Toby had anticipated something like this, so he’d set the metarules by which they’d have to operate. So as Peter was excitedly giving him a tour through the place, it came as no surprise when one of the sentry tanks failed to recognize Peter as the owner and blew them both to smithereens with one blast of its ion cannon.
It was more than a year before Toby was able to suggest (and Peter was able to hear), “Why don’t you just build a world where nobody would have any reason to attack you?”
This had never occurred to Peter. In fact, it had never occurred to him that violence might have reasons.
Sometimes Toby had despaired of the lesson ever taking hold. But the revelation that there were Consensus gameworlds stored in the twentier’s data block had him thinking a lot about the game. He hadn’t yet summoned the courage to open any of them—they were from the years just after Toby’s disappearance, and he was half afraid of what might be in them. This didn’t prevent Toby from seeing Consensus everywhere he went, though. As he and Orpheus strolled the rich upper levels of the city, he found himself staring around in amazement—and pride. The streets and stairs of the continent were nothing like Peter’s paranoid cathedral, but now that he’d realized who this world’s creator was, Toby could see his brother’s hand in everything.
Two days after Jay’s visit, he was taking one of these strolls in the richer upper levels of the continent when suddenly Orpheus stuck his nose in the air, then took off. A virtual flag over his head signified he’d recognized something or somebody. In seconds he’d scrambled up a drainpipe and was running along the edge of a roof.
“Don’t mind me,” Toby shouted after him. “I’ll just keep walking here, where it’s slow.”
Orpheus had his own maps of the city. To Toby, a chair was for sitting on, a table was for sitting at, and a potted plant was for looking at. Orpheus might consider sitting on all three, so they all had the affordance of “sitability” to him. It was the same with the tops of walls, with some of the narrow gaps between buildings; with banisters and tree limbs. To Orpheus, roof cornices were little balconies and drainpipes were subways.
Toby was still getting used to this fact of denner life. It had been this way all along, not just for denners but also for cats and dogs. Humans had just never had the ability to see them the way animals did. Orpheus’s interface gave Toby that ability.
None of which helped him catch up to the denner. He jogged off in the direction he thought Orpheus had gone and, rounding a corner, nearly toppled over the young woman who was kneeling on the sidewalk and scratching Orpheus’s chin.
“Whoa!” He stumbled and stopped.
She stood up, smiling.
“Oh,” he said stupidly. “Hello.”
“Hello again,” she said. “I never got a chance to thank you the other day.”
“Thank me? Do I know…” This was the girl he’d saved from being hit by one of the pilgrims during that miniature riot. “Oh,” he said. “Yes.”
Orpheus looked from Toby to the young lady, then back. He did it again.
“I was happy to help,” he said. “What … was that all about?”
“My friends and I were just trying to exercise our right to free speech.” She stuck out her hand for him to shake. “I’m Kirstana.”
“T-Toby.” He’d been using an alias, but in the moment he completely forget to give it.
She knelt again to scritch Orpheus’s ears. “I think your denner likes me. What’s his name?”
“Orpheus. Yeah, he does seem to have latched on to you.” Toby scowled at the denner, but Orpheus blithely ignored him.
Kirstana put three fingers on the ground and leaned a bit, looking up askance at Toby. “What about you? You came out of the prep station, were you planning on going on pilgrimage?”
“No no,” he said. “I was just touring around and walked into the middle of things.”
“Touring, huh? Following the tags in those awful city guides?” She waggled her fingers next to her eyes. Toby’s touched the tourist glasses, which must be a dead giveaway. He grinned sheepishly, though he didn’t know why he should be embarrassed.
“They’re hardly a substitute for a real local guide,” she continued.
“Well, I don’t know anybody here.”
“You know me.”
Toby opened his mouth, then closed it. He’d never had this kind of a conversation with a girl—woman, for she was few years older than him. Was she flirting? Or just being friendly? He had no idea, just as he had no idea how old she thought he was.
“Well,” he said. “I, um—”
The moment dragged.
Suddenly Orpheus leaped up, claws extended, and scrambled up Toby to perch on his shoulder. “Ow, ow!” He batted at the creature. Kirstana laughed.
“I could use a guide, sure,” said Toby.
Orpheus purred loudly in his ear.
“You, I’ll talk to later,” he muttered.
Nine
LATE THAT EVENING, TOBY found he couldn’t sleep. Things were finally starting to go his way, as he explained to Orpheus. On his haunches on the floor, he frowned seriously at the denner and listed his accomplishments on his fingers. “One: I know Mom’s on Destrier. I just have to get there. But two: I’ve figured out how to make money so I can get there. Three: I met a girl. Well, you met her, but we’re going out together tomorrow!
“And four: Jaysir’s unlocked this for me.” He waggled the twentier’s data block. “Shall we take a look inside?”
There were two kinds of data in the block. It was mostly backups, which kind of made sense; what else would you stick in the bin of bot like this? The backups were in turn partly stuff he didn’t recognize, but some were Consensus Empire worlds, dated after he’d left Sedna. Peter’s work, then.
He was as uneasy about opening these as he was about accessing the libraries’ worth of information you could find online about his brother and sister. The way those library books took his family and turned their lives into dry discourses and reports, printed and categorized and cross-referenced … It was supremely creepy. The idea that these Consensus backups might reveal some side of Peter that he didn’t know was also unsettling.
The second category of data in the block consisted of recordings made by the twentier itself. Shots of home: that seemed innocuous enough. So he linked the data block to his glasses and sat back against the bed.
Orpheus came to curl up in his lap. “Okay,” said Toby, “here we go.” And he loaded the first of the twentier’s own records.
Ice and a black sky. He was looking at the horizon of Sedna. The twentier was crawling forward across the reddish plains, along with five or six others. Its scanning software classified the rocks (actually rock-hard water ice) and sand (smaller chunks of the same) as it went, so virtual labels kept popping up to obscure the vista. A faint murmur of radio chatter between the bots sounded like crickets chirping.
“Hmm.” Toby fast-forwarded, getting a crazy zoom view of crater rims, giant rocks and plains, and the legs of space-suited humans flicking back and forth. Then the horizon disappeared, and it was all about digging.