Complete Atopia Chronicles

“Atopia and Cognix aren’t simply about being green,” I pointed out, “but about boosting business productivity and profits to provide the basis for a whole new surge in the world economy.”

I could see the faces closest to me, reporters that were mostly familiar.  Beyond that, faces upon faces filled my display spaces into the blue–shifted distance.  This was a well worn speech for me, like a rutted track down an old country road.  Maybe not the best analogy, I chuckled to myself.

I stopped and looked up and around at the crowd. The pause was well rehearsed and I was enjoying this. I let a confidence inspiring smile spread across my many faces.

“And the Infinixx distributed consciousness platform is the solution that will carry business into the 22 century!”

The masses before me burst into applause.  I shook my head and looked down at the stage, trying to convey that I didn’t deserve such adulation.

“So… questions?” I asked, looking back up into the crowd.  I saw Tammy from World Press with her arm up. She was always a friendly starter.  I pointed at her and nodded.

“Could you describe for our audience what, exactly, distributed consciousness feels like?” asked Tammy. “I mean, how would you describe it, and not from a technical point of view.”

This brought hushed laughter. I was famous for inundating reporters with technical jargon that left them feeling like they knew less than what they started with, so I made an effort to make it simple.

“Sure, good question. The easiest way to describe it is like speed reading.  When you’re speed reading, you don’t really read every word—you read the first and last lines of paragraphs and scan for a few key words in between.  It’s sort of like that.”

“Doesn’t that imply you’re not really getting the whole picture?” asked Tammy.

Good question, but hard to answer simply. Distributed consciousness both was and wasn’t what it described.

It wasn’t really distributing your conscious mind; what it was doing was creating an estimate of your cognitive state at that point in time, and with the particular issue you needed to deal with, then tagging this with as much background data regarding your memories as it thought relevant and available. The system then started up a synthetic intelligence engine and sent it out to canvas whatever you wanted to look at.

From time to time this ‘splinter’, as we called it, would report back with compressed sensory data that would be perfectly understandable only to your frame of reference.

Imagine your best friend winking at you when you asked about someone you both knew—based on your shared experiences, huge amounts of information could be encoded in a single binary bit communicated this way. Infinixx was something like this—the ultimate data gathering, compression and transmission scheme, tailored exactly to your individual mind at that moment in time.

Even without pssi—the poly-synthetic sensory interface developed here on Atopia—we could approximate a lot of the techniques so that first time users could realize some benefits. At first this worked nowhere near as well as it did for long time pssi users, but still, it worked.

“Well, you are getting the whole picture,” I responded to Tammy after reflection, “just not every detail. Speed reading really comes down to the unconscious skill the reader has in scanning the right parts to focus on.”

I paused to let them soak in what I was saying.

“Infinixx technology provides that attentional context, as well as the sensory and cognitive multiplexing technology to make it easy for even a novice to begin distributing their consciousness into the cloud within a few hours.”

I scanned the upturned faces and watched them nodding, but that last sentence had injected a slightly glazed look into their eyes.

“Okay for instance,” I continued quickly, “the last meeting you attended, how much of that was just an excuse for a co–worker to ramble on about something that had nothing to do with you?”

This earned a few chuckles.

“However,” I declared, drawing the word out, “there were probably a few bits here and there that you found useful. Infinixx provides the ability to tune a small part of your attention to only those interesting bits, allowing you to ‘be there’ the whole time without actually needing to be there.”

“So how long does it take to understand how to use all this?” Max cut in.

“Even you’ll be able to use it right away, Max,” I joked as I winked at him. This earned some laughs. “We’re ready to go if you are!”

I tried to maintain a steady smile on Max. To fully realize the benefits of this technology, I was thinking, you really needed to grow up with it, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. Not right now, anyway.

3

Identity: William McIntyre

“IT IS IN our interest to work together, to find a way to shape our differences,” droned the Chinese Minister of State. Sure, in exactly the same way that you’ve shaped all previous differences; in your favor.