“I dunno,” Jamie said. He didn’t want to talk about his memory of his family being turned to stone, the eerie glowing figure floating before them. He didn’t want to remember how everyone said it was just a dream.
He didn’t want to talk about the suspicions that had never quite gone away.
“That stuff was weird, Digit,” Becky said. “It gave me the creeps. Let me know before you start talking about stuff like that again.”
“Why do you call me Digit?” Jamie asked.
Becky smirked. “No reason,” she said.
“Jamie’s home!” Mister Jeepers’s voice warbled from the sky. Jamie looked up to see Mister Jeepers doing joyful aerial loops overhead. “Master Jamie’s home at last!”
“Where shall we go?” Jamie asked.
Their lessons for the day were over, and he and Becky were leaving the little red schoolhouse. Becky, as usual, had done very well on her lessons, better than her older brother, and Jamie felt a growing sense of annoyance. At least he was still better at Latin and computer science.
“I dunno,” Becky said. “Where do you want to go?”
“How about Pandaland? We could ride the Whoosh Machine.”
Becky wrinkled her face. “I’m tired of that kid stuff,” she said.
Jamie looked at her. “But you’re a kid.”
“I’m not as little as you, Digit,” Becky said.
Jamie glared. This was too much. “You’re my little sister! I’m bigger than you!” “No, you’re not,” Becky said. She stood before him, her arms flung out in exasperation. “Just notice something for once, will you?”
Jamie bit back on his temper and looked, and he saw that Becky was, in fact, bigger than he was. And older-looking. Puzzlement replaced his fading anger.
“How did you get so big?” Jamie asked.
“I grew. And you didn’t grow. Not as fast anyway.”
“I don’t understand.”
Becky’s lip curled. “Ask Mom or Dad. Just ask them.” Her expression turned stony. “Just don’t believe everything they tell you.”
“What do you mean?”
Becky looked angry for a moment, and then her expression relaxed. “Look,” she said, “just go to Pandaland and have fun, okay? You don’t need me for that. I want to go and make some calls to my friends.”
“What friends?”
Becky looked angry again. “My friends. It doesn’t matter who they are!”
“Fine!” Jamie shouted. “I can have fun by myself!”
Becky turned and began to walk home, her legs scissoring against the background of the green grass. Jamie glared after her, then turned and began the walk to Pandaland.
He did all his favorite things, rode the Ferris wheel and the Whoosh Machine, watched Rizzio the Strongman and the clowns. He enjoyed himself, but his enjoyment felt hollow. He found himself watching, watching himself at play, watching himself enjoying the rides.
Watching himself not grow as fast as his little sister.
Watching himself wondering whether or not to ask his parents about why that was.
He had the idea that he wouldn’t like their answers.
He didn’t see as much of Becky after that. They would share lessons, and then Becky would lock herself in her room to talk to her friends on the phone.
Becky didn’t have a telephone in her room, though. He looked once when she wasn’t there.
After a while, Becky stopped accompanying him for lessons. She’d got ahead of him on everything except Latin, and it was too hard for Jamie to keep up.
After that, he hardly saw Becky at all. But when he saw her, he saw that she was still growing fast. Her clothing was different, and her hair. She’d started wearing makeup.
He didn’t know whether he liked her anymore or not.
It was Jamie’s birthday. He was eleven years old, and Momma and Daddy and Becky had all come for a party. Don Quixote and Princess Gigunda serenaded Jamie from outside the window, accompanied by La Duchesa on Spanish guitar. There was a big cake with eleven candles. Momma gave Jamie a chart of the stars. When he touched a star, a voice would appear telling Jamie about the star, and lines would appear on the chart showing any constellation the star happened to belong to. Daddy gave Jamie a car, a miniature Mercedes convertible, scaled to Jamie’s size, which he could drive around the country and which he could use in the Circus Maximus when the chariots weren’t racing. His sister gave Jamie a kind of lamp stand that would project lights and moving patterns on the walls and ceiling when the lights were off. “Listen to music when you use it,” she said.
“Thank you, Becky,” Jamie said.
“Becca,” she said. “My name is Becca now. Try to remember.”
“Okay,” Jamie said. “Becca.”
Becky—Becca—looked at Momma. “I’m dying for a cigarette,” she said. “Can I go, uh, out for a minute?”
Momma hesitated, but Daddy looked severe. “Becca,” she said, “this is Jamie’s birthday. We’re all here to celebrate. So why don’t we all eat some cake and have a nice time?”
“It’s not even real cake,” Becca said. “It doesn’t taste like real cake.”
“It’s a nice cake,” Daddy insisted. “Why don’t we talk about this later? Let’s just have a special time for Jamie.”
Becca stood up from the table. “For the Digit?” she said. “Why are we having a good time for Jamie? He’s not even a real person!” She thumped herself on the chest. “I’m a real person!” she shouted. “Why don’t we ever have special times for me?”
But Daddy was on his feet by that point and shouting, and Momma was trying to get everyone to be quiet, and Becca was shouting back, and suddenly a determined look entered her face and she just disappeared—suddenly, she wasn’t there anymore, there was only just air.
Jamie began to cry. So did Momma. Daddy paced up and down and swore, and then he said, “I’m going to go get her.” Jamie was afraid he’d disappear like Becca, and he gave a cry of despair, but Daddy didn’t disappear, he just stalked out of the dining room and slammed the door behind him.
Momma pulled Jamie onto her lap and hugged him. “Don’t worry, Jamie,” she said. “Becky just did that to be mean.”
“What happened?” Jamie asked.
“Don’t worry about it.” Momma stroked his hair. “It was just a mean trick.”
“She’s growing up,” Jamie said. “She’s grown faster than me and I don’t under-stand.”
“Wait till Daddy gets back,” Momma said, “and we’ll talk about it.”
But Daddy was clearly in no mood for talking when he returned, without Becca. “We’re going to have fun,” he snarled, and reached for the knife to cut the cake.
The cake tasted like ashes in Jamie’s mouth. When the Don and Princess Gigunda, Mister Jeepers and Rizzio the Strongman, came into the dining room and sang “Happy Birthday,” it was all Jamie could do to hold back the tears.
Afterward, he drove his new car to the Circus Maximus and drove as fast as he could on the long oval track. The car really wouldn’t go very fast. The bleachers on either side were empty, and so was the blue sky above.
Maybe it was a puzzle, he thought, like Princess Gigunda’s love life. Maybe all he had to do was follow the right clue, and everything would be fine.
What’s the moral they’re trying to teach? he wondered.
But all he could do was go in circles, around and around the empty stadium.
“Hey, Digit. Wake up.”
Jamie came awake suddenly with a stifled cry. The room whirled around him. He blinked, realized that the whirling came from the colored lights projected by his birthday present, Becca’s lamp stand.
Becca was sitting on his bedroom chair, a cigarette in her hand. Her feet, in the steel-capped boots she’d been wearing lately, were propped up on the bed.
“Are you awake, Jamie?” It was Selena’s voice. “Would you like me to sing you a lullaby?”
“Fuck off, Selena,” Becca said. “
Get out of here. Get lost.”
Selena cast Becca a mournful look, then sailed backward, out of the window, riding a beam of moonlight to her pale home in the sky. Jamie watched her go, and felt as if a part of himself was going with her, a part that he would never see again.
“Selena and the others have to do what you tell them, mostly,” Becca said. “Of course, Mom and Dad wouldn’t tell you that.”
Jamie looked at Becca. “What’s happening?” he said. “Where did you go today?”
Colored lights swam over Becca’s face. “I’m sorry if I spoiled your birthday, Digit. I just got tired of the lies, you know? They’d kill me if they knew I was here now, talking to you.” Becca took a draw on her cigarette, held her breath for a second or two, then exhaled. Jamie didn’t see or taste any smoke.
“You know what they wanted me to do?” she said. “Wear a little girl’s body, so I wouldn’t look any older than you, and keep you company in that stupid school for seven hours a day.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t do it. They yelled and yelled, but I was damned if I would.”
“I don’t understand.”
Becca flicked invisible ashes off her cigarette and looked at Jamie for a long time. Then she sighed.
“Do you remember when you were in the hospital?” she said.
Jamie nodded. “I was really sick.”
“I was so little then, I don’t really remember it very well,” Becca said. “But the point is—” She sighed again. “The point is that you weren’t getting well. So they decided to—” She shook her head. “Dad took advantage of his position at the University, and the fact that he’s been a big donor. They were doing AI research, and the neurology department was into brain modeling, and they needed a test subject, and—Well, the idea is, they’ve got some of your tissue, and when they get cloning up and running, they’ll put you back in—” She saw Jamie’s stare, then shook her head. “I’ll make it simple, okay?”
She took her feet off the bed and leaned closer to Jamie. A shiver ran up his back at her expression. “They made a copy of you. An electronic copy. They scanned your brain and built a holographic model of it inside a computer, and they put it in a virtual environment, and—” She sat back, took a drag on her cigarette. “And here you are,” she said.
Jamie looked at her. “I don’t understand.”
Colored lights gleamed in Becca’s eyes. “You’re in a computer, okay? And you’re a program. You know what that is, right? From computer class? And the program is sort of in the shape of your mind. Don Quixote and Princess Gigunda are programs, too. And Mrs. Winkle down at the schoolhouse is usually a program, but if she needs to teach something complex, then she’s an education major from the University.”
Jamie felt as if he’d just been hollowed out, a void inside his ribs. “I’m not real?” he said. “I’m not a person?”
“Wrong,” Becca said. “You’re real, alright. You’re the apple of our parents’ eye.” Her tone was bitter. “Programs are real things,” she said, “and yours was a real hack, you know, absolute cutting-edge state-of-the-art technoshit. And the computer that you’re in is real, too—I’m interfaced with it right now, down in the family room—we have to wear suits with sensors and a helmet with scanners and stuff. I hope to fuck they don’t hear me talking to you down here.”
“But what—” Jamie swallowed hard. How could he swallow if he was just a string of code? “What happened to me? The original me?”
Becca looked cold. “Well,” she said, “you had cancer. You died.”
“Oh.” A hollow wind blew through the void inside him.
“They’re going to bring you back. As soon as the clone thing works out—but this is a government computer you’re in, and there are all these government restrictions on cloning, and—” She shook her head. “Look, Digit,” she said. “You really need to know this stuff, okay?”
“I understand.” Jamie wanted to cry. But only real people cried, he thought, and he wasn’t real. He wasn’t real.
“The program that runs this virtual environment is huge, okay, and you’re a big program, and the University computer is used for a lot of research, and a lot of the research has a higher priority than you do. So you don’t run in real-time—that’s why I’m growing faster than you are. I’m spending more hours being me than you are. And the parents—” She rolled her eyes. “They aren’t making this any better, with their emphasis on normal family life.”
She sucked on her cigarette, then stubbed it out in something invisible. “See, they want us to be this normal family. So we have breakfast together every day, and dinner every night, and spend the evening at the Zoo or in Pandaland or someplace. But the dinner that we eat with you is virtual, it doesn’t taste like anything—the grant ran out before they got that part of the interface right—so we eat this fast-food crap before we interface with you, and then have dinner, all over again with you … Is this making any sense? Because Dad has a job and Mom has a job and I go to school and have friends and stuff, so we really can’t get together every night. So they just close your program file, shut it right down, when they’re not available to interface with you as what Dad calls a ‘family unit,’ and that means that there are a lot of hours, days sometimes, when you’re just not running, you might as well really be dead—” She blinked. “Sorry,” she said. “Anyway, we’re all getting older a lot faster than you are, and it’s not fair to you, that’s what I think. Especially because the University computer runs fastest at night, because people don’t use them as much then, and you’re pretty much real-time then, so interfacing with you would be almost normal, but Mom and Dad sleep then, ‘cuz they have day jobs, and they can’t have you running around unsupervised in here, for God’s sake, they think it’s unsafe or something …”
She paused, then reached into her shirt pocket for another cigarette. “Look,” she said, “I’d better get out of here before they figure out I’m talking to you. And then they’ll pull my access codes or something.” She stood, brushed something off her jeans. “Don’t tell the parents about this stuff right away. Otherwise they might erase you, and load a backup that doesn’t know shit. Okay?”
And she vanished, as she had that afternoon.
Jamie sat in the bed, hugging his knees. He could feel his heart beating in the darkness. How can a program have a heart? he wondered.
Dawn slowly encroached upon the night, and then there was Mister Jeepers, turning lazy cartwheels in the air, his red face leering in the window.
“Jamie’s awake!” he said. “Jamie’s awake and ready for a new day!”
“Fuck off,” Jamie said, and buried his face in the blanket.
Jamie asked to learn more about computers and programming. Maybe, he thought, he could find clues there, he could solve the puzzle. His parents agreed, happy to let him follow his interests.
After a few weeks, he moved into E Castillo. He didn’t tell anyone he was going, he just put some of his things in his car, took them up to a tower room, and threw them down on the bed he found there. His mom came to find him when he didn’t come home for dinner.
“It’s dinnertime, Jamie,” she said. “Didn’t you hear the dinner bell?”
“I’m going to stay here for a while,” Jamie said.
“You’re going to get hungry if you con’t come home for dinner.”
“I don’t need food,” Jamie said.
His mom smiled brightly. “You need food if you’re going to keep up with the Whirlikins,” she said.
Jamie looked at her. “I don’t care about that kid stuff anymore,” he said.
When his mother finally turned and left, Jamie noticed that she moved like an old person.
After a while, he got used to the hunger that was programmed into him. It was always there, he was always aware of it, but he got so he could ignore it after a while.
But he couldn’t ignore the need tc sleep. That was just built into the program, and eventually, try though he might, he needed to give in
to it.
He found out he could order the people in the castle around, and he amused himself by making them stand in embarrassing positions, or stand on their heads and sing, or form human pyramids for hours and hours.
Sometimes he made them fight, but they weren’t very good at it.
He couldn’t make Mrs. Winkle at the schoolhouse do whatever he wanted, though, or any of the people who were supposed to teach him things. When it was time for a lesson, Princess Gigunda turned up. She wouldn’t follow his orders, she’d just pick him up and carry him to the little red schoolhouse and plunk him down in his seat.
“You’re not real!” he shouted, kicking in her arms. “You’re not real! And I’m not real, either!”
But they made him learn about the world that was real, about geography and geology and history, although none of it mattered here.
After the first couple times Jamie had been dragged to school, his father met him outside the schoolhouse at the end of the day.
“You need some straightening out,” he said. He looked grim. “You’re part of a family. You belong with us. You’re not going to stay in the castle anymore, you’re going to have a normal family life.”
“No!” Jamie shouted. “I like the castle!”
Dad grabbed him by the arm and began to drag him homeward. Jamie called him a pendejo and a fellator.
“I’ll punish you if I have to,” his father said.
“How are you going to do that?” Jamie demanded. “You gonna erase my file? Load a backup?”
A stunned expression crossed his father’s face. His body seemed to go through a kind of stutter, and the grip on Jamie’s arm grew nerveless. Then his face flushed with anger. “What do you mean?” he demanded.
“Who told you this?”
Jamie wrenched himself free of Dad’s weakened grip.
“I figured it out by myself,” Jamie said. “It wasn’t hard. I’m not a kid anymore.”
“I—” His father blinked, and then his face hardened. “You’re still coming home.”
Jamie backed away. “I want some changes!” he said. “I don’t want to be shut off all the time.”
Dad’s mouth compressed to a thin line. “It was Becky who told you this, wasn’t it?”
The Best of the Best, Volume 1 Page 88
