The user group has briefly discussed the possibility of paying for the port out of their own pockets, but it’s clearly not feasible. As a result, some members are considering the unthinkable:
From: Stuart Gust
I hate being the one to bring this up, but someone has to. What about temporarily suspending the digients for a year or so, until we’ve raised the money for the port?
From: Derek Brooks
You know what happens when anyone suspends their digient. Temporary becomes indefinite becomes permanent.
From: Ana Alvarado
I couldn’t agree more. It’s just too easy to get into perpetual postponement mode. Have you ever heard of anyone restarting a digient that they’d suspended for more than six months? I haven’t.
From: Stuart Gust
But we’re not like those people. They suspended their digients because they were tired of them. We’ll miss our digients every day that they’re suspended; it’ll be an incentive for us to raise the money.
From: Ana Alvarado
If you think suspending Zaff will increase your motivation, go ahead. Keeping Jax awake is what keeps me motivated.
Ana has no doubts when she posts her reply on the forum, but the conversation is more difficult when, a few days later, Jax brings up the issue himself. The two of them are in the private Data Earth, where she is showing him around a new game continent. It’s a classic, one that Ana enjoyed years ago, and it’s recently been released for free, so the user group instantiated a copy for the digients. She tries to convey her enthusiasm for it, pointing out what distinguishes it from the other game continents that the digients have grown bored with, but Jax sees the continent for what it is: yet another attempt to keep him occupied while they wait for Neuroblast to be ported.
As they walk through a deserted medieval town square, Jax says, “Sometimes wish I just be suspended, not have to wait more. Restarted when I can enter Real Space, feel like no time passed.”
The comment catches Ana off guard. None of the digients has access to the user-group forums, so Jax must have come up with the idea on his own. “Do you really want that?” she asks.
“Not really. Want stay awake, know what happening. But sometimes get frustrated.” Then he asks, “You sometimes wish you don’t have take care me?”
She makes sure Jax is looking her in the face before she replies. “My life might be simpler if I didn’t have you to take care of, but it wouldn’t be as happy. I love you, Jax.”
“Love you too.”
Driving home from work, Derek gets a message from Ana saying that she’d been contacted by someone at Polytope, so as soon as he gets home he calls her. “So what happened?” he asks.
Ana looks bemused. “It was a very strange call.”
“Strange how?”
“They’re offering me a job.”
“Really? Doing what?”
“Training their Sophonce digients,” she says. “Because of all my previous experience, they want me to be the team leader. They offered a great salary, three years guaranteed employment, and a signing bonus that’s, frankly, fabulous. There’s a catch, though.”
“Well? Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“All their trainers are required to use InstantRapport.”
Derek’s eyes widen. “You’re kidding,” he says. InstantRapport is one of the smart transdermals, a patch that delivers doses of an oxytocin-opioid cocktail whenever the wearer is in the presence of a specific person. It’s used to strengthen rocky marriages and strained parent-child relationships, and it’s recently become available without a prescription. “What the hell for?”
“They figure that affection will produce better results, and the only way trainers will feel affection for Sophonce digients is with pharmaceutical intervention.”
“Oh, I get it. It’s a way to increase employee productivity.” He knows plenty of people who take nootropics or use transcranial magnetic stimulation to boost their performance at work, but so far no employer has made it a requirement. He shakes his head in disbelief. “If their digients are so hard to love, you would think they’d take a hint and switch to Neuroblast digients.”
“I said something similar to them, but they weren’t interested. I had an idea, though.” Ana leans forward. “I might be able to change their minds if I go work for them.”
“How do you figure?”
“It’d be an opportunity to show Jax to Polytope’s management on an ongoing basis. I could log in to our private Data Earth from work, maybe even bring him in wearing the robot body. What better way to demonstrate how versatile the Neuroblast engine is? And once they realize that, they’ll port it to Real Space.”
Derek considers it. “Assuming they don’t forbid you from spending time with Jax during work hours—”
“Give me some credit. I wouldn’t give them the hard sell; I’d be subtle about it.”
“It might work,” he says. “But they’d make you wear the InstantRapport patch. Is the chance worth that?”
Ana gives a frustrated shrug. “I don’t know. It sure as hell isn’t my first choice. But sometimes we have to take a chance, right? Push things a little.”
He isn’t sure what to say. “What does Kyle think about it?”
She sighs. “He’s totally against it. He doesn’t like the idea of me taking InstantRapport, and he definitely doesn’t think the chances are good enough to justify it.” She pauses, and then says, “But he doesn’t feel the same way about digients that you or I do, so of course he’d say that. For him, the payoff doesn’t seem that big.”
Ana’s clearly expecting support and he obliges, but privately his thoughts are more conflicted. He has reservations about what she’s proposing, but he’s hesitant about saying so.
He hates that he has such thoughts, but on the occasions that Ana has mentioned having difficulties with Kyle, he daydreams about the two of them splitting up. He’s told himself that he would never do anything to drive them apart, but if Kyle doesn’t share Ana’s commitment to the digients, Derek isn’t doing anything wrong by showing that he does. If that suggests to Ana that he’s a better match for her than Kyle, he can’t be blamed for that.
The question is whether he really thinks it’s a good idea for Ana to accept Polytope’s job offer. He’s not sure he does, but until he’s sure, he’s going to be supportive.
After he gets off the phone, Derek logs on to the private Data Earth to spend time with Marco and Polo. They’re playing a game of zero-G racquetball, but descend from the court when they see him.
“Met nice visitors today,” says Marco.
“Really? Do you know who they were?”
“Person name Jennifer, and person name Roland.”
Derek checks the visitor log and is dismayed by what he sees: Jennifer Chase and Roland Michaels are employees of a company called Binary Desire, maker of sex dolls both virtual and physical.
This isn’t the first time the user group has received an inquiry from someone wanting to use the digients for sex. The vast majority of sex dolls are still controlled by conventional software to enact scripted scenarios, but for as long as there have been digients, there have been people trying to have sex with them; the typical procedure is to copy a public-domain digient and reconfigure its reward map so that it enjoys whatever its owner finds arousing. Critics consider it the equivalent of having a dog lick peanut butter off your genitals, and it’s not an unfair comparison, either in terms of the intelligence of the digients or the sophistication of the training. Certainly there aren’t any digients remotely as person-like as Marco or Polo available for sex right now, so the user group gets occasional inquiries from sex-doll makers interested in purchasing copies of the digients. Everyone in the group has agreed that they should ignore such inquiries.