"I"m going to bring you in to speak to the doctor before you leave okay? He needs to have a final word," I said, walking out the door and stopping outside to wait for her to finish getting dressed.
In a few seconds she was done, and strode quickly out the door and down the hallway, purposely avoiding looking my way. I watched her carefully, looking for any tell-tale tremors or jitters that could betray an issue with her motor cortex. She looked smooth, if not graceful, but then, her grace wasn"t my issue.
She hung her head around into the doctor"s office, and I walked over to observe the exchange.
"So how do you feel?" I could hear him asking her. "Please, come in."
"No, I"m fine. I mean, I just want to get going. This was supposed to be under an hour, I"ve got things to do," she complained to the doctor. "So just tell me quick, what do I need to know?"
"You have a very powerful new tool at your disposal now Olympia, just be careful with it okay?" explained the doctor. "I don"t think you should activate any of the distributed consciousness features for now."
"Distributed consciousness," snorted Olympia, looking back at me, "where do they get these ideas?"
I raised my eyebrows. Sensing my job here done, this splinter began to slide back towards the edges of my conscious awareness again to become just another voice in my sensory crowd. As it did, Olympia"s question resonated, sliding a part of mind off somewhere else, backwards in time, into my childhood.
Infinixx had really begun as a pssikid game we"d invented called flitter tag. In the forested yards of the Schoolyard at recess, we used to have huge games of it, jumping and chasing after each other in what seemed to the adults as completely nonsensical behavior.
More than just using pssi to venture off into virtual worlds, as pssikids we were the first to really master the art of body s.n.a.t.c.hing-sneaking into each others" sensory channels and taking control of each others" bodies. Sharing bodily control was chaperoned by our proxxi that allowed the visitor to do what they liked as long as they didn"t hurt our bodies or do something we wouldn"t do or say ourselves. Proxxi also managed the transition, the handing off and receiving of control, so it all went smoothly and safely.
Sometimes it could get confusing, but then that was a part of the fun. If it ever became too much, whenever you were "out of body" and lending it to someone or off in another world, you could always punch the Uncle b.u.t.ton and snap back into yourself, so you were never really far from home.
Flitter tag worked as we all jumped w.i.l.l.ynilly from each other"s bodies into the next. Whoever was "it" was flittering their consciousness from this body to that, trying to reach out and touch someone else as we squealed and shrieked and jumped about from one body to another, randomly forcing resets as we punched our Uncle b.u.t.tons. It was disorienting, completely mad and completely fun and there was nothing else quite like it when one was growing up as a pssikid on Atopia.
What started off as a simple game became ever more complex over time and we began to invent more and more rules. Of course we played not just in this world, but also jumping off into the endless multiverse worlds we played in. It was during these advanced games of flitter tag that we first began to really experience distributed consciousness, working to keep track of new bodies we sp.a.w.ned, madly rushing through worlds of fire, water, ice, and skies and inhabiting creatures and bodies and physics of worlds unrecognizable to the experiential s.p.a.ce of normal humans. We didn"t realize what we were doing at the time. It was just natural.
As we grew older, many of my peers dropped off into what could only be described as selfindulgent gratification. I was the only one to seriously think about what had happened to us, to dissect how it had happened. This was the beginning of Infinixx.
It was my aunt Patricia who"d nurtured my ideas and given them the s.p.a.ce and light to grow. Really, she was my greatgreatgreataunt. To everyone else she was the famous Dr. Patricia Killiam, the G.o.dmother of synthetic reality and right hand of Kesselring, but to me she was always just Aunt Pattie.
"So you can really hold five conversations at once?" she had asked me at the end of my eventful thirteenth birthday party.
After my naming ceremony, we"d decided to take a walk together in Never Ever Land, across a lavender field amid floating daisies. We held hands, Aunt Pattie brushing the blushing blooms from our path as we tried to walk just so, in synch, so we wouldn"t float too far up or down but would stay just right. It was a game, as almost all things were.
"I"m doing it right now," I giggled, and broke away from her and ran, rising up above the field as I did, but not too high so the circling Levantours couldn"t catch me.
I stopped and turned to watch her coming, sinking slowly back down. I was also chatting with my friend Kelly in the Great Beyond about boys, about Bob of course, and also with w.i.l.l.y about how he managed to control an entire combat battalion simultaneously in a Normandy invasion, and also trying to console Jimmy after the frightful incident at my party.
"It"s easy, and I can do way more than that. I can do a hundred if I really wanted," I boasted.
"Come on Nancy, don"t tease your old Auntie, please tell the truth."
"Okay, maybe not a hundred, but a lot, you just have to think about it the right way," I explained, and went on describing just how it happened to happen.
Ident.i.ty: William McIntyre I SIGHED, BUT happily now. Sitting belly-deep in the water on our boards, a dark ma.s.s moved smoothly underneath us. The Great Whites had begun their nightly garbage collection sweep of the undersea ledge. Bob noticed them too and smiled.
"This was great," beamed Bob. "I"m really glad you made it out today."
"Well I said I would, didn"t I?" I laughed back.
"Yeah, but that doesn"t always mean it"ll happen," observed Bob, shaking his head but smiling, "at least, not lately."
The setting sun was painting a picture-perfect end to the day in pink and azure clouds hanging high in the sky. We bobbed around in the water for a bit in silence, and then another one of the Great Whites slid silently past. It was time to get in.
"I guess that"s fair," I replied. "Work has just been such a grind lately."
We both leaned forward and began a lazy paddle back to the beach.
"I"m sure it has been. Well at least you look more relaxed today."
It was true. After my talk with Jimmy I could finally see a way out, perhaps even a means to really break through. It would require a huge amount of work, but at least I could see a crack of opportunity to crawl through.
Bob, slightly ahead of me now, smiled back at me. I smiled at him too, and his grin widened.
"See you on the beach!" he called out and then turned abruptly. I was wondering what the heck he was smiling about when my board suddenly angled up, spilling me forward. In my daydreaming, I"d lost track of my water-sense.
"Thanks a..." was all I managed to get out before I swallowed a big mouthful of foamy salt.w.a.ter and my world crashed into a watery tumult as a large wave broke over me.
Surfing at the end of the day had been legendary. The coming storms out in the Pacific had generated amazing incoming swells, and we"d spent the late afternoon riding twenty foot monsters to the delight of the crowds watching from the beach.
Bob had picked up a few female tourists, and taken them out for some tandem surfing, a sport he had almost single handedly resuscitated. We"d only just managed to disentangle ourselves from them by the end of the day, after I"d made it clear I wanted to make it a boys" night out.
Darkness had fallen as we sat at a tikihut beach bar under an awning of palms fringing the powdery sands of the beach. Bob and Sid were already stoned, and I was well into my sixth beer, a large mouthful of which I had just spat out, projectile fashion, trying to hopelessly contain a burst of laughter.
An elderly woman, obviously a tourist, was walking past us as we slouched on our stools against the bar. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were undulating back and forth near her knees, complemented by a grotesquely protruding rear end, both spilling out of her modest bikini as they swung back and forth in a counterbalancing rhythm.
Sid had started up a new reality skin he"d created called Droopy. It grossly magnified the physical characteristics of women we looked at, scaled by the intensity of their attention towards us.
He"d just pointed out this new victim who was making her way towards the bar, and she had given us such a scowl that her t.i.ts had literally mushroomed out of her chest to bounce off the beach.
"Jesus, Sid, you"re killing me!" I choked out, wiping spittle from my mouth and desperately averting my eyes from the glare of the scowling matriarch.
She just made things that much worse, and was practically engulfed by her now gargantuanly distended mammary glands as she slowly dragged her expanding bottom through the sand.
"It"s the blob!" screeched Vicious, pointing with eyes wide in mock fear. "Run! Run away now!"
To make his point, Vicious ran helter-skelter into the jungle behind the bar.
I doubled over, howling with laughter and just not caring. The swollen, rolling subject of our consideration had now turned sharply on her heel, and was slugging off through the sand away from us, apparently not needing a drink anymore. As she retreated, she slowly returned to normal proportions.
"Oh," I gasped, rubbing the tears from my eyes, giggling, "we should do this more often."
"We do this every day, son. What you mean is, you should do this more often," pointed out Vicious, peering out carefully from the bushes at our retreating victim. He was right.
Vicious returned to the bar, now that the coast was clear. He sat back down on his stool in his punkish best, with his black jeans rolled up to his k.n.o.bby knees, sporting a ripped tshirt, his eternally spiked black hair contrasting nicely with his pasty white complexion. The rest of us comfortably lounged in our swim shorts. Sid eyed me merrily, and then spat the remainder of a mouthful of beer onto me and laughed.
We all laughed.
"William!" someone screeched into my emergency audio channel.
Wally popped in beside me. "You"d better take this right away, she"s p.i.s.sed."
He took control of my body, and I detached quickly to respond to Brigitte.
"Yes my splinter winky?" I answered, my face radiating innocence as I dropped into my works.p.a.ce to take the call. She stood scowling in front of me.
"William, I am working late finishing some interviews, and all of a sudden, my interviewee"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s start swelling and spilling out onto the table, which is totally distracting and embarra.s.sing."
Oh shoot, I had forgotten we were sharing realities.
"Ah geez, sorry about that, I was just having a little fun with the boys..." I started to say.
"You"re drunk," she stated incriminatingly, "and you guys are pigs."
"...come on..."
"Cochon!" she added, shaking her head.
"Brigitte, please," I said defensively, "I"m only sharing realities because you asked. This isn"t a big deal..."
"William," she cut in, "w.i.l.l.y..."
She paused, looking sadly at the floor. I waited.
"You know, I have barely seen you in weeks, months even," she continued, "and you can"t even take the time to have breakfast with me, and here you are off with...ah...ca fait rien."
I switched off my end of the shared reality, frustrated.
I hadn"t seen the boys in weeks, and I"d been doing my best to spend any spare time I had with Brigitte. It wasn"t my fault I needed to focus more and more on my moonlighting work. My early gains had quickly been gobbled up after Nancy had restricted my splinter limit, and my bank account was now fast turning into a blank account.
I felt trapped.
We fell into a mutually accusatory silence.
"w.i.l.l.y, I think we need to talk," she said after studying me.
"I think so too," was all I replied.
While Brigitte finished up with work, I flitted back to the boys. My mood was ruined, however, so I begged off and tried going back to work for a bit to lose myself.
Soon enough, Brigitte pinged me and appeared briefly in my works.p.a.ce. Taking a resigned look around at what had replaced her, she took my hand and flittered us off to a quiet corner of the beach for our talk.
The day had settled into a heartbreakingly beautiful evening, and a crescent moonrise was casting a sparkling carpet over inky seas. Waves gently caressed the sh.o.r.e, and she held my hand tightly in hers, walking me through the wet sand at the water"s edge. We slowly left a trail of footprints behind us.
"w.i.l.l.y," she pleaded, "my heart is breaking, w.i.l.l.y. I love you, but I can"t do this anymore. Please, let"s sit down and fix this. Just tell me what you need."
"Brigitte, I love you too, but...I just don"t feel like we share the same goals anymore," I replied. "I need to focus on my business right now."
And then the pause, that hurtful s.p.a.ce of silence between words that shifted worlds.
"Look, I don"t want to hurt you. I think the best thing could be for us to separate for a while so I can figure this out."
She looked into my eyes while the tears welled in hers. Her feet left the ground, and she floated in front of me as I walked, holding both my hands now. Cast in the soft monochromatic moonlight, she hovered like a ghost before me.
"w.i.l.l.y," she sobbed, "you want me to leave you?"
I can"t believe that I did it, but I slowly started to nod, looking steadily into her eyes.
Catching her breath sharply, she looked away, her body convulsing as she tried to stop the coming sobs. She let go of my hands. Brigitte floated up and away from me and into the starry sky. Perhaps not like a ghost, but more like an angel.
My footsteps continued alone in the sand awhile before being washed away by the waves. It was as if we had never been there at all.
The Infinixx launch was coming up, and I had to rush to try the idea Jimmy had suggested before the end of the beta program. Brigitte would understand, and once I had everything going we could have the life together that we"d always wanted. What I had planned was going to blow everyone away. I just needed to focus.
I went back to work.
Ident.i.ty: Nancy Killiam ITCHING. ITCHING DESPERATION. Sweaty visions of bunched up sheets, of desire for release, pain, guilt, of junkies staring with hollow eyes; these all flooded my mind. The desperation gave way to confusion, a mad whispering of ideas that meant something, but didn"t mean anything to me. Then something else, a contained s.p.a.ce, I was trapped in a small vehicle that suddenly burst into flames. Just as quickly, I was sitting, combing my hair, and looking back into a face that wasn"t mine.
I closed down my splinter network, collapsing my conscious webwork at the same time.
"It"s some kind of bug," explained Karen, my technical lead. "The subjective streams are getting crossed somehow, and there"s meme-matching problems, too."
"Do we know what the problem is?"
Launch time was fast approaching. While building our technology platform, we were at the same time using it to provide for our own proof of concept. The problem was that bugs tended to get cycled back, amplifying their effects.
"We think so. We"re just running some final QA now before letting it out into the eco-system."
"What caused it?" I asked. We"d been having some speed b.u.mps, but nothing as serious as this.
"It seems like a code change somewhere in the kernel layers. We"re trying to figure it out."
"You"re sure this will solve it?" Honestly, I didn"t care what caused it, I just needed it fixed. "I have another press event in a few minutes. Tell me the truth."
"Yes," confirmed Karen with some conviction, "that"ll solve it."
I looked around the table. The meeting room pulsed softly and silently in its synthetic reality coc.o.o.n. Things didn"t have the feeling of a problem being solved.
"What?"
A few of them looked down at the floor, and Karen just shrugged and hit me with it. The details of a lawsuit splintered into my consciousness.
"Some guy in Minnesota is suing for emotional damages after his sensory stream got crossed with his teenage daughter"s."