Complete Atopia Chronicles

by Matthew Mather

  The new pssi display was amazing, it looked so good I felt like I could get up and walk right through from my living room and drop right into whatever I was looking it. At that moment it was a swirling storm system somewhere out in the Atlantic, grinding its way towards some unfortunate Caribbean island.

  The image was far superior to my old holographic, and much better than the contact lens displays I found so irritating and headache inducing.

  “By the end of the week,” predicted the Phuture News weather anchor floating to one side of the display, “tropical storm Ignacia will reach hurricane status and quickly progress into the third major storm of the season.”

  They were projecting it would wash all the way up the coast and threaten New York, an almost regular occurrence.

  In an overlaid display, Phuture News droned on about soon to be emerging conflicts in the Weather Wars along with a list of other clashes and predicted famines and disasters. It seemed it was all they ever talked about. No wonder everyone was anxious and depressed, never mind the advertising.

  Oh well, I thought as I spooned my oatmeal rhythmically into my mouth and they detailed the death and destruction, what could I do about it?

  “Good morning. I hope you didn’t mind, but I filtered out the street noise last night. I thought it would help you sleep better.”

  I looked up from my oatmeal to find myself looking at me, or rather, a similar version of myself. My proxxi was strikingly composed in a tight, fashionable business suit with her hair done up in a severe bun. She looked amazing. Oatmeal dripped off my spoon as I looked at her. My hair was a frizzy mess.

  “I also took the liberty of preparing a relevant summary of world events that happened while you were sleeping,” she said brightly. I stared at her, feeling violated and annoyed. I just wanted to have my oatmeal in peace. I hadn’t requested any of this.

  “I think that these may be most relevant regarding your work today,” she continued, and a blur of images hung in an augmented display space in front of me. I put my spoon down. “Instead of talking it would be easier if we could commingle my subjective reality with yours…”

  I cut her off. “No, no, look, I just wanted to try this for the advertising block. I realize you are the main system interface but please, just communicate with Kenny, okay?” Anyway, my doctor had said to avoid distributed consciousness features, which is what this commingling of realities sounded like.

  She shrugged. “Of course, Olympia. My apologies. I will interface with Kenny from now on until I hear otherwise from you.”

  With that she faded away. Honestly, I found this proxxi thing unnerving, but at least she hadn’t given me any attitude. She’d just responded to my request and gotten on with it.

  I returned my gaze to Phuture News and began eating my oatmeal again.

  “News off please!” I announced, wondering how the pssi system would respond.

  Magically, the display faded and my wall returned, but the system left behind a persistent visual overlay that was curiously both visible and somehow invisible at the same time. This technology was actually pretty amazing.

  An image of some new war that was about to start hung in my new overlaid display. Maybe I shouldn’t start my days with Phuture News. But even as I muttered this aloud, I could see a Phuture News feed at the bottom of my display saying there was a ninety percent chance I would anyway. I laughed. Obviously the system was a comedian as well.

  As I sat mulling this, I picked up the new edition of Marketing Miracles from the counter, a rare print magazine, and leafed through it. My brow furrowed. That’s odd. Then I figured it out.

  “Kenny,” I announced into thin air, “could you switch the advertisement blocking system off?”

  Immediately the pages of the magazine began to morph, shifting and dissolving until the same page appeared before me, but this time with the advertisements in it.

  “And, Kenny, now back on please.”

  The images and text on the page quickly shape shifted back and the adverts dissolved away. Amazing.

  As I considered this, I realized that the news broadcast hadn’t had any ads floating across it either, nor had it been interrupted by any advertising breaks. Really amazing.

  I sat bolt upright and listened hard to the noise from outside, paying attention more carefully. I could still hear the traffic and bustle of people, but the baseline clatter of the street hawkers and holo ads was absent.

  Nice.

  6

  WE’D WON THE first phase of the Cognix account. It was the biggest our marketing company had ever been awarded and I was something of a hero around the office. Bertram had even been tolerable lately, but only just.

  Today we were helping run an online press conference with Patricia Killiam, Cognix’s most famous scientist and primary press presence. The meeting was being held in one of the Atopian conference rooms. Many of the reporters were actually on Atopia with Patricia in the room, but most people, like me, were attending remotely. I started up the holographic promo-world for the reporters to get the show started.

  “Imagine,” said an extremely attractive young woman, or man, depending on your preference, “have you ever thought of hiking the Himalayas in the morning and finishing off the day on a beach in the Bahamas?”

  As she walked along an exotically anonymous beach, she began nodding, conveying to us that not only was it possible, but it was something that we needed, and that we obviously needed right away.

  “Pssionics now enables limitless travel with nearly zero environmental impact. You’ll be having the most fun, with the lowest combined footprint, of anyone in your social cloud!”

  “And you’ll never forget anything again,” laughed the girl, reminding us of everything we’d ever thought we’d forgotten. “You’ll never again have to argue about who said what!”

  While we all contemplated the things our mates had gotten wrong over the years, her face shifted into a more serious demeanor.

  “Imagine performing more at work while being there less. Want to get in shape? Your new proxxi can take you for a run while you relax by the pool!” she exclaimed, stopping her walk to look directly into the viewer’s eyes.

  “Look how you want, when you want, where you want, and live longer doing it. Create the reality you need right now with Atopian pssionics, and sign up soon for zero cost!”

  The woman faded into the slowly rotating Atopian logo.

  A short silence settled while Patricia let it all sink in. She was the master at this, and she should be after all the years she’d spent punting for it.

  “So, how exactly is pssionics going to make the world a better place?” asked an attractive blond from one of the entertainment outlets.

  I watched Patricia carefully roll her eyes. She didn’t like the term ‘pssionics’, too much baggage. The blond reporter’s name floated into view in one of my display spaces: Ginny.

  “Well Ginny, I prefer to use the term ‘polysynthetic sensory interface’ or just pssi,” replied Patricia, detaching from her body.

  A computerized image of Patricia floated up above her body and continued to talk with the reporters while her proxxi walked her body along beneath the projection. Nobody batted an eye. They weren’t easily impressed anymore.

  “We’ve been able to demonstrate here on Atopia that people are just as happy with virtual goods as material ones. You just need to make the simulation good enough, real enough.”

  Everyone nodded as they’d all heard this before. I’d already heard this speech a dozen times myself, and my mind wandered off to thinking about how pssi had already changed my life. I certainly felt more rested. I began thinking of calling Alex, just to chat.

  “Everyone!” announced Patricia, drawing my attention back to her presentation. That’s right. This morning they were going to be doing the weapons demonstration. It was a good marketing stunt to show off that they were serious.

  “If you’ll allow me,” continued Patricia, “I’d like to tak
e whoever is coming up to watch the test firing of the slingshot.”

  Everyone nodded, and she took control of our visual points-of-view and pulled us up through the ceiling of the conference room and out above Atopia with dizzying speed. We shot upwards into the sky.

  “So to answer your question, pssi will change the world by moving it from the destructive downward spiral of material consumption and into the clean world of synthetic consumption.”

  Our viewpoint began to slow as we neared the edge of space. The curved horizon of the Earth was spread out in the distance, above oceans far below. The sun was just rising.

  “Ten billion people all fighting for their piece of the material dream is destroying the planet, and pssi is the solution that will bring us back from the brink!”

  Her finale was punctuated by a growling roar as the slingshot filled the air around us with a fiery inferno. The reporters clapped loudly in the background.

  They couldn’t get enough of this stuff.

  7

  IT HAD BEEN a long day, and a creeping headache was just reaching a roaring finale by the time I finished late at night. After a few weeks of smooth sailing on the Cognix account, today we’d had our first major speed bump with the disaster of a Cognix-related project launch called Infinixx.

  We were all in high damage control mode. The spectacle of Bertram in another one of his ridiculous outfits had just topped it all off. While I was slaving away, he’d spent most of the day trolling around the office assistant pool, looking for some ditzy new romantic victim.

  Bertram and I had also just had a big argument about whether to use Patricia or some new young pssi-kid, Jimmy, as the main media presence for marketing. I was adamant about sticking with Patricia, but Bertram was just as convinced we should switch to someone newer and younger.

  Everything and everyone at the office was getting on my nerves. I had to escape outside for a cigarette nearly every half hour to get away. I just wanted to be left alone.

  I’d found out that Alex had started dating Mary. I didn’t care, but their hypocrisy made me angry. Is this what friends did? I was having a hard time getting it out of my mind, and I’d blocked all of their incoming messages and removed them from my social clouds.

  Grabbing a handful of anti–inflammatories from my desk drawer, I got up to leave for the night, and downed the pills dry as I exited the giant brass and glass doors of our building out onto 5 Avenue.

  I was lost deep in thought about how to spin the Infinixx mess when my senses were shocked by an expectational vacuum. Stopped in my tracks, I blinked out into the collecting dusk, looking out above the sea of people jostling past me.

  It was as if a layer of noisy fluorescent dirt had been scraped off the City by the hand of God.

  All the advertising was gone, as if it had never been there. I could actually see the buildings around me. The comparative calmness was mesmerizing, and I stepped out and into the quiet flow of pedestrian hubbub, looking up above and around me in wonderment. The flow carried me up 5 and into Central Park, and in a dreamy state I continued to walk around the edge of the park, staring at my City with new eyes.

  I’d been using my pssi for a while already, but New York without advertising still had a creepy feel to it. But, it was definitely relaxing, and as my headache subsided, I decided to get a little exercise and finish the walk all the way home myself.

  The gathering darkness was something else I wasn’t accustomed to. Normally the advertisements lit up the streets and sidewalks. As I neared home, staring up and around, I was nearly tripped up by a bum who was splayed out on the street. The stench of his body odor should have been forewarning enough, but the darkness and my wandering eyes betrayed me.

  “Lady! Lady! Watch it!”

  Looking down just in time, I danced awkwardly over the grubby human at my feet, knocking over his collection bowl. Nobody else around me even bothered to glance at the commotion as they swept past.

  He cowered for an instant, with me jittering over him, and then shot outwards on all fours to collect the bills I’d scattered, darting this way and that underfoot the human traffic.

  What a pathetic creature.

  I should report this to Passport Control. I bet he’s not even supposed to be here, and even if he is, he should be deported. What possible good could be coming from him being here, dirtying up my neighborhood? He was worse than trash. At least trash you could package up and bury or burn somewhere.

  “Get out of the way!” I spat at him as he sat back on his haunches.

  He just looked up at me. I had expected to see a scowl and his anger reflected to fuel my own, but he simply stared at me.

  “You think you’re important lady?”

  People streamed past us. We seemed lost in the moment, staring at each other. Still the blank stare. Was he about to cry? Ah shit. I fumbled around in my pockets, but I had no change. Anyway, why should I help him? Nobody had ever helped me in my life. I’d always had to fend for myself, for everything.

  I felt suddenly angry. In a flash my senses returned and I dismissed this human straggler. Turning away I merged back into the pedestrian flow.

  “You should be more careful, life can throw you funny curveballs lady,” I heard him say while I was swept away.

  “We’ll be seeing you here with us soon!” he shouted, in the distance, fading away.

  I shivered. There was no way I’d let myself fall so far. He was probably lying anyway. That’s what they did. At that moment an incoming ping arrived from Kenny.

  “What?” I asked, happy to move onto some new topic.

  Kenny materialized walking in step beside me.

  “That was close,” he commented.

  “What was close?” Was he spying on me?

  “That bum that almost knee capped you just now.”

  “Kenny, how do you know what just happened?” My anger began brimming from its ambient low boil.

  “Your pssi has an automated threat assessment, and since I’m the root user, a security alert popped up on my display,” he said defensively. “You know, there’s an automated collision avoidance system you could activate.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” I shot back. “You’re not watching me with that thing are you?”

  “No, no, it’s just an alarm,” protested Kenny, his projection ducking and weaving around the foot traffic as he kept pace with me. “Like I said, as the root user, I get security alerts fed to me automatically. I just thought you may have needed some help.”

  I looked at him. “So you managed to get root access to my system? I thought you said the system didn’t allow it?”

  It was all the same to me. I hated dealing with that stuff. Having Kenny manage it made my life that much simpler.

  “Yeah, someone from the company authorized it as part of the testing procedure. They gave us a backdoor workaround.”

  “Good.”

  At least something was going my way. Kenny was staring at me as I squinted into the darkness.

  “What?” I urged. I could see he had something more to say.

  “Well, I could set the pssi to adjust your perceptual brightness, even optimize contrast. That would make it easier for you to see things.”

  I wasn’t too keen on the thing controlling my body, but this seemed reasonable.

  “Sure, show me,” I replied, my anger fizzling.

  Immediately, the scene around me brightened and the edges grew sharper. I knew it was dark out, but I could see everything clearly, in even sharper detail than full daylight.

  “Kenny, that is actually…great,” I said after a moment. “Good work.”

  He brightened up at my praise like a puppy. Before I could say anything else, Kenny started to speak again, his geek–citement bubbling out.

  “Believe it or not, but we could filter out street people too,” he added. “I could also set it so that garbage and dirt is cleaned off the street, or remove graffiti. There are all kinds of reality skins you can set in this
thing. We would need to initiate some of the kinesthetic features, though.”

  I had turned onto 75 by then, my street, and could see a few street people hanging around on the corner up ahead, begging for money. They were more or less invisible to me anyway, the great unseen as it were, but seeing them there irked me.

  “Sure, Kenny, let’s try it,” I replied with mildly venomous enthusiasm at the thought of wiping out these street vermin. The instant I said it, the panhandlers up ahead melted away, and the walls of the buildings suddenly washed free of graffiti. The sidewalk beneath me began to glisten as if it was newly laid.

  “How’s that?” asked Kenny.

  “That is amazing,” I replied.

  It actually was amazing. It was my neighborhood, just a better version. Scrubbed clean.

  In the distance, I saw a robot walk by.

  “Could you also set it to remove all robotics, I mean, unless they directly address me?” They still made me nervous. This gave me another idea. “And remove all couples holding hands as well.”

  Perhaps this was a little too much information to share with Kenny, but he just shrugged and nodded.

  “All done. So this is the new pssi system that Cognix is going to release, huh?” asked Kenny.

  I was busy enjoying myself, looking around and admiring my new neighborhood, but felt some irritation creep back in. Kenny was always looking to pick under the edges.

  “I don’t know, Kenny, but they’re going to be giving it away soon so you’ll be able to play with it to your heart’s content, okay?”

  “Cool,” he replied.

  In an overlaid display space I could see him tuning into a media broadcast from Patricia Killiam. Our marketing program really did seem to be working.

  8

  NEW YORK CAN make you crazy, but if I’d ever had a bad day at work, this was the worst. I’d spent the past week almost sleeping at the office, preparing reams of new material for the Cognix launch. It was a simultaneous worldwide release, the biggest media campaign of all time, and we were in a fever pitch trying to get everything ready.