"Kenny, I hate dealing with all this technical stuff," I complained, "can I give you root access to my system and you handle the settings and dealing with this proxxi? I don't want to have anything to do with it, and quite frankly I find it, or her or whatever, disturbing."

"Not sure boss," he replied skeptically, "let me look into it. From what I understood, you can't hand off all the root functions, but give me a day or two to research it."

His geek love was sparking hard.

"Just don't waste too much time on it, right?" He'd just use this as an excuse to duck out of other work, the little weasel.

He nodded. "Okay."

"Any problem I have, I just call your name and you pop up, right?"

"Exactly," he agreed, "anytime, anywhere. Still, were you paying attention to the safety? If you need to reset the system there is this hardwired gesture recognition..."

He began motioning in the air, reaching towards his chest and twisting and pulling. It looked ridiculous.

"Look Kenny, I've got you, right? Or Dr. Simmons, or failing that I just call this proxxi thing, right?"

"Yes, absolutely." He smiled and shrugged, stopping what he was doing.

"I really don't like dealing with this AI and synthetic stuff," I sighed.

"But you were listening to all that, right?" he asked, furrowing his brow in feigned concern. "This system is very powerful."

I rolled my eyes. "Yes Kenny, I was listening, but just take care of it for me, okay?"

"Right boss," he replied with a shrug.

"Now, please set it so it removes all advertising as my doctor prescribed."

There was a short pause while he spoke to my new proxxi on his end.

"All done," he replied quickly. He smiled and raised his eyebrows.

That was fast.

I had to admit I liked the way I didn't need the mobile bud anymore, and the technology looked pretty amazing, even from just the proxxi session.

Waving Kenny away, I settled back into the couch. Mr. Tweedles made an attempt to come up for some affection, and I shoved him away. Not on my new authentic leather couch. What the h.e.l.l was he thinking?

It was time for bed. I picked my reading tablet up from the coffee table and walked off towards my bedroom. Quickly, I undressed and slipped under the covers, opening up the tablet to get back into reading a trashy romance novel I had been trying to finish, set in some ridiculous corner of the multiverse.

The pages of text quickly began to fade and blur as I tried to read them, and I fell peacefully off to sleep amid dreams of peaceful order and solitude.

5.

THE NEXT MORNING I awoke early, feeling unusually refreshed. At this time of year, the sun just managed to sneak into the alleyway between the buildings next to me and was casting some cheerful rays in through my bedroom window.

Laid out peacefully in my bed under the covers, my body was lethargic from sleep. I dreamily watched motes of dust settle and spin in the sunlight streaming in from the blinds. My mind was completely at ease for the first time in longer than I could remember. Something was different, but what?

Then slowly, very slowly, the noise from the street began to filter into my consciousness, gradually rising until it filled the s.p.a.ce it usually did. I realized then that the pssi interface had been filtering it out while I was asleep. No wonder I felt so refreshed.

Energized, I pulled back the sheets. Time to face the day! As I swung my terry cloth pajama legs off the bed, I called out to Mr. Tweedles, who trotted in obediently to rub up against me. I leaned down to pet him, then stretched and yawned and sat for a moment on the edge of the bed as I collected myself and put on my slippers.

"Okay, okay, enough!" I complained at Mr. Tweedles. I shooed him away and got up to pad off into the kitchen to pick up my morning cup of coffee that was waiting for me there.

Arriving in the kitchen, I began to fumble around for the holographic remote in the bowl of junk in the middle of the counter. As I rooted around looking for it, my morning Phuture News Network sprang into life by itself, dissolving the opposite wall of my living room. I blinked, surprised, and realized this must be my new pssi system again.

A message flashed up on the display. Mary had called again. I didn't make friends easily, but her and I had met a few months ago at a coffee shop nearby and had struck up an immediate friendship. She was beginning to annoy me a little as we got to know each other better. A hypocrite, and very judgmental. I ignored the message.

Sitting down on a stool at my granite breakfast countertop, I pa.s.sed my bowl of instant oats under the tap and a short jet of water filled it to the prescribed level. The oatmeal began sputtering and bubbling as the thermo-reactive particles in it prepared themselves, and I sat stirring it absentmindedly while I watched predictions of the day's news to come.

The new pssi display was amazing, it looked so good I felt like I could get up and walk right through from my living room and drop right into whatever I was looking it. At that moment it was a swirling storm system somewhere out in the Atlantic, grinding its way towards some unfortunate Caribbean island.

The image was far superior to my old holographic, and much better than the contact lens displays I found so irritating and headache inducing.

"By the end of the week," predicted the Phuture News weather anchor floating to one side of the display, "tropical storm Ignacia will reach hurricane status and quickly progress into the third major storm of the season."

They were projecting it would wash all the way up the coast and threaten New York, an almost regular occurrence.

In an overlaid display, Phuture News droned on about soon to be emerging conflicts in the Weather Wars along with a list of other clashes and predicted famines and disasters. It seemed it was all they ever talked about. No wonder everyone was anxious and depressed, never mind the advertising.

Oh well, I thought as I spooned my oatmeal rhythmically into my mouth and they detailed the death and destruction, what could I do about it?

"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 to find myself looking at me, or rather, a similar version of myself. My proxxi was strikingly composed in a tight, fashionable business suit with her hair done up in a severe bun. She looked amazing. Oatmeal dripped off my spoon as I looked at her. My 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, feeling violated and annoyed. I just wanted to have my oatmeal in peace. I hadn't requested any of this.

"I think that these may be most relevant regarding your work today," she continued, and a blur of images hung in an augmented display s.p.a.ce 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..."

I cut her off. "No, no, look, I just wanted to try this for the advertising block. I realize you are the main system interface but please, just communicate with Kenny, okay?" Anyway, my doctor had said to avoid distributed consciousness features, which is what this commingling of realities sounded like.

She shrugged. "Of course, Olympia. My apologies. I will interface with Kenny from now on until I hear otherwise from you."

With that she faded away. Honestly, I found this proxxi thing unnerving, but at least she hadn't given me any att.i.tude. She'd just responded to my request and gotten on with it.

I returned my gaze to Phuture News and began eating my oatmeal again.

"News off please!" 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 curiously both visible and somehow invisible at the same time. This technology was actually pretty amazing.

An image of some new war that was about to start hung in my new overlaid display. Maybe I shouldn't start my days with Phuture News. But even as I muttered this aloud, I could see a Phuture News feed at the bottom of my display saying there was a ninety percent chance I would anyway. I laughed. Obviously the system was a comedian as well.

As I sat mulling this, I picked up the new edition of Marketing Miracles from the counter, a rare print magazine, and leafed through it. My brow furrowed. That's odd. Then I figured it out.

"Kenny," I announced into thin air, "could you switch the advertis.e.m.e.nt blocking system off?"

Immediately the pages of the magazine began to morph, shifting and dissolving until the same page appeared before me, but this time with the advertis.e.m.e.nts in it.

"And, Kenny, now 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. Really amazing.

I sat bolt upright and listened hard to the noise from outside, paying attention more carefully. I could still hear the traffic and bustle of people, but the baseline clatter of the street hawkers and holo ads was absent.

Nice.

6.

WE'D WON THE first phase of the Cognix account. It was the biggest our marketing company had ever been awarded and I was something of a hero around the office. Bertram had even been tolerable lately, but only just.

Today we were 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 me, were attending remotely. I started up the holographic promo-world for the reporters to get the show started.

"Imagine," said an extremely 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 exotically anonymous beach, she began nodding, conveying to us that not only was it possible, but it was something that we needed, and that we obviously needed right away.

"Pssionics now enables limitless travel with nearly zero 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," laughed the girl, reminding us of everything 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 shifted into a more serious demeanor.

"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 the 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, and sign up soon for zero cost!"

The woman faded into the slowly rotating Atopian logo.

A short silence settled while Patricia let it all sink in. She was the master at this, and she should be after all the years she'd spent punting for it.

"So, how exactly is pssionics going to make the world a better place?" asked an attractive blond from one of the entertainment outlets.

I watched Patricia carefully 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 s.p.a.ces: Ginny.

"Well Ginny, I prefer to use the term 'polysynthetic sensory interface' or just pssi," replied Patricia, 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. n.o.body 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 as they'd all heard this before. I'd already heard this speech a dozen times myself, and my mind wandered off to thinking about how pssi had already changed my life. I certainly felt more rested. I began thinking of calling Alex, just to chat.

"Everyone!" announced Patricia, drawing my attention back to her presentation. That's right. This morning they were going to be doing the weapons demonstration. It was a good marketing stunt to show off that they were serious.

"If you'll allow me," continued Patricia, "I'd like to take whoever is coming up to watch the test firing of the slingshot."

Everyone nodded, and she took control of our visual points-of-view and pulled us up through the ceiling of the conference room and out above Atopia with dizzying speed. We shot upwards into the sky.

"So to answer your question, pssi will change the world by moving it from the destructive downward spiral of material consumption and into the clean world of synthetic consumption."

Our viewpoint began to slow as we neared the edge of s.p.a.ce. The curved horizon of the Earth was spread out in the distance, above oceans far below. The sun was just rising.

"Ten billion people all fighting for their piece of the material dream is destroying the planet, and pssi is the solution that will bring us back from the brink!"

Her finale was punctuated by a growling roar as the slingshot filled the air around us with a fiery inferno. The reporters clapped loudly in the background.

They couldn't get enough of this stuff.

7.

IT HAD BEEN a long day, and a creeping headache was just reaching a roaring finale by the time I finished late at night. After a few weeks of smooth sailing on the Cognix account, today we'd had our first major speed b.u.mp with the disaster of a Cognix-related project launch called Infinixx.

We were all in high damage control mode. The spectacle of Bertram in another one of his ridiculous outfits had just topped it all off. While I was slaving away, he'd spent most of the day trolling around the office a.s.sistant pool, looking for some ditzy new romantic victim.

Bertram and I had also just had a big argument about whether to use Patricia or some new young pssi-kid, Jimmy, as the main media presence for marketing. I was adamant about sticking with Patricia, but Bertram was just as convinced we should switch to someone newer and younger.

Everything and everyone at the office was getting on my nerves. I had to escape outside for a cigarette nearly every half hour to get away. I just wanted to be left alone.

I'd found out that Alex had started dating Mary. I didn't care, but their hypocrisy made me angry. Is this what friends did? I was having a hard time getting it out of my mind, and I'd blocked all of their incoming messages and removed them from my social clouds.

Grabbing a handful of antiinflammatories from my desk drawer, I got up to leave for the night, and downed the pills dry as I exited the giant bra.s.s and gla.s.s doors of our building out onto 5 Avenue.

I was lost deep in thought about how to spin the Infinixx mess when my senses were shocked by an expectational vacuum. Stopped in my tracks, I blinked out into the collecting dusk, looking out above the sea of people jostling past me.

It was as if a layer of noisy fluorescent dirt had been sc.r.a.ped off the City by the hand of G.o.d.