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.