“The Altus Space does not show you things, it gives your brains impressions of things that it interprets as a reality. For example”—she gestured to herself—“Altus did not design me, Altus is not telling you what I look like, it is giving your brain a signal to call up an attractive young woman. What that looks like to you is your brain’s decision, not ours.”

Mercifully, Alta didn’t give me time to spend with this unique new shame, and she continued.

“We allow you to create your objects in the Open Access Space, but what we send out are your mind’s impressions of that object. So, here in the Premium Altus Space, we have two main services. Our sandboxes are custom environments filled with objects more detailed and usable than what has, thus far, been created for Open Access users.

“But second, and more importantly, we are also able to capture the experiences of people in the real world. And you can enter those experiences, whether they are reading a book, hiking a trail, or doing acrobatics. These experiences are not like anything that has ever happened to you before, and they are not easy to explain. Luckily, it’s very easy to show.”

Suddenly I was walking through some kind of tropical forest. Or someone was. I was a person who was walking through a tropical forest. They were thinking about the plants there, about a tree branch that had fallen since their last walk. They knew that they were hoping to see a particular kind of bird. The name of the bird didn’t enter their brain, but an image of the bird did. It was small and black with a bright yellow belly.

I was … thinking their thoughts. I was in their memory. And I felt everything. I felt the burn in my quads and an unfamiliar tightness in my ankle. I smelled the sweetness of the leaf litter and felt the trickle of sweat rolling between my shoulder blades. But still, I also maintained enough distance from the experience that I could consider it. I was inside and outside at the same time.

And then the vision ended and I was back in my Altus Space with Alta.

“People have varying reactions to this,” she said, “so understand that it is normal to be a little freaked-out right now. But yes, Altus can capture moments of other people’s minds, store them, and then map them to yours. You cannot read a book this way, but you can inhabit someone else’s mind as they read a book. You can’t go into a boxing ring and fight, but you can inhabit someone else as they fight.

“The story of humans is the story of the escalation in speed of information transfer. That began with language, expanded with writing, and exploded with the internet. And now, another exponential shift, a new kind of giant leap for mankind. You can be inside a business leader’s mind as they make decisions. You can understand the thoughts of people you disagree with. And most powerful of all, people who inhabit people as they play sports, or do math, or think critically gain those skills at a much faster rate than those who practice during waking hours. The Altus Space will not only fundamentally change recreation; it will fundamentally change education, connection, politics, and all human interaction.

“Welcome to the Premium Space. Take your time, learn your way around, and take the opportunity to become a better you.”

It was impossible for me not to imagine the power of a tool like this. A doctor could use it to diagnose a patient! A person’s pain would no longer need to be a mystery! Empathy would no longer need to be an exercise in imagination. We could literally feel each other’s feelings. And what about learning? If I inhabited the body of someone playing piano, I could understand their mastery much faster. And then, of course, there was the Adult menu I had noticed before. The temptation to check that out was strong.

When your body experienced discomfort while you were in the Altus Space, it filtered through, even if dampened, and just then I felt a pushing pain in my side. “Exit,” I said, and then I pulled off the headset. Bex was standing over me. I think she had just kicked me! Not hard, but hard enough.

“Really?” she said, her hands on her hips. She was only wearing her underwear, and I couldn’t help but take her in.

I sat up. “I just wanted to see …” And then I trailed off.

“Yeah, OK,” she said, and then she started searching around for her clothes.

“Bex, look. I screwed up. It was just too compelling. I thought I’d drop in for a second.”

“Uh-huh,” she said as she pulled her shirt over her head.

“It’s not an excuse, it was shitty. I’m really sorry.”

“Yep.” She was pulling on her pants now.

“Can I walk you to the train? We can talk.”

“Not right now, no,” she said, not meeting my eyes as she walked past me and out of the room.

I sat down on my bed and waited to hear the door to my apartment close. I pulled out my phone and wrote several texts to Bex, all of which I deleted before sending.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

There was no way to fix what I’d just done to Bex, at least not right now, and my VR headset wouldn’t stop staring at me. I lay down on my bed and went back into the Space.

In there, I discovered that experiences like the one I’d just enjoyed could be purchased. In the Open Access Space, an object might, at most, cost 10 AltaCoin, which was, at the moment, around twenty-five dollars and going up as demand for the currency outpaced supply. In the Premium Space, there were no experiences for sale for under 20 AltaCoin, and they were regularly in the hundreds. Of course, I had enough AltaCoin to last a dozen lifetimes, but clearly if this product was here to revolutionize the way we learn and think and interact, it was going to do it for rich people first.

MIRANDA

I had no cell phone, no window. There were armed guards between me and the outside, and no one would even talk to me, much less talk about letting me outside. I had no access to internet of any kind. I didn’t even have access to a computer terminal. All I had was an Altus headset. I didn’t want to go into the Space, but eventually boredom wins. I had been given a job, and even if I knew it was useless, doing something was better than doing nothing.

My job now was no longer anything to do with understanding how Altus’s (or, rather, Carl’s) brain interface worked.

I was what they called a “client.” Clients were people who made content for Altus. This was some wild doublespeak, as it seemed to indicate that Altus worked for us, when in reality, we clearly worked for Altus. I never saw the room full of “clients” who were mining AltaCoin. Instead, I walked back and forth between my sleeping room and a private room, where I sat and built a learning sandbox.

Altus could either capture and share the direct experiences of someone else’s mind, or they could build environments, shape by shape. But there was no way to scan images into the Space, which made things like books basically impossible to reproduce. You could experience someone else reading a book, but you couldn’t read it yourself.

In this way, Altus experiences were a kind of ultimate laziness. Not only could you skip the reading part, you could just fall into someone else’s thoughts about the book. You didn’t even have to do the work of imagining.

But if you wanted to have an environment you were in control of, it had to be a sandbox. I was tasked with creating classroom sandboxes. It was hugely labor-intensive, and ultimately it felt like a futile project because real classrooms are not about the rooms; they’re about people gathering.