The Atopia Chronicles

1 Identity: Commander Rick Strong

From this altitude, the stars just began to poke their pinpricks of light through the dark blue-violet sky. As the sun rose and morning broke fully, the hazy film of the Earth’s atmosphere painted a milky edge onto the curved horizon.

Looking down, I could just make out Atopia flashing like a distant green gem beneath wisps of stratospheric clouds, almost swallowed in the endless seas below. Zooming in to view it from here, Atopia appeared as a forested island about a mile across fringed by white-sand beaches. The only visible structures on its surface were the ring of the mass driver circling it and the four gleaming farm towers that rose up out of its center.

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

“Good enough?” I asked.

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

“No hurry. Let’s make sure nothing is out here.”

I was enjoying the lazy crawl across the top of the world with the UAV. I took a deep breath, watching the sun reflect off the seas. The silence was serene. I should come up more often.

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

Turning my viewpoint around, I could see Patricia Killiam and her gaggle of reporters from the marketing presentation 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. They appeared as a halo of tiny stars hanging 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 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 outward and away. 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. Backpedaling down and away, I watched the sheet of flame envelope the sky.

“Very nice,” I declared, snapping 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 folded arms beside me, 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 toward 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 tiny explosive pellets into the sky at speeds of up to seven miles per 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 superheated plasma at ranges of a hundred or more miles away. It could take out incoming ballistic missiles, cruise weapons, aircraft, pretty much anything coming our way.

Heck, if I feel like it, I thought, I could even take out a mean-looking flock of seagulls from two hundred clicks.

And so far, seagulls were all that dared come near us.

Atopia bristled with an array of fearsome weapons, of which the slingshots were just one part. Some of my other toys included the mass driver and the aerial and submarine UAV defense systems, not to mention the offensive and defensive cyberweapons. 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.

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 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.

We were closely allied with America, of course, but the United States had enough trouble taking care of its shrinking sphere of influence. I should know—I spent my earlier career in the thick of the first Weather War battles.

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. After damming nearly all of the water flowing out of the mountains, China’s 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 engulf most of Asia and Africa. Of course, the world teetering on the brink of destruction was nothing new.

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

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

The air began to shimmer in an empty space beside me, and her image slowly materialized. She was lighting up a cigarette and smiling at me, dressed in a dark business suit, old-school style, her hair done up in a tight gray bun. Relaxed, but 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.

It was the first time we’d tested the slingshots, and they’d more than lived up to expectations.

I checked some last-second details. “That about does it.”

“Good, because you scared the heck out of what wildlife I’ve managed to nurture on this tin can,” she admonished cheerfully and took 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. That was quite the shock-and-awe campaign.”

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

We’d purposely decided not to pssi-block anything in order to measure emotional responses during the test. I’d talked to Dr. Granger about getting the best bang for the buck out of our weapons exercises to impress upon the rest of the world how they’d better not mess with us.

“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. “Good work.”

“Did you see that thunderstorm coming in? We’ve been tracking that depression for weeks, 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?”

I’d returned to fiddling with the slingshot control systems, but this got my attention. I looked up at her.

“Actually,” I said slowly, “that would be great. You wouldn’t mind?” Cindy, my wife, was having a hard time adjusting to us coming to Atopia. We could use the time together to re-connect. “So you really think that whole sim kid thing might be a good idea?”

Patricia hesitated. “Yes, if you’re careful.”

“Maybe I’ll speak to her about it then. I’ll see you later.” I smiled at her as she thanked me again and walked off, fading away without another word.

Patricia was one of the founding fathers, so to speak, of Atopia. After the mess the rest of the world had become, the best and brightest of the world had emigrated to build the new New World, the Bensalem group of seasteads in the Pacific Ocean, of which Atopia was the crown jewel. Atopia was supposed to be—was marketed as—this shining beacon of libertarian ideals. She was, by far, the largest in a collection of platforms in the oceans 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 rest of humanity.

I laughed to myself. Tough guy, huh? Who was I kidding? I was a washed-up basket case who could barely manage a night of sleep without waking up in a terrified sweat half of the time. The only reason I was here was to try to revive my relationship with my wife. Without Cindy, I would be off in some seedy 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, feeling that old guilt begin to bleed out around the edges of my life.

“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.

“Please,” 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.”

Echo nodded and silently walked off to fetch the flowers. He was good at taking orders.

The excitement of the slingshot test hadn’t yet faded, and I walked briskly home. The flowers Echo had gotten from Vince were perfect.

“Hi, sweetie! I’m home!”

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

Cindy looked at the flowers less than enthusiastically.

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 in the background. Cindy wasn’t smiling, though, her face dully reflecting the light from the display.

It was going to be another one of those nights.

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

“Sorry, sweetie.” I was always sorry.

Walking in, I saw 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.” Hal’s head disappeared from the middle of the room and cast the place into a sullen silence.

With a great sigh, she glanced at me and declared, “I guess I’ll get a vase or something,” before swinging herself laboriously off the couch to walk into the kitchen.

“How was your day?” I said brightly, trying to restart the conversation.

She rummaged around in some drawers in the kitchen. “It was fine,” she replied, lightening up a bit. “But this place is so depressing. I feel like I can’t get any air. This apartment is so… subterranean.”

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. But then that was the entire point of Atopia: everyone had unlimited access to perfect synthetic reality, so you didn’t need much in the way of space or material things in the physical world.

“Sub-marine,” I corrected her pointlessly. “You mean sub-marine.”

“Whatever. It’s dark and claustrophobic.” She found a vase and filled it with water, then walked toward me with it in hand, reaching for the flowers.

“Sweetheart… ,” I started to say, then stopped, searching for the right words. “Just try to use the pssi system. You can be anywhere, do anything you want.”

But that was the wrong thing to say.

“I hate the pssi system!” she spat at me, but then she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Backing up a little, her shoulders relaxed and she opened her eyes.

I said nothing.

“Sorry, I had a bad day.” She paused. “Pssi is great for watching programs and surfing the ‘net, but I don’t like all this… this… ” she stuttered, 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. I can’t crawl back to Washington with my tail between my legs. Can’t you give it a chance?”

“You’re right.” She sighed once again and put the flowers down on our coffee table, stepping back to admire them. “I’ll try. I will.”

My heart filled with small hope. “Thank you, sweetheart. You might like it, if you give it a chance.”

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

I knew what was coming next, and my heart sank.

“Have you thought about what we talked about? The reason I thought we came here?”

Now it was my turn to sigh. “I’ve thought about it, but I’m not sure that either of us is ready for it. Maybe soon, okay?”

“Okay,” she replied, her voice small.

Maybe it was time to talk about Patricia’s idea.

2

There was still nothing 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. Patricia had given me some homework assignments, and I was reading about the synthetic reality system that everything on Atopia depended upon.

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 control signals passing through it. Fairly quickly, they’d learned the trick of modifying the signals going to our eyes, ears, and other sensory channels, making it possible to perfectly simulate our senses. Creating completely synthetic worlds 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 my own proxxi, Echo felt as much a part of me as I was myself. It was hard 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 of pssi to the world.

“Describe a proxxi again?” asked a reporter.

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

“And why would I need one?”

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

My mind wandered as the press conference continued. Despite the endless list of projects to get through, my thoughts couldn’t help circling back to Cindy. Clicking off the visual overlay of Patricia’s press conference, I returned my attention to my Command task list as the rest of my staff arrived for the day. The first task of the day, of every day, was to look at the weather systems coming our way.

Patricia had just uploaded some of her latest weather forecasts, and we’d been surprised by her upgrading of tropical storm Ignacia in the North Atlantic. Our own weather systems hadn’t predicted this, but as we reviewed her datasets, it all suddenly fit. It worried me that, despite all the technology we had, we could miss something like 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 needed to do our best to steer clear of her. Record global temperatures predicted an intense hurricane season this year, putting us well into the seasonal dance of avoiding disturbances coming our way.

This usually wasn’t much of a problem out here in the east Pacific off the Baja Peninsula. 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.

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

“Looks good to me,” I offered.

Atopia wasn’t really a ship—she was a platform—but we could drive her around comfortably at a few miles per hour. More, if we really needed to. 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 predictions indicated a gathering string of depressions coming our way, so we’d begun backing away north and eastward toward 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. The Command ops team needed my sign off, and I gave it almost right away, 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 rolled my eyes, taking a sip from my coffee.

“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 need all the help you can get, and it’s his area of expertise.”

“I don’t disagree, but he’s just a kid.”

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. His situation struck a very personal chord for me.

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

Personally, I didn’t go for all that stuff about Terra Nova. They didn’t pose any tactical threat, but that didn’t stop Atopians from getting worked up. In the outside world, Atopia and Terra Nova were seen as two sides to the same coin, but the rivalry between these competing colonies was being whipped into a fervor. I wasn’t sure it was for the best.

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

“Jimmy is a special kid,” said Marie quietly. “Anyway, he’s our pick.”

I registered the finality in her tone. “Good enough for me.”

“Good.” She smiled winningly at me and disappeared.

It was a long day, and I’d been worrying about Cindy the whole time. Standing alone in the featureless corridor outside our apartment, I hesitated. Is it really what I want? Our door slid open and I strode in.

“Hey honey, I’m home!” I yelled out then stopped as I tried to make sense of what greeted me.

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

Marbled columns rose up around a sunken living area in the middle of the room, surrounded by a raised terrace. A feast awaited on a low table, with red and gold pillows littered around it. Incense filled the room, and two handservants quietly and quickly moved toward 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 through one of the doorways to the side, filmy skirt of shimmering red swirling about her legs, and jumped into my arms.

“Isn’t it just dreamy?” Draping her arms around me, she kissed me wetly. “Thanks for those flowers yesterday. That was really sweet.”

“Looks fantastic,” I said from beneath her kiss. Cindy sometimes swung from depression into manic episodes. I smiled cautiously.

“Come on, let’s eat!” She took me by the hand and led me down the stairs to a low table where she had bunched up some throw pillows and blankets. She kissed me again, and sat us both down. Reaching onto the table, she grabbed a bunch of grapes and began feeding them to me, one at a time.

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

“Long,” I replied, laughing. “We’ve nominated Jimmy to the Security Council as our specialist in conscious security. He’ll be a big help.”

“Jimmy—Bob’s adopted brother Jimmy?”

“Yeah, that’s right, I guess.” For brothers, adopted or not, Jimmy and Bob sure didn’t seem to talk much. Of course, I hardly spoke to my own brother either.

We pulled some more pillows around ourselves, and the sun began setting while we chatted and began eating. She’d planned a feast for evening, all my favorites—fried shrimp, filet steak, even profiteroles for desert. It was the first time I felt totally at ease with Cindy in longer than I could remember. When I was about stuffed, she surprised me again.

“So, Mr. Rick Strong, who would you like me to be tonight?” she asked as all of the serving and cleaning staff retreated into the antechambers.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.” She cast her eyes down, then looked back at me, smiling.

“Really?”

She nodded bashfully.

“Would you like me to skin-up, too?”

“Sure… ,” she giggled. “You first.” We hadn’t made love in months. Unbuttoning my shirt, she began rubbing my chest.

She nudged me with a phantom for a stimshare. Surprised that she used a phantom, I looked into her eyes, and she winked at me. I quickly accepted and watched her shiver as my sensory input filled her senses.

I hadn’t expected this when I walked in the door. I didn’t really go for this stuff, but I was happy to experiment a little, especially when it was me that had asked her to try and get into it.

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

She looked at me shyly. “That Spanish guy in the crime dramas, you know, Julio.… ”

I laughed. “Are you sure?”

She nodded.

Echo sent me the licensing agreement in an overlay-display the moment she uttered the words. Skin-time in this Julio guy was expensive. He must be popular.

What the heck.

I punched the “buy” and “skin” buttons with a phantom hand and detached out of myself to look down at some Spanish guy sitting on the pillows, cuddling with my wife. It was hard getting used to this stuff. I snapped back into my body.

“What do you think?” I sat up 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 with the.… ” 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. “If that’s what you’d like.”

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

I could get used to this.

A rush of animal desire coursed through me. Lifting her top, I scooped her into my arms.

I could definitely get used to this.

Afterward, back in our own skins, we rested in a jumble of pillows beside the table. Cindy was curled up beside me with one of my arms wrapped around her. My brain was lazily tingling. She was trying—maybe it was time for me to try, too.

Baby steps, baby steps. I smiled.

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

“Cindy… ,” I said gently, my brain fighting back from the fog it had drifted into. Her body shook again. “Are you okay?”

She slowly turned to me, her eyes wet above cheeks streaked with tears. Wiping them away with the back of one hand, she looked away.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly.

“Come on, baby, what’s wrong?”

She hunched inward. “I didn’t like that. That way you looked at me. You were happy I was someone else.”

Sensing imminent danger, the fog around my brain evaporated.

“Honey, that’s not true at all.” 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.

“And I was only doing it because I thought that’s what you wanted.” She wiped away new tears. “I know I haven’t been great to be around lately.”

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

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

This seemed like the right time. “Look, I’ve been thinking.”

“Uh huh,” she sniffled.

I took a deep breath. “I’m not sure if we’re ready for kids yet, but maybe we could find out. Maybe we could take a half-step and get you more into the pssi system at the same time.”

“I’m listening.” She reached up to stroke my chin with one hand.

“What would you think about proxxids?”

She crinkled her nose. “Fake kids?”

“I’ve been talking to Jimmy and Patricia. I think it could be perfect for us.”

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

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

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 our kids will look and behave.”

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

A hint of the wit I remembered from when we first met. Maybe the clouds were clearing.

“It’s not just that,” I added. “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 the point. You can see how your kid might behave at different ages before you have them, to make sure you’ll be comfortable with what you’re getting.”

“And why would I want to do this?”

“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.”

“And then?”

“And then, if it felt right, we could have a real child. 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.”

A weight lifted from my chest.

3

Baby shower—I 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.

The baby shower turned into 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, chatting amiably in the entertainment space I had Echo create for us. The star of the evening, of course, was 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 the blond dreadlocks of Bobby Baxter, Jimmy’s brother, through the crowd. Even in a pssi projection, he emanated a laid-back surfer vibe that seemed to warm up the room. He was making his way toward us with an attractive brunette in tow.

“Congratulations, Commander Strong!” he blurted out, extending his hand.

Smiling, I gripped his hand and shook it. “Thanks, Bob.” I wasn’t quite sure if everyone’s well-wishes were genuine, or if they were gently poking fun at our simulated life, our imaginary baby.

“Is Jimmy coming?” I asked.

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

There was an awkward pause.

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

I glanced past him to have a look at his date, who 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. She smiled back.

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

“Pleased to meet you,” I said as I reached out to shake her hand.

“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 Cindy to have a look at the proxxid.

She lifted him to me. “Here, could you hold him for a second, honey?”

“Sure.”

The group of woman all smiled, watching me awkwardly take hold of Ricky. 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 as she released him. “I just need to get some juice.”

The baby let out a loud squeal as she left and wriggled in my arms. The overhead lights reflected brightly in his wet little eyes. 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. It certainly seemed to be doing Cindy a world of good.

Adriana, my slingshot lead at Command, stood beside me and poked Ricky gently in the tummy, tickling him to generate more squeals and giggles. “Just so sweet,” she whispered.

I couldn’t resist. “He sure is, just like his daddy.”

Adriana was the one with the sensorgy artist boyfriend. To me, it all seemed like pornography, but to them, well, I was just old.

“Look at those bright blue eyes. I hope you’ll get those same blue eyes when you have your real kid. So beautiful. He’ll be a lady killer!” she exclaimed, tickling his ribs again for more squeals. “What a happy boy!”

I laughed and began bouncing Ricky up and down a bit, 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.” She nodded toward the door, where Vince Indigo, the famous founder of the Phuture News Network, had just appeared. He’d gone out of his way to welcome us here when we first arrived.

He looked awful, as if he hadn’t slept in days, but smiled at me as I looked his way.

I gave him a small wave, then cooed at Ricky one more time before handing him back to my wife. I walked over to say hello to Vince and grab a drink. I could use one, and I knew from experience that he enjoyed a drink or two himself.

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

I took his hand firmly and motioned him over to the bar. 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 shook his head. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

That’s odd.

“You sure?” I dropped some ice cubes into a cut-glass tumbler and topped it off with some whiskey.

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

Definitely not the Vince I knew. What’s going on? Maybe he was trying his best not to offend me, thinking this whole thing ridiculous.

“This is just a little game,” I laughed, looking toward my wife and simulated baby. “I’m only doing it to keep her happy; you know how it is.”

At that, Vince’s attention sharpened. “No, no, this is the best thing,” he replied warmly. “You need to do this. It’s the way of the future!”

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

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

He seemed genuine about it.

“You really think so?”

“I do, my friend.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. “I have to get going, though. Sorry. Give Cindy a kiss for me, okay?”

“I will.” I nodded, smiling. “Go on, get going!”

Vince nodded, smiled, and with a wave good-bye, 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 guess he didn’t understand baby showers either. I poured myself another celebratory cocktail. My heart was bursting with pride.

This proxxid thing is the best idea I ever had.

4

Maybe these proxxids were a bad idea. Everything had started off great a few weeks ago, but Cindy continued to insist on the full treatment, diapers and screams and all. She liked to remind me that it had been my idea.

I hadn’t slept properly in weeks.

It had been a long and difficult day of trying to stay on top of the blended threats that were testing our defenses. Cyberattacks were constantly probing our perimeter, searching for vulnerabilities and weaknesses. They’d also upgraded a large storm moving up the coast of Central America in the Eastern Pacific to tropical storm Newton, and another depression was following quickly behind.

I had a pile of more work to try to get done, but at the same time, I wanted to spend quality time with Cindy and the boys. In the end, I came home as early as I could, but regretted it the moment I stepped across the threshold.

My home was a pigsty of toys. But then “my home” hadn’t resembled our old apartment in weeks. 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 it reminded her of where she’d grown up.

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!” Ricky squealed 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 that we had him, during the next three weeks he had aged five more.

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 only stepped them through a few target ages to get the general idea, but Cindy was enjoying the whole, painful process—if at warp speed.

“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. It scuttled around the same corner the kids had come from, the last in the chase pack. Shooting by behind my legs and into the living room, it set off another round of excited screams. I raised my eyebrows.

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

She was sitting at the dining room table feeding 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 last week, honey.”

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

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

“It’s nice to see how their personalities would react with animals, no?” She wiped the 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?”

“You’re right.” I had to admit, my plan was working.

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

Not only that, but she was great at it.

She was sticking with the whole nine yards of the mothering experience, feeding and changing the proxxids, bringing simulated kids over for playtime, everything. It really did seem to suit her.

She picked up Derek and sat him on her lap, looking into his face. “What do you think of brown eyes?”

I walked over to the both of them. “I like brown,” I replied. I still found how real these kids seemed disconcerting, and maybe that was part of the reason for my frayed nerves.

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

“You seem to ‘like’ everything,” she replied after a pause, then gently put Derek down. “Go on and play with your brother,” she told him, and he squeaked and began wriggling across the floor into the living room. She turned back to me. “You’re the one who wanted to do this. It would be nice if you could participate a little more.”

Tired and irritated, I began to stammer, “I am… I mean, I’m trying—” but I was cut short by a cacophony of shrieks.

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

“Do we really need to have half a dozen simulated brats running around?” I said more loudly than I intended. I’d done a lot of thinking on the walk home, and I’d decided to tell Cindy that I was ready to have real kids. But I couldn’t find the words with these kids running around me screaming their heads off.

Her eyes flashed angrily at me, and she turned to the kids. “Boys, boys, we’re trying to talk here,” she said softly, shooing the flock of dragons back toward the living room. “Please.”

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

Cindy smiled and turned back to me.

“Did you see that? How he took the lead? We need to see how 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.

“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 he rapidly dematerialized.

She turned back to me. “This is just what I was talking about. If you find Ricky too rambunctious, maybe we should select for more introverted character traits. Part of this process is understanding how our children would affect us and our relationship.”

I could see her point, but I already had a head of steam brewing. “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,” she gushed out breathlessly before I could continue. “I want another proxxid.”

I was stunned. In another week, 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 as she worked into a panic. “We haven’t even gotten started with them. 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! I’m trying to make sure this tin can we’re floating in isn’t sabotaged or wrecked by some storm, and I can’t think straight because I’m strung out on Sleep-Overs from waking up to rock these stupid simulated babies to sleep every night!”

I didn’t notice that I was 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.

It was almost pitch black under the dense tropical canopy as I worked myself up into a full sprint, dodging and weaving between the tree trunks. 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, but after an hour I’d decided to come up top to go for a run through the jungles that covered the surface of Atopia. Most people couldn’t get easy access to the topside—there were advantages to being Commander.

Pssi was many things, but it was something else at night. What to my unaided eyes was pitch darkness was now 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 also networked in a few wild horses to stampede through the underbrush with us. Even a few monkeys swung hooting overhead. The whole result was a mad, euphoric rush through the undergrowth.

It was the best way I knew to burn off steam.

The argument with Cindy reminded me of how my parents had fought, of how my father had treated us, and memories of childhood jumped back into my mind. I just wanted to tell her that I was ready to take the next step, but it had turned into another well-worn fight. It felt like a sign, and I’d fought that, too.

My cheekbone bounced off something as I ricocheted off to one side and spun into a thicket of palmettos. Wetness spread across my face. The horde around me stopped, dousing the rampage with 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.

“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.

When we used pssi prototypes in combat in the Weather Wars, I’d always made it a point to keep my team and myself 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 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.

“Just combat training,” I tried to tell him, but he knew me better than I knew myself.

I tuned my pain filters back up and felt a flood of hurt from my face and ankle. It wasn’t smart to try to 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 toward the edge of the woods with Echo walking beside me. Just past the tree line, I could see waves breaking along the shore.

“You can’t turn off the pain, and you can’t beat yourself up either,” my proxxi continued 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 looked at me and nodded. “Sure is.”

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

“Beautiful to be alive, isn’t it?”

I hardly noticed that Echo didn’t respond.

I stayed out the rest of that evening, not wanting to fight with Cindy again or explain a bloody and bruised face in the middle of the night. Feeling like a coward, I had Echo leave her a message that I was sorry but everything was fine, and that I’d be staying at the office overnight.

After nearly not sleeping again, the next day was a blur. I gobbled Sleep-Over tabs like candy and tried to pull myself together.

My Command staffers were sympathetically amused at my swollen, purpled face. Even though I’d tried to secure a reality filter over the top of it, most of them overrode it for a laugh. I was mostly just waiting ’til 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.” He grinned ever so slightly. “Hey, want me to finish up with this stuff?” he 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 infinity. Looking at them made my headache worse.

“Actually, Jimmy, that’d be great.”

“No problem.”

“Why don’t you just take the rest of the day off? I think Jimmy is right,” Echo added. “And I just checked with Cindy, she has the afternoon free.”

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

“She was just checking in on you while you were busy with Jimmy.”

“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.

Echo walked my body most of the way home while I finished some paperwork. Reaching the door, I stowed the paperwork in my virtual office and took control back. I paused, thinking about what I wanted to say to Cindy. With a deep breath, I opened the door to our apartment, expecting a wave of screaming kids. It was completely quiet, however, and right away, I was worried.

Tentatively, I looked around inside.

Cindy was sitting by herself on a small couch in the center. Our place was pristine white, a nearly featureless projection—calm and quiet.

It felt creepy.

“Oh, Rick,” she exclaimed, getting up off the couch and coming to me as I entered. “What did you do to yourself?”

“It’s not your fault. It was my fault.” I held up my hands. “I’m okay, it’s just a 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.”

She smiled and wrapped her arms around me, kissing me. “That’s wonderful news, baby.”

I’d expected a little more. I repeated myself. “I want to have a real baby with you, you understand?”

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

I took a deep breath, feeling relief wash through my body. “Where are the boys?”

“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. Still, 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 smooth white wall behind the couch. She led me by the hand toward it as the wall slid open to reveal a room beyond. I heard a soft gurgling sound. We walked up to the edge of a cradle, and Cindy bent over to pick up a baby girl who lay 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 daughter’s face. She was beautiful.

Maybe I’d always wanted a baby girl.

5

Cindy had transported our family into a Norman Rockwell–like setting. We were outside, sitting together at an old weather-beaten table at the edge of an apple orchard behind a gray-shingled cottage complete with peeling paint 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, easygoing feel to it, which was nice after a hectic day of chasing down cyberthreats. Sea air rustled in through tall, unkempt grasses atop the nearby dunes.

Like getting a fresh 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 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 became 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 progressed, one by one, through Brianna, our first girl proxxid, and then Georgina, Paul, Pauli, and eventually to our new favorite, Ricky-Two.

“Adriana was right,” said Cindy, looking down into 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 was delayed and then quickly canceled. Suddenly, a report came in that a tactical nuclear weapon would be launched against a target in Kashmir, but this was aborted at the last instant. All sides were already at the negotiating table.

Accurate futuring technology was bringing out random behavior—phuturecasting meant everyone could see you coming, so being unpredictable and random had its advantages, usually at the expense of lacking strategic intent. The irony that “knowing the future” seemed to make things even less predictable didn’t escape me, but the serious strategists on the topic said that this perception was just the result of our primary subjectives being stuck in a single timeline.

I sighed.

The ops teams were reporting that Hurricane Ignacia had shifted directions entirely and now looked like it would slam into Costa Rica and cross over from the Caribbean into the Eastern Pacific. It had grown into a monster Category 4.

We were already backpedaling away from Hurricane Newton, a steady Category 2, as it wound its way up the coast of Mexico, and so were suddenly faced with two major hurricanes in our oceanic basin, with several other depressions 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 our first Ricky’s eyes?” repeated Cindy. “I replayed them in Ricky-Two’s features. I just love them.”

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

“Yes, I love them, too,” 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.

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

Cindy went completely still. In the sudden silence, I could hear the wooden grandfather clock in the cottage’s main hallway ticking through the seconds. Cindy stared down into Ricky-Two’s face. She seemed about to cry.

“Me too,” replied Cindy, catching herself. With a deep breath, she recovered from whatever it was.

“Who’s my cute little baby boy?” she whispered to the baby, jiggling him softly and then squeezing him against her body. He burbled with delight and cuddled his head into her.

Something definitely wasn’t right. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She held the synthetic baby ever tighter.

A cicada’s whine played high in the distance. I squinted into the sunlight slanting through the apple trees and watched my wife 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 some time.

I held up one hand to shield my eyes. “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 Ricky-Two. “We don’t need to do that. I already have a pretty good idea.”

Irritated, I looked down to inspect some crabgrass 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.

“What do you mean, you have a good idea?” I asked. “We only let the first 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?”

“You just know these things when you’re a mother,” she said firmly. “You can look at the older simulations if you like, but I don’t need to.”

She held the baby in front of her and began cooing softly at him.

The discussion was apparently over. I felt both uncomfortable and annoyed. “Isn’t that what the proxxids are for?”

“Honey,” she answered, staring at our proxxid. “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. “Cindy, please, put Ricky 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 not comfortable here anymore.”

Hurt blossomed in her eyes, and she resisted for a moment, glancing back and forth at the cottage and then at me. Sensing my aggravation, though, she let the apple orchard and cottage fade away.

She still held Ricky-Two, 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 angelfish that swam past the window-walls of our apartment.

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

“And I love you, too.” She took my cue and held my hand with one of hers but still held tightly onto the proxxid with her other arm.

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

I waited, expecting the worst.

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

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

She bounced 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. We were childfree for the first time in months, like 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—but I was happy it was over. In retrospect, I’d enjoyed the process of picking out the perfect baby for us, but putting it all behind us felt like we’d crossed an important threshold.

I was finally ready for the real thing.

The experience seemed to have brought Cindy back to life, the clouds of her chronic depression lifting. I figured it was the prospect of finally having a child together, the whole process we’d been through together. 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, as we lay amid a mess of pillows, that I asked if she might not want to go off her 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.”

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.” And, of course, have the labs tweak its genetics afterward to match the Ricky proxxid, by far our favorite.

She giggled and I scooped her up into my arms.

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

“Sure is, Commander.”

“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. “Whatever you say, Sir.”

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 toward 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 Killiam 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 since.

“Do you think the Terra Novans are involved?” I asked it, or her, or whatever. All the theorizing on how this could be made to happen was academically interesting, but I needed to know who, and more importantly, 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. 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.

“Do you have any idea where this is coming from?” I demanded.

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

Too perfect? Too perfect for whom? This is a waste of time. I looked toward Jimmy to see if he had anything to add. He didn’t. Great. I rubbed my eyes, trying to wipe away my headache.

Cindy had begun to fall back into depression, and I was having a hard time focusing at work. Having a few drinks last night hadn’t helped anything. Cindy’s moods 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, could look into this more? I need to take care of things at home.” 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, wait. I have that date tonight, remember.”

I looked up toward the ceiling. “Susie, right?” I laughed. “So that’s going well?”

“I can cancel,” Jimmy offered.

“No, no, keep the date. I know you’ll keep a few splinters around if I need you. I’ll be back.”

As I entered our apartment, a foreboding gloom enveloped me. It was dark inside, with the glimmering reflections of a holo-projection playing off the walls.

“Honey?” I cautiously peered around the door as I entered.

Cindy was in a heap on the couch, the same as when I’d left several hours ago, and our home was a mess. The room was almost pitch black, with Hal’s EmoShow playing endlessly in the center. My unease growing, I walked over to the couch and sat down with her.

I put my hand on Cindy’s knee. “You okay?”

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. At least she was trying.

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

“Seriously, baby, what’s up? Talk to me.”

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

“What’s hard?”

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

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

Maybe it was something to do with me.

“I have someone to talk to,” she said. “It’s okay sweetheart, but thanks.”

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

Cindy looked at me and smiled her eyes looking a thousand miles away. “I know you are, honey.”

7

The call came 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 doctor called.

Echo patched the communication straight through, immediately requesting to take over all of my Command functions. I glanced at him but took the call without asking.

“Something is wrong with your wife, Commander Strong,” the doctor announced, his image floating in a display space while I sat in my workspace.

“What do you mean, something is wrong?”

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

I immediately punched down, and in the next instant I was standing beside him in the infirmary and looking at Cindy, who lay 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. I looked at Cindy. She appeared to be in a deep sleep.

“It seems to be something we’re calling reality suicide,” explained the doctor.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a condition where the subject—in this case, your wife—withdraw 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?”

“I’m sorry, but 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 to herself.”

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

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.

“So what can you do?”

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

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

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

8

An investigation 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 started constructing ever more elaborate worlds. She hid them deeper and deeper away from me, using private networks and security blankets to cover her tracks and protect her ever-growing family.

It wasn’t all that hard, and I hadn’t really been paying attention. Her mood had been so great at the time that I hadn’t dug too deeply 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 their terms as short as possible to try and move the process along.

Since they used a recombination of our DNA, using our individual 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 peace of mind amid the wreckage of what had once been my life.

There were security controls in place to protect against certain psychological dangers involved in using proxxids, but Cindy had overridden the 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 Ricky-Two playing together, growing up together, and 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, created surreally accelerated lifespans where they’d aged from babies into old men and women in varying spans of up to three months—a crazy, nonlinear time warp.

They didn’t seem to notice anything odd was happening due to the cognitive blind spot built into them; or maybe because, as children living the only lives they ever knew, they couldn’t have imagined anything 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 Ricky’s funeral. The illicit gang of proxxid children, my children, were all hiding upstairs when I’d arrived 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 that scene over and over again, standing with them in the darkened upstairs room as they giggled and hid, looking down at Cindy and me 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.

Ricky’s funeral had been an emotional tidal wave for her, and she’d been 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 the first Ricky’s death. He’d been a wizened old man at that point, bent over and leaning on his cane as he came out onto 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 closed the door, Georgina squealing as she was chased by Brianna.

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

“Come sit down, Ricky,” said Cindy, getting up from the great old oak table we had sat at together not so very long ago.

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.

As I replayed the scene, sitting with them at the table, a wasp buzzed by angrily on its way to a nest under the eaves. Cindy took Ricky by the arm, carefully easing him into his seat and sitting 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,” Ricky said, 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 rocked his old head back to look up at the perfect blue sky and smiled. “What a beautiful day to be alive.”

9

I learned that we’d acquired Ricky-Two right after the first Ricky had died. I guessed it was an attempt to fill the gap that had appeared in her life. The rest of them soon passed as well, and it had all just become too much for her.

Watching reruns of this family that I had, but never had, I was filled with an indescribable sadness. But maybe, just maybe, Cindy had gotten what she’d wanted. 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 flatly refused to allow me to have access to her DNA for the purposes of having children, which I’d petitioned for in case anything else went wrong.

“Rick,” 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 nearly killed her each time you went back out.”

“I know, sir—”

“She begged you for children, and now you’ve.… ” He tried to stay calm, but his voice trembled. “This is an abomination, man! What in the world are you people doing out there?”

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 fast out here, and maybe there was a way we could fix what had happened.

“So you have no ideas left, doc?”

“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, 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 high in the stratosphere around Atopia, looking down at the storms that threatened to crush and destroy it.

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

Sitting near the top of 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 held their 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, 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, and the field erupted in pandemonium.

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

“I sure do,” I replied as my boy scampered up the stairs through the departing crowd. Leaping into my arms, he squealed in excitement. “We won, Dad!” He looked up at me. “Why are you crying, Dad? We won!”

I wiped my face. “You sure have your mother’s eyes, you know that?”

Ricky 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.