Complete Atopia Chronicles

Today Cindy had transported our family into a Norman Rockwell-like setting. We were outside, sitting together at an old weather beaten oak table at the edge of an apple orchard, behind a vintage white washed cottage, complete with peeling paint outside and a musty interior full of yellowing family photographs on mantelpieces.

It was warm, hot even, as the sun lazily set under a cloudless blue sky. We were on Martha’s Vineyard in a circa 1940s wikiworld. The fading day had a languid, easy going feel to it, which was nice after a hectic day of chasing down cyber threats. Sea air rustled in through tall unkempt grasses atop sand dunes lining the nearby beaches.

Like getting a new fix, our first baby girl proxxid had injected new life into our relationship, and the days and weeks had passed with a sense of rejuvenated expectations. Jimmy and Echo had sensed what was going on, and the pair of them had volunteered to take on a lot of my Command functions, giving me the time to work things out with Cindy.

The highlight of each day had become a ritualized homecoming to explore a new metaworld that Cindy would create for us, and, of course, to play with the latest proxxid. As time went on, we’d progressed, one by one, through Brianna, our first girl proxxid, and then Georgina, Paul, Pauli and eventually to our new favorite, Little Ricky-Two.

“Adriana was right,” commented Cindy, looking down into Little Ricky-Two’s face, “blue eyes are the best. Just like Little Ricky’s.”

“Huh?”

I was deep into a Phuture News report predicting a flare-up in the Weather Wars. I flicked away tabloid splinters that tried to correlate this to some paranormal reports. Of course, a lot of people were tracking events in the Weather Wars, and with so many people getting advance notice of events on this scale, there was a good chance the event wouldn’t happen.

As I was thinking this, the new news reported that the offensive had been delayed, and was just as quickly canceled. Suddenly, a report came in that a tactical nuclear weapon would be launched against a target in Kashmir, but this was quickly aborted at the last instant. All sides were already at the negotiating table.

Accurate futuring technology had begun to bring out random behavior-being predictable meant everyone could see you coming, so being unpredictable and random had its advantages, but usually at the expense of lacking a certain strategic intent.

The irony of how ‘knowing the future’ made things less predictable didn’t escape me, but the serious strategists said that this perception was just the result of our primary subjectives being stuck in one timeline at a time. I sighed.

At the same time, Hurricane Ignacia had shifted directions entirely, and looked like it would slam into Costa Rica and could cross over from the Caribbean and into the Eastern Pacific. It had grown into a monster category four. We were already backpedaling away from Hurricane Newton, a steady category two as it wound its way up the coast of Mexico, and were suddenly faced with two major hurricanes in our oceanic basin with several other depressions already spinning up in the background. Not unprecedented, but certainly unusual.

A mosquito hovered uncertainly before me and I swatted it away, shaking my head.

“Remember the original Little Ricky’s eyes?” repeated Cindy. “I replayed them in Little Ricky-Two’s features. I just love them.”

She choked up as she said this, even though it had been more than six weeks since we’d discontinued the original Little Ricky proxxid. Sensing tears coming, I snapped out of Phuture News and focused my attention on Cindy.

“Oh, yes, of course,” I replied.

One of our favorite activities was to discuss and compare features of each proxxid. I thought I’d try launching into this to avert whatever was happening and focus her in the moment.

“I really like the cheekbone structure of Little Ricky-Two,” I suggested helpfully.

Cindy went completely still. In the sudden silence, I could hear the wooden grandfather clock in the main hallway of the cottage slowly ticking through the seconds. Something was terribly wrong, but I couldn’t understand what it was. Cindy stared down into Little Ricky-Two’s face. She seemed about to cry.

“Me too,” replied Cindy, catching herself, still staring into the proxxid’s face. With a deep breath, she recovered from whatever it was.

“Who’s my cute little baby boy?” Cindy whispered at Little Ricky-Two, shaking him softly and then squeezing him into her body. He burbled with delight, and cuddled his head into her as she held him.

“Are you okay?” I asked Cindy.

“Yes, of course,” she replied unconvincingly. Shrugging and smiling, she held the synthetic baby ever tighter.

A cicada’s whine played high in the distance, and I squinted into the sunlight slanting through the apple trees and watched her doting over the proxxid. This was all very nice, but my uneasiness was wearing my patience thin. I’d been more than ready to move onto the real thing for a while.