Тед Чан - Exhalation - Stories

The person he wants to talk to is, of course, Ana. What once seemed a groundless fear of Wendy’s has come true; he has definitely developed feelings for her beyond friendship. It’s not the cause of the problems he’s having with Wendy; if anything, it’s a result. The time he spends with Ana is a relief, a chance for him to enjoy the digients’ company unapologetically. When he’s angry he thinks it’s Wendy’s fault for driving him away, but when he’s calm he realizes that’s unfair.

The important thing is that he hasn’t acted on his feelings for Ana, and he doesn’t plan to. What he needs to focus on is reaching an accord with Wendy regarding the digients; if he can do that, the temptation that Ana poses should pass. Until then, he ought to reduce the amount of time he spends with Ana. It’s not going to be easy: given how small the digient-owner community is, interaction with Ana is inevitable, and he can’t let Marco and Polo suffer because of this. He’s not sure what to do, but for now, he refrains from calling Ana for advice and posts a question to the forum instead.

Another year passes. Currents within the mantle of the marketplace change, and virtual worlds undergo tectonic shifts in response: a new platform called Real Space, implemented using the latest distributed-processing architecture, becomes the hotspot of digital terrain formation. Meanwhile Anywhere and Next Dimension stop expanding at their edges, cooling into a stable configuration. Data Earth has long been a fixture in the universe of virtual worlds, resistant to growth spurts or sharp downturns, but now its topography begins to erode; one by one, its virtual landmasses disappear like real islands, vanishing beneath a rising tide of consumer indifference.

Meanwhile, the failure of the hothouse experiments to produce miniature civilizations has caused general interest in digital life-forms to dwindle. Occasionally curious new fauna are observed in the biomes, a species demonstrating an exotic body plan or a novel reproductive strategy, but it’s generally agreed that the biomes aren’t run at a high-enough resolution for real intelligence to evolve there. The companies that make the Origami and Fabergé genomes go into decline. Many technology pundits declare digients to be a dead end, proof that embodied AI is useless for anything beyond entertainment, until the introduction of a new genomic engine called Sophonce.

Sophonce’s designers wanted digients that could be taught via software instead of needing interaction with humans; toward that end, they’ve created an engine that favors asocial behavior and obsessive personalities. The vast majority of the digients generated with the engine are discarded for their psychological malformations, but a tiny fraction prove capable of learning with minimal supervision: give them the right tutoring software, and they’ll happily study for weeks of subjective time, meaning that they can be run at hothouse speeds without going feral. Some hobbyists demonstrate Sophonce digients that outperform Neuroblast, Origami, and Faberge digients on math tests, despite having been trained with far less real-time interaction. There’s speculation that, if their energies can be aimed in a practical direction, Sophonce digients could become useful workers within a matter of months. The problem is that they’re so charmless that few people want to engage in even the limited amounts of interaction that the digients require.

Ana has brought Jax along with her to Siege of Heaven, the first new game continent to appear in Data Earth in a year. She shows him around the Argent Plaza, where players congregate and socialize in between missions; it’s a massive courtyard of white marble, lapis lazuli, and gold filigree located on top of a cumulonimbus cloud. Ana has to wear her game avatar, a kestrel-cherub, but Jax keeps his traditional copper robot avatar.

As they’re strolling among the other gamers, Ana sees the on-screen annotation for a digient. His avatar is a hydrocephalic dwarf, the standard avatar for a Drayta: a Sophonce digient who’s skilled at solving the logic puzzles found on the gaming continents. The original Drayta’s owner trained him using a puzzle generator pirated from the Five Dynasties continent on the Real Space platform and then released copies to the public domain. Now so many game players take a Drayta with them on their missions that game companies are considering major redesigns.

Ana directs Jax’s attention to the other digient. “See the guy over there? He’s a Drayta.”

“Really?” Jax has heard about Draytas, but this is the first one he’s met. He walks over to the dwarf. “Hi,” he says. “I’m Jax.”

“Wanna solve puzzles,” says Drayta.

“What kind puzzles you like?”

“Wanna solve puzzles.” Drayta is getting anxious; he runs around the waiting area. “Wanna solve puzzles. ”

A nearby gamer wearing an osprey-seraph avatar pauses in his conversation to point a finger at Drayta; the digient freezes in midstep, shrinks to an icon, and snaps into one of the gamer’s belt compartments as if pulled by an elastic.

“Drayta weird,” says Jax.

“Yes, he was, wasn’t he?”

“All Draytas like that?”

“I think so.”

The seraph walks over to Ana. “What kind of digient have you got? Haven’t seen his sort before.”

“His name’s Jax. He runs on the Neuroblast genome.”

“Don’t know that one. Is it new?”

One of the seraph’s teammates, wearing a Nephilim avatar, comes by. “Nah, it’s old, last generation.”

The seraph nods. “Is he good at puzzles?”

“Not really,” says Ana.

“So what does he do?”

“I like singing,” volunteers Jax.

“Really? Let’s have a song, then.”

Jax doesn’t need further encouragement; he launches into one of his favorites, “Mack the Knife” from Threepenny Opera. He knows all the words, but the tune he sings is at best a rough approximation of the actual melody. At the same time he performs an accompanying dance that he choreographed himself, mostly a series of poses and hand gestures borrowed from an Indonesian hip-hop video he likes.

The other gamers laugh all through his performance. Jax finishes with a curtsy, and they applaud. “That’s brilliant,” says the seraph.

Ana says to Jax, “That means he likes it. Say thanks.”

“Thanks.”

To Ana, the seraph says, “Not going to be much help in the labyrinths, is he?”

“He keeps us entertained,” she says.

“I’ll bet he does. Send me a message if he ever learns to solve puzzles; I’ll buy a copy.” He sees that his entire team has assembled. “Well, off to our next mission. Good luck on yours.”

“Good luck,” says Jax. He waves as the seraph and his teammates take flight and dive in formation toward a distant valley.

Ana’s reminded of that encounter a few days later, when she’s reading a discussion on the user-group forums:

From: Stuart Gust

Last night I played SoH with some people who take a Drayta on their missions, and while he wasn’t much fun, he was definitely useful to have around. It made me wonder if it has to be one or the other. Those Sophonce digients aren’t any better than ours. Couldn’t our digients be both fun and useful?

From: Maria Zheng

Are you hoping to sell copies of yours? You think you can raise a better Andro?

Maria’s referring to a Sophonce digient named Andro, trained by his owner, Bryce Talbot, to act as his personal assistant. Talbot demonstrated Andro to VirlFriday, maker of appointment-management software, and got the company’s executives interested. The deal fell through after the executives got demonstration copies; what Talbot hadn’t realized was that Andro was, in his own way, as obsessive as Drayta. Like a dog forever loyal to its first owner, Andro wouldn’t work for anyone else unless Talbot was there to give orders. VirlFriday tried installing a sensory-input filter so each new Andro instantiation perceived his new owner’s avatar and voice as Talbot’s, but the disguise never worked for more than a couple of hours. Before long, all the executives had to shut down their forlorn Andros, who kept looking for the original Talbot.