Complete Atopia Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page B

say.
    “Well, I could set the pssi to adjust your perceptual brightness, even optimize contrast. That would make it easier for you to see things.”
    I wasn’t too keen on the thing controlling my body, but this seemed reasonable.
    “Sure, show me,” I replied, my anger fizzling.
    Immediately, the scene around me brightened and the edges grew sharper. I knew it was dark out, but I could see everything clearly, in even sharper detail than full daylight.
    “Kenny, that is actually...great,” I said after a moment. “Good work.”
    He brightened up at my praise like a puppy. Before I could say anything else, Kenny started to speak again, his geek–citement bubbling out.
    “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 would need to initiate some of the kinesthetic features, though.”
    I had turned onto 75by then, my street, and could see a few street people hanging around on the corner up ahead, begging for money. They were more or less invisible to me anyway, the great unseen as it were, but seeing them there irked me.
    “Sure, Kenny, let’s try it,” I replied with mildly venomous enthusiasm at the thought of wiping out these street vermin. The instant I said it, the panhandlers up ahead melted away, and the walls of the buildings suddenly washed free of graffiti. The sidewalk beneath me began to glisten as if it was newly laid.
    “How’s that?” asked Kenny.
    “That is amazing,” I replied.
    It actually was amazing. It was my neighborhood, just a better version. Scrubbed clean.
    In the distance, I saw a robot walk 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 a little too much information to share with Kenny, but he just shrugged and nodded.
    “All done. So this is the new pssi system that Cognix is going to release, huh?” asked Kenny.
    I was busy enjoying myself, looking around and admiring my new neighborhood, but felt some irritation creep back in. Kenny was always looking to pick under the edges.
    “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, okay?”
    “Cool,” he replied.
    In an overlaid display space I could see him tuning into a media broadcast from Patricia Killiam. Our marketing program really did seem to be working.
     

8
     
    NEW YORK CAN make you crazy, but if I’d ever had a bad day at work, this was the worst. I’d spent the past week almost sleeping at the office, preparing reams of new material for the Cognix launch. It was a simultaneous worldwide release, the biggest media campaign of all time, and we were in a fever pitch trying to get everything ready.
    Storms were sweeping up the Eastern Pacific towards Atopia. Hurricanes by themselves were nothing unusual, and these weren’t close to threatening the island city, but Atopia had begun inexplicably moving itself much closer towards America. Without any explanation from them we had to somehow cover and spin this positively in addition to everything else going on.
    Kenny had managed to install filters in my own pssi system so that Bertram the jerk, and the floosies in the assistant pool, were filtered out of my visual input unless they directly addressed me in some way. That had been great to begin with, but as the days went by, I’d started getting more and more frustrated with almost everyone.
    The show stopper had come at the end of the week.
    “Olympia,” came the call from my boss, “could you come in here please?”
    This was the final decision on the final stage of the Cognix account, and I was nervous. The old school and the new school were facing down, and I felt the