Complete Atopia Chronicles

SHOWING UP IN person for the press may have been a mistake. My God, how my body ached, even with its pain receptors tuned all the way down. I probably hadn’t spent more than a few dozen hours in my own skin in the past year, but who would want to? Under siege by a frightening list of diseases barely held back by the magic of modern medicine, my body was as shrunken as an old pea left out overnight. Nearly a hundred and forty years old and I still wasn’t ready to give up the ghost.

Sighing inwardly, I started up the promo-world.

“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?”

She was walking along one of our own beaches, a beautiful stretch of white sand near the Eastern Inlet.

“Pssionics now makes limitless travel possible with zero environmental impact!”

The girl paused to let us think about all the places we wished we could visit.

“You’ll never forget anything again,” she continued, forcing people to remember everything they thought they’d ever forgotten. “And you’ll never again have to argue about who said what!”

I looked out at the reporters, seeing their eyes narrow as they remembered some argument they’d recently had with their spouses.

“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 the viewer’s eyes.

“Create the reality you need right now with Atopia pssionics. The promise of a better world and the life you’ve always wanted. Join up soon for zero cost!”

A short silence settled while I let it all sink in.

“So, how exactly is pssionics going to make the world a better place?” asked a stick-thin blond from the front row.

I carefully rolled my eyes. I’d never really liked ‘pssionics’—the baggage it carried created a constant battle to separate fact from fiction when talking to reporters, but then again, when had that ever mattered? 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,” I replied, detaching and floating upwards out of my body to get their attention as my proxxi walked my body along beneath my projection. Nobody batted an eye. They weren’t easily impressed anymore.

“We’ve been able to demonstrate here on Atopia that people are as happy—even happier, in fact—with virtual goods as material ones. You just need to make the simulation good enough, real enough.” Everyone nodded as they’d all heard this before.

“I’ll give you an example.” I floated down and snapped back into my body, and a bright red apple popped into existence in my hand. “So here we have an apple, right?”

There was a general murmur of agreement.

“Since pssi also controls my neuromotor system, not only can I see the apple,” I explained as I tossed it into the air and caught it with a satisfying thwap, “but I actually feel like I’m holding it. It feels perfectly real to me.”

“But perhaps even better,” I continued, taking a loud bite, “I can eat it too.”

As I munched away, I could feel its juices running down my chin. It was a good simulation of biting into an apple, but still had room for improvement, I thought as I chewed, contemplating the appleness of my experience.

“The ultimate no calorie snack,” I joked, taking another bite. This got some laughs.

“Seriously, though,” I continued, raising the apple and smiling, “with pssi installed, you can eat and drink whatever you like as much as you like with zero caloric intake—for this afternoon’s activity we’ll be lounging in Pompeii at a Roman feast while your proxxi takes your body to the gym.” This earned some more hushed laughter.

“Describe a proxxi again?” asked Ginny, cocking her head and fishing for a sound bite. I obliged.

“Proxxi are biological-digital symbiotes that attach to your neural system, sharing all your memories and sensory data as well as control of your motor system.”

The proxxi program was my life’s work in creating the basis for synthetic intelligence. Where previous research had tried to create artificial intelligence in a kind of vacuum by itself, my contribution had been to understand that a body and mind didn’t exist separately but could only exist together.

We’d started by creating synthetic learning systems attached to virtual bodies in virtual worlds that gradually became intelligent by feeling their way through their environments. The proxxi program had taken this one step further when we’d integrated them intimately into peoples’ lives, to share in their day to day experiences.

They were still artificial intelligences, but ones that now shared our physical reality to seamlessly bridge the gap between the worlds of humans and machines.

Ginny screwed up her face and asked, “And why would we want to attach something to our neural systems?”