Chem said brightly, ‘I’d go with my parents. I always do whatever they want.’
Tod said maliciously, ‘They would go without you. They probably have already.’
‘No, they haven’t.’ Chem’s lips were working. ‘They’ll come back to me when—’
‘When, when, when,’ Tod sang. ‘When is never. They’re never coming back!’
‘And nor are yours!’
‘But I don’t care any more,’ Tod said. ‘You do. Ha ha!’
Chem, in a tearful fury, flew at Tod. The wrestling boys fell to the floor and crashed through table legs. Pixels flew and protocol-violation warnings pinged, but the table didn’t so much as quiver.
Symat watched curiously. He lived in a world saturated by sentience, where everything was aware, everything potentially had feelings. He understood Virtual children could be hurt, but he didn’t necessarily know what might hurt them.
‘Enough.’ Mela waded into the mêlée and pulled the boys apart. Chem, crying copiously, ran from the room. Mela said to Tod, ‘You know how it upsets him when you say such things.’
‘It’s true. Our parents are never coming back. His aren’t. We all know that.’
Mela put her hand on her heart. ‘He doesn’t know it. Not in here.’
‘Then he’s stupid,’ Tod said.
‘Maybe he is, maybe not. But we have to look out for him. All we have is each other now. Go after him.’
‘Aww—’ Tod pulled a face, but he went out obediently.
Mela looked at Symat. ‘Kids,’ she said, smiling faintly.
Symat, his head full of his own issues, chewed his food.
When he had done eating, the apartment was a little more like a home, a little less like a strange place. And, his muscles still aching from his time in the water, he realised he felt tired. He found a bathroom, and a bedroom stripped of light furnishings. He sat on a pallet.
The three Virtuals clustered in the doorway, looking at him.
‘I’m going to sleep,’ he said.
‘All right.’ They receded into the shadows.
Symat lay down on the pallet, and his clothes, sensing his intentions, fluffed themselves up into a warm cocoon around his body. Experimentally he ordered the room to dim its lights; the command worked. He turned over and closed his eyes.
He thought he slept.
But he heard murmuring. He saw the two boys in the dim light, standing at the foot of his pallet – no, hovering, their feet just above the ground. And they were talking, softly, and too rapidly for him to hear, like speeded-up speech. He heard a name: ‘The Guardians.’ Then one of them whispered, ‘He’s awake!’ And they fled, sliding through the solid wall like spectres, accompanied by a soft pinging.
So much for protocol violations, Symat said to himself. Those Virtuals were creepy. He didn’t understand where they had come from, what they wanted. But he reminded himself they were artificial; and like all artefacts they were here to serve humanity – him. He huddled down in his clothes and went back to sleep.
When he rose and walked out of the apartment into the unchanging sunlight, the three Virtuals were waiting for him. They were sitting on a low stone wall, or at least they looked like they were doing so, Mela in the centre with the two boys to either side.
‘Um, thank you for bringing me to this place. The food.’
‘You’re human. That’s our job,’ Mela said.
‘I suppose it is. Thanks anyhow.’ He walked off down the street towards the canal.
When he looked back they were following. Perhaps they were waiting for him to give them more commands. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but he was glad to have some company.
Walking along the line of the canal they soon left the city behind. The canal continued to head towards the immobile sun, but now the water looked turbid, muddy.
While Mela walked with Symat, the two boys ran by themselves. They played elaborate games of hide and seek, which could involve hiding inside the fabric of a wall, which evidently didn’t hurt that much; the air was full of warning pings, and the laughter of the boys. It reminded Symat uneasily of their odd behaviour in the bedroom last night. Maybe they had been inhibited about violating their protocols around him. If so, the inhibition was wearing off.
They came to a small township, as empty as the city. The boys ran off to explore. Mela and Symat sat on a low wall.
He asked her, ‘How come I didn’t see you yesterday, before you found me in the canal?’
‘We didn’t want you to see us.’
He wondered what a Virtual had to hide from. ‘Why does Chem talk about “parents”? Virtuals don’t have parents.’
‘We did.’
It had been a craze, a few generations back. It began after humans had been pushed back to Sol system.
‘People still wanted kids,’ Mela said. ‘But you don’t want to bring kids into a defeated world. So they had us instead.’
A Virtual child could be a very convincing simulacrum of the real thing. You could raise it from infanthood, teach it, learn from it. It would have been trivial to realise a child physically, downloading complex sensoria into a flesh-and-blood shell, but such ‘dolls’ were unpopular, apparently violating some even deeper set of instincts. It was more comfortable to be with Virtuals, even if you couldn’t cuddle them.
And Virtual kids actually had advantages. You could back them up, rerun favourite moments. You could even wipe them clean if you really made a hash of raising them, though sentience laws discouraged this.
One feature, popular but hotly debated ethically, was the ability to stop the growth of your child at a certain age. You could stretch out a childhood for as long as you wanted, enough to match your own long lifespan. Some people kept their Virtual children as perpetual infants; generally, however, eight to ten years old was the chosen plateau range.
‘I’m twelve,’ Mela said. ‘Few ever got as old as me. For a long time I’ve been surrounded by kids younger than me.’
‘A long time? How long?’
Mela considered. ‘Oh, two hundred years, nearly.’
Symat, shocked, didn’t know what to say.
Times changed, Mela said. Now, in increasing numbers, people were leaving the world behind altogether, passing through the transfer booths to an unknown destination beyond. And the Virtual children couldn’t follow: you could take your pots and pans, but you couldn’t take your Virtual child.
More than that, Mela told him mildly, Virtual children had simply gone out of fashion, as had so many technological toys before them. It became embarrassing to admit you needed such an emotional crutch.
For all these reasons, the children were shut down – or more commonly just abandoned, perhaps after centuries of companionship every bit as intense as the bond between a parent and a real child.
‘Every last mother said she would come back. I always knew the truth. I was twelve years old. But Chem is only eight. He’ll be eight for ever. And he still believes. Every day he is disappointed.’
Every day for centuries, Symat thought, Chem wakes up full of pointless hope, trapped in childhood. ‘Tod seems to understand.’
‘He’s actually younger than Chem, but he’s tougher minded.’
‘How come?’
She shrugged. ‘His parents had him designed that way. You could choose what you liked. Chem’s parents must have wanted a child more dependent, more vulnerable.’
‘But they abandoned him anyway.’
‘Oh, yes.’