“Your pssi has automated threat detection, and since I’m the root user, a security alert popped up on my display,” he replied defensively. “You know, there’s an automated collision avoidance system you could activate.”
“You’re not watching me with that thing are you?”
“It’s just an alarm,” protested Kenny, his projection ducking and weaving around the foot traffic as he kept pace with me. “As root user, I get security alerts fed to me and thought you might need help.”
I looked at him. “So you managed to get root access? I thought you said it didn’t allow it?”
That was good news. I hated dealing with that stuff.
“Someone authorized it as part of the testing and gave us a workaround.”
Probably because we had a close working relationship with them. “Good.”
At least something was going my way. Kenny stared at me as I squinted into the darkness. I could see he had something more to say.
“What?”
“Want me to make it easier for you to see things?” he asked. “I could set the pssi to adjust your perceptual brightness, even optimize contrast.”
I wasn’t too keen on the thing controlling my body, but this seemed reasonable.
“Sure, show me,” I replied, my anger fizzling.
Immediately, the scene around me brightened and the edges grew sharper. I knew it was dark out, but I could see everything clearly and in even sharper detail than full daylight.
“Kenny, that is actually...great,” I said after a moment. “Good work.”
He brightened up like a puppy at my praise.
“Believe it or not, but we could filter out street people, too,” he added. “I could also set it so that garbage and dirt is cleaned off the street or remove graffiti. There are all kinds of reality skins you can set in this thing. We’d need to initiate some of the kinesthetic features, though.”
We turned onto Seventy-Fifth, my street, and I could see a few homeless people hanging around on the corner up ahead, begging for money. Guilt about my encounter with the bum a few minutes before suddenly enveloped me.
“Sure, let’s try it.”
Nearly the instant I said it, the panhandlers up ahead melted away and the walls of the buildings washed free of graffiti. The sidewalk beneath me began to glisten as if it was newly poured.
“How’s that?” Kenny asked.
I stopped walking. “Amazing.”
It was amazing. It was my neighborhood, just a better version. Scrubbed clean.
In the distance, a robot walked by.
“Could you also set it to remove all robotics, I mean, unless they directly address me?” They still made me nervous. This gave me another idea. “And remove all couples holding hands as well.”
Perhaps this was too much to share with Kenny, but I said it without thinking. Kenny nodded, and I realized then that he was perhaps the closest thing that I had to a friend.
“All done,” he replied after a few seconds. “So this is the new pssi system that Cognix is going to release, huh?”
I was busy enjoying myself, looking around and admiring my new neighborhood, and felt suddenly irritated. My nerves were frayed.
“I don’t know, Kenny, but they’re going to be giving it away soon, so you’ll be able to play with it to your heart’s content. I’ll make sure you’re first in line.”
“Cool,” he replied.
In an overlaid display space I could see him tuning into a media broadcast from Patricia Killiam.
8
NEW YORK COULD make you crazy, but if I’d ever had a bad day at work, this was the worst. I’d spent the past week almost sleeping at the office, preparing reams of new material for the Cognix launch. It was a simultaneous worldwide release, the biggest media campaign in the history of the world, and we were in a fever pitch trying to get everything ready.
Storms were sweeping up the Eastern Pacific towards Atopia. Hurricanes by themselves were nothing unusual these days, and they weren’t really threatening the island-city, but Atopia had begun inexplicably moving itself much closer towards America. Too close, some were saying, and the Atopians weren’t offering any explanations for why.
We had to somehow spin it positively in addition to everything else going on.
Kenny installed filters in my pssi so that Bertram and the floozies in the assistant pool were filtered out of my visual input unless they directly addressed me in some way. That was great to begin with, but as the days went by, I’d started getting more and more frustrated with almost everyone.
The showstopper came at the end of the week.
“Olympia,” came the call from Roger, “could you come in here, please?”
It was the final decision on the last stage of the Cognix account and I was nervous. The old school and new school were facing down in the battle brewing between Bertram and me, and I felt my career hanging in the balance.
Flicking off a gossip-girl channel on Phuture News, I collected my Cognix materials and sent them over to the conference room, closing down my workspaces as I got up to leave. I ran a hand through my hair to straighten it out and absently brushed some lint off my shoulder as I looked out at the wall of the building facing my window, hardly ten feet away.
My reflected image hung thinly over the cold, chipped brick beyond. My God, is that me? I looked so old. My long, blond hair, the pride of my youth, hung in a frazzled mess around my shoulders. Even from here, I could see the lines in my face. I’d always been slender, but my reflection looked gaunt. My heart thumped loudly in my chest, each contraction forcing the blood through my arteries, straining it into the smallest of vessels as the pressure built up.
I tried taking a deep breath, but there was nowhere for the air to go as my chest tightened. Sweat beaded on my forehead.
Shake it off, take the fight to them. A vision of that bum on the street suddenly crowded my mind and I looked down.
My heart began racing.
You’re a high-powered executive, a queen of New York. You have savings, you have important friends, you own your home, and you’ve even got Mr. Tweedles. I smiled at that. The doctor was right—the stress was getting to me.
Letting out a big sigh, I collected myself and made for the door. Everything would be fine.
I entered the conference room down the hallway and was surprised to find that projections of our Cognix customers—Patricia Killiam and the others—weren’t filling the holographic wall. Roger and Bertram were sitting down on the other side of the long table looking at me expectantly.
Pulling up a chair opposite them, I leaned into the table, feeling my old friend anger begin to make an appearance.
“What’s up guys?” I half-asked, half-challenged.
“Olympia, we’re glad you’re here,” Roger began, opening clasped hands that had been supporting his chin.
I let go an audible groan. “What’s up? Cut the bullshit. Did we lose the final phase?”
“No,” he announced with pronounced lack of enthusiasm. “Actually, we won.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“No problem at all. In fact, we want to use all of the materials you created. Great work!”
“Well, good then,” I replied carefully, softening up my seated posture.
“But...”
“But what?”
“We’ve made, ah, our client wants…” Roger coughed and wiped a hand across his face. “We want Bertram to head the account. You’ll be working under him on this. But I’d like you to show him the ropes, you know, you’re the expert.”
He smiled at me weakly while Bertram beamed. The simmering pot inside me exploded.
“Are you out of your mind?” I yelled back at them both.
Bertram shifted back in his chair, enjoying the spectacle, his grin floating disconnectedly in my red-shifted vision. My chest tightened as I attempted to let go another salvo. Gripping the table with white
knuckles, my vision swam. “Does this have anything to do with me not wanting to use that kid Jimmy instead of Patricia?”
“Nothing like that,” said Bertram, smiling. I didn’t believe him.
“Olympia, look, I understand how you feel,” pleaded my boss, “but you could learn a lot from Bertram, too. Look how calm and collected he is.” He looked back at Bertram. “There is no rush on this, why don’t you take next week off, paid leave, and think about everything?”
I stared down at the table, trying to get a grip. Maybe that wasn’t a bad idea.
“Fine,” I grumbled under my breath, realizing this wasn’t a fight I could win right then. “Glad we won the contract, sir. I could actually use a little time off.”
“See,” said Roger, brightening, “now that’s the spirit. Take as much time as you need, Olympia, we need you here in top shape. This will be a big job.”
Yes, I thought, this will be a big job.
§
Taking off early, I got home quickly and was just into second bottle of wine and curled up on my couch with Mr. Tweedles when night began to fall. An unusually early snow had started outside, and I watched squalls of snowflakes begin sweeping by in the streets outside through my large bay window.
After polishing off the first bottle, I was having a hard time concentrating on a new romance novel I’d started. My mind was constantly shifting back to plotting the downfall of Bertram.
Mr. Tweedles started purring and rubbing up against me. I’d been enjoying cuddling with him, but he’d rolled over onto his back, inviting me to scratch his tummy. My frustration was brimming over, and his neediness annoyed me. I kicked him off the couch.
Sighing, I picked up two sleeping pills from a drawer in my coffee table, and taking a deep breath, I washed them down with a mouthful of wine. Lighting up my last cigarette for the night, I called Kenny.
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied instantly, appearing with a careful smile in my primary display space. I was sure he'd heard about my little incident with Roger and Bertram. I bet I'd been the talk of the office.
I’d show them.
“Kenny, look, could you set my pssi to filter out anything that I find annoying until you hear different from me?” If I have some time off, I reasoned, I might as well try to depressurize and make the most of the tools at my disposal.
“Sure,” he replied. “I guess I could do that.”
“I’ll just ping you if I need anything, okay?”
“Sounds good, no problem,” he responded, and then added, “and hey, enjoy the time off.”
Was that sarcasm?
Without another word, I clicked him out of my sensory spaces and got up off the couch, realized I was drunker than I thought, and wandered into my bedroom to collapse on the bed.
9
OH, MY HEAD.
I groggily lifted it off the sheets and waited while my blurry vision adjusted to the semidarkness of my bedroom. It was still early. Wait a minute, it’s Saturday. I didn't need to go to work. Memories seeped into my brain, and I realized I had a pass from work the whole next week, perhaps longer. Flopping my head back onto my pillow, I called out weakly for Mr. Tweedles.
“Hey, kitty kitty.”
He didn’t appear. That’s odd. Ah, well. I conked back out.
What seemed like moments later, bright light was streaming in through the window. It must have been fully morning. I flopped out of bed and made for the kitchen to get a glass of water.
Mr. Tweedles was still nowhere to be seen. In a sudden panicked thought I tried to remember if I’d let him out the night before. I didn’t usually when we were in the city, but I had been a little drunk. I looked out the front door and the windows, but he was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was hiding, I thought I guiltily, remembering getting annoyed with him.
Maybe I should go for a run.
That’d burn off some stress and get the gears going. There was nothing like a good run to fire up the imagination, and my mind was already cycling with ways to get back at Bertram. If Mr. Tweedles was out, he’d be back by the time I returned, and if he was hiding, maybe he’d have forgiven me by then.
Walking into my bedroom, I put on some cool-weather sports gear. Moments later, I was bounding down my front steps and off jogging down my street. I drank in the cool autumn air, enjoying the crisp bite of the year’s first frost burning off in the early sunshine.
I admired the scenery, completely devoid of any ads, the streets sparkling and walls scrubbed clean, with no vagrants to spoil the view or inspire guilt. It was perfect. I jogged along Seventy-Fifth towards Central Park.
Gradually, I began to get the feeling something was wrong.
There was a complete lack of other people on the streets, or even in cars. It was early morning on the weekend, but even so. As I made it to the corner of the park, I decided I’d better check in with Kenny to make sure my pssi was working properly.
“Kenny, could you check the pssi system for me?”
No response. I slowed up my jog, suddenly nervous. Maybe he was hungover, too.
“Kenny!” I yelled out again, stopping and waiting for him to appear.
“Kenny!” I yelled, and then screamed, “Kenny!!”
My voice echoed back from the empty space of the park.
There were no sounds at all except for seagulls squawking in the distance. Panicking, I turned around and began to sprint as quickly as I could back to my apartment, calling out people’s names.
“Pssi interface!” I screeched as I ran.
No response.
“Dr. Simmons!” I pleaded, but there was no answer.
Maybe the pssi is broken—I’ll try my mobile. I burst through my front door, grabbed my purse and rummaged around in it for my earbud. I popped it in and began pinging people. Still nothing.
Alarm settled into my gut and I fled back outside in a panic, purse in hand.
Cars lined the street, but no one drove them—there were no people anywhere, and no Mr. Tweedles. How was it possible I could be walking right down the middle of Seventy-Fifth Street and not see anyone, anywhere?
My mind raced. I’d told Kenny to set the system to erase anything I found annoying. I’d given him root executive control—and I certainly found Kenny annoying lately, as well as my doctor.
My God, what have I done?
I ran down the street, tears streaming down my face and my chest burning. My office, I thought. Someone would be there even on the weekend. They would see me, they could fix this. My legs tired, and I slowed to a walk. This is ridiculous. Don’t panic. Stay calm, I told myself.
Eventually, I rounded the last block before my building, and turning the corner, I thought of how I was going to laugh this off with everyone. Then my heart fell through my stomach. My office tower was gone, replaced by some other morphed amalgamation that looked similar but dissimilar at the same time.
I began to weep. Of course I’d found work annoying. In fact, I found almost everything and everyone annoying.
“Please, someone help me! I’m stuck in the pssi! Please someone help me!” I cried out into the empty streets, utterly alone in one of the world’s most densely populated cities.
10
AT FIRST I’D wandered through the empty streets of New York. In desperation, I took the New York Passenger Cannon, operating perfectly to timetable but empty of passengers, to San Francisco. But that foggy city was as empty as New York.
For the first few days, I’d tried to remember the deactivation gesture that Kenny had attempted to show me—the hardwired failsafe—but I hadn’t been paying enough attention. What was the sequence; what was the motion?
Wandering around, I pulled and scraped at my chest, twisting and turning and muttering random words, hoping that something would deactivate it. But nothing changed. With a mounting sense of horror, I slowly realized that perhaps I was the only person left—the last person on Earth, or at least the last person on w
hatever version of the Earth I’d led myself onto.
I stopped at the end of the pier at Fisherman’s Wharf. This place was usually packed with tourists, but, of course, it was desolately empty.
Opening my purse, I stared at the pack of cigarettes inside. It had become endless. No matter how many cigarettes I took from it, the next time I opened my purse, it was full once more. I’d even tried throwing it away in a fit of frustration, but there it was again the next time I felt an urge coming on. With shaking hands, I pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
I’d explored everywhere, tried everything. I didn’t need to bring any luggage with me for traveling as I could just pick up clothes, any clothes I wanted, right off the racks in empty department stores.
Restaurants were always open. At first I tried going into buffets, and row upon row of fresh, steaming food would always be waiting for me. After a little while I’d discovered that if I had an urge for anything, I could just enter a restaurant, and magically, the meal I wanted would be there, ready for me to sit down and eat alone.
All of the mediaworlds were still broadcasting, but the news was filled with stories about families, about happy reunions and lost children that had been found. I often spent my afternoons sitting alone in cinemas, watching endless reruns of old romance films.
Weren’t the smarticles supposed to wash out of my system by themselves eventually? Somebody out there would figure it out, somebody would save me, and then just as suddenly as it had started—it would be over.
Wouldn’t it?
Something had to be wrong with the pssi system; it wasn’t working as it was supposed to. I’d gone to the orphanage in New York where I’d helped out, but it was gone too. I hadn’t been annoyed with them, had I? I wasn’t sure. Perhaps I’d been upset with everyone, angry at the world, but certainly I wasn’t anymore, so shouldn’t people be appearing back in my sensory spaces? Beyond terrified of being alone, I just desperately wanted to see someone, anyone.
11
Matthew Mather's Compendium Page 26
