Disclaimer: None of the characters belong to me. They are all property of the Wachowski brothers and Warner Bros.
Hah! Finally ff net is back up. I still give you my assurance I still know what I'm doing, so don't fret if you think this chapter is weird. And Tiger Lily, I'm actually not a Neo/Trinity shipper (ducks from all the rotten tomatoes thrown). I'm not a Neo/Persephone one either.
Chapter 7: False Memory
Rated PG-13.
As Persephone watched Neo grope his way through his new environment, she was struck by how easily he took to it, like a duck to water. He took long forays into the city; checking out the wares at the marketplace, talking to the philosophers at the plaza, going down to the wharves to see the fishing ships dock. He took a great interest in everything and everyone around him, and why not - she thought - he was seeing everything for the first time. And a subconscious part of him knew it.
At first she was afraid for his safety. He was after all the Prince Consort and although she hadn't programmed any enemies, she was sure that the rogue people programs in this world she had created would assimilate some unpleasant tendencies. Like kidnapping, for one. Or regicide.
She needn't have worried. Neo retained that aura of otherworldly invincibility even in this Sim world. Although he had absolutely no knowledge of his powers, nor had he a chance to use them, the people seemed to embrace him with a fondness and loyalty usually reserved for very old and doting patriarchs.
Even in this world, as with Zion, he set about to help the citizens make better lives for themselves. It was in his hacker's modus operandi to cut through the chase to get to the meat of things. So he helped invent waterwheels and irrigation channels, ways to harness winds and waves. He sat in Guild meetings of weavers, dyers, tanners, builders and bricklayers. He was playing the exact part he played in Zion, in which everybody wanted him to be a part of anything and everything.
Another more sinister reason was, she suspected, he was trying to avoid her.
It was not as though he openly displayed it. He was too nice and emotionally matured for that. Sometimes she caught him gazing at her with a perturbed look in his eyes, as if to ask 'Why are you still a stranger to me?' When he made love to her, which was often, his doubts and fears about her seeped through. She could read the thoughts running through his head - he thought she was a wonderful wife; it caused him great anguish to be unable to give himself completely to her. Some lingering memory of something that would not quite come to the surface was holding him back.
She had underestimated the power of his bond with Trinity. Even from beyond, she was calling to him.
Sometimes she felt like weeping. She had chosen this path for both of them, and although he was kind and courteous, generous and loving to her, there was always the sense of something being missing, something that was incomplete. Not that he wanted to hold anything back, he was struggling within himself to come to terms with it; but it was something out of his control.
On her part, she gave him her almost all. She gave him her body, heart and soul. All the love she could not bestow upon her husband from another life, the Merovingian, she now lavished upon Neo. It was easy. Even though he had closed up some remote part of him to her, he was still very easy to love. The only things she promised herself she would ever hold back from him were his real memories. It was for their protection; hers and the child she carried in her womb.
Perhaps it was time to have children. Perhaps it would bring him closer, and allow whatever ghosts he had to be exorcised. She had never been a mother before. She had never had the time or the inclination, or a husband worthy enough to have a family with. A long time ago she might have thought the Merovingian worthy; but it was a time of war and turmoil, and she had not wanted to bring a child - whether or not it was a sentient program or fully human - into the world. Now however, in her peaceful Sim City, the ambience was nurturing and the time was ripe.
Two years had lapsed since she had brought Neo into this world. Two years of waiting for him to love her as much as she loved him.
She wanted nothing but the chance to live her life all over again, as she would have chosen it. She wanted nothing but best for both of them. Was that so wrong?
*
Neo heralded the birth of his first child with trepidation. It was something he couldn't quite put his finger on, but it was there, like a splinter in his mind.
He had tried to love Persephone. She was everything a man could want, his friends - who seemed to have known him since the day he docked at this strange land - were quick to point out.
'If I had the Queen as my wife,' said Patroclus, the captain of his guard and the closest person to being a best friend as Neo's rank would allow him, 'I wouldn't be out here drinking with us in taverns like these. I would be home with her every night, scr-'
Neo gave him a look.
'Okay,' his friend interjected hastily. 'Don't mean any disrespect to the Queen. But you don't know what you've got there. When she looks at you, her eyes light up, as though you're her whole reason for her existence, or something. Have you seen that?'
Yes. He had seen it. It had made him feel guilty as hell.
'I'm a good husband to her.'
He really was. He made sure all her needs were taken care of, whatever it was in his means to provide (since she was Queen anyway, nothing material was required of him). He accompanied her to state occasions, temple gatherings and sumptuous parties given in their honor by the gentry. He made love to her almost daily, even when she was hugely pregnant, taking care to make it pleasurable for her. Lovemaking was something she was very good at, being boundlessly creative and having the means to enact both their fantasies. He enjoyed all their intimate contacts, which were plagued only by his guilt that he wasn't really in love with her.
He was very fond of her however. He did love her in a fashion; the kind of love one had for a friend who had been very good to him; a love grown over time, much mingling and many good deeds. But it was not the head-over-heels passion the romantics write poems about and died for. Unlike Patroclus, he was not quick to dismiss such stories, because somewhere in some strange netherworld, he knew he had loved and experienced thus.
'Another life maybe?' Patroclus ventured.
'Perhaps.' Neo frowned. 'I'm trying to think back to my earlier years back home. But the only thing I can remember are some hunting memories with my brother and father. I don't remember any girlfriends, or people at court. At least you'd think I'd remember someone I had loved like that. But no.'
'It was the blow on your head. Wipes out everything. Probably it was the Queen. This love thing is overrated anyway.'
'No. If it had been Persephone, I would have known it. It was someone else.'
'You're not going to hurt her, are you?' His best friend arched an eyebrow. 'She's still my Queen and I'm sworn to protect her.'
'I would never hurt her.' He knew what Patroclus was referring to. There were many women in court who did not mind catching the eye of the Prince consort, Queen or no Queen, and the temptations came daily. But he respected Persephone too much for that. Besides, he had never been really interested. Even his excessive lovemaking to his wife had been a form of compensation for not loving her enough.
Unless....
There were moments when the floodgates threatened to break through. Like when he was looking outside a glass window stained green, and the rain was spattering against it. The water running down vertically in tiny rivulets down the green glass had awoken some unsung memory inside him, and he had raised one hand in wonder to touch the surface -
'Neo?' Persephone had come up behind him. 'What are you looking at?' She had appeared concerned.
The moment had been shattered like the tinkling of glass, and the images hidden by a hastily flung veil.
'Nothing,' he had assured her, kissing her on the cheek and absent-mindedly rubbing her swollen belly. 'It is nothing.'
*
If Neo had any doubts about having a child with someone he wasn't truly in love with, they were dispelled the moment he laid eyes on his son. The tiny squalling babe was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Holding hands with his wife, the child sleeping between them, he had no misgivings whatsoever they had created something wondrous; and life just felt so right. For the first time in many years, he had a moment of absolute peace.
Couples who had children later in life usually made better parents. Neo and Persephone, backed by a Queendom's largesse and an inherited sense of twenty-second century child-rearing techniques, were among the best. They infused their son Hermes, named after the Messenger god, with all the values worthy of a royal heir from an early age.
He was taught to be courteous to everybody, even the lowest scullery maid, and that to abuse his position's power was unworthy of a monarch. He was taught to cherish all life, and to take from nature only what was needed. He was taught the best thing you could do for the needy was not to give them what they needed, but to instill in them a sense of pride and an ability to procure it for themselves. He was taught knowledge was power, and to share it was even greater.
Raising Hermes was such a joy and success that when the boy was three, Neo and Persephone had another child. She was named Demeter, after Persephone's mother. While Hermes was a pensive, thoughtful child who liked to read and take long reflective walks by himself, Demeter was noisy and gregarious, with an appetite for life that was as bountiful as it was exhausting.
'She certainly doesn't take after me,' Neo said.
'Nor me,' Persephone said. 'It must have been one of our ancestors.'
Since neither of them had any true ancestors in this world, she knew that was highly unlikely.
Now that they had two children and they were both well into middle age - Neo was forty-five and she one year younger, though her actual age numbered a good many more moons than that - they had settled into a comfortable rhythm of family life and routine. The program had allowed them to age with the rest of the world; it was one of the mode settings she had insisted upon: the ability to grow old along with someone and to experience the best of what poets like Robert Browning said life would offer thereafter. It was both the gift and the price of mortality.
Neo had aged well, with the physical appearance of a man ten years younger. She supposed it was in his genetics, which were an equal mix of Polynesian, Oriental and Caucasian - not that he knew it; in this world, he supposedly came from a completely white ancestry. His exoticness was reflected too in the faces of their children, especially Demeter, who was already using her sloe-eyed charms to bend adults and other toddlers to her will.
Persephone too had aged well. At first she had been apprehensive, she who was immortal and had never seen a silken gray hair on her impeccable coiffure, or a wrinkle on her perfect Latin features. But it was more pleasant than she had initially thought. There was a sense of passage and progress, like milestones achieved on a sand hourglass.
Something more wonderful had come between them however. Her husband had begun to love her the way she wanted him to. It had happened somewhere in the middle of teaching Hermes to walk and deciding as a couple to have Demeter. It was a deep-seated love of respect and mutual trust, of loyalty and acceptance. It was the love that many Eastern brides have come to develop for their husbands from arranged marriages, whom they have only met on the wedding day. It took time like many other good things - sometimes over many years - but it was well worth the wait.
As long as she had the love of her husband and her children, even her inevitable mortality was a price worth paying.
*
'Are we lost, father?'
'Not yet, but I'll tell you when we are.'
Neo had made a promise to himself to always be honest with his children, even if it meant admitting fallibility. He regretted it sometimes. He had been riding into the Eastern forest with seven-year-old Hermes and an entourage of four guards, but the two of them had become separated from the rest when Hermes stopped to examine a rare privet moth fluttering on a gossamer bush.
The danger of being alone in the forest was always brigands, who preyed on travelers. He had strived for years with Patroclus to rid the passageways of outlaws and thieves but no matter how hard they tried, there was never enough manpower to patrol the entire country. Unless of course he raised the salaries of the prefecture to attract more recruits, which meant resetting the entire civil servants' pay scale and getting the revenue from either increased taxes on trade or the citizens.
No one ever said running a government was easy.
Even as he thought about it, he heard a rustling of bush and the crack of a twig. A dozen men suddenly sprung out of nowhere to surround them. Most of them were armed with staffs and clubs, but there were two archers with trained arrows at Hermes and himself.
'We'll take those horses, thank you.' A man who appeared to be the leader sauntered up and grasped the bridle of Neo's all black charger. 'And relieve you of your purse, as well as that ring.' He pointed at Neo's wedding band, which was simple white gold garnished with a star sapphire the cost of several third world kingdoms.
'Father...'
'It's all right, son, they're just possessions.' He had taught Hermes the rote. If apprehended, never let on whom you really are if they don't know already.
They were forced to dismount. Neo was stripped of his ring and his cloak, which was a rich wool woven from sheep in the Aramaic mountains. Hermes had to give up his golden circlet, a good luck charm given to him by his mother.
'Thank you for your generosity,' said the lead brigand. 'We apologize however for having to take your son. He would do well in the child mines of Perugia.'
Neo felt a potent fury surge through him. He had outlawed slavery in the queendom, but he couldn't do anything about the next state, unless he asked Persephone to invade it. If he managed to get Hermes out of this, he would personally hunt down every brigand in the country.
It's your fault, he told himself. You allowed this to happen. You shouldn't have allowed him to stop and ask the others to go ahead. Some responsible father you are.
If they required him to trade in his life for Hermes, he would do it in an instant. But he would have to have a strategy first. He eyed the two archers. They were the wild card in the equation, why he couldn't engage the group in immediate hand to hand combat.
'Threatening children now, are we, Dahak?'
Everyone turned to the female voice that had spoken. A black-clad woman with a drawn bow was aiming her arrow at the leader. Neo felt himself stiffen when he saw her - she had very short dark hair, blue eyes, an angular face and a no-nonsense demeanor that suggested she was every bit as deadly as she was striking. A wave of déjà vu swept through him, his strongest yet, and he knew he had known her somehow in his blurry past. And he knew with conviction he had loved this woman before with the world-hurtling, heart-wrenching passion he had described to Patroclus.
(her name was just at the tip of his mind....it was)
'Stay out of this, Trois,' Dahak replied. 'It's none of your business.'
Trois!
In trepidation, he raised his eyes to meet that of the woman's.
TBC
P/s: Weird? Think I've veered off course the main story despite my assurances that I haven't? (Though I need a kick now and then to remind myself to keep on track). Whatever your thoughts are, pls R and R me a line.
Hah! Finally ff net is back up. I still give you my assurance I still know what I'm doing, so don't fret if you think this chapter is weird. And Tiger Lily, I'm actually not a Neo/Trinity shipper (ducks from all the rotten tomatoes thrown). I'm not a Neo/Persephone one either.
Chapter 7: False Memory
Rated PG-13.
As Persephone watched Neo grope his way through his new environment, she was struck by how easily he took to it, like a duck to water. He took long forays into the city; checking out the wares at the marketplace, talking to the philosophers at the plaza, going down to the wharves to see the fishing ships dock. He took a great interest in everything and everyone around him, and why not - she thought - he was seeing everything for the first time. And a subconscious part of him knew it.
At first she was afraid for his safety. He was after all the Prince Consort and although she hadn't programmed any enemies, she was sure that the rogue people programs in this world she had created would assimilate some unpleasant tendencies. Like kidnapping, for one. Or regicide.
She needn't have worried. Neo retained that aura of otherworldly invincibility even in this Sim world. Although he had absolutely no knowledge of his powers, nor had he a chance to use them, the people seemed to embrace him with a fondness and loyalty usually reserved for very old and doting patriarchs.
Even in this world, as with Zion, he set about to help the citizens make better lives for themselves. It was in his hacker's modus operandi to cut through the chase to get to the meat of things. So he helped invent waterwheels and irrigation channels, ways to harness winds and waves. He sat in Guild meetings of weavers, dyers, tanners, builders and bricklayers. He was playing the exact part he played in Zion, in which everybody wanted him to be a part of anything and everything.
Another more sinister reason was, she suspected, he was trying to avoid her.
It was not as though he openly displayed it. He was too nice and emotionally matured for that. Sometimes she caught him gazing at her with a perturbed look in his eyes, as if to ask 'Why are you still a stranger to me?' When he made love to her, which was often, his doubts and fears about her seeped through. She could read the thoughts running through his head - he thought she was a wonderful wife; it caused him great anguish to be unable to give himself completely to her. Some lingering memory of something that would not quite come to the surface was holding him back.
She had underestimated the power of his bond with Trinity. Even from beyond, she was calling to him.
Sometimes she felt like weeping. She had chosen this path for both of them, and although he was kind and courteous, generous and loving to her, there was always the sense of something being missing, something that was incomplete. Not that he wanted to hold anything back, he was struggling within himself to come to terms with it; but it was something out of his control.
On her part, she gave him her almost all. She gave him her body, heart and soul. All the love she could not bestow upon her husband from another life, the Merovingian, she now lavished upon Neo. It was easy. Even though he had closed up some remote part of him to her, he was still very easy to love. The only things she promised herself she would ever hold back from him were his real memories. It was for their protection; hers and the child she carried in her womb.
Perhaps it was time to have children. Perhaps it would bring him closer, and allow whatever ghosts he had to be exorcised. She had never been a mother before. She had never had the time or the inclination, or a husband worthy enough to have a family with. A long time ago she might have thought the Merovingian worthy; but it was a time of war and turmoil, and she had not wanted to bring a child - whether or not it was a sentient program or fully human - into the world. Now however, in her peaceful Sim City, the ambience was nurturing and the time was ripe.
Two years had lapsed since she had brought Neo into this world. Two years of waiting for him to love her as much as she loved him.
She wanted nothing but the chance to live her life all over again, as she would have chosen it. She wanted nothing but best for both of them. Was that so wrong?
*
Neo heralded the birth of his first child with trepidation. It was something he couldn't quite put his finger on, but it was there, like a splinter in his mind.
He had tried to love Persephone. She was everything a man could want, his friends - who seemed to have known him since the day he docked at this strange land - were quick to point out.
'If I had the Queen as my wife,' said Patroclus, the captain of his guard and the closest person to being a best friend as Neo's rank would allow him, 'I wouldn't be out here drinking with us in taverns like these. I would be home with her every night, scr-'
Neo gave him a look.
'Okay,' his friend interjected hastily. 'Don't mean any disrespect to the Queen. But you don't know what you've got there. When she looks at you, her eyes light up, as though you're her whole reason for her existence, or something. Have you seen that?'
Yes. He had seen it. It had made him feel guilty as hell.
'I'm a good husband to her.'
He really was. He made sure all her needs were taken care of, whatever it was in his means to provide (since she was Queen anyway, nothing material was required of him). He accompanied her to state occasions, temple gatherings and sumptuous parties given in their honor by the gentry. He made love to her almost daily, even when she was hugely pregnant, taking care to make it pleasurable for her. Lovemaking was something she was very good at, being boundlessly creative and having the means to enact both their fantasies. He enjoyed all their intimate contacts, which were plagued only by his guilt that he wasn't really in love with her.
He was very fond of her however. He did love her in a fashion; the kind of love one had for a friend who had been very good to him; a love grown over time, much mingling and many good deeds. But it was not the head-over-heels passion the romantics write poems about and died for. Unlike Patroclus, he was not quick to dismiss such stories, because somewhere in some strange netherworld, he knew he had loved and experienced thus.
'Another life maybe?' Patroclus ventured.
'Perhaps.' Neo frowned. 'I'm trying to think back to my earlier years back home. But the only thing I can remember are some hunting memories with my brother and father. I don't remember any girlfriends, or people at court. At least you'd think I'd remember someone I had loved like that. But no.'
'It was the blow on your head. Wipes out everything. Probably it was the Queen. This love thing is overrated anyway.'
'No. If it had been Persephone, I would have known it. It was someone else.'
'You're not going to hurt her, are you?' His best friend arched an eyebrow. 'She's still my Queen and I'm sworn to protect her.'
'I would never hurt her.' He knew what Patroclus was referring to. There were many women in court who did not mind catching the eye of the Prince consort, Queen or no Queen, and the temptations came daily. But he respected Persephone too much for that. Besides, he had never been really interested. Even his excessive lovemaking to his wife had been a form of compensation for not loving her enough.
Unless....
There were moments when the floodgates threatened to break through. Like when he was looking outside a glass window stained green, and the rain was spattering against it. The water running down vertically in tiny rivulets down the green glass had awoken some unsung memory inside him, and he had raised one hand in wonder to touch the surface -
'Neo?' Persephone had come up behind him. 'What are you looking at?' She had appeared concerned.
The moment had been shattered like the tinkling of glass, and the images hidden by a hastily flung veil.
'Nothing,' he had assured her, kissing her on the cheek and absent-mindedly rubbing her swollen belly. 'It is nothing.'
*
If Neo had any doubts about having a child with someone he wasn't truly in love with, they were dispelled the moment he laid eyes on his son. The tiny squalling babe was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Holding hands with his wife, the child sleeping between them, he had no misgivings whatsoever they had created something wondrous; and life just felt so right. For the first time in many years, he had a moment of absolute peace.
Couples who had children later in life usually made better parents. Neo and Persephone, backed by a Queendom's largesse and an inherited sense of twenty-second century child-rearing techniques, were among the best. They infused their son Hermes, named after the Messenger god, with all the values worthy of a royal heir from an early age.
He was taught to be courteous to everybody, even the lowest scullery maid, and that to abuse his position's power was unworthy of a monarch. He was taught to cherish all life, and to take from nature only what was needed. He was taught the best thing you could do for the needy was not to give them what they needed, but to instill in them a sense of pride and an ability to procure it for themselves. He was taught knowledge was power, and to share it was even greater.
Raising Hermes was such a joy and success that when the boy was three, Neo and Persephone had another child. She was named Demeter, after Persephone's mother. While Hermes was a pensive, thoughtful child who liked to read and take long reflective walks by himself, Demeter was noisy and gregarious, with an appetite for life that was as bountiful as it was exhausting.
'She certainly doesn't take after me,' Neo said.
'Nor me,' Persephone said. 'It must have been one of our ancestors.'
Since neither of them had any true ancestors in this world, she knew that was highly unlikely.
Now that they had two children and they were both well into middle age - Neo was forty-five and she one year younger, though her actual age numbered a good many more moons than that - they had settled into a comfortable rhythm of family life and routine. The program had allowed them to age with the rest of the world; it was one of the mode settings she had insisted upon: the ability to grow old along with someone and to experience the best of what poets like Robert Browning said life would offer thereafter. It was both the gift and the price of mortality.
Neo had aged well, with the physical appearance of a man ten years younger. She supposed it was in his genetics, which were an equal mix of Polynesian, Oriental and Caucasian - not that he knew it; in this world, he supposedly came from a completely white ancestry. His exoticness was reflected too in the faces of their children, especially Demeter, who was already using her sloe-eyed charms to bend adults and other toddlers to her will.
Persephone too had aged well. At first she had been apprehensive, she who was immortal and had never seen a silken gray hair on her impeccable coiffure, or a wrinkle on her perfect Latin features. But it was more pleasant than she had initially thought. There was a sense of passage and progress, like milestones achieved on a sand hourglass.
Something more wonderful had come between them however. Her husband had begun to love her the way she wanted him to. It had happened somewhere in the middle of teaching Hermes to walk and deciding as a couple to have Demeter. It was a deep-seated love of respect and mutual trust, of loyalty and acceptance. It was the love that many Eastern brides have come to develop for their husbands from arranged marriages, whom they have only met on the wedding day. It took time like many other good things - sometimes over many years - but it was well worth the wait.
As long as she had the love of her husband and her children, even her inevitable mortality was a price worth paying.
*
'Are we lost, father?'
'Not yet, but I'll tell you when we are.'
Neo had made a promise to himself to always be honest with his children, even if it meant admitting fallibility. He regretted it sometimes. He had been riding into the Eastern forest with seven-year-old Hermes and an entourage of four guards, but the two of them had become separated from the rest when Hermes stopped to examine a rare privet moth fluttering on a gossamer bush.
The danger of being alone in the forest was always brigands, who preyed on travelers. He had strived for years with Patroclus to rid the passageways of outlaws and thieves but no matter how hard they tried, there was never enough manpower to patrol the entire country. Unless of course he raised the salaries of the prefecture to attract more recruits, which meant resetting the entire civil servants' pay scale and getting the revenue from either increased taxes on trade or the citizens.
No one ever said running a government was easy.
Even as he thought about it, he heard a rustling of bush and the crack of a twig. A dozen men suddenly sprung out of nowhere to surround them. Most of them were armed with staffs and clubs, but there were two archers with trained arrows at Hermes and himself.
'We'll take those horses, thank you.' A man who appeared to be the leader sauntered up and grasped the bridle of Neo's all black charger. 'And relieve you of your purse, as well as that ring.' He pointed at Neo's wedding band, which was simple white gold garnished with a star sapphire the cost of several third world kingdoms.
'Father...'
'It's all right, son, they're just possessions.' He had taught Hermes the rote. If apprehended, never let on whom you really are if they don't know already.
They were forced to dismount. Neo was stripped of his ring and his cloak, which was a rich wool woven from sheep in the Aramaic mountains. Hermes had to give up his golden circlet, a good luck charm given to him by his mother.
'Thank you for your generosity,' said the lead brigand. 'We apologize however for having to take your son. He would do well in the child mines of Perugia.'
Neo felt a potent fury surge through him. He had outlawed slavery in the queendom, but he couldn't do anything about the next state, unless he asked Persephone to invade it. If he managed to get Hermes out of this, he would personally hunt down every brigand in the country.
It's your fault, he told himself. You allowed this to happen. You shouldn't have allowed him to stop and ask the others to go ahead. Some responsible father you are.
If they required him to trade in his life for Hermes, he would do it in an instant. But he would have to have a strategy first. He eyed the two archers. They were the wild card in the equation, why he couldn't engage the group in immediate hand to hand combat.
'Threatening children now, are we, Dahak?'
Everyone turned to the female voice that had spoken. A black-clad woman with a drawn bow was aiming her arrow at the leader. Neo felt himself stiffen when he saw her - she had very short dark hair, blue eyes, an angular face and a no-nonsense demeanor that suggested she was every bit as deadly as she was striking. A wave of déjà vu swept through him, his strongest yet, and he knew he had known her somehow in his blurry past. And he knew with conviction he had loved this woman before with the world-hurtling, heart-wrenching passion he had described to Patroclus.
(her name was just at the tip of his mind....it was)
'Stay out of this, Trois,' Dahak replied. 'It's none of your business.'
Trois!
In trepidation, he raised his eyes to meet that of the woman's.
TBC
P/s: Weird? Think I've veered off course the main story despite my assurances that I haven't? (Though I need a kick now and then to remind myself to keep on track). Whatever your thoughts are, pls R and R me a line.
