' – The cat, he gets them worked up.' She wrings her hands and begins to turn as Sirhan comes into view.
'At last!'
'I came fast.' He nods respectfully at Eloise, then frowns. 'The children -' Something small and fast runs headfirst into him, grabs his legs, and tries to head-butt him in the crotch. 'Oof!' He bends down and lifts Manni up. 'Hey, son, haven't I told you not to -'
'Not his fault,' Rita says hurriedly. 'He's excited because -'
'I really don't think -' Eloise begins to gather steam, looking around uncertainly.
'Mrreeow?' something asks in a conversational tone of voice from down around Sirhan's ankles.
'Eek!' Sirhan jumps backward, flailing for balance under the weight of an excited toddler. There's a gigantic disturbance in the polity thoughtspace – like a stellar-mass black hole – and it appears to be stropping itself furrily against his left leg. 'What are you doing here?' He demands.
'Oh, this and that,' says the cat, his innerspeech accent a sardonic drawl. 'I thought it was about time I visited again. Where's your household assembler? Mind if I use it? Got a little something I need to make up for a friend…'
'What?' Rita demands, instantly suspicious. 'Haven't you caused enough trouble already?' Sirhan looks at her approvingly; obviously Amber's long-ago warnings about the cat sank in deeply, because she's certainly not treating it as the small bundle of child-friendly fun it would like to be perceived as.
'Trouble?' The cat looks up at her sardonically, lashing his tail from side to side. 'I won't make any trouble, I promise you. It's just -'
The door chime clears its throat, to announce a visitor: 'Ren Fuller would like to visit, m'lord and lady.'
'What's she doing here?' Rita asks irritably. Sirhan can feel her unease, the tenuous grasping of her ghosts as she searches for reason in an unreasonable world, simulating outcomes, living through bad dreams, and backtracking to adjust her responses accordingly. 'Show her in, by all means.' Ren is one of their neighbor- cognates (most of her dwelling is several light-years away, but in terms of transit time, it's a hop, skip, and a jump); she and her extruded family are raising a small herd of ill-behaved kids who occasionally hang out with Manni.
A small blue eeyore whinnies mournfully and dashes past the adults, pursued by a couple of children waving spears and shrieking. Eloise makes a grab for her own and misses, just as the door to the exercise room disappears and Manni's little friend Lis darts inside like a pint-sized guided missile. 'Sam, come here right now -'
Eloise calls, heading toward the door.
'Look, what do you want?' Sirhan demands, hugging his son and looking down at the cat.
'Oh, not much,' Aineko says, turning to lick a mussed patch of fur on his flank. 'I just want to play with him.'
'You want to -' Rita stops.
'Daddy!' Manni wants down.
Sirhan lowers him carefully, as if his bones are glass. 'Run along and play,' he suggests. Turning to Rita:
'Why don't you go and find out what Ren wants, dear?' he asks. 'She's probably here to collect Lis, but you can never be sure.'
'I was just leaving,' Eloise adds, 'as soon as I can catch up with Sam.' She glances over her shoulder at Rita apologetically, then dives into the exercise room.
Sirhan takes a step toward the hallway. 'Let's talk,' he says tightly. 'In my study.' He glares at the cat. 'I want an explanation. I want to know the truth.'
* * *
Meanwhile, in a cognitive wonderland his parents know about but deeply underestimate, parts of Manni are engaging in activities far less innocent than they imagine.
Back in the twenty-first century, Sirhan lived through loads of alternate childhoods in simulation, his parents' fingers pressing firmly on the fast-forward button until they came up with someone who seemed to match their preconceptions. The experience scarred him as badly as any nineteenth-century boarding school experience, until he promised himself no child he raised would be subjected to such; but there's a difference between being shoved through a multiplicity of avatars, and voluntarily diving into an exciting universe of myth and magic where your childhood fantasies take fleshy form, stalking those of your friends and enemies through the forests of the night.
Manni has grown up with neural interfaces to City's mindspace an order of magnitude more complex than those of Sirhan's youth, and parts of him – ghosts derived from a starting image of his neural state vector, fertilized with a scattering borrowed from the original Manfred, simulated on a meat machine far faster than real time – are fully adult. Of course, they can't fit inside his seven-year-old skull, but they still watch over him. And when he's in danger, they try to take care of their once and future body.
Manni's primary adult ghost lives in some of New Japan's virtual mindspaces (which are a few billion times more extensive than the physical spaces available to stubborn biologicals, for the computational density of human habitats have long since ceased to make much sense when measured in MIPS per kilogram). They're modeled on presingularity Earth. Time is forever frozen on the eve of the real twenty-first century, zero eight-forty-six hours on September 11: An onrushing wide-body airliner hangs motionless in the air forty meters below the picture window of Manni's penthouse apartment on the one hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower. In historical reality, the one hundred and eighth floor was occupied by corporate offices; but the mindspace is a consensual fiction, and it is Manni's conceit to live at this pivotal point. (Not that it means much to him – he was born well over a century after the War on Terror – but it's part of his childhood folklore, the fall of the Two Towers that shattered the myth of Western exceptionalism and paved the way for the world he was born into.)
Adult-Manni wears an avatar roughly modeled on his clone-father Manfred – skinnier, pegged at a youthful twentysomething, black-clad, and gothic. He's taking time out from a game of Matrix to listen to music, Type O Negative blaring over the sound system as he twitches in the grip of an ice-cold coke high. He's expecting a visit from a couple of call girls – themselves the gamespace avatars of force-grown adult ghosts whose primaries may not be adult, or female, or even human – which is why he's flopped bonelessly back in his Arne Jacobsen recliner, waiting for something to happen.
The door opens behind him. He doesn't show any sign of noticing the intrusion, although his pupils dilate slightly at the faint reflection of a woman, stalking toward him, glimpsed dimly in the window glass. 'You're late,'
he says tonelessly. 'You were supposed to be here ten minutes ago -' He begins to look round, and now his eyes widen.
'Who were you expecting?' asks the ice blond in the black business suit, long-skirted and uptight. There's something predatory about her expression: 'No, don't tell me. So you're Manni, eh? Manni's partial?' She sniffs, disapproval. 'Fin de siecle decadence. I'm sure Sirhan wouldn't approve.'
'My father can go fuck himself,' Manni says truculently. 'Who the hell are you?'
The blond snaps her fingers: An office chair appears on the carpet between Manni and the window, and she sits on the edge of it, smoothing her skirt obsessively. 'I'm Pamela,' she says tightly. 'Has your father told you about me?'
Manni looks puzzled. In the back of his mind, raw instincts alien to anyone instantiated before the midpoint of the twenty-first century tug on the fabric of pseudoreality. 'You're dead, aren't you?' he asks. 'One of my ancestors.'
'I'm as dead as you are.' She gives him a wintry smile. 'Nobody stays dead these days, least of all people who know Aineko.'
Manni blinks. Now he's beginning to feel a surge of mild irritation. 'This is all very well, but I was
Pamela snorts. 'Wallow in your pigsty for all I care, kid, I've got more important things to worry about.
Have you looked at your primary recently?'
