Barbara Campbell sat facing her husband on one side of a crackling fire in their living room fireplace. Her mint green lounging suit was new to Ken. It looked like one he’d seen Kimberly Fleetwood wear in a recent STOPIT ad. He hadn’t noticed before, but her hair style was also the same as Mrs. Fleetwood’s; only the color was different. Her arms were folded under her bosom and one bouncing leg crossed over the other.

"I’m not going to ask you why you tried to sell me that ridiculous lie," she said. "I just want to know what gave you the idea that I was stupid enough to buy it?"

She cocked her head, batted her eyelashes and smiled sweetly.

Ken blinked twice, repositioned himself in his seat and held out a beseeching hand. "Why can’t you...Why can’t we..." He pulled back his hand and exhaled slowly through his nostrils. "How can you listen to me so quietly and patiently for as long as you have, then call me a liar when your father—your father, can confirm or deny everything I told you? Why would anybody be stupid enough to tell a lie like that?"

However much he may have wanted to sway her with well-reasoned argument, he hadn’t expected to. But what was the tiny change of expression he thought he’d seen on her face? ...Yes! He had seen it. Something he said had struck a cord with her.

Ken’s first impulse was to exploit the opening in his wife’s defenses with a suggestion that she give her father a call. Then, he thought better of it. For months, Barbara had been drifting away from her father and from him. In the process, she had been drifting away from herself. Perhaps it had started as far back as their race reassignment when she was pregnant with their son, Sam but only within the past few months had it become evident. Whenever it had started and whatever was happening now, Ken sensed that it was wise to let his wife make the next move.

Ken bit his lip. Barbara looked to the floor. For a long time neither of them said a word, though the pain of Barbara’s inner battle played across her features all the while. Ken could see what was coming next as surely as Aaron had been able to see what Ken would do in the classroom VRS with his cigar smoke.

Barbara covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

What’s the matter with me? cried an inner voice that sounded only slightly like her own, as her self-esteem thrashed helplessly in a steadily rising flood of good reasons to think better of a pregnant roach than she did of herself. Why couldn’t I see that he was telling the truth? Why? Why?

To pose the question was to answer it, bluntly and completely. The truth was clearly an unbearable reflection of herself—of the kind of person she had to be to have ignored all the evidence of the kind of man Jack Fleetwood had to be. Worse than ignoring the evidence against Fleetwood, she had found ways of using it against her husband to argue in Fleetwood’s favor. She had gone so far as to have embraced STOPIT whole-heartedly because Fleetwood had embraced it, and to have questioned only her own intelligence for not truly understanding the STOPIT rationale for Gidarbing.

Barbara stood and hurried from the room, seeing her husband through a blur of tears as she passed him on her way up the stairs to their bedroom. Each step to the upper floor was a mocking reminder of the escalating levels of mental torture she had subjected him to for no other reason than the fact that he wasn’t Jack Fleetwood.

Ken heard the bedroom door close as the side door opened and closed.

"Hey Mom!" shouted Sam.

"Sam," called Ken. "Don’t bother your mother."

The boy was in the living room before his father had finished talking. "Hi Dad. Can I go to the rodeo with Oliver and Mr. Wesson?"

"The rodeo?"

"Yeah, at the Dome."

"Since when have you been interested in cowboys?"

"Since I found out grandpa used to be one...Didn’t you know he was a bull rider?

"No," said Ken, knowing that his own father had done nothing more unusual than getting himself killed in a drive-by shooting when Ken was a baby. Barbara’s father, on the other hand, had done so many remarkable things that being a rodeo cowboy shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise, except that no one ever mentioned it.

"Oh," said Ken.

"Can I go?"

"Well, son..."

The boy shifted his weight impatiently from one foot to the other. "Mr. Wesson is waiting in the car."

"Well...Okay."

Sam grinned. "Thanks, Dad," he said. He scampered from of the room.

When the side door opened and closed again, Ken’s full attention returned to his wife.

He hadn’t been especially moved by her tears, having seen them so many times before. They could have been tears of pain, tears of remorse or tears of manipulation. They could have been tears of frustration. There was no telling what she would do when she found herself on the losing side of an argument.

Ken huffed and staggered to the stairs, not knowing what he would say to her much less what she would say to him.

Barbara heard his approaching footfalls on the stairs. She lay face up on the bed with her ankles crossed and her hands folded on her stomach. She was still crying. She didn’t try to stop. She didn’t want to do anything she didn’t truly feel. With the decision not to try, came an unexpected sense of power and well-being. Suddenly, she was seeing her mindless devotion to a charming megalomaniac—who happened to look like her childhood image of the ideal man—as any sane person would see him. It was embarrassing. If one looked at it in a certain way it was also funny. It was so funny that she laughed through her tears.

She wasn’t sure how long Ken had been standing by the bed looking down at her or what he thought of the laughter. Perhaps he thought that she had lost her mind or that she was playing games with his mind. How could she tell him that she had found hers and that the cruel games she had been playing with his were over, when she couldn’t stop laughing or crying? She wasn’t hysterical. Far from it. Her thoughts were as clear as they had ever been. She was getting the psychic wreckage of her collision with reality out of her system and rejoicing in the fact that it had happened in time to save her marriage. At least she hoped there was still time.

"Ken," she croaked, trying to dry her face with the backs of her hands, "I’m so sorry."

With those words came a pitiful wail and another flood of tears that washed away all of the laughter. She flung herself on her side, her head buried in her arms, her shoulders heaving.

Ken rocked back on his heels, only now convinced that his wife was playing it straight. It was a moment as stunning and memorable as the sighting of an oasis after being lost in a desert without vital provisions for nearly too long. A huge swell of nameless emotion threatened to grow to uncontainable proportions in his chest. If he attempted to speak, he knew it would rupture.

He did not attempt to speak. For a long time he stood rooted to the floor fighting down the urge to let himself cry while Barbara cried herself out.

When he no longer had to fight and Barbara was no longer able to weep, she turned over on her back. They searched each other’s eyes. For some twisted reason Ken saw his peaches-and-cream colored-wife as the chocolate-colored girl he fell in love with a dozen years before. The vivid hallucination persisted for several seconds, like a video tape paused on a frame from a different tape before resuming, a jerky hop away, from where it left off. As strange as that was, it wasn’t nearly as strange, under the circumstances, as the stirring in his loins.

The whole room seemed to be charged with sexual energy that no living thing could resist. Not even Barbara was immune to its effects. Without exchanging a word, they knew what would happen next. They weren’t going to make love; they were going to have sex—raw, nasty, uninhibited, illegal sex....And they did....

Barbara Campbell lay naked and sweaty on top of her naked, sweaty husband, her breasts pressed against his back, her hands between his chest and the bed sheet, her legs hooked around his. She squirmed and whispered sweet words of love and forbidden words of lust in his ear.

"Stop," he groaned, with a smile stretched so far across his face that it hurt.

She laughed and squirmed all the more. She was having a good time, the best time of her life. If she had to speak for Ken she would have said with complete confidence that the same was true for him. There was something about relinquishing other people’s ideas of what men and women should do to give each other pleasure that was immensely pleasurable in itself. Apart from allowing them to discover new heights of what they could do, the courage it took to do it put them on a paradoxically higher moral plane. Who would have thought that it was possible to extend one’s self beyond the normal limits of sensual pleasure and to feel morally superior for having done so?

Barbara smiled at the thought. The giddy heights of sensual pleasure was new to her. The feeling of moral superiority was not.

Her smile vanished. She rolled away from Ken onto her back.

Ken sensed the change of mood before he turned to his side to face his wife. Sure enough, she wasn’t playing anymore. But she didn’t have that STOPIT look of righteous suffering he was so used to seeing when she switched so suddenly to her serious mode. She looked sad and pensive on a human scale that was somehow as comforting as it was a sign for a need to be comforted.

He took her hand. "What is it, Barbara?"

She hesitated. "...You know...you know how crazy I’ve been acting lately.

Ken would have restrained himself from grimacing if his face muscles hadn’t reacted before his intellect could intervene.

Barbara read the expression and his abortive attempt to surprises it. "I don’t know what happened," she said wearily. "It’s probably a lot of things. I guess you could call it an identify crisis." She looked in his eyes. "You don’t know what it’s like to be nothing."

Ken wrinkled his nose. Barbara touched it with her finger. "You’re a big city homicide detective. That’s something. You were a star athlete in high school and college. You graduated with honors from Wayne State University. You were always somebody. You were always an important part of something."

"You’re a teacher," said Ken.

"Oh? And what does that mean?"

Ken didn’t dare say that he wasn’t sure. He said, "It means that you have an identity of your own."

"Oh, Ken, a teacher is a nobody. We don’t even have faces. We go to a studio and monitor teacher-ELFs for program irregularities. That’s it."

"Well, you’re the real brains behind the ELFs, aren’t you?"

"We used to be," snorted Barbara. "With the new AI chips, the only way we can hang on to our jobs is with a lot of creative programming."

"Isn’t that the same as being the brains behind the ELFs?"

"It would be if we were using our creativity to make the ELFs teach better."

Ken was slow to catch on. When he did, he was speechless. Who would have thought that Barbara and an entire class of obsolete professionals like her would sabotage their teaching programs to maintain the fiction of their professional worth? Who would have thought that so many people in the same line of work would take the same chance—and get away with it?

Once again, he flashed on the cigar smoke he blew in the VR teacher’s face.

Then he had it: Nobody knew that school teachers were obsolete but the teachers themselves. They were all in the same fix with no incentive for anyone to spill the beans to the authorities. But wait; wasn’t he one of the authorities?

"Barbara, you shouldn’t be telling me this."

She patted him on his chest then rested her hand there. "Why not, darling? There’s no law that says a certified teacher can’t make her own lesson plans. As long as they conform to the local guidelines and the student average stays high enough on the NST."

"What’s the NST?"

"National Standardized Test. The way the teaching programs are set up, it’s harder to fail the NST than it is to pass it no matter what so-called teachers like me do for better or worse. All we have to do is make sure that we monkey with the programs enough to look like we’re doing something. Some teachers really do believe they’re accomplishing something. But it’s like piling people in an airplane and telling them they have to flap their arms to make it fly. They flap their arms, the plane flies and some of them might convince themselves that there’s a connection. If they put together everything that they know about what was really happening, they’d have to face the truth. The NST puts everything together."

Ken was puzzled. "If it’s that easy to tell that the AI chip is flying the plane, so to speak, and the teachers are just passengers flapping their arms, why don’t they stop it?"

"They who?" asked Barbara. "The teachers? The administrators? The parents? The government? Why would anybody want to change a system that benefits everybody associated with it? It keeps a high number of the right kind of people employed at the right socio-economic level, which is good for them. It helps the local economy, which is good for the people in those locals, and it give the government a chance to make sure that no un-American virus can creep into the history and social studies programs."

Ken sat up straight, as if hurled upright by a spring-loaded board in his back. He slapped the sides of his head with his palms and swiveled his feet around to the floor.

"What is it?" asked his worried wife, scrambling to her knees on the bed and placing her white hands on his white shoulders.

Ken shot forward toward the dresser. "Call your dad," he said, snatching open a drawer and pulling out a pair of boxer shorts.

"Ken?"

"Do it!" he snapped, nearly falling on his face trying to get into his shorts. "Shit! Where’s my band? Oh, there it is. He stumbled to the near side night stand and snatched up his wristband computer while Barbara grabbed the light pen on the far stand and pointed it at the mid-sized telewindow in the wall.

Her husband’s urgent tone was one she hadn’t heard before. It scared her. What frightened her more was the emergency call he was putting in to the police. He was directing them to her father’s house on Oakwood Blvd. Barbara used the address along with his name to key-in the phone line, red-faced that he wasn’t already keyed in on her priority contacts list. A creepy chill stole into her spine as an ELF of her father appeared in the window to deliver a brief, not-at-home message.

"What’s going on, Ken?" implored Barbara.

"I think your father is in trouble," he said. He had his pants on and he was tugging on a sock. "Damnit! I should have figured something was wrong when they didn’t call me right away."

"What makes you think something is wrong now?"

"It’s been..." He looked at the time display in his wristband telewindow. "...more than 90 minutes since I got pulled out of that Virtual Reality Session I told you about with your father and that other guy." Now he had both socks on and one shoe. "I thought I got yanked out of there too soon but I didn’t pay attention to when I went in, so I didn’t question it. The thing is, the other guy, The Genie, said he wanted to show me something else when I was fading out. Whatever it was, it was important."

Barbara was out of bed slipping into the second of a pair of long black stockings. "How does that add up to an emergency?" she asked.

"Are you coming with me?"

"You are going to daddy’s, aren’t you?" She yanked a dress out of the closet and threw it on over her head.

"Yeah," said Ken, tacitly agreeing to take her with him.

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Why does all of that stuff you just said make you think daddy is in trouble?" she asked in a meek, shaky voice.

That was the second time she called him ‘daddy,’ thought Ken. Though it was hardly the time to take note of such trivia, the absence of that word from her speaking vocabulary for over a decade made it unavoidable. He chose not to mention it.

"It stand’s to reason," he said, hurrying out of the door with Barbara right behind him. "Whatever The Genie had to show me, he would have showed your father if everything was all right." They scampered down the stairs.

"So?" said Barbara, following Ken to the foyer closet where he grabbed their coats.

"Your father would have called me. I would have called him if..." Oh God! he thought, recalling how focused he’d been on staying out of trouble with Barbara and then how lost he’d been in lust that nothing else crossed his mind until he lost his erection. I can’t say that!

Unfortunately, he didn’t have to. Barbara had all the facts she needed to fill in the blanks. If something bad had happened to her father, how could she not blame herself?

....The Campbells arrived at the home of Aaron Lee McPhail sometime after the police. A young, blond, uniformed officer approached their car with a happy grin.