Тед Чан - Exhalation - Stories

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.

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. The customers who kept their digients running formed a Neuroblast user group to keep in touch; it’s a smaller community than before, but 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 seen before only 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 on-screen 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 in to 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 on-screen annotations, which aren’t visible to digients—but one owner successfully taught his digient to recognize commands written on flash cards, 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 Fabergé 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 was 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—motivates 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 back seat. Marco steps onto 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.

The robot’s helmet lights up to display a jaguar-cub face; Derek recognizes him as Zaff, who’s owned by one of the beta testers. “Hi Ana hi Derek,” says Zaff, and immediately runs toward a nearby tree. Derek and Ana follow.

“So seeing them in the robot body didn’t win her over?” asks Ana.

Derek stops Zaff from picking up some dog turds. To Ana, he says, “Nope. She still doesn’t understand why I don’t suspend them whenever it’s convenient.”

“It’s hard to find someone who understands,” Ana says. “It was the same when I worked at the zoo; every guy I dated felt like he was coming in second. And now when I tell a guy that I’m paying for reading lessons for my digient, he looks at me like I’m crazy.”

“That’s been an issue for Wendy, too.”

They watch as Zaff sorts through the leaf litter, extracts a leaf decayed to near transparency, and holds it up to his face to look through it, a mask of vegetable lace. “Although I guess I shouldn’t really blame them,” says Ana. “It took me a while to understand the appeal myself.”

“Not me,” says Derek. “I thought digients were amazing right away.”

“That’s true,” agrees Ana. “You’re a rare one.”

Derek watches her with Zaff, admires her patience in guiding him. The last time he felt so much in common with a woman was when he met Wendy, who shared his excitement at bringing characters to life through animation. If he weren’t already married, he might ask Ana out, but there’s no point in speculating about that now. The most they can be is friends, and that’s good enough.