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.