The twilight at the end of the day was gray as the lights of the city lit up the sky, the concrete and metal and glass of the city the same color as the sky and the sea, all of it indistinct from the other in a precipitation that was neither rain nor mist, but something shifting in between.
“So this is New York,” Sid laughed, staring into the gray mist. “Been here a million times, but never in the flesh. Can’t say I like it better like this. I should go visit Uncle Avi just to see the look on his face—”
Bob grabbed Sid’s arm.
“I know, I know, we can’t talk to anyone.” Grinning, Sid brushed off Bob’s hand.
Bob shook his head. “You know who you’ve always reminded me of?”
“Why do I feel like I don’t want to know?”
“Jimmy.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” Bob smiled. “You guys are two peas in a pod. It’s why I talked to him way back then.”
Sid smiled. “So I remind you of a psychopath?”
“Not the psychopath part, but the hidden nerd, thinking you’re better than everyone else.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I mean that in the best possible way.” Bob put an arm around Sid, pushing him forward. “Come on, keep moving.”
Images of Jimmy hung everywhere around them—on billboards and floating holograms at street corners—part of the ubiquitous advertising campaign for the product launch of Atopian pssi. Beside him in many of the advertisements was Nancy.
Bob didn’t overlay a reality filter to erase the images. Filtering reality here felt dangerous. Instead he augmented it, overloading his senses, searching for threats, always on the hair trigger. Fifty feet in the air a self-propelled NYPD gun platform hovered past, and tiny ornithopter drones buzzed through crowds like insects.
A news overlay announced that Atopia had withdrawn support for SyBCoR, led by Nancy.
Sid glanced at Bob, seeing the same news report. “What the hell’s going on?”
Bob studied the background of the report. There was little detail, apart from an admission that SyBCoR would undermine the financial structure of the modern world. But there was no way Nancy would’ve withdrawn support for that without some intense pressure being applied to her.
Seeing Nancy’s face hovering above him, worrying about what was happening to her—it felt like a spike was being driven into Bob’s head. He escaped by letting a splinter sweep above the bay, sailing over the top of the Statue of Liberty. She was ringed by her own skirt of concrete to keep out the rising waters. Spinning further out to sea, he turned his point-of-view to look back at the twinkling city under the setting sun, extending his view as wide as he could. The AEC—American East Coast—was now over a hundred million people in an unending metropolis that stretched from Boston to Washington.
At the start of the twenty-first century, there’d been only thirty nations of the world’s three hundred with declining populations, but now only thirty had ones that were increasing. The humanscape, like the seas and land, was stagnating. Many of the big cities of over a hundred million—Guangzhou, Mumbai, Sao Paulo—had gone feral, their ground levels given over to street gangs. The rich lived in their padded penthouses, part spas and part life-support systems, living out unending twilights in endlessly aging bodies. They said the meek would inherit the Earth, but nobody said anything about the state it would be in when it was time for the handover.
“Really?” Sid said, interrupting Bob’s thoughts. “Jimmy? I remind you of Jimmy?”
Bob pulled his main perspective back into his body. “Not happy with that, huh?”
“No, I mean—”
“What I really meant was, you both value intelligence and knowledge above everything else. I think that whatever we find out here, maybe we could use that to tweak Jimmy somehow. Get inside his head.”
Sid walked in silence for a few moments. “Oooh, I see what’s going on.” He turned to face Bob, walking backward. “You want to save Jimmy. You don’t think he’s as bad as Patricia says he is.”
“I don’t know.” Bob wagged his head back and forth. “Maybe, I just don’t see him doing all this stuff. He’s changed somehow.”
“People change…”
“I know. But come on, nobody ever thinks they’re really a bad person. They always think they’re doing whatever they’re doing for some good reason. So what’s his reason?”
“Cause he’s gone bat shit?”
“I’m serious. Ever think that Jimmy is just mad at the world?” But was he just projecting his own feelings onto Jimmy?
Sid considered this. “Still doesn’t give you the right to do whatever you want.”
“Yeah, but it gives you a reason. If he thinks he was abused by his parents, hard to blame him…”
Sid shook his head and laughed. “You’d love a leech if I gave you a sob story about it.” He grabbed Bob and pulled him forward. “Move faster, the identity theft algorithm works better with constant motion.”
Bob watched the names and details of the people that walked by him pop up into splinters, each one briefly pasting the identity onto Bob. Mr. Brooks, brushing by Bob on his right, had just left his wife and was on his way to his mistress. Peter Lucasis, standing a few feet behind Bob, was probably thinking that he should have never let his girlfriend convince him into getting a cat. All of this was derived from data that was either publicly available or hacked from databases on the fly.
New York was refreshing in one sense—Bob’s metasenses felt full again.
Already half of New Yorkers had started using pssi, and Bob let his secondary subjective spin through the mishmash of childish reality skins they were sporting, flimsy virtual realities he could poke a hole through with his phantoms. The more people that shared a reality, the stronger that reality became, but here they were all stuck in their own. Most of them hadn’t bothered to change their conscious security settings, and he heard their meta-cognition systems chattering around him like an angry beehive.
Worse were the non-augmented humans. They weren’t pssi-aware, but there were enough smarticles floating in the air of New York already that some suffused into their bodies, passively interacting with the environment. They weren’t supposed to be active, but Sid’s systems could tap into them, sense their nerve impulses to paint a picture of their unprotected minds.
Bob sensed that the man next to him was about to ask him to take a picture. The words hadn’t yet formed in his mouth, and he hadn’t even really decided yet, not consciously. But the nerve impulses that preceded his decision making were already there. It was fractions of a second perhaps, but the decision had already been made, and the man wasn’t even aware of it yet.
Bob was. Bob waited.
Fractions of a second stretched out in time as Bob quickened his nervous systems in a short burst. “Want me to frame a picture for you?”
The man turned, surprised. “Yeah. Please. Ah, Steve Barker, 06913564.”
Bob had already stolen Steve’s unique social marker to use as his own identity for the next seconds, but Steve didn’t know that. Bob made a show of entering the USM by typing into the air with one hand. Sid stopped and turned to watch from a few paces away. Gathering up his daughter and wife, Steve took a step toward the Sea Wall. Bob stepped back and smiled, framing some stills from the wikiworld and sending them into the man’s social cloud.
“Thank you,” said Steve’s wife, and with a nod and a smile, they continued on their way.
The man hadn’t even been aware of the request he was about to make, even though it was preordained by his own chemical nerve signals. It was more than phuturing, more than making statistical predictions based on past events. It was a foregone conclusion, a decision already made before Steve consciously knew it. Was he really making a choice? Did he have a choice? Or was it all an illusion, just preprogrammed? Was all the world just a stage for a play already written?