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.