she can count on Derek to take one–he cares about the digients just as much as she does–but the trainers are unexpectedly reluctant. They’re all fond of the digients, but most feel that keeping one as a pet now would be like doing their job after they’ve stopped being paid. Ana is sure that Robyn will take one, but Robyn preempts her with news of her own at lunch.
“We weren’t going to tell anyone yet,” Robyn confides, “but…I’m pregnant.”
“Really? Congratulations!”
Robyn grins. “Thanks!” She releases a flood of pent-up information: the options that she and her partner Linda considered, the ova-fusion procedure they gambled on, their fabulous luck at having the first attempt succeed. Ana and Robyn discuss issues of job hunting and parental leave. Eventually they get back to the topic of adopting the mascots.
“Obviously you’re going to have your hands full,” says Ana, ”but what do you think about adopting Lolly?” It would be fascinating to see Lolly’s reaction to a pregnancy.
“No,” says Robyn, shaking her head. “I’m past digients now.”
“You’re past them?”
“I’m ready for the real thing, you know what I mean?”
Carefully, Ana says, “I’m not sure that I do.”
“People always say that we’re evolved to want babies, and I used to think that was a bunch of crap, but not anymore.” Robyn’s facial expression is one of transport; she’s no longer speaking to Ana exactly. “Cats, dogs, digients, they’re all just substitutes for what we’re supposed to be caring for. Eventually you start to understand what a baby means, what it really means, and everything changes. And then you realize that all the feelings you had before weren’t–” Robyn stops herself. “I mean, for me, it just put things in perspective.”
Women who work with animals hear this all the time: that their love for animals must arise out of a sublimated child-rearing urge. Ana’s tired of the stereotype. She likes children just fine, but they’re not the standard against which all other accomplishments should be measured. Caring for animals is worthwhile in and of itself, a vocation that need offer no apologies. She wouldn’t have said the same about digients when she started at Blue Gamma, but now she realizes it might be true for them, too.
Chapter Four
The year following Blue Gamma’s closure involves many changes for Derek. He gets a job at the firm that employs his wife Wendy, animating virtual actors for television. He’s fortunate to work on a series with good writing, but no matter how quick-witted and nonchalant the dialogue sounds, every word of it, every nuance and intonation, is painstakingly choreographed. During the animation process he hears the lines delivered a hundred times, and the final performance seems glossy and sterile in its perfection.
By contrast, life with Marco and Polo is a never ending stream of surprises. He adopted both of them because they didn’t want to be separated, and while he can’t spend as much time with them as when he worked for Blue Gamma, owning a digient now is actually more interesting than it’s ever been before. The customers who kept their digients running formed a Neuroblast user group to keep in touch, and while it’s a smaller community than before, the members are more active and engaged, and their efforts are bearing fruit.
Right now it’s the weekend, and Derek is driving to the park; in the passenger seat is Marco, wearing a robotic body. He’s standing upright on the seat–restrained by the seat belt–so he can see out the window; he’s looking for anything that he’s only seen before in videos, things that aren’t found in Data Earth.
“Firi hidrint,” says Marco, pointing.
“Fire hydrant.”
“Fire hydrant.”
“That’s right.”
The body Marco’s wearing is the one that Blue Gamma owned. Group field trips came to an end because SaruMech Toys closed shortly after Blue Gamma did, so Ana–who got a job testing software used in carbon- sequestration stations–bought the robot body at a discount for Jax to use. She let Derek borrow the body last week so Marco and Polo could play in it, and now he’s returning it. She’s going to spend the day in the park, letting other owners’ digients have a turn in the body.
“I make fire hydrant next craft time,” says Marco. “Use cylinder, use cone, use cylinder.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” says Derek.
Marco’s talking about the craft sessions that the digients now have every day. These began a few months ago, after an owner wrote software that allowed a few of Data Earth’s onscreen editing tools to be operated from within the Data Earth environment itself. By manipulating a console of knobs and sliders, a digient can now instantiate various solid shapes, change their color, and combine and edit them in a dozen different ways. The digients are in heaven; to them it seems as if they’ve been granted magical powers, and given the way the editing tools circumvent Data Earth’s physics simulation, in a sense they have. Every day after work when Derek logs into Data Earth, Marco and Polo show him the craft projects they’ve made.
“Then can show Polo how–Park! Park already?”
“No, we’re not there yet.”
“Sign says ‘Burgers and Parks.’” Marco points out a sign that they’re driving past.
“It says ‘Burgers and Shakes.’ Shakes, not parks. We’ve still got a little way to go.”
“Shakes,” Marco says, watching the sign recede in the distance. Another new activity for the digients has been reading lessons.
Marco or Polo never paid much attention to text before–there isn’t a lot of it in Data Earth aside from onscreen annotations, which aren’t visible to digients–but one owner successfully taught his digient to recognize commands written on flashcards, prompting a number of other owners to give it a try. Generally speaking, the Neuroblast digients recognize words reasonably well, but have trouble associating individual letters with sounds. It’s a variety of dyslexia that appears to be specific to the Neuroblast genome; according to other user groups, Origami digients learn letters readily, while Faberge digients remain frustratingly illiterate no matter what instruction method is used.
Marco and Polo take a reading class with Jax and a few others, and they seem to enjoy it well enough. None of the digients were raised on bedtime stories, so text doesn’t fascinate them the way it does human children, but their general curiosity–along with the praise of their owners–motivate them to explore the uses that text can be put to. Derek finds it exciting, and laments the fact that Blue Gamma didn’t stay in business long enough to see these things come to pass.
They arrive at the park; Ana sees them and walks over as Derek parks the car. Marco gives Ana a hug as soon as Derek lets him out of the car.
“Hi Ana.”
“Hi Marco,” replies Ana; she rubs the back of the robot’s head. “You’re still in the body? You had a whole week. Wasn’t that enough?”
“Wanted ride in car.”
“Did you want to play in the park for a bit?”
“No, we go now. Wendy not want us stay. Bye Ana.” By now Derek has gotten the charging platform for the robot out of the backseat. Marco steps on to the charging platform–they’ve trained the digients to return to it whenever they return to Data Earth–and the robot’s helmet goes dark.
Ana uses her handheld to get the first digient ready to enter the robot. “So you have to go, too?” she asks Derek.
“No, I don’t have to be anywhere.”
“So what did Marco mean?”
“Well…”
“Let me guess: Wendy thinks you spend too much time with digients, right?”
“Right,” says Derek. Wendy was also uncomfortable with the amount of time he’s been spending with Ana, but there’s no point in mentioning that. He assured Wendy that he doesn’t think of Ana that way, that they’re just friends who share an interest in digients.
