The Fractal Prince

‘They will deliver my past self to me. They can have the rest, for all they care.’

The thief runs his fingers through sand. ‘You know, Matjek, I am curious. What is it that made you into such a bastard? You never told me in Paris.’

‘Are you still trying to get my Founder Codes, Jean?’ Matjek says. ‘I assure you it won’t be that easy.’

‘Actually, I’m really just dying to know. I’ve told you a story. Perhaps you could entertain us with one. Mieli seemed to genuinely like the old you. I want to know what happened.’

‘Death,’ Matjek says. ‘Death made me angry.’ He tells the dream vir to make his words real. Why not? He has all the time in the world.

The Story of Little Matjek and Death

Matjek is fabbing a leg for his imaginary friend when his mother decides to take twenty minutes of holiday.

He likes playing in the rooftop garden. Beyond the glass walls, the tops of the high buildings remind him of being in a forest. Sometimes they let him go to a park, escorted by security drones, but it is never the same. And it’s the perfect place to play with his friends. When they are cooperative, that is.

The lightkraken does not like the way the transparent limb extruded by the handheld fabber’s beak looks, and expresses its displeasure by dancing angrily in the air. Its tentacles whirl around like a glowing carousel.

‘Stop it!’ Matjek tells it angrily. ‘Or you are not going to have a body after all.’ The kraken gives him a disapproving look with its sharp ink-dot eyes. It is the eldest of all of Matjek’s friends so of course it has to be the first one to come through. But there are more on the other side, waiting for their turn: the Chimney Princess and the Green Soldier and the Flower Prince. It might not be a bad idea to teach the kraken a lesson, Matjek thinks.

‘Hello, Matjek,’ his mother says.

He looks up. When she is off work, she always looks like a stranger. Her face moves, her fingers are not twitching as if playing invisible keyboards, and even her eyes are still as if there is no data coming into them except what she sees. And she always looks so tired. Matjek’s mother is a small woman, and she does not have to bend down far to give him a hug. In spite of the warmth in the rooftop garden, her skin feels cold.

‘What are you doing?’ she asks. He looks at the fabber. There is something wrong with it: it is sputtering out gobs that look like large boogers. Probably he should not have fed the tree branch into it. But the Chimney Princess wanted a face made from painted wood.

‘Nothing,’ he mutters.

‘Tell me,’ she begs.

‘You are not going to have the time to listen,’ he chides her.

‘Little kvetinka, I have almost half an hour,’ she says, eyes dull with fatigue. She tousles his hair, like she always does. He does not want her to notice he is wearing the beemee again, so he brushes her hand away.

‘It’s just you are early,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t finished. It’s important.’

‘Shall I go away?’ she asks, a hurt look on her face. ‘You can continue if you want.’

‘I guess it’s all right,’ he says. Her face lights up. ‘It looks very exciting,’ she says. ‘Can we do it together? Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘I’m making bodies for my friends,’ he says.

‘Baby, we talked about this,’ her mother says. ‘They can’t have bodies. They are not real.’

Of course he knows that the lightkraken and the others are not real in the same way he is: he asked the watson to explain to him about imaginary friends and paracosms. The idea that they would all fade away as he got older just seemed unfair. So he has been tuning the beemee to the parts of his brain the watson says they live in, to help them to get out. But he decides it’s not a good idea to tell that to his mother.

‘Yes, they are,’ he says firmly. He pushes out his lower lip in a way that tells his mother that the conversation is over. She is smart enough to pick up on it and sighs. ‘Whatever you say, dear. Can we play with them, then?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘They don’t like you. They went away.’

She looks around. ‘I’m sorry, sweetie. What can I do to make it up to them?’

She has the haunted look in her eyes that means that she is already thinking about work. Matjek asked the watson what his mother does but did not really understand the answer: quantum hedge funds and corporate avatars and doing what the shareholders vote for you to do. It sounded a bit like having imaginary friends except letting them control you, instead of the other way around.

‘They want to see Daddy,’ Matjek says.

‘Your father has promised to spend time with you tomorrow,’ his mother says.

‘I want him now,’ Matjek says. His friends join him in an angry chorus inside his head.

‘He is only going to be able to make it tomorrow, sweetheart. He is very busy with his show.’

It’s like there is a bell ringing in Matjek’s head, suddenly. The bell that wakes up the Flower Prince.

‘Now. Now. Now.’ He purses his lips and looks away from his mother.

‘Mommy’s holiday is almost over, sweetie. Are you sure we can’t do something together?’

‘I want Daddy,’ Matjek says. His mother sighs. ‘All right. I’ll call him.’ She looks pale. ‘I’m going to have to get ready for work now, sweetie. Be good.’ She almost touches his hair again, sees his expression and pulls her hand back. Then her ghosts take over and she walks away, giving him one more look before her eyes fill with flickering numbers.

You were mean to her, the Chimney Princess chides him, brown eyes sad in her wooden face beneath her lopsided crown. She sits on the grass and smooths her sooty dress.

‘That’s the only way she listens to me,’ Matjek says. He looks first at his waiting friends, then at the sputtering fabber. He kicks at it. It spits out one more misshapen clump of plastic and circuitry and dies.

‘Son,’ says the Green Soldier. ‘There is no point in being upset if you are not prepared to do something about it.’

Matjek looks at the Soldier’s craggy face. He is crouched on the ground, leaning on a tree, a rifle across his knees.

‘What should I do?’ Matjek asks.

‘Let’s go find your dad,’ the Chimney Princess says.

Matjek is not allowed to look at his father’s beemee feeds. But he has already figured out how to pretend to be his mother. The watson shows him a timeline of his father’s activities. Like all big beemee stars, there are whole fan communities around tracking him, distributed computing engines running Bojan Chen recognition software. The watson condenses discussions for him:

But is it not just a glorified form of pornography? No, it’s poetry of experience. He could be anywhere, he could be anyone. That’s what you pay him for, making the mundane extraordinary.

Lots of the beemee stars do extreme things: benji jumps, hot air balloon rides. The big stars go for having sex in a drop capsule during an orbital dive from a space station. But Matjek’s father is credited with turning the beemee-experience transfer via transcranial magnetic stimulation – into an art form. To be seen through Bojan Chen’s eyes is something special.

Still using his mom’s password, Matjek queries the watson for his father’s calendar. He is not far. He is going to be in a park in the city, looking at wet leaves. So that’s the location. The problem is getting there.

‘How can I sneak past the watson?’ he asks his friends. ‘I’m not going to get very far. Mom will find out. And then there is no point.’

‘Don’t worry, son,’ the Green Soldier says. ‘You just leave it to us.’

The doors open for him. The security system does not see him. He takes the elevator down, the one that usually opens for Mom or the guards, through the three hundred floors. The Chimney Princess whispers to him all the way.

Now, right. Now, left.

Thousands of people, in a shopping centre. Ribbons of light and images in the air around them. Shop windows sending avatars to materialise in front of them, telling them about toys and games. A camera drone whizzes past him, then swings around. Soon, there are several of them. He whispers to the Flower Prince and they fall down to