by Ted Chiang
Right now it’s the weekend, and Derek is driving to the park; in the passenger seat is Marco, wearing a robotic body. He’s standing upright on the seat–restrained by the seat belt–so he can see out the window; he’s looking for anything that he’s only seen before in videos, things that aren’t found in Data Earth.
“Firi hidrint,” says Marco, pointing.
“Fire hydrant.”
“Fire hydrant.”
“That’s right.”
The body Marco’s wearing is the one that Blue Gamma owned. Group field trips came to an end because SaruMech Toys closed shortly after Blue Gamma did, so Ana–who got a job testing software used in carbon-sequestration stations–bought the robot body at a discount for Jax to use. She let Derek borrow the body last week so Marco and Polo could play in it, and now he’s returning it. She’s going to spend the day in the park, letting other owners’ digients have a turn in the body.
“I make fire hydrant next craft time,” says Marco. “Use cylinder, use cone, use cylinder.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” says Derek.
Marco’s talking about the craft sessions that the digients now have every day. These began a few months ago, after an owner wrote software that allowed a few of Data Earth’s onscreen editing tools to be operated from within the Data Earth environment itself. By manipulating a console of knobs and sliders, a digient can now instantiate various solid shapes, change their color, and combine and edit them in a dozen different ways. The digients are in heaven; to them it seems as if they’ve been granted magical powers, and given the way the editing tools circumvent Data Earth’s physics simulation, in a sense they have. Every day after work when Derek logs into Data Earth, Marco and Polo show him the craft projects they’ve made.
“Then can show Polo how–Park! Park already?”
“No, we’re not there yet.”
“Sign says ‘Burgers and Parks.’” Marco points out a sign that they’re driving past.
“It says ‘Burgers and Shakes.’ Shakes, not parks. We’ve still got a little way to go.”
“Shakes,” Marco says, watching the sign recede in the distance. Another new activity for the digients has been reading lessons.
Marco or Polo never paid much attention to text before–there isn’t a lot of it in Data Earth aside from onscreen annotations, which aren’t visible to digients–but one owner successfully taught his digient to recognize commands written on flashcards, prompting a number of other owners to give it a try. Generally speaking, the Neuroblast digients recognize words reasonably well, but have trouble associating individual letters with sounds. It’s a variety of dyslexia that appears to be specific to the Neuroblast genome; according to other user groups, Origami digients learn letters readily, while Faberge digients remain frustratingly illiterate no matter what instruction method is used.
Marco and Polo take a reading class with Jax and a few others, and they seem to enjoy it well enough. None of the digients were raised on bedtime stories, so text doesn’t fascinate them the way it does human children, but their general curiosity–along with the praise of their owners–motivate them to explore the uses that text can be put to. Derek finds it exciting, and laments the fact that Blue Gamma didn’t stay in business long enough to see these things come to pass.
They arrive at the park; Ana sees them and walks over as Derek parks the car. Marco gives Ana a hug as soon as Derek lets him out of the car.
“Hi Ana.”
“Hi Marco,” replies Ana; she rubs the back of the robot’s head. “You’re still in the body? You had a whole week. Wasn’t that enough?”
“Wanted ride in car.”
“Did you want to play in the park for a bit?”
“No, we go now. Wendy not want us stay. Bye Ana.” By now Derek has gotten the charging platform for the robot out of the backseat. Marco steps on to the charging platform–they’ve trained the digients to return to it whenever they return to Data Earth–and the robot’s helmet goes dark.
Ana uses her handheld to get the first digient ready to enter the robot. “So you have to go, too?” she asks Derek.
“No, I don’t have to be anywhere.”
“So what did Marco mean?”
“Well…”
“Let me guess: Wendy thinks you spend too much time with digients, right?”
“Right,” says Derek. Wendy was also uncomfortable with the amount of time he’s been spending with Ana, but there’s no point in mentioning that. He assured Wendy that he doesn’t think of Ana that way, that they’re just friends who share an interest in digients.
The robot’s helmet lights up to display a jaguar-cub face; Derek recognizes him as Zaff, who’s owned by one of the beta testers. “Hi Ana hi Derek,” says Zaff, and immediately runs toward a nearby tree. Derek and Ana follow.
“So seeing them in the robot body didn’t win her over?” asks Ana.
Derek stops Zaff from picking up some dog turds. To Ana, he says, “Nope. She still doesn’t understand why I don’t suspend them whenever it’s convenient.”
“It’s hard to find someone who understands,” Ana says. “It was the same when I worked at the zoo; every guy I dated felt like he was coming in second. And now when I tell a guy that I’m paying for reading lessons for my digient, he looks at me like I’m crazy.”
“That’s been an issue for Wendy, too.”
They watch as Zaff sorts through the leaf litter, extracts a leaf decayed to near transparency, and holds it up to his face to look through it, a mask of vegetable lace. “Although I guess I shouldn’t really blame them,” says Ana. “It took me a while to understand the appeal myself.”
“Not me,” says Derek. “I thought digients were amazing right away.”
“That’s true,” agrees Ana. “You’re a rare one.”
Derek watches her with Zaff, admires her patience in guiding him. The last time he felt so much in common with a woman was when he met Wendy, who shared his excitement at bringing characters to life through animation. If he weren’t already married, he might ask Ana out, but there’s no point in speculating about that now. The most they can be is friends, and that’s good enough.
#
It’s a year later, and Ana is spending the evening at her apartment. On her computer she has a window open to Data Earth, where her avatar is at a playground, supervising a group play-date that Jax has with a handful of other digients. The number of digients continues to shrink–Tibo, for example, hasn’t been around in months–but Jax’s regular group has merged with another one recently, so he still has the opportunity to make new friends. A few of the digients are up in the climbing equipment, others play with toys on the ground, while a couple watch a virtual television.
In another window, Ana browses through the user-group discussion forums. The topic du jour is the latest action by the Information Freedom Front, an organization that lobbies for the end of privately owned data. Last week they publicized techniques for cracking many of Data Earth’s access-control mechanisms, and in recent days people have been seeing rare and expensive items from their game inventories being handed out like flyers on a downtown street corner. Ana hasn’t been to a game continent in Data Earth since the problem began.
In the playground, Jax and Marco have decided to play a new game. They both get down on all fours and begin crawling around. Jax waves to get her attention, and she walks her avatar over to him. “Ana,” he says, “you know ants talk each other?” They’ve been watching nature videos on the television.
“Yes, I’ve heard that,” she says. “You know we know what they saying?”
“You do?”
“We talk ant language. Like this: imp fimp deemul weetul.”
Marco replies, “Beedul jeedul lomp womp.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Not tell you. Only we know.”
“We and ants,” adds Marco.
And then Jax and Marco both laugh, mo mo mo, and Ana smiles. The digients run off t
o play something else, and she goes back to browsing the forums.
FROM: Helen Costas
Do you think we need to worry about our digients being copied?
FROM: Stuart Gust
Who would bother? If there were a big demand for digients, Blue Gamma wouldn’t have gone out of business. Remember what happened with the shelters? You literally couldn’t give a digient away. And it’s not as if they’ve gotten any more popular since then.
In the playground, Jax exclaims, “I win!” He’s been playing some vaguely defined game with Marco. He rocks side to side in triumph.
“Okay,” says Marco, “your turn.” He sorts through the toys around him until he finds a kazoo and then hands it to Jax.
Jax puts one end of the kazoo in his mouth. He gets on his knees and uses the kazoo to rhythmically poke at Marco’s midsection, around where his navel would be if he had one.
Ana asks, “Jax, what are you doing?”
Jax takes the kazoo from his mouth. “Make Marco blowjob.”
“What? Where did you see a blowjob?”
“On TV yesterday.”
She looks at the television; right now it’s showing a child’s cartoon. The television is supposed to draw its content from a children’s video repository; someone is probably inserting adult material using the IFF hack. She decides not to make a big deal of it to the digients. “Okay,” she says, and Jax and Marco resume their mime. She posts a note about the video tampering to the forums, and continues reading.
A few minutes later, Ana hears an unfamiliar chittering sound, and sees that Jax has gone to watch television; all of the digients are watching it. She moves her avatar so she can see what’s drawn their attention.
On the virtual television, a person wearing a clown avatar is holding down a digient wearing a puppy avatar, and hitting the digient’s legs repeatedly with a hammer. The digient’s legs can’t break because its avatar wasn’t designed to account for that, and it probably can’t scream for similar reasons, but the digient must be in agony, and the chittering sounds are the only way it can express that.
Ana turns the virtual television off.
“What happen?” asks Jax, and several of the other digients repeat the question, but she doesn’t answer. Instead she opens a window on her physical screen to read the description accompanying the video that was playing. It’s not an animation, but a recording of a griefer using the IFF hack to disable the pain circuit-breakers on a digient’s body. Even worse, the digient isn’t an anonymous new instantiation, but someone’s beloved pet, illicitly copied using the IFF hack. The digient’s name is Nyyti, and Ana realizes that he’s a classmate in Jax’s reading lessons.
Whoever copied Nyyti could have a copy of Jax, too. Or he could be making a copy of Jax right now. Given Data Earth’s distributed architecture, Jax is vulnerable if the griefer is anywhere on the same continent as the playground.
Jax is still asking about what they saw on the television. Ana opens a window listing all the Data Earth processes running under her account, finds the one that represents Jax, and suspends it. In the playground, Jax freezes in midsentence and then vanishes.
“What happen Jax?” asks Marco.
Ana opens another window for Derek’s processes–they granted each other full privileges for their accounts–and suspends Marco and Polo. She doesn’t have full privileges for the other digients, though, and she’s not sure what to do next. She can see that they’re agitated and confused. They don’t have the fight-or-flight response that animals have, nor do they have any reactions triggered by smelling pheromones or hearing distress calls, but they do have an analog of mirror neurons. It helps them learn and socialize, but it also means they’re distressed by what they saw on the television.
Everyone who brought their digient to the playdate granted Ana permission to make the digients take a nap, but their processes would still be running even if they were asleep, meaning they’d still be at risk of being copied. She decides to move the digients to a small island, away from the major continents, in hopes that there’s less chance that a griefer will be scanning processes there.
“Okay everybody,” she announces, “we’re going to the zoo.” She opens a portal to the visitor’s center of the Pangaea archipelago and ushers the digients through it. The visitor’s center appears to be empty, but she’s not taking any chances. She forces the digients to sleep and then sends messages to all their owners, telling them where they can pick up their digients. She keeps her avatar with them while she goes on the forums to warn everyone else.
Over the next hour the other owners arrive to pick up their digients, while Ana watches the discussion on the forums bloom like algae. There’s outrage and threats of lawsuits against various parties. Some gamers take the position that digient owners’ complaints should take a backseat to their own because digients have no monetary value, igniting a flame war. Ana ignores most of it, looking for information about the response from Daesan Digital, the company that runs the Data Earth platform. Eventually there’s solid news:
FROM: Enrique Beltran
Daesan has an upgrade to Data Earth’s security architecture that they say will fix the breach. It was going to be part of next year’s update, but they’re bumping it up because of what’s been happening. They can’t give us a schedule for when it’ll be done. Until it is, everyone better keep your digients suspended.
FROM: Maria Zheng
There’s another option. Lisma Gunawan is setting up a private island, and she’s only going to allow approved code to run on it. You won’t be able to use anything you’ve bought recently, but Neuroblast digients will run fine. Contact her if you want to be put on the visitor list.
Ana sends a request to Lisma, and gets an automated reply promising news when the island is ready. Ana’s not set up to run a local instance of the Data Earth environment herself, but she does have another option. She spends an hour configuring her system to run a completely local instance of the Neuroblast engine; without a Data Earth portal, she has to load Jax’s saved state manually, but eventually she’s able to get Jax running with the robot body.
“–turn off television?” He stops, realizing his surroundings have changed. “What happen?”
“It’s okay, Jax.” He sees the body he’s wearing. “I in outside world.” He looks at her.
“You suspend me?”
“Yes, I’m sorry. I know I said I wouldn’t, but I had to.”
Plaintively, he asks, “Why?”
Ana’s embarrassed by how hard she’s hugging the robot body. “I’m trying to keep you safe.”
#
A month later, Data Earth gets its security upgrade. The IFF disclaims any responsibility for what griefers do with the information they published, saying that every freedom has the potential to be abused, but they shift their attention to other projects. For a while, at least, the public continents in Data Earth are safe for digients again, but the damage has been done. There’s no way to track down copies that are being run privately, and even if no one releases videos of digient torture anymore, many Neuroblast owners can’t bear the thought that such things are going on; they suspend their digients permanently and leave the user group.
At the same time, other people are excited by the availability of copied digients, particularly of digients who’ve been taught to read. Members of an AI research institute have wondered whether digients could form their own culture if left in a hothouse, but they never had access to digients who could read, and they weren’t interested in raising any themselves. Now the researchers assemble copies of as many text-literate digients as they can, mostly Origami digients since they have the best reading skills, but they mix in a few Neuroblast ones as well. They put them on private islands furnished with text and software libraries, and started running the islands at hothouse speeds. The discussion forums teem with speculation about cities in a bottle, microcosms on a tabletop.
Derek thinks the idea is ridiculous–a bunch of aban
doned children aren’t going to become autodidacts no matter how many books they’re left with–so he’s not surprised to read about the results: every test population eventually goes feral. The digients don’t have enough aggression in them to descend into “Lord of the Flies”-style savagery; they simply divide into loose, non-hierarchical troops. Initially, each troop’s daily routines are held together by force of habit–they read and use eduware when it’s time for school, they go to the playgrounds to play–but without reinforcement these rituals unravel like cheap twine. Every object becomes a toy, every space a playground, and gradually the digients lose what skills they had. They develop a kind of culture of their own, perhaps what wild digient troops would demonstrate if they’d evolved on their own in the biomes.
As interesting as that is, it’s a far cry from the nascent civilization that the researchers were seeking, so they try redesigning the islands. They try to increase the variety of the test populations, asking owners of educated digients to donate copies; to Derek’s surprise, they actually receive a few from owners who have grown tired of paying for reading lessons and are satisfied that the feral digients aren’t suffering. The researchers devise various incentives–all automated, so no real-time interaction is required–to keep the digients motivated. They impose hardships so that indolence has a cost. While a few of the revised test populations avoid going feral, none ever begin the climb toward technological sophistication.
The researchers conclude that there’s something missing in the Origami genome, but as far as Derek’s concerned, the fault lies with them. They’re blind to a simple truth: complex minds can’t develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any other. And minds don’t grow the way weeds do, flourishing under indifferent attention; otherwise all children in orphanages would thrive. For a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds. That cultivation is what he’s trying to provide for Marco and Polo.
Marco and Polo occasionally get into arguments, but they don’t stay angry for very long. A few days ago, however, the two of them got into a fight over whether it was fair that Marco had been instantiated earlier than Polo, and for some reason it escalated. The two digients have hardly spoken to each other since, so Derek’s relieved when they approach him as a pair.
