Complete Atopia Chronicles

Even from a young age, it wasn’t just toys we played with, we also played with making ourselves into toys, altering our bodies to become teddy bears, worms, little flocks of soaring dinosaurs in endless sky-worlds and ever more alien creatures inhabiting ever more impossible spaces as our minds developed a fluid capacity for neuroplasticity. Our proxxi and educational bots constantly presented us with an endless barrage of games and puzzles to solve as we spun through these worlds, treating every moment as a learning opportunity.

From the first few years of our lives, from our point of view, our proxxi were simply our playmates. But for their part, though, they weren’t playing. They were constantly correlating the flood of neuronal data traffic through the smarticle network embedded in our bodies and matching it with our behavior.

It didn’t take long to learn a human wetware matrix, but our brains and nervous systems were still in development, and they were using our data to continuously redesign the pssi system. We were Cognix’s Guinea pigs, part and parcel of our parents’ agreement to participate in the Atopian project.

Almost all of my early childhood was spent with my proxxi—the ultimate tool in familial productivity enhancement. To us, our proxxi were our brothers and sisters, little artificial boys and girls we could play with.

This even became a primary selling feature of the program. After all, who had the cycles left over in today’s busy world to have even one child, never mind a second one?  Proxxi filled this need in the market by creating a kind of digital clone of your child to act as playmate, babysitter, and educator, or even your child’s twin depending on your point of view.

The floodgates were opened near our fourth birthdays. Around this age, one by one, we were gradually given independent access to our own pssi systems. Like quick little fish, we’d disappeared over and through the worlds that our parents understood, and began venturing out into the open network. The reign of the pssi–kids in the multiverse had begun.

Before then, we’d been limited to one body, but we learned to spawn our minds simultaneously into others. This was the beginning of my journey into the discovery of distributed consciousness.

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Leaning forward in my chair, I focused my mind on several key events unfolding in the worlds my consciousness was spread out into, all the while fine tuning the parameters of some phuturecasts that tied them all together.  A high–dimensional correlation matrix floated through my display spaces, and I watched it growing, pulsing and fading as predictions grew or fell in their interconnectedness.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

“You know what I think,” responded Cunard, my proxxi, and I did.

While we were talking, I was holding forth on dozens of splintered conversations in other virtual worlds while keeping an eye on reports coming in from a platoon of sub–proxxi and bots out collecting and spreading data with trusted, and not trusted, parties. I could sense a coalescing cascade in the mood of billions of humans out there, and subtle shifts in the goings on in the billions more worlds they wandered about.

The timing felt about right.

Distributing my consciousness that wide and thin was tiring, and I’d been at it constantly for nearly forty hours straight, even while arguing with Willy. An aching pressure was building up behind my collective eyeballs from the lengthy act of forced concentration. The Sleep–Over tabs worked great up to a point, but I was feeling sluggish after a long week. It was just beginning to pay off as I could feel the ebb and flow of the world’s opinion around the Infinixx project.  Just a little more certainty was all I needed, so I gritted my teeth, rubbed my many eyeballs and focused inwards and back outwards.

“Nancy!” someone called out, intentionally overriding my sensory dataflow using an emergency channel.  The interruption jolted me and my conscious webwork partially collapsed.  It was David, of course, I realized after a split second of hang time. I sighed but smiled as his face floated into view.

“C’mon Nance, come to Davey-boy.  Enough is enough.”

He was smiling too, but I could see concern worrying the corners of his mouth.

“Just a little longer. I’m sorry.”

I had a splinter ghosting him but I’d lost track of it. Visions of him cooking up a storm in the kitchen floated into view as I retrieved that conscious stream. Most of my awareness was still hovering in countless minds and bodies scattered throughout dozens of worlds.  I checked the pulsating high–dimensional correlation matrix one last time. Things looked good, and that was good enough for me.

I initiated a wrap to the session, and like a shockwave, streams of information flowed outwards from me into my agents across the multiverse.  Collapsing my cognitive webwork, it felt like a brick was being lifted off my brain.  The relief was palpable.