I turned my face up to feel the morning sunshine. Where my life before had been sliding into apathy, the past few months had led me on a spiritual journey into an almost mystical place. Decoding the hidden pattern had helped us navigate the most stable path through my future, and it was leading us further and further back. There was a hidden truth I was just beginning to glimpse, buried somewhere in humankind’s history.
The solution to my problem was simply to carry on. I was still engaged in a desperate struggle against death, but it had become more like a dance, with effortless action guiding me through. I’d reached a heightened state of being that I would never have been able to achieve any other way.
In the struggle to save myself, I’d been reborn.
As this timeline wore on, people began filtering out the predictions of my death as the attempts of another bored trillionaire at getting attention. The world, at large, was erasing me from their networks as phuture spam, and even the FDMs had gotten bored. The man with no future, who existed only in the moment, was invisible to a world fixated on anywhere but where they actually were.
On my end, I’d come to grips with my situation. My death had become a local solution to the universe that, with the massive resources at my disposal, I’d brought under control in a tight but stable spiral.
The irony just made it that much richer.
I was trapped by my future prediction systems, my own creation, unable to even tell people what was happening. Even more ironic was that I didn’t really even know if it all was true. It was possible that I was just running around every day, doing it all for no reason.
But then, this was life.
I smiled at that thought.
The existentialists did say that life was all about pulling the victory of meaning from the jaws of senseless absurdity, and in that I’d discovered a purpose I’d struggled to find before. That purpose was finding out who was doing this to me, and why, and the trail was leading back to core of Atopia.
INTERLUDE
Introduction to Patricia Killiam
Sitting and waiting. Perfect the art of sitting and waiting, and you will live a long, long life.
I was in the main Cognix conference room, perched about two thousand feet up in the complex spanning the tops of the farming towers at the center of Atopia. The afternoon sun was shining hotly through the glass window walls, and I was sure he was making me wait on purpose, knowing I had come here in person.
My mind was circling back to my press conferences this morning, about what I’d been telling the reporters. Truths and half-truths, I’d been mixing them both for so long that I hardly knew the difference anymore.
How is pssi going to change the world? To be honest, I really didn’t know. The real power of pssi, I wanted to tell them, was harnessing the brain’s natural ability for adaptively rewiring itself to extend the human mind into the multiverse—but this would only have earned me blank stares.
The human sensory and motor system had evolved to help us make sense of our environment, and to fend for ourselves within it. It was great when our ancestors were out hunting gazelles on the savannah, but the modern human environment was a massive flow of information, and pssi made it possible to plug our nervous systems directly into it.
Explaining that to reporters was just a bridge too far for me to cross with them. It was easier to let them run into some pssi-kids on Atopia somewhere—they’d get the idea soon enough.
I sighed.
Being present in the flesh was something I had started to do more and more, sensing my time growing short. Up here in the conference room, the security blankets blocked outgoing and incoming communications, so there was no escaping down a rabbit hole while I waited. But there was no sense in letting time, illusion or not, go to waste, so I decided to limber up a little.
Taking a deep breath, I straightened up in my chair and activated the visual overlays of my phantoms, which appeared arrayed around me. Concentrating, I began moving the phantom that controlled my spatial point-of-view. This little phantom was visible floating disconnected beside my body, like a little putty-colored finger, and I could move it around as if it was a part of my natural body.
Despite working with this technology for more than thirty years, it still felt strangely thrilling to feel this projection as a part of me, its tactiles and kinesthetics wired into my own sensory system, so that I could feel it stretch and click through the boundaries of its interface.
The brain had an almost inexhaustible capacity to neuroplastically rewire itself. Learn to play the piano and the brain devoted more of its motor cortex to your fingers. Cut off an arm, on the other hand, and your brain could adaptively learn to reroute control of an artificial arm by reworking the way it used various packets of neurons.
Phantoms were an extension of this.
Without removing any existing limbs or digits, we created virtual fingers and limbs in synthetic spaces using pssi to connect them to neurons in the motor cortex. It was like having a dozen extra hands to manage controls that were directly wired into our brains like a part of our bodies.
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 ones 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.
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 embedded in the smarticles that suffused through our nervous systems, we’d discovered that the brain had a stunning capacity to grow and adapt to the pssi stimulus, one 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 the spatial-control phantom I was exercising. As I stretched and moved it, my subjective point-of-view shot back outward from the conference room to hover outside the building.
Diving down into the treetops below, I stopped just above the Boulevard. Quickly, I cycled this phantom back and forth, limbering it up, and then I unlatched the rest of my phantoms. Sitting 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 as if I were dancing, and I leaned back in my chair with my eyes half-closed, smiling and enjoying my performance.
With a short, characteristic tone announcing his arrival, Kesselring, the principal 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 chest. Smiling, 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 his salt-and-pepper beard. The worn creases in his face projected just the right angles of wisdom for a man of his stature.
He beamed enthusiastically at me. “Great work with the press today, Patricia. You’re the best. You looked terrific!”