“But anyone could use the new engine—” He stops. It’s true that there are probably millions of snapshots of Neuroblast digients stored in archives around the world. But the user group can’t honestly claim to be working on their behalf; without someone willing to raise them, none of those digients would benefit from a Real Space version of the Neuroblast engine. The only digients the user group is trying to help are its own.
Ana nods without him saying a word; she must have had the exact same thought earlier. “Okay,” says Derek, “we can’t be a nonprofit. So what’s the good news?”
“She says we can still solicit contributions outside of the nonprofit model. What we need to do is tell a story that generates sympathy for the digients themselves. That’s the way some zoos pay for things like surgeries on elephants.”
He considers that for a moment. “I guess we could post some videos about the digients, try tugging on people’s heartstrings.”
“Exactly. And if we can build up enough popular sentiment, we might get contributions of time as well as money. Anything that raises the profiles of the digients will increase our chances of getting volunteers from the open-source community.”
“I’ll start going through my videos for footage of Marco and Polo,” he says. “There’s plenty of cute stuff from when they were young; I’m not so sure about the more recent stuff. Or do we need heartrending stuff?”
“We should talk about what would work best,” says Ana. “I’ll post a message on the forum asking everyone else.”
This reminds Derek of something. “By the way, I got a call yesterday that might help us out. It’s kind of a long shot, though.”
“Who was it?”
“Do you remember the Xenotherians?”
“Those digients that were supposed to be aliens? Is that project still going on?”
“Sort of.” He explains that he was contacted by a young man named Felix Radcliffe, who is one of the last participants in the Xenotherian project. Most of the original hobbyists gave up years ago, exhausted by the difficulty of inventing an alien culture from scratch, but there remains a small group of devotees who have become almost monomaniacal. From what Derek has been able to determine, most of them are unemployed and rarely leave their bedrooms in their parents’ homes; they live their lives in Data Mars. Felix is the only member of the group willing to initiate contact with outsiders.
“And people call us fanatics,” says Ana. ”So why did he contact you?”
“He heard we were trying to get Neuroblast ported, and wants to help. He recognized my name because I was the one who designed the avatars for them.”
“Lucky you,” she says, smiling, and Derek makes a face. “Why would he care if Neuroblast gets ported? I thought the whole point of Data Mars was to keep the Xenotherians isolated.”
“Originally it was, but now he’s decided they’re ready to meet human beings, and he wants to conduct a first-contact experiment. If Data Earth were still running, he’d let the Xenotherians send an expedition to the main continents, but that’s no longer an option. So Felix is in the same boat as us; he wants Neuroblast ported so his digients can enter Real Space.”
“Well…I guess I can understand that. And you said he might be able to help with funding?”
“He’s trying to generate interest among anthropologists and exobiologists. He thinks they’ll want to study the Xenotherians so much they’ll pay for the port.”
Ana looks dubious. “Would they actually pay for something like that?”
“I doubt it,” says Derek. “It’s not as if the Xenotherians are actually aliens. I think Felix would have better luck with game companies who need aliens to populate their worlds, but it’s his decision. I figure that as long as he doesn’t approach any of the people we’re contacting, he won’t hurt our chances, and there’s a possibility he can help.”
“But if he’s as awkward as he sounds, how likely is it he can persuade anyone?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be with his salesmanship. He’s got a video of the Xenotherians that he shows anthropologists, to whet their appetites. He let me see a little bit of it.”
“And?”
He shrugs, raises his hands. “I could’ve been looking at a hive of weedbots for all that I understood.”
Ana laughs. “Well, maybe that’s good. Maybe the more alien they are, the more interesting they’ll be.”
Derek laughs too, imagining the irony: after all the work they did at Blue Gamma to make digients appealing, what if it turns out that the alien ones are what people are more interested in?
Chapter Seven
Another two months go by. The user group’s attempts at fund-raising don’t meet with much success; the charitably inclined are growing fatigued of hearing about natural endangered species, let alone artificial ones, and digients aren’t nearly as photogenic as dolphins. The flow of donations has never risen above a trickle.
The stress of being confined to Data Earth is definitely taking a toll on the digients; the owners try to spend more time with them to keep them from getting bored, but it’s no substitute for a fully populated virtual world. Ana also tries to shield Jax from the problems surrounding the Neuroblast port, but he’s aware of it nonetheless. One day when she comes home from work, she logs in to find him visibly agitated.
“Want ask you about porting,” he says, with no prelude.
“What about it?”
“Before thought it just another upgrade, like before. Now think it much bigger. More like uploading, except with digients instead people, right?”
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
“You seen video with mouse?”
Ana knows the one Jax is referring to: newly released by an uploading research team, it shows a white mouse being flash-frozen and then vaporized, one micrometer at a time, into curls of smoke by a scanning electron beam, and then instantiated in a test scape where it’s virtually thawed and awakened. The mouse immediately has a seizure, convulsing piteously for a couple of subjective minutes before it dies. It’s currently the record-holder for longest survival time for an uploaded mammal.
“Nothing like that will happen to you,” she assures him.
“You mean I not remember if happens,” says Jax. “I only remember if transition successful.”
“No one’s going to run you, or anyone else, on an untested engine. When Neuroblast has been ported, we’ll run test suites on it and fix all the bugs before we run a digient. Those test suites don’t feel anything.”
“Researchers ran test suites before they uploaded mice?”
Jax is good at asking the tough questions. “The mice were the test suites,” Ana admits. “But that’s because no one has the source code to organic brains, so they can’t write test suites that are simpler than real mice. We have the source code for Neuroblast, so we don’t have that problem.”
“But you don’t have money afford port.”
“No, not right now, but we’re going to get it.” She hopes she sounds more confident than she feels.
“How I help? How I make money?”
“Thanks, Jax, but right now there isn’t a way for you to make money,” she says. “For now your job is to just keep studying and do well in your classes.”
“Yes, know that: now study, later do other things. What if now I get loan, then pay back later when earn money?”
“Let me worry about that, Jax.”
Jax looks glum. “Okay.”
In fact, what Jax suggests is almost exactly what the user group has attempted recently by looking for corporate investors. It’s an avenue opened up by VirlFriday’s success in selling digients as personal assistants. It took several years, but Talbot finally managed to raise an instance of Andro that would work for anyone; VirlFriday has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It’s the first demonstration that a digient can actually be profitable, and several other companies are looking to duplicate Talbot’s achievement.
One of those companies is called Polytope, who’ve announced plans for launching an enormous breeding program to create the next Andro. The user group contacted them and offered them a stake in the Neuroblast digients’ future: in exchange for paying to port the Neuroblast engine, Polytope would get a percentage of any income generated by the digients in perpetuity. The group was more hopeful than it had been in months, but the company’s answer was no; the only digients that Polytope is interested in are Sophonce digients, whose obsessive focus is a necessity if they’re going to replace conventional software.