“Good morning. I hope you didn’t mind, but I filtered out the street noise last night. I thought it would help you sleep better.”
I looked up from my oatmeal. My proxxi was sitting across the counter from me, strikingly composed in a tight, fashionable business suit with her hair done up in a severe bun. She looks amazing. Oatmeal dripped off my spoon as I took her in, uncomfortably aware that my own hair was a frizzy mess.
“I also took the liberty of preparing a relevant summary of world events that happened while you were sleeping,” she said brightly.
I stared at her. I just wanted to have my oatmeal in peace.
“I think that these may be most relevant regarding your work today,” she continued, and a blur of images hung in an augmented display space in front of me. I put my spoon down. “Instead of talking, it would be easier if we could commingle my subjective reality with yours—”
“Look,” I cut her off, “I just wanted to try this for the advertising block. I realize you are the main system interface, but please deal through Kenny, okay?” Anyway, my doctor had said to avoid the distributed consciousness features, which was what her commingling of realities sounded like.
She smiled. “Of course, Olympia. My apologies. I will interface with Kenny from now on until I hear otherwise from you.”
With that, she faded away. This proxxi thing was unnerving, but at least she hadn’t given me any attitude. I returned my gaze to Phuture News and my oatmeal.
“News off!” I announced, wondering how the pssi system would respond.
Magically, the display faded and my wall returned, but the system left behind a persistent visual overlay that was both visible and somehow invisible at the same time—information about some war that was about to start in Africa hung in my new overlaid display.
“Maybe I shouldn’t start my days with Phuture News,” I muttered aloud, and immediately a Phuture News feed at the bottom of my display said there was a 90 percent chance I would anyway. I laughed. The system was a comedian as well.
Picking up the new edition of Marketing Miracles from the counter, a rare print magazine, I leafed through it. That’s odd. Something wasn’t right.
And then I figured it out.
“Kenny,” I announced into thin air, “could you switch the advertisement blocking system off?”
Before my eyes, the pages of the magazine began to morph, shifting and dissolving until the same page appeared before me, but this time with the advertisements on it.
“Kenny, put the advertisement block back on, please.”
The images and text on the page quickly shape-shifted back and the adverts dissolved away.
Amazing.
As I considered this, I realized that the news broadcast hadn’t had any ads floating across it either, nor had it been interrupted by any advertising breaks. Sitting bolt upright, I listened hard to the noise from outside. I could still hear the traffic and bustle of people, but the baseline clatter of the street hawkers and holo-ads was absent.
Really amazing.
6
“Congratulations on the win, Olympia.”
“Thank you, Ms. Mitchell,” I replied quietly. We’d won the first phase of the Cognix account, and I was sitting next to one of the firm’s senior partners, Antonia Mitchell.
It was the biggest contract our company had ever been awarded, and I was something of a hero around the office. Bertram had even been tolerable lately.
Antonia smiled back at me. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, please continue.”
The day’s main event was helping run an online press conference with Patricia Killiam, Cognix’s most famous scientist and primary press presence. The meeting was being held in one of the Atopian conference rooms. Many of the reporters were actually on Atopia with Patricia in the room, but most people, like Antonia and I, were attending remotely.
Atopia was one of the floating city-states, physically located somewhere in the thousands of miles of open ocean in the Pacific off California. The technology they were developing, and we were marketing for them, enabled perfect simulated reality. That meant place and distance ceased to have any real meaning for them. Antonia was participating in the meeting using an older, lens-based virtual reality technology, but I used my new pssi system.
I started up the holographic promo-world for the reporters to get the show started.
“Imagine,” said an attractive young woman, or man, depending on your preference, “have you ever thought of hiking the Himalayas in the morning and finishing off the day on a beach in the Bahamas?”
As she walked along an exotic anonymous beach, she smiled confidently, conveying to us that not only was it possible, but it was something we needed, and needed right away. “Pssionics enables limitless travel with no environmental impact. You’ll be having the most fun, with the lowest combined footprint, of anyone in your social cloud!”
“And you’ll never forget anything again,” she laughed, reminding us of all the things we’d ever thought we’d forgotten. “You’ll never again have to argue about who said what!”
While we all contemplated the things our mates had gotten wrong over the years, her face became more serious.
“Imagine performing more at work while being there less. Want to get in shape? Your new proxxi can take you for a run while you relax by the pool!” she exclaimed, stopping her walk to look directly into each viewer’s eyes. “Look how you want, when you want, where you want, and live longer doing it. Create the reality you need right now with Atopian pssionics. Sign up soon for zero cost!”
The woman faded into the slowly rotating Atopian logo, a pyramid with a sphere balanced at its apex. A short silence settled while Patricia let it sink in. She was the master at this, and she should be after the lifetime she’d spent working on it.
“So how exactly is pssionics going to make the world a better place?” asked an attractive blond reporter from one of the entertainment outlets.
I watched Patricia roll her eyes. She didn’t like the term “pssionics,” too much baggage. The blond reporter’s name floated into view in one of my display spaces: Ginny.
“Well, Ginny, I prefer to use the term ‘polysynthetic sensory interface,’ or just pssi,” Patricia replied, detaching from her body.
A computerized image of Patricia floated up above her body and continued to talk with the reporters while her proxxi walked her body along beneath the projection. Nobody batted an eye. They weren’t easily impressed anymore.
“We’ve been able to demonstrate here on Atopia that people are just as happy with virtual goods as material ones. You just need to make the simulation good enough, real enough.”
Everyone nodded. They’d heard this before—as had I, at least a dozen times, and my mind wandered off to thinking about how pssi had already changed my life. I certainly felt more rested, and I started to consider calling Alex, perhaps just to chat.
“Now, if you’ll allow me,” continued Patricia, “I’d like to take whoever is coming up to watch the slingshot’s test firing.”
Her asking was a formality as they’d all signed off already, but they all nodded just the same. Patricia took control of our collective visual points-of-view and pulled us up through the ceiling of the conference room and out above Atopia with dizzying speed. We shot upward into the sky, while the green dot of Atopia receded into the endless blue of the Pacific below us.