Tensing, Bob flooded his body with smarticles, quickening his nervous system, the world slowing down as his mind sped up. Spinning, he shot backwards a few steps, reaching out to grab a young girl just as she tripped and fell out into the street. A transport growled past just inches from them.
The girl gasped.
More threat alarms triggered. Someone grabbed a weapon in the bar behind him. The emotional constructs of the workers nearby spiked into aggression, and a police camera focused on him. The attentional structure of the whole area zeroed in on Bob.
Reacting without thinking, Bob launched a protective wall into the surrounding digital infrastructure, throwing up one hand with a dozen phantoms that he spun around himself and the girl. Doors and windows rolled closed and locked, and the cars and transports passing in the street skidded to a halt. Overhead, turbofans were redirected away from the area. Screeching white noise filled the audio inputs of people nearby, doubling them over in pain, while he scrubbed the local data and video feeds, firewalling off this section of the wikiworld.
“Stop! Stop!” Deanna yelled, running up the sidewalk behind him. “He’s with me.”
Still crouching, Bob looked around. He watched Deanna running toward him in slow motion. The person in the bar with the weapon was kicking down the door Bob just locked. Bob scooped the girl into his arms, getting ready to bolt, and then Deanna was there. She leaned close and held him back.
“It’s okay, let her go,” Deanna whispered into his ear.
With a crash, the door to the bar shattered open and a man appeared holding a shotgun. The gang of workers had disengaged from the white noise attack. They realized where it had come from, and their emotive aggression constructs spiked into directed anger focused on Bob.
“It’s okay, Phil, this is just a mistake!” yelled Deanna, holding a hand up at the man with the shotgun. She repeated to Bob, “Let her go, it’s okay.”
The girl was breathing in quick panicked gasps in Bob’s arms. He released her, and with a cry she pushed him aside and ran toward the man with the shotgun, collapsing into his chest.
“You’re that Baxter kid in the news,” said one of the workers, pointing at Bob. They might be in the country, but they were still connected. Even out here, he couldn’t escape the negative media. “We don’t want no smart-asses around here.”
Smart-asses. He meant people using Atopian smarticles. As pssi had spread, so had the pssi-kids. Celebrities in some circles, pssi-kids’ ability to infer thoughts, to seem like they were everywhere at once, was as unnerving as it was amazing.
“What are you doing mixing with them, Deanna?” asked the man with the shotgun.
“That’s my business.” Deanna picked Bob up. “You mind your own.” She whispered again in his ear. “Release everything, right now.”
Trusting more than understanding, Bob unlocked the windows and doors in the area. Close by and into the distance, their mechanisms clicked and snapped through the silence. The engines of cars and transports in the streets started up again.
Above the hum, Bob heard the man with the shotgun. “You get him out of here.”
“Not exactly the way to keep a low profile,” Deanna joked as they bumped their way back along the dirt road to the farm. “People aren’t used to pssi-kids in rural Montana.”
Bob sulked in the seat beside her. Reality had a different edge here, rough and wild, and wasn’t something Bob could mold the way he was used to. Even a cursory probe of the social cloud showed that almost nobody in Cut Bank was using pssi yet, even as the rest of the outside world had rushed to adopt it in the past weeks. Deanna was nearly the only one in the city even wearing lens displays.
“They’re afraid of what they don’t understand,” added Deanna when Bob didn’t respond. “All they have to go on are the lies spread in the mediaworlds about you.”
“I saved that girl’s life.”
A phuturecast sweep had tripped Bob’s alarms and predicted her stumbling over a dropped package onto the road, falling right into the path of an oncoming transport.
“I know that and you know that, but they didn’t see it. They just saw you running and grabbing her.” Deanna sighed. “That was her father with the gun. I know you know that now, but still, you should’ve looked a bit deeper yourself.”
He’d been too quick in assessing and reacting to the threat. He’d failed to parse that the man grabbing the gun was the father of the girl he was rescuing. He could have defused the situation, but instead he made it worse. He made it more dangerous.
“You want to try?” asked Deanna after another mile of silence, nodding at the wheel. Montana was one of the few states where it was still legal to manually drive—in the rest of the country only automated driving was allowed on public roads.
That got Bob’s attention, and his mind collapsed inward from the cloud of splinters following the truck. “Yeah, maybe I could get my proxxi to learn it…”
“I mean do you want to try it?”
Bob shifted in his seat. “Ah, maybe.” But he wasn’t sure. He spun back out into his splinters.
After another mile of silence slid by, Deanna smiled and looked at Bob. “One moment you can be like gods, and the next, babes in the woods.”
Coming up on the farm, she parked the truck next to the old barn out back. Its graying clapboard sagged under the weight of time. Part of its roof had fallen in. The timbers were rotten.
“Endless reality brings an end to morality, that’s what the doomsdayers are saying about Atopia,” Deanna said as they climbed out of the truck. The robot carriers in the back started unloading the lumber.
“Nothing is endless.” Bob’s main subjective, still flying around the fields, brought itself back to the conversation. “If it was endless reality, nothing would mean anything, and that’s not true.”
“It’s not?” Deanna smiled. She was teasing him.
“I’m here for Willy, my friends, and because Patricia asked me.”
“But you didn’t want to be here, did you?”
Bob looked down. The only place he wanted to be—where he burned to be—was next to Nancy, back on Atopia, but his friends needed him here. “That’s a hard question.”
Deanna paused and waited for him to look up. “But here you are.”
It was time for Deanna to get to work. They walked around the back of the barn and she unlatched its door, swinging it wide open. Something pinged her incoming circuits. Bob waited.
Holding onto the barn door, Deanna smiled. “Looks like one good turn does deserve another.”
“What happened?”
“The Commune granted Vince and Brigitte entry.” Deanna disappeared into the darkness of the barn.
Bob reviewed the message from the Commune’s Reverend that Deanna sent him. “They won’t let me and Sid in? Just Brigitte and Vince?” He tried to make sense of it. If this was in response to Bob saving that girl in town, then why wasn’t he invited?
A gust of air and dust and hay rocketed out from the barn. Bob squinted and staggered back. The sleek outlines of Deanna’s electric jet hovered into view, the setting sun glinting off its polished curves.
“No idea,” said Deanna, on comms now. The turbofan’s engine ratcheted up several decibels as it rose. “But looks like somebody’s watching out for you.” Her jet jumped up into the sky, receding to a tiny dot before disappearing on its way into New York.
Deanna was a two-sleeper—a tweeper—dosing up on a cocktail of melatonin and synthetics to sleep twice a day on her three-and-a-half hour commute into and out of New York on her personal electric turbofan each morning and night. The tweeper movement claimed it was natural to sleep twice a day and that this was the way humans used to sleep. The way they went about it wasn’t natural, though, tweaking their nervous systems with drugs and electronics.