The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

by Walter Jon Williams

  Janis went on to describe one of the victims of this ruthless type of upbringing. "Flat of emotional affect, offended by disorder and incapable of coping with obstruction, unable to function without adherence to a belief system as rigid as the artificial and constricted environments in which she was raised."

  When I realized Janis was describing Anna-Lee I almost de-rezzed.

  Janis offered a scheme to cure the problem, which was to get rid of the virtual environments and start out with real incarnated babies. She pulled out vast numbers of statistics demonstrating that places that did this—chiefly Earth—seemed to raise more successful adults. She also pointed out that the initial shortage of resources that had prompted the creation of virtual children in the first place had long since passed—plenty of water-ice coming in from the Kuiper Belt these days, and we were sitting on all the minerals we could want. The only reason the system continued was for the convenience of the adults. But genuine babies, as opposed to abstract computer programs, would help the adults, too. They would no longer be tempted to become little dictators with absolute power over their offspring. Janis said the chance would turn the grownups into better human beings.

  All this was buttressed by colossal numbers of statistics, graphs, and other data. I realized when I'd finished it that the Cadre of Glorious Destiny had produced one true genius, and that this genius was Janis.

  The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.

  Anna-Lee determined her, all right, and the problem was that Janis probably didn't have that long to live. Aside from the fact that Janis had ruthlessly caricatured her, Anna-Lee couldn't help but notice that the whole work went smack up against the Five Principles Movement. According to the Movement people, all available resources had to be devoted to the expansion of the human race out of the solar system and into new environments. It didn't matter how many more resources were available now than in the past, it was clear against their principles to devote a greater share to the raising of children when it could be used to blast off into the universe.

  And though the Five Principles people acknowledged our rather high death rate, they put it down to our settlements' hazardous environments. All we had to do was genetically modify people to better suit the environments and the problem would be solved.

  I skipped the appendices and zoomed from my room across the common room to Janis' door, and hit the button to alert her to a visitor. The door vanished, and there was Janis—for the first time since her fight with Anna-Lee, she was using her quadbod avatar. She gave me a wicked grin.

  "Great, isn't it?"

  "It's brilliant! But you can't let Anna-Lee see it."

  "Don't be silly. I sent Mom the file myself."

  I was horrified. She had to have seen the way my Picasso-face gaped, and it made her laugh.

  "She'll have you erased!" I said.

  "If she does," Janis said. "She'll only prove my point." She put a consoling hand on my shoulder. "Sorry if it means missing your incarnation."

  When Anna-Lee came storming in—which wasn't long after—Janis broadcast the whole confrontation on a one-way link to the whole cadre. We got to watch, but not to participate. She didn't want our advice any more than she wanted her mother's.

  "You are unnatural!" Anna-Lee stormed. "You spread slanders! You have betrayed the highest truth!"

  "I told the truth!" Janis said. "And you know it's the truth, otherwise you wouldn't be so insane right now."

  Anna-Lee stiffened. "I am a Five Principles Constant Soldier. I know the truth, and I know my duty."

  "Every time you say that, you prove my point."

  "You will retract this thesis, and apologize to your committee for giving them such a vicious document."

  Anna-Lee hadn't realized that the document was irretrievable, that Janis had given it to everyone she knew.

  Janis laughed. "No way, Mom," she said.

  Anna-Lee lost it. She waved her fists and screamed. "I know my duty! I will not allow such a slander to be seen by anyone!" She pointed at Janis. "You have three days to retract!"

  Janis gave a snort of contempt.

  "Or what?"

  "Or I will decide that you're incorrigible and terminate your program."

  Janis laughed. "Go right ahead, Mom. Do it now. Nothing spreads a new idea better than martyrdom." She spread her four arms. "Do it, Mom. I hate life in this hell. I'm ready."

  I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.

  Yes, Doctor Sam. That's it exactly.

  "You have three days," Anna-Lee said, her voice all flat and menacing, and then her virtual image de-rezzed.

  Janis looked at the space where her mom had been, and then a goofy grin spread across her face. She switched to the redheaded, stick-figure avatar, and began to do a little dance as she hovered in the air, moving like a badly animated cartoon.

  "Hey!" she sang. "I get to go to Alison's party after all!"

  I had been so caught up in the drama that I had forgot my incarnation was going to happen in two days.

  But it wasn't going to be a party now. It was going to be a wake.

  "Doctor Sam," I said, "I've got to save Janis."

  The triumph of hope over experience.

  "Hope is what I've got," I said, and then I thought about it. "And maybe a little experience, too."

  * * *

  My Incarnation Day went well. We came down by glider, as we had that first time on Titan, except that this time I told Ground Control to let my friends land wherever the hell they wanted. That gave us time to inspect the Great Buddha, a slim man with a knowing smile sitting cross-legged with knobs on his head. He's two and a half kilometers tall and packed with massively parallel quantum processors, all crunching vast amounts of data, thinking whatever profound thoughts are appropriate to an artificial intelligence built on such a scale, and repeating millions of sutras, which are scriptures for Buddhists, all at the speed of light.

  It creeps along at two or three centimeters per day, and will enter the strait at the end of the Kra Peninsula many thousands of years from now.

  After viewing the Buddha's serene expression from as many angles as suited us, we soared and swooped over many kilometers of brilliant green jungle and landed on the beach. And we all did land on the beach, which sort of surprised me. And then we all did our best to learn how to surf—and let me tell you from the start, the surfing simulators are totally inadequate. The longest I managed to stand my board was maybe twenty seconds.

  I was amazed at all the sensations that crowded all around me. The breeze on my skin, the scents of the sea and the vegetation and the charcoal on which our banquet was being cooked. The hot sand under my bare feet. The salt taste of the ocean on my lips. The sting of the little jellyfish on my legs and arms, and the iodine smell of the thick strand of seaweed that got wrapped in my hair.

  I mean, I had no idea. The simulators were totally inadequate to the Earth experience.

  And this was just a part of the Earth, a small fraction of the environments available. I think I convinced a lot of the cadre that maybe they'd want to move to Earth as soon as they could raise the money and find a job.

  After swimming and beach games we had my Incarnation Day dinner. The sensations provided by the food were really too intense—I couldn't eat much of it. If I was going to eat Earth food, I was going to have to start with something a lot more bland.

  And there was my brown-eyed body at the head of the table, looking down at the members of the Cadre of Glorious Destiny who were toasting me with tropical drinks, the kind that have parasols in them.

  Tears came to my eyes, and they were a lot wetter and hotter than tears in the sims. For some reason that fact made me cry even more.

  My parents came to the dinner, because this was the first time they could actually hug me—hug me for real, that is, and not in a sim. They had downloaded into bodies that didn't look much like the four-armed quadbods they used back on
Ceres, but that didn't matter. When my arms went around them, I began to cry again.

  After the tears were wiped away we put on underwater gear and went for a swim on the reef, which is just amazing. More colors and shapes and textures than I could ever imagine—or imagine putting in a work of art.

  A work of art that embodies all but selects none is not art, but mere cant and recitation.

  Oh, wow. You're right. Thank you, Doctor Sam.

  After the reef trip we paid a visit to one of the underwater settlements, one inhabited by people adapted to breathe water. The problems were that we had to keep our underwater gear on, and that none of us were any good at the fluid sign language they all used as their preferred means of communication.

  Then we rose from the ocean, dried out, and had a last round of hugs before being uploaded to our normal habitations. I gave Janis a particularly strong hug, and I whispered in her ear.

  "Take care of yourself."

  "Who?" she grinned. "Me?"

  And then the little brown-haired body was left behind, looking very lonely, as everyone else put on the electrodes and uploaded back to their normal and very-distant worlds.

  As soon as I arrived on Ceres, I zapped an avatar of myself into my parents' quarters. They looked at me as if I were a ghost.

  "What are you doing here?" my mother managed.

  "I hate to tell you this," I said, "but I think you're going to have to hire a lawyer."

  * * *

  It was surprisingly easy to do, really. Remember that I was assisting Dane, who was a communications tech, and in charge of uploading all of our little artificial brains to Earth. And also remember that I am a specialist in systems interopability, which implies that I am also a specialist in systems unoperability.

  It was very easy to set a couple of artificial intelligences running amok in Dane's system just as he was working on our upload. And that so distracted him that he said yes when I said that I'd do the job for him.

  And once I had access, it was the work of a moment to swap a couple of serial numbers.

  The end result of which was that it was Janis who uploaded into my brown-haired body, and received all the toasts, and who hugged my parents with my arms. And who is now on Earth, incarnated, with a full set of human rights and safe from Anna-Lee.

  I wish I could say the same for myself.

  Anna-Lee couldn't have me killed, of course, since I don't belong to her. But she could sue my parents, who from her point of view permitted a piece of software belonging to them to prevent her from wreaking vengeance on some software that belonged to her.

  And of course Anna-Lee went berserk the second she found out—which was more or less immediately, since Janis sent her a little radio taunt as soon as she downed her fourth or fifth celebratory umbrella drink.

  Janis sent me a message, too.

  "The least you could have done was make my hair red."

  My hair. Sometimes I wonder why I bothered.

  An unexpected side effect of this was that we all got famous. It turns out that this was an unprecedented legal situation, with lots of human interest and a colorful cast of characters. Janis became a media celebrity, and so did I, and so did Anna-Lee.

  Celebrity didn't do Anna-Lee's cause any good. Her whole mental outlook was too rigid to stand the kind of scrutiny and questioning that any public figure has to put up with. As soon as she was challenged she lost control. She called one of the leading media interviewers a name that you, Doctor Sam, would not wish me to repeat.

  Whatever the actual merits of her legal case, the sight of Anna-Lee screaming that I had deprived her of the inalienable right to kill her daughter failed to win her a lot of friends. Eventually the Five Principles people realized she wasn't doing their cause any good, and she was replaced by a Movement spokesperson who said as little as possible.

  Janis did some talking, too, but not nearly as much as she would have liked, because she was under house arrest for coming to Earth without a visa and without paying the immigration tax. The cops showed up when she was sleeping off her hangover from all the umbrella drinks. It's probably lucky that she wasn't given the opportunity to talk much, because if she started on her rants she would have worn out her celebrity as quickly as Anna-Lee did.

  Janis was scheduled to be deported back to Ceres, but shipping an actual incarnated human being is much more difficult than zapping a simulation by laser, and she had to wait for a ship that could carry passengers, and that would be months.

  She offered to navigate the ship herself, since she had the training, but the offer was declined.

  Lots of people read her thesis who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it. And millions discussed it whether they'd read it or not. There were those who said that Janis was right, and those that said that Janis was mostly right but that she exaggerated. There were those who said that the problem didn't really exist, except in the statistics.

  There were those who thought the problem existed entirely in the software, that the system would work if the simulations were only made more like reality. I had to disagree, because I think the simulations were like reality, but only for certain people.

  The problem is that human beings perceive reality in slightly different ways, even if they happen to be programs. A programmer could do his best to create an artificial reality that exactly mimicked the way he perceived reality, except that it wouldn't be as exact for another person, it would only be an approximation. It would be like fitting everyone's hand into the same-sized glove.

  Eventually someone at the University of Adelaide read the thesis and offered Janis a professorship in their sociology department. She accepted and was freed from house arrest.

  Poor Australia, I thought.

  I was on video quite a lot. I used my little-girl avatar, and I batted my big eyes a lot. I still wore blue, mourning for Fritz.

  Why, I was asked, did I act to save Janis?

  "Because we're cadre, and we're supposed to look after one another."

  What did I think of Anna-Lee?

  "I don't see why she's complaining. I've seen to it that Janis just isn't her problem anymore."

  Wasn't what I did stealing?

  "It's not stealing to free a slave."

  And so on. It was the same sort of routine I'd been practicing on my parents all these years, and the practice paid off. Entire cadres—hundreds of them—signed petitions asking that the case be dismissed. Lots of adults did the same.

  I hope that it helps, but the judge that hears the case isn't supposed to be swayed by public opinion, but only by the law.

  And everyone forgets that it's my parents that will be on trial, not me, accused of letting their software steal Anna-Lee's software. And of course I, and therefore they, am completely guilty, so my parents are almost certainly going to be fined, and lose both money and Citizenship Points.

  I'm sorry about that, but my parents seem not to be.

  How the judge will put a value on a piece of stolen software that its owner fully intended to destroy is going to make an interesting ruling, however it turns out.

  I don't know whether I'll ever set foot on Earth again. I can't take my place in Pisa because I'm not incarnated, and I don't know if they'll offer again.

  And however things turn out, Fritz is still zeroed. And I still wear blue.

  I don't have my outside job any longer. Dane won't speak to me, because his supervisor reprimanded him, and he's under suspicion for being my accomplice. And even those who are sympathetic to me aren't about to let me loose with their computers.

  And even if I get a job somewhere, I can't be incarnated until the court case is over.

  It seems to me that the only person who got away scot-free was Janis. Which is normal.

  So right now my chief problem is boredom. I spent fourteen years in a rigid program intended to fill my hours with wholesome and intellectually useful activity, and now that's over.

  And I can't get properly started on the non-wholesome
thing until I get an incarnation somewhere.

  Everyone is, or hopes to be, an idler.

  Thank you, Doctor Sam.

  I'm choosing to idle away my time making pictures. Maybe I can sell them and help pay the Earth tax.

  I call them my "Doctor Johnson" series. Sam. Johnson on Mars. Sam. Johnson Visits Neptune. Sam. Johnson Quizzing the Tomasko Glacier. Sam. Johnson Among the Asteroids.

  I have many more ideas along this line.

  Doctor Sam, I trust you will approve.

  Afterword: Incarnation Day

  "Incarnation Day" was written in response to a solicitation by Jonathan Strahan for his young adult anthology The Starry Rift. The finished story was too long for that collection, so "Incarnation Day" went to Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann for their own YA anthology, Escape from Earth, and in turn I wrote "Pinocchio" for Jonathan.

  Every story I write is practice for some other story. Though "Incarnation Day" uses ideas that I have developed elsewhere—the plight of minor children in virtual environments controlled by grownups, and the future in which everything went right (for adults, anyway)—I'd like to think I deployed the ideas here to better advantage. Practice improved things.

  At least one reviewer thought it unlikely that a modern lady like Alison would have an imaginary friend from a century as far removed as Sam Johnson. I disagree. This element of the story is pure realism.

  It so happens that when I was younger, Dr. Samuel Johnson was my imaginary playmate.

  Send Them Flowers

  We skipped through the borderlands of Probability, edging farther and farther away from the safe universes that had become so much less safe for us, and into the fringe areas where stars were cloudy smears of phosphorescent gas and the Periodic Table wasn't a guide, but a series of ever-more-hopeful suggestions.