Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

the Strongman came into the dining room and sang “Happy Birthday,” it was all Jamie could do to hold back the tears.

Afterwards he drove his new car to the Circus Maximus and drove as fast as he could on the long oval track. The car really wouldn’t go very fast. The bleachers on either side were empty, and so was the blue sky above.

Maybe it was a puzzle, he thought, like Princess Gigunda’s love life. Maybe all he had to do was follow the right clue, and everything would be fine.

What’s the moral they’re trying to teach? he wondered.

But all he could do was go in circles, around and around the empty stadium.

“Hey, Digit. Wake up.”

Jamie came awake suddenly, with a stifled cry. The room whirled around him. He blinked, realized that the whirling came from the colored lights projected by his birthday present, Becca’s lamp stand.

Becca was sitting on his bedroom chair, a cigarette in her hand. Her feet, in the steel-capped boots she’d been wearing lately, were propped up on the bed.

“Are you awake, Jamie?” It was Selena’s voice. “Would you like me to sing you a lullaby?”

“Fuck off, Selena,” Becca said. “Get out of here. Get lost.”

Selena cast Becca a mournful look, then sailed backward, out the window, riding a beam of moonlight to her pale home in the sky. Jamie watched her go, and felt as if a part of himself was going with her, a part that he would never see again.

“Selena and the others have to do what you tell them, mostly,” Becca said. “Of course, Mom and Dad wouldn’t tell you that.”

Jamie looked at Becca. “What’s happening?” he said. “Where did you go today?”

Colored lights swam over Becca’s face. “I’m sorry if I spoiled your birthday, Digit. I just got tired of the lies, you know? They’d kill me if they knew I was here now, talking to you.” Becca took a draw on her cigarette, held her breath for a second or two, then exhaled. Jamie didn’t see or taste any smoke.

“You know what they wanted me to do?” she said. “Wear a little girl’s body, so I wouldn’t look any older than you, and keep you company in that stupid school for seven hours a day.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t do it. They yelled and yelled, but I was damned if I would.”

“I don’t understand.”

Becca flicked invisible ashes off her cigarette, and looked at Jamie for a long time. Then she sighed.

“Do you remember when you were in the hospital?” she said.

Jamie nodded. “I was really sick.”

“I was so little then, I don’t really remember it very well,” Becca said. “But the point is — ” She sighed again. “The point is that you weren’t getting well. So they decided to — ” She shook her head. “Dad took advantage of his position at the University, and the fact that he’s been a big donor. They were doing AI research, and the neurology department was into brain modeling, and they needed a test subject, and — Well, the idea is, they’ve got some of your tissue, and when they get cloning up and running, they’ll put you back in — ” She saw Jamie’s stare, then shook her head. “I’ll make it simple, okay?”

She took her feet off the bed and leaned closer to Jamie. A shiver ran up his back at her expression. “They made a copy of you. An electronic copy. They scanned your brain and built a holographic model of it inside a computer, and they put it in a virtual environment, and — ” She sat back, took a drag on her cigarette. “And here you are,” she said.

Jamie looked at her. “I don’t understand.”

Colored lights gleamed in Becca’s eyes. “You’re in a computer, okay? And you’re a program. You know what that is, right? From computer class? And the program is sort of in the shape of your mind. Don Quixote and Princess Gigunda are programs, too. And Mrs. Winkle down at the schoolhouse is usually a program, but if she needs to teach something complex, then she’s an education major from the University.”

Jamie felt as if he’d just been hollowed out, a void inside his ribs. “I’m not real?” he said. “I’m not a person?”

“Wrong,” Becca said. “You’re real, all right. You’re the apple of our parents’ eye.” Her tone was bitter. “Programs are real things,” she said, “and yours was a real hack, you know, absolute cutting-edge state-of-the-art technoshit. And the computer that you’re in is real, too — I’m interfaced with it right now, down in the family room — we have to wear suits with sensors and a helmet with scanners and stuff. I hope to fuck they don’t hear me talking to you down here.”

“But what — ” Jamie swallowed hard. How could he swallow if he was just a string of code? “What happened to me? The original me?”

Becca looked cold. “Well,” she said, “you had cancer. You died.”

“Oh.” A hollow wind blew through the void inside him.

“They’re going to bring you back. As soon as the clone thing works out — but this is a government computer you’re in, and there are all these government restrictions on cloning, and — ” She shook her head. “Look, Digit,” she said. “You really need to know this stuff, okay?”

“I understand.” Jamie wanted to cry. But only real people cried, he thought, and he wasn’t real. He wasn’t real.

“The program that runs this virtual environment is huge, okay, and you’re a big program, and the University computer is used for a lot of research, and a lot of the research has a higher priority than you do. So you don’t run in realtime — that’s why I’m growing faster than you are. I’m spending more hours being me than you are. And the parents — ” She rolled her eyes. “They aren’t making this any better, with their emphasis on normal family life.”

She sucked on her cigarette, then stubbed it out in something invisible. “See, they want us to be this normal family. So we have breakfast together every day, and dinner every night, and spend the evening at the Zoo or in Pandaland or someplace. But the dinner that we eat with you is virtual, it doesn’t taste like anything — the grant ran out before they got that part of the interface right — so we eat this fast-food crap before we interface with you, and then have dinner all over again with you… Is this making any sense? Because Dad has a job and Mom has a job and I go to school and have friends and stuff, so we really can’t get together every night. So they just close your program file, shut it right down, when they’re not available to interface with you as what Dad calls a ‘family unit,’ and that means that there are a lot of hours, days sometimes, when you’re just not running, you might as well really be dead — ” She blinked. “Sorry,” she said. “Anyway, we’re all getting older a lot faster than you are, and it’s not fair to you, that’s what I think. Especially because the University computer runs fastest at night, because people don’t use them as much then, and you’re pretty much realtime then, so interfacing with you would be almost normal, but Mom and Dad sleep then, cuz they have day jobs, and they can’t have you running around unsupervised in here, for God’s sake, they think it’s unsafe or something…”

She paused, then reached into her shirt pocket for another cigarette. “Look,” she said, “I’d better get out of here before they figure out I’m talking to you. And then they’ll pull my access codes or something.” She stood, brushed something off her jeans. “Don’t tell the parents about this stuff right away. Otherwise they might erase you, and load a backup that doesn’t know shit. Okay?”

And she vanished, as she had that afternoon.

Jamie sat in the bed, hugging his knees. He could feel his heart beating in the darkness. How can a program have a heart? he wondered.

Dawn slowly encroached upon the night, and then there was Mister Jeepers, turning lazy cartwheels in the air, his red face leering in the window.

“Jamie’s awake!” he said. “Jamie’s awake and ready for a new day!”

“Fuck off,” Jamie said, and buried his face in the blanket.

Jamie asked to learn more about computers and programming. Maybe, he thought, he could find clues there, he could solve the puzzle. His parents agreed, happy to let him follow his interests.

After a few weeks, he moved into El Castillo. He didn’t tell anyone he was going, he just put some of his things in his car, took them up to a tower room, and threw them down on the bed he found there. His Mom came to