Complete Atopia Chronicles

“Hmm…” I replied while my mind assimilated a thin stream of information from the splinter that had been attending her here, “about two hours I’d say. Everything seems to be working perfectly. In fact we’ve just activated the system. Your proxxi will explain everything to you once you get home. I would have woken you sooner but you just seemed so peaceful.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for that,” she said grumpily, swinging her legs off the side of the pod–bed and sitting up.

I tried to reach over to steady her, but she just pushed me off. I shrugged and leaned over to grab her clothes and hand them to her.

“I can take it from here, thank you very much,” she stated flatly and aggressively, waving me away.

I stared at her with concern, wondering if her intensely aggressive mood had been stimulated by some psycho-active response to the pssi stimulus, but a set of clinical notes floated into view in an overlaid display space. She was always that way. Everything was fine, then, in fact all of the other reports coming in signaled that this was another perfect pssi installation.

“I’m going to bring you in to speak to the doctor before you leave okay? He needs to have a final word,” I said, walking out the door and stopping outside to wait for her to finish getting dressed.

In a few seconds she was done, and strode quickly out the door and down the hallway, purposely avoiding looking my way. I watched her carefully, looking for any tell-tale tremors or jitters that could betray an issue with her motor cortex. She looked smooth, if not graceful, but then, her grace wasn’t my issue.

She hung her head around into the doctor’s office, and I walked over to observe the exchange.

“So how do you feel?” I could hear him asking her. “Please, come in.”

“No, I’m fine. I mean, I just want to get going. This was supposed to be under an hour, I’ve got things to do,” she complained to the doctor. “So just tell me quick, what do I need to know?”

“You have a very powerful new tool at your disposal now Olympia, just be careful with it okay?” explained the doctor. “I don’t think you should activate any of the distributed consciousness features for now.”

“Distributed consciousness,” snorted Olympia, looking back at me, “where do they get these ideas?”

I raised my eyebrows. Sensing my job here done, this splinter began to slide back towards the edges of my conscious awareness again to become just another voice in my sensory crowd. As it did, Olympia’s question resonated, sliding a part of mind off somewhere else, backwards in time, into my childhood.

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Infinixx had really begun as a pssi–kid game we’d invented called flitter tag.  In the forested yards of the Schoolyard at recess, we used to have huge games of it, jumping and chasing after each other in what seemed to the adults as completely nonsensical behavior.

More than just using pssi to venture off into virtual worlds, as pssi–kids we were the first to really master the art of body snatching—sneaking into each others’ sensory channels and taking control of each others’ bodies. Sharing bodily control was chaperoned by our proxxi that allowed the visitor to do what they liked as long as they didn’t hurt our bodies or do something we wouldn’t do or say ourselves. Proxxi also managed the transition, the handing off and receiving of control, so it all went smoothly and safely.

Sometimes it could get confusing, but then that was a part of the fun. If it ever became too much, whenever you were ‘out of body’ and lending it to someone or off in another world, you could always punch the Uncle Button and snap back into yourself, so you were never really far from home.

Flitter tag worked as we all jumped willy–nilly from each other’s bodies into the next. Whoever was ‘it’ was flittering their consciousness from this body to that, trying to reach out and touch someone else as we squealed and shrieked and jumped about from one body to another, randomly forcing resets as we punched our Uncle Buttons.  It was disorienting, completely mad and completely fun and there was nothing else quite like it when one was growing up as a pssi–kid on Atopia.

What started off as a simple game became ever more complex over time and we began to invent more and more rules. Of course we played not just in this world, but also jumping off into the endless multiverse worlds we played in.  It was during these advanced games of flitter tag that we first began to really experience distributed consciousness, working to keep track of new bodies we spawned, madly rushing through worlds of fire, water, ice, and skies and inhabiting creatures and bodies and physics of worlds unrecognizable to the experiential space of normal humans.  We didn’t realize what we were doing at the time. It was just natural.

As we grew older, many of my peers dropped off into what could only be described as self–indulgent gratification. I was the only one to seriously think about what had happened to us, to dissect how it had happened. This was the beginning of Infinixx.