I got the call 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 call came in.
Echo patched the communication straight through and immediately requested to take over all of my Command functions. I glanced at him with a furrowed brow and took the call.
“Something is wrong with your wife, Commander Strong,” the doctor told me immediately, his image floating in a display space while I sat at my workstation.
“What do you mean, something is wrong?”
“I think you’d better come down here,” he said.
I immediately punched down and was standing beside him in the infirmary watching over Cindy, who was lying 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.
“So what do you mean exactly?” I demanded.
I looked towards Cindy. She had all the appearances of being asleep.
“It’s a new phenomenon-we’re calling it ‘realicide’ or reality suicide.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s a condition where the subject, your wife, withdraws 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?”
“No, I’m sorry, 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 herself.”
“Chosen to do what to herself?” I demanded.
The doctor shrugged and shook his head. 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 in silence.
“So what can you do then?”
“Well, Commander Strong, it would help if we understood why. Is there anything that happened recently? I noted that you’d been experimenting with the proxxids.”
“Yes,” I responded, feeling mounting dread, “sure we did. That’s what this place is for, right?”
“Commander Strong,” the doctor continued, “proxxids can have very powerful emotional side effects if not taken properly. Did you read the warning labels before taking so many of them? Tell me, Commander Strong, what did you do with the proxxids when you were done?”