Тед Чан - Exhalation - Stories

“Tell me it’s not true,” she says, but one look at his face confirms that it is.

“I didn’t mean for you to find out this way. I was going to call you, but—”

Ana’s so astonished she can barely find the words. “Why did you do it?” Derek hesitates so long that she says, “Was it for the money?”

“No! Of course not. I just decided that Marco’s arguments made sense, and that he was old enough to choose.”

“We talked about that. You agreed that it was better to wait until he had more experience.”

“I know. But then I—I decided I was being overly cautious.”

“Overly cautious? You’re not letting Marco risk scraping his knee; Binary Desire is going to perform brain surgery on him. How can you be too cautious about that?”

He pauses, and then says, “I realized it was time to let go.”

“Let go?” As if the idea of protecting Marco and Polo were some childish fancy he’d outgrown. “I didn’t know you thought of it that way.”

“I didn’t either, until recently.”

“Does this mean you don’t plan on incorporating Marco and Polo someday?”

“No, I still plan to do that. I just won’t be as—” Again he hesitates. “Fixated.”

“Not as fixated.” Ana wonders how well she knew Derek at all. “Good for you, I guess.”

He looks hurt by that, which is fine with her. “It’s good for everyone,” he says. “The digients get access to Real Space—”

“I know, I know.”

“Really, I think it’s for the best,” he says, but he doesn’t seem to believe it himself.

“How can it be for the best?” she asks. Derek doesn’t say anything, and she just stares at him.

“I’ll talk to you later,” says Ana, and closes the phone window. Thinking about the ways Marco might be used—without ever realizing that he’s being used—makes her heart break. You can’t save them all, she reminds herself. But it never occurred to her that Marco might be one of those at risk. She assumed Derek felt the same way she does, that he understood the need to make sacrifices.

In her Data Earth window she can see Jax gleefully piloting his hovercar up and down slopes like a kid on a trackless rollercoaster. She doesn’t want to tell him about the deal with Binary Desire right now; they would have to discuss what it means for Marco, and she doesn’t have the energy for that conversation. For the moment, all she wants to do is watch him and, tentatively, try to get used to the idea that the Neuroblast port is actually under way. It’s a peculiar sensation. She can’t call it relief, because of the cost entailed, but it’s undeniably a good thing that this enormous obstacle to Jax’s future has been removed, and she didn’t have to take the job with Polytope to do it. It’ll be months before the port is finished, but the time will pass quickly now that the destination is known. Jax will be able to enter Real Space, see his friends again, and rejoin the rest of the social universe.

Not that the future will be all smooth sailing. There is still an endless series of obstacles ahead, but at least she and Jax will have a chance to tackle them. Briefly, Ana indulges herself, fantasizing about what might happen if they succeed.

She imagines Jax maturing over the years, both in Real Space and in the real world. Imagines him incorporated, a legal person, employed and earning a living. Imagines him as a participant in the digient subculture, a community with enough money and skills to port itself to new platforms when the need arises. Imagines him accepted by a generation of humans who have grown up with digients and view them as potential relationship partners in a way that members of her generation will never be able to. Imagines him loving and being loved, arguing and compromising. Imagines him making sacrifices, some hard and some made easy because they’re for a person he truly cares about.

A few minutes pass, and Ana tells herself to stop daydreaming. There’s no guarantee that Jax is capable of any of those things. But if he’s ever going to get the chance to try them, she has to get on with the job in front of her now: teaching him, as best she can, the business of living.

She initiates the game’s shutdown procedure and calls Jax on the intercom. “Playtime’s over, Jax,” she says. “Time to do your homework.”

FROM THE CATALOG ACCOMPANYING THE EXHIBITION LITTLE DEFECTIVE ADULTS—ATTITUDES TOWARD CHILDREN FROM 1700 TO 1950; NATIONAL MUSEUM OF PSYCHOLOGY, AKRON, OHIO

The Automatic Nanny was the creation of Reginald Dacey, a mathematician born in London in 1861. Dacey’s original interest was in building a teaching engine; inspired by the recent advances in gramophone technology, he sought to convert the arithmetic mill of Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine into a machine capable of teaching grammar and arithmetic by rote. Dacey envisioned it not as a replacement for human instruction but as a laborsaving device to be used by schoolteachers and governesses.

For years Dacey worked diligently on his teaching engine, and even the death of his wife, Emily, in childbirth in 1894 did little to slow his efforts.

What changed the direction of his research was his discovery, several years later, of how his son, Lionel, was being treated by the nanny, a woman known as Nanny Gibson. Dacey himself had been raised by an affectionate nanny, and for years assumed that the woman he’d hired was treating his son in the same way, occasionally reminding her not to be too lenient. He was shocked to learn that Nanny Gibson routinely beat the boy and administered Gregory’s Powder (a potent and vile-tasting laxative) as punishment. Realizing that his son actually lived in terror of the nanny, Dacey immediately fired her. He carefully interviewed several prospective nannies afterward and was surprised to learn of the vast range in their approaches to child-rearing. Some nannies showered their charges with affection, while others applied disciplinary measures worse than Nanny Gibson’s.

Dacey eventually hired a replacement nanny, but regularly had her bring Lionel to his workshop so he could keep her under close supervision. This must have seemed like paradise to the child, who demonstrated nothing but obedience in Dacey’s presence; the discrepancy between Nanny Gibson’s accounts of his son’s behavior and his own observations prompted Dacey to begin an investigation into optimal child-rearing practices. Given his mathematical inclination, he viewed a child’s emotional state as an example of a system in unstable equilibrium. His notebooks from the period include the following: “Indulgence leads to misbehavior, which angers the nanny and prompts her to deliver punishment more severe than is warranted. The nanny then feels regret, and subsequently overcompensates with further indulgence. It is an inverted pendulum, prone to oscillations of ever-increasing magnitude. If we can only keep the pendulum vertical, there is no need for subsequent correction.”

Dacey tried imparting his philosophy of child-rearing to a series of nannies for Lionel, only to have each report that the child was not obeying her. It appears not to have occurred to him that Lionel might behave differently with the nannies than with Dacey himself; instead he concluded that the nannies were too temperamental to follow his guidelines. In one respect he concurred with the conventional wisdom of the time, which held that women’s emotional nature made them unsuitable parents; where he differed was in thinking that too much punishment could be just as detrimental as too much affection. Eventually he decided that the only nanny that could adhere to the procedures he outlined would be one he built himself.