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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.