Matthew Mather's Compendium

by Matthew Mather

  “Not sure, boss. From what I understood, you can’t hand off all the root functions, but give me a day or two to look into it.”

  His geek love was sparking hard.

  “Just don’t waste too much time, right?” He’d just used this as an excuse to duck out of other work if I let him.

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “Any problem I have, I just call your name and you pop up, right?”

  “Exactly. Anytime, anywhere.”

  “Perfect.”

  I was about to dismiss him, but he was staring at me intently.

  “What?” I asked irritably.

  “You were you paying attention to the safety stuff, right?” he asked. “If you need to reset the system there’s this hardwired gesture recognition.” He began motioning in the air, reaching towards his chest and twisting and pulling. It looked ridiculous.

  “Look, Kenny, I’ve got you, right? Or Dr. Simmons, or failing that, I just call this proxxi thing, correct?”

  He stopped what he was doing in mid-motion. “Sure, yeah.”

  “Just take care of it for me, okay?”

  “Right, boss.”

  “Now, please, set it so it removes all advertising as my doctor prescribed.”

  There was a short pause while he spoke to my new proxxi on his end.

  “All done,” he replied quickly. He smiled and raised his eyebrows.

  That was fast. I had to admit I liked not needing the mobile bud anymore, and the technology looked amazing, even from just the proxxi session.

  Waving Kenny away, I settled back into the couch. Mr. Tweedles came up for some affection and, despite this being my new leather couch, I let him cuddle up into me. I scratched his ears and felt him purring, and then felt a sudden twinge of realization that Alex wouldn’t be coming by anymore. It’s just and me and you, again, Mr. Tweedles.

  It had been a long day and I was tired, but my mobile pinged me about finishing some marketing communications for a fund raising drive I was helping the orphanage with. With a sigh, I got up to go into my office.

  5

  THE NEXT MORNING I awoke early, feeling unusually refreshed. At this time of year, the rising sun just snuck into the alleyway between the buildings next to me and cast cheerful rays in through my bedroom window. I dreamily watched motes of dust settle and spin in the sunlight streaming through the blinds. My mind was completely at ease for the first time in longer than I could remember. Something was different, but what?

  Then slowly, very slowly, the noise of the world outside rose in volume, gradually growing until it filled the same space in my consciousness that it usually did. I realized then that the pssi interface had been keeping it quiet while I was asleep.

  Energized, I pulled back the sheets. Time to face the day! Swinging my legs off the bed, I called out to Mr. Tweedles, who trotted in obediently to rub up against me. I leaned down to pet him, then stretched and yawned, sitting for a moment on the edge of the bed as I collected myself and put on my slippers and robe. Picking up Mr. Tweedles, I got up to walk into the kitchen, grabbing my morning cup of coffee that was waiting for me.

  As I rooted around for the holographic remote in the bowl of junk in the middle of the kitchen counter, my morning Phuture News Network sprang into life by itself, dissolving the opposite wall of my living room. Surprised, I blinked and realized this must be another feature of my new pssi system.

  A message flashed up on the display. Mary had called again. I didn’t make friends easily, but we’d met a few months ago at a coffee shop nearby. We’d struck up an immediate friendship, but she was beginning to annoy me as we got to know each other better. I was finding her to be a bit of a hypocrite, and judgmental as well. I ignored the message.

  Sitting down on a stool at my breakfast countertop, I passed my bowl of instant oats under the tap and a short jet of boiling water filled it to the prescribed level. I stirred it absentmindedly while I watched predictions of the day’s news to come on Phuture News.

  This new pssi display is amazing. It looked so realistic that I felt as if I could get up and walk right from my living room into whatever I was looking it. At that moment it was a swirling storm system out in the Atlantic, grinding its way towards some unfortunate Caribbean island. The image was far superior to my old holographic display, and much better than the contact lens systems I found so irritating and headache-inducing.

  “By the end of the week,” predicted the Phuture News weather anchor who floated to one side of the display, “tropical storm Ignacia will reach hurricane status and 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 these days.

  In an overlaid display, Phuture News described soon-to-be-emerging conflicts in the Weather Wars, along with a list of predicted famines and disasters. It was all they ever talked about. No wonder everyone was anxious and depressed, never mind the advertising. I spooned my oatmeal rhythmically into my mouth as they detailed the death and destruction.

  “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. My proxxi was strikingly composed in a tight, fashionable business suit with her hair done up in a severe bun. She looks amazing. Oatmeal dripped off my spoon as I took her in, uncomfortably aware that my own 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 coolly. 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—”

  “Look," I cut her off, “I just wanted to try this for the advertising block. I realize you are the main system interface, but please deal through Kenny, okay?” Anyway, my doctor had said to avoid the distributed consciousness features, which was what her commingling of realities sounded like.

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

  With that, she faded away. This proxxi thing was unnerving, but at least she hadn’t given me any attitude. I returned my gaze to Phuture News and my oatmeal.

  “News off!” 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 both visible and somehow invisible at the same time— information about some war that was about to start in Africa hung in my new overlaid display.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t start my days with Phuture News,” I muttered aloud, and immediately a Phuture News feed at the bottom of my display said there was a 90 percent chance I would anyway. I laughed. The system was a comedian as well.

  Picking up the new edition of Marketing Miracles from the counter, a rare print magazine, I leafed through it. That’s odd. Something wasn’t right.

  And then I figured it out.

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

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

  “Kenny, put the advertisement block 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. Sitting bolt upright, I listened hard to the noise from o
utside. I could still hear the traffic and bustle of people, but the baseline clatter of the street hawkers and holo-ads was absent.

  Really amazing.

  6

  “CONGRATULATIONS ON THE win, Olympia.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Mitchell,” I replied quietly. We’d won the first phase of the Cognix account, and I was sitting next to one of the firm’s senior partners, Antonia Mitchell.

  “Please, Olympia, you can call me Tony.”

  Of course, with Antonia’s family connections into Atopia, we had a built-in advantage over the competition, but it was still the biggest contract our company had ever been awarded. I was something of a hero around the office. Bertram had even been tolerable lately.

  I smiled at Antonia, admiring her refined good looks. Just like her mother. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Antonia smiled back at me. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, please continue.”

  The day's main event was 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 Antonia and I, were attending remotely.

  Atopia was one of the floating city-states, physically located somewhere in the thousands of miles of open ocean in the Pacific off California. The technology they were developing, and we were marketing for them, enabled perfect simulated reality. That meant place and distance ceased to have any real meaning for them. Antonia was participating in the meeting using an older, lens-based virtual reality technology, but I used my new pssi system.

  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 exotic anonymous beach, she smiled confidently, conveying to us that not only was it possible, but it was something we needed, and 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,” she laughed, reminding us of all the things 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 became more serious.

  “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 each 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. Sign up soon for zero cost!”

  The woman faded into the slowly rotating Atopian logo, a pyramid with a sphere balanced at its apex. A short silence settled while Patricia let it sink in. She was the master at this, and she should be after the lifetime she’d spent working on it.

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

  I watched Patricia 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,” Patricia replied, 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. They’d heard this before—as had I, already at least a dozen times, and my mind wandered off to thinking about how pssi had already changed my life. I certainly felt more rested, and I started to consider calling Alex, perhaps just to chat.

  “Now, if you’ll allow me,” continued Patricia, “I’d like to take whoever is coming up to watch the slingshot's test firing.”

  Her asking was a formality as they’d all signed off already, but they all nodded just the same. Patricia took control of our collective 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, while the green dot of Atopia receded into the endless blue of the Pacific below us.

  “To answer Ginny’s original 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 Earth's curved horizon spread out in the distance, above the 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 its own roaring finale by the time I finished late at night. After a few weeks of smooth sailing on the Cognix account, we’d had our first major speed bump with the disaster of a Cognix-related project launch called Infinixx.

  We were in damage-control mode, and 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 a big argument about whether to use Patricia or a young pssi-kid named 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. Antonia was on my side, but Bertram had allies against us in some of the other senior partners.

  Everything and everyone at the office was getting on my nerves, and I’d escaped outside for a cigarette nearly every hour just to get away.

  Alex had started dating my sort-of-friend Mary. Is this what friends do? 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. Downing the pills dry, I exited the giant brass-and-glass doors of our building and walked out onto Fifth Avenue.

  I was lost deep in thought about how to spin the Infinixx mess when I stopped in my tracks to marvel again at my new city. Blinking, I looked 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 advertisements were gone, as if they had never been there.

  I could actually see the buildings around me.

  Stepping into the flow of pedestrian traffic, I looked up above me in wonderment, admiring all the views I’d never been able to see before that had been blocked by billboards and holograms. The flow carried me up Fifth 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 some time already, but New York without advertising still felt special. It was definitely relaxing, and as my headache subsided, I decided to get a little exercise and finish the walk home by foot.

  The gathering darkness was something else I still 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 by a bum 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 around me even glanced at the commotion as they swept past.

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

  The frustration of the day and my lingering headache got the better of me. I bet he’s not even legal. What was he doing there, dirtying up my neighborhood?

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

  He looked up at me. I’d expected to see a scowl, but he simply stared at me. “You think you’re important, lady? I used to be a stockbroker.”

  People streamed past us as we stared at each other. Still the blank stare. Was he about to cry? My sympathy and frustration fought with each other, and I fumbled around in my pockets but had no change. Who carried money these days? Wanting to escape, I turned away, merging back into the pedestrian flow.

  “You should be more careful. Life can throw you funny curveballs, lady,” I heard him shout, his voice fading away.

  I shivered. At that moment, an incoming ping arrived from Kenny.

  “What?” I asked aloud, happy to move onto a 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 kneecapped you just now.”

  “How do you know what just happened?” My encounter with the bum had hit a nerve, exposing some unreasonable fear that I couldn’t identify.