Instead, it turns out that the mascots are fascinated by textures. Surfaces in Data Earth have a lot of visual detail but no tactile qualities beyond a coefficient of friction; very few players use controllers that convey tactition, so most vendors don’t bother implementing texture for their environmental surfaces. Now that the digients can feel surfaces in the real world, they find novelty in the simplest things. When Marco returns from his turn in the robot body, he can’t stop talking about the carpets and furniture upholstery; when Polo is wearing the body, he spends all his time feeling the gritty nonskid treads in the building’s stairwells. Not surprisingly, the sensor pads in the robot’s fingers are the first components that need replacement.
The next thing Marco notices is how Derek’s mouth differs from his own. Digient mouths bear only a superficial resemblance to human mouths; although their lips move when they talk, the digients’ speech generators aren’t physics-based. Marco wants to learn about the mechanics of speech and keeps asking to put his fingers in Derek’s mouth when he talks. Polo is astonished to discover that food actually passes down Derek’s throat when he swallows, rather than simply vanishing the way digient food does. Derek had feared that the digients might be distressed to learn the boundaries of their physicality, but instead they just find it funny.
An unexpected benefit of seeing the digients in a robot body is that it provides a closer view of their faces than is common when watching them in Data Earth. As a result, the work that Derek has put in on the digients’ facial expressions is easier to appreciate. One day Ana comes to his cubicle and says, excited, “You are amazing!”
“Er…thanks?”
“I just saw Marco make the most hilarious expressions. You’ve got to see them. May I?” Ana gestures at his keyboard, and Derek rolls his chair back from his desk so she can reach it. She opens a couple of video windows on his screen: one is a recording of the robot body’s camera, showing the digient’s point of view, while the other is a recording of what the helmet screen was displaying. Judging by the former, they were out in the parking lot again.
“He went on one of SaruMech’s field trips last week,” explains Ana, “and of course he loved it, so now he’s bored with the office park.”
On the screen, Marco says, “Want go park we go field trip.”
“You can have just as much fun here.” On the screen, Ana gestures for Marco to follow her.
The image swings back and forth as Marco shakes his head. “Not same fun. Park more fun. Show you.”
“We can’t go to that park. It’s very far away; we would have to travel a long time to get there.”
“Just open portal.”
“Sorry, Marco, I can’t open portals here in the outside world.”
“Now watch his face,” says Ana.
“You try. Try hard please please.” Marco forms his panda-bear face into a pleading expression; Derek hasn’t seen it before, and it makes him laugh in surprise.
Ana laughs, too, and says, “Keep watching.”
On the screen she says, “It doesn’t matter how hard I try, Marco; the outside world doesn’t have portals. Only Data Earth has portals.”
“Then we go Data Earth, open portal there.”
“That would work for you if there’s a body there for you to wear, but I can’t wear a different body, I’d have to move this one, and that would take a long time.”
Marco thinks about that, and Derek’s delighted to see that the digient’s face actually suggests his incredulity. “Outside world dumb,” the digient announces.
Derek and Ana burst out into laughter. She closes the windows and says, “You did some terrific work there.”
“Thanks. And thanks for showing that to me; it made my day.”
“Glad to do it.”
It’s nice to be reminded that his earlier work is bearing fruit, because most of Derek’s recent assignments aren’t nearly as interesting. The Origami and Fabergé digients have begun to pop up in a wider variety of avatars, such as baby dragons, gryphons, and other mythological creatures, so Blue Gamma wants to offer similar avatars for the Neuroblast digients. The new avatars are straightforward modifications of the existing ones, requiring nothing new in terms of their facial expressions.
In fact, his newest assignment requires him to create an avatar with no facial expressions at all. A group of artificial-life hobbyists was impressed by the potential of the Neuroblast genome and, rather than wait for real intelligence to evolve on its own in the biomes, commissioned Blue Gamma to design an intelligent alien species for them. The developers engineered a personality taxon that was miles away from the breeds that Blue Gamma sells, and Derek’s designing an avatar with three legs, a pair of tentacles instead of arms, and a prehensile tail. Some of the hobbyists want an even stranger body plan, as well as an environment with different physics, but he reminded them that they’ll have to wear the avatars themselves when raising the digients, and controlling tentacles will be difficult enough.
The hobbyists have named their new species Xenotherians and set up a private continent called Data Mars on which they intend to create an alien culture from scratch. Derek’s curious about it but hasn’t been able to visit, because the only language allowed in the presence of the digients is a custom dialect of the artificial language Lojban. He wonders how long the hobbyists will be able to stick with their project. Aside from the enormous barrier to entry, raising the Xenotherians won’t offer pleasures like the one that he and Ana just got from watching Marco. The rewards will be purely intellectual, and over the long term, will that be enough?
3
Over the course of the following year, the forecast for Blue Gamma’s future changes from sunny to decidedly cloudy. Sales to new customers have slowed down, but worse than that, the revenue generated by the food-dispensing software has fallen: more and more of the existing customers are suspending their digients.
The problem is that as the Neuroblast digients leave infancy behind, they’re growing too demanding. In breeding them Blue Gamma aimed for a combination of smart and obedient, but with the unpredictability inherent in any genome, even a digital one, it turns out the developers missed their target. As in an overly difficult game, the balance of challenge and reward that the digients provide is tilting beyond what most people consider fun, and so they suspend them. But unlike dog owners who bought a breed they were unprepared for, Blue Gamma’s customers can’t be blamed for not having done their homework; the company itself didn’t know that the digients would evolve in this way.
Some volunteers have begun maintaining rescue shelters, accepting unwanted digients in hopes of matching them with new owners. These volunteers practice a variety of strategies; some keep the digients running without interruption, while others restore the digients from their last checkpoint every few days, to keep them from developing abandonment issues that might make it harder for them to get adopted. Neither strategy is enormously successful at attracting prospective owners. There is occasionally a person who wants to try a digient without having to raise one from infancy, but these adoptions never last for long, and the shelters essentially become digient warehouses.