Vacuum Diagrams

The children sat on the floor and played with paints and dolls, or talked earnestly to brilliantly-colored Virtual figures — smiling birds, tiny clowns. The children turned to watch as she came in with her mother, their faces round and bright, like dapples of sunlight through leaves. She’d never been so close to other children before. Were these children different, too?

One small girl scowled at her, and Lieserl quailed against her mother’s legs. But her mother’s familiar warm hands pressed into her back. “Go ahead. It’s all right.”

As she stared at the unknown girl’s scowling face, Lieserl’s questions, her too-adult, too-sophisticated doubts, seemed to evaporate. Suddenly, all that mattered to her — all that mattered in the world — was that she should be accepted by these children — that they wouldn’t know she was different.

An adult approached her: a man, young, thin, his features bland with youth. He wore a jumpsuit colored a ludicrous orange; in the sunlight, the glow of it shone up over his chin. He smiled at her. “Lieserl, isn’t it? My name’s Michael. We’re glad you’re here.” In a louder, exaggerated voice, he said, “Aren’t we, people?”

He was answered by a rehearsed, chorused “Yes.”

“Now come and we’ll find something for you to do,” Michael said. He led her across the child-littered floor to a space beside a small boy. The boy — red-haired, with startling blue eyes — was staring at a Virtual puppet which endlessly formed and reformed: the figure two, collapsing into two snowflakes, two swans, two dancing children; the figure three, followed by three bears, three fish swimming in the air, three cakes. The boy mouthed the numbers, following the tinny voice of the Virtual. “Two. One. Two and one is three.”

Michael introduced her to the boy — Tommy — and she sat down with him. Tommy, she was relieved to find, was so fascinated by his Virtual that he scarcely seemed aware that Lieserl was present — let alone different.

The number Virtual ran through its cycle and winked out of existence. “Bye-bye, Tommy! Goodbye, Lieserl!”

Tommy was resting on his stomach, his chin cupped in his palms. Lieserl, awkwardly, copied his posture. Now Tommy turned to her — without appraisal, merely looking at her, with unconscious acceptance.

Lieserl said, “Can we see it again?”

He yawned and poked a finger into one nostril. “No. Let’s see another. There’s a great one about the pre-Cambrian explosion—”

“The what?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “You know, the Burgess Shale and all that. Wait till you see Hallucigenia crawling over your neck…”

The children played, and learned, and napped. Later, the girl who’d scowled at Lieserl — Ginnie — started some trouble. She poked fun at the way Lieserl’s bony wrists stuck out of her sleeves (Lieserl’s growth rate was slowing, but she was still growing out of her clothes during a day). Then — unexpectedly, astonishingly — Ginnie started to bawl, claiming that Lieserl had walked through her Virtual. When Michael came over Lieserl started to explain, calmly and rationally, that Ginnie must be mistaken; but Michael told her not to cause such distress, and for punishment she was forced to sit away from the other children for ten minutes, without stimulation.

It was all desperately, savagely unfair. It was the longest ten minutes of Lieserl’s life. She glowered at Ginnie, filled with resentment.

The next day she found herself looking forward to going to the room with the children again. She set off with her mother through sunlit corridors. They reached the room Lieserl remembered — there was Michael, smiling a little wistfully to her, and Tommy, and the girl Ginnie — but Ginnie seemed different: childlike, unformed…

At least a head shorter than Lieserl.

Lieserl tried to recapture that delicious enmity of the day before, but it vanished even as she conjured it. Ginnie was just a kid.

She felt as if something had been stolen from her.

Her mother squeezed her hand. “Come on. Let’s find a new room for you to play in.”

Every day was unique. Every day Lieserl spent in a new place, with new people.

The world glowed with sunlight. Shining points trailed endlessly across the sky: low-orbit habitats and comet nuclei, tethered for power and fuel. People walked through a sea of information, with access to the Virtual libraries available anywhere in the world, at a subvocalized command. Lieserl learned quickly. She read about her parents. They were scientists, studying the Sun. They weren’t alone; there were many people, huge resources, devoted to the Sun.

In the libraries there was a lot of material about the Sun, little of which she could follow. But she sensed some common threads.

Once, people had taken the Sun for granted. No longer. Now — for some reason — they feared it.

On the ninth day Lieserl studied herself in a Virtual holomirror. She had the image turn around, so she could see the shape of her skull, the lie of her hair. There was still some childish softness in her face, she thought, but the woman inside her was emerging already, as if her childhood was a receding tide. She would look like her mother — Phillida — in the strong-nosed set of her face, her large, vulnerable eyes; but she would have the sandy coloring of her father, George.

Lieserl looked about nine years old. But she was just nine days old.

She bade the Virtual break up; it shattered into a million tiny images of her face which drifted away like flies in the sunlit air.

Phillida and George were fine parents, she thought. They spent their time away from her working through technical papers — which scrolled through the air like falling leaves — and exploring elaborate, onion-ring Virtual models of stars. Although they were both clearly busy they gave themselves to her without hesitation. She moved in a happy world of smiles, sympathy and support.

Her parents loved her unreservedly. But that wasn’t always enough.

She started to come up with more complicated, detailed questions. Like, what was the mechanism by which she was growing so rapidly? She didn’t seem to eat more than the other children she encountered; what could be fueling her absurd growth rates?

How did she know so much? She’d been born self-aware, with even the rudiments of language in her head. The Virtuals she interacted with in the classrooms were fun, and she always seemed to learn something new; but she absorbed no more than scraps of knowledge through them compared to the feast of insight with which she awoke each morning.

What had taught her, in the womb? What was teaching her now?

She had no answers. But perhaps — somehow — it was all connected with this strange, global obsession with the Sun. She remembered her childish fantasy — that she might be like a flower, straining up too quickly to the Sun. Maybe, she wondered now, there was some grain of truth in that insight.

The strange little family had worked up some simple, homely rituals together. Lieserl’s favorite was the game, each evening, of snakes and ladders. George brought home an old set — a real board made of card, and wooden counters. Already Lieserl was too old for the game; but she loved the company of her parents, her father’s elaborate jokes, the simple challenge of the game, the feel of the worn, antique counters.

Phillida showed her how to use Virtuals to produce her own game boards. Her first efforts, on her eleventh day, were plain, neat forms, little more than copies of the commercial boards she’d seen. But soon she began to experiment. She drew a huge board of a million squares, which covered a whole room — she could walk through the board, a planar sheet of light at about waist-height. She crammed the board with intricate, curling snakes, vast ladders, vibrantly glowing squares — detail piled on detail.

The next morning she walked with eagerness to the room where she’d built her board — and was immediately disappointed. Her efforts seemed pale, static, derivative — obviously the work of a child, despite the assistance of the Virtual software.

She wiped the board clean, leaving a grid of pale squares floating in the air. Then she started to populate it again — but this time with animated half-human snakes, slithering “ladders” of a hundred forms. She’d learned to access the Virtual libraries, and she plundered the art and history of a hundred centuries to populate her board.

Of course it was no longer possible to play games on the board, but that didn’t matter. The board was the thing, a little world in itself. She withdrew a little from her parents, spending long hours in deep searches through the libraries. She gave up her classes. Her parents didn’t seem to mind; they came to speak to her regularly, and showed an interest in her projects, and respected her privacy.

The board kept her interest the next day. But now she evolved elaborate games, dividing the board into countries and empires with arbitrary bands of glowing light. Armies of ladder-folk joined with legions of snakes in crude reproductions of the great events of human history.

She watched the symbols flicker across the Virtual board, shimmering, coalescing; she dictated lengthy chronicles of the histories of her imaginary countries.

By the end of the day, though, she was starting to grow more interested in the history texts she was plundering than in her own elaborations on them. She went to bed, eager for the next morning to come.

She awoke in darkness, doubled in agony.

She called for light, which flooded the room, sourceless. She sat up in bed.

Blood spotted the sheets. She screamed.

Phillida sat with her, cradling her head. Lieserl pressed herself against her mother’s warmth, trying to still her trembling.

“I think it’s time you asked me your questions.”

Lieserl sniffed. “What questions?”

“The ones you’ve carried around with you since the moment you were born.” Phillida smiled. “I could see it in your eyes, even at that moment. You poor thing… to be burdened with so much awareness. I’m sorry, Lieserl.”

Lieserl pulled away. Suddenly she felt cold, vulnerable.

“Tell me why you’re sorry,” she said at last.

“You’re my daughter.” Phillida placed her hands on Lieserl’s shoulders and pushed her face close; Lieserl could feel the warmth of her breath, and the soft room light caught the gray in her mother’s blonde hair, making it seem to shine. “Never forget that. You’re as human as I am. But—” She hesitated.

“But what?”

“But you’re being — engineered.”

Nanobots swarmed through Lieserl’s body, Phillida said. They plated calcium over her bones, stimulated the generation of new cells, force-growing her body like some absurd human sunflower — they even implanted memories, artificial learning, directly into her cortex.

Lieserl felt like scraping at her skin, gouging out this artificial infection. “Why? Why did you let this be done to me?”

Phillida pulled her close, but Lieserl stayed stiff, resisting mutely. Phillida buried her face in Lieserl’s hair; Lieserl felt the soft weight of her mother’s cheek on the crown of her head. “Not yet,” Phillida said. “Not yet. A few more days, my love. That’s all…”

Phillida’s cheeks grew warmer, as if she was crying, silently, into her daughter’s hair.

Lieserl returned to her snakes-and-ladders board. She found herself looking on her creation with affection, but also nostalgic sadness; she felt distant from this elaborate, slightly obsessive concoction.

Already she’d outgrown it.

She walked into the middle of the sparkling board and bade a Sun, a foot wide, rise out from the center of her body. Light swamped the board, shattering it.