Тед Чан - Exhalation - Stories

For weeks Ana tried having Jax sit at her computer in his robot body and log in to Real Space that way, but he refuses to do it anymore. There were difficulties with the user interface—his inexperience with using an actual computer, compounded by the camera’s suboptimal tracking of gestures performed by a robot body—but she believes they could have overcome them. The bigger problem is that Jax doesn’t want to control an avatar remotely: he wants to be the avatar. For him, the keyboard and screen are a miserable substitute for being there, as unsatisfying as a jungle video game would be to a chimpanzee taken from the Congo.

All the remaining Neuroblast digients are having similar frustrations, making it clear that a private Data Earth is only a temporary fix. What’s needed is a way to run the digients on Real Space, allowing them to move freely and interact with its objects and inhabitants. In other words, the solution is to port the Neuroblast engine—to rewrite it to run on the Real Space platform. Ana has persuaded Blue Gamma’s former owners to release the source code for Neuroblast, but it will take experienced developers to do the rewriting. The user group has posted announcements on open-source forums in an attempt to attract volunteers.

The sole advantage of Data Earth’s obsolescence is that their digients are safe from the dark side of the social world. A company called Edgeplayer markets a digient torture chamber on the Real Space platform; to avoid accusations of unauthorized copying, they use only public-domain digients as victims. The user group has agreed that once they get the Neuroblast engine ported, their conversion procedure will include full ownership verification; no Neuroblast digient will ever enter Real Space without someone committed to taking care of it.

It’s two months later, and Derek is browsing the user-group forum, reading the responses to an earlier post of his on the status of the Neuroblast port. Unfortunately, the news was not good; the attempts to recruit developers for the project haven’t met with much success. The user group has held open-house events in their private Data Earth so that people could meet the digients, but there have been very few takers.

The problem is that genomic engines are old news. Developers are drawn to new, exciting projects, and right now that means working on neural interfaces or nanomedical software. There are scores of genomic engines languishing in various states of incompletion on the open-source repositories, all in need of volunteer programmers, and the prospect of porting the dozen-year-old Neuroblast engine to a new platform may be the least exciting of them all. Only a handful of students is contributing to the Neuroblast port, and considering how little time they’re able to devote, the Real Space platform will itself be obsolete before the port is finished.

The other alternative is to hire professional developers. Derek has talked to some developers with experience in genomic engines and requested quotes on how much it would cost to port Neuroblast. The estimates he’s received are reasonable given the complexity of the project, and for a company with several hundred thousand customers, it would make perfect sense to go ahead with it. For a user group whose membership has dwindled down to about twenty people, however, the price is staggering.

Derek reads the latest comments on the discussion forum and then calls up Ana. Having the digients confined to a private Data Earth has definitely been hard, but for him there’s also been a silver lining: he and Ana have reason to talk every day now, whether it’s about the status of the Neuroblast port or trying to organize activities for their digients. Over the last few years Marco and Polo had drifted away from Jax as they all pursued their own interests, but now the Neuroblast digients have only one another for company, so he and Ana try to find things for them to do as a group. He no longer has a wife who might complain about this, and Ana’s boyfriend, Kyle, doesn’t seem to mind, so he can call her up without recrimination. It’s a painful sort of pleasure to spend this much time with her; it might be healthier for him if they interacted less, but he doesn’t want to stop.

Ana’s face appears in the phone window. “Have you seen Stuart’s post?” Derek asks. Stuart pointed out what each person would have to pay if they divided the cost evenly, and asked how many of the members could afford that much.

“I just read it,” says Ana. “Maybe he thinks he’s being helpful, but all he’s doing is getting people anxious.”

“I agree,” he says. “But until we come up with a good alternative, the per-person cost is what everyone will be thinking about. Have you met with that fund-raiser yet?” Ana was going to talk to a friend of a friend, a woman who has run fund-raising campaigns for wildlife sanctuaries.

“As a matter of fact, I just got back from lunch with her.”

“Great! What did you find out?”

“The bad news is she doesn’t think we can qualify for nonprofit status, because we’re only trying to raise money for a specific set of individuals.”

“But anyone could use the new engine—” He stops. It’s true that there are probably millions of snapshots of Neuroblast digients stored in archives around the world. But the user group can’t honestly claim to be working on their behalf; without someone willing to raise them, none of those digients would benefit from a Real Space version of the Neuroblast engine. The only digients the user group is trying to help are its own.

Ana nods without him saying a word; she must have had the exact same thought earlier. “Okay,” says Derek, “we can’t be a nonprofit. So what’s the good news?”

“She says we can still solicit contributions outside of the nonprofit model. What we need to do is tell a story that generates sympathy for the digients themselves. That’s the way some zoos pay for things like surgeries on elephants.”

He considers that for a moment. “I guess we could post some videos about the digients, try tugging on people’s heartstrings.”

“Exactly. And if we can build up enough popular sentiment, we might get contributions of time as well as money. Anything that raises the profiles of the digients will increase our chances of getting volunteers from the open-source community.”

“I’ll start going through my videos for footage of Marco and Polo,” he says. “There’s plenty of cute stuff from when they were young; I’m not so sure about the more recent stuff. Or do we need heartrending stuff?”

“We should talk about what would work best,” says Ana. “I’ll post a message on the forum asking everyone else.”

This reminds Derek of something. “By the way, I got a call yesterday that might help us out. It’s kind of a long shot, though.”

“Who was it?”

“Do you remember the Xenotherians?”

“Those digients that were supposed to be aliens? Is that project still going on?”

“Sort of.” He explains that he was contacted by a young man named Felix Radcliffe, who is one of the last participants in the Xenotherian project. Most of the original hobbyists gave up years ago, exhausted by the difficulty of inventing an alien culture from scratch, but there remains a small group of devotees who have become almost monomaniacal. From what Derek has been able to determine, most of them are unemployed and rarely leave their bedrooms in their parents’ homes; they live their lives in Data Mars. Felix is the only member of the group willing to initiate contact with outsiders.

“And people call us fanatics,” says Ana. “So why did he contact you?”

“He heard we were trying to get Neuroblast ported and wants to help. He recognized my name because I was the one who designed the avatars for them.”