“Maybe later.” The moment had passed for him, too. “I’ve got a lot to do. Be careful with those storms brewing out there—could swing in some weird waves.”
“I will, I promise.” I gave him a small salute. “I’ll see you later.”
Martin returned the salute and winked as he signed off and faded from view.
5
How in the world did I get roped into attending a baby shower for a proxxid?
“Congratulations, Commander Strong!” I said enthusiastically, smiling as I reached out to pump his hand.
Rick smiled back and shook my hand, rolling his eyes slightly. “Thanks, Bob. Is Jimmy coming?”
“You’d know more than me, Commander.” Turning to his wife, I said, “And, of course, congratulations to the lovely new proxxid mother.” I laughed and reached over to kiss her on the cheek, looking down at the baby in her arms.
“And this lovely lady is?” asked Commander Strong, looking toward my date.
“Oh, ah,” I mumbled, turning to introduce my newish girlfriend. “This is Nicky.”
Nicky graciously introduced herself to the Strongs. I nodded, smiling, and then left them to it, wandering off toward the alcohol stand. I doubted Nicky wanted a drink, but I sure did.
A baby shower. How did I let these things happen to me?
Any party was, however, a great reason to get stoned. With that thought, I popped a tab of MDMA from my pocket into my mouth. Virtual drugs weren’t bad, but they weren’t quite the authentic experience, and I liked to style myself as a retro-abuser.
Just another great day in the world of Bobtopia.
Grabbing a drink, I walked over and sat down on a couch. We were waiting for some last person to show up to sing the birthday song, a crazy ritual someone had started for proxxid births.
Actually—we weren’t really waiting, since everyone everywhere knew exactly where everyone else was at any moment. We were just, well, what the hell are we doing?
I guessed we were waiting, but we all knew exactly how long we had to wait. There’s a difference, no? Perhaps we’d reached the end of waiting, and we were now experiencing some new verb that defined what waiting was, when we all knew exactly how long we had to wait.
I decided, right then and there, that I was going to call it phwaiting. Immediately, I published my inspiration into my social cloud. With my creative work done for the day, I scanned some Phuture News flowing across the bottom of my display spaces.
More celebrities were about to drop dead, or start doing tons of drugs, or stop doing them and go into rehab.
Boring.
Flicking my phantoms, I opened an overlay and researched the definition of “wait.”
Wait: transitive verb—to stay in place in expectation of.
This seemed to amount to what we were already doing. I guess we don’t need a cool new word. Already, my proxxi was splintering me over four thousand variations on the idea of waiting from the remaining distinct human languages. The inspiration was hollowed, and I posted an announcement regarding the death of phwaiting back into my social cloud and watched the meme explode and die.
At the same time, a fast-trending news report splintered that the Chinese were talking about sending a manned mission to Mars. It had been about thirty years since China had last landed men on the moon—on their best guess of Mao’s birthday one holiday season—but their plans for a permanent moon base had fizzled when the water deposits there had proven harder to extract than imagined. Now their new grand plans seemed ludicrous, even if Mars—and half of the rest of our solar system—seemed to be practically teeming with life.
Why spend any time or effort moving a physical body around when you could just flit anywhere in an instant using sensor networks? Everything that was happening in the outside world seemed amazingly wasteful and nonsensical to those of us who lived on the inside of Atopia—but then again, soon everyone would be as blessed as we are.
Bored, I collapsed most of my displays and opened up an overlay to watch a new game my friends had started. Sid, Vicious, Martin, and my own proxxi, Robert, were hot into an apocalyptic otherworld battle, pinned down in a cave by an android army and flanked by giant armored worms. It looked like a lot more fun than what I was doing, so I tried to splinter in, but Sid blocked me. That annoyed me, but he was right. Either I had to be there fully, or not at all. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of them. Anyway, I could just joyride in Robert if I wanted to experience it.
The rest of my displays held forth on a multitude of other live wikiworld feeds. The Bieb was just delivering his inaugural address as the 52nd President of the United States, and in an interesting first, was singing the first few lines of his speech.
I guessed that the “Bieb Bill” had passed allowing nonnatives to run for the highest office.
In another feed, Manchester United had just scored in a Premier League game, and they were replaying the goal with a stimcast of the hapless LA goalie that ended with him crashing face first into one of the goalposts, breaking his nose in a bloody explosion of pain.
What they managed to broadcast was a pale reflection of what his pain would have really felt like. Sensory broadcast technology was still in its infancy outside Atopia, but all that would be fixed soon with the release of pssi.
Flicking off the news feeds, I focused back on the battle the boys were in. Someone had just blown Martin’s head off. I sighed. Martin was hopeless.
I checked my dimstim stats and a few dozen people were still logged into my body. Christ, I was bored out of my head, and there were still people who would prefer to be me than do whatever boring shit they could be doing on their own.
Glancing at my bio-stats, I could see my heart rate was hovering in the mid-forties, my cortisol was a little high, my insulin low, but all systems go. Those stats would be moving around as soon as the MDMA hit. Looking good, Bob, I told myself. If your heart rate was any lower, you’d slip into a coma, and that sounds pretty good about now.
The room was crowded with people milling around, getting drinks, engaging in small talk, and doing whatever tiring stuff adults did at a baby shower. One side of the room was lined with retro-modern impressionists to match the sleek, minimal décor of the world they’d created for the event. The other side was a terrace, open to the outside, looking down from a few stories up onto the leafy beach promenade of east Atopia.
While I waited for the drugs to hit my bloodstream, sulking seemed like a good option, so I opened up Bunnies and sent a sub-proxxi to get me another drink. Innocent little rabbits appeared floating in space in front of me, exiting their underground warrens, sniffing the ground for food.
I flicked my finger at one of them, and a fireball magically issued forth, flaming toward the hapless little creature. It looked up, confused, and then squealed as the fireball engulfed it, crisping it into a pile of ash. The other rabbits ducked for cover, and then, slowly, crawled back out to sniff at their erstwhile compadre.
My eyes narrowed as I lined up my next victim.
“Bob, what are you doing?” came a subtext from Nicky. “Could we just be a little sociable?”
I grumbled and shut off Bunnies. Lucky little bastard didn’t know how close he came to the big ticket.
The sub-proxxi was back with my drink and I thanked him. Turning off my kinetic-collision subsystems, I rolled out of the couch’s embrace and stood up to stride purposefully through one of the remote guests, a round and balding little man who affected a shocked look.