looking at the floor.

I waited.

“I’ve 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… ah… ça 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. After Nancy restricted my splinter limit, my bank account had quickly been turning into a blank account.

I felt trapped.

We fell into a mutually accusatory silence.

“Willy, I think we need to talk,” she said, studying my face.

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

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

“Willy,” she pleaded, “I love you, but I can’t do this anymore. Please, let’s fix this. Just tell me what you need.”

“I love you, too, but… I just don’t feel like we share the same goals,” 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.

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

She looked into my eyes while 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 couldn’t believe I was doing it, but I slowly started nodding, looking steadily into her eyes.

Catching her breath she looked away, her body convulsing as she tried to fight back the tears. She let go of my hands and 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 implement Jimmy’s suggestion before the end of the beta program. Once I had everything going full steam, 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

“Everyone—everywhere—every time.”

Silence.

“So what does it mean?” a reporter finally asked from the front row of the press conference.

We were unveiling our new marketing program—E3—the “E” and the “3” stylized in the logo to face each other and form an infinity symbol above the Infinixx name. It was all very clever.

“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 to be.”

I paused before my finale, catching my breath.

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

Applause rang out as I raised my hands to the crowd. I wasn’t sure I even understood what it meant, but I managed to deliver the pitch without cracking a smile. 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 pushed 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 investors were pouring in.

The press conference was complete, so I let the splinter in attendance slip away and pulled in a splinter that was minding a staff meeting we were having in our Infinixx boardroom.

Karen, my technical lead, jumped me into experiencing a technical glitch we were having. My mind quickly filled with visions of bunched up sheets, of pain and guilt, of junkies staring with hollow eyes. The anxious desperation gave way to confusion, a mad whispering of ideas that must have 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 the splinter network, collapsing my conscious webwork at the same time.

“It’s some kind of bug,” explained Karen. “The subjective streams are getting mixed up, and there are meme-matching faults as well.”

“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 ourselves, in the office and in meetings with people, 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 running some final QA before letting it out into the ecosystem.”

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

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

“You’re sure this will solve 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.”

My VP of Human Resources glanced at us. “Did you hear about Cynthia, that new administrative girl we hired?”

Cynthia was a great hire, but had recently dropped off the radar without any warning. People disappearing off into hedonistic cyber-fantasy worlds wasn’t uncommon, but Cynthia had been my personal pick. She’d seemed 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 business partner.

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

“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, not wanting to reveal any suspicions I had.

“Anyway, 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 said.

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

“Hey!” I exclaimed. “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, so whatever that made us. 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; we’d been inseparable as children. From that point on, though, I’d been teased for dating what amounted to a distant cousin, if only cousin-in-law. Childhood taunts had a way of sticking with you.

Cunard pinged me for yet another press event starting in a few minutes, and I was happy to escape. “Guys, I have to move this splinter back. Anything else?”

I looked around the table. The meeting room pulsed silently in its synthetic reality cocoon. There was something they weren’t telling me—something they didn’t want to tell me. “What?”

A few of them looked down at the floor. Karen hit me with it, and 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 networks. 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 only filed ten minutes ago,” replied our legal counsel, a loaner from Cognix corporate who’d materialized at our table.

“Do you really 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 turned to stare into my eyes. “You need to deal with this right now.”

I sighed. Lawyers were a part of the job I hated, but running Infinixx didn’t give me much choice.

“Nothing in the media worlds yet?” Cunard had already run a background check in the seconds since we’d learned of the problem. There was nothing we could see 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 toward 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.” The lawyer looked even more bored as he said it. “Or unfriendly, depending on which side of the fence you sit.”

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

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

“And Karen,” I added, just before flittering off to the next press event, “fix this problem. I don’t care what it takes, but get it fixed.”

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, who was I to talk?

The last time I’d seen Bob was when we were surfing, when Brigitte and I had split, and that was already a few weeks ago. Work was absorbing me, and to focus I’d been filtering all of my communications straight to my proxxi.

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

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

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

“How’s it going, Mr. Rockefeller?”

“It’s going really well.” I smiled uncomfortably. “I’ve had a gale force wind blowing up my back almost all week.”

Bob didn’t quite share my enthusiasm.

“As long as you’re happy.” He sat up on the couch. “I heard you quit Infinixx.”

“I was tired of dealing with Nancy.” I didn’t mention the investigation into my tinkering with the Infinixx code. Nothing came of it, and I’d gotten what I’d wanted.

Bob raised his eyebrows. The three of us had been inseparable as kids, but I’d been the third wheel to their intense romantic relationship, one that everyone but them realized wasn’t over yet.

“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.”

Thinking of Brigitte made my stomach tighten into knots, and my patience evaporated. I have a lot to get done. Bob watched me in silence. “Who are you hanging out with these days?”

“Ah, just work people, you know.… ” It wasn’t as if he worked, so why should I bother explaining? Maybe accepting his ping was a bad idea. I balled my fists.

Right at that moment, Wally warned me that Vince Indigo was waiting. I don’t remember taking a meeting with Vince. Wally noted that he’d alerted me not five minutes before about it, but I’d been so deeply splintered.…

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

“Yeah, okay, sure.” Bob squinted and cocked his head to one side. “Do you think you could ask Vince if he’s okay? That stuff on Phuture News is weirding me out.”

“I’m not comfortable doing that.” I began drumming my fingers against my leg. “I don’t know him very well. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

“He doesn’t answer my pings anymore.”

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

Bob looked down. “Right. Anyway, let’s hang out soon? We should talk about all this stuff, your work changes, Brigitte.… ”

“Sure, sure, gotta go.” I waved good-bye, leaving a wafer-thin splinter behind. I flitted back into real-space at my apartment, where Vince was already waiting. Visions of an unimpressed Bob watching me go persisted in several of my visual channels.

“So I assume business is good?” Vince asked. He wandered around the periphery of my apartment, staring outward 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 floated in air, suspended above an almost endless array of cubicles housing renderings of my splintered parts, sub-proxxies, and other synthetic beings and bots that were spawned outward from my own cognitive systems. It was thousands of me working for me.

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

Vince had an air of desperation. It flattered my ego 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, and 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.

“I noticed you amped up your Phuture News services,” he said carefully, “but that’s not why I’m here. I’m sending the details of what I need, right now.”

A description of a series of financial transaction he wanted me to carry out was uploaded to one of my splinters. In an instant they had analysed it.

“You want me to what?” I replied. “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 wondered how much he really knew. “Sure, but it’ll still look odd.”

Vince had ulterior designs afoot, and that was fine with me. He was offering a princely sum for almost no work. So this is what it’s like to be 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.

In a few seconds, we were finished with the details of the transaction.

Vince looked at me. “And be careful.”

“It doesn’t look like there will be any problems—”

“Not with that. I mean with whatever you have going on here.” He motioned at my office.

“There’s nothing going on here.”

He looked away. “Just be careful.”

“No problem, Mr. Indigo,” I replied, 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 a sparkling neon plastic wrap.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

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

“Listen, Wally, I’m 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 stunned when I returned to real space, and I was letting details slip.

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 more or less a copy of me anyway. Vince and Bob were the first real humans I’d spoken to in days, perhaps even weeks.

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

Wally looked at me steadily. “Sure thing, boss.”

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 activity at Infinixx. Our hundred employees managed to output the workload of a thousand—and then two thousand—workers compared with levels of productivity in the outside world. We touted our accomplishments almost hourly as the launch date neared, and the world’s business community couldn’t wait to get their hands on it.

A bigger struggle than building the technology, however, was the Atopian politics. Since I was pushing to have my own launch before the Cognix release of pssi, we needed to embed some pssi technology into our systems, and this meant a messy cross-licensing arrangement. I had Aunt Patricia on my side, but it was still a fierce fight.

“Give me one good reason we should let this happen!” Dr. Baxter had fumed at the Cognix meeting when we were trying to get final approval. Infinixx was stealing some of his thunder as the first Atopian-platform product release.

“You’ve seen all the phutures Nancy presented. Every scenario pushes the Cognix stock higher as we establish Infinixx as early adopters,” countered Patricia. “You’re only annoyed because it’s not under your thumb.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” replied Dr. Baxter, and the arguing continued.

Kesselring had just sat quietly, watching, sighing.

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

“Everyone!” he’d called out, standing up and raising his hands. He winked at me. “I will give you one very good reason.”

Until recently, I hadn’t spoken to Jimmy in years, ever since the incident at my thirteenth birthday party. I felt responsible for what had happened, and it was too awkward to talk about. But since he’d been nominated to the Security Council, we were reintroduced on a professional level. It was as if nothing had ever happened. Jimmy and I had struck a close working relationship, and he was my biggest supporter—after Aunt Patty, of course.

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

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

Gasps rose around the table.

Getting India and China to agree on anything was impossible with new Weather War skirmishes breaking out almost daily. Details of the negotiations sprang into everyone’s workspaces the moment Jimmy spoke. Everyone dropped a splinter to have a look. This wouldn’t just be a commercial coup, but a major political one for Atopia as well.

“How in the world…?” Dr. Baxter’s voice trailed off as his mind assimilated the backstory.

“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 a reality.

“I didn’t want to get your hopes up,” replied one of Jimmy’s splinters. “It was a long shot, but hey, it worked.”

“You’re giving up a lot here,” said Kesselring, back in the conference space, speaking for the first time as he reviewed the details, “But the payoff is worth it, and it’ll keep the media’s attention off those damn storms.”

He looked toward Jimmy and smiled, nodding his approval.

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 filled the space around me with a soft radiance that was growing and alive. Curious, I moved toward the light. It grew brighter and more intense, surrounding and enveloping me, and then swallowed me whole, painlessly and 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. What was that about? I must be dreaming again.

I tried pinging Bob, Sid, Brigitte, but nobody answered—weird. I felt lightheaded. Maybe I’d better get something to eat and shake out the cobwebs.

Getting out of bed, I walked to the fridge and pulled out an apple, some bread to toast, and after a moment of thought, reached into the adjacent cupboard for some instant oatmeal. I poured water over it and watched it begin to boil. This is your brain on oatmeal.

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 burned toast. Am I having a stroke? The toast popped. Oh right. Calm down.

I flicked on the Phuture News Network. Blank. Nothing was about to happen, apparently. All that was playing on Phuture News were images of me sitting and watching a blank display-space with my oatmeal in front of me. Must be some screwy trick of Sid’s again, but I wasn’t going to play along.

I returned my attention to my oatmeal.

A deep chill passed through me, sending goose bumps rising across my exposed arms. I got the feeling of watching myself through a pane of frosted glass.

I was there, but not there.

All the worries I had a second ago—work, Brigitte, money—everything went away, 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 am I? And why do I want to know?

My brain snapped out of it, as if wrenched from a bear trap.

I blinked hard and shook my head, looking down at my congealing oatmeal. Phuture News was back now, and the odds were that our friends Orlando and Melinda were going to have a big catfight soon.

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

It reminded me of Brigitte, and my stomach jumped. I put down my spork. And then 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. 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 vu-ing hard, losing my grip. My chest tightened, and my breathing was labored.

Am I having a heart attack?

I smelled burned toast.

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

Where was he when I needed him? 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, everything is fine. The chest pain is 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 felt flushed. “Calm down,” I told myself, “calm down.”

Closing my eyes, I tried to focus, and the stress began to wash out. In an instant, I was lying down, but I didn’t remember getting there. Maybe Wally had helped me back to bed.

I could see myself lying still, absolutely calm. What was I just worrying about? Why worry about anything? Everything was so insignificant. My head felt like cotton balls had been stuffed in through my ears, displacing my brain, and I had the curious sensation that I had been wrapped in idiot mittens, to keep me from hurting myself.

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 hummed a lullaby, giving me a bath in the chipped porcelain wash basin in our old family kitchen on the Montana commune.

Through streaked windowpanes, trees swayed outside under wet, windy skies. The cows in the field huddled under the protection of the ponderosa pines that nestled along one side of our farm. 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 soaked 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 washcloth, 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.

“Everything is okay,” I felt him say. “But there’s something I need to tell you.”

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

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

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

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

I liked that. “Go on.” 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.

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

“Okay, but what’s this got to do with me?” The idea of quantum physics needing a conscious observer had always annoyed me. It smacked of God hiring city workers to turn the cranks of the cosmos.

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

I had already lain down. What’s 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. You are both alive and dead at the same time, a conscious nexus point between life and death. In a moment, when you understand what I’m saying, you will also be the first sentience to observe yourself in superposition, and so create your own existence. Before you fully understand what I’m saying, Willy, hurry, and tell us what you are feeling.”

So I was the cat in the box.

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

I woke up in bed, alone, soaked in sweat and my heart pounding. As the dream faded, I remembered what had happened. Brigitte and I had split up, and now Wally was gone, but I was still alive, which meant that somebody somewhere out there was taking care of my body that had somehow disappeared. My greed had put me in this position, and they were probably going to put me in jail for it.

That was, if they could find me.

12 Identity: Nancy Killiam

I couldn’t believe the big day was actually here. Infinixx was about to be released to the world.

Although our product worked in the open multiverse, it still needed physical infrastructure on the ground in the form of three 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 they had to be booted up in sequence to maintain a coherent phase-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 the launch of 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 members and senior executives to be there in person for the launch. I was walking up and down in front of the head table that was set on the stage above the main floor, shaking each person’s hand in turn, thanking them for their hard work and support.

“Excited, Brian?” I asked my CTO. He nodded and told me I should sit down. I couldn’t. My entire future was resting on what happened in the next few minutes, and I felt ill.

In the ceremonial opening, I was to throw the switch to get everything started. Its power system was routed up here, the junction box set against the wall just above and behind my chair. I’d decided to inject a little surprise and symbolism into the event by bestowing the honor of throwing the switch onto either Jimmy or Aunt Patty, who were sitting up on the stage with me.

“Everyone!” Kesselring thundered with a smile, shouting out at the packed crowd from the podium. He had gotten on board with the launch in a big way once we’d made the decision. “Everyone, quiet down!”

The huge ballroom was filled to overflowing, with the tables packed and a crush of people milling about along the edges of the room. The sound of glasses and tableware clinking competed with a beehive of buzzing background conversation. The noise began settling as the crowd turned its attention toward us.

“Very good!” continued Kesselring. “We’re now bringing online the Indian and Chinese contingents. I would like a hearty Atopian round of applause to welcome them!”

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

Protocol for the event dictated that the senior Chinese and Indian officials would come to the center table to shake hands at exactly the same time, and it came off perfectly. In a splinter, I watched the pre-market analysis of the Infinixx stock as the broadcast of the event caught the world. The anticipated stock price was 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 of the moment pressing down upon me as we got up from our chairs at the banquet table, on stage at the front of the hall, to approach the switch. I had Jimmy to one side of me and Patricia to the other, with the rest of the board and executives fanning out around us.

Stepping to the back wall, I stared at the big green power switch. “It looks like something borrowed from a Russian hydroelectric dam,” I joked with Patricia under my breath. She smiled and turned to beam at the assembled crowd.

Reaching out, I held Patricia’s and Jimmy’s hands in mine, then let go to touch the switch. It felt cool and hard and hummed as it coursed with unseen power. Then the lights dimmed and the countdown began.

The whole auditorium joined in, as if it were New Year’s in Times Square.

“TEN!” they all shouted. “NINE!… EIGHT!… ”

“Aunt Patty,” I said, turning to look at her with tears in my eyes, “I’ve decided I’d like you to throw the switch. Everything here is all because of you!”

The crowd continued to roar, “SEVEN!… 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!… FOUR!… ”

Ah well, I thought, crestfallen.

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

“THREE!… TWO!… ”

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

“ONE!”

The blood drained from my face. I could hear a SNAP as the Chinese and Indians flipped their 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. 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 with dread at the audience—I’m not here 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 first cyberattacks nearly fifty years ago, 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 cyberworld, we had to conform to international security standards, especially for a project like this.

I told myself that I hadn’t overlooked this—I’d expected all of my executive team and board members to be here in person. I’d specifically requested it and even verified it 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 ballroom was as empty and quiet as a morgue.

I stared back at the green switch, humiliated.

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 toward 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 their bootstrap cycles 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 at a later date, but for now, we’d have to run them as separate domains.

It meant users would only be able to distribute their consciousnesses locally. Technically, it wasn’t a disaster, but it made me look incredibly foolish. Correction, it made us look foolish. Kesselring was furious at the damage to the Atopian brand.

I withdrew my conscious webwork 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, tripping on your own sword.

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 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, dividing in half the four gleaming farm towers at the center of the surface 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 in between. Even with the storms threatening and the evacuations announced, the atmosphere was still carefree and festive.

At least for now.

It’d been ages since I’d been above, and I hadn’t been to these parts since I was a tween. I stood blinking in the bright sunshine as I tried to think my way through what was happening to me.

I felt alone and exposed.

What else can I do?

Looking up at the towers, I imagined myself as one of the psombies inside. My hand trembling, I 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 walked toward 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.”

After reporting my body missing to the police, the first person I turned to was Bob. It was amazing how quickly you could go from feeling invincible one moment to needing the protective embrace of friends the next.

At least, I hoped they were still my friends.

“Hey 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. Taking a swig of his beer, he waggled it toward me, did I want one? I shook my head. “What can I help you with?”

I cast a thick security blanket around us, and we were surrounded by its glittering and softly undulating shell. Bob raised his eyebrows and took another swig.

“What’s up?” He screwed his eyebrows. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll just lay it out.” I paused. “I’ve lost my body.”

Another pause.

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

“I don’t think so.” I sat down on a stool next to him and rubbed the back of my neck. “Wally, or someone—I’m assuming it’s Wally—has stolen my body.”

Bob’s eyes narrowed, and then he smiled. “Whatever game you’re playing, I’m in.” His smile slowly disappeared as he studied my face.

“I just got back from the police station,” I continued. “Not only can’t I find my body, but now I’ve been charged with a felony and I’m under arrest.” I didn’t mention that I was also under investigation for my trades in Infinixx stock.

“So how are you here? Did you post bail?”

I shook my head. “It’s complicated.”

“I’d say.”

Leaning my head back, I rubbed my eyes.

“We’d better get Sid in here,” suggested Bob.

I sighed. “I guess we better.”

Bob’s face slackened for an instant as he detached, and then he was back. Sid and Vicious materialized on barstools inside the perimeter of the security blanket.

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 us again, eh?”

“Knock it off!” snapped Bob. “This is serious. Sid, you looked at Willy’s situation?”

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

“Let me make sure I have this straight.” Sid was all business, this was his domain. “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 then 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 again.”

“And the Terra Novans have absolutely refused to divulge or break the anonymous connection, and the connection has been paid-up one hundred years in advance.”

“That is correct.”

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?” Bob asked.

“No,” said Sid. “A proxxi isn’t the same as other synthetic beings. He doesn’t really exist in the multiverse. They’re biological-digital symbiotes embedded in our bodies. Wally can control Willy’s body when Willy’s mind is away, and he 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.”

Bob put down his beer. “So I ask again—has Wally gone nuts?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” I admitted. “I 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?” Sid laughed, rolling his eyes.

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

“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 manage to ignore him when this went down?” Sid asked incredulously.

I took a deep breath. “With this new setup, my mind was shattered into hundreds of splinters, and fed through the anonymizer. Wally couldn’t always get my attention. That’s why I asked him to take immediate action without me, if necessary.”

“Seems to have taken action all right,” Vicious laughed, clearly enjoying this.

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

I choked back tears. I didn’t deserve Bob’s kindness after the way I’d been treating him.

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

“Wally, one question,” Vicious asked, the gears of his brain turning. “So you’re arrested and charged and convicted, right?”

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

“But you’re still with us. So I understand why 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 any citizen, they can’t block my access here, but then they can’t contain me either.”

“That makes you one very interesting person to know, my friend.”

I could see where he was going with this. “I’m not about to test anyone’s patience right now.”

“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’s happened.”

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

“Jimmy.”

14 Identity: Nancy Killiam

“I feel so cloudy.”

It was pssi-kid expression, an attempt to describe that feeling we got when we couldn’t understand our own splinters and it felt like our conscious minds were spread outward from a single point to become an indistinct smudge in time and space. I knew Aunt Patty 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 surrounded by twinkling gumdrop stars.

“Why didn’t you tell me you wouldn’t be there?” Finally, I let myself ask the question.

She looked away and then back at me, but avoided my eyes. “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 its way to the ballroom. What changed?”

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

I angrily kicked at some lollipop sprouts. “I’m so stupid.”

Everyone 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 Patty said gently. “You’ve done a wonderful thing for the world.”

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

The lollipop trees rattled as they jostled together on their spindly stalks. Aunt Patty 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 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 was one of my favorites as a child, but I wasn’t a child anymore. Now all these cutesy worlds and spaces felt contrived and creepy.

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

My tears started again.

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

Now the tears came in great heaving sobs, and she let me, smothering me in her chest.

“Have you talked to David?”

“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 afterward.”

“What about Bob? Did you try him?”

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

Aunt Patty stroked my head and then dried my tears. We walked on in silence, stepping gently through the lollipops.

15 Identity: William McIntyre

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

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

The four of us—Bob, Sid, Vicious, and me—didn’t make a very threatening package. Jimmy had accepted our speaking request only as a courtesy to Bob. He didn’t seem concerned with the news. Then again, with the storms looming, and him being newly appointed to the Security Council, he had much more important things on his plate at the moment.

“I appreciate your situation, and I honestly feel for you,” Jimmy said after a moment, looking up from the file at me. “But I can’t do anything right now. I’m spread too 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?”

“This is half your fault, you can do better than that,” urged Bob. “Willy’s in serious trouble.”

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

“Only to get what you wanted,” Sid pointed out.

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 toward Sid and Vicious, still looking at Bob. “Too busy having a good time to even pay attention to your family, which includes me if you’ve forgotten.”

“Of course not,” said Bob quietly.

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

Nobody said anything, but the words seemed to physically strike Bob. He rocked back on his feet a little.

“We all have problems.” Jimmy looked straight into Bob’s face. “We all have our pain to deal with. You don’t think I’ve had it hard? But I’m trying to become part of the solution.”

This was getting personal.

“This is my own fault.” I waved my hands in the air and stepped between Bob and Jimmy. “We’re not trying to blame anyone, I’m just looking for help.”

Jimmy shook his head. “The situation you’ve created is beyond me right now.”

Bob and I both nodded, but Sid wasn’t buying it. “Maybe we should go speak with police about your part in this.” He tried 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,” Jimmy replied. “I’ve been watching you, my friend.”

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

“Maybe yes, but maybe no.”

“What does that mean?”

“Go ahead and tell the police that I was involved.” Jimmy ignored Bob’s question. “But I’m the one on the Security Council. And any chats I had with Willy were under tight security blankets, so it would be my word against his.” He let this settle. “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.”

“Are you threatening to cut him off?” Bob demanded. “Where would he end up?”

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

This was tantamount to exile and brought cold stares from Bob and Sid.

I felt like I was going to throw up.

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

Stony silence.

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

Jimmy closed the connection.

16 Identity: William McIntyre

After the confrontation with Jimmy, the whole gang had rallied to help me.

The carpet of stars hung above us just as it had when we last camped at this spot. It seemed like it had happened in another lifetime. An owl hooted softly in the darkness. Bob sat with a beer balanced on his knee, half-illuminated by the fire, grinning at me.

I poked the embers and watched them dance.

“I told you everything would be fine.” Bob emphasized his point by raising his empty beer can.

I continued to stare into the fire, lost in my own thoughts. I imagined the heat of the sun warming green leaves of long ago, which soaked it up, slowly converting it into the lignin and biomass of the tree trunk. Then, after being stored for decades, that same captured sunshine radiated back out as heat energy when we burned the wood, warming my hands and face. That none of this was real didn’t detract from my daydreaming.

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 what nearly amounted to a private army to try and find it, using up most of the fortune I’d amassed as Atopia’s hottest stock jock back in my brief blaze of glory. Back when I had a body.

The searching began 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-dusting of smarticles.

Quickly, we’d expanded the physical search radius into the waters surrounding Atopia and then into the cities directly connected to our passenger cannon. We rented and sent out uncountable bots and synthetics, even human private investigators that scoured this world and the wikiworlds for any hint of my face or my body, any trace that signaled mine or Wally’s presence out there.

We found nothing.

In the face of the impending 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 the same ironclad international treaties that protected Atopia applied here.

Terra Nova refused any action, citing the protection of its unconditional stance on the 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, though, there was no bio-authentication, and therefore no access.

I was desperate at first, but gradually I began to come to grips with my situation.

Sometimes, they say, it takes a great loss to realize what is important. In my fight to find my body, I was humbled by the loyalty and ferocity of my friends and family as they came to my aid, even after I’d abandoned them in my greed.

The search had even brought some direction to Bob, shaking him out of the drugged slumber he’d been in for years, and brought him back together with Nancy. Vince put his vast spy network to work on my problem, and Sid and Vicious had worked tirelessly, combing the open worlds, hacking the closed ones, and searching the back-ways 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, watching little sparks escape and float back into the sky.

Brigitte and I were back together. She liked to joke that when we lived together before I was never around and it had been 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.

Vicious tossed a can into the fire and glanced my way. “Okay there, William?”

“Yes, Vicious, as a matter of fact, I am okay.”

People spent their lives searching for peace by chasing idle dreams, addictions, money, religion, and even other people, hoping to fill some gap. Now, for the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt at peace. All this time, it had been right inside me. I’d just never slowed down enough to look within.

A stream of air tickled 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. Now though, I found it reassuring, like rubbing an old scar.

Only one thing felt absent in my life, and it had taken on the eerie feeling of a missing limb. I looked toward the 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, and it was conspicuously empty.

I often went back to replay that last talk I’d had with Wally.

It was hard to say whether he had really 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 go. They’d issued a general notice of clemency on my case now, so even if he was trying to save us from jail, by now he would have known it was safe to return.

But he didn’t.

The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that Wally wasn’t trying to save me from jail. Maybe he was saving me from a worse fate, perhaps from myself. At the time, I was so busy digging myself into a deep, isolated hole that I might have never returned from it. I’d been suffocating myself in an impenetrable layer of greed 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, and 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. 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 the last time we’d been here. Wally had told me that he loved me on our return home. I thought it was so odd then—but not anymore. Raising my beer can, I looked toward the empty chair beside me and toasted my absent friend.

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