Complete Atopia Chronicles

“You want me to what?” I exclaimed. “You know this is going to look suspicious, especially with me working for Infinixx.”

“From what I’ve heard, you don’t work for them anymore.”

I stopped fidgeting and stared at Vince, wondering how much he really knew. “Yeah that’s right, but it will still look odd.”

“You wouldn’t be making any profit off this, and nobody will know,” he explained. “I know it seems crazy, but if you could do this for me, and keep it quiet, I can pay you an awful lot of money. I need you to dump all that stock and chalk up a huge loss for me, and I need you to do it from New York.”

I could see Vince had ulterior designs afoot, and that was fine with me. He was offering a princely sum for almost no work. So this was what it was like to be in with the big boys. I didn’t care what he was up to and it didn’t look illegal—at least, my end didn’t.

“You be careful,” said Vince after a moment.

“It doesn’t look like there will be any problems with this transaction, Vince, in fact…”

“No, not with that,” he said simply, stopping me in my tracks, “with what you have going on here.”

“There’s nothing going on here.”

We both stood and stared at each other.

He sighed. “Just be careful, okay?”

“No problem, Mr. Indigo,” I replied immediately, shrugging, and I offered my hand to shake. He shook it, smiling weakly, and then flitted off without another word.

Wally materialized facing me on the white couch in my apartment. A dense security blanket shimmered around us like sparkling neon plastic wrap.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

Wally knew both as much and as little as I did. He shrugged and shook his head.

“Listen, Wally, I’m suddenly feeling very nervous. We have a great thing going here, but we need to protect ourselves.”

Being splintered into a hundred pieces was great for business, but it was taking a toll on my mind. Focusing on the market all the time left me a little stunned when I returned into real space, and I was letting details slip more and more often.

On the other hand, I felt like I was approaching some new kind of state of being, a perfectly self-sufficient and self-contained human being. I spent all day talking with various parts of myself, and held forth on meetings of mind with dozens of my splinters at a time. The only distinctly different entity I spoke with was Wally, who was basically a copy of me anyway. Vince and Bob were the first real humans I’d spoken to in days, perhaps even weeks now.

“Wally, when I’m off in the cloud, I need you to protect us here. I need you to make sure we’re safe, okay?”

He looked at me steadily and replied, “Sure thing, boss.”

We looked at each other for a few seconds. With that I flitted off to New York to get working on Vince’s project.

If I didn’t need anyone else’s help anymore, I definitely didn’t want anyone interfering. More than anything, though, I absolutely didn’t want to get caught.

10

Identity: Nancy Killiam

THE LAST FEW weeks had been a compressed explosion of frenetic activity at Infinixx.  Our hundred or so team members had managed to output the workload of a thousand, and then two thousand, workers compared to outside levels of productivity. We touted our accomplishments almost hourly as the launch date arrived. The world’s business community couldn’t wait to get their hands on it.

Building out the platform itself had been fairly straightforward once we had the core in place. A bigger struggle than the technology had been all the internal Atopian politics.

Since I was pushing to have my own launch before the Cognix release of pssi, and we needed to embed some pssi technology into our systems, the result was a messy cross-licensing arrangement. I had Aunt Patricia on my side, but it had still been a fierce fight.

“Give me one good reason we should let this happen,” fumed Dr. David Baxter at the Cognix meeting when we’d finally gotten it all approved.

He’d been steamed since Infinixx would be stealing some of his thunder as the first Atopian-platform product release, and wouldn’t be under his direct control as PR Director.

“David, you’ve seen all the phutures Nancy presented. Almost every scenario comes out pushing the Cognix stock higher as we establish this with early adopters,” countered Patricia. “You’re just annoyed because it’s not under your thumb.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” replied Dr. Baxter, and the tumult had continued as the assembly argued back and forth while Kesselring sat quietly and watched us all, sighing.

We’d been at a stalemate when Jimmy had magically produced the trump card.

“Okay everyone, I will give you one very good reason,” Jimmy shouted out above the arguing as he stood up, raising his hands to quiet everyone. He winked at me.