Afterward, back in our own skins, we rested in a jumble of pillows beside the table. Cindy was curled up beside me with one of my arms wrapped around her. My brain was lazily tingling. She was trying—maybe it was time for me to try, too.
Baby steps, baby steps. I smiled.
Cindy gently twitched against me, dropping off to sleep. Then she twitched harder, and then again. Wait, is that a sob?
“Cindy…,” I said gently, my brain fighting back from the fog it had drifted into. Her body shook again. “Are you okay?”
She slowly turned to me, her eyes wet above cheeks streaked with tears. Wiping them away with the back of one hand, she looked away.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she said quietly.
“Come on, baby, what’s wrong?”
She hunched inward. “I didn’t like that. That way you looked at me. You were happy I was someone else.”
Sensing imminent danger, the fog around my brain evaporated.
“Honey, that’s not true at all.” I raised myself up on one elbow to look down at her. “I was only doing it because you wanted to.”
That was true enough.
“And I was only doing it because I thought that’s what you wanted.” She wiped away new tears. “I know I haven’t been great to be around lately.”
“Aw, honey,” I replied, searching for the right way out of this. “I love you. You’re the only person I want to be with.” That was absolutely the truth. “If anything, it’s me that wants to make you happy. I want to make us work again. It’s my fault, all this, I mean…you know what I mean.”
“I love you, too,” she replied. “I’m not comfortable with all this pssi stuff. But I am trying.”
This seemed like the right time. “Look, I’ve been thinking.”
“Uh huh,” she sniffled.
I took a deep breath. “I’m not sure if we’re ready for kids yet, but maybe we could find out. Maybe we could take a half-step and get you more into the pssi system at the same time.”
“I’m listening.” She reached up to stroke my chin with one hand.
“What would you think about proxxids?”
She crinkled her nose. “Fake kids?”
“I’ve been talking to Jimmy and Patricia. I think it could be perfect for us.”
Silence settled, then: “I’m still listening.”
“They’re not just ‘fake kids.’ They take our actual DNA code, mix it together as if it were a real fertilization, and then simulate the developmental process to generate what our real little baby would be like.”
I took a breath, watching her carefully before continuing.
“You can pick traits, of course, like eye color, or more subtle stuff if you want, but that’s sort of the point,” I explained. “It’s like trying out a trial version of how our kids will look and behave.”
“Uh huh,” she replied skeptically. “Why don’t you just get them to send a bunch of mock-ups, and we can stick them up on the wall and pick a model we like?”
A hint of the wit I remembered from when we first met. Maybe the clouds were clearing.
“It’s not just that,” I added. “These things, you have to take care of them, just like they were real babies—feed them, burp them, put them to sleep. You get the full treatment, and that’s the point. You can see how your kid might behave at different ages before you have them, to make sure you’ll be comfortable with what you’re getting.”
“And why would I want to do this?”
“I thought that if we took care of a proxxid for a few weeks or months,” I answered, looking straight into her eyes, “we could see if we liked having a screaming kid around.”
“And then?”
“And then, if it felt right, we could have a real child. What do you think?”
She cuddled into me and looked up into my face. “Okay, Mr. Rick Strong, I’m willing to give it a try.”
A weight lifted from my chest.