Blue Skies (Atopia Chronicles)

by Matthew Mather

  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 outside. 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.

  Chapter 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 still, it was 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 exotically anonymous beach, she began nodding, 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,” laughed the girl, reminding us of everything 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 shifted into a more serious demeanor.

  “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 carefully 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,” replied Patricia, 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.

  “Everyone!” announced Patricia loudly, drawing my attention back to her presentation. That’s right. That morning they were doing the weapons demonstration. It was a good marketing stunt to show off how serious they were.

  “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.

  Chapter 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 Mitchell, the senior partner, 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 every half hour, just to get away.

  I wanted to be left alone.

  Alex had started dating Mary. I didn’t care, but their hypocrisy made me angry. 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 my senses were shocked by an expectational vacuum. Stopping in my tracks, I blinked, looking 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 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.

  What a pathetic creature.

  I should report this to Passport Control. I bet he’s not even legal, I thought. And even if he is, he should be deported. What possible good could be coming from him being there, dirtying up my neighborhood? He was worse than trash. At least trash you could package up and dispose of.

  “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 and his anger reflected to fuel my own, 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? Ah, shoot. I fumbled around in my pockets but had no change. Who carried money these days? Anyway, why should I help him? Nobody had ever helped me—I’d always had to fend for myself.

  In a flash, my senses returned and I dismissed this human straggler. Turning away, I merged 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. “We’ll be seeing you here with us soon!”

  I shivered. There was no way I’d let myself fall so far. He was probably lying anyway. That’s what they did. 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 knee capped you just now.”

  “How do you know what just happened?” My anger began brimming from its ambient low-boil.

  “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. “Like I said, 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.

  “Yeah, someone from the company authorized it as part of the testing procedure. They gave us a backdoor 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. They were more or less invisible to me anyway—the great unseen—but now seeing them there irked me.

  “Sure, Kenny, 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?” asked Kenny.

  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 that Kenny wanted something from me.

  “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. Our marketing program was really working.

  Chapter 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 cover this up and 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 my boss 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 brewin
g 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, I thought to myself. A vision of that bum on the street suddenly crowded my mind and I looked down. We’ll be seeing you soon, was what he’d said. What had he meant by that? That would never be me.

  My heart began racing.

  Why are you thinking like this? 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 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 as if they were waiting for my arrival.

  I pulled up a chair opposite them, taking an aggressive stance as I sat down. 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,” began Roger stupidly, 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.”