And now I was in the center of the cyber universe.
So the best and brightest of the world had begun emigrating to build the new New World, the Bensalem group of seasteads of which Atopia was the crown jewel. Atopia was supposed to be-was marketed as-this shining beacon of libertarian ideals. She was the largest of a collection of platforms in the Pacific off California, a kind of new Silicon Valley that would solve the world’s problems with technological wizardry.
Come to the offshore colonies, they said, for the security, fresh air, good food, the sun, the sea and first dibs on the latest and greatest in cyber gadgets. Come to escape the crowding, the pollution, the strife and conflict-and that, brother, was the truth. So the rich came here and to other places like this, while the rest of humanity watched us needily and greedily.
It was my job to protect them; the rich folks of Atopia, of course, not the masses of the rest of humanity.
I laughed to myself; tough guy, huh? Who was I kidding? I was a washed-up basket case who could hardly manage a night of sleep without waking up in a terrified sweat half the time. The only reason I was here was to try and make an attempt at reviving my relationship with my wife, Cindy. Without Cindy, I would be off in some sweaty corner of the world acting out a kind of ‘heart of darkness’ finale to my life in a psychotic blaze of glory.
Maybe that was a little dramatic. I’d probably be off soaking my sorrows in a bottle while desk jockeying in Washington-that sounded a little more likely. I smiled and began to run through the slingshot shutdown checklist, but then paused as I felt the old guilt begin to bleed out around the edges of my life again.
“Want me to pick up some flowers for her from Vince?” asked Echo. He always knew what I was thinking, especially when I was thinking about her.
“Yeah, that’s a great idea,” I responded without looking away from what I was doing. Noticing a breach report from Jimmy I added, “And could you look into what made that UAV malfunction? The damn thing circled back and burned up in the blaze. What the hell was it doing up there anyway?” I shook my head.
Echo nodded that he’d take care of it as he silently walked off. He was good at taking orders.
The excitement of the slingshot test hadn’t yet faded and I felt an energetic flow carrying me down the hallways back home. The flowers Echo had gotten from Vince were perfect. Flowers were always a sure bet for making a woman feel special, weren’t they?
“Hi, sweetie! I’m home!”
I proudly held the bouquet of real flowers in front of me as I walked through the door. I’d snuck along the corridors as I’d arrived with them, trying to avoid the prying eyes and bad graces of our neighbors who would have seen the wasteful gift in my hands.
Cindy looked at the flowers less than enthusiastically as I entered.
She hadn’t even bothered to shower today and sat in a dreary heap on the couch, bags under her eyes, watching a dimstim projection. A large head floated in the middle of our living room, contorting itself in the middle of a joke while a laugh track droned on in the background. Cindy wasn’t smiling, though, her face just dully reflecting light from the display.
It was going to be another one of those kinds of evenings.
“Rick, you didn’t need to buy flowers,” she immediately complained. “What are the neighbors going to think?”
“Sorry, sweetie.” I felt like I was always being sorry these days.
Walking in, I could see it was Dr. Hal Granger’s EmoShow floating in the display space in the middle of the room.
“Could we turn off Dr. Emo, please?” I asked more edgily than I intended. “I get enough of him during the day.”
I felt stupid standing there with the flowers.
“Sure. He’s all that gets me through the days here, but no problem,” she announced as Hal’s head disappeared from the middle of the room, casting the place into sullen silence. With a great sigh she glanced at me and declared, “Well, I guess I’ll get a vase or something.”
She swung herself laboriously off the couch and got up to go into the kitchen area.
“How was your day?” I said brightly, trying to restart the conversation. She was rummaging around in some drawers in the kitchen, off to the side of the large, open main room of our apartment.
“It was fine,” she responded, lightening up a bit, “but this place is so depressing. I feel like I can’t get any space or air. This apartment is so…subterranean.”
I rolled my eyes, but carefully. 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. That was the entire point of Atopia: with everyone here having deep and easy access to almost perfect synthetic reality, you didn’t need much in the way of space or material things in the physical world.
“Submarine,” I corrected her pointlessly, “you mean submarine.”
“Whatever. It’s dark and claustrophobic.”
She had found a vase and was filling it with water. The tap turned off after a few inches had filled its bottom, and then she walked purposely towards me with it in hand.
“Cindy,” I started, and then stopped. I searched for the right words. “Cindy, just try to use the pssi system. You can be anywhere, do anything you want.”
That was the wrong thing to say. I took the vase of water from her hands and cringed looking at her face. I was a real tough guy, all right.
“I don’t like the pssi system!” she spat out at me. Then she closed her eyes, counting to ten as she backed up a little. Her shoulders relaxed and she opened her eyes.
I said nothing.
“Okay, sorry, I just had a bad day. Sorry.” She shook her head.
“Look, pssi is great for watching stuff and surfing the net, but I don’t like all this…this…” she stuttered, searching for words and 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 here, and I can’t very well crawl back to Washington with my tail between my legs now. I mean, just try and give it a chance, or at least go up on the beaches?”
I was holding the vase with one hand and waving the other towards the ceiling, pleading with her. She took 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
