"Well you gotta wake up the neighbors from time to time," I laughed.

We'd purposely decided not to pssiblock anything during the test to measure emotional responses during the weapons tests. I'd talked to Dr. Hal Granger about getting the best bang-for-the-buck out of our weapons exercises to impress on the rest of the world how not to mess with us. Hal projected the image of thoughtfulness on his broadcasts, but in person he was a bit of a toad-funny how that worked.

"Well, that's your job, Rick, to help scare the world into respecting us. My job is to help scare the world into saving itself," she said without a trace of humor. "Anyway, good work."

"Did you see that thunderstorm coming in?" I asked after a moment. "We've been tracking that depression for weeks now, but we can't avoid them all. Anyway, it'll water your plants up top."

She smiled.

"Why don't you take the rest of the day off?" she suggested after a pause. I'd returned my attention to the slingshot control systems, but this thought snapped my mind back. I looked up at her.

"That's actually a great idea," I replied. Cindy, my wife, was having a hard time adjusting to coming here.

"So you really think that whole thing could be a good idea?" I added, coming back to an idea I'd been discussing with Pat earlier about Cindy.

"Yes, I think so," she replied. I looked at her, sensing some hesitation, but her smile convinced me otherwise.

I nodded and smiled, then returned my attention to the slingshot systems.

"Thanks, Pat, see you later then."

I smiled at her as she walked off and faded away without another word. This was definitely her party.

All that neohippie stuff that Atopia floated on in the waters of the world media didn't mean that a lot of nasty people out there weren't eyeing this little piece of heaven with very bad things in mind. Atopia was out in international waters, and as one of the first floating sovereign city-states, it had to be able to protect itself from all comers. At some point the Atopian masters of synthetic reality had to bow to where the rubber met the road in the dirty, physical world, and that was where I came in.

Atopia was closely allied with America, its original flag before independence, but America had enough trouble taking care of its shrinking sphere of influence. I should know after spending the best part of my career in the thick of the first Weather War skirmishes.

What had begun with China diverting water from rivers flowing out of the Himalayas had quickly turned the roof of the world into a global hot spot, but their double punch of seeding clouds to drop their rain before reaching India was what had really tipped the bucket. The combination had driven crop failures, ma.s.s starvations, and a nasty confrontation between the newly muscular superpowers.

While the initial conflict was long over, regional wars over a growing variety of resource depletions had continued to expand and had engulfed most of Asia. Of course, the world teetering on the brink of destruction was nothing new.

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 offsh.o.r.e 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 ma.s.ses of the rest of humanity.

I laughed to myself; tough guy, huh? Who was I kidding? I was a washedup 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 d.a.m.n thing circled back and burned up in the blaze. What the h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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.

THERE WAS STILL nothing quite like a hot cup of jamoke to get me kick started in the morning. I was back in Command, getting a bright and early start to the day, and going through my homework a.s.signments, coming up to speed on the core synthetic reality platform that everything else depended on.

The pssi-polysynthetic sensory interface-system had originally grown out of research to move artificial limbs, using nanoscale smarticles embedded in the nervous system to sense and modify signals pa.s.sing through it. Fairly quickly they'd learnt the trick of replaying stored nerve conduction patterns, and creating completely synthetic sensory s.p.a.ces had followed in short order. In this they'd more than succeeded; to most Atopians, synthetic reality was more real than the real world.

You didn't need to understand how it worked to use it, though. The proxxi program, a kind of digital alter ego designed to help users navigate pssi s.p.a.ce, was almost as amazing as the platform itself. After only a year of using it, my own proxxi, Echo, felt as much a part of me as I was myself. It was impossible to imagine how I'd gotten along before. I clicked over to watch Patricia Killiam in another of her press conferences promoting the upcoming launch.

"Describe a proxxi again?" asked a reporter.

"Proxxi are like biological-digital symbiotes that attach to your neural system, sharing all your memories and sensory data as well as control of your motor system. You could think of them as your digital twin."

"So why do we need one?"

"That is a very good question," replied Patricia, smiling approvingly. "Did you know that more peoples' bodies are injured today while they're off in virtual worlds and games than in auto and air accidents combined? Proxxi help solve this problem by controlling and protecting your body while you're away, so to speak..."

The press conference droned on as my own mind wandered off. Despite the endless list of projects to get through, my mind couldn't help circling back to Cindy and my idea. I clicked off the visual overlay of Patricia's press conference and focused back on my Command task list as the rest of my staff arrived for the day.

Patricia had just uploaded some of her latest weather forecasts, and we'd been surprised by her predicted upgrading of tropical storm Ignacia out in the North Atlantic. Our own weather systems hadn't seen this, but as we reviewed her datasets it all suddenly fit together.

It worried me that even with all the technology we had we could miss this, even if it was in another ocean and off our radar screens.

Mother Nature was a far more tangible danger to Atopia than a foreign attack, and we had to do our best to steer clear of Her. Record global temperatures predicted an intense hurricane season, and we were already well into the seasonal dance of steering clear of disturbances coming our way. This usually wasn't much of a problem out here in the East Pacific off the Baja. Most of the intense hurricanes and cyclones tended to keep to the North Atlantic and Western Pacific basins. Still, Atopia had a draft of more than five hundred feet below the waterline, and the thought of the fusion reactor core down there grinding into a seamount made me sweaty.

"Looks good to me," I offered, shrugging.

A simulation graphic occupied almost the entire volume of the room, and a grunt from Solomon House was driving our point of view around it with dizzying speed. It was a month-ahead projection of winds, storms, surface and subsurface ocean currents and temperatures, plotting an optimal course through it all.

Atopia wasn't really a ship of course, she was a platform, but we could drive her around comfortably at a few miles per hour and more if we really needed. Staying away from bad weather also meant that the beaches were usually sunny, which was a plus even in a place where everyone was off in synthetic s.p.a.ce most of the time. Long range future predictions indicated a gathering string of depressions coming our way, so we'd begun backing away north and eastwards towards the distant coast of America.

"Great! Well, that's it then," said the grunt, a pssikid named Eddy.

He floated in a lotus position in the middle of the display, toying with it. Officially the Command ops team needed my sign off, but they could see my mind was elsewhere. They were just humoring me with their detailed explanations. Eddy rode the disappearing projection like a magic carpet, receding into an infinitesimal point in the middle of the room.

I sighed and rolled my eyes, taking a sip from my coffee. Give me boots in the mud over this any day, but I was there and had to try to wrap my tired head around it.

I summoned up some energy.

"So you think I should bring on Jimmy, huh?" I asked, looking at a note from Patricia Killiam in the report. Her proxxi, a young looking woman named Marie, materialized in front of me, leaning on a railing and stretching her long legs between us.

"Yes, we do, absolutely," Marie responded. "You know as much as we do that you need all the help you can get in this area."

"I don't disagree, it's just...he's just a kid." I knew any objections would be pointless, but thought it worthwhile to at least express my opinion.

Patricia had taken Jimmy under her wing like her own child when his parents had abruptly left Atopia, so beyond his doubtless qualifications there were other factors involved. There were rumors of marriage problems and abuse involving Jimmy which struck a very personal chord. I'd had it rough growing up too.

"He's a kid that knows more about conscious boundary security systems than you and the whole rest of your team," she argued, and then added, "and pretty much more than anyone else for that matter. We have to stay on top of the threat posed by Terra Nova."

Her eyes narrowed.

Personally I didn't go for all this stuff about Terra Nova. They didn't pose any tactical threat to Atopia, but they sure were worked up about it. On the outside, Atopia and Terra Nova were more or less viewed as two sides to the same coin, but the rivalry between these competing colonies was whipping up into a fervor. I wasn't sure it was for the best.

"Yeah, you're right," was all I could think to say at that point. "Hey, this tub is your party. If you want some kid with peach fuzz for whiskers on the Security Council, it's all good with me."

"Jimmy is a special kid, Rick," she mused. "Anyway, he's our pick."

She said this with some finality. I let it settle.

"Good enough for me, then." I grinned.

"Good."

She smiled winningly at me and faded away.