Complete Atopia Chronicles

by Matthew Mather

  “It’s so peaceful out here,” I said, leaning forward to pick up a stick and poke the embers of the dying fire. I could feel a breeze blowing across my backside, but I let it go for now.

  “You got that right, Willy,” replied Bob, slumped comfortably in his folding camp chair and balancing a beer on his knee.

  “Yes sir,” added Wally, my proxxi.

  “Willy, do you want another beer?” he asked, seeing me toss my empty can into the fire.

  Wally was sitting to my right, Bob and Martin to my left, and Sid and Vicious opposite me on the other side of the fire.

  “Naw. I’m good, Wally. Thanks.”

  Poking the embers I watched their hot orange and red sparks dance around like tiny demons escaping from the charred wood. I extended my hands toward the coals to warm them and rubbed them together. It was going to be a cold night. A loon called out from the blackness above the lake with a haunting wail. It was time to go soon, but not yet.

  “This is amazing,” drawled Bob.

  We all sat entranced around the fire.

  “This is so relaxing,” he continued. “Hey Willy, did you catch the slingshot tests this morning?”

  I watched him smiling and taking another swig from his beer, grinning at me. He was usually smiling, the lucky bum. Then again, he didn’t have it that easy.

  “I saw them, it was kind of impossible to miss,” I replied. “Were you with your family?”

  He laughed. “Naw, Sid and I were out in Humungous Fungus watching the mash-up version.”

  I grinned back. “I bet that was a lot of fun.”

  “It was, but my dad gave me a lot of trouble.”

  Wally pinged me with an alert. Oh shoot, I’d forgotten.

  “Oh, ah, Martin,” I blurted out awkwardly, “happy birthday, by the way.”

  Martin smiled, looking up at me from the fire.

  “Thanks Willy,” he laughed, and then looked at Bob, “and dad wasn’t really mad, you know, he’s under a lot of pressure.”

  “I know,” replied Bob. “I’m sorry I was late. Thanks for covering for me.”

  “That’s what brothers are for,” chuckled Martin, shaking his head. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” sighed Bob heavily, “that’s what brothers are for.”

  An uncomfortable silence descended and everyone stared down at the ground, everyone, that was, except Martin. He looked around at us all with wide eyes.

  “What, did somebody die or something?” he laughed out.

  Bob snorted, shaking his head. “Naw, just forget it.”

  “Forget what?”

  “Just forget it,” snapped Bob. “You will no matter what anyway.”

  Martin stared at Bob and shrugged, but Bob looked away.

  More uncomfortable silence.

  “I can’t believe more people don’t come out into nature to experience this,” said Bob after a while, changing the topic. “It’s just amazing. You know, doing things with your own two hands, getting back to the basics.”

  Now everyone nodded, except Martin who’d returned to staring blankly into the fire.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, but Bob could always tell my moods.

  “Are you still worrying?” he asked me.

  “Naw.”

  “Yes you are. I can tell. Just forget about it, okay? Everything will be fine. It always is,” he declared, smiling sadly, “even if it isn’t.”

  He tossed his beer can into the fire. Vicious, Sid’s proxxi, started coughing as the wind moved his way and pushed the smoke into him.

  “Mates, it’s been a real pleasure,” coughed out Vicious, “but I I’ve ‘ad about enough. This nature shite is not for me.”

  “Come on,” laughed Sid, “we’re having a nice time here! Tough it out a little, old boy!”

  The spell was broken, though, and the suspension of disbelief cracked, revealing the grainy quality of the fire and the hollow texture of the night. It all suddenly felt very fake.

  “Yeah, anyway, I think I’m going to get going too.” A heavy weight fell back across my shoulders.

  “Surfing tomorrow, right, buddy?” asked Bob.

  “Sure thing, Bob, wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I lied.

  I gave a perfunctory wave to the gang, and without another word the campsite faded away and was replaced by the white, featureless confines of my apartment.

  Wally was still sitting beside me, though now on the convertible couch of my tiny living space. My digs could, at best, be described as minimalist. Real space on Atopia came at a premium price, and one I couldn’t afford.

  “Don’t worry so much, Willy,” said Wally.

  “Easy for you to say. You don’t live in this pill box.”

  “Well, yes and no, Willy,” Wally noted, watching me carefully. “Look, I’ve never said this before and I’m not sure why I’m saying it now, but …”

  I waited.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  Why on earth was my proxxi getting weird on me now? That’s all I needed, as if I didn’t have enough to worry about.

  He took a deep breath and looked at me. “William, I just wanted to make sure you know, well, that I love you.”

  I was slightly stunned, and he saw it.

  “Not in a weird way,” he added quickly. “I mean, as brothers, you know.” He smiled at me, waiting for me to respond.

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said slowly, not sure of what to do with this. “Look, I appreciate that, and I like you too, Wally.”

  He just kept smiling at me earnestly. Geez, I’m going to have to talk to someone at Cognix technical support about this. I had lot of work to get done and I didn’t need this.

  “Look, I’m fine,” I finally told him. “Let’s just focus on the here and now, okay?”

  Switching topics to the work at hand, the walls and features of my apartment morphed outwards into the sea of displays that were my workspace. I had a busy day tomorrow and wanted to get a jump start on organizing myself for the big meeting with Nancy Killiam, who was heading the new tech company Infinixx I was working for.

  Wally and I worked well into the night, pulling and pushing masses of financial data through the deep reaches of the the multiverse, trying to make sense of the rapidly accelerating world around us.

  §

  The next morning Brigitte, my girlfriend, dropped the expected warning shot, “So, you didn’t ping me last night when you got back from camping with the boys.”

  She tried to say it whimsically, but I could tell. We’d been together a long while now and I could sense her moods coming like winds approaching high in the treetops.

  “Pumpkin,” I said, attempting to deflect the approaching storm, “sweetheart, look, you know I have this big meeting I am trying to prepare for with Nancy.”

  “Pumpkin my ass,” she proclaimed, “I bet you and Wally were up picking stocks all night.”

  I paused, deciding on my plan of defense; feint or full retreat?

  “We were preparing for the meeting,” I stated defensively, “and,” I added quickly, “we did do some stock picks too.”

  My job at Infinixx paid alright, but I’d been brought in as an outside contractor and wasn’t on their stock option dream ticket. The real reason I had gunned so hard for the job was that it gave me access to the distributed consciousness platform they were developing. Being able to be in a dozen places at once gave me an edge nobody else had in the market right now, and in the market any edge equaled an opportunity to make money.

  Brigitte pouted. A beautiful pout if there ever was one. Her full lips and petite Parisian nose, under a beautiful tangle of laissez–faire auburn hair that women of a lesser pedigree would kill for, gave her an impossibly irresistible look that hovered somewhere between beautiful and beautifully cute. Even when her deep brown eyes flashed angrily at me as they did now, it was hard to resist the urge to simply scoop her up into my arms and kiss her. So I did.

  “William,” she laughed in her little French accent, pushing me
away. She was laughing, but when she used my full name she always had a serious point to make. I looked at her in my arms. “William, vraiement, money isn’t everything. Look around you, cheri.”

  I looked around. We were having breakfast on top of a Scottish Highlands mountain ridge. The small, white table and chairs with us in pajamas, and her in bunny slippers, set against the backdrop of a blossoming sunrise amid rolling fog and boulders and grass and sheep—it was surreal to say the least, but she liked it and that was all that mattered.

  “We’re in the most amazing place on earth. We can travel anywhere we want, do almost anything we like. So what if we have a small apartment? Look where we’re having breakfast! What do we need more money for?”

  I tried not to roll my eyes. This was well–trodden ground. It would be nice to be able to afford more sub–proxxi; as it was I could hardly afford to have Wally show up at more than one event at a time. It would be nice to be able to afford to expand my Phuture News Network; right now, it was an immense effort just stay ahead of the game. Just accessing the wikiworld at this resolution to have breakfast here cost us dearly, but this wouldn’t cut any ice with her. Everyone else I knew was better off than us, and frankly, it pissed me off.

  No end was in sight for paying off the multi–generational mortgage my dad had taken out for my family to get a berth on Atopia. It was a shrewd move on his part, entering the lottery for a spot here—the value of the berth had more than quadrupled since we’d won it. The size of the mortgage, however, was crippling to a regular family like ours, and we struggled under the debt. It didn’t help, of course, that I’d made some bad stock picks of late and was far in the hole.

  “You’re right, pumpkin, you’re right,” was all I could think to say.

  I could feel my metasenses tingling and that meant a hot stock move. I’d remapped my skin’s tactile array from the nape of my neck and down my back, like a fish’s lateral line sensors, in order to pick up eddy currents in market phuturecasts. I could feel even the slightest pressure trends in the markets tickling across my back, a sure–fire way to get my attention. Right now a stiff wind was buffeting my buttocks as I was buttering my toast.

  “I gotta go,” I told her hurriedly, getting up and leaning over to peck her on the cheek. “Something for work. I really have to run. Sorry.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  I stepped away and bolted upwards through the sky, the world disappearing away below me as I arrived at my workworld. This was my favorite way to get going—it gave me that Superman start for the day.

  Wally was already there, and I rapidly turned on, tuned in, and dropped out into the multiverse, splintering my mind to assimilate what was happening. One splinter was already tuned into the press conference my boss, Nancy, had just started, so I let my mind hover over this for a moment.

  2

  Identity: Nancy Killiam

  “ECONOMIC GROWTH IS only possible through enhanced productivity and the clustering of talent,” I roared out to an approving audience.

  The world population was declining and fertility rates were collapsing, I didn’t have to add the failing prospects for the Yen and greenback, as bitcoin derivatives gained ground. While declining populations equaled better prospects for the planet, it was bad news for economics, and for once, today was all about business.

  “Atopia and Cognix aren’t simply about being green,” I pointed out, “but about boosting business productivity and profits to provide the basis for a whole new surge in the world economy.”

  I could see the faces closest to me, reporters that were mostly familiar. Beyond that, faces upon faces filled my display spaces into the blue–shifted distance. This was a well worn speech for me, like a rutted track down an old country road. Maybe not the best analogy, I chuckled to myself.

  I stopped and looked up and around at the crowd. The pause was well rehearsed and I was enjoying this. I let a confidence inspiring smile spread across my many faces.

  “And the Infinixx distributed consciousness platform is the solution that will carry business into the 22 century!”

  The masses before me burst into applause. I shook my head and looked down at the stage, trying to convey that I didn’t deserve such adulation.

  “So… questions?” I asked, looking back up into the crowd. I saw Tammy from World Press with her arm up. She was always a friendly starter. I pointed at her and nodded.

  “Could you describe for our audience what, exactly, distributed consciousness feels like?” asked Tammy. “I mean, how would you describe it, and not from a technical point of view.”

  This brought hushed laughter. I was famous for inundating reporters with technical jargon that left them feeling like they knew less than what they started with, so I made an effort to make it simple.

  “Sure, good question. The easiest way to describe it is like speed reading. When you’re speed reading, you don’t really read every word—you read the first and last lines of paragraphs and scan for a few key words in between. It’s sort of like that.”

  “Doesn’t that imply you’re not really getting the whole picture?” asked Tammy.

  Good question, but hard to answer simply. Distributed consciousness both was and wasn’t what it described.

  It wasn’t really distributing your conscious mind; what it was doing was creating an estimate of your cognitive state at that point in time, and with the particular issue you needed to deal with, then tagging this with as much background data regarding your memories as it thought relevant and available. The system then started up a synthetic intelligence engine and sent it out to canvas whatever you wanted to look at.

  From time to time this ‘splinter’, as we called it, would report back with compressed sensory data that would be perfectly understandable only to your frame of reference.

  Imagine your best friend winking at you when you asked about someone you both knew—based on your shared experiences, huge amounts of information could be encoded in a single binary bit communicated this way. Infinixx was something like this—the ultimate data gathering, compression and transmission scheme, tailored exactly to your individual mind at that moment in time.

  Even without pssi—the poly-synthetic sensory interface developed here on Atopia—we could approximate a lot of the techniques so that first time users could realize some benefits. At first this worked nowhere near as well as it did for long time pssi users, but still, it worked.

  “Well, you are getting the whole picture,” I responded to Tammy after reflection, “just not every detail. Speed reading really comes down to the unconscious skill the reader has in scanning the right parts to focus on.”

  I paused to let them soak in what I was saying.

  “Infinixx technology provides that attentional context, as well as the sensory and cognitive multiplexing technology to make it easy for even a novice to begin distributing their consciousness into the cloud within a few hours.”

  I scanned the upturned faces and watched them nodding, but that last sentence had injected a slightly glazed look into their eyes.

  “Okay for instance,” I continued quickly, “the last meeting you attended, how much of that was just an excuse for a co–worker to ramble on about something that had nothing to do with you?”

  This earned a few chuckles.

  “However,” I declared, drawing the word out, “there were probably a few bits here and there that you found useful. Infinixx provides the ability to tune a small part of your attention to only those interesting bits, allowing you to ‘be there’ the whole time without actually needing to be there.”

  “So how long does it take to understand how to use all this?” Max cut in.

  “Even you’ll be able to use it right away, Max,” I joked as I winked at him. This earned some laughs. “We’re ready to go if you are!”

  I tried to maintain a steady smile on Max. To fully realize the benefits of this technology, I was thinking, you really needed to grow up with it, but I wasn’t going t
o tell them that. Not right now, anyway.

  3

  Identity: William McIntyre

  “IT IS IN our interest to work together, to find a way to shape our differences,” droned the Chinese Minister of State. Sure, in exactly the same way that you’ve shaped all previous differences; in your favor.

  The splinter covering this latest round of peace talks between China and India didn’t need to send in very much new information, the tone and character of the meeting having been pretty much the same as every other one in the recent past; nothing positive, and very predictable. Then again, for business purposes, predictability was everything. I pulled the splinter back for more important work elsewhere.

  I quickly assimilated that thin conscious stream and turned my mind to an exploration hike that another one of my splinters was on in the Brazilian rain forest.

  The wikiworld displayed vast tracts of remote farmland belonging to Greengenics outside of Manos, all sown with a complex matrix of plants varietals that was supposed to mimic the diversity of the forest surrounding it. I wasn’t buying their story and suspected they were strip farming the area. I’d hired a local guide to walk in and snoop for me, and this splinter was ghosting in through the guide’s contact lens display.

  Pulling back the last of the dense foliage before the edge of the farm area, we peered in, and my suspicions were confirmed. Long rows of bio-engineered farmaceuticals stretched out into the distance. Greengenics had been falsifying its wikiworld feeds. This splinter of information, at the edges of my attention, shattered into a dozen others and then went off and used the information, shorting the Greengenics stock, pushing and pulling information that streamed outwards.