the vase back from me and smiled as she poked at the flowers.
“I know you’re right, Rick. And these are beautiful flowers,” she said, leaning down to put them on the table. She stepped back and stood straight up to admire them.
“I’ll try harder,” she declared.
My heart filled with some small hope.
“Thank you, sweetheart.”
“It is nice being able to use pssi to spend time with my sister back home,” she admitted, “and she has such great kids.”
I could see what was coming next, and my heart sank back down fearfully.
“Rick, have you thought about what we talked about? What would make me really happy? The reason I thought we came here?”
“I’ve thought about it, sweetie. I’m just not sure that either of us is ready for it,” I replied. “Just not quite yet, okay?”
“Okay,” she replied, doing her best to smile as I walked over to give her a hug.
I had an idea.
2
THERE WAS STILL nothing quite 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, and going through my homework assignments, coming up to speed on the core synthetic reality platform that everything else depended on.
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 sense and modify signals passing through it. Fairly quickly they’d learnt the trick of replaying stored nerve conduction patterns, and creating completely synthetic sensory spaces 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 it, my own proxxi, Echo, felt as much a part of me as I was myself. It was impossible 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.
“Describe a proxxi again?” asked a reporter.
“Proxxi are like biological-digital symbiotes that attach to your neural system, sharing all your memories and sensory data as well as control of your motor system. You could think of them as your digital twin.”
“So why do we need one?”
“That is a very good question,” replied Patricia, smiling approvingly. “Did you know that more peoples’ bodies are injured today while they’re off in virtual worlds and games than in auto and air accidents combined? Proxxi help solve this problem by controlling and protecting your body while you’re away, so to speak…”
The press conference droned on as my own mind wandered off. Despite the endless list of projects to get through, my mind couldn’t help circling back to Cindy and my idea. I clicked off the visual overlay of Patricia’s press conference and focused back on my Command task list as the rest of my staff arrived for the day.
Patricia had just uploaded some of her latest weather forecasts, and we’d been surprised by her predicted upgrading of tropical storm Ignacia out in the North Atlantic. Our own weather systems hadn’t seen this, but as we reviewed her datasets it all suddenly fit together.
It worried me that even with all the technology we had we could miss 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 had to do our best to steer clear of Her. Record global temperatures predicted an intense hurricane season, and we were already well into the seasonal dance of steering clear of disturbances coming our way. This usually wasn’t much of a problem out here in the East Pacific off the Baja. 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.
“Looks good to me,” I offered, shrugging.
A simulation graphic occupied almost the entire volume of the room, and a grunt from Solomon House was driving our point of view around it with dizzying speed. It was a month-ahead projection of winds, storms, surface and sub–surface ocean currents and temperatures, plotting an optimal course through it all.
Atopia wasn’t really a ship of course, she was a platform, but we could drive her around comfortably at a few miles per hour and more if we really needed. 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 future predictions indicated a gathering string of depressions coming our way, so we’d begun backing away north and eastwards towards 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. Officially the Command ops team needed my sign off, 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 sighed and rolled my eyes, taking a sip from my coffee. Give me boots in the mud over this any day, but I was there and had to try to wrap my tired head around it.
I summoned up some energy.
“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 know as much as we do that you need all the help you can get in this area.”
“I don’t disagree, it’s just…he’s just a kid.” I knew any objections would be pointless, but thought it worthwhile to at least express my opinion.
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. There were rumors of marriage problems and abuse involving Jimmy which struck a very personal chord. I’d had it rough growing up too.
“He’s a kid that knows more about conscious boundary security systems than you and the whole rest of your team,” she argued, and then added, “and pretty much more than anyone else for that matter. We have to stay on top of the threat posed by Terra Nova.”
Her eyes narrowed.
Personally I didn’t go for all this stuff about Terra Nova. They didn’t pose any tactical threat to Atopia, but they sure were worked up about it. On the outside, Atopia and Terra Nova were more or less viewed as two sides to the same coin, but the rivalry between these competing colonies was whipping up into a fervor. I wasn’t sure it was for the best.
“Yeah, you’re right,” was all I could think to say at that point. “Hey, this tub is your party. If you want some kid with peach fuzz for whiskers on the Security Council, it’s all good with me.”
“Jimmy is a special kid, Rick,” she mused. “Anyway, he’s our pick.”
She said this with some finality. I let it settle.
“Good enough for me, then.” I grinned.
“Good.”
She smiled winningly at me and faded away.
It’d been a long day, and I’d been mulling over my idea for Cindy the whole time. Standing alone in the featureless tubular corridor outside our apartment, I hesitated. Was it really what I wanted?
