As I entered our apartment, a foreboding gloom enveloped me. It was dark inside, with the glimmering reflections of a holo-projection playing off the walls.
“Honey?” I cautiously peered around the door as I entered.
Cindy was in a heap on the couch, the same as when I’d left several hours ago, and our home was a mess. The room was almost pitch black, with Hal’s EmoShow playing endlessly in the center. My unease growing, I walked over to the couch and sat down with her.
I put my hand on Cindy’s knee. “You okay?”
She put her hand on mine and sat up a bit. Hal’s head disappeared as she turned off the EmoShow, and the lights in the room came up. At least she was trying.
“I’m okay,” she replied, sounding less than okay. “How are you?”
“Seriously, baby, what’s up? Talk to me.”
“I’m just a little down. It’s hard, you know.”
“What’s hard?”
She didn’t reply, just looked at me sadly.
“Do you want to speak to someone, maybe someone other than me, have you tried that?”
Maybe it was something to do with me.
“I have someone to talk to,” she said. “It’s okay sweetheart, but thanks.”
“What about our plans?” I asked gently. “I thought having a child was what you wanted, what would make you happy. You were so great with the proxxids. Don’t you want to try to have our own? We’re ready now.”
Cindy looked at me and smiled her eyes looking a thousand miles away. “I know you are, honey.”
7
The call came 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 doctor called.
Echo patched the communication straight through, immediately requesting to take over all of my Command functions. I glanced at him but took the call without asking.
“Something is wrong with your wife, Commander Strong,” the doctor announced, his image floating in a display space while I sat in my workspace.
“What do you mean, something is wrong?”
“I think you’d better come down here.”
I immediately punched down, and in the next instant I was standing beside him in the infirmary and looking at Cindy, who lay 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. I looked at Cindy. She appeared to be in a deep sleep.
“It seems to be something we’re calling reality suicide,” explained the doctor.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a condition where the subject—in this case, your wife—withdraw 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?”
“I’m sorry, but 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 to herself.”
“Chosen to do what to herself?” I demanded.
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.
“So what can you do?”
“Commander Strong, it would help if we understood why. Is there anything that happened recently? I noted that you’d been experimenting with proxxids.”
“Yes,” I responded, feeling mounting dread, “sure we did. That’s what this place is for, right?”
“Commander Strong,” the doctor continued slowly, “proxxids can have very powerful emotional side effects if not handled properly. Did you read the warning labels before acquiring so many of them? Tell me, Commander Strong, what did you do with the proxxids when you were done?”