‘What are you doing?’ she asks. He looks at the fabber. There is something wrong with it: it is sputtering out gobs that look like large boogers. Probably he should not have fed the tree branch into it. But the Chimney Princess wanted a face made from painted wood.
‘Nothing,’ he mutters.
‘Tell me,’ she begs.
‘You are not going to have the time to listen,’ he chides her.
‘Little kvetinka, I have almost half an hour,’ she says, eyes dull with fatigue. She tousles his hair, like she always does. He does not want her to notice he is wearing the beemee again, so he brushes her hand away.
‘It’s just you are early,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t finished. It’s important.’
‘Shall I go away?’ she asks, a hurt look on her face. ‘You can continue if you want.’
‘I guess it’s all right,’ he says. Her face lights up. ‘It looks very exciting,’ she says. ‘Can we do it together? Is there anything I can do to help?’
‘I’m making bodies for my friends,’ he says.
‘Baby, we talked about this,’ her mother says. ‘They can’t have bodies. They are not real.’
Of course he knows that the lightkraken and the others are not real in the same way he is: he asked the watson to explain to him about imaginary friends and paracosms. The idea that they would all fade away as he got older just seemed unfair. So he has been tuning the beemee to the parts of his brain the watson says they live in, to help them to get out. But he decides it’s not a good idea to tell that to his mother.
‘Yes, they are,’ he says firmly. He pushes out his lower lip in a way that tells his mother that the conversation is over. She is smart enough to pick up on it and sighs. ‘Whatever you say, dear. Can we play with them, then?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘They don’t like you. They went away.’
She looks around. ‘I’m sorry, sweetie. What can I do to make it up to them?’
She has the haunted look in her eyes that means that she is already thinking about work. Matjek asked the watson what his mother does but did not really understand the answer: quantum hedge funds and corporate avatars and doing what the shareholders vote for you to do. It sounded a bit like having imaginary friends except letting them control you, instead of the other way around.
‘They want to see Daddy,’ Matjek says.
‘Your father has promised to spend time with you tomorrow,’ his mother says.
‘I want him now,’ Matjek says. His friends join him in an angry chorus inside his head.
‘He is only going to be able to make it tomorrow, sweetheart. He is very busy with his show.’
It’s like there is a bell ringing in Matjek’s head, suddenly. The bell that wakes up the Flower Prince.
‘Now. Now. Now.’ He purses his lips and looks away from his mother.
‘Mommy’s holiday is almost over, sweetie. Are you sure we can’t do something together?’
‘I want Daddy,’ Matjek says. His mother sighs. ‘All right. I’ll call him.’ She looks pale. ‘I’m going to have to get ready for work now, sweetie. Be good.’ She almost touches his hair again, sees his expression and pulls her hand back. Then her ghosts take over and she walks away, giving him one more look before her eyes fill with flickering numbers.
You were mean to her, the Chimney Princess chides him, brown eyes sad in her wooden face beneath her lopsided crown. She sits on the grass and smooths her sooty dress.
‘That’s the only way she listens to me,’ Matjek says. He looks first at his waiting friends, then at the sputtering fabber. He kicks at it. It spits out one more misshapen clump of plastic and circuitry and dies.
‘Son,’ says the Green Soldier. ‘There is no point in being upset if you are not prepared to do something about it.’
Matjek looks at the Soldier’s craggy face. He is crouched on the ground, leaning on a tree, a rifle across his knees.
‘What should I do?’ Matjek asks.
‘Let’s go find your dad,’ the Chimney Princess says.
Matjek is not allowed to look at his father’s beemee feeds. But he has already figured out how to pretend to be his mother. The watson shows him a timeline of his father’s activities. Like all big beemee stars, there are whole fan communities around tracking him, distributed computing engines running Bojan Chen recognition software. The watson condenses discussions for him:
But is it not just a glorified form of pornography? No, it’s poetry of experience. He could be anywhere, he could be anyone. That’s what you pay him for, making the mundane extraordinary.
Lots of the beemee stars do extreme things: benji jumps, hot air balloon rides. The big stars go for having sex in a drop capsule during an orbital dive from a space station. But Matjek’s father is credited with turning the beemee-experience transfer via transcranial magnetic stimulation – into an art form. To be seen through Bojan Chen’s eyes is something special.
Still using his mom’s password, Matjek queries the watson for his father’s calendar. He is not far. He is going to be in a park in the city, looking at wet leaves. So that’s the location. The problem is getting there.
‘How can I sneak past the watson?’ he asks his friends. ‘I’m not going to get very far. Mom will find out. And then there is no point.’
‘Don’t worry, son,’ the Green Soldier says. ‘You just leave it to us.’
The doors open for him. The security system does not see him. He takes the elevator down, the one that usually opens for Mom or the guards, through the three hundred floors. The Chimney Princess whispers to him all the way.
Now, right. Now, left.
Thousands of people, in a shopping centre. Ribbons of light and images in the air around them. Shop windows sending avatars to materialise in front of them, telling them about toys and games. A camera drone whizzes past him, then swings around. Soon, there are several of them. He whispers to the Flower Prince and they fall down to the floor. Then he runs, the Green Soldier guiding his steps.
It takes a long time to find the park, but if the calendar was right, there is still time. And there, on the bench, looking down, is his father. Shouting, Matjek runs to him.
Matjek’s father pushes up his goggles, swirls his red cape aside and grins at Matjek. There is glitter around his eyes. His thick blond hair covers his beemee. He swoops Matjek up in his arms.
‘Matjek! What are you doing here?’ He uses the formal tone that means he is on the beemee feed but Matjek does not care, he is having too much fun.
‘I came to find you,’ he says.
‘That’s great. Sit with me.’ He pats Matjek on the back.
‘Have you been reading?’
‘No,’ he says.
‘You should, it’s different from beemee. Harder work, but more rewarding.’ He grins at Matjek.
Then his eyes widen. ‘Is that ours?’ he whispers, not to Matjek, but to someone else.
There is a tiny dragonfly hovering in the air, all gleaming black plastic and metal, a couple of metres away. Its eye lenses are bright.
‘They saw me in the shopping centre,’ Matjek says. ‘It’s kind of pretty—’
There is a clap of thunder and a burst of white heat. Matjek’s father throws them down to the ground. Matjek hits his head and feels his father’s weight falling over him, crushing all the air from his lungs and the light from his eyes—
He wakes up in the garden. Everything feels distant and strange, like a dream. His mother is there, and she seems bigger, somehow. She is not wearing her work face.
‘Can you hear me, little one?’ she says. He nods.
‘What happened?’ he asks.