A nearby gamer wearing a osprey-seraph avatar pauses in his conversation to point a finger at Drayta; the digient freezes in midstep, shrinks to a icon, and snaps into one of the gamer’s belt compartments as if pulled by an elastic.
“Drayta weird,” says Jax.
“Yes he was, wasn’t he?”
“All Draytas like that?”
“I think so.”
The seraph walks over to Ana. “What kind of digient have you got? Haven’t seen his sort before.”
“His name’s Jax. He runs on the Neuroblast genome.”
“Don’t know that one. Is it new?”
One of the seraph’s teammates, wearing a nephilim avatar, comes by. “Nah, it’s old, last generation.”
The seraph nods. “Is he good at puzzles?”
“Not really,” says Ana.
“So what does he do?”
“I like singing,” volunteers Jax.
“Really? Let’s have a song, then.”
Jax doesn’t need further encouragement; he launches into one of his favorites, “Mack the Knife” from Threepenny Opera. He knows all the words, but the tune he sings is at best a rough approximation of the actual melody. At the same time he performs an accompanying dance that he choreographed himself, mostly a series of poses and hand gestures borrowed from an Indonesian hip-hop video he likes.
The other gamers laugh all through his performance. Jax finishes with a curtsy, and they applaud. “That’s brilliant,” says the seraph.
Ana says to Jax, “That means he likes it. Say thanks.”
“Thanks.”
To Ana, the seraph says, “Not going to be much help in the labyrinths, is he?”
“He keeps us entertained,” she says.
“I’ll bet he does. Send me a message if he ever learns to solve puzzles, I’ll buy a copy.” He sees that his entire team has assembled.
“Well, off to our next mission. Good luck on yours.”
“Good luck,” says Jax. He waves as the seraph and his teammates take flight and dive in formation toward a distant valley. Ana’s reminded of that encounter a few days later, when she’s reading a discussion on the user-group forums:
FROM: Stuart Gust
Last night I played SoH with some people who take a Drayta on their missions, and while he wasn’t much fun, he was definitely useful to have around. It made me wonder if it has to be one or the other. Those Sophonce digients aren’t any better than ours. Couldn’t our digients be both fun and useful?
FROM: Maria Zheng
Are you hoping to sell copies of yours? You think you can raise a better Andro?
Maria’s referring to a Sophonce digient named Andro, trained by his owner Bryce Talbot to act as his personal assistant. Talbot demonstrated Andro to VirlFriday, maker of appointment-management software, and got the company’s executives interested. The deal fell through after the executives got demonstration copies; what Talbot hadn’t realized was that Andro was, in his own way, as obsessive as Drayta. Like a dog forever loyal to its first owner, Andro wouldn’t work for anyone else unless Talbot was there to give orders.
VirlFriday tried installing a sensory input filter, so each new Andro instantiation perceived his new owner’s avatar and voice as Talbot’s, but the disguise never worked for more than a couple of hours. Before long all the executives had to shut down their forlorn Andros, who kept looking for the original Talbot.
As a result, Talbot wasn’t able to sell the rights to Andro for anywhere near what he’d hoped. Instead, VirlFriday bought the rights to Andro’s specific genome and a complete archive of his checkpoints, and they’ve hired Talbot to work for them. He’s part of a team that’s restoring earlier checkpoints of Andro and retraining them, attempting to create a version that has the same personal-assistant skills and is also willing to accept a new owner.
FROM: Stuart Gust
No, I don’t mean selling copies. I’m just thinking about Zaff doing work the way dogs guide the blind or sniff out drugs. My goal isn’t to make money, but if there’s something the digients can do that people are willing to pay for, it would prove to all the skeptics out there that digients aren’t just for entertainment.
Ana posts a reply:
FROM: Ana Alvarado
I just want to make sure we’re clear about our motivations. It’d be terrific if our digients learned practical skills, but we shouldn’t think of them as failures if they don’t. Maybe Jax can make money, but Jax isn’t for making money. He’s not like the Draytas, or the weedbots. Whatever puzzles he might solve or work he might do, those aren’t the reason I’m raising him.
FROM: Stuart Gust
Yes, I agree with that completely. All I meant was that our digients might have untapped skills. If there’s some kind of job they’d be good at, wouldn’t it be cool for them to do that job?
FROM: Maria Zheng
But what can they do? Dogs were bred to be good at specific things, and Sophonce digients are so single minded that they only want to do one thing, whether they’re good at it or not. Neither is true for Neuroblast digients.
FROM: Stuart Gust
We could expose them to lots of different things and see what they have an aptitude for. Give them a liberal arts education instead of vocational training. (I’m only half kidding.)
FROM: Ana Alvarado
That’s actually not as silly as it might sound. Bonobos have learned to do everything from making stone cutting tools to playing computer games when they were given the chance. Our digients might be good at things that it hasn’t occurred to us to train them for.
FROM: Maria Zheng
Just what are we talking about? We’ve already taught them to read. Are we going to give them lessons in science and history? Are we going to teach them critical thinking skills?
FROM: Ana Alvarado
I really don’t know. But I think that if we do this, it’s important to have an open mind and not be skeptical. Low expectations are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we aim high, we’ll get better results.
Most of the user-group members are content with their digients’ current education — an improvised mixture of home-schooling, group tutoring, and eduware — but there are some who are excited by the idea of going further. This latter group begins a discussion with their digients’ tutors about expanding the curriculum. Over the course of months, various owners read up on pedagogical theory and try to determine how the digients’ learning style differs from those of chimps or human children, and how to design lesson plans that best accommodate it. Most of the time the owners are receptive to all suggestions, until the question arises of whether the digients might make faster progress if their tutors assigned them homework.
Ana prefers that they find activities that develop skills but which the digients enjoy enough to do on their own. Other owners argue that the tutors ought to give the digients actual assignments to be completed. She’s surprised to read a forum post from Derek in which he supports the idea. She asks him about it the next time they talk.
“Why would you want to make them do homework?”
“What’s wrong with that?” says Derek. “Is this because you once had a mean teacher when you were a kid?”
“Very funny. Come on, I’m serious.”
“Okay, seriously: what’s so bad about homework?”
She hardly knows where to begin. “It’s one thing for Jax to have ways to keep himself entertained outside of class,” she says. “But to give him assignments and tell him he has to finish them even if he doesn’t enjoy it? To make him feel bad if he doesn’t do it? That goes against every principle of animal training.”