4
The sense of touch is the most underappreciated of all the senses, at least of the senses the rest of the world has. When the first elemental life ventured out into the primordial goo, it was its sense of touch that kept it safe from danger. Touch is the most ancient of our senses, existing before any sight, sound, taste, or smell existed.
Touch is essential to the sense of things being a part of your body. When playing tennis, nobody thinks about the racquet hitting the ball as they swing. The racquet just becomes a part of us. Tools that begin as extensions of our bodies soon become a part of it—it’s the way the human mind works.
The same process applies to any tools we used, and pssi made it possible to make tools out of the information flow in the multiverse and incorporate it into our bodies in much the same way.
For me, the flow of information was an apt metaphor. As surfing became my obsession at a young age, my innovation had been to remap my tactile sense into the water around me.
Sitting on my surfboard, bobbing up and down between the swells, I could feel the pressure, shape, and temperature of the water’s surface around me through my skin. The thousands of neurons attached to each hair follicle could sense even tiny subsurface eddies and water currents.
After nearly twenty years of dedicated practice, my brain had neuroplastically reformatted to devote a large part of itself to my water-sense, and I now had the most highly attuned tactile array of any pssi-kid, or for that matter anyone else in the world. Sitting with my eyes closed, I could feel the water moving and undulating around me as a perfectly natural and integral part of my body.
I was one with the water, and it was one with me.
Still a little hungover from the previous evening, I opened my eyes to awake from my reverie. Atopia sure was pretty from out here. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move, and a beautiful stag burst forth from the forest underbrush. We eyed each other for a moment, then he disappeared.
Above decks, the floating island of Atopia was covered in forests that were teeming with “wild” animals, but like everything else, their neural systems were loaded down with the smarticles that floated in the air and water around us. Everything here was a part of the pssi network, but I doubted that the animals ever realized they were off in virtual worlds as they stampeded through synthetic savannahs while vet-bots tended to their real bodies during downtime.
Not much wild was left in the world today. It was ironic that tourists now lined up to come to a completely artificial island that was built to perfect synthetic reality, all to enjoy a shred of the old reality by dusting themselves down in smarticles.
Smarticles were the pixie dust that permeated everything on Atopia, a system of nanoscale particles that worked as both a sensor and communication network. They suffused through the bodies of living creatures, lodging into their nervous systems to form the foundation of pssi.
The polysynthetic sensory interface enabled not just the ability to jump off into virtual worlds, but also the sharing of experiences and even bodies. A philosopher had once rhetorically asked what it was like to be a bat, meaning that it was something we could never know. But here on Atopia, you could inhabit a bat, a bear, a fish, a shark, a tree, and even sometimes, yourself.
The beaming sun was drying the saltwater into crystals on my skin, making it itchy as it baked. I scratched my neck and shifted positions on my board. A breeze mixed the sea air with the musty odor of a tangle of seaweed floating nearby. Though the water was cold, my pssi tuned it out, and I was perfectly comfortable. I just had to be careful my muscles didn’t get too sluggish.
Seagulls wheeled in the sky, and otters were playing in the kelp not far away, chattering away about whatever otters chattered about. Some were floating around on their backs, eating a breakfast of clams they’d scrounged from the aquaculture bins below.
Out here I felt a certain peace that escaped me elsewhere, a deep meditative calm outside the madness. Often, I came to think about Nancy, to think about my brother, to think about how I’d messed everything up. Looking up, cirrus clouds striped the blue cathedral of the sky.
Just another day in paradise.
After some fuss, Vince Indigo, the famous founder of Phuture News, had agreed to hit the waves with me this morning. He’d become my regular surf buddy in the past year, but had recently, and without explanation, dropped off the map.
Convincing him to come out had been a major struggle, and even now, he didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. He was just staring into space, uncharacteristically quiet. I was about to call out to him, to see what was bugging him, when I was interrupted.
“Hey.”
I looked down to find a pssi-projection of Martin sitting on the front of my board. We bobbed up and down in the swells together.
“Hey to you, too, buddy,” I responded sheepishly. “Sorry about this morning. I know it was your birthday.”
Martin always kept the same clean-cut, square-jawed image going despite the vagaries of fashion—fashion being so ugly these days that its look had to be changed almost hourly. His pale blue eyes reflected the skies, and I admired the tight buzz cut he was sporting. Buzz Aldrin came to mind, or better, Buzz Lightyear.
“Don’t worry about it. Dad gets worked up, but I don’t care.”
“Thanks for not ratting on me. So—Inuit, huh? No Eskimos left in this world?”
“Not according to me, I guess.”
We laughed together. It was nice.
“I get so tired of him talking about Jimmy all the time,” I added.
Martin nodded. “I know what you mean.”
When we were growing up, I was nearly the only one who’d tried befriending Jimmy. He was an oddball kid, but he shared the same birthday as my brother, and I’d felt some kind of affinity toward him. These days, I almost wished I hadn’t.
When his parents had abandoned Jimmy as a teenager, Patricia Killiam, his godmother and head of the Solomon House Research Center, had asked our family to take him in. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say, and Jimmy’s presence seemed to only accelerate the downward spiral our family had already been in. To our father, Jimmy had become the shining star and savior of our family honor. I suppose I really didn’t have anyone to blame but myself.
“I guess it’s hard to be encouraging if your son’s a stoner,” I laughed sourly. “Anyway, who cares? I’m doing what I love.”
“Then what more could you ask for?”
I smiled, enjoying the soothing sensation of the water rolling through my skin.
“Got some big action today, huh?” Martin asked, changing the topic.
“Huge!” I confirmed.
He must have checked out the big barrels being laid down across the northern crescent. Storm systems were generating some dangerous waves today—just how I liked it.
“Anything interesting?”
One of my phuturecasts was focused on the incoming swells, predicting the shape and size of the break, how the pipe would develop, and a dozen other factors. I could sit there and watch the horizon for waves, but using a dedicated phuturecast, I could track swells coming from miles away and select the perfect one to get set at just the right point.
“A few nice ones, but I’m waiting for the beast.”
Martin laughed. “Perfectionist, huh?”
“With some things.”
“Yeah, with some things.” He smiled and looked away.
“Bob!” came a yell from across the water. It was Vince, waving at us. “Bob, I need to get going!”
“Already?”
“I need to get back to that thing. Hotstuff’s on my back. ”
I wondered again what had his hair on fire. “I have a hard time imagining anyone telling you what to do. But anyway, ping me if you change your mind.”