“All right, baby.”
Kim sighed. Then said quickly, in the same breath, as if jumping off a cliff:
“My friend is in there. My best friend.”
“An artificial intelligence?”
“No, he’s human. Just like us.”
“This is a great start. That is, it’s a great place to stop. Kim, darling, let me take a shower and change? Then you can tell me the rest, okay?”
They took a shower together. There was nothing erotic about it; Kim simply couldn’t wait to start telling her story. She must have been longing to share her secret with someone for a long time now.
Alex put on light overalls, sat down on the bed. Kim didn’t go back to her cabin for a change of clothes, but simply wrapped herself in a bath towel. Alex didn’t mind—she looked even better this way.
“I was nine,” Kim began, having settled, legs and all, into an armchair. “And I… well, it just so happened that I had absolutely no friends back then, girls or boys. I had lots of pals, you know, but not a single really close friend.”
Alex nodded.
“I found a friend in virtual reality.” Kim smiled gently as she said this. These memories must have been pleasant for her. “His name was Edgar. He was my age. We hit it off, became good friends… you know the way it happens in virtuality?”
“Yeah. At that age, I also liked virtual reality. Especially spaceflight simulations.”
“Well… these were not spaceflights. You see, he didn’t have a real body.”
“What?” Alex raised one brow in surprise.
“Edgar told me he had been in a car wreck. Back when he was really small, only three. They couldn’t save him, so they just transferred his consciousness into a gel-crystal…”
“Kim!” Alex raised his hand. “Wait a minute! Stop right there. This is utter nonsense! A gel-crystal this size costs as much as a good hospital. So it’s much less expensive, not to mention more… humane, to reconstruct a body, even if it has been smashed up into suspension.”
“They couldn’t get him to the hospital on time. Just managed to transfer his mind into the crystal.”
“Hold it right there! Let’s suppose the boy’s parents could afford it… although I can’t really imagine such a thing. Why couldn’t they reverse the process, grow another body for him, say, by cloning the old one or generating a new one out of his parents’ stem cells? They could then transfer his mind back into the clean brain. I’ve heard of such cases, except they were famous scientists and politicians, not little boys.”
“That’s right. I’ve been telling you a bunch of lies.” Kim smiled. “But they aren’t my lies… that’s the crap they told Edgar. Don’t forget, we were both just nine.”
Alex nodded.
“All right, then. Go on.”
“Edgar grew up in the crystal. In the virtual worlds. His playmates came and went back to the real world, but he stayed there. Always. At first, his parents would visit him, often, in their virtual bodies. After a while, they stopped coming. He was thinking they’d simply forgotten about him, had more children, or whatever… He was really upset about that.”
“But what was really going on?”
“He’d been stuck into the crystal on purpose!” Kim tossed back her hair. “Can you even imagine? There wasn’t any car accident! His memory got placed into the crystal, and his body… we don’t know what they did with it! Maybe they threw it away. Maybe it’s out there somewhere, in a vegetative state. And maybe his memory got copied, without erasing the original, and there’s another Edgar somewhere, alive and well.”
“Why?” Alex shrugged his shoulders. “Kim, this is a crazy story. Why would anyone screw up a little boy’s life like that? A crystal which contains a human consciousness and is also, I assume, capable of sustaining some semblance of a living environment… the cost is simply inconceivable!”
“All you talk about is money,” Kim snarled. “Alex, the thing is that Edgar is a very rare kind of spesh. It was an experimental mutation. He is a spesh to create speshes.”
“A genetic designer?”
“Yup. You don’t have to change the body for this specialization. The eyes will never match an electron microscope, anyway. All the alterations were done to his mental processes. It was a project of the Edemian government… they had decided that Edgar didn’t need a body at all. That he’d be better off growing up in the crystal.”
Alex studied the girl’s face as she spoke. Was she lying? Didn’t look like it… she seemed to believe her own words. When she was telling him that first legend, she spoke with a smirk, as if to say, “Can you believe how stupid I was to have bought this stuff?” But now her voice held real sorrow. Kim believed what she was saying. And really wanted Alex to believe it, too.
“But why make it all so complicated?” he asked. “I believe that there are assholes in the Edemian government. Just like anywhere. They may be assholes, but they aren’t idiots. It has been obvious to everyone for a long time now that transferring a mind to virtual reality has a lot of drawbacks. The mind still feels the illusory nature of that existence and slowly the person… the human mind… goes insane. When the first human consciousness was copied into a machine, back in the twenty-first century, it was the computer genius David Kross. He managed to have a normal existence for thirty years. But then…”
“Yes, I know.” Kim nodded. “I’ve studied everything I could about the field. These weirdos were hoping to get the most out of Edgar. They wanted absolutely nothing to interfere with his work. They didn’t want him to have or do anything but work. They also wanted to make multiple copies of his mind, if the experiment was successful.”
“Then they shouldn’t have let him out into the common virtual space.”
“They didn’t. He broke out by himself. He’s a genius, Alex!”
“All right, so how come you ended up with the crystal?”
Kim smiled.
“It happened a year ago. Edgar organized his own abduction. He hacked into one of the military cyborgs that were guarding the lab with the crystal. The robot took the crystal, mailed it to my address, and then destroyed itself, along with the whole building. We were both sure that the trail was lost, and that the crystal was considered destroyed in the fire. I… I took care of Ed. I had a good computer, and I managed to hook the crystal up to it. We were still virtual friends, except now Edgar was free. I was thinking that as soon as I could work, I would quickly save up for a new body… any body. Ed said, ‘Make me a baby, or a geezer, just don’t make me a girl.’ Except I think at that point he was ready for anything… We would transfer his mind, and he could really be human again.”
“Then you could be sisters, like the Zzygou,” commented Alex. “Suppose I believe you. So something went wrong?”
“A month ago.” Kim tightened her lips. “I… I messed up. I told Mother about Edgar. I was sure she’d understand! But she reported me to that lab. That’s why I simply can’t go back to Edem! We managed to run away, but they’re looking for us.”
“Probably unofficially. This sure is fishy business.”
“The security agency always prefers searching unofficially.”
Alex drummed his fingers against the wall. The story Kim just told him was not completely impossible. Idiocy is universal. Someone could have thought up this idea of raising a genius-spesh in a virtual world. This genius could have deceived the security agency. An excitable girl-spesh could have fallen in love and run away to become a galactic fugitive.
But what irked him was the melodrama. Alex was ready to believe in any coincidence… but not when the chain of events so strongly resembled a soap opera for young, hysterical girls and their sentimental grandmothers.