The excitement of the slingshot test hadn’t yet faded, and I walked briskly home. The flowers Echo had gotten from Vince were perfect.
“Hi, sweetie! I’m home!”
I proudly held the bouquet in front of me as I walked through the door. I’d snuck along the corridors with them, trying to avoid the prying eyes and bad graces of our neighbors. They would see real flowers as wasteful.
Cindy looked at the flowers less than enthusiastically.
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 in the background. Cindy wasn’t smiling, though, her face dully reflecting the light from the display.
It was going to be another one of those nights.
“You didn’t need to buy flowers,” she complained. “What are the neighbors going to think?”
“Sorry, sweetie.” I was always sorry.
Walking in, I saw it was Dr. Hal Granger’s EmoShow floating in the display space 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.” Hal’s head disappeared from the middle of the room and cast the place into a sullen silence.
With a great sigh, she glanced at me and declared, “I guess I’ll get a vase or something,” before swinging herself laboriously off the couch to walk into the kitchen.
“How was your day?” I said brightly, trying to restart the conversation.
She rummaged around in some drawers in the kitchen. “It was fine,” she replied, lightening up a bit. “But this place is so depressing. I feel like I can’t get any air. This apartment is so…subterranean.”
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 space and furnishings. But then that was the entire point of Atopia: everyone had unlimited access to perfect synthetic reality, so you didn’t need much in the way of space or material things in the physical world.
“Sub-marine,” I corrected her pointlessly. “You mean sub-marine.”
“Whatever. It’s dark and claustrophobic.” She found a vase and filled it with water, then walked toward me with it in hand, reaching for the flowers.
“Sweetheart…,” I started to say, then stopped, searching for the right words. “Just try to use the pssi system. You can be anywhere, do anything you want.”
But that was the wrong thing to say.
“I hate the pssi system!” she spat at me, but then she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Backing up a little, her shoulders relaxed and she opened her eyes.
I said nothing.
“Sorry, I had a bad day.” She paused. “Pssi is great for watching programs and surfing the ‘net, but I don’t like all this…this…” she stuttered, 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. I can’t crawl back to Washington with my tail between my legs. Can’t you give it a chance?”
“You’re right.” She sighed once again and put the flowers down on our coffee table, stepping back to admire them. “I’ll try. I will.”
My heart filled with small hope. “Thank you, sweetheart. You might like it, if you give it a chance.”
“It is nice being able to use pssi to spend time with my sister back home,” she admitted. “Her kids are great.”
I knew what was coming next, and my heart sank.
“Have you thought about what we talked about? The reason I thought we came here?”
Now it was my turn to sigh. “I’ve thought about it, but I’m not sure that either of us is ready for it. Maybe soon, okay?”
“Okay,” she replied, her voice small.
Maybe it was time to talk about Patricia’s idea.