Just like any war, anywhere, any time, life was very different for us after the Robotnik wars. The village of Knothole was virtually abandoned after being firebombed throughout the war, causing the mass exodus to New Mobotropolis, where humans and mobians alike moved from all over to be protected by Nicole's cyber shield. Under her protective umbrella, we were all lucky in that we got a jumpstart on the post-war economy. With the last few months of fighting going on just outside the city walls, people were growing their own food, trading, making money, and having babies for the first time in years.

You may not know that New Mobotropolis was originally an enormous swath of land. Supposedly, Sally and Elias knew that we'd have to survive in the cyber bubble for an extended period of time, like a castle under siege. So to avoid strategic bottlenecks, they picked a site with a strong river and an underground spring, a few large tracts of fertile land, and a relatively flat area to chop up into industrial, residential, and commercial zones. New Mobo is pretty unusual in that the city is broken up into exclusive thirds- there are no retail businesses in residential areas, for instance, and there are no slums in the shipyard or near the slaughterhouses. Everybody lives in the residential district, and if you want to work or shop, you've got to leave the extended neighborhood.

For my family, post-war life meant that everything was different. Geoffrey and I both were discharged honorably from the military, at which point we started looking for safer and better-paying work. He and my mom hit it off right away. She moved to New Mobo before our tour was up, so we stayed with her for a short time while looking for a bigger place that we could afford. But we enjoyed staying with her so much that when we finally found a place, we invited her to come live with us. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made; after my difficult teenage runaway years, my mom and I make great friends as adults, and Geoffrey was so happy to finally have a parent.

I found a great job at a home for teenage girls, many of them with histories just like mine. I'm not usually one to brag, but I had the best job in the world. I loved my girls, and they loved me. There were a lot of tough nuts to crack- these girls had their hearts broken so many times, after all- but I was a tough nut once, and finding that structure and support was all it took to help me reach my potential. The home was state-funded, so my salary was kind of low, but I was able to do it in part because my mom's job as an ER nurse helps pay the bills.

Geoffrey's post-war job actually started out as a joke. I'm sure you know that my husband is very vain; get him drunk enough and even he'll laugh about it. He likes for things to be "just so", including himself. He has to look perfect all the time or he gets very anxious. While he and I were arguing one time- money was getting tight- I accused him of being a narcissist. We exchanged a lot of harsh words, many of which I still regret, until he finally stormed out of the apartment to cool off for a few hours. As a kind of mean joke, I mailed some pictures of him to a modeling agency, imagining his confusion, and his deflated ego, when he got a rejection letter that he never applied for. But then a few weeks later, he was called back.

Of course, I then had to sheepishly explain myself. We went to his callback not expecting anything. We knew nothing about modeling. But his cockiness, obsessively maintained physique, and stark coloring did him well. His photographer told us that he was "the closest thing to a born model" she had ever seen. He was stupidly lucky, I guess. It took a few months before he started making any kind of good money- which isn't even a lot of time in that industry, not by a long shot- but when he did, he quickly overshot me.

My life was nearly complete. Once all of us had decent jobs, I approached my husband and my mom together and told them about how badly I wanted to be a mother. We stayed up late one Saturday night, my work phone plugged into the wall and on full volume in case one of my girls needed me, mom's phone on the coffee table in case the hospital needed her to come in. We talked about how much money we needed to save, who would stay home with the baby, whether or not I could bring him or her to work with me safely, and how everybody felt about it. Before the night was over, Mom was online, buying me preconception vitamins and offering to soundproof our bedroom.

That was almost three years ago. I'm twenty-seven, Mom's fifty-two, and Geoffrey's turning thirty in December. The city of New Mobo has reached a population of five million, and none of those people are my baby.