But Daddy was on his feet by that point and shouting, and Momma was trying to get everyone to be quiet, and Becca was shouting back, and suddenly a determined look entered her face and she just disappeared – suddenly, she wasn’t there any more, there was only just air.
Jamie began to cry. So did Momma. Daddy paced up and down and swore, and then he said, “I’m going to go get her.” Jamie was afraid he’d disappear like Becca, and he gave a cry of despair, but Daddy didn’t disappear, he just stalked out of the dining room and slammed the door behind him.
Momma pulled Jamie onto her lap and hugged him. “Don’t worry, Jamie,” she said. “Becky just did that to be mean.”
“What happened?” Jamie asked.
“Don’t worry about it.” Momma stroked his hair. “It was just a mean trick.”
“She’s growing up,” Jamie said. “She’s grown faster than me and I don’t understand.”
“Wait till Daddy gets back,” Momma said, “and we’ll talk about it.”
But Daddy was clearly in no mood for talking when he returned, without Becca. “We’re going to have fun,” he snarled, and reached for the knife to cut the cake.
The cake tasted like ashes in Jamie’s mouth. When the Don and Princess Gigunda, Mister Jeepers and Rizzio the Strongman, came into the dining room and sang “Happy Birthday”, it was all Jamie could do to hold back the tears.
Afterward, he drove his new car to the Circus Maximus and drove as fast as he could on the long oval track. The car really wouldn’t go very fast. The bleachers on either side were empty, and so was the blue sky above.
Maybe it was a puzzle, he thought, like Princess Gigunda’s love life. Maybe all he had to do was follow the right clue, and everything would be fine.
What’s the moral they’re trying to teach? he wondered.
But all he could do was go in circles, around and around the empty stadium.
“Hey, Digit. Wake up.”
Jamie came awake suddenly with a stifled cry. The room whirled around him. He blinked, realized that the whirling came from the coloured lights projected by his birthday present, Becca’s lamp stand.
Becca was sitting on his bedroom chair, a cigarette in her hand. Her feet, in the steel-capped boots she’d been wearing lately, were propped up on the bed.
“Are you awake, Jamie?” It was Selena’s voice. “Would you like me to sing you a lullaby?”
“Fuck off, Selena,” Becca said. “Get out of here. Get lost.”
Selena cast Becca a mournful look, then sailed backwards, out of the window, riding a beam of moonlight to her pale home in the sky. Jamie watched her go, and felt as if a part of himself was going with her, a part that he would never see again.
“Selena and the others have to do what you tell them, mostly,” Becca said. “Of course, Mom and Dad wouldn’t tell you that.”
Jamie looked at Becca. “What’s happening?” he said. “Where did you go today?”
Coloured lights swam over Becca’s face. “I’m sorry if I spoiled your birthday, Digit. I just got tired of the lies, you know? They’d kill me if they knew I was here now, talking to you.” Becca took a draw on her cigarette, held her breath for a second or two, then exhaled. Jamie didn’t see or taste any smoke.
“You know what they wanted me to do?” she said. “Wear a little girl’s body, so I wouldn’t look any older than you, and keep you company in that stupid school for seven hours a day.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t do it. They yelled and yelled, but I was damned if I would.”
“I don’t understand.”
Becca flicked invisible ashes off her cigarette and looked at Jamie for a long time. Then she sighed.
“Do you remember when you were in the hospital?” she said.
Jamie nodded. “I was really sick.”
“I was so little then, I don’t really remember it very well,” Becca said. “But the point is –” She sighed again. “The point is that you weren’t getting well. So they decided to –” She shook her head. “Dad took advantage of his position at the University, and the fact that he’s been a big donor. They were doing AI research, and the neurology department was into brain modelling, and they needed a test subject, and – Well, the idea is, they’ve got some of your tissue, and when they get cloning up and running, they’ll put you back in –” She saw Jamie’s stare, then shook her head. “I’ll make it simple, okay?”
She took her feet off the bed and leaned closer to Jamie. A shiver ran up his back at her expression. “They made a copy of you. An electronic copy. They scanned your brain and built a holographic model of it inside a computer, and they put it in a virtual environment, and –” She sat back, took a drag on her cigarette. “And here you are,” she said.
Jamie looked at her. “I don’t understand.”
Coloured lights gleamed in Becca’s eyes. “You’re in a computer, okay? And you’re a program. You know what that is, right? From computer class? And the program is sort of in the shape of your mind. Don Quixote and Princess Gigunda are programs, too. And Mrs Winkle down at the school is usually a program, but if she needs to teach something complex, then she’s an education major from the University.”
Jamie felt as if he’d just been hollowed out, a void inside his ribs. “I’m not real?” he said. “I’m not a person?”
“Wrong,” Becca said. “You’re real, all right. You’re the apple of our parents’ eye.” Her tone was bitter. “Programs are real things,” she said, “and yours was a real hack, you know, absolute cutting-edge state-of-the-art technoshit. And the computer that you’re in is real, too – I’m interfaced with it right now, down in the family room – we have to wear suits with sensors and a helmet with scanners and stuff. I hope to fuck they don’t hear me talking to you down here.”
“But what –” Jamie swallowed hard. How could he swallow if he was just a string of code? “What happened to me? The original me?”
Becca looked cold. “Well,” she said, “you had cancer. You died.”
“Oh.” A hollow wind blew through the void inside him.
“They’re going to bring you back. As soon as the clone thing works out – but this is a government computer you’re in, and there are all these government restrictions on cloning, and –” She shook her head. “Look, Digit,” she said. “You really need to know this stuff, okay?”
“I understand.” Jamie wanted to cry. But only real people cried, he thought, and he wasn’t real. He wasn’t real.
“The program that runs this virtual environment is huge, okay, and you’re a big program, and the University computer is used for a lot of research, and a lot of the research has a higher priority than you do. So you don’t run in real-time – that’s why I’m growing faster than you are. I’m spending more hours being me than you are. And the parents –” She rolled her eyes. “They aren’t making this any better, with their emphasis on normal family life.”
She sucked on her cigarette, then stubbed it out in something invisible. “See, they want us to be this normal family. So we have breakfast together every day, and dinner every night, and spend the evening at the Zoo or in Pandaland or some place. But the dinner that we eat with you is virtual, it doesn’t taste like anything – the grant ran out before they got that part of the interface right – so we eat this fast-food crap before we interface with you, and then have dinner, all over again with you . . . Is this making any sense? Because Dad has a job and Mom has a job and I go to school and have friends and stuff, so we really can’t get together every night. So they just close your program file, shut it right down, when they’re not available to interface with you as what Dad calls a ‘family unit’, and that means that there are a lot of hours, days sometimes, when you’re just not running, you might as well really be dead – ” She blinked. “Sorry,” she said. “Anyway, we’re all getting older a lot faster than you are, and it’s not fair to you, that’s what I think. Especially because the University computer runs fastest at night, because people don’t use them as much t
hen, and you’re pretty much real-time then, so interfacing with you would be almost normal, but Mom and Dad sleep then, ’cuz they have day jobs, and they can’t have you running around unsupervised in here, for God’s sake, they think it’s unsafe or something . . .”
She paused, then reached into her shirt pocket for another cigarette. “Look,” she said, “I’d better get out of here before they figure out I’m talking to you. And then they’ll pull my access codes or something.” She stood, brushed something off her jeans. “Don’t tell the parents about this stuff right away. Otherwise they might erase you, and load a backup that doesn’t know shit. Okay?”
And she vanished, as she had that afternoon.
Jamie sat in the bed, hugging his knees. He could feel his heart beating in the darkness. How can a program have a heart? he wondered.
Dawn slowly encroached upon the night, and then there was Mister Jeepers, turning lazy cartwheels in the air, his red face leering in the window.
“Jamie’s awake!” he said. “Jamie’s awake and ready for a new day!”
“Fuck off,” Jamie said, and buried his face in the blanket.
Jamie asked to learn more about computers and programming. Maybe, he thought, he could find clues there, he could solve the puzzle. His parents agreed, happy to let him follow his interests.
After a few weeks, he moved into El Castillo. He didn’t tell anyone he was going, he just put some of his things in his car, took them up to a tower room, and threw them down on the bed he found there. His mom came to find him when he didn’t come home for dinner.
“It’s dinnertime, Jamie,” she said. “Didn’t you hear the dinner bell?”
“I’m going to stay here for a while,” Jamie said.
“You’re going to get hungry if you don’t come home for dinner.”
“I don’t need food,” Jamie said.
His mom smiled brightly. “You need food if you’re going to keep up with the Whirlikins,” she said.
Jamie looked at her. “I don’t care about that kid stuff any more,” he said.
When his mother finally turned and left, Jamie noticed that she moved like an old person.
After a while, he got used to the hunger that was programmed into him. It was always there, he was always aware of it, but he got so he could ignore it after a while.
But he couldn’t ignore the need to sleep. That was just built into the program, and eventually, try though he might, he needed to give in to it.
He found out he could order the people in the castle around, and he amused himself by making them stand in embarrassing positions, or stand on their heads and sing, or form human pyramids for hours and hours.
Sometimes he made them fight, but they weren’t very good at it.
He couldn’t make Mrs Winkle at the schoolhouse do whatever he wanted, though, or any of the people who were supposed to teach him things. When it was time for a lesson, Princess Gigunda turned up. She wouldn’t follow his orders, she’d just pick him up and carry him to the little red schoolhouse and plunk him down in his seat.
“You’re not real!” he shouted, kicking in her arms. “You’re not real! And I’m not real, either!”
But they made him learn about the world that was real, about geography and geology and history, although none of it mattered here.
After the first couple of times Jamie had been dragged to school, his father met him outside the schoolhouse at the end of the day.
“You need some straightening out,” he said. He looked grim. “You’re part of a family. You belong with us. You’re not going to stay in the castle any more, you’re going to have a normal family life.”
“No!” Jamie shouted. “I like the castle!”
Dad grabbed him by the arm and began to drag him homeward. Jamie called him a pendejo and a fellator.
“I’ll punish you if I have to,” his father said.
“How are you going to do that?” Jamie demanded. “You gonna erase my file? Load a backup?”
A stunned expression crossed his father’s face. His body seemed to go through a kind of stutter, and the grip on Jamie’s arm grew nerveless. Then his face flushed with anger. “What do you mean?” he demanded. “Who told you this?”
Jamie wrenched himself free of Dad’s weakened grip.
“I figured it out by myself,” Jamie said. “It wasn’t hard. I’m not a kid any more.”
“I –” His father blinked, and then his face hardened. “You’re still coming home.”
Jamie backed away. “I want some changes!” he said. “I don’t want to be shut off all the time.”
Dad’s mouth compressed to a thin line. “It was Becky who told you this, wasn’t it?”
Jamie felt an inspiration. “It was Mister Jeepers! There’s a flaw in his programming! He answers whatever question I ask him!”
Jamie’s father looked uncertain. He held out his hand. “Let’s go home,” he said. “I need to think about this.”
Jamie hesitated. “Don’t erase me,” he said. “Don’t load a backup. Please. I don’t want to die twice.”
Dad’s look softened. “I won’t.”
“I want to grow up,” Jamie said. “I don’t want to be a little kid for ever.”
Dad held out his hand again. Jamie thought for a moment, then took the hand. They walked over the green grass towards the white frame house on the hill.
“Jamie’s home!” Mister Jeepers floated overhead, turning aerial cartwheels. “Jamie’s home at last!”
A spasm of anger passed through Jamie at the sight of the witless grin. He pointed at the ground in front of him.
“Crash right here!” he ordered. “Fast!”
Mister Jeepers came spiralling down, an expression of comic terror on his face, and smashed to the ground where Jamie pointed at the sight of the crumpled body and laughed.
“Jamie’s home at last!” Mister Jeepers said.
As soon as Jamie could, he got one of the programmers at the University to fix him up a flight program like the one Mister Jeepers had been using. He swooped and soared, zooming like a super hero through the sky, stunting between the towers of El Castillo and soaring over upturned, wondering faces in the Forum.
He couldn’t seem to go as fast as he really wanted. When he started increasing speed, all the scenery below paused in its motion for a second or two, then jumped forward with a jerk. The software couldn’t refresh the scenery fast enough to match his speed. It felt strange, because throughout his flight he could feel the wind on his face.
So this, he thought, was why his car couldn’t go fast.
So he decided to climb high. He turned his face to the blue sky and went straight up. The world receded, turned small. He could see the Castle, the hills of Whirlikin Country, the crowded Forum, the huge oval of the Circus Maximus. It was like a green plate, with a fuzzy, nebulous horizon where the sky started.
And, right in the centre, was the little two-storey frame house where he’d grown up.
It was laid out below him like scenery in a snow globe.
After a while he stopped climbing. It took him a while to realize it, because he still felt the wind blowing in his face, but the world below stopped getting smaller.
He tried going faster. The wind blasted onto him from above, but his position didn’t change.
He’d reached the limits of his world. He couldn’t get any higher.
Jamie flew out to the edges of the world, to the horizon. No matter how he urged his program to move, he couldn’t make his world fade away.
He was trapped inside the snow globe, and there was no way out.
It was quite a while before Jamie saw Becca again. She picked her way through the labyrinth beneath El Castillo to his throne room, and Jamie slowly materialized atop his throne of skulls. She didn’t appear surprised.
“I see you’ve got a little Dark Lord thing going here,” she said.
“It passes the time,” Jamie said.
“And all those pits and stake
s and tripwires?”
“Death traps.”
“Took me for ever to get in here, Digit. I kept getting de-rezzed.”
Jamie smiled. “That’s the idea.”
“Whirlikins as weapons.” She nodded. “That was a good one. Bored a hole right through me, the first time.”
“Since I’m stuck living here,” Jamie said, “I figure I might as well be in charge of the environment. Some of the student programmers at the University helped me with some cool effects.”
Screams echoed through the throne room. Fires leaped out of pits behind him. The flames illuminated the form of Marcus Tullius Cicero, who hung crucified above a sea of flame.
“O tempora, o mores!” moaned Cicero.
Becca nodded. “Nice,” she said. “Not my scene exactly, but nice.”
“Since I can’t leave,” Jamie said, “I want a say in who gets to visit. So either you wait till I’m ready to talk to you, or you take your chances on the death traps.”
“Well. Looks like you’re sitting pretty, then.”
Jamie shrugged. Flames belched. “I’m getting bored with it. I might just wipe it all out and build another place to live in. I can’t tell you the number of battles I’ve won, the number of kingdoms I’ve trampled. In this reality and others. It’s all the same after a while.” He looked at her. “You’ve grown.”
“So have you.”
“Once the paterfamilias finally decided to allow it.” He smiled. “We still have dinner together sometimes, in the old house. Just a normal family, as Dad says. Except that sometimes I turn up in the form of a werewolf, or a giant, or something.”
“So they tell me.”
“The advantage of being software is that I can look like anything I want. But that’s the disadvantage, too, because I can’t really become something else, I’m still just . . . me. I may wear another program as a disguise, but I’m still the same program inside, and I’m not a good enough programmer to mess with that, yet.” Jamie hopped off his throne, walked a nervous little circle around his sister. “So what brings you to the old neighbourhood?” he asked. “The old folks said you were off visiting Aunt Maddy in the country.”
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