Complete Atopia Chronicles

The flip side of the coin was feeding data into our senses, whether touch, sight, sound or any of the dozens of other more minor senses humans possessed, to create an unlimited number of metasenses that warned or informed us of what was happening within the informational flow of the multiverse. Of course this included entirely synthetic sensory worlds we could transport ourselves into.

Now we could completely customize our bodies and senses to the way we wanted to interact with real and virtual worlds. Helped along by the neurotrophic growth factors we’d embedded into the smarticles suffusing through our nervous systems, we’d discovered that the brain had a stunning capacity to grow and adapt to the pssi stimulus, far beyond even our wildest imaginings at the beginning of the project.

I latched myself firmly into place at the conference table and connected my primary visual point of view to this spatial control phantom. As I stretched and moved it, my subjective point of view shot back outwards from the conference room to hover outside the building.

Then I dove down into the treetops below, stopping just above the Boulevard. Quickly I cycled this phantom back and forth, limbering it up, and then I unlatched the rest of my phantoms. As I sat in the conference room with my hands resting gently on the polished cherry wood table, my eighteen phantoms danced around me, and I concentrated as I felt each of them sliding through their interface points, coordinating my visual and metasense overlays.

These phantoms weren’t just projections; they were a part of my living, breathing body. It felt like I was dancing, and I leaned back in my chair, my eyes half closed and smiling, enjoying my performance.

With a short characteristic tone announcing his arrival, Kesselring, the principle owner and CEO of Cognix Corporation, materialized opposite me on the other side of the table. I quickly and immediately stowed my phantoms as if sweeping toys back into a toy chest. He smiled as he watched me packing them away, waiting for me to finish before he spoke.

Below a thick head of perfectly groomed black hair, Kesselring’s flecked hazel eyes shone intensely above a salt and pepper beard. The worn creases in his face projected just the right angles of intelligence and sagacity for a man of his stature.

“Great work with the press today, Patricia. You are the best. You looked great!” he announced with some enthusiasm, if perhaps a touch patronizingly.

“I do get tired of lying to them all the time,” I sourly complained.

Maybe I was annoyed at him for making me wait, or perhaps I felt silly being caught playing with my phantoms. Really it was because I couldn’t shake the surreal realization that we were planning a conspiracy of the vastest  scale, but, it wasn’t really a conspiracy, as in the end everyone would be complicit. We weren’t just building a better mouse trap here—we were building the best mouse trap of all time.

“We’re not really lying to anyone,” said Kesselring. “We’ve been over this a million times. I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing it up.”

“You’re right,” I sighed.

He was right.

We’d been over it countless times in the years since it’d become clear what we had to do, but as we neared the threshold, things just didn’t feel right anymore.

He changed the topic to what he’d really called this meeting to discuss.

“Do you think he suspects anything?”

I sighed deeply.

“Obviously he suspects something,” I replied, shaking my head, “but no, nothing to do with us, at least, not yet.”

The hamster wheel we had Vince running on hadn’t been my idea, but then again, it was only my deep connections into the Phuture News Network technology that made what we were doing to him possible. I’d also made some modifications to his proxxi, Hotstuff, to keep him where we wanted him. The intention had never been to actually harm Vince, but we couldn’t afford to let him see what we were planning, at least, not until it was too late to stop us.

“Good.”

“But he’ll figure it out eventually,” I pointed out. I was already having a hard time holding off his agents. “He’s already most of the way there.”

“Soon it won’t matter,” shrugged Kesselring. “And nobody would pay any attention to him anyway.”

A pause while I eyed Kesselring, trying to lay blame elsewhere for what I’d done to my friend. I took a deep breath.

“So we’re going to be giving it away for free?”

Kesselring smiled. “Free to install anyway.”

“And it doesn’t worry you that we’re not telling people the full story?”

He rolled his eyes and looked down into the conference table, tapping his fingers.

“Hal’s new work looks promising…”

“Christ, don’t get me started on Hal,” I scowled. I could see Kesselring was hiding something from me.

“I’m just saying…”

“I know what you’re saying.”

Using the problem to fix the problem was a disaster recipe for unintended consequences.