Chapter Seven
Another two months go by. The user group’s attempts at fund-raising don’t meet with much success; the charitably inclined are growing fatigued of hearing about natural endangered species, let alone artificial ones, and digients aren’t nearly as photogenic as dolphins. The flow of donations has never risen above a trickle.
The stress of being confined to Data Earth is definitely taking a toll on the digients; the owners try to spend more time with them to keep them from getting bored, but it’s no substitute for a fully populated virtual world. Ana also tries to shield Jax from the problems surrounding the Neuroblast port, but he’s aware of it nonetheless. One day when she comes home from work, she logs in to find him visibly agitated.
“Want ask you about porting,” he says, with no prelude.
“What about it?”
“Before thought it just another upgrade, like before. Now think it much bigger. More like uploading, except with digients instead people, right?”
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
“You seen video with mouse?”
Ana knows the one Jax is referring to: newly released by an uploading research team, it shows a white mouse being flash-frozen and then vaporized, one micrometer at a time, into curls of smoke by a scanning electron beam, and then instantiated in a test scape where it’s virtually thawed and awakened. The mouse immediately has a seizure, convulsing piteously for a couple of subjective minutes before it dies. It’s currently the record-holder for longest survival time for an uploaded mammal.
“Nothing like that will happen to you,” she assures him.
“You mean I not remember if happens,” says Jax. “I only remember if transition successful.”
“No one’s going to run you, or anyone else, on an untested engine. When Neuroblast has been ported, we’ll run test suites on it and fix all the bugs before we run a digient. Those test suites don’t feel anything.”
“Researchers ran test suites before they uploaded mice?”
Jax is good at asking the tough questions. “The mice were the test suites,” Ana admits. “But that’s because no one has the source code to organic brains, so they can’t write test suites that are simpler than real mice. We have the source code for Neuroblast, so we don’t have that problem.”
“But you don’t have money afford port.”
“No, not right now, but we’re going to get it.” She hopes she sounds more confident than she feels.
“How I help? How I make money?”
“Thanks, Jax, but right now there isn’t a way for you to make money,” she says. “For now your job is to just keep studying and do well in your classes.”
“Yes, know that: now study, later do other things. What if now I get loan, then pay back later when earn money?”
“Let me worry about that, Jax.”
Jax looks glum. “Okay.”
In fact, what Jax suggests is almost exactly what the user group has attempted recently by looking for corporate investors. It’s an avenue opened up by VirlFriday’s success in selling digients as personal assistants. It took several years, but Talbot finally managed to raise an instance of Andro that would work for anyone; VirlFriday has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It’s the first demonstration that a digient can actually be profitable, and several other companies are looking to duplicate Talbot’s achievement.
One of those companies is called Polytope, who’ve announced plans for launching an enormous breeding program to create the next Andro. The user group contacted them and offered them a stake in the Neuroblast digients’ future: in exchange for paying to port the Neuroblast engine, Polytope would get a percentage of any income generated by the digients in perpetuity. The group was more hopeful than it had been in months, but the company’s answer was no; the only digients that Polytope is interested in are Sophonce digients, whose obsessive focus is a necessity if they’re going to replace conventional software.
The user group has briefly discussed the possibility of paying for the port out of their own pockets, but it’s clearly not feasible. As a result, some members are considering the unthinkable:
FROM: Stuart Gust
I hate being the one to bring this up, but someone has to. What about temporarily suspending the digients for a year or so, until we’ve raised the money for the port?
FROM: Derek Brooks
You know what happens when anyone suspends their digient. Temporary becomes indefinite becomes permanent.
FROM: Ana Alvarado
I couldn’t agree more. It’s just too easy to get into perpetual postponement mode. Have you ever heard of anyone restarting a digient that they’d suspended for more than six months? I haven’t.
FROM: Stuart Gust
But we’re not like those people. They suspended their digients because they were tired of them. We’ll miss our digients every day that they’re suspended; it’ll be an incentive for us to raise the money.
FROM: Ana Alvarado
If you think suspending Zaff will increase your motivation, go ahead. Keeping Jax awake is what keeps me motivated.
Ana has no doubts when she posts her reply on the forum, but the conversation is more difficult when, a few days later, Jax brings up the issue himself. The two of them are in the private Data Earth, where she is showing him around a new game continent. It’s a classic, one that Ana enjoyed years ago, and it’s recently been released for free, so the user group instantiated a copy for the digients. She tries to convey her enthusiasm for it, pointing out what distinguishes it from the other game continents that the digients have grown bored with, but Jax sees the continent for what it is: yet another attempt to keep him occupied while they wait for Neuroblast to be ported.
As they walk through a deserted medieval town square, Jax says, “Sometimes wish I just be suspended, not have to wait more. Restarted when I can enter Real Space, feel like no time passed.”
The comment catches Ana off-guard. None of the digients have access to the user-group forums, so Jax must have come up with the idea on his own. “Do you really want that?” she asks.
“Not really. Want stay awake, know what happening. But sometimes get frustrated.” Then, he asks, “You sometimes wish you don’t have take care me?”
She makes sure Jax is looking her in the face before she replies. “My life might be simpler if I didn’t have you to take care of, but it wouldn’t be as happy. I love you, Jax.”
“Love you too.”
Driving home from work, Derek gets a message from Ana saying that she’d been contacted by someone at Polytope, so as soon as he gets home he calls her. “So what happened?” he asks.
Ana looks bemused. “It was a very strange call.”
“Strange how?”
“They’re offering me a job.”
“Really? Doing what?”
“Training their Sophonce digients,” she says. “Because of all my previous experience, they want me to be the team leader. They offered a great salary, three years guaranteed employment, and a signing bonus that’s, frankly, fabulous. There’s a catch, though.”
“Well? Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“All their trainers are required to use InstantRapport.”
Derek’s eyes widen. “You’re kidding,” he says. InstantRapport is one of the smart transdermals, a patch that delivers doses of an oxytocin-opioid cocktail whenever the wearer is in the presence of a specific person. It’s used to strengthen rocky marriages and strained parent-child relationships, and it’s recently become available without a prescription. “What the hell for?”
