Whoever copied Nyyti could have a copy of Jax, too. Or he could be making a copy of Jax right now. Given Data Earth’s distributed architecture, Jax is vulnerable if the griefer is anywhere on the same continent as the playground.
Jax is still asking about what they saw on the television. Ana opens a window listing all the Data Earth processes running under her account, finds the one that represents Jax, and suspends it. In the playground, Jax freezes in midsentence and then vanishes.
“What happen Jax?” asks Marco.
Ana opens another window for Derek’s processes — they granted each other full privileges for their accounts — and suspends Marco and Polo. She doesn’t have full privileges for the other digients, though, and she’s not sure what to do next. She can see that they’re agitated and confused. They don’t have the fight-or-flight response that animals have, nor do they have any reactions triggered by smelling pheromones or hearing distress calls, but they do have an analog of mirror neurons. It helps them learn and socialize, but it also means they’re distressed by what they saw on the television.
Everyone who brought their digient to the playdate granted Ana permission to make the digients take a nap, but their processes would still be running even if they were asleep, meaning they’d still be at risk of being copied. She decides to move the digients to a small island, away from the major continents, in hopes that there’s less chance that a griefer will be scanning processes there.
“Okay everybody,” she announces, “we’re going to the zoo.” She opens a portal to the visitor’s center of the Pangaea archipelago and ushers the digients through it. The visitor’s center appears to be empty, but she’s not taking any chances. She forces the digients to sleep and then sends messages to all their owners, telling them where they can pick up their digients. She keeps her avatar with them while she goes on the forums to warn everyone else.
Over the next hour the other owners arrive to pick up their digients, while Ana watches the discussion on the forums bloom like algae. There’s outrage and threats of lawsuits against various parties. Some gamers take the position that digient owners’ complaints should take a backseat to their own because digients have no monetary value, igniting a flame war. Ana ignores most of it, looking for information about the response from Daesan Digital, the company that runs the Data Earth platform. Eventually there’s solid news:
FROM: Enrique Beltran
Daesan has an upgrade to Data Earth’s security architecture that they say will fix the breach. It was going to be part of next year’s update, but they’re bumping it up because of what’s been happening. They can’t give us a schedule for when it’ll be done. Until it is, everyone better keep your digients suspended.
FROM: Maria Zheng
There’s another option. Lisma Gunawan is setting up a private island, and she’s only going to allow approved code to run on it. You won’t be able to use anything you’ve bought recently, but Neuroblast digients will run fine. Contact her if you want to be put on the visitor list.
Ana sends a request to Lisma, and gets an automated reply promising news when the island is ready. Ana’s not set up to run a local instance of the Data Earth environment herself, but she does have another option. She spends an hour configuring her system to run a completely local instance of the Neuroblast engine; without a Data Earth portal, she has to load Jax’s saved state manually, but eventually she’s able to get Jax running with the robot body.
“—turn off television?” He stops, realizing his surroundings have changed. “What happen?”
“It’s okay, Jax.” He sees the body he’s wearing. “I in outside world.” He looks at her.
“You suspend me?”
“Yes, I’m sorry. I know I said I wouldn’t, but I had to.”
Plaintively, he asks, “Why?”
Ana’s embarrassed by how hard she’s hugging the robot body. “I’m trying to keep you safe.”
#
A month later, Data Earth gets its security upgrade. The IFF disclaims any responsibility for what griefers do with the information they published, saying that every freedom has the potential to be abused, but they shift their attention to other projects. For a while, at least, the public continents in Data Earth are safe for digients again, but the damage has been done. There’s no way to track down copies that are being run privately, and even if no one releases videos of digient torture anymore, many Neuroblast owners can’t bear the thought that such things are going on; they suspend their digients permanently and leave the user group.
At the same time, other people are excited by the availability of copied digients, particularly of digients who’ve been taught to read. Members of an AI research institute have wondered whether digients could form their own culture if left in a hothouse, but they never had access to digients who could read, and they weren’t interested in raising any themselves. Now the researchers assemble copies of as many text-literate digients as they can, mostly Origami digients since they have the best reading skills, but they mix in a few Neuroblast ones as well. They put them on private islands furnished with text and software libraries, and started running the islands at hothouse speeds. The discussion forums teem with speculation about cities in a bottle, microcosms on a tabletop.
Derek thinks the idea is ridiculous — a bunch of abandoned children aren’t going to become autodidacts no matter how many books they’re left with — so he’s not surprised to read about the results: every test population eventually goes feral. The digients don’t have enough aggression in them to descend into “Lord of the Flies”-style savagery; they simply divide into loose, non-hierarchical troops. Initially, each troop’s daily routines are held together by force of habit — they read and use eduware when it’s time for school, they go to the playgrounds to play — but without reinforcement these rituals unravel like cheap twine. Every object becomes a toy, every space a playground, and gradually the digients lose what skills they had. They develop a kind of culture of their own, perhaps what wild digient troops would demonstrate if they’d evolved on their own in the biomes.
As interesting as that is, it’s a far cry from the nascent civilization that the researchers were seeking, so they try redesigning the islands. They try to increase the variety of the test populations, asking owners of educated digients to donate copies; to Derek’s surprise, they actually receive a few from owners who have grown tired of paying for reading lessons and are satisfied that the feral digients aren’t suffering. The researchers devise various incentives — all automated, so no real-time interaction is required — to keep the digients motivated. They impose hardships so that indolence has a cost. While a few of the revised test populations avoid going feral, none ever begin the climb toward technological sophistication.
The researchers conclude that there’s something missing in the Origami genome, but as far as Derek’s concerned, the fault lies with them. They’re blind to a simple truth: complex minds can’t develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any other. And minds don’t grow the way weeds do, flourishing under indifferent attention; otherwise all children in orphanages would thrive. For a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds. That cultivation is what he’s trying to provide for Marco and Polo.
Marco and Polo occasionally get into arguments, but they don’t stay angry for very long. A few days ago, however, the two of them got into a fight over whether it was fair that Marco had been instantiated earlier than Polo, and for some reason it escalated. The two digients have hardly spoken to each other since, so Derek’s relieved when they approach him as a pair.