Complete Atopia Chronicles

I leaned over to kiss her, but she just held my head in her hands and kissed my forehead.

7

I got the call 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 call came in.

Echo patched the communication straight through and immediately requested to take over all of my Command functions. I glanced at him with a furrowed brow and took the call.

“Something is wrong with your wife, Commander Strong,” the doctor told me immediately, his image floating in a display space while I sat at my workstation.

“What do you mean, something is wrong?”

“I think you’d better come down here,” he said.

I immediately punched down and was standing beside him in the infirmary watching over Cindy, who was lying 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.

“So what do you mean exactly?” I demanded.

I looked towards Cindy. She had all the appearances of being asleep.

“It’s a new phenomenon-we’re calling it ‘realicide’ or reality suicide.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s a condition where the subject, your wife, withdraws 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?”

“No, I’m sorry, 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 herself.”

“Chosen to do what to herself?” I demanded.

The doctor shrugged and shook his head. 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 in silence.

“So what can you do then?”

“Well, Commander Strong, it would help if we understood why. Is there anything that happened recently? I noted that you’d been experimenting with the proxxids.”

“Yes,” I responded, feeling mounting dread, “sure we did. That’s what this place is for, right?”

“Commander Strong,” the doctor continued, “proxxids can have very powerful emotional side effects if not taken properly. Did you read the warning labels before taking so many of them? Tell me, Commander Strong, what did you do with the proxxids when you were done?”

8

The investigation had 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’d started constructing ever more elaborate worlds and hidden them deeper and deeper away from me to protect her ever growing family, using private networks and security blankets to cover her tracks.

It wasn’t all that hard, and I guess I hadn’t been paying attention. Her mood had been so great at the time that I hadn’t dug too deep 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 them as short as possible to try and move the process along.

Since they used a recombination of our DNA, based on our 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 piece of mind amid the wreckage that had become my life.

Proxxids weren’t intended to have been used this way. Cindy had overridden the proxxid controls using my own security clearance. A desperate mother could find a way around any obstacle that threatened her children.