7
It had been a long day, and a creeping headache was reaching its roaring finale by the time I finished late that night. After a few weeks of smooth sailing on the Cognix account, we’d hit our first major speed bump with the disasterous launch of a Cognix-related project called Infinixx.
We were in damage-control mode, and 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 assistant pool, looking for some ditzy new romance victim.
Bertram and I had a big argument about whether to use Patricia or a young pssi-kid named 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. Antonia was on my side, but Bertram had allies against us in some of the other senior partners.
Everything and everyone at the office was getting on my nerves, and I’d escaped outside for a cigarette nearly every hour just to get away.
Alex had started dating my sort-of-friend Mary. Is this what friends do? 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 anti-inflammatories from my desk drawer, I got up to leave for the night. Downing the pills dry, I exited the giant brass-and-glass doors of our building and walked out onto Fifth Avenue.
I was lost deep in thought about how to spin the Infinixx mess when I stopped in my tracks to marvel again at my new city. Blinking, I looked out above the sea of people jostling past me. It was as if a layer of noisy fluorescent dirt had been scraped off the City by the hand of God—all the advertisements were gone, as if they had never been there.
I could actually see the buildings around me.
Stepping into the flow of pedestrian traffic, I looked up above me in wonderment, admiring all the views I’d never been able to see before because they’d been blocked by billboards and holograms. The flow carried me up Fifth and into Central Park, and in a dreamy state, I continued to walk around the edge of the park, staring at my city with new eyes.
I’d been using my pssi for some time already, but New York without advertising still felt special. It was relaxing, and as my headache subsided, I decided to get some exercise and finish my return home by foot.
The gathering darkness was something else I still wasn’t accustomed to. Normally, the advertisements lit up the streets and sidewalks. As I neared home, staring up and around, I was nearly tripped by a bum splayed out on the street. The stench of his body odor should have been forewarning enough, but the darkness and my wandering eyes betrayed me.
“Lady! Lady! Watch it!”
Looking down just in time, I danced awkwardly over the grubby man at my feet, knocking over his collection bowl. Nobody around me even glanced at the commotion as they swept past.
He cowered for an instant with me jittering over him, then shot outward on all fours to collect the bills I’d scattered, darting this way and that beneath the feet of human traffic.
The frustration of the day and my lingering headache got the better of me. I bet he’s not even legal. What was he doing there, dirtying up my neighborhood?
“Get out of the way!”
He looked up at me. I’d expected to see a scowl, but he simply stared at me. “You think you’re important, lady? I used to be a stockbroker.”
People streamed past us as we stared at each other. Still the blank stare. Was he about to cry? My sympathy and frustration fought with each other, and I fumbled around in my pockets but had no change. Who carried money these days? Wanting to escape, I turned away, merging back into the pedestrian flow.
“You should be more careful. Life can throw you funny curveballs, lady,” I heard him shout, his voice fading away.
I shivered. At that moment, an incoming ping arrived from Kenny.
“Yes?” I asked aloud, happy to move onto a new topic.
Kenny materialized, walking in step beside me. “That was close.”
“What was close?” Was he spying on me?
“That bum that almost kneecapped you just now.”
“How do you know what just happened?” The encounter had hit a nerve, exposing some unreasonable fear that I couldn’t identify.
“Your pssi has automated threat detection, and since I’m the root user, a security alert popped up on my display,” he replied defensively. “You know, there’s an automated collision avoidance system you could activate.”
“You’re not watching me with that thing are you?”
“It’s just an alarm,” protested Kenny, his projection ducking and weaving around the foot traffic as he kept pace with me. “As root user, I get security alerts fed to me and thought you might need help.”
I looked at him. “So you managed to get root access? I thought you said it didn’t allow it?”
That was good news. I didn’t need any more responsibilities on my plate.
“Someone authorized it as part of the testing and gave us a workaround.”
Probably because we had a close working relationship with them. “Good.”
At least something was going my way. Kenny stared at me as I squinted into the darkness. I could see he had something more to say.
“What?”
“Want me to make it easier for you to see things?” he asked. “I could set the pssi to adjust your perceptual brightness, even optimize contrast.”
I wasn’t too keen on the thing controlling my body, but this seemed reasonable. “Sure.”
Immediately, the scene around me brightened and the edges grew sharper. I knew it was dark out, but I could see everything clearly and in even sharper detail than full daylight.
“Kenny, that is actually…great,” I said after a moment. “Good work.”
He brightened up like a puppy at my praise.
“Believe it or not, but we could filter out street people, too,” he added. “I could also set it so that garbage and dirt is cleaned off the street or remove graffiti. There are all kinds of reality skins you can set in this thing. We’d need to initiate some of the kinesthetic features, though.”
We turned onto Seventy-Fifth, my street, and I could see a few homeless people hanging around on the corner up ahead, begging for money. An image of the bum I’d nearly tripped over floated into my mind, and my chest tightened up.
“Sure, let’s try it.”
Nearly the instant I said it, the panhandlers up ahead melted away and the walls of the buildings washed free of graffiti. The sidewalk beneath me began to glisten as if it was newly poured.
“How’s that?” Kenny asked.
I stopped walking. “Amazing.”
It was amazing. It was my neighborhood, just a better version. Scrubbed clean.
But if I couldn’t see them…“What happens if I run into them?”
“The kinesthetic function is turned on now, so it won’t let you run into them,” explained Kenny. “You’re guiding your body, but the system takes over your foot placements, even modifies what you see so that you don’t notice your body making the detours your kinesthetic system makes for you.”
I nodded. Of course I’d read all about it, but experiencing it was different.
In the distance, a robot walked by.
“Could you also set it to remove all robotics, I mean, unless they directly address me?” They still made me nervous. This gave me another idea. “And remove all couples holding hands as well.”
Perhaps this was too much to share with Kenny, but I said it without thinking. Kenny nodded, and I realized then that he was perhaps the closest thing that I had to a friend.
“All done,” he replied after a few seconds. “So this is the new pssi system that Cognix is going to release, huh?”
I had been busy enjoying myself, admiring my new neighborhood—Kenny’s innocent mention of Cognix brought me roughly back down to Earth. My nerves were frayed. “I don’t know, Kenny, but they’re going to be giving it away soon, so you’ll be able to play with it to your heart’s content. I’ll make sure you’re first in line.”
“Cool.” In an overlaid display space I could see him tuning into a media broadcast from Patricia Killiam.