Complete Atopia Chronicles

1 Identity: Commander Rick Strong

From this altitude, the stars had just begun to poke their pinpricks of light through the deep blue violet sky. The hazy film of the Earth’s atmosphere painted a milky edge onto the curved horizon as the sun rose up and morning broke fully.

Looking down I could just make out Atopia, flashing like a distant green gem beneath the wisps of stratospheric clouds, almost swallowed amid the endless seas below. From here, lacking any surface buildings except for the ring of the mass driver circling it and the four gleaming farm towers that rose up out of its center, Atopia appeared as a forested island a mile across, fringed by white sand beaches.

Returning my focus to the job at hand, I did another sweep of the area. But still nothing. I zeroed in on one of our UAVs, a giant but gossamer-winged creature whose photovoltaics glittered and reflected the morning sunshine back into the emptiness. I followed it with my projected visual point of view, watching its massive transparent propeller swing slowly around and around, urging it onwards into the edge of space.

“Good enough?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think that’s far enough,” responded Echo, my proxxi.

“Well, no hurry. Let’s make sure nothing is out here.”

I was kind of enjoying this lazy crawl across the top of the world with the UAV. I took a deep breath, watching the sun reflect off the seas from between the clouds below, trying to force a sense of relaxation into my body. The silence was serene and complete up here. I should come up more often, I thought to myself.

Just then, the new metasense I’d had installed prickled the back of my neck.

I looked around to see Patricia and her gaggle of reporters rising up from Atopia. In this augmented display space, each of their points-of-presence blinked and then brightened to a steady glow as they assembled around the test range. To me they appeared as a halo of tiny stars, hanging nearly ninety thousand feet up here with me.

They were waiting for the show to begin.

“Okay Adriana, let’s light this thing up,” I said to one of my system operators, pushing my focus back down to the dot of Atopia below and leaving the UAV to spin off into the distance.

Immediately, the speck of Atopia began pulsing with intense flickers of light, and I waited for the show to begin. I counted; one, two, three, four, and then the first flashes began to glitter in the near distance.

Tiny concentric shockwaves flashed outwards and away and the empty space began to shimmer, filling with hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands of white hot streaks that pancaked and mushroomed into a wall of flame. The inferno spread and engulfed me in a booming roar. I back-pedaled downwards and away, watching the sheet of flame envelope the sky.

“Very nice,” I declared, snapping back into my body at Atopia Defense Force Command.

Everyone was watching a three-dimensional display of the firestorm hovering over the center of the room, surrounded by the floating control systems of the slingshot battery.

“Would have been nice on that mission back in Nanda Devi, huh?” suggested Echo, standing with his arms folded beside me and admiring the show with the rest of the ADF Command team.

I took a deep breath.

“That’s just what I was thinking.”

Jimmy, my up-and-coming protégé, laughed, pointing towards his temple. “The wars of the future are going to be fought in here.”

“Wars have always been fought in there,” I chuckled back, “but even so, these babies sure make me feel better.”

The slingshot batteries were rotating platforms that could sling tens of thousands of explosive pellets per second into the sky at speeds of up to seven miles a second. The pellets were set to disintegrate and spread their incendiary contents at preset distances, creating a shield effect weapon that could put up an almost impenetrable wall of super heated plasma at ranges of up to a hundred or more miles away. This bad boy could take out incoming ballistic missiles, cruise weapons, aircraft, pretty much anything coming our way. Heck, I could have even taken out a mean looking flock of seagulls from two hundred clicks if I felt like it.

So far, seagulls were about all that dared come near us.

Atopia bristled with an array of fearsome weapons of which the slingshots were just one part of the high energy kinetic variety. Some of my other toys included the mass driver, the aerial and submarine UAV defense systems, not to mention the offensive and defensive cyber weapons. Everything was dusted down so heavy with smarticle sensor motes that even a flea couldn’t hop out there without me getting a bead on it. We were locked down tighter than a nun’s thighs, and that’s just how I liked it.

I looked around at the Command staff proudly. They were really starting to come together as a team. Just then I received a ping from Patricia Killiam, asking for a quick chat.

In an empty space beside me, the air began to shimmer, and her image slowly began to materialize. She was lighting up a cigarette and smiling at me, and dressed in a dark, short skirted business suit, old school style. Relaxed, but still somehow strict with her hair done up in a tight gray bun, and always well presented, never slouching. I liked Patricia.

“Finished playtime yet Rick?” she asked, shifting her hips from one side to the other and taking a drag from her smoke. She took a quick glance at the dissipating blaze on the main display, raising her eyebrows.

Today was the first time we’d tested the slingshots, and they’d more than lived up to their expectations. I checked a few last second details.

“Yeah, I think that about does it.”

“Good, because I think you scared the heck out of the wildlife I’ve managed to nurture on this tin can,” she admonished cheerfully, taking a puff from her smoke, “and the tourists want to go back in the water—not that you didn’t put on a good show for them. That was quite the shock and awe campaign.”

“Well you gotta wake up the neighbors from time to time,” I laughed.

We’d purposely decided not to pssi-block anything during the test to measure emotional responses during the weapons tests. I’d talked to Dr. Hal Granger about getting the best bang-for-the-buck out of our weapons exercises to impress on the rest of the world how not to mess with us. Hal projected the image of thoughtfulness on his broadcasts, but in person he was a bit of a toad—funny how that worked.

“Well, that’s your job, Rick, to help scare the world into respecting us. My job is to help scare the world into saving itself,” she said without a trace of humor. “Anyway, good work.”

“Did you see that thunderstorm coming in?” I asked after a moment. “We’ve been tracking that depression for weeks now, but we can’t avoid them all. Anyway, it’ll water your plants up top.”

She smiled.

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?” she suggested after a pause. I’d returned my attention to the slingshot control systems, but this thought snapped my mind back. I looked up at her.

“That’s actually a great idea,” I replied. Cindy, my wife, was having a hard time adjusting to coming here.

“So you really think that whole thing could be a good idea?” I added, coming back to an idea I’d been discussing with Pat earlier about Cindy.

“Yes, I think so,” she replied. I looked at her, sensing some hesitation, but her smile convinced me otherwise.

I nodded and smiled, then returned my attention to the slingshot systems.

“Thanks, Pat, see you later then.”

I smiled at her as she walked off and faded away without another word. This was definitely her party.

All that neo-hippie stuff that Atopia floated on in the waters of the world media didn’t mean that a lot of nasty people out there weren’t eyeing this little piece of heaven with very bad things in mind. Atopia was out in international waters, and as one of the first floating sovereign city-states, it had to be able to protect itself from all comers. At some point the Atopian masters of synthetic reality had to bow to where the rubber met the road in the dirty, physical world, and that was where I came in.

Atopia was closely allied with America, its original flag before independence, but America had enough trouble taking care of its shrinking sphere of influence. I should know after spending the best part of my career in the thick of the first Weather War skirmishes.

What had begun with China diverting water from rivers flowing out of the Himalayas had quickly turned the roof of the world into a global hot spot, but their double punch of seeding clouds to drop their rain before reaching India was what had really tipped the bucket. The combination had driven crop failures, mass starvations, and a nasty confrontation between the newly muscular superpowers.

While the initial conflict was long over, regional wars over a growing variety of resource depletions had continued to expand and had engulfed most of Asia. Of course, the world teetering on the brink of destruction was nothing new.

And now I was in the center of the cyber universe.

So the best and brightest of the world had begun emigrating to build the new New World, the Bensalem group of seasteads of which Atopia was the crown jewel. Atopia was supposed to be—was marketed as—this shining beacon of libertarian ideals. She was the largest of a collection of platforms in the Pacific off California, a kind of new Silicon Valley that would solve the world’s problems with technological wizardry.

Come to the offshore colonies, they said, for the security, fresh air, good food, the sun, the sea and first dibs on the latest and greatest in cyber gadgets. Come to escape the crowding, the pollution, the strife and conflict—and that, brother, was the truth. So the rich came here and to other places like this, while the rest of humanity watched us needily and greedily.

It was my job to protect them; the rich folks of Atopia, of course, not the masses of the rest of humanity.

I laughed to myself; tough guy, huh? Who was I kidding? I was a washed-up basket case who could hardly manage a night of sleep without waking up in a terrified sweat half the time. The only reason I was here was to try and make an attempt at reviving my relationship with my wife, Cindy. Without Cindy, I would be off in some sweaty corner of the world acting out a kind of ‘heart of darkness’ finale to my life in a psychotic blaze of glory.

Maybe that was a little dramatic. I’d probably be off soaking my sorrows in a bottle while desk jockeying in Washington—that sounded a little more likely. I smiled and began to run through the slingshot shutdown checklist, but then paused as I felt the old guilt begin to bleed out around the edges of my life again.

“Want me to pick up some flowers for her from Vince?” asked Echo. He always knew what I was thinking, especially when I was thinking about her.

“Yeah, that’s a great idea,” I responded without looking away from what I was doing. Noticing a breach report from Jimmy I added, “And could you look into what made that UAV malfunction? The damn thing circled back and burned up in the blaze. What the hell was it doing up there anyway?” I shook my head.

Echo nodded that he’d take care of it as he silently walked off. He was good at taking orders.

The excitement of the slingshot test hadn’t yet faded and I felt an energetic flow carrying me down the hallways back home. The flowers Echo had gotten from Vince were perfect. Flowers were always a sure bet for making a woman feel special, weren’t they?

“Hi, sweetie! I’m home!”

I proudly held the bouquet of real flowers in front of me as I walked through the door. I’d snuck along the corridors as I’d arrived with them, trying to avoid the prying eyes and bad graces of our neighbors who would have seen the wasteful gift in my hands.

Cindy looked at the flowers less than enthusiastically as I entered.

She hadn’t even bothered to shower today and sat in a dreary heap on the couch, bags under her eyes, watching a dimstim projection. A large head floated in the middle of our living room, contorting itself in the middle of a joke while a laugh track droned on in the background. Cindy wasn’t smiling, though, her face just dully reflecting light from the display.

It was going to be another one of those kinds of evenings.

“Rick, you didn’t need to buy flowers,” she immediately complained. “What are the neighbors going to think?”

“Sorry, sweetie.” I felt like I was always being sorry these days.

Walking in, I could see it was Dr. Hal Granger’s EmoShow floating in the display space in the middle of the room.

“Could we turn off Dr. Emo, please?” I asked more edgily than I intended. “I get enough of him during the day.”

I felt stupid standing there with the flowers.

“Sure. He’s all that gets me through the days here, but no problem,” she announced as Hal’s head disappeared from the middle of the room, casting the place into sullen silence. With a great sigh she glanced at me and declared, “Well, I guess I’ll get a vase or something.”

She swung herself laboriously off the couch and got up to go into the kitchen area.

“How was your day?” I said brightly, trying to restart the conversation. She was rummaging around in some drawers in the kitchen, off to the side of the large, open main room of our apartment.

“It was fine,” she responded, lightening up a bit, “but this place is so depressing. I feel like I can’t get any space or air. This apartment is so…subterranean.”

I rolled my eyes, but carefully. By Atopian standards we lived in a palace. Our place was near the edge of the underwater shelf, not more than eighty feet down. A large curved window looked out into the kelp forests, and rays of sunlight danced through from the waves above, illuminating the brightly colored fish swimming past.

Most people didn’t even have an exterior window, never mind all this space and furnishings. That was the entire point of Atopia: with everyone here having deep and easy access to almost perfect synthetic reality, you didn’t need much in the way of space or material things in the physical world.

“Submarine,” I corrected her pointlessly, “you mean submarine.”

“Whatever. It’s dark and claustrophobic.”

She had found a vase and was filling it with water. The tap turned off after a few inches had filled its bottom, and then she walked purposely towards me with it in hand.

“Cindy,” I started, and then stopped. I searched for the right words. “Cindy, just try to use the pssi system. You can be anywhere, do anything you want.”

That was the wrong thing to say. I took the vase of water from her hands and cringed looking at her face. I was a real tough guy, all right.

“I don’t like the pssi system!” she spat out at me. Then she closed her eyes, counting to ten as she backed up a little. Her shoulders relaxed and she opened her eyes.

I said nothing.

“Okay, sorry, I just had a bad day. Sorry.” She shook her head.

“Look, pssi is great for watching stuff and surfing the net, but I don’t like all this…this…” she stuttered, searching for words and waving her hands around in the air, “all this flittering and stimswitching. It’s weird.”

“I know,” I acknowledged. I’d been subjected to enough of Dr. Hal’s EmoShow to know that acknowledging your partner’s feelings was important. “I know this isn’t working out the way we hoped, but I took on a commitment here, and I can’t very well crawl back to Washington with my tail between my legs now. I mean, just try and give it a chance, or at least go up on the beaches?”

I was holding the vase with one hand and waving the other towards the ceiling, pleading with her. She took the vase back from me and smiled as she poked at the flowers.

“I know you’re right, Rick. And these are beautiful flowers,” she said, leaning down to put them on the table. She stepped back and stood straight up to admire them.

“I’ll try harder,” she declared.

My heart filled with some small hope.

“Thank you, sweetheart.”

“It is nice being able to use pssi to spend time with my sister back home,” she admitted, “and she has such great kids.”

I could see what was coming next, and my heart sank back down fearfully.

“Rick, have you thought about what we talked about? What would make me really happy? The reason I thought we came here?”

“I’ve thought about it, sweetie. I’m just not sure that either of us is ready for it,” I replied. “Just not quite yet, okay?”

“Okay,” she replied, doing her best to smile as I walked over to give her a hug.

I had an idea.

2

There was still nothing quite like a hot cup of jamoke to get me kick started in the morning. I was back in Command, getting a bright and early start to the day, and going through my homework assignments, coming up to speed on the core synthetic reality platform that everything else depended on.

The pssi—polysynthetic sensory interface—system had originally grown out of research to move artificial limbs, using nanoscale smarticles embedded in the nervous system to sense and modify signals passing through it. Fairly quickly they’d learnt the trick of replaying stored nerve conduction patterns, and creating completely synthetic sensory spaces had followed in short order. In this they’d more than succeeded; to most Atopians, synthetic reality was more real than the real world.

You didn’t need to understand how it worked to use it, though. The proxxi program, a kind of digital alter ego designed to help users navigate pssi space, was almost as amazing as the platform itself. After only a year of using it, my own proxxi, Echo, felt as much a part of me as I was myself. It was impossible to imagine how I’d gotten along before. I clicked over to watch Patricia Killiam in another of her press conferences promoting the upcoming launch.

“Describe a proxxi again?” asked a reporter.

“Proxxi are like biological-digital symbiotes that attach to your neural system, sharing all your memories and sensory data as well as control of your motor system. You could think of them as your digital twin.”

“So why do we need one?”

“That is a very good question,” replied Patricia, smiling approvingly. “Did you know that more peoples’ bodies are injured today while they’re off in virtual worlds and games than in auto and air accidents combined? Proxxi help solve this problem by controlling and protecting your body while you’re away, so to speak…”

The press conference droned on as my own mind wandered off. Despite the endless list of projects to get through, my mind couldn’t help circling back to Cindy and my idea. I clicked off the visual overlay of Patricia’s press conference and focused back on my Command task list as the rest of my staff arrived for the day.

Patricia had just uploaded some of her latest weather forecasts, and we’d been surprised by her predicted upgrading of tropical storm Ignacia out in the North Atlantic. Our own weather systems hadn’t seen this, but as we reviewed her datasets it all suddenly fit together.

It worried me that even with all the technology we had we could miss this, even if it was in another ocean and off our radar screens.

Mother Nature was a far more tangible danger to Atopia than a foreign attack, and we had to do our best to steer clear of Her. Record global temperatures predicted an intense hurricane season, and we were already well into the seasonal dance of steering clear of disturbances coming our way. This usually wasn’t much of a problem out here in the East Pacific off the Baja. Most of the intense hurricanes and cyclones tended to keep to the North Atlantic and Western Pacific basins. Still, Atopia had a draft of more than five hundred feet below the waterline, and the thought of the fusion reactor core down there grinding into a seamount made me sweaty.

“Looks good to me,” I offered, shrugging.

A simulation graphic occupied almost the entire volume of the room, and a grunt from Solomon House was driving our point of view around it with dizzying speed. It was a month-ahead projection of winds, storms, surface and sub-surface ocean currents and temperatures, plotting an optimal course through it all.

Atopia wasn’t really a ship of course, she was a platform, but we could drive her around comfortably at a few miles per hour and more if we really needed. Staying away from bad weather also meant that the beaches were usually sunny, which was a plus even in a place where everyone was off in synthetic space most of the time. Long range future predictions indicated a gathering string of depressions coming our way, so we’d begun backing away north and eastwards towards the distant coast of America.

“Great! Well, that’s it then,” said the grunt, a pssi-kid named Eddy.

He floated in a lotus position in the middle of the display, toying with it. Officially the Command ops team needed my sign off, but they could see my mind was elsewhere. They were just humoring me with their detailed explanations. Eddy rode the disappearing projection like a magic carpet, receding into an infinitesimal point in the middle of the room.

I sighed and rolled my eyes, taking a sip from my coffee. Give me boots in the mud over this any day, but I was there and had to try to wrap my tired head around it.

I summoned up some energy.

“So you think I should bring on Jimmy, huh?” I asked, looking at a note from Patricia Killiam in the report. Her proxxi, a young looking woman named Marie, materialized in front of me, leaning on a railing and stretching her long legs between us.

“Yes, we do, absolutely,” Marie responded. “You know as much as we do that you need all the help you can get in this area.”

“I don’t disagree, it’s just…he’s just a kid.” I knew any objections would be pointless, but thought it worthwhile to at least express my opinion.

Patricia had taken Jimmy under her wing like her own child when his parents had abruptly left Atopia, so beyond his doubtless qualifications there were other factors involved. There were rumors of marriage problems and abuse involving Jimmy which struck a very personal chord. I’d had it rough growing up too.

“He’s a kid that knows more about conscious boundary security systems than you and the whole rest of your team,” she argued, and then added, “and pretty much more than anyone else for that matter. We have to stay on top of the threat posed by Terra Nova.”

Her eyes narrowed.

Personally I didn’t go for all this stuff about Terra Nova. They didn’t pose any tactical threat to Atopia, but they sure were worked up about it. On the outside, Atopia and Terra Nova were more or less viewed as two sides to the same coin, but the rivalry between these competing colonies was whipping up into a fervor. I wasn’t sure it was for the best.

“Yeah, you’re right,” was all I could think to say at that point. “Hey, this tub is your party. If you want some kid with peach fuzz for whiskers on the Security Council, it’s all good with me.”

“Jimmy is a special kid, Rick,” she mused. “Anyway, he’s our pick.”

She said this with some finality. I let it settle.

“Good enough for me, then.” I grinned.

“Good.”

She smiled winningly at me and faded away.

It’d been a long day, and I’d been mulling over my idea for Cindy the whole time. Standing alone in the featureless tubular corridor outside our apartment, I hesitated. Was it really what I wanted?

Our door slid open as I strode in.

“Hey honey, I’m home!” I yelled out as enthusiastically as I could muster, and then stopped and tried to make sense of what appeared in front of me.

Our apartment was gone. Well, not exactly gone, but replaced by a pssi projection.

Marbled columns rose around a sunken living area in the middle of the room, surrounded by a raised terrace, and there was a feast waiting on a low table with red and gold pillows littered around it. Incense filled the room and two hand servants quietly and quickly moved in towards me and bowed. A gentle wind blew in through billowing silk curtains, revealing the jumbled and exotic skyline of Mumbai framed in the distance.

Cindy swept in through one of the doorways to the side.

“Isn’t it just dreamy?” she exclaimed, running to jump at me. She was wearing a tight wrap around skirt with an almost transparent sheer red kurta on top. Draping her arms around me she kissed me wetly. “Thanks for those flowers yesterday—that was really sweet of you.”

“Looks fantastic,” I said encouragingly from beneath her kiss, bemused at the scene and her enthusiasm.

She took my hand and squealed, “Come on, let’s eat!” as she pulled me around the side of the room and down to the stairs to the table.

It was a very low table, the kind you had to sit at on the floor and squeeze your legs underneath, and she pulled me down onto the pillows and blankets at its side, kissing me again. Reaching over she pulled a bunch of grapes off the table and began feeding them to me one at a time.

“So how was work today?” she asked, popping a grape into my mouth.

I laughed and ate the offering.

“Long,” I replied, “but we’ve decided to nominate Jimmy to the Security Council as a specialist in conscious boundary systems. He’ll be a big help.”

“Jimmy—Bob’s brother Jimmy?” she asked.

“Yeah, that’s right, well sort-of brother anyway.”

I frowned. For brothers, adopted or not, Jimmy and Bob sure didn’t seem to talk much. Of course, I hardly spoke to my own brothers much either.

We pulled some pillows up around us, and the sun began to set as we chatted. This was the first time I could remember feeling totally at ease with Cindy in a long time. It was nice. Finally, perhaps things were turning around.

When I was about stuffed, she surprised me again.

“So Mr. Rick Strong, who would you like me to be tonight?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, casting her eyes down, and then looking back up at me as she bit her tongue between her teeth and smiled.

Yes, I knew what she meant.

“Would you like me to skin up too?”

I smiled playfully at her.

“Sure...” she giggled like a schoolgirl, “you go first.”

She had unbuttoned my shirt and was rubbing my chest, playing with one of my nipples. We hadn’t made love in months. She nudged me with a phantom for a stimshare and I quickly accepted, watching her shiver as my sensory input filled her. I hadn’t expected this when I walked in the door.

“No, you first, who would you like me to be?” I asked.

This wasn’t the kind of stuff I really went for, but I was happy to experiment a little. She looked at me shyly, and then looked away, embarrassed.

“Well, that Spanish guy in the crime dramas, you know, Julio...”

“Sure, sure...I know him,” I said, laughing. “Are you sure?”

She nodded.

Echo had already sent me the copyright release in an overlay the moment she uttered the words. Looking at the rates, I could see that skin time in this Julio guy was expensive. He must be popular with the ladies.

What the heck. I punched the ‘buy’ and ‘skin’ buttons simultaneously with a phantom and detached out of myself to look down at some Spanish guy sitting on the pillows, cuddling with my wife. It was hard to get used to this stuff, I thought, shaking my head, and then snapped back into my body.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

I sat up a little and put myself on display, raising my eyebrows and winking at her.

“Very sexy, Mr. Commander,” she laughed, “now it’s your turn.”

“Ahh...how about that Phuture News Network celebrity girl?”

“What?” she exclaimed, laughing and punching me gently in the shoulder.

“Yeah, yeah, that girl...you know the one.”

I laughed awkwardly. The Phuture News girl’s large breasts were about all that came to mind on such short notice.

“Okay,” she agreed, grinning shyly. “If that’s what you’d like.”

As I watched, holding her, she morphed into the Phuture News girl. With particular fascination, I watched her breasts swell under the transparent fabric of the kurta. She looked up at me bashfully.

Maybe I could get used to this.

A rush of animal desire coursed through me. I lifted the kurta, revealing her swollen breasts whose nipples popped to attention like little soldiers. I took one of them into my mouth, rolling it around with my tongue, hearing my wife softly moan as I scooped her into my arms.

Yeah, I could definitely get used to this.

Afterwards we were lying in the jumble of pillows beside the table, back in our own skins. Cindy was lying curled up beside me with one of my arms wrapped around her, and my brain was lazily tingling and thinking about how best to bring up my idea. She was trying, so maybe it was time for me to try too.

Baby steps, baby steps. I smiled at that thought.

Cindy gently twitched against me, dropping off to sleep, and then she twitched harder, and then again. Wait, was that a sob?

“Cindy?” I said gently, my brow furrowing and my brain fighting back from the fog it had drifted off into.

“Cindy?” I asked again, more urgently.

She turned to me, slowly, her eyes wet above cheeks streaked with tears. She wiped the tears away with the back of one hand, looking down and away from me.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know...”

“Come on, what’s wrong?”

She sighed and looked at me, shrugging her shoulders and hunching inwards as if to protect herself.

“I just didn’t like that, Rick,” she said softly. “The way you looked at me, you were happy I was someone else.”

The fog around my brain quickly evaporated, sensing imminent danger.

“Honey, that’s not true at all,” I said, knowing this was only half true. I raised myself up on one elbow to look down at her. “I was only doing it because you wanted to.”

That was true enough.

“I was only doing it because I thought that’s what you wanted,” she declared, wiping away another tear. “I want to make you happy, Rick. I know I haven’t been great to be around lately.”

“Aw, honey,” I replied, searching for the right way out of this, “look, I love you, and you’re the only person I want to be with.”

This was absolutely the truth.

“If anything, it’s me that wants to make you happy. I want to make us work again. It’s my fault, all this, I mean, you know what I mean.”

The guilt spilled back out and my emotions welled up. I knew she could see it.

“I love you too,” she replied simply. “I’m just not comfortable with all this pssi stuff. I am trying though.”

This suddenly seemed like the right time.

“Look, I’ve been thinking.”

“Uh huh,” she sniffled.

I took a deep breath.

“Like I said, I’m not sure if we’re ready for kids just yet, but maybe we are. Maybe we could take a half step, and get you more into the pssi system at the same time.”

“I’m listening,” she said, reaching up to tenderly stroke my chin with one hand.

“What would you think about proxxids?”

She crinkled her nose. “What, those are like little fake simulated kids right?”

“Well, yes and no,” I answered, “I’ve been looking them up and talking to Jimmy and Patricia. I think it could be perfect for us right now.”

Silence settled, and then, “I’m still listening.”

“They’re not just fake kids. They take our actual DNA code and mix it together as if it was a real fertilization, and then simulate the development process to generate what our real little baby would be like if we had one.”

I took a breath, watching her carefully before continuing.

“You can pick traits, of course, like eye color or more subtle stuff if you want, but that’s sort of the point,” I explained. “It’s like trying out a trial version of how your kid will look and behave.”

“Uh huh,” she replied skeptically, “why don’t you just get them to send you a bunch of mock-ups and we can stick them up on the wall and pick a model we like?”

The sarcasm was obvious, but lightened with humor. I could sense the clouds clearing.

“It’s not just that,” I added encouragingly, “these things, you have to take care of them, just like they were real babies...feed them, burp them, put them to sleep. You get the full treatment, and that’s really the point—you can see how your kid will behave at different ages before you have them, to make sure you’ll like what you’re getting.”

“And why would I want to do this?”

“Well, I thought that if we took care of a proxxid for a few weeks or months,” I answered, looking straight into her eyes, “we could see if we liked having a screaming kid around.”

I smiled at her.

“...and then?” she asked, smiling back.

“And then, well, if it felt right, we could have a real child, but we’d get to experiment a little first. What do you think?”

She cuddled into me and looked up into my face.

“Okay Mr. Rick Strong, I’m willing to give it a try.”

Maybe this whole thing would work out, I thought, and a great weight lifted from my chest.

3

Baby shower—I’d never really understood the term. Why did they call it a shower? Because they showered the mother with gifts? Weren’t they supposed to have these parties before the baby arrived?

Anyway, I guess it didn’t matter, and I had to admit, he sure was a cute little sucker. Our Little Ricky had bright blue eyes—his daddy’s eyes.

This had turned into something of a coming out party for the Strong family on Atopia. The place was packed and everyone was milling about our apartment with drinks in hand, dropping into spontaneous little groups for small talk around the entertainment space I had Echo create for us. The star of the evening, of course, was Little Ricky, our bouncing baby proxxid, who burbled and gurgled away in his mother’s arms.

Cindy positively glowed.

From the corner of one eye, I could see Bobby Baxter, Jimmy’s adopted brother, making his way towards us with a stunning blond in tow.

“Congratulations Commander Strong!” he immediately blurted out when he got near, outstretching his hand.

I smiled and rolled my eyes slightly, but gripped his hand tightly and shook it.

“Thanks Bob.”

I still wasn’t quite sure if everyone was being genuine, or if they were gently poking fun at someone having a simulated baby.

“Is Jimmy coming?” I asked.

Bob shook his head. “You’d know more than me, Commander.”

Awkward pause.

“And of course congratulations to the lovely new proxxid mother,” laughed Bob as he let go of my hand and leaned over to kiss my wife on the cheek.

I looked past him to have a look at his date. She shifted uncomfortably, waiting to be introduced. The rumor mill was constantly circulating with stories about how Bob was wasting his life away, but he sure could pick his women.

“…and this lovely lady is?” I asked, smiling at his date intently. She smiled back. Stunning.

“Oh, ah,” mumbled Bob, “this is Nicky”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said as I reached out to shake her hand, gently pulling her close for a kiss on the cheek. Just being polite, of course.

“A pleasure,” replied Nicky, smiling radiantly.

Bob wandered off for a drink while my wife and I exchanged some pleasantries with his girlfriend. A few more women arrived and began mobbing my wife to have a look at the proxxid.

“Here, could you hold him for a second, Rick honey?” asked my wife.

I nodded, returning my attention to her. The group of woman all smiled watching me awkwardly take hold of him. Such a tiny package, so warm and soft; it was disarming to look down into his little face and see part of myself staring back up at me. I couldn’t help but smile.

“I’ll be back in a sec,” said Cindy. “I just need to get some juice.”

Little Ricky let out a loud squeal as she left, wriggling in my arms. The overhead lights reflected brightly in his wet little eyes and moist little lips and he smiled a toothless, gummy grin at me.

When we’d ordered the proxxid, it had come with some warnings, but I had a hard time seeing how an imaginary baby could be dangerous. We’d just try this one, and it certainly seemed to be doing Cindy a world of good.

Adriana, my slingshot lead at Command, stood beside me and poked Little Ricky gently in the tummy, tickling him to generate more squeals and giggles.

“Isn’t he just the sweetest little thing, Commander?”

If I wasn’t married and holding my synthetic baby, I would have sworn she was flirting with me. I couldn’t resist.

“He sure is, just like his daddy,” I replied with a smile.

She was the one with the sensorgy artist boyfriend. To me, it all seemed like pornography, but to them, well, I was just old. She smiled at me, and then looked back down at Little Ricky.

“Look at those bright blue eyes—you guys just have to make sure you get blue eyes when you have your kid, so beautiful...he’ll be a lady killer!” she exclaimed, winking at me, or so I thought. She tickled Little Ricky’s ribs again for more squeals. “What a happy boy!”

I laughed. Was she referring to him or me?

I bounced Little Ricky up and down a bit, basking in Adriana’s attention and thinking that this was what one did with babies. Perhaps it really was best to have a proxxid before attempting the real thing.

Cindy returned and tapped me on the shoulder, taking a sidelong glance at Adriana.

“I’ll take him back now, tiger,” said my wife.

She nodded towards the door. Vince Indigo, the famous founder of the Phuture News Network, had just appeared. He’d been one of the people who’d gone out of their way to welcome us onto Atopia. He looked tired and stressed, but smiled at me as I looked his way.

I gave him a small wave, and then cooed at Little Ricky one more time before handing him back to my wife. I walked over to grab a drink and say hello to Vince. It looked like he could use a drink as well.

“Congrats Rick!” he exclaimed as I neared, reaching out to shake my hand.

I motioned him over to the bar, taking his hand firmly. Again, I felt slightly foolish.

“Thanks Vince. Oh, and thanks for those flowers the other day, Cindy really loved them.”

“No problem at all.”

We’d reached the bar.

“So, what’ll it be?” I asked.

Vince surveyed the bottles, but then shook his head. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

That wasn’t like Vince.

“You sure?” I asked as I dropped some ice cubes into a cut glass tumbler, topping it off with some whiskey.

He shrugged.

“I’m just kind of busy…” His voice trailed off and he stared at the floor.

Definitely not the Vince I knew. I wondered what was up. Maybe he was trying his best not to offend me, thinking this whole thing was ridiculous.

“This thing, it’s just a little game,” I laughed, shaking my head and looking towards my wife holding our simulated baby. “I’m just doing it to keep her happy, you know how it is.”

At that, Vince’s attention seemed to suddenly sharpen.

“No, no, absolutely this is the best thing,” replied Vince warmly, “you need to do this, it’s the way of the future!”

He clapped me enthusiastically on the back. I snorted and took a sip of my drink, feeling less self-conscious.

“I mean it, Rick, you should have as many proxxids as you can before going on to the real thing.”

Vince seemed very genuine about it.

“You really think so?” I asked.

“I do my friend, I do.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it.

“Listen, I have to get going, though. Sorry. Give Cindy a kiss for me, okay?”

“I will.” I nodded, smiling.

He hesitated. Something was wrong. He wanted to say something but couldn’t. He just needed to be somewhere else, and not some baby shower.

“Go on, get going!” I laughed and clapped him on the back.

Vince nodded, smiling, and with a wave goodbye he faded away from this reality.

I took a long pull of my drink and looked around.

Bob was sulking on a couch in a corner, flicking little fireballs at what looked like tiny rabbits. I guessed that he didn’t understand baby showers either, and laughed as I poured myself another stiff drink to celebrate.

This proxxid was one of the best ideas I’d ever had. My heart was bursting with pride.

4

Maybe these proxxids had been a bad idea. While everything had started off great a few weeks ago, Cindy had continued to insist on the full treatment. This was my idea, she liked to remind me as she gently prodded me to get up and coddle our screaming baby at all hours of the night. I hadn’t slept properly in weeks.

It’d been a long and difficult day as I’d tried to get on top of the blended threats that were testing our defenses. Cyber attacks were constantly probing our perimeter, searching for vulnerabilities and weaknesses. They’d also just upgraded the large depression moving up the coast of Central America in the Eastern Pacific into tropical storm Newton, and another depression was fast following behind.

I had a pile more work to try and get done, but at the same time I wanted to spend quality time with Cindy and the boys. In the end, I’d come home as early as I could, but I regretted it as I stepped across the threshold into our space.

My home was a pigsty of toys, but then again my ‘home’ hadn’t resembled our old apartment in weeks. Today Cindy had turned it into a kind of suburban estate somewhere in Connecticut, complete with an enormous backyard with a trampoline and swimming pool. I guessed that it reminded her of where she grew up.

About half a dozen sim-kids were over to play with Little Ricky, and they were all screaming and running past me as I came in the door.

“Hey Dad!” squealed out Little Ricky as he flew past, chasing the others into the living room.

It was amazing how fast they grew up. I mean, really amazing. Proxxids were designed to give you the full spectrum of how your kids would look and act, and we had them aging at an exponential pace, so while Ricky had aged one year during the first month we had him, during the next three weeks he had aged five more years.

It was hard to keep in mind they were just simulations, and they didn’t seem to notice because of the built-in cognitive blind spots. Most people just stepped them through a few target ages to get the general idea, but Cindy seemed to be enjoying the whole, painful process.

“Hey Ricky,” I called back.

Despite my grumpiness I couldn’t help smiling at the glee on his face. At that point a big black Labrador appeared, scuttling around the same corner the kids had appeared from, the last in the chase pack. It shot by behind my legs and into the living room to set off a new round of excited screams. I raised my eyebrows.

“Biffy is the newest addition to the family,” declared Cindy proudly.

She was sitting at the dining room table and feeding little Derek, our second proxxid. She’d seen me eyeing the dog.

“Biffy huh? I thought Derek was the newest addition to the family.”

“That was so last week, honey.”

She hardly looked up at me. I thought she was joking, but she didn’t crack a smile.

Derek dribbled carrot baby food down his chin as Cindy tried to spoon it in. He looked up at me, let go a big squeak, and pounded his rattle on the tray holding the food, sending thick orange splatters up around the room and onto Cindy. She patiently smiled in a motherly way and kept trying to spoon it in.

“Well, it’s nice to see how their personalities would react with animals, no?” she asked, wiping carrot puree from her hair with the back of one hand. “Isn’t this what we’re trying to do, to try out different things?”

“Yeah, you’re right.” I shrugged.

I had to admit, my plan seemed to be working.

Since we’d had the proxxids in our lives, Cindy had begun using her pssi more and more. To begin with, she had just added some rooms to our place, and then she’d begun changing the configuration of our home and location more elaborately to suit her needs. It was something new almost every day, and it wasn’t unwillingly like before. She was taking to it as a part of her day to day life.

Not only that, but I had to admit she looked great at it. She was sticking with the whole nine yards of the proxxid experience, feeding and changing them, bringing simulated kids over for playtime, everything. It really did seem to suit her.

“So what do you think of brown eyes?” she asked while I admired her mothering skills.

She picked up Derek and sat him on her lap, looking into his face. I walked over to the both of them.

“I like brown too,” I replied looking down into Derek’s eyes.

I still found it a little unnerving how real these kids seemed, and maybe that was part of the reason for my own frayed nerves. Not sleeping in more than a week wasn’t helping either.

While Cindy had taken to the full blown experience, I was having a hard time balancing it with all my other responsibilities. Cindy was also interrupting me a dozen times a day to tell me about something one of them did and explain how great it was and how it related to this or that genetic expression.

“You seem to like everything, Rick,” she said, gently putting Derek down.

“Go on and play with your brother,” she told him, and he squeaked and began wriggling across the floor to the living room. She turned back to me.

“Rick, you’re the one who wanted to do this,” she sternly observed. “I just want you to participate a little more.”

Annoyed, I began to stammer, “I am…I mean I’m trying...” but I was cut short by a rising cacophony of shrieks.

The boys appeared from the living room and began running around the dining room table we were sitting at, laughing and chasing a flock of tiny flying dragons. I stopped, scratching the stubble on my neck irritably, waiting for them to disappear again.

“Do we really need to have a half a dozen simulated brats running around?” I demanded louder than I intended, my frustration mounting.

On the walk over here, I had decided to tell Cindy that I was ready to have real kids, and I was annoyed to have these things running around me screaming at such an important moment.

Her eyes flashed angrily at me, and then she turned to the kids.

“Boys, boys, we’re trying to talk here,” she said softly, shooing the flock of dragons back towards the living room. “Please.”

When I wasn’t looking, they’d all skinned themselves up as miniature purple tyrannosaurs, and were affecting puzzled little dinosaur expressions looking at the two of us. Little Ricky, the eldest, could take a hint, though, and quickly turned to lead the pack squealing back into the other room.

Cindy smiled and turned back to me.

“Did you see that? How he took the lead?” she pointed out. “We need to see how Little Ricky socializes, don’t we? I mean we picked a specific set of genes regarding his personality, and I for one want to see what this really means. Expression markers on a piece of paper are one thing, but...” The noise level in the next room exploded in screeches again, cutting her off.

I shrugged with wide eyes.

“Can’t we just turn the simulation off for a minute?”

I was getting a headache.

“You can’t just turn kids off, can you Rick?”

“No, but we can sure as heck turn these ones off.”

Echo materialized in my display space beside her, sensing something imminent. Cindy turned to him angrily.

“You mind your own business, mister!” she spat at him, wagging a finger in his direction. If a proxxi could be taken aback, he was, and rapidly dematerialized.

She turned back to me and added, “See Rick, this is just what I was talking about. If you find Ricky too rambunctious, maybe we should select for more introverted character traits. A part of this process is understanding how they will affect us and our relationship.”

I could see her point, but I already had a head of steam brewing.

“Look, I don’t want to have an introvert as a son. I had something important to tell you this evening...”

“And I had something important too, Rick,” she gushed out breathlessly before I could continue. “I want another proxxid.”

I was stunned. In another week or two Little Ricky would be ten years old, Derek would be heading into the terrible twos and now she wanted another one?

“We’re getting rid of these ones, though, right?” I asked incredulously.

“Getting rid of them?”

The whites of her eyes grew and she worked into a panic.

“We haven’t even gotten started with them. So you want to stop halfway through and call this whole thing a waste of time? Call my effort a waste of time?”

“Waste of time? I’ll tell you what a waste of time is, Cindy. I’m trying to make sure this tin can we’re floating in isn’t sabotaged or wrecked by some storm, and I’m strung out on Sleep-Overs from waking up to rock these stupid simulated babies to sleep every night!”

I hadn’t noticed that I’d started yelling, and suddenly everything was very quiet. The boys had circled back into the dining room, and the tiny dinosaurs were staring at me, tears welling in their little carnivorous eyes.

Derek started crying.

Cindy looked up at me and said quietly, “I just wanted to try having a little girl proxxid, to see what that was like.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose between my index and forefinger, my eyes tightly closed.

“I’m going to go back to work for a while, okay? I really have some stuff I need to get done. We’ll talk later. I’m sorry.”

Cindy tried to reach for me, but I shrugged her off and walked quickly back out the door.

Even with a full moon, it was almost pitch black under the dense tropical canopy. I’d just about worked myself up into a full sprint, dodging and weaving between the tree trunks.

Pssi was many things, but it was something else at night. The pitch darkness to my unaided eyes was overlaid with infrared and enhanced color images, so I could make my way easily even in the blackness. While I was primarily in charge of the run, Echo was subtly shifting my foot placements and balance here and there, and ducking my head slightly every now and then to adjust my trajectory through the jungle maze as I shot through it.

Echo had also networked in a few wild horses to stampede through the underbrush with us, and some monkeys swung hooting overhead. The net effect was a mad, euphoric rush through the undergrowth. It was the best way I knew to burn off steam.

The argument with Cindy had reminded me of how my parents had fought, and those bad memories jumped back into my mind. At first I’d gone back to the office to burrow into a pile of work, and Echo had said nothing, just working with me on the files. I’d really just wanted to tell her I was ready, but then that had happened. It felt like some kind of sign. I fought off the feeling.

Maybe that was what the proxxids were designed for, to help test you. If so, they were working.

My cheekbone bounced off something as I ricocheted off to one side and then cart wheeled into a thicket of palmettos. Wetness spread across my face. The hoard around me stopped, dousing the rampage in a sudden stillness.

“Maybe you should let me do more of the night driving,” said Echo. He waited for me to pick myself up.

I must have hit a tree branch. Ouch. The animals quietly dispersed, sensing an end to our fun.

“Naw, I like to keep myself as in touch with my body as I can, you know that.”

The more you used a proxxi to guide your body, the more you stood to lose neural cohesion, and that led down a slippery slope. I needed to be in total control of my body. When we used pssi prototypes in simulated combat training, I always made it a point to keep myself and my team in perfect neural coherence between our simulated and real bodies. Pssi was great for adjusting your aim or getting through trauma, but for the day to day stuff I still believed in plain old wetware as much as possible.

“For a guy who likes to keep in touch with his body, you sure can’t feel a thing,” commented Echo, standing beside me. “That’s going to leave a mark in the morning.”

I had my incoming neural pain network tuned down so low I had almost no sensation, at least none of the pain coming from my nervous system. My heart ached something terrible, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.

The perception of emotional pain was a funny thing. The more you tried to push it out, the more it seemed to dig itself in.

“Hey this is what we do in combat training,” I tried to tell him, but he knew me as well as I knew myself.

I tuned my pain receptors back up and felt a flood of pain from my face and ankle. It wasn’t smart to try and walk on a sprained ankle without your pain receptors fired up, not unless you had to.

“We’re not in combat training, soldier,” laughed Echo.

I limped towards the edge of the woods. Echo was walking beside me, and we were just at the edge of the beaches.

“You can’t turn off the pain, and you can’t beat yourself up either,” continued Echo as we reached the sand and walked out onto the empty beach. “You’re not your parents, Rick.”

“I know.”

“I’m not sure that you do, actually.”

A silence settled.

“Nice out here tonight, huh?” I said after a bit, changing the topic.

Echo just looked at me and nodded. “Yeah, it sure is.”

We laid down in the sand, side by side, and looked up at the bright stars hanging silently above us. I tuned the ultraviolet and x-ray spectra into my visual system, and watched the night sky begin to glow in neon blues and ghostly whites above us.

“Beautiful to be alive, isn’t it?” I said to Echo, wondering to myself if I was just trying to run away again.

I hardly noticed that Echo didn’t respond.

I stayed out the rest of that evening, not wanting to explain a bloody and bruised face to Cindy in the middle of the night. Dodging responsibility, I had Echo leave her a low priority message that I was sorry, but that everything was fine, and that I’d be staying at the office overnight.

The next day was a blur after not sleeping again, so I gobbled more Sleep-Over tabs. On top of everything else, my body was trying to recover from my self-inflicted injuries.

The Command staffers were sympathetically amused at my purple, swollen face. Even though I’d tried to secure a reality filter over the top of it, most of them easily overrode it for a laugh. I was mostly just waiting till the end of the day to speak with Cindy.

“You look the worse for wear,” said Jimmy as we started going over the daily threat reports after lunch. He was smiling.

“Yeah, yeah,” I replied with a grin, “I am supposed to be the fighting part of this unit, remember?”

“Of course, Commander.”

He rolled his eyes, and I looked down, shaking my head.

“Hey, do you want me to finish up with this stuff?” Jimmy offered. “I can see you have a lot on your mind.”

The reports and diagrams floating in the shared display space between us seemed to stretch off into infinite space. Just looking at them made my headache worse.

“Actually, Jimmy, that’d be great.”

“No problem.”

“Rick, why don’t you just take the rest of the day off? I think Jimmy is right, go and take it easy,” Echo added. “I just checked with Cindy, and she’s got some time too.”

I looked up at him suddenly. “You talked to Cindy?”

“Yeah, I sure did,” Echo replied. “She was just checking in on you while you were busy with Jimmy, and she said she had the rest of the day free.”

“Good, thanks guys,” I said, looking at the two of them. “I really appreciate it.”

“Oh, Rick, by the way,” said Jimmy as I began to get up to go. “Your wife asked me to help her with some stuff with your proxxids, you’re okay with all that?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” I said, waving him on, “whatever she needs.”

I forwarded him my proxxid credentials and flitted off to wrap up some details.

I opened the door to our apartment after Echo had walked me home, expecting a wave of screaming kids. It was completely quiet, however, and right away that got me worried. Tentatively, I looked around inside and found Cindy sitting on a small couch in the center. Our place was a pristine white, featureless projection, very calm and quiet.

It felt creepy.

“Oh Rick,” she exclaimed as she saw me enter, getting up off the couch and coming to me, “what did you do to yourself? Echo told me you went out last night? This was all my fault...”

“No, no, it’s not your fault. It was my fault.” I held up my hands. “I’m okay, it’s just a big scratch. I was out doing some night drills for work.”

She looked unconvinced.

“About last night Rick, I know you had something important to say...”

“And I still do,” I interrupted, “look, I know it’s been a long time getting here...but...I’m ready now, and I know you are.”

I smiled. She smiled back and wrapped her arms around me, kissing me.

“That’s wonderful news, sweetie.”

She looked happy, but I had expected a little more, so I repeated myself. “I want to have a real baby with you now, you understand?”

She nodded and smiled, “Of course I do, and that’s wonderful news. Well, let’s get it just right, then.”

I took a deep breath, feeling relief wash through my body.

“So, where are the boys then?” I asked, looking around.

“Oh, they’re gone now,” she replied casually, surprising me. As long as she was happy, which she seemed to be, it was fine with me, but I had to admit I felt some sudden pangs of regret.

“But,” she continued, “I do have someone I’d like you to meet.”

A crack appeared in the flat white wall behind the couch, and she led me by the hand towards it as the wall slid open to reveal a room beyond. I could hear a soft gurgling sound. We walked up to the edge of a cradle, and Cindy bent over to pick up a little baby girl lying inside it.

She held her up to me, and I took the baby in my arms.

“Rick, please meet Brianna,” Cindy announced softly.

I looked down into my new baby girl’s face, and she was amazingly beautiful. We could try this out for a while.

Maybe I’d always wanted a baby girl.

5

Today Cindy had transported our family into a Norman Rockwell-like setting. We were outside, sitting together at an old weather beaten oak table at the edge of an apple orchard, behind a vintage white washed cottage, complete with peeling paint outside and a musty interior full of yellowing family photographs on mantelpieces.

It was warm, hot even, as the sun lazily set under a cloudless blue sky. We were on Martha’s Vineyard in a circa 1940s wikiworld. The fading day had a languid, easy going feel to it, which was nice after a hectic day of chasing down cyber threats. Sea air rustled in through tall unkempt grasses atop sand dunes lining the nearby beaches.

Like getting a new fix, our first baby girl proxxid had injected new life into our relationship, and the days and weeks had passed with a sense of rejuvenated expectations. Jimmy and Echo had sensed what was going on, and the pair of them had volunteered to take on a lot of my Command functions, giving me the time to work things out with Cindy.

The highlight of each day had become a ritualized homecoming to explore a new metaworld that Cindy would create for us, and, of course, to play with the latest proxxid. As time went on, we’d progressed, one by one, through Brianna, our first girl proxxid, and then Georgina, Paul, Pauli and eventually to our new favorite, Little Ricky-Two.

“Adriana was right,” commented Cindy, looking down into Little Ricky-Two’s face, “blue eyes are the best. Just like Little Ricky’s.”

“Huh?”

I was deep into a Phuture News report predicting a flare-up in the Weather Wars. I flicked away tabloid splinters that tried to correlate this to some paranormal reports. Of course, a lot of people were tracking events in the Weather Wars, and with so many people getting advance notice of events on this scale, there was a good chance the event wouldn’t happen.

As I was thinking this, the new news reported that the offensive had been delayed, and was just as quickly canceled. Suddenly, a report came in that a tactical nuclear weapon would be launched against a target in Kashmir, but this was quickly aborted at the last instant. All sides were already at the negotiating table.

Accurate futuring technology had begun to bring out random behavior—being predictable meant everyone could see you coming, so being unpredictable and random had its advantages, but usually at the expense of lacking a certain strategic intent.

The irony of how ‘knowing the future’ made things less predictable didn’t escape me, but the serious strategists said that this perception was just the result of our primary subjectives being stuck in one timeline at a time. I sighed.

At the same time, Hurricane Ignacia had shifted directions entirely, and looked like it would slam into Costa Rica and could cross over from the Caribbean and into the Eastern Pacific. It had grown into a monster category four. We were already backpedaling away from Hurricane Newton, a steady category two as it wound its way up the coast of Mexico, and were suddenly faced with two major hurricanes in our oceanic basin with several other depressions already spinning up in the background. Not unprecedented, but certainly unusual.

A mosquito hovered uncertainly before me and I swatted it away, shaking my head.

“Remember the original Little Ricky’s eyes?” repeated Cindy. “I replayed them in Little Ricky-Two’s features. I just love them.”

She choked up as she said this, even though it had been more than six weeks since we’d discontinued the original Little Ricky proxxid. Sensing tears coming, I snapped out of Phuture News and focused my attention on Cindy.

“Oh, yes, of course,” I replied.

One of our favorite activities was to discuss and compare features of each proxxid. I thought I’d try launching into this to avert whatever was happening and focus her in the moment.

“I really like the cheekbone structure of Little Ricky-Two,” I suggested helpfully.

Cindy went completely still. In the sudden silence, I could hear the wooden grandfather clock in the main hallway of the cottage slowly ticking through the seconds. Something was terribly wrong, but I couldn’t understand what it was. Cindy stared down into Little Ricky-Two’s face. She seemed about to cry.

“Me too,” replied Cindy, catching herself, still staring into the proxxid’s face. With a deep breath, she recovered from whatever it was.

“Who’s my cute little baby boy?” Cindy whispered at Little Ricky-Two, shaking him softly and then squeezing him into her body. He burbled with delight, and cuddled his head into her as she held him.

“Are you okay?” I asked Cindy.

“Yes, of course,” she replied unconvincingly. Shrugging and smiling, she held the synthetic baby ever tighter.

A cicada’s whine played high in the distance, and I squinted into the sunlight slanting through the apple trees and watched her doting over the proxxid. This was all very nice, but my uneasiness was wearing my patience thin. I’d been more than ready to move onto the real thing for a while.

I held up one hand to shield my eyes from the sun and asked, “How about we step this one quickly through his age profiles, maybe see what he’d be like at five years old tomorrow?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Then maybe as a twenty-something the day after?”

Cindy shot me a hateful look and tightly cradled Little Ricky-Two.

“No, we don’t need to do that. I already have a pretty good idea.”

Feeling irritated, I looked down to inspect some crab grass sprouting desperately out from under one of the feet of the table. A breeze rippled the struggling blades of grass as I watched, bringing with it the moldering decay of spoiled apples out in the yard. I looked back up at Cindy, straining my eyes against the setting sun.

“What do you mean, you have a good idea?” I asked. “We only let the first Little Ricky develop to about five, and Derek was just a baby when we terminated. Don’t you want to see what they’ll be like when they’re older?”

“Rick, you just know these things when you’re a mother.”

She sighed.

“You can look at the simulations of them older if you like, but I don’t need to.”

She held Little Ricky-Two up in front of her and began cooing softly at him.

The discussion was apparently over. I felt both uncomfortable and annoyed. Little Ricky-Two was wearing tiny stone washed denim dungarees and a checked red shirt, just how we used to dress up the original Little Ricky.

“Isn’t that what the proxxids are for?” I asked her, my frustration beginning to mount.

“Honey,” she answered, still staring at Little Ricky-two, “I don’t want to argue with you, okay? It’s just not something I want to do.”

I sat for a moment, quietly putting my emotions in order before responding while I watched her nuzzling the proxxid some more.

“Cindy, please, put Little Ricky-Two down for a second.”

“Okay, Mr. Big Ricky,” she replied finally. She turned and sat the baby on her lap, cradling him defensively. Looking up at me, she was about to say something but I cut her off.

“Can we turn this simulation off for a minute?” I asked. “I’m really not comfortable here anymore.”

Hurt blossomed in her eyes and she seemed to resist for a moment, glancing back and forth at the cottage and then at me. She hesitated. Sensing my aggravation, the apple orchard and cottage faded away.

She still sat holding Little Ricky-Two in her arms and on her lap, but we were sitting back at our own dining room table in real space. Behind her, light danced down from the kelp forests, illuminating a school of angel fish that were swimming past the window walls of our apartment.

I leaned forward towards her and put one hand on her knee and said, “Cindy, I love you honey.”

“And I love you too.”

She took my cue to hold my hand in hers, but she held tightly onto the proxxid with her other arm.

“I know this was all my idea,” I explained, “and I’ve enjoyed it, and I think we’ve learnt a lot, but I think this is enough, don’t you? It’s time to get onto the real thing, don’t you think?”

I waited, expecting the worst.

She just smiled. “Yes, I think you’re right. This is enough.”

“Really?” I was surprised. “So we can move onto the real thing?”

She smiled back at me and bounced Little Ricky-Two on her knee.

“Well, give me a little time to myself, no?”

As suddenly as it had started, it was over.

The next day I came home from work and there were no more proxxids. It felt like a huge weight had been lifted from me. We were child free for the first time in months, like we were proxxid empty-nesters. It was a shock to my system to begin with—coming home to find only Cindy waiting for me, with no new proxxid to play with.

In retrospect, I’d actually enjoyed the process of picking out the perfect baby for us. Putting it all behind us felt like we’d crossed an important threshold, and I looked forward to having a real baby.

Most important, the experience seemed to have recreated Cindy. She was happy to simply be alive, and the clouds of her chronic depression had lifted. I figured it was the prospect of finally having a child together, the whole process we’d been through. Each day I would return from work and she was energized and refreshed, and we would enjoy long lovemaking sessions more often than not.

It was after one of those sessions, lying amid the mess of sheets and pillows, that I asked her, “Cindy, don’t you want to get pregnant, get off the birth control? I mean, we could be making our baby right now.”

“Silly,” she replied, poking my nose playfully with one finger, “just give me some time. I’m really enjoying myself right now.”

I couldn’t argue with that. She was being terrific.

“I don’t want to do it artificially,” I continued dreamily. “I’d prefer that we inseminate ourselves, or rather, I inseminate you.”

She giggled and I scooped her up into my arms.

“Is that good enough for you?” I teased.

“Sure is, Commander Ricky.”

“Hey, let’s stay in bed and splinter into the Infinixx launch party tonight,” I said, smiling at her. “No fixing your hair, no nothing. We can just stay here and cuddle and project ourselves there, all spiffed up. What do you think?”

She giggled again. “Like I said, I’m good with that, Commander.”

6

“There is something very unnatural going on here.”

With that statement, our mandroid guest reached down with one slender metallic arm to adjust the snug jumpsuit along her thin, gleaming legs. I couldn’t help feeling some revulsion watching her standing there, despite many friends who’d come back from the Wars in bits and pieces to be rebuilt robotically.

It was early Saturday morning, but we’d all been called into Command to review scenarios around the threat of the storms that were pinching Atopia towards the coast. Although we couldn’t figure out how yet, it seemed these storms weren’t natural, and our mandroid guest was presenting some possible explanations of what was going on.

On top of it, Patricia had suffered some kind of medical emergency after the disaster of the Infinixx launch a few weeks back. She said she was fine, but she’d been acting strangely ever since.

“So do you think the Terra Novans are involved?” I asked it, or her, or whatever. All the technical details on how this could be made to happen were academically interesting, but I needed to know who and why.

“We’re not sure,” it responded.

Neither was I. Something wasn’t right about this mandroid, nothing I could put my finger on, but she’d been rushed in by Patricia as an outside expert so I hadn’t had much input in the vetting process. Whatever had happened to her, it must have been incredibly traumatic. She was barely more than a stump of flesh suspended between spindly robotic appendages.

“So then where is this coming from?” I demanded impatiently.

“We can’t say for certain yet, but there’s something too perfect about these storms.” She just shrugged.

Too perfect? Too perfect for who, I wondered. This was a waste of time. I looked towards Jimmy, seeing if he had anything to add. He shrugged as well. Great. I rubbed my eyes, trying to wipe away my headache.

Cindy had begun to fall back into her depressions, and I was having a hard time focusing at work. Having a few drinks last night hadn’t helped anything either. Cindy’s depressions had become even worse than before, where just a short time ago she’d been doing so well. She didn’t even want to speak about having children anymore.

“Jimmy, do you think you could look into this more? I need to go and see Cindy.” Honestly, I needed to go and lie down.

“No problem,” he replied immediately.

I nodded my thanks and was about to flit off when Jimmy added something.

“Oh, yeah, I have that date tonight, if you remember.”

I looked up towards the ceiling.

“Oh, yeah. Susie, right?” I smiled and laughed. “So that’s going well then?”

“I can cancel if you want,” offered Jimmy.

“No, no, keep the date. You can’t let stuff like this stop you from living life. Anyway I know you’ll keep a few splinters around if I need you. I’ll be back.”

With that I flitted off home.

Opening the door to our apartment, a foreboding gloom enveloped me like a storm cloud dropping from the sky. It was dark inside, with the glimmering reflections of a holo projection playing off the walls.

“Honey?” I announced, worried, peering around the door as I entered.

Cindy was in a heap on the couch, the same as when I’d left many hours ago, and our home was a mess. The room was almost pitch black with Hal’s EmoShow playing endlessly in the center. I was anxious but not sure what to do, so I walked over to the couch and sat down with her. I put my hand on her knee.

“Honey, how are you doing?” I asked.

She put her hand on mine and sat up a bit. Hal’s head disappeared as she turned off the EmoShow, and the lights in the room came up a bit. At least she was trying.

“I’m okay,” she responded, but sounding less than okay. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” I replied. “But seriously, honey, what’s up? Please talk to me.”

“I’m just a little down. It’s hard, you know.”

“What’s hard, honey?”

She didn’t reply. She just looked at me.

“Do you want to speak to someone, maybe someone other than me, have you tried that?”

Maybe it was something to do with me.

“Oh, I’ve been talking to people, I have someone to talk to,” she replied. “It’s okay sweetheart, but thanks.”

“What about our plans?” I asked gently. “What about having a child, I thought that was what you wanted, what would make you happy? You were so great with the proxxids. Don’t you want to try and have our own child? We’re ready now.”

Cindy looked at me and smiled weakly.

“I know you are, honey.”

I was running out of things to say.

“Do you want to try some more proxxids?” I asked helplessly.

“No,” she responded, brightening up, “not anymore. I think I’m ready now.”

Cool relief poured into my veins.

“Honey, I’m so happy to hear that,” I replied, my heart in my throat.

I leaned over to kiss her, but she just held my head in her hands and kissed my forehead.

7

I got the call the next day, on Sunday morning.

We were all back at Command again, running through the storm predictions for the millionth time as they swung around in perfectly the wrong way, trapping Atopia against the coast. We’d just decided that we needed to take some emergency action, and we were about to begin the escalation process when the call came in.

Echo patched the communication straight through and immediately requested to take over all of my Command functions. I glanced at him with a furrowed brow and took the call.

“Something is wrong with your wife, Commander Strong,” the doctor told me immediately, his image floating in a display space while I sat at my workstation.

“What do you mean, something is wrong?”

“I think you’d better come down here,” he said.

I immediately punched down and was standing beside him in the infirmary watching over Cindy, who was lying on a raised bed in front of us. The infirmary had an otherworldly look and feel to it with glowing, pinkish hued walls and ceilings that were there but not there in a soothingly anesthetic sort of way. The doctor was the only one in attendance, and he looked at me with detached concern.

“So what do you mean exactly?” I demanded.

I looked towards Cindy. She had all the appearances of being asleep.

“It’s a new phenomenon—we’re calling it ‘realicide’ or reality suicide.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s a condition where the subject, your wife, withdraws completely from reality to permanently lock their mind in some fantasy metaworld that they’ve created.”

“Can’t you stop it? Can I talk to her?”

“No, I’m sorry, we can’t reach her,” explained the doctor. “Her pssi and inVerse are completely contained within her own body, a kind of extension of her own mind. We have control over the technology, but not over her mind, and she’s chosen to do this herself.”

“Chosen to do what to herself?” I demanded.

The doctor shrugged and shook his head. Apparently he wasn’t sure.

“We could physiologically remove the pssi network by flushing out all the smarticles, but this could trigger an unstable feedback loop that could destroy her psyche in the process.”

I stared at him in silence.

“So what can you do then?”

“Well, Commander Strong, it would help if we understood why. Is there anything that happened recently? I noted that you’d been experimenting with the proxxids.”

“Yes,” I responded, feeling mounting dread, “sure we did. That’s what this place is for, right?”

“Commander Strong,” the doctor continued, “proxxids can have very powerful emotional side effects if not taken properly. Did you read the warning labels before taking so many of them? Tell me, Commander Strong, what did you do with the proxxids when you were done?”

8

The investigation had uncovered that Cindy hadn’t been terminating our proxxids. Instead she’d been secreting them away, one by one, in her own private metaworlds. As she’d become more pssi aware, she’d started constructing ever more elaborate worlds and hidden them deeper and deeper away from me to protect her ever growing family, using private networks and security blankets to cover her tracks.

It wasn’t all that hard, and I guess I hadn’t been paying attention. Her mood had been so great at the time that I hadn’t dug too deep into what she was up to when I was away.

All the questions she had been asking about the lifespan of the proxxids floated into sharp detail in my mind. She’d begun demanding more and more flexibility for each of them as we’d spawned them. I’d always refused, wanting to keep them as short as possible to try and move the process along.

Since they used a recombination of our DNA, based on our legal copyrights, both of us had to agree on the format of the proxxid before spawning. Once their processes had been started they could only be changed by resetting the system, effectively terminating that instance. So she hadn’t been able to modify them without destroying them.

Despite the mounting emergency facing Atopia, I could hardly muster the energy to spend any time at Command, especially after Jimmy had cracked into her private worlds and delivered copies to me.

Jimmy and Echo could handle what was going on as well as I could. Atopia would push through the storms, and even if it didn’t, what would it matter to me? I was busy fighting for my own piece of mind amid the wreckage that had become my life.

Proxxids weren’t intended to have been used this way. Cindy had overridden the proxxid controls using my own security clearance. A desperate mother could find a way around any obstacle that threatened her children.

As I accessed the copies of the worlds she’d created, I began a bizarre journey, watching them all grow up together in that little white washed cottage on Martha’s Vineyard I had once visited with her. It was like watching an ancient rerun of a television show about country living, complete with sheets flapping like white flags surrendering yesteryear on the clothesline out back.

I spent my days sitting and watching Little Ricky, Derek, Brianna, Georgina, Paul, Pauli and Little Ricky-Two playing together, growing up together, living out their lives. I smiled as I watched them, remembering them all as babies in my arms.

The simulation mechanics of the proxxids, which I’d forced upon Cindy, had created surreally accelerated lifespans where they’d aged from babies into old men and women in varying spans of barely three months in a crazy, non-linear time warp.

They didn’t seem to notice anything odd was happening because of the cognitive blind spot they had built into them, or maybe because, as children living the only lives they ever knew, they didn’t know any different. It was impossible to know.

She had only brought me there that one time. As it turned out, it was just after they’d had the first Little Ricky’s funeral. The illicit gang of proxxid children, my children, were all hiding upstairs when I’d arrived there that afternoon at the cottage. They were on the strictest of instructions to remain quiet. Most of them were still small children at that point.

I replayed, over and over again, that scene, standing with them in the darkened upstairs room as they giggled and hid, looking down onto Cindy and myself talking in the yard. I think she’d been on the verge of telling me, and was planning on bringing them all out as a big surprise.

Little Ricky’s funeral had been an emotional tidal wave for her, and she was trying her best to reach out to me, but I hadn’t let her.

She’d wanted my help to somehow extend their lives, but I had shut her down before she’d even been able to ask. My anger had cut her short, as it always had.

I found myself going back and replaying over and over again one scene in particular, just before Little Ricky’s death.

He was a wizened old man at that point, bent over and leaning on his cane as he came out the back porch of the cottage, the door squeaking on its hinges as he exited. Two of the girls came running past him as he opened the door, Georgina squealing as she was chased by Brianna.

Little Ricky wobbled unsteadily as they flew past, but he smiled at them. I smiled at them too.

“Come sit down, Little Ricky,” said Cindy, getting up from the great old weather beaten oak table we had sat at together, not so very long ago, but now seeming in another lifetime.

Time was a funny thing—even as I traveled through it freely back and forth to view what had happened, it was frozen now, my life as immobile as an insect caught in amber.

I was sitting at the table with them as I replayed the scene. A wasp buzzed by angrily on its way to a nest under the eaves as Cindy took Little Ricky by the arm to sit him down. Cindy carefully eased him into his seat, and sat herself down across from him, her hands on his hands across the table, looking into his eyes.

“I don’t know how much longer this old body is going to last, mother,” said Little Ricky, matter-of-factly. Tears spilled down Cindy’s face.

“Don’t cry mother, what’s there to be sad about? It’s a beautiful day,” he said, rocking his old head back to look up at the perfect blue sky and smiling. “What a beautiful day to be alive.”

They buried Little Ricky in a plot near the house, but only Cindy had cried as they’d lowered him in. The rest of them couldn’t figure out what there was to be sad about on such a wonderful, sunny day amid the apple trees on Martha’s Vineyard.

9

I learnt that we’d had Little Ricky-Two right after Little Ricky had died, I guess to try and fill the gap that had appeared in her life. As the rest of them soon passed as well, it had all just become too much for her.

Watching reruns of this family that I had, but never had, I was filled with a bittersweet sadness. But maybe, just maybe, Cindy had gotten what she’d wanted after all. Did living a full life in a few short months make it any less? Did I feel any less sense of meaning in my life, having watched my children grow up and grow old and pass before my eyes so quickly?

It was all very hard to say.

What I could say with certainty was that Cindy’s family had flatly refused to allow me to have access to her body for the purposes of having children, which I had petitioned for immediately.

“Commander Strong,” her father told me, “I know Cindy loved you, more than we could understand after you kept leaving her alone for each new tour of duty. You know you nearly killed her each time you went back out.”

“I know sir...”

“She begged you for children, and now that you’ve...” he tried to say calmly, but then lost his temper. “This is an abomination, man! What in the world are you people doing out there?”

There wasn’t much I could say, so I waited for him to regain his composure.

“Rick, I just don’t see how, in good conscience, and after everything that has happened, that we can let you have a child of our dear Cindy.”

I could understand her father’s point of view. They’d never much cared for her marrying a military man to begin with, and this had just proved their point, whether it made much sense or not.

They didn’t ask to move Cindy from Atopia, as this remained the one place where they could still hold out hope. The future was approaching awfully fast out here, and maybe there was a way we could fix what had happened.

“So you have no ideas left, doc?” I asked, at yet another review I’d requested.

“Commander Strong, we’re going to have to refuse any further meeting requests until we have something new,” said the doc’s proxxi. “It’s one thing to play with the inputs and outputs to the brain, but the actual place where the mind comes together...it’s a tricky thing.”

Jimmy was with me too, trying to help out. “Why don’t you just take it easy, Commander, I’ll keep you posted if we can figure anything out.”

So I left it in their hands. Apart from watching reruns of my family, I spent a lot of my time floating back up on the edge of space, following the UAVs in their lazy orbits around Atopia high in the stratosphere, looking down at the storms that threatened to crush and destroy Atopia.

They could figure it out without me. I had other things to do.

Sitting high in the bleachers, the drama of the little league game was spread out before me. Tensions were running high at the bottom of the ninth inning, and everyone around held their collective breath as the final hitter came to the plate.

Nervously shifting silhouettes far in the outfield cast long shadows in the last rays of a late summer sunset. I squinted into the sun, trying to make out which kid was which, and then turned my attention back to the hitter.

Strike went the first pitch. Then strike again went the second. Hushed silence as the pitcher went into his windup.

“Strike three!” thundered the umpire.

The scene turned into pandemonium, at least for half of us there. I smiled, watching the little figures running in from the outfield, and someone grabbed me by the arm.

“What a great game!” said the man standing beside me. “You got a son in the game?”

“I sure do,” I replied as my boy scampered up the stairs through the departing crowd. He jumped into my arms and hugged me, and I looked down into his eyes.

“We won dad!” he squealed at me. “Why are you crying, dad? We won!”

I wiped my face.

“You sure have your mother’s eyes, you know that?”

Little Ricky just smiled without understanding. Drying my eyes I took his hand, and we walked down off the bleachers, across the infield and into the dying sunshine.