Complete Atopia Chronicles

They’d inhabited Adriana’s body today, and it still threw off my pssi as it posited her personal details in my display space. We’d have to fix it. I’d planned on making composites as much a part of the launch protocol as I could, but time was running out.

“And we are everything he really wanted,” she continued, “a responsible, motherly woman who is career oriented but also zany and spontaneous. I don’t think this could have happened any other way.”

These little victories were what made it all worthwhile. Love was still that most powerful of emotions, as it magically found ways to fill the cracks that pssi had fissured open in Atopian culture.

“So I heard you’re going to have children?” I asked. “That’s wonderful news!”

Without them reforming as a composite, offspring by any of them separately would have probably never happened. Post-pssi fertility rates on Atopia were approaching zero, but then again, that was counting fertility in the old, biological sense.

If we began counting synthetic and bio-synthetic beings, such as proxxi, fertility rates were actually skyrocketing. It all depended on your point of view.

Adriana-Ormead smiled even wider, if that was possible.

“Yes, we’re going to use Adriana’s body to gestate triplets,” she gushed. “We’re going to do it the natural way and just mix our six DNA patterns together randomly and see what comes up.”

“That sounds wonderful,” I congratulated her.

Composites weren’t just a meeting of minds. It enabled individual neurons in one body to connect with the billions of neurons in the attached composited bodies, using the pssi communication network to replace biological nerve signaling.

While this mimicked the dense connectivity of nerves themselves, it was creating neurological structures that had never existed, could never exist, in the real world, and people had already begun stretching the boundaries. Some had begun compositing with animals, with nano-assemblers, with robotics and artificial minds, even expanding their wetware into entirely synthetic spaces.

Life constantly evolved to fill new ecosystems as they emerged, and pssi had opened, not just a new ecosystem, but an endless ecosystem of ecosystems.  At the very start of the program, we’d begun experimenting with releasing the nervous systems of pssi infected biological animals into synthetic worlds, creating rules of nature there to allow them to evolve freely.

The results had been sometimes staggering. What was happening to humans as they released themselves into the pssi-augmented multiverse was an experiment in the making, and one we hadn’t had the luxury of time to understand. And all this had been just within the controlled and monitored experiment of Atopia, released into a few hundred thousand people living within a relatively homogeneous culture.

What would happen when this was freed, unchecked, into the billions of souls in the rest of the world, was anyone’s guess.

I felt like I was witnessing the cyber version of the Cambrian explosion a half a billion years ago, when the first elemental life had burst forth in diversity to cover the earth. Except instead of the Earth, life was now flooding into the endless reaches of the cyber multiverse, and instead of millions of years, evolution was now measured in weeks, days and hours.

“Our plan is let them decide whether they want to composite themselves or not,” continued Ormead, refocusing my wandering mind, “but it’s hard to imagine why they wouldn’t want to, knowing what we know now.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” was all I could say.

She’d started on a journey that I could scarcely imagine.

§

Sitting in my office, I was going over some research notes regarding Hurricane Ignacia. Needing a break, I decided to splinter in on a game of rag doll that some of the younger pssi-kids had started up in the Schoolyard. It was one thing to review data, but the data could never quite match the intuitive observations of actually sensing an event in process.

While the flitter tag game they played was straightforward from a game theory point of view, rag dolling wasn’t even really a game, and it was dominated by singular personalities.

Flitter tag had the organic feeling of birds flocking, the madly fluttering splinters of the children’s minds circling around each other in one body and then the next, in this world and then another. But rag dolling had an entirely different feeling to it, something decidedly uncomfortable. Watching these young pssi-kids at play, I couldn’t help getting the feeling there was something I wasn’t seeing.

The problem was in exactly what I couldn’t see. It was fairly simple to catalogue the changes to the body as people switched from one to the other, added phantoms and metasenses, or switched into entirely synthetic bodies in the metaworlds. We could even track the neurological adaptations going on.

The mind, however, was an emergent property of all this and more than just a sum of the parts. It was impossible to understand how minds were changing as a result.