"What about our plans?" I asked gently. "What about having a child, I thought that was what you wanted, what would make you happy? You were so great with the proxxids. Don't you want to try and have our own child? We're ready now."

Cindy looked at me and smiled weakly.

"I know you are, honey."

I was running out of things to say.

"Do you want to try some more proxxids?" I asked helplessly.

"No," she responded, brightening up, "not anymore. I think I'm ready now."

Cool relief poured into my veins.

"Honey, I'm so happy to hear that," I replied, my heart in my throat.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 h.e.l.l 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 sp.a.w.ned 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 sp.a.w.ning. 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.

As I accessed the copies of the worlds she'd created, I began a bizarre journey, watching them all grow up together in that little white washed cottage on Martha's Vineyard I had once visited with her. It was like watching an ancient rerun of a television show about country living, complete with sheets flapping like white flags surrendering yesteryear on the clothesline out back.

I spent my days sitting and watching Little Ricky, Derek, Brianna, Georgina, Paul, Pauli and Little Ricky-Two playing together, growing up together, living out their lives. I smiled as I watched them, remembering them all as babies in my arms.

The simulation mechanics of the proxxids, which I'd forced upon Cindy, had created surreally accelerated lifespans where they'd aged from babies into old men and women in varying spans of barely three months in a crazy, non-linear time warp.

They didn't seem to notice anything odd was happening because of the cognitive blind spot they had built into them, or maybe because, as children living the only lives they ever knew, they didn't know any different. It was impossible to know.

She had only brought me there that one time. As it turned out, it was just after they'd had the first Little Ricky's funeral. The illicit gang of proxxid children, my children, were all hiding upstairs when I'd arrived there that afternoon at the cottage. They were on the strictest of instructions to remain quiet. Most of them were still small children at that point.

I replayed, over and over again, that scene, standing with them in the darkened upstairs room as they giggled and hid, looking down onto Cindy and myself talking in the yard. I think she'd been on the verge of telling me, and was planning on bringing them all out as a big surprise.

Little Ricky's funeral had been an emotional tidal wave for her, and she was trying her best to reach out to me, but I hadn't let her.

She'd wanted my help to somehow extend their lives, but I had shut her down before she'd even been able to ask. My anger had cut her short, as it always had.

I found myself going back and replaying over and over again one scene in particular, just before Little Ricky's death.

He was a wizened old man at that point, bent over and leaning on his cane as he came out the back porch of the cottage, the door squeaking on its hinges as he exited. Two of the girls came running past him as he opened the door, Georgina squealing as she was chased by Brianna.

Little Ricky wobbled unsteadily as they flew past, but he smiled at them. I smiled at them too.

"Come sit down, Little Ricky," said Cindy, getting up from the great old weather beaten oak table we had sat at together, not so very long ago, but now seeming in another lifetime.

Time was a funny thing-even as I traveled through it freely back and forth to view what had happened, it was frozen now, my life as immobile as an insect caught in amber.

I was sitting at the table with them as I replayed the scene. A wasp buzzed by angrily on its way to a nest under the eaves as Cindy took Little Ricky by the arm to sit him down. Cindy carefully eased him into his seat, and sat herself down across from him, her hands on his hands across the table, looking into his eyes.

"I don't know how much longer this old body is going to last, mother," said Little Ricky, matteroffactly. Tears spilled down Cindy's face.

"Don't cry mother, what's there to be sad about? It's a beautiful day," he said, rocking his old head back to look up at the perfect blue sky and smiling. "What a beautiful day to be alive."

They buried Little Ricky in a plot near the house, but only Cindy had cried as they'd lowered him in. The rest of them couldn't figure out what there was to be sad about on such a wonderful, sunny day amid the apple trees on Martha's Vineyard.

9.

I LEARNT THAT we'd had Little Ricky-Two right after Little Ricky had died, I guess to try and fill the gap that had appeared in her life. As the rest of them soon pa.s.sed as well, it had all just become too much for her.

Watching reruns of this family that I had, but never had, I was filled with a bittersweet sadness. But maybe, just maybe, Cindy had gotten what she'd wanted after all. Did living a full life in a few short months make it any less? Did I feel any less sense of meaning in my life, having watched my children grow up and grow old and pa.s.s before my eyes so quickly?

It was all very hard to say.

What I could say with certainty was that Cindy's family had flatly refused to allow me to have access to her body for the purposes of having children, which I had pet.i.tioned for immediately.

"Commander Strong," her father told me, "I know Cindy loved you, more than we could understand after you kept leaving her alone for each new tour of duty. You know you nearly killed her each time you went back out."

"I know sir..."

"She begged you for children, and now that you've..." he tried to say calmly, but then lost his temper. "This is an abomination, man! What in the world are you people doing out there?"

There wasn't much I could say, so I waited for him to regain his composure.

"Rick, I just don't see how, in good conscience, and after everything that has happened, that we can let you have a child of our dear Cindy."

I could understand her father's point of view. They'd never much cared for her marrying a military man to begin with, and this had just proved their point, whether it made much sense or not.

They didn't ask to move Cindy from Atopia, as this remained the one place where they could still hold out hope. The future was approaching awfully fast out here, and maybe there was a way we could fix what had happened.

"So you have no ideas left, doc?" I asked, at yet another review I'd requested.

"Commander Strong, we're going to have to refuse any further meeting requests until we have something new," said the doc's proxxi. "It's one thing to play with the inputs and outputs to the brain, but the actual place where the mind comes together...it's a tricky thing."

Jimmy was with me too, trying to help out. "Why don't you just take it easy, Commander, I'll keep you posted if we can figure anything out."

So I left it in their hands. Apart from watching reruns of my family, I spent a lot of my time floating back up on the edge of s.p.a.ce, following the UAVs in their lazy orbits around Atopia high in the stratosphere, looking down at the storms that threatened to crush and destroy Atopia.

They could figure it out without me. I had other things to do.

Sitting high in the bleachers, the drama of the little league game was spread out before me. Tensions were running high at the bottom of the ninth inning, and everyone around held their collective breath as the final hitter came to the plate.

Nervously shifting silhouettes far in the outfield cast long shadows in the last rays of a late summer sunset. I squinted into the sun, trying to make out which kid was which, and then turned my attention back to the hitter.

Strike went the first pitch. Then strike again went the second. Hushed silence as the pitcher went into his windup.

"Strike three!" thundered the umpire.

The scene turned into pandemonium, at least for half of us there. I smiled, watching the little figures running in from the outfield, and someone grabbed me by the arm.

"What a great game!" said the man standing beside me. "You got a son in the game?"

"I sure do," I replied as my boy scampered up the stairs through the departing crowd. He jumped into my arms and hugged me, and I looked down into his eyes.

"We won dad!" he squealed at me. "Why are you crying, dad? We won!"

I wiped my face.

"You sure have your mother's eyes, you know that?"

Little Ricky just smiled without understanding. Drying my eyes I took his hand, and we walked down off the bleachers, across the infield and into the dying sunshine.

* Timedrops *