“That sounds like a good idea,” says Ana.
He’s surprised. “You really think so? I’d have thought you’d prefer the animal avatars.”
“Everyone here thinks of the digients as animals,” she says. “The thing is, the digients don’t behave like any real animal. They’ve got this nonanimal quality to them, so it feels like we’re dressing them in circus costumes when we try to make them look like monkeys or pandas.”
It hurts a little to hear his carefully crafted avatars compared to circus costumes. His face must give him away, because she adds, “Not that the average person would notice. It’s just that I’ve spent a lot more time with animals than most people.”
“That’s okay,” he says. “I appreciate hearing a different perspective.”
“Sorry. The avatars look great, honestly. I like the tiger cub especially.”
“It’s fine. Really.”
She gives an apologetic wave and walks down the hall while Derek thinks about what she said.
Perhaps he’s gotten too wrapped up in the animal avatars, so much so that he’s begun thinking of the digients as something they’re not. Ana’s right, of course, that the digients aren’t animals any more than they’re traditional robots, and who’s to say that either analogy is more accurate than the other? If he works from the premise that a robotic avatar is just as good a way for this new life-form to express itself as an animal avatar, then perhaps he’ll be able to design an avatar he’s happy with.
A year later, and Blue Gamma is days away from its big product launch. Ana is at work in her cubicle, across the aisle from Robyn’s; they sit with their backs to each other, but right now both of their video screens are displaying Data Earth, where their avatars stand side by side. Nearby, a dozen digients scamper around a playground, chasing one another over a tiny bridge or under it, climbing up a short flight of steps, and sliding down a ramp. These digients are the release candidates; in a few days, they—or close approximations thereof—will be available for purchase to customers throughout the overlapping realms of the real world and Data Earth.
Rather than teach the digients any new behaviors at this late date, Ana and Robyn are supposed to keep the digients in practice with what they’ve already learned. They’re in the middle of a session when Mahesh, one of the cofounders of Blue Gamma, walks past their cubicles. He pauses to watch. “Don’t mind me; keep doing what you’re doing. What’s today’s skill?”
“Shape identification,” says Robyn. She instantiates a scattering of colored blocks on the ground in front of her avatar. To one of the digients, she says, “Come here, Lolly.” A lion cub toddles over from the playground.
Meanwhile Ana calls over Jax, whose avatar is a neo-Victorian robot made of polished copper. Derek did a great job designing it, from the proportions of the limbs to the shape of the face; Ana thinks Jax is adorable. She likewise instantiates a selection of colored blocks with different shapes and directs Jax’s attention to them.
“See the blocks, Jax? What shape is the blue one?”
“Tringle,” says Jax.
“Good. What shape is the red one?”
“Squir.”
“Good. What shape is the green one?”
“Circle.”
“Good job, Jax.” Ana gives him a food pellet, which he devours with enthusiasm.
“Jax smirt,” says Jax.
“Lolly smirt too,” Lolly volunteers.
Ana smiles and rubs them on the backs of their heads. “Yes, you’re both very smart.”
“Both smirt,” says Jax.
“That’s what I like to see,” says Mahesh.
The release candidates are the final distillation of countless trials, the cream of the crop in terms of teachability. It’s partly been a search for intelligence, but just as much it’s been a search for temperament, the personality that won’t frustrate customers. One element of that is the ability to play well with others. The development team has tried to reduce hierarchical behavior in the digients—Blue Gamma wants to sell a pet that owners won’t need to continually reassert their dominance over—but that doesn’t mean competition never arises. The digients love attention, and if one notices that Ana’s giving praise to another, it tries to get in on the action. Most of the time this is fine, but whenever a digient seemed particularly resentful of its peers or of Ana, she would flag it, and its specific genome would be excluded from the next generation. The process has felt a bit like breeding dogs, but more like working in an enormous test kitchen, baking endless batches of brownies and sampling each one’s toothsomeness to find the perfect recipe.
The current instances of the release candidates will be kept as mascots, and copies will be available for purchase, but the expectation is that most people will buy younger digients, when they’re still prelinguistic. Teaching your digient how to talk is half the fun; the mascots primarily serve as examples of the kind of results you can expect. Selling prelinguistic digients also allows them to be sold in non-English-speaking markets, even though Blue Gamma only has enough staff to raise mascots in English.
Ana sends Jax back to the playground and calls over a panda-bear digient named Marco. She’s about to start testing his shape recognition when Mahesh points to one corner of her video screen. “Hey, look at that.” A couple of digients are on the hill next to the playground, rolling down the slope.
“Hey, cool,” she says. “I’ve never seen them do that before.” She walks her avatar over to the hill, with Jax and Marco following and then joining the rest of the digients. The first time Jax tries it, he stops rolling almost immediately, but after a little practice he’s able to make it all the way down the hill. He does that a few times and then runs back to Ana.
“Ana watch?” asks Jax. “Jax spinning lying din!”
“Yes, I saw you! You were rolling down the hill!”
“Rilling din hill!”
“You did great.” She rubs him on the back of his head again.
Jax runs back and resumes rolling. Lolly has also taken to the new activity with enthusiasm. Once she’s reached the bottom of the hill, she keeps rolling across the flat ground, and then hits one of the playground bridges.
“Eeh, eeh, eeh,” Lolly says. “Fuck.”
Suddenly everyone’s attention is on Lolly. “Where did she learn that?” asks Mahesh.
Ana toggles her microphone off and walks her avatar over to comfort Lolly. “I don’t know,” she says. “She must have overheard it.”
“Well, we can’t sell a digient that says ‘fuck.’”
“I’m on it,” says Robyn. In a separate window on her own screen, she brings up the archives of their training sessions and runs a search on the audio track. “Looks like that’s the first time any of the digients has said it. As for when any of us has said it…” The three of them watch as search results accumulate in the window; it appears that the culprit is Stefan, one of the trainers from Blue Gamma’s Australian office. Blue Gamma has people working in Australia and England to train the digients when the West Coast office is closed; the digients don’t need to sleep—or, more precisely, the integration processing that’s their analog to sleep can be run at high speed—so they can be trained twenty-four hours a day.
They review the video footage of every time Stefan said the word “fuck” during a training session. The most dramatic outburst is from three days ago; it’s hard to be sure from watching his Data Earth avatar, but it sounds like he banged his knee against his desk. There are previous examples going weeks back, but none as loud or prolonged.
“What do you want us to do?” asks Robyn.
The trade-off is apparent. This close to the release date, they don’t have time to repeat weeks of training; should they gamble that the earlier utterances didn’t make an impression on the digients? Mahesh thinks for a moment, and then decides. “Okay. Roll them back three days and pick up from there.”