Cindy smiled and turned back to me.
“Did you see that? How he took the lead?” she pointed out. “We need to see how Little Ricky socializes, don’t we? I mean we picked a specific set of genes regarding his personality, and I for one want to see what this really means. Expression markers on a piece of paper are one thing, but…” The noise level in the next room exploded in screeches again, cutting her off.
I shrugged with wide eyes.
“Can’t we just turn the simulation off for a minute?”
I was getting a headache.
“You can’t just turn kids off, can you Rick?”
“No, but we can sure as heck turn these ones off.”
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 rapidly dematerialized.
She turned back to me and added, “See Rick, this is just what I was talking about. If you find Ricky too rambunctious, maybe we should select for more introverted character traits. A part of this process is understanding how they will affect us and our relationship.”
I could see her point, but I already had a head of steam brewing.
“Look, 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, Rick,” she gushed out breathlessly before I could continue. “I want another proxxid.”
I was stunned. In another week or two Little 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 and she worked into a panic.
“We haven’t even gotten started with them. So 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, Cindy. I’m trying to make sure this tin can we’re floating in isn’t sabotaged or wrecked by some storm, and I’m strung out on Sleep-Overs from waking up to rock these stupid simulated babies to sleep every night!”
I hadn’t noticed that I’d started 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.
Even with a full moon, it was almost pitch black under the dense tropical canopy. I’d just about worked myself up into a full sprint, dodging and weaving between the tree trunks.
Pssi was many things, but it was something else at night. The pitch darkness to my unaided eyes was 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 had also networked in a few wild horses to stampede through the underbrush with us, and some monkeys swung hooting overhead. The net effect was a mad, euphoric rush through the undergrowth. It was the best way I knew to burn off steam.
The argument with Cindy had reminded me of how my parents had fought, and those bad memories jumped back into my mind. 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. I’d really just wanted to tell her I was ready, but then that had happened. It felt like some kind of sign. I fought off the feeling.
Maybe that was what the proxxids were designed for, to help test you. If so, they were working.
My cheekbone bounced off something as I ricocheted off to one side and then cart wheeled into a thicket of palmettos. Wetness spread across my face. The hoard around me stopped, dousing the rampage in a 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.
“Naw, 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. I needed to be in total control of my body. When we used pssi prototypes in simulated combat training, I always made it a point to keep myself and my team 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 incoming 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.
“Hey this is what we do in combat training,” I tried to tell him, but he knew me as well as I knew myself.
I tuned my pain receptors back up and felt a flood of pain from my face and ankle. It wasn’t smart to try and 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 towards the edge of the woods. Echo was walking beside me, and we were just at the edge of the beaches.
“You can’t turn off the pain, and you can’t beat yourself up either,” continued Echo 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 just looked at me and nodded. “Yeah, it sure is.”
We laid down in the sand, side by side, and looked up at the bright stars hanging silently above us. I tuned the ultraviolet and x-ray spectra into my visual system, and watched the night sky begin to glow in neon blues and ghostly whites above us.
“Beautiful to be alive, isn’t it?” I said to Echo, wondering to myself if I was just trying to run away again.
I hardly noticed that Echo didn’t respond.
I stayed out the rest of that evening, not wanting to explain a bloody and bruised face to Cindy in the middle of the night. Dodging responsibility, I had Echo leave her a low priority message that I was sorry, but that everything was fine, and that I’d be staying at the office overnight.
The next day was a blur after not sleeping again, so I gobbled more Sleep-Over tabs. On top of everything
