Тед Чан - Exhalation - Stories

“What do you want us to do?” asks Robyn.

The trade-off is apparent. This close to the release date, they don’t have time to repeat weeks of training; should they gamble that the earlier utterances didn’t make an impression on the digients? Mahesh thinks for a moment, and then decides. “Okay. Roll them back three days and pick up from there.”

“All of them?” says Ana. “Not just Lolly?”

“We can’t take the chance; roll them all back. And I want a keyword flagger running on every training session from now on. The next time any of you curses, roll all of them back to the last checkpoint.”

So the digients lose three days of experience. Including the first time they rolled down a hill.

Blue Gamma’s digients are a hit. Within the first year of release, a hundred thousand customers buy them and—more important—keep them running. Blue Gamma is gambling on a razor-and-blades business model, because just selling the digients wouldn’t recoup the development costs; instead, the company charges customers each time they make digient food, and thus maintains a revenue stream for as long as the digients remain entertaining to their owners. And so far, the customers are finding them enormously entertaining, keeping them running all day long. It’s common for customers to run the integration processing slowly so the digients sleep the entire night, but some run it at high speed, so their digients are awake almost all the time; they share their digients in cooperation with people in other time zones, enabling them to mature more rapidly. Scores of digient playgrounds and day-care centers appear across Data Earth’s social continents, and public-events calendars become dotted with group playdates, training classes, and talent contests. Some owners even bring their digients to the racing zones and let them ride in their vehicles. The virtual world acts as a global village for raising the digients, a social fabric into which a new category of pet is woven.

Half of the digients that Blue Gamma sells are one-offs, having a genome that’s randomly generated while remaining within the parameters chosen during the breeding process. The other half are copies of the mascots, but the company takes pains to remind buyers that each copy will develop differently depending on its environment. As an illustration of this, Blue Gamma’s sales team points to Marco and Polo, two of the company’s mascots. Both are instances of the exact same genome and both have panda-bear avatars, but they have distinctly different personalities. Marco was two years old when Polo was instantiated, and Polo latched on to him as a kind of older brother; the two are inseparable now, but Marco is more outgoing while Polo is more cautious, and no one expects that Polo will turn into Marco anytime soon.

Blue Gamma’s mascots are the oldest Neuroblast digients running, and management originally hoped they would provide the test team with a preview of digient behavior before customers encountered it. In practice, it hasn’t worked out that way; it’s impossible to predict how digients raised in a thousand different settings will turn out. In a very real sense, each digient owner is exploring new territory, and they turn to one another for help. Online forums for digient owners spring up, filled with anecdotes and discussions, advice sought and given.

Blue Gamma has a customer liaison whose job is to read the forums, but Derek sometimes follows the forums on his own, after work. Sometimes customers talk about the digients’ facial expressions, but even when they don’t, Derek enjoys reading the anecdotes.

From: Zoe Armstrong

You won’t believe what my Natasha did today! We were at the playground, and another digient hurt himself when he fell and was crying. Natasha gave him a hug to make him feel better, and I praised her to high heaven. Next thing I know, she pushes over another digient to make him cry, hugs him, and looks to me for praise!

The next post he reads attracts his attention:

From: Andrew Nguyen

Are some of the digients just not as smart as others? My digient doesn’t respond to my commands the way I’ve seen other people’s do.

He looks at the customer’s public profile, and sees that the avatar is an endless shower of gold coins; the coins bounce off one another so that their trajectories suggest a highly abstract human figure. It’s a dazzling piece of animation, but Derek suspects that the user hasn’t read Blue Gamma’s recommendations on raising the digients. He posts a reply:

From: Derek Brooks

When you’re playing with your digient, are you wearing the avatar that’s displayed in your profile? If you are, one problem is that your avatar doesn’t have a face. Set your camera to track your facial expressions and wear an avatar that can display them, and you’ll get a much better response from your digient.

He continues to browse. A minute later, he sees another question that he finds interesting:

From: Natalie Vance

My digient Coco is a Lolly, a year and a half old. Lately she’s been really naughty. Never does what I tell her to, driving me crazy. She was an absolute doll a few weeks ago, so I tried restoring her from a checkpoint, but it doesn’t last. I’ve tried it twice now, and she still ends up with the same naughty attitude. (It took a little longer the second time, though.) Has anyone had a similar experience? I’m especially interested if you have a Lolly. How far did you need to roll back to get around the problem?

There are several replies in which people suggest ways to isolate what specifically triggered Coco’s change in mood and then work around it. He’s about to post a reply of his own, to the effect that a digient is not a video game that you replay until you get a perfect score, when he sees a response from Ana:

From: Ana Alvarado

I can sympathize, because I’ve seen the exact same thing. It’s not specific to the Lollys, it’s something that a lot of digients go through. You can keep trying to work around episodes like this, but I suspect they’re unavoidable, and you’ll just wind up spending months on a digient that never gets any older. Or you can push through the rough patch and have a more mature digient when you come out the other side.

He’s heartened to read this. The practice of treating conscious beings as if they were toys is all too prevalent, and it doesn’t just happen to pets. Derek once attended a holiday party at his brother-in-law’s house, and there was a couple there with an eight-year-old clone. He felt sorry for the boy every time he looked at him. The child was a walking bundle of neuroses, the result of growing up as a monument to his father’s narcissism. Even a digient deserves more respect than that.

He sends Ana a private message, thanking her for her post. Then he notices that the customer with the faceless avatar has responded to his suggestion.

From: Andrew Nguyen

The hell with that. I paid good money for this avatar, and I bought it specifically to wear when I’m on the social continents. I’m not going to stop wearing it for a digient.

Derek sighs; there’s probably no chance of changing the man’s mind, but hopefully he’ll just suspend his digient rather than do a bad job of raising it. Blue Gamma has done what it can to minimize abuses; all the Neuroblast digients are equipped with pain circuit breakers, which render them immune to torture and thus unappealing to sadists. Unfortunately, there’s no way to protect the digients from things like simple neglect.

Over the next year, other companies begin marketing their own genomic engines that support language learning. None of them can match Neuroblast’s popularity on the Data Earth platform, although on other platforms the situation is different. On Next Dimension, the Origami engine becomes dominant; on Anywhere, it’s an engine called Fabergé. Fortunately, Blue Gamma has inspired companies to offer complementary products as well as competing ones.