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by McClelland, Mark

  "Begin session."

  o-------------------------------o

  Raymond showered in the common bathroom, careful to choose the shower stall closest to the hook on which he always hung his exercise robe, so he could defend it from theft. He then returned to his room and dressed in his Workbound uniform—a blue-gray unitard provided to Illinois children who chose to participate in the state's work program. His wrist relay vibrated. He tapped it and a holographic text display popped up, a standard reminder from the Home network: "Don't forget to eat breakfast!" it flashed... "Only thirty minutes till your work shuttle arrives".

  In all Illinois Homes, breakfast was mandatory, part of the Diet and Fitness Regimen. Pods, the child groupings intended to mimic families, were required to sit together with their primary caregiver. Each pod was supposed to consist of three same-sex sibling pairs, but the numbers rarely worked out. There were never enough caregivers to go around, so pods with fewer than six children were split up and mixed in with other pods. An adult, usually a woman, was assigned to a pod as its primary caregiver. The Primary was responsible for making sure all the children ate proper meals, had tolerably good hygiene, and basically got on okay in life. Pods with very young children were given a secondary caregiver, to help with feeding, bathing, and monitoring.

  Raymond's pod was a six-child pod with no young children. There was Raymond, Greg, and four girls aged nine to twelve. The girls completely ignored Raymond and alternately loathed and were amused by Greg. Raymond had often wondered whether his life might be different if there were a boy his age in his pod, one he actually liked. But there wasn't, and at least the girls kept their distance.

  When Raymond arrived at the pod table that morning, only Joe, the pod's Primary, was there. One of the many perks of the Workbound program was that it forced Raymond to wake up early, before any of the others in his pod. Of course, it also forced Joe to wake up early, as Primaries were required to be present throughout pod breakfast. Joe, a grumbly old black man who was never shy about sharing an opinion, had made it clear right away that he didn't like getting up early.

  Raymond set his breakfast shake and banana down at his usual spot on the long cafeteria table and sat down, opposite Joe and one seat down. Joe sat with his eyes closed, slouched to one side with his cheek resting heavily against his hand. He was listening to something on his ear buds. Raymond was halfway through his banana before Joe noticed him. Seeing Raymond, he told his wrist relay to pause whatever he was listening to, and he looked thoughtfully at Raymond.

  "So, how's the Karate Kid today?" asked Joe.

  Raymond liked being called the Karate Kid. Ever since telling Joe about the karate lessons, Joe had been calling him that. It was apparently from some old 2-D movie. Before "the Karate Kid", Joe had always called him Ray, or Baby Ray, or X-Ray—chummy meaningless names that rubbed Raymond the wrong way. Being called the Karate Kid was a little embarrassing, but it made him proud, too. Both the embarrassment and the pride arose from its being a nickname based on something that mattered to him, not just some random cute name.

  "Not bad," responded Raymond. "What are you listening to?"

  "One of them sports feeds. It's Nate Carr talking about Tobey Brown." Raymond's blank stare must have betrayed his ignorance. "Tobey Brown," explained Joe, "was one of the great three-goal-superball forwards of the '40s. Nobody could read the field and move like he could. Real shame when he switched over to football."

  "I see." Raymond had no interest in sports, or any pop culture, for that matter.

  "So, all's good?"

  "Yep." Raymond picked the last of his banana out of the peel and popped it in his mouth.

  "Well, I'll be right here."

  Joe told his wrist relay to resume and closed his eyes again. Raymond drank his shake, watching two girls at another table and half-heartedly trying to overhear them as they listed off favorite v-worlds—favorites from among the comparatively narrow selection of government-run v-worlds used in schools and children's homes around the country. Raymond had heard of most of them, but had visited only a couple. He had his own v-world—Nurania. He had started building it in his abundant free time at Mr. Tate's. It was a private v-world, off the Net.

  Maybe I should open it to the Net someday. Probably not—people would just ruin it.

  As he drained the last of his shake, his wrist relay vibrated and displayed its annoyingly cheery animation of a smiling little bus screeching to a halt in front of a cute little house.

  o-------------------------------o

  The work shuttle navigated its way north on Canal Street, its teenaged passengers uncharacteristically quiet, separated from their cliques and sobered by the early start of a new workday. The boy next to Raymond slept, and Raymond stared out the window. Chicago's downtown loomed large ahead, its skyscrapers icons of urban preeminence throughout pre-virtual civilization. Buildings over ninety stories tall, once the workplaces of thousands of office workers, remained as a testament to the value that centralized population once offered. They now served primarily as residential space. Raymond imagined a young Mr. Tate making his fortune in those buildings, back when they were cubicle mazes. Tate as management consultant, wearing a business suit, flying to other cities to meet with people, riding up and down buildings in elevators, hailing pre-grid cabs driven by people whose lives consisted primarily of driving other people around. Raymond looked to the front of the shuttle and imagined there being a special seat for driving, and a human driver controlling the shuttle. He wondered how they knew where to go, how they avoided hitting each other.

  Raymond thought about just how old Nicholas Tate was. The old man had recently turned 85. That meant he was born in 1975, and that he had witnessed the infancy of the computer age. The computer industry had given Tate his wealth, incredible sums of money, made largely—as Tate had admitted, even bragged, to Raymond—through insider trading. Yet the money now sat ignored in low-yield investments while Tate lived his life in his v-chamber, in a nice but dated home far below his means. A vast suburban home with a one-acre yard. Which is where Raymond came in.

  Tate hired Raymond to do routine maintenance work on the robots that tended his lawn and cleaned his house, and to do any housework that the robots couldn't do. It was a charity job, really—Tate could easily have hired cleaning and maintenance services. But he wanted to "give a young man a chance," as he liked to say. Raymond just happened to have been the lucky Workbound applicant to get the job.

  It proved to be a dream of a job. He rarely saw Tate, who spent nearly every minute of every day in his big v-chamber in the basement. Tate granted him unlimited, unmonitored Net access, and encouraged him to convert the garage into a robotics workshop. Tate even gave him access to a special bank account, from which to fund the workshop. The few times that Raymond did see Tate, he had to endure the old man's magnanimity, out-of-touch advice, and putrid body odor, but it was a small price to pay.

  The real kicker was that Raymond had been given a hacker's playground. Early on, his curiosity about the man had gotten the better of him. What did this old man do all day in v-space? Raymond listened at the door, as his mother had once listened at the door of his father's v-chamber. But Tate's was soundproof. He used his Net access to research the particular v-chamber model, to learn whether it might have security gaps. His research was fruitless at first, but he persisted, amazed by the amount of information available to him. His search led him to learn about other v-chamber models, including the old Crown Series beast in the second-floor study lounge. But Tate's proved to be a tough one to crack.

  It was serendipity that ultimately showed him the way. Tate came storming into the garage one day in his tattered old bathrobe, complaining that his v-session had been interrupted by some silly warning about a medical alert system of some sort, and could Raymond take a look at it. Raymond looked into it and discovered that the v-chamber had a special subsystem that monitored vital signs of the user. If it identified a health emergency, it
could contact a local hospital and request that an ambulance be sent.

  To ensure that the subsystem was working properly, it routinely sent out a test message to the local emergency network. If the emergency network did not respond, the v-chamber would try again a few times and ultimately terminate the v-session. Which is what had happened to Tate. Raymond discovered that the real problem was simply that the emergency network was down. To appease Tate and allow him to return to whatever it was that so occupied him, Raymond rigged up one of his own computers to play the role of emergency network. It received the test signal, responded appropriately, and everything was back in order.

  Then it dawned on Raymond that this little subsystem had to be aware of the user's activities in order to recognize a health problem. If he could just tap into it, he could monitor Tate's v-sessions and find out more about him. Within a few days, Raymond had it figured out. He told Tate that a possible replacement part had come in and that he needed to access the health monitoring subsystem again. He inserted a broadcasting repeater into the subsystem where it received its activities feed, then had Tate resume his session. Upstairs, in a second v-chamber, Raymond tried out his hack. Next thing he knew, he was experiencing Tate's v-world session, in full detail.

  The voyeuristic thrill wore off pretty quickly, and Raymond moved on to a new goal. For years, he had been creating virtual personas—simulated people—with the objective of creating one so realistic that nobody would be able to tell it apart from an actual person. He had quickly discovered that the easiest way to do this was to record a real person and use sophisticated pattern recognition and replication software to "learn" the person's personality. But it took an immense body of data to come up with something decent, and he had never been satisfied with the results. Here was his opportunity. He could record Tate night and day, month after month. And so he did, and within a few months he had a remarkable likeness of Tate, complete with a rich body of self-knowledge. Including, Raymond soon realized, knowledge of bank account access codes.

  o-------------------------------o

  A vague awareness of the shuttle's winding path westward pushed through Raymond's state of reverie. The shuttle had made many stops, at the restaurants, hospitals, and nursing homes where Raymond was pleased not to work. Before he knew it, he was watching the familiar homes of Tate's subdivision pass by out the window. It was a neighborhood of pretentious old brick homes, built in the 1990s for the burgeoning upper-middle class. The shuttle stopped at the end of Tate's driveway. The boy next to Raymond turned to the side to let him out.

  Tate's home sat in the center of a perfect lawn. Though the wind was cool and carried a moist note of coming rain, the hot June sun shone on the grass, and on the green leaves of the mature, bushy maples that stood on either side of the driveway. A little round robot the size of a raccoon, built to look like an oversized ladybug, cruised across the lawn, poking holes in the soil with instruments attached to its head. Its back-and-forth progress was evident from the patterns in the grass. From the outside, one might imagine the house to give shelter to an idyllic, prosperous family living out the middle class dream of the 20th century.

  Raymond underwent the retinal scan and voice recognition tests at the door, leftovers from a previous resident more security-conscious than Tate. Once in, he proceeded through the bright, soaring, tile-floored great room, and down a hallway past the disused kitchen and several closed-off rooms. He didn't even bother to call out hello—Tate never came out of his v-chamber before 10 AM.

  Raymond proceeded through the door at the end of the hall, into the converted garage, where he spent the majority of his workday—his robotics lab. The lights turned on and ceiling panels slid open to reveal skylights. He crossed to the workbench, upon which were dozens of neatly arranged components, and performed his morning ritual. He took off his Home wrist relay and set it at the far edge of the work surface. It was a cheap black plastic thing, scuffed after only a year of use. From a shelf above the workbench, he took down his own personal wrist relay. It was a beautiful metallic relay. When turned in the light, its iridescent black surface showed hints of green and violet, like the feathers of a grackle. His Home relay could only connect to the Home's local network. With his personal relay, he was in full communication with the network in Tate's home, which in turn gave him unlimited access to the Net.

  As soon as he put on his personal relay, a holographic display sprang to life. He was surprised—this meant that there was some high-priority message, perhaps a special request from Tate. He pressed a holographic button on the display to play the message.

  "At 8:17 AM," said the relay's generic female persona in her invariably pleasant voice, "a health emergency signal was received. Shall I forward it to the local emergency network?"

  Panic seized Raymond. If a medical team came to the house, they would see that he had tampered with the emergency subsystem on Tate's v-chamber. And they would know that he had hacked into it—that he was watching Tate's private life. He looked at the clock on the display. It was now 8:20 AM. The signal had been sent only three minutes ago. But those three minutes might have made all the difference—had he repaired the medical alert system, an ambulance would already be at the house. Now, if he did forward the signal and Tate were to die, the death would be attributed to Raymond's hack.

  Oh my god. He's downstairs. He's in his v-chamber, downstairs, dying.

  It occurred to him that the message could be a false alarm. He imagined Tate bursting into the garage, raving about the silly medical alert system, telling Raymond to just turn the fool thing off. Perhaps the original message would tell him more.

  "Show me the message," he instructed.

  An entire page of medical terminology appeared on his display. For a couple of seconds, he was completely baffled. The words "ischemic cardiomyopathy" jumped out at him as maybe having something to do with a heart attack. Then his doubts were erased. Toward the end of the message was the phrase "cardiac death imminent".

  "Oh my god," he said aloud. "He is dying."

  Basic human compassion finally kicked in. Somehow, he had never pictured being around when the old man died. He wasn't willing to call in outside help, but he at least had to go downstairs. Maybe there was something he could do. With long strides, he hurried back into the house, to the door at the top of the basement stairs. He pulled the door open and stepped down the first couple of stairs, then gripped the railing and paused. His bravado collapsed. He half expected some desperate zombie version of Tate to come up from the bottom of the stairs, clawing at him, pleading.

  Raymond slowly descended the stairs, dazed by apprehension. In utter contrast to his imaginings, he found the basement to be quiet and completely still. The sparse furnishings were in their usual places, the space and its contents eerily unchanged.

  The v-chamber's ventilation system hummed. The large black unit was ten feet square. Only the gap between its top and the basement ceiling made it seem like an object within a room, rather than a room of its own. The door was closed. Raymond walked around the end of the old double bed, a leftover from Tate's life before giving himself up so completely to v-space. On tip-toe, he approached the door, then paused again. He inched toward it, listening for sound, expecting the old man to burst out at any moment and reprimand him for the invasion of privacy.

  Raymond's mind raced. What if Tate were dead? Nobody would know. Who could know? Was Tate with others in v-space when it happened? What would they have seen? The session should have terminated when the v-chamber recognized the health problem. Raymond was still recording Tate's sessions, forever refining his Tate persona—all he had to do was replay it, to see where the shutoff had occurred. Even if people had seen Tate die, how would they interpret it? It would most likely seem like the death of Tate's avatar, in whatever v-world he was in.

  Paranoia seized Raymond. What if there were a surveillance system in the house that he didn't know about? Was there some way that the administrators at the Home coul
d find out? Or could he just return to the Home at the end of the day and come back to work the next day, as if nothing had happened? He imagined himself having to take some crap job, like the other kids on the shuttle. Did anyone really have to know?

  What am I doing?

  Steeled for the possibility of finding Tate alive and in need, Raymond touched the door. It slid open. A violet light shone inside. A pair of boxer shorts sat in the center of the floor. Aside from these, Raymond saw nothing—the chamber looked empty. But the air was tainted with a sickly body odor, strong enough to defy the chamber's deluxe ventilation system.

  Raymond stepped forward through the doorway.

  To his right, on the floor, lay Tate, naked, legs folded under him, leaning against the wall. Motionless. The eerie stillness that Raymond had felt when he first reached the basement was magnified tenfold.

  Raymond looked at the body. It looked as if the old man had been leaning his shoulder against the wall, then slid down. The violet light reflected off of Tate's bony shoulders and the bald crown of his head. It seemed such a pathetic end to this man's life of pride and ambition.

  "You're dead, aren't you, Mr. Tate."

  He paused, watching the body, as if Tate might suddenly gasp back to life. He started feeling light-headed. He backed out of the v-chamber. The door slid shut. He felt queasy, revolted. He made his way to the double bed, sat down on the bare mattress, and looked around at the mismatched furniture, oddly positioned here and there in the vast half-finished basement.

  "This was no life," he said to himself. "He was done years ago. It's not like anyone's going to miss him."