The man sitting on the bench—the priest, the Destroyer—smiled at Bob. “So now you see?”
Bob looked at the priest. “Yes, I see.”
“Good,” said the priest. “So now we begin.”
Glossary of Terms
Atopia
An independent, sovereign city-state that is a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean, about 2 miles across and reaching more than five hundred feet into the depths of the ocean, home to half a million Atopians. It is the largest platform in the Bensalem group of platforms that are first recognized as sovereign nations by the United Nations in the mid-twenty-first century. These are high-tech retreats where the world’s wealthy come to escape the crush and clutter of a packed and polluted Earth. Cognix funded the development of Atopia as a capital project, as well as to gain their own regulatory environment to proceed with the development of pssi technology and clinical trials that would have been difficult or impossible elsewhere.
Cognix (Corporation)
This is the leading technology company of the mid- to late-twenty-first century that rises to dominate the “synthetic reality and intelligence” market. The founder, Herman Kesselring, uses his amassed fortune to fund the construction of Atopia and the pssi project.
Distributed consciousness
This isn’t really “distributed consciousness” but a simulation of this, using “splinters” that allow a user to send a version of themselves to be at an event or investigate something without needing to actually be there physically.
Infinixx (Corporation)
This is an Atopian start-up (Atopia is like a new Silicon Valley where entrepreneurs flock to develop new synthetic-reality applications) that is using the pssi platform to create “distributed consciousness,” which is targeted as the top business productivity app for Cognix.
Phantoms
Phantoms is a contraction of “phantom limbs” and in the context of pssi refers to additional fingers or hands or limbs that are created in purely virtual spaces that the user can control using their adapted motor control centers. Just as when a person has a limb amputated and can learn to operate a robotic arm by reusing other packets of neurons (using the principle of neuroplasticity), using pssi, a person can learn to control a dozen or more purely virtual “fingers” that can operate workspace in synthetic spaces. Many Atopians, and more specifically pssi-kids, grow dozens of phantoms.
Phuture
Where the future is the singular outcome of this universe in the next moment of time that your mind finds itself in, a phuture is a “possible future” and just one of a set of any possible future universes this timeline may slide into (and that your mind might find itself dragged into). A phuture could be simply regarded as a probabilistic event that either happens or does not happen, or they could be equally regarded as real alternate universes that sprout out from the present moment of time. This is based on the “nearly infinite multiverse” model of multiple universes and timelines that many physicists think is how the world may work.
Phuture News Network
A twenty-four-hour news network, but instead of dealing with news of today, it reports on the news of the phuture. It delivers high-probability news stories that haven’t happened yet, with a particular focus on celebrity (e.g., “Tomorrow morning, a famous celebrity will die in a plane crash”). Phuture News is used not just to passively watch what will happen to the outside world, but to predict what happens in people’s immediate environment (e.g., friends, family, work, etc…). Combined with pssi, people on Atopia don’t just read about possible future events, they actually experience them as they begin to live even further in the worlds of tomorrow.
Proxxi
In the pssi-technology platform, a proxxi is the digital alter-ego of the user that is a synthetic intelligence construct based on the cognitive models of the user, and that, importantly, retains a sensory recording of everything the user has ever seen, touch, heard, tasted, etc… (a more-than-memory recording of their memories). The proxxi is the entity that helps the user navigate pssi space, hopping from one synthetic reality to another, even allowing other people to enter their owner’s sensory streams (equivalent to “ghosting” into someone else’s body) or allowing other people to totally take over someone’s body. Importantly, the proxxi can walk and talk with the user’s body when the user is away, physically protecting the body, and also coordinate hand-over of the body when another user occupies it. A user can commingle, or combine, their subjective reality with the reality experienced by their proxxi. For Atopians, a proxxi is a direct stand-in for its user, accorded the same respect and identity as the user themselves. Under the pssi protocols, users can only assign one proxxi, but they often create multiple sub-proxxi to attend multiple events at once. Proxxi are also the entities responsible for creating “splinters,” which are parts of the proxxi that are splintered off to attend or review events or appointments. This becomes a cultural convention—sending a proxxi is a full stand-in for a person for an important event, but only sending a splinter means this is less important. The full attention of the a person is termed the “primary subjective” and it is rare that a person’s primary subjective would be in only one place at one time, even more rarely within their own body.
Psombie
A psombie is when a human’s body is occupied by a machine intelligence that has nothing to do with the person (i.e., their body is not left in the control of their proxxi or even a splinter, and they have no subjective sensory stream coming from their body that they can tap into), often when a person leases or lends their body to perform work when they don’t need it—or in the event they are incarcerated for crimes, their minds will be disconnected from their bodies, and their minds imprisoned while their bodies are used to help in farming or cleaning during the sentence period. On Atopia, psombies occupy and run the vertical farming complexes as well as cleaning the property.
pssi
This term is purposely uncapitalized because it is so commonly used)—acronym for “poly-synthetic sensory interface.” This is a platform of technologies that enables an absolutely perfect synthetic reality—a perfect sensory reconstruction of sight, sound touch, smell, taste, plus a range of 20-plus other senses. For example, the sense of touch by itself is made up of five senses—tactile, kinesthetic (the position and motion of limbs), sense of temperature, sense of skin being penetrated, and the proprioceptive sense of things being a part of our bodies.