I smiled and waved.
“Hey Billy!” I cried. “Hi Samantha!”
They squeaked their hellos back. My dad let go of me and I rushed to the side to put my hand into the water to pet their snouts. The dolphins radiated affection. They were like the best dog you ever had, but huge and wet and much, much smarter.
The Terra Novan dolphins weren’t really working for us. It was more like they worked with us. They liked the excitement of the place and enjoyed the privileged access to multiverse worlds only possible on Atopia.
Terra Nova was another off-shore colony competing with Atopia. They were rumored to be creating monstrosities, tinkering with life itself, and the bobble-headed Terra Novans who appeared on Atopia from time to time did nothing to help with this image. The dolphins, though, were wonderful.
“Okay, okay everyone,” laughed my dad, “that’s a lot of love. Come on, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
The dolphins shifted their attention away from me and to my dad.
“Today we’re going to be harvesting sardines, so we need you guys to go and corral a few schools into the tanker over there,” he explained, pointing to a ship floating a few hundred feet away. “Could someone go get me a sample?”
Samantha, my favorite, squawked and dove down into the depths.
“Okay people,” my dad continued, “let’s get this show on the road!”
The dolphins chattered their goodbyes and shot off, except for Samantha who popped back up with a sardine in her mouth.
“Thank you Samantha,” said my dad. He nodded to her and bent over to take the sardine, then turned back to his workstation, knife in hand, to begin the examination. Samantha and I waited, staring at him. He stopped and smiled, shaking his head slightly.
“Okay you two!” he laughed. “Go on and have some fun!”
Clapping my hands with glee, I detached from my body and snapped into Samantha’s, instantly rocketing off into the ocean. It was pure exhilaration as I felt her powerful sinews and muscles forcing us through the frigid waters, chasing her brothers and sisters into the depths.
Running with the dolphins had been the greatest joy of my life.
2
Identity: Patricia Killiam
SHOWING UP IN person for the press may have been a mistake. My God, how my body ached, even with its pain receptors tuned all the way down. I probably hadn’t spent more than a few dozen hours in my own skin in the past year, but who would want to? Under siege by a frightening list of diseases barely held back by the magic of modern medicine, my body was as shrunken as an old pea left out overnight. Nearly a hundred and forty years old and I still wasn’t ready to give up the ghost.
Sighing inwardly, I started up the promo-world.
“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?”
She was walking along one of our own beaches, a beautiful stretch of white sand near the Eastern Inlet.
“Pssionics now makes limitless travel possible with zero environmental impact!”
The girl paused to let us think about all the places we wished we could visit.
“You’ll never forget anything again,” she continued, forcing people to remember everything they thought they’d ever forgotten. “And you’ll never again have to argue about who said what!”
I looked out at the reporters, seeing their eyes narrow as they remembered some argument they’d recently had with their spouses.
“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.
“Create the reality you need right now with Atopia pssionics. The promise of a better world and the life you’ve always wanted. Join up soon for zero cost!”
A short silence settled while I let it all sink in.
“So, how exactly is pssionics going to make the world a better place?” asked a stick-thin blond from the front row.
I carefully rolled my eyes. I’d never really liked ‘pssionics’—the baggage it carried created a constant battle to separate fact from fiction when talking to reporters, but then again, when had that ever mattered? 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,” I replied, detaching and floating upwards out of my body to get their attention as my proxxi walked my body along beneath my projection. Nobody batted an eye. They weren’t easily impressed anymore.
“We’ve been able to demonstrate here on Atopia that people are as happy—even happier, in fact—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’ll give you an example.” I floated down and snapped back into my body, and a bright red apple popped into existence in my hand. “So here we have an apple, right?”
There was a general murmur of agreement.
“Since pssi also controls my neuromotor system, not only can I see the apple,” I explained as I tossed it into the air and caught it with a satisfying thwap, “but I actually feel like I’m holding it. It feels perfectly real to me.”
“But perhaps even better,” I continued, taking a loud bite, “I can eat it too.”
As I munched away, I could feel its juices running down my chin. It was a good simulation of biting into an apple, but still had room for improvement, I thought as I chewed, contemplating the appleness of my experience.
“The ultimate no calorie snack,” I joked, taking another bite. This got some laughs.
“Seriously, though,” I continued, raising the apple and smiling, “with pssi installed, you can eat and drink whatever you like as much as you like with zero caloric intake—for this afternoon’s activity we’ll be lounging in Pompeii at a Roman feast while your proxxi takes your body to the gym.” This earned some more hushed laughter.
“Describe a proxxi again?” asked Ginny, cocking her head and fishing for a sound bite. I obliged.
“Proxxi are biological-digital symbiotes that attach to your neural system, sharing all your memories and sensory data as well as control of your motor system.”
The proxxi program was my life’s work in creating the basis for synthetic intelligence. Where previous research had tried to create artificial intelligence in a kind of vacuum by itself, my contribution had been to understand that a body and mind didn’t exist separately but could only exist together.
We’d started by creating synthetic learning systems attached to virtual bodies in virtual worlds that gradually became intelligent by feeling their way through their environments. The proxxi program had taken this one step further when we’d integrated them intimately into peoples’ lives, to share in their day to day experiences.
They were still artificial intelligences, but ones that now shared our physical reality to seamlessly bridge the gap between the worlds of humans and machines.
Ginny screwed up her face and asked, “And why would we want to attach something to our neural systems?”
“And just why wouldn’t you want to get attached to me?” asked Marie, my own proxxi, materializing to walk beside me. She smiled at everyone.
This earned a round of laughs. With the flick of a phantom I removed the apple from existence, my taste buds going blank as it flashed away. The hair on the back of my neck had begun to stand up which meant the slingshot test must be about to start. I’d better wrap this up.
“Everyone,” I announced, reaching out to encircle the group of reporters with my phantoms, “if you’ll allow me, I’d like to take whoever is coming up to watch the test firing of the slingshot.”
We’d ensured almost everyone had signed up for a front row seat to the demonstration. We needed to
show we weren’t just serious about cyber, but also had a committed kinetic program.
“To finally answer your original question Ginny,” I said as I grabbed them all and we shot through the ceiling of the conference room, accelerating up into space and earning a few gasps, “pssi will change the world by beginning to move it from the destructive downward spiral of material consumption and into the clean world of synthetic consumption. It’s about the only viable solution we have left with nearly ten billion people all struggling for their own piece of the material dream.”
I slowed and stabilized our flight path, bringing us to a stop about ninety thousand feet up. Dispersing the reporters’ subjective points of view across a wide radius surrounding the target zone, I motioned down at the oceans below and then towards the rising sun on the horizon.
“The fact that we have to face is that the eco-crunch is destroying the planet while the fight over dwindling resources is fueling the Weather Wars, and pssi is the solution that will bring us all back from the brink!”
On cue, the slingshot began to fill the space around us with an ear-splitting roar and fiery inferno. I left the reporters’ visual subjectives in the thick of it while retreating to view from a distance, backing away several miles, and then several more. What had seemed so awe inspiring moments ago now appeared as just a bright smudge in the sky, and miles below shimmered the green dot of Atopia.
My mind clouded with sudden doubt. Who were we to think we could change the world, to think that we could bend reality? Just a pinpoint of green floating in the oceans, on a planet that was just a tiny speck adrift in a vast cosmos of unending universes. Are we fooling ourselves?
Our imagined power dwindled to nothing when viewed with a little perspective, dwarfed by unseen forces operating on much larger scales. Just then I was enveloped in a fast moving cloud, and, as if responding to my thoughts, a strong wind sprang up. The thunderstorm was coming.
I’d better get down and talk with Rick.
§
The blaze of the slingshot test was still dissipating on the main display in the middle of the Atopia Defence Command center. I lit up a smoke as I arrived, gently fading my image in next to Commander Rick Strong, my own pick as head of our newly formed Atopian Defence Forces.
He’d had an exemplary career in the US Marines, demonstrating repeated bravery rescuing men under his command. His first deployment had been in Nanda Devi, in the terrible fighting over dams high in the Himalayas that had sparked the Weather Wars. His psych profile indicated latent post-traumatic stress disorder, but just enough to make him think twice before starting a fight. With the fearsome weapons we’d installed on Atopia, I didn’t want some trigger-happy wingnut’s finger over the button if things got hairy.
A battle-hardened veteran, Rick brought a direct, and sometimes violent, experience of the realities from the outside world that helped ground the team here. We were masters of synthetic reality, but I had a feeling our created realities could be blinding us to the real dangers out there. Rick was the perfect antidote.
Kesselring, the CEO of Cognix and main benefactor behind Atopia, had been the first to begin speaking about the need to have defensive weapons. To begin with, the suggestion had seemed completely antiethical to the cause, Atopia having been born from a free-minded spirit to escape the cluttered corner the rest of the world had led itself into. I’d been against it to begin with, but as time wore on, I began to get the feeling that we may need them before all this was over.
“Finished playtime yet Rick?” I asked, shifting my hips from one side to the other and taking a drag from my smoke. I could feel the sense of safety that these weapons instilled in him. Perhaps he had a point.
In all cases, I wanted him to feel safe. I knew that one of his main reasons for coming here was to try and rescue his relationship with his estranged wife, Cindy, and I sincerely wanted him to succeed and raise a family here.
“Yeah, I think that about does it.”
“Good, because I think you scared the heck out of the wildlife I’ve managed to nurture on this tin can,” I said with a laugh, “and the tourists want to go back in the water—not that you didn’t put on a good show for them. That was quite the shock and awe campaign.”
“You gotta wake up the neighbors from time to time,” he laughed.
We’d purposely removed any reality filtering of the weapons test to measure the cognitive impact they would have on people. The response had more than exceeded the threshold for emotional deterrence that we’d needed for the project—just another success notched up on our path forward.
“Well, that’s your job, Rick, to help scare the world into respecting us. Mine is to scare the world into saving itself.”
I said this without humor, and Rick looked at me, nodding at my seriousness.
“Anyway, good work.”
A small pause while we looked at each other.
“Did you see that thunderstorm coming in?” he asked, and I nodded. “We’ve been tracking that depression for weeks, but we can’t avoid them all. Anyway, it’ll water your plants up top.”
He smiled. I smiled back.
“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?” I suggested. I knew his wife was having a hard time adjusting to life here and missed her family. It was more than that, though, her depression being a chronic condition that stemmed from her relationship with Rick. It was something I thought we could help fix.
People reacted differently to the sudden immersion into limitless synthetic reality when they arrived here for the first time. Most adjusted quickly and within a short time they’d usually be off creating their little own nooks and crannies of reality that suited them. Some had a more difficult time, but I had a feeling Cindy would come around soon.
“That’s actually a great idea,” answered Rick after a moment, busy adjusting the control systems for the slingshot shutdown. He looked towards me. “So you really think that thing is a good idea?”
He was talking about the proxxids, simulated babies that Cognix was encouraging couples to try before the ‘real’ thing. It would help Cindy get acclimatized to pssi, but in general it wasn’t something I was comfortable with. In this case, however, it seemed like a good idea; putting a toe in the water first, so to speak.
“Yes,” I replied, shrugging, “why not?”
With that I looked over and smiled at Jimmy, and with the smallest of waves goodbye, clicked out of the Command sensory spaces.
3
Identity: Jimmy Jones
I SMILED AND nodded my goodbye to Patricia as she faded out of Command.
“I think that’s a good idea, Commander,” I said once she was completely gone. “I mean about going to see your wife. I can handle the rest of this.”
Rick looked over from the slingshot controls at me, smiled, and began nodding. Standing up from his workstation, he shifted the controls to me, and then walked over.
“Thanks Jimmy, I really appreciate it. You and Patricia have a pretty special bond, don’t you?”
I smiled.
“We do,” I agreed while I focused on some security protocols that had been breached during the weapons test. Somebody had been poking around up there in the UAV that had been destroyed during the test. Odd.
“It hasn’t been easy moving here,” he continued. “At least, it hasn’t been easy for Cindy.”
I filed the security breach report away to have a look at later, and looked up at the Commander.
“I can’t imagine how much of a change it must be for her,” I replied, “or for you, for that matter.”
Rick nodded, and then pulled a security blanket down around us. The other Command staff looked up from their workstations, wondering what was going on.
“Confidentially, son, I’ve heard that you had it pretty rough growing up here.”
I shrugged. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“If you ever need anyone to talk to,” he said softly, “I had it rough growing up too.”
“Thanks…” I replied uncertainly, surprised at this sudden intimacy.
“I’m just saying, any time, and of course, entirely confidential.”
“I appreciate that Commander,” I answered more confidently. “And I will, but I’m fine.”
I pulled down the security blanket, feeling self-conscious with all the rest of the staff there.
“Why don’t you get on to seeing your wife?”
He smiled. “I will. You just remember, anytime, right?”
“Right.” I smiled back at him.
“See you later, Jimmy.”
§
While Atopia was marketed as this amazing place, and the tabloid worlds were constantly spinning stories about the fantastic pssi-kids that grew up here, my own parents fighting had made my experience on Atopia a special sort of hell I had to drag myself through. Now I had the perspective to view it, even appreciate it, as a part of the fire that had forged me, but back then, pssi could be cruel.
I remembered it all.
“Look,” said my mother, back when I was an infant, soon after they’d first arrived on Atopia, “look at him, so cute. I think he just shat himself again, and he’s looking around wondering what the bad smell is.”
She was laughing at a shared rendering of my inVerse. She even tried sharing the smell with the guests. I wasn’t even a year old, and Mother was at it again, and drunk of course.
“Look, look, smell that?” she laughed. “Can you believe something so small and useless could make a smell so bad?”
As children, we had no right to privacy from our parents. Mother was always criticizing everything I did, in minute detail, and in excruciatingly public fashion.
My parents had been having another couple over for coffee, and Mother had turned our cramped apartment into a synthetic space projection that was decked out like a Spanish palace for the evening. We were sitting in the middle of an open courtyard, under a deep blue sky, surrounded by a three story terracotta palazzo, the walls decorated with intricate murals inlaid with tiny blue, white and gold tiles.
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