4
Maybe these proxxids were a bad idea. Everything had started off great a few weeks ago, but Cindy continued to insist on the full treatment, diapers and screams and all. She liked to remind me that it had been my idea.
I hadn’t slept properly in weeks.
It had been a long and difficult day of trying to stay on top of the blended threats that were testing our defenses. Cyberattacks were constantly probing our perimeter, searching for vulnerabilities and weaknesses. They’d also upgraded a large storm moving up the coast of Central America in the Eastern Pacific to tropical storm Newton, and another depression was following quickly behind.
I had a pile of more work to try to get done, but at the same time, I wanted to spend quality time with Cindy and the boys. In the end, I came home as early as I could, but regretted it the moment I stepped across the threshold.
My home was a pigsty of toys. But then “my home” hadn’t resembled our old apartment in weeks. Cindy had turned it into a kind of suburban estate somewhere in Connecticut, complete with an enormous backyard with a trampoline and swimming pool. I guessed it reminded her of where she’d grown up.
Half a dozen sim-kids were over to play with little Ricky, and they were all screaming and running past me as I came in the door.
“Hey, Dad!” Ricky squealed as he flew past, chasing the others into the living room.
It was amazing how fast they grew up. I mean, really amazing. Proxxids were designed to give you the full spectrum of how your kids would look and act, and we had them aging at an exponential pace. So while Ricky had aged one year during the first month that we had him, during the next three weeks he had aged five more.
It was hard to keep in mind they were just simulations, and they didn’t seem to notice because of the built-in cognitive blind spots. Most people only stepped them through a few target ages to get the general idea, but Cindy was enjoying the whole, painful process—if at warp speed.
“Hey, Ricky,” I called back.
Despite my grumpiness, I couldn’t help smiling at the glee on his face. At that point, a big black Labrador appeared. It scuttled around the same corner the kids had come from, the last in the chase pack. Shooting by behind my legs and into the living room, it set off another round of excited screams. I raised my eyebrows.
“Biffy is the newest addition to the family,” declared Cindy.
She was sitting at the dining room table feeding Derek, our second proxxid. She’d seen me eyeing the dog.
“Biffy, huh? I thought Derek was the newest addition to the family.”
“That was last week, honey.”
She hardly looked up at me. I thought she was joking, but she didn’t crack a smile.
Derek dribbled carrot down his chin as Cindy tried to spoon it in. He looked up at me, letting go a big squeak, and pounded his rattle on the tray, sending thick orange splatters up around the room and onto Cindy. She patiently smiled in a motherly way and leaned forward with the spoon.
“It’s nice to see how their personalities would react with animals, no?” She wiped the carrot puree from her hair with the back of one hand. “Isn’t this what we’re trying to do, to try out different things?”
“You’re right.” I had to admit, my plan was working.
Since we had the proxxids in our lives, Cindy was using her pssi more and more. To begin with, she tried adding some rooms to our place, and then she’d begun changing the configuration of our home and location ever more elaborately to suit her needs. Now it was something new almost every day, and it wasn’t grudgingly like before. She was taking to it as a part of her day-to-day life.
Not only that, but she was great at it.
She was sticking with the whole nine yards of the mothering experience, feeding and changing the proxxids, bringing simulated kids over for playtime, everything. It really did seem to suit her.
She picked up Derek and sat him on her lap, looking into his face. “What do you think of brown eyes?”
I walked over to the both of them. “I like brown,” I replied. I still found how real these kids seemed disconcerting, and maybe that was part of the reason for my frayed nerves.
While Cindy had taken to the full-blown experience like a duck to water, I was having a hard time balancing it with my other responsibilities. Cindy was interrupting me a dozen times a day to tell me about something one of them did, explaining how great it was and how it related to this or that genetic expression.
“You seem to ‘like’ everything,” she replied after a pause, then gently put Derek down. “Go on and play with your brother,” she told him, and he squeaked and began wriggling across the floor into the living room. She turned back to me. “You’re the one who wanted to do this. It would be nice if you could participate a little more.”
Tired and irritated, I began to stammer, “I am…I mean, I’m trying—” but I was cut short by a cacophony of shrieks.
The boys appeared from the living room and began running around the table we were sitting at, laughing and chasing a flock of tiny flying dragons. I stopped, scratching the stubble on my neck, waiting for them to go away.
“Do we really need to have half a dozen simulated brats running around?” I said more loudly than I intended. I’d done a lot of thinking on the walk home, and I’d decided to tell Cindy that I was ready to have real kids. But I couldn’t find the words with these kids running around me screaming their heads off.
Her eyes flashed angrily at me, and she turned to the kids. “Boys, boys, we’re trying to talk here,” she said softly, shooing the flock of dragons back toward the living room. “Please.”
When I wasn’t looking, they’d all skinned themselves up as miniature purple tyrannosaurs and were effecting puzzled little dinosaur expressions. Ricky, though, could take a hint, and he turned to lead the squealing pack back into the other room.
Cindy smiled and turned back to me.
“Did you see that? How he took the lead? We need to see how Ricky socializes, don’t we? I mean, we picked a specific set of genes regarding his personality, and I for one want to see what this really means. Expression markers on a piece of paper are one thing, but—”
The noise level in the next room exploded in screeches again, cutting her off.
“Can’t we just turn the simulation off for a minute?” I was getting a headache.
“You can’t just turn kids off, can you, Rick?”
“No, but we can sure as heck turn these ones off.”
Echo materialized in my display space beside her, sensing something imminent. Cindy turned to him angrily.
“You mind your own business, mister!” she spat at him, wagging a finger in his direction. If a proxxi could be taken aback, he was, and he rapidly dematerialized.
She turned back to me. “This is just what I was talking about. If you find Ricky too rambunctious, maybe we should select for more introverted character traits. Part of this process is understanding how our children would affect us and our relationship.”
I could see her point, but I already had a head of steam brewing. “I don’t want to have an introvert as a son. I had something important to tell you this evening—”
“And I had something important, too,” she gushed out breathlessly before I could continue. “I want another proxxid.”
I was stunned. In another week, Ricky would be ten years old, Derek would be heading into the terrible twos, and now she wanted another one?
“We’re getting rid of these ones, though, right?” I asked incredulously.
“Getting rid of them?” The whites of her eyes grew as she worked into a panic. “We haven’t even gotten started with them. You want to stop halfway through and call this whole thing a waste of time? Call my effort a waste of time?”
“Waste of time? I’ll tell you what a waste of time is! I’m trying to make sure this tin can we’re floating in isn’t sabotaged or wrecked by some storm, and I can’t think straight because I’m strung out on Sleep-Overs from waking up to rock these stupid simulated babies to sleep every night!”
I didn’t notice that I was yelling, and suddenly everything was very quiet. The boys had circled back into the dining room, and the tiny dinosaurs were staring at me, tears welling in their little carnivorous eyes. Derek started crying.
Cindy looked up at me and said quietly, “I just wanted to try having a little girl proxxid to see what that was like.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my index and forefinger, my eyes tightly closed. “I’m going to go back to work for a while, okay? I really have some stuff I need to get done. We’ll talk later. I’m sorry.”
Cindy tried to reach for me, but I shrugged her off and walked quickly back out the door.