Complete Atopia Chronicles

by Matthew Mather

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

  “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  §

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She deserved better. I would do better.

  “Yes?”

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

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

  She watched me quietly.

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

  Waiters immediately floated in around us with plates of food.

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

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

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

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

  Her smile turned seductive.

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

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

  §

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  So I jumped.

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

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

  “I love you sweetheart.”

  “I love you too,” she softly replied.

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

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

  She hit me playfully with a pillow.

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

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

  §

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

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

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

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

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

  “We’ve been over this Willy.”

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

  She rolled her eyes.

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

  She just didn’t get it.

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

  She said nothing.

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

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

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

  4

  Identity: Nancy Killiam

  “TEN?”

  “That’s it, William. I am not going to discuss this anymore.”

  I looked at a graphic detailing the metaworld Willy had created for his business. A threadbare and kludged together collection of Phuture News feeds, second-rate synthetics and metasense overlays that snaked out into the hyperspaces surrounding him. The only saving grace was the distributed consciousness network connecting it all together, borrowed illegally from my Infinixx beta labs. It looked like an interesting test case for what small business could do with our technology, but it was just too early.

  “Look, I’ll just keep to the fifteen I have now,” he pleaded.

  I took a deep breath. He looked desperate, and it broke my heart to have to have this kind of conversation with him.

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

  “But obviously not yours,” he snorted. “I guess forever and ever ends pretty quickly in Atopian time.”

  I shook my head. “We were children, Willy.”

  “And?”

  “That was just a silly game in childhood worlds.”

  “Maybe to you.”

  I sighed. As children, Bob, Willy and I had been part of an almost inseparable gang, and we’d promised to always stick together and do whatever we could for each other, no matter what, forever and ever. It was a long time ago. I shook my head again.

  “Ten, Willy, that’s it, and even that I wouldn’t do for anyone else but you.”

  Now he looked angry. I felt myself wavering, but we were at a critical point in our developmental path. We had to stick to the known unknowns, and letting someone splinter their consciousness into more than just a few instances could lead to some unknown unknowns that I couldn’t afford.

  He glowered in my display space. I didn’t have to plug into his emotional feeds to feel the angry waves spilling out around him.

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

  My primary subjective snapped back into the Infinixx control center, and I leaned back in my chair, thinking of ways I could try and help Willy.

  I was already feeling more than uncomfortable, pssi-kid or not, being in my early twenties and bossing around people more than twice my age. Explaining to our Board of Directors that I was putting the program at risk for a childhood friendship just wasn’t a place I was willing to go.

  Willy had always had a chip on his shoulder, even when we were kids. He’d arrived on Atopia with his family when he was already six years old, at an age when the rest of us pssi-kids were already amazing the world with our amazing abilities in the virtual worlds where we’d grown up. He’d had to start from less than nothing, having come from a Luddite community in central Montana. In the Schoolyard we’d teased him mercilessly as he’d struggled to come to grips with the pssi system.

  Bob had been the first one to befriend him, bringing him into our gang, and their friendship was one that had survived. This was no mean feat in the churning social space of Atopia.

  His young mind, back then, had been forced to leapfrog almost 400 years of time, starting from a place stuck somewhere in the eighteenth century and straight into Atopia, a place far ahead of the rest of the world. He’d been incredibly determined, though, and within a short time had become the best flitter tag player in the Schoolyard.

  Willy had always been on an upward climb, always trying to prove himself, and now more than ever.

  I sighed.

  I wondered what the world must look like from his perspective, coming from a place so alien to me. In a way he straddled these worlds, and it was hard for me to imagine his childhood. This made me think of mine.

  §

  As a baby girl, my own first memories, my first fully formed memories, were of my mother’s face. This wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the detail with which I could remember it. My mother was holding me, coddling me, and looking down into my eyes, cooing softly.

  “Hello Nancy, how are you feeling my little darling?” my mother had said to me. She had a slightly worried look on her face, full of love.

  I’ve gone back and relived it so many times it’s almost embarrassing. It was a very special moment to me, and as the first pssi-kid to pass this threshold, it was a special moment that was shared with the whole Cognix program. My memories were famous.

  This memory was from the first moment my pssi was turned on. It was the beginning of my inVerse—the complete sensory recording of everything I had ever seen, heard, felt or sensed. I was three months old, and the moment was exactly 7am, Pacific Time, on September 20 on
the year my family had just moved onto the first prototype Atopian platform.

  I’ve gone back and relived it all many times; felt my mother’s hot breath on my blushing cheeks, sensed her holding me tightly, observed every nuance of her pupils dilating and contracting, breathed in the tang of her perfume and strong soap, and felt my small eyes suddenly distracted away to catch glimpses of glowing dust motes floating in the angled sunlight streaming in from the windows. In the corner of the room my father crouched anxiously over the quietly humming machines as he monitored my signals and systems, stealing quick glances towards us from time to time.

  As pssi–kids growing up, we hadn’t known anything special was happening around us. Like kids anywhere and anytime, we’d just assumed that life was like that for everyone. But we were special. We were the first generation of children to grow up with seamless synthetic reality sensory interfaces.

  After running out of letters at the end of the alphabet, TIME Magazine had tried to label us ‘Generation A’, as in artificial reality, but this expression had died almost as quickly as the magazine. The world quickly came to refer to us simply as the ‘pssi-kids’. We were a part of Cognix Corporation’s phase III clinical trials of early developmental pssi on the island colony of Atopia. We weren’t just making history. As my dad liked to say—we were history.

  While Atopia was an amazing place to grow up, we were still just kids and we did the things that all kids did. We screamed, we dribbled, and we wobbled when we first learned to walk. We did learn to walk much earlier than regular children, using pssi muscle-memory training, but this was just one in a long list of things we could do that human children couldn’t.

  Our world was more than just this world—this world was just a tiny patch of our playground as we quickly learned to flitter across the endless streams of metaworlds that were filled with toys and creatures that sparkled in our sensory display spaces. We perceived little difference between the real and the virtual, in fact synthetic worlds felt more real and tangible to us than what the rest of the world would call reality.

  Even from a young age, it wasn’t just toys we played with, we also played with making ourselves into toys, altering our bodies to become teddy bears, worms, little flocks of soaring dinosaurs in endless sky-worlds and ever more alien creatures inhabiting ever more impossible spaces as our minds developed a fluid capacity for neuroplasticity. Our proxxi and educational bots constantly presented us with an endless barrage of games and puzzles to solve as we spun through these worlds, treating every moment as a learning opportunity.