“Ten! Ten!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, offering ten times the going rate. I was tired and frightened and wanted to get out of there.
A cab slipped from traffic to pull up beside me, my generosity earning me dirty looks from the people around me trying to snag their own ride. In return, I offered them my finger as the tiny gull-wing door of the cab opened.
I stepped inside and sat down. Cool, recycled air swept around me as the door clicked shut. I took a moment to collect myself, closing my eyes, exhaling softly, trying to relieve the pressure.
“Where to, lady?” chimed a metallic voice. It was a self-driving electric, one of those Hondasoft ones with the motors in the wheels—barely more than a plastic tub on roller skates, if you asked me, but a cab nonetheless.
I took a deep breath. “Ah.… ” What the hell was my office address? I sat upright in a panic. What was wrong with me? I’d worked there for over ten years.
“Lady, where to?”
“One second,” I snapped. Remembering I still had the mobile bud in place, I called up my tech assistant. “Kenny, what’s our office address?”
“555 Fifth Avenue,” a perplexed Kenny responded almost instantly, which I relayed to the cabbie.
My face flushed. How could I have forgotten my own office address? I needed a drink. The cab immediately accelerated and merged into traffic. Sitting back I took some deep breaths, trying to loosen up the tightness in my chest while we sped off.
2
Carefully taking one bright paper napkin from the black conference room table, I wiped the sweat from the nape of my neck. I was nervous. Patricia Killiam, the famous godmother of synthetic reality, had decided to personally attend the marketing meeting we had planned today, or at least her bio-simulation proxxi had.
This was much the same thing to Atopians.
The new Cognix account was the biggest to ever come through our office, and I’d been named as the lead for closing the deal. By winning it, I could finally step out from the shadows and take center stage. The pressure was intense.
I’d had to rush to get there, sprinting the last yards from the elevators, but I’d made it just in time. They’d immediately jumped me into my presentation to the Cognix people. My pitch was a mess––the incident with the robot and my blank-out in the cab had really thrown me—and my timing was off.
Well, at least my part was done. I sat back and watched my colleague Bertram finish the presentation.
I was thinking of my fight with Alex. It wasn’t just about living together. He was always on me to spend more time with his family, his brothers and sisters, but they always seemed to ready to critique me. It was a constant source of friction between us, made worse when he kept insisting that it was just my own insecurities. Raised in a big family, he wanted kids, but I had no idea how anyone could want to bring a child into this world. It was falling apart.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an incoming email from the Washington Heights orphanage I was working with. Maybe I didn’t want to have a kid with Alex, but that didn’t mean I didn’t care. I understood what it was like to be left alone. But that was my business. I erased the message before anyone else could see it.
I looked back up at Bertram. After the endless overtime I’d put into this account, I couldn’t believe my boss had almost given Bertram the lead on closing it. Floppy mop of brown hair, pantomiming away in that ridiculous multi-phasic suit, laughing at his own jokes. Judging from the way everyone was reacting to his end of the pitch, however, whatever he was doing was working. I could almost feel my career slipping away.
I needed a smoke.
Maybe I was getting too old for this. Kids nowadays had AIs running around doing most of their jobs for them. I had a hard time keeping up with it all. Thinking about kids made me think about Alex again. Had I made a terrible mistake? My stomach lurched.
“Cognix, making tomorrow your today!” gushed Bertram as he finished up, sweeping his hand into the distance with a flourish.
There was a smattering of applause.
Wait a minute. That’s my tagline. What was he doing presenting that today? I was supposed to be using it tomorrow. I thought we’d agreed.
My boss glanced at me. “Something wrong, Olympia?” The epitome of middle-management, Roger always had a coffee cup in hand and a seemingly unending supply of ill-fitting suits and cheap ties. “Do you have anything to add?” He lifted his coffee to take a sip. Everyone turned to look at me.
My God, it’s stuffy in here.
“I, uh, I… ,” I stammered, but I couldn’t get anything out.
It seemed as if all the air in the room evacuated, and a crushing pain tightened my chest like a vise. Wrenching myself up from the table I fled through the door in search of air.
“Someone call a doctor!” I heard Roger yelling behind me. My vision faded and blackness descended.
3
“Nothing more than a simple panic attack.” The doctor’s bald pate reflected the overhead panel lighting like a shimmering, sweaty halo above his radiantly clean lab coat. A stethoscope hung uselessly around his neck. He leaned forward over his desk and clasped his hands, bringing them up to support his chin in what I assumed was his thoughtful pose. “Are you still smoking?”
A stupid question. Of course he knew.
“Yes, but I stay fit.”
He nodded and looked at his notes, sensing this was a fight he didn’t want to get into. “This could be fixable via medication—”
“I’m trying to keep on an organic farmaceutical diet,” I interrupted. “I need to limit the medications.”
Something about him reminded me of the endless string of men my mother had dated after my father left. My parents’ relationship had been doomed from the start—trying to mix a Greek and a Scot was a surefire recipe for disaster.
The doctor stared at me, considering what to say next. “Stress and anxiety are the big killers these days. You really need to take care of this.”
They’d had me as an excuse to try to justify their angry entanglement, a glue that hadn’t worked despite their best attempts to argue and fight their way through it. In the process, neither of them had paid much attention to me. I’d taken my mother’s name, Onassis, as an adult. It was the only thing I wanted from her anymore.
“Olympia, are you all right?” The doctor had noticed my attention wandering.
“Yes, yes.” I just wanted to get out of there. “But there must be something else. What about more nanobots?”
“Those still use medications,” he explained. “Mostly they’re just delivery systems.”
“So I have to figure this out myself.” I rolled my eyes. “Meditation, relaxation.… ” What a load of bullshit, I didn’t need to add.
“That would probably work best in the long term, but I’m not so sure in your case.”
“So what are you suggesting?” Why couldn’t he get to the point already?
He took a deep breath. “I think we have something perfect for you, but I’ve been weighing the options.”
“And?” I waited for his revelation. He struck another irritatingly thoughtful pose.
“Stress and anxiety are deeply rooted problems in society,” he replied calmly. “While they respond to drugs, these don’t correct the underlying issues. Medical science has found ways to fix most major diseases, but the mind is a tricky thing.… ”
He adjusted himself in his seat. “There’s a new synthetic reality system that we’ve been testing with select clients,” he began, raising his hands to fend off my objections. “Before you say anything, there are no implants, nothing surgical anyway. You’ve already used the delivery nanobots, and this is just one step further.”