“How do you deal with it?”
“You mean me?” Limpopo’s voice hadn’t aged, though there were algorithms for making the voice age as the years went by.
“Who do you think? The house?”
“I just deal. I’ve got bumpers. When I get to the edge, they knock me back.”
“Do you ever turn yourself off? Go into watch-cursor mode?”
“Haven’t been tempted. I think it’s the trauma of my wakeup, all those years—”
It took fourteen years before anyone figured out how to stabilize Limpopo’s sim. That reflected the long gap between World War Default and the Walkaway Decade, which was a dumb name everyone hated, but at least it had a built-in expiry date. It was also Limpopo’s idiosyncrasies, her weird neuroanatomy. That weirdness was practically normal. When they’d succeeded in bringing up Dis and then, briefly, CC, there was going to be a set of categories you could sort imaged human brains into, like blood types, and each used different sim parameters.
Scans were more like fingerprints than blood types, each with distinctive and uncooperative wrinkles (literally and figuratively). Stabilization of sims was resistant to overarching systematization, pigheadedly insisting on remaining art, not science.
Between chaos and the intractability of human brains, Limpopo lay dormant for a long time. When she woke, she immediately grasped the situation. It helped that Etcetera was there. For a time the two had been fast friends. They’d even conducted a famous set of discussions on the years Limpopo had missed, all-important years of chaos when no one had been sure what was going on, posting an hour of voice every day, then running on huge clusters that let them absorb millions of replies to their discussion and integrate it into the next day’s debate. The Limpopo/Etcetera Talks were as famous in their own way as the Feynman Lectures.
Neither ever publicly explained their falling out – nor had either told Tam what it was about (not that she’d asked, though she’d burned with curiosity). They’d kept it secret as long as possible – it wasn’t like house spirits went out to dinner together – but eventually someone produced a signed email from Limpopo to Etcetera in which she told him to go fuck himself forever. That was it, instant viral gossip evil that went around the world.
The gossip lasted longer than most scandals, because of the questions it raised about sims. If Limpopo and Etcetera had been soul-mates when made of meat, how could an accurate simulation get to a point where they hated each other and never wanted to speak again?
Tam wished there was a graceful way to raise it with Limpopo, explain she thought it was bullshit, most relationships came to an end, the fact that two people fell out of love could be cited as proof the sim was faithful as much as proof it was inaccurate. People grew and changed. A true sim was true to its originator, and what kind of freak wouldn’t be changed by waking up inside a computer?
“A lot of years,” is what she said.
“Not aging gracefully, is he? It’s ironic that he looked so young for so long; it let him pretend that he was immune.”
“None of us can be exactly the person we want to be. I’m not delighted about my hips, don’t like that I’ve lost my night-vision—”
“Sometimes, it’s something you can get used to, sometimes it’s not. You know there are some kinds of body–mind mismatch that people just can’t—”
She sighed. “How do you cope?”
“Being a head in a jar? Bumpers. While I never go into suspension, I sometimes dial myself way slow, let myself dream. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to switch off for another decade. It was refreshing to get that time-lapse view. Imagine if I suspended and left instructions not to wake me for a century.”
“Sounds awful.”
“Think it through. Pretty much everyone you loved would be around, in some form. The world would be an amazing new place, jetpacks and shit—”
“Maybe gone back to default. There’s plenty of walled cities, the Harrier-jet-and-mountaintop set. They spent a hell of a long time on top, who’s to say they won’t get there again?”
“That’s what you lazy assholes are for, fighting that shit. Wake me when it’s over. I like the sound of that.”
“They’re right, you’re not Limpopo, she’d never have wanted to sit out the action.”
There was a longer pause than was comfortable. Tam worried she’d offended Limpopo. She was about to apologize, then –
“No, there was action the old Limpopo would have wanted to sit out. No one is pure. You guys give me so much sainthood for never wanting leaderboards, never letting anyone keep track of the fact that I was doing all that heavy lifting – but it wasn’t because I didn’t crave the brownie points. It was precisely because I was jonesing for recognition that I refused it. Every day was a struggle to squash the part of me that wanted to be seated on a golden throne and carried around the town square.”
“Everyone craves recognition, Limpopo. Look at the kids—” There were eleven kids in the house, from six mothers: two dribble-factories that had only just started sleeping through the night, then a smooth bell-curve that tapered off at twelve or thirteen (she could never keep track, they had the contradictory property of being impossibly young and always much older than she remembered). “They’re always wanting credit for their work.”
“They also want to monopolize their parents’ attention, are clutter-blind, and the small ones are incontinent. There are many virtues to the state of childhood, but just because children do something, it doesn’t follow we should aspire to it.”
“You’ve had this discussion before.”
“There’ve been kids around as long as there’ve been walkaways. There were always parents who found the risk of taking their kids out of default was less than the risk of leaving them in. The ‘accountability’ stuff in schools accelerated it – once they started paying teachers based on test-scores, parents saw their kids getting crammed relentlessly by the system, no room for helping them with their problems or passions. Then they threatened parents with jail for not sending their kids to school—”
“They didn’t really do that!”
“Tam, I know you never paid attention to parenting and children, but this can’t have escaped your notice. It was a huge scandal, even by the standards of the day. A bridge too far for lots of parents. There were some big lawsuits. Ever hear of the Augurs?”
“Rings a bell, ish?”
“Both parents raised by residential school survivors, saw that their daughter was miserable, decided to take her out for home-schooling, wanted to get her in touch with her First Nations heritage, but refused to buy official home-schooling materials or pay for home-schooling standardized tests. They put ’em in jail.”
“I sort of remember.”
“It was huge. The number of parents who walked away – it was when we got the first nursery at B&B, had to adapt refugee-ware from the third Arab Spring, get all the fabbers doing toy-safety checks and mounting changing tables all over the place.”
“Before my time. I was at the university then.”
“Right.”
“There were kids there, but not in my group. The LGBT crowd, I guess it was kinda toxic to people who wanted kids, that bullshit about ‘breeders’ that seems funny when you’re a kid but is shitty in hindsight. Imagine how Gretyl and Iceweasel would have felt if they’d had to hear us talking that way.”
Iceweasel had delivered two kids, both boys, without much drama, though Gretyl was a bundle of nerves through both labors and had to leave the room, both times. The boys were, what, six and eight? Five and eight? She was a shitty honorary aunt, though she loved both of them in an abstract, cautious way that kept its distance from their penumbra of boogers, spit, and destruction.