The Atopia Chronicles

INTERLUDE Introduction to Patricia Killiam

Sitting and waiting. Perfect the art of sitting and waiting, and you will live a long, long life.

I was in the main Cognix conference room, perched about two thousand feet up in the complex spanning the tops of the farming towers at the center of Atopia. The afternoon sun was shining hotly through the glass window walls, and I was sure he was making me wait on purpose, knowing I had come here in person.

My mind was circling back to my press conferences this morning, about what I’d been telling the reporters. Truths and half-truths, I’d been mixing them both for so long that I hardly knew the difference anymore.

How is pssi going to change the world? To be honest, I really didn’t know. The real power of pssi, I wanted to tell them, was harnessing the brain’s natural ability for adaptively rewiring itself to extend the human mind into the multiverse—but this would only have earned me blank stares.

The human sensory and motor system had evolved to help us make sense of our environment, and to fend for ourselves within it. It was great when our ancestors were out hunting gazelles on the savannah, but the modern human environment was a massive flow of information, and pssi made it possible to plug our nervous systems directly into it.

Explaining that to reporters was just a bridge too far for me to cross with them. It was easier to let them run into some pssi-kids on Atopia somewhere—they’d get the idea soon enough.

I sighed.

Being present in the flesh was something I had started to do more and more, sensing my time growing short. Up here in the conference room, the security blankets blocked outgoing and incoming communications, so there was no escaping down a rabbit hole while I waited. But there was no sense in letting time, illusion or not, go to waste, so I decided to limber up a little.

Taking a deep breath, I straightened up in my chair and activated the visual overlays of my phantoms, which appeared arrayed around me. Concentrating, I began moving the phantom that controlled my spatial point-of-view. This little phantom was visible floating disconnected beside my body, like a little putty-colored finger, and I could move it around as if it was a part of my natural body.

Despite working with this technology for more than thirty years, it still felt strangely thrilling to feel this projection as a part of me, its tactiles and kinesthetics wired into my own sensory system, so that I could feel it stretch and click through the boundaries of its interface.

The brain had an almost inexhaustible capacity to neuroplastically rewire itself. Learn to play the piano and the brain devoted more of its motor cortex to your fingers. Cut off an arm, on the other hand, and your brain could adaptively learn to reroute control of an artificial arm by reworking the way it used various packets of neurons.

Phantoms were an extension of this.

Without removing any existing limbs or digits, we created virtual fingers and limbs in synthetic spaces using pssi to connect them to neurons in the motor cortex. It was like having a dozen extra hands to manage controls that were directly wired into our brains like a part of our bodies.

The flip side of the coin was feeding data into our senses, whether touch, sight, sound, or any of the dozens of other more minor ones humans possessed, to create an unlimited number of metasenses that warned or informed us of what was happening within the informational flow of the multiverse.

We could completely customize our bodies and senses to the way we wanted to interact with real and virtual worlds. Helped along by the neurotrophic growth factors we embedded in the smarticles that suffused through our nervous systems, we’d discovered that the brain had a stunning capacity to grow and adapt to the pssi stimulus, one far beyond even our wildest imaginings at the beginning of the project.

I latched myself firmly into place at the conference table and connected my primary visual point-of-view to the spatial-control phantom I was exercising. As I stretched and moved it, my subjective point-of-view shot back outward from the conference room to hover outside the building.

Diving down into the treetops below, I stopped just above the Boulevard. Quickly, I cycled this phantom back and forth, limbering it up, and then I unlatched the rest of my phantoms. Sitting in the conference room, with my hands resting gently on the polished cherry-wood table, my eighteen phantoms danced around me, and I concentrated as I felt each of them sliding through their interface points, coordinating my visual and metasense overlays.

These phantoms weren’t just projections—they were a part of my living, breathing body. It felt as if I were dancing, and I leaned back in my chair with my eyes half-closed, smiling and enjoying my performance.

With a short, characteristic tone announcing his arrival, Kesselring, the principal owner and CEO of Cognix Corporation, materialized opposite me on the other side of the table. I quickly and immediately stowed my phantoms, as if sweeping toys back into a chest. Smiling, he watched me packing them away, waiting for me to finish before he spoke.

Below a thick head of perfectly groomed black hair, Kesselring’s flecked hazel eyes shone intensely above his salt-and-pepper beard. The worn creases in his face projected just the right angles of wisdom for a man of his stature.

He beamed enthusiastically at me. “Great work with the press today, Patricia. You’re the best. You looked terrific!”

“I do get tired of lying to them all the time,” I complained.

I felt like he was patronizing me.

Maybe I was annoyed at him for making me wait, or perhaps I felt silly being caught playing with my phantoms. But really, it was because I couldn’t shake the surreal realization that we were planning a conspiracy on the vastest of scales. But it wasn’t really a conspiracy, I reminded myself, because everyone would be complicit.

“We’re not really lying to anyone,” said Kesselring. “We’ve been over this a million times. I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing it up.”

“You’re right.” We had been over it countless times in the years since what we had to do became clear, but as we neared the threshold, things didn’t feel right anymore.

He changed the topic, eager to discuss the reason he’d really called this meeting. “Do you think he suspects anything?”

“Obviously he suspects something, but nothing to do with us. At least, not yet.”

The hamster wheel we had Vince running on hadn’t been my idea, but it was only my deep connections into the Phuture News Network technology that made what we were doing to him possible. The intention hadn’t been to harm Vince, just to keep him distracted. We couldn’t afford to let him see what we were planning, at least, not until it was too late to stop us.

“Good.”

“But he’ll figure it out eventually.” I was having a hard time understanding how our technology was able to do what it was doing to him, and didn’t think our agents could hold him off much longer. “He’s already most of the way there.”

“Soon it won’t matter,” shrugged Kesselring. “And nobody will pay any attention to him anyway.”

A pause while I eyed Kesselring, trying to lay blame elsewhere for what I had done to my old friend. I took a deep breath. “So we’re going to be giving it away for free?”

Kesselring smiled. “Free to install, anyway.”

“And it doesn’t worry you that we’re not telling people the full story?”

On Atopia, we weren’t just building a better mousetrap; we were building the best mousetrap of all time.

“Dr. Granger’s new work looks promising.… ”

“Don’t get started on Hal,” I scowled.

“I’m just saying.… ”

“I know what you’re saying.” Using the problem to fix the problem was a recipe for unintended consequences, for disaster.

“As you’ve said many times,” he pointed out, “we need to maximize saturation of the product introduction to maximize networking effects. The Terra Novan’s own synthetic reality system isn’t far behind us. We need to get our product in first, and fast, to capture the market.”

I shook my head. “That’s not the real goal.”

Kesselring looked at me steadily. “Perhaps not yours, but somebody has to pay for all this.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose, feeling the noose tighten around my neck.