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walked her body along beneath the projection. Nobody 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 space. 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 bump 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 assistant 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 anti–inflammatories from my desk drawer, I got up to leave for the night, and downed the pills dry as I exited the giant brass and glass doors of our building out onto 5Avenue.
    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 scraped off the City by the hand of God.
    All the advertising was gone, as if it had never been there. I could actually see the buildings around me. The comparative calmness was mesmerizing, and I stepped out and into the quiet flow of pedestrian hubbub, looking up above and around me in wonderment. The flow carried me up 5and into