The Lifecycle of Software Objects (4 page)

Some volunteers have begun maintaining rescue shelters, accepting unwanted digients in hopes of matching them with new owners. These volunteers practice a variety of strategies; some keep the digients running without interruption, while others restore the digients from their last checkpoint every few days, to keep them from developing abandonment issues that might make it harder for them to get adopted. Neither strategy is enormously successful at attracting prospective owners. There is occasionally a person who wants to try a digient without having to raise one from infancy, but these adoptions never last for long, and the shelters essentially become digient warehouses.

Ana's not happy about this trend, but she's familiar with the realities of animal welfare: she knows you can't save them all. She'd prefer to shield Blue Gamma's mascots from what's happening, but the phenomenon is too widespread for that to be practical. Again and again she has taken them to a playground and one of the digients realizes that a regular playmate is absent.

Today's trip to a playground is different, and brings a pleasant surprise. Even before all the mascots are through the portal, Jax and Marco notice another digient wearing a robot avatar. They simultaneously exclaim "Tibo!" and run over to him.

Tibo is one of the oldest digients aside from the mascots, owned by a beta tester named Carlton. He suspended Tibo about a month ago; Ana's glad to see that it wasn't permanent. As the digients chatter, she walks her avatar over to Carlton's and talks with him; he explains that he just needed a break, and now is feeling ready to give Tibo the attention he needs.

Later on, after she's brought the mascots back from the playground to Blue Gamma's island, Jax tells her about his conversation with Tibo. "Tell him about fun we do time he gone. Tell him about field trip zoo fun fun."

"Was he sad he missed it?"

"No he instead argue. He said field trip was mall not zoo. But that trip last month."

"That's because Tibo was suspended the whole time he's been gone," Ana explains, "so he thinks last month's trip was yesterday."

"I say that," says Jax, surprising her with his understanding, "but he not believe. He argue until Marco and Lolly too tell him. Then he sad."

"Well, I'm sure there'll be other trips to the zoo."

"Not because missed zoo. Sad missed month."

"Ah."

"I not want be suspended. Not want miss month."

Ana does her best to sound reassuring. "You don't have to worry about that, Jax."

"You not suspend me, right?"

"Right."

To her relief, Jax seems satisfied by this; he hasn't encountered the idea of extracting a promise, and she's embarrassingly glad that she didn't have to make him one. She takes comfort in the knowledge that if they suspend the mascots for any period of time, they'll almost certainly suspend all of them, so at least there won't be experiential discrepancies within the group. The same would be true if they ever roll the mascots back to a younger age. Restoring an early checkpoint is one of Blue Gamma's suggestions for customers who find their digients too demanding, and there's been talk that the company should do this with its own mascots to endorse the strategy.

Ana notices the time, and begins instantiating some games for the mascots to play on their own; it's time for her to train the digients in Blue Gamma's new product line. In the years since creating the Neuroblast genome, the developers have written more sophisticated tools for analyzing the interactions of its various genes, and they understand the genome's properties better. Recently they've created a taxon with less cognitive plasticity, resulting in digients that should stabilize more quickly and stay docile forever. The only way to know for certain is to let customers raise them for years and see what happens, but the developers' confidence is high. This is a significant departure from the company's original goal of digients that become ever more sophisticated, but drastic situations call for drastic measures. Blue Gamma is counting on these new digients to stanch the loss of revenue, so Ana and the rest of the test team are intensively training them.

She has the mascots sufficiently well-trained that they wait for her permission before they start playing the games. "All right everyone, go ahead," she says, and the digients all rush over to their favorites. "I'll see you all later."

"No," says Jax. He stops and walks back to her avatar. "Don't want play."

"What? Sure you do."

"No playing. Want job."

Ana laughs. "What? Why do you want to get a job?"

"Get money."

She realizes that Jax isn't happy when he says this; his mood is glum. More seriously, she asks him, "What do you need money for?"

"Don't need. Give you."

"Why do you want to give me money?"

"You need," he says, matter-of-factly.

"Did I say I need money? When?"

"Last week ask why you play with other digients instead me. You said people pay you play with them. If have money, can pay you. Then you play with me more."

"Oh Jax." She's momentarily at a loss for words. "That's very sweet of you."

After another year has gone by, it becomes official: Blue Gamma is shutting down its operations. Not enough customers were willing to take a chance on the perpetually docile digients. Internally there were many proposals discussed, including a breed of digient that understands language but can't speak, but it was too late. The customer base has stabilized to a small community of hardcore digient owners, and they don't generate enough revenue to keep Blue Gamma afloat. The company will release a no-fee version of the food-dispensing software so those who want to can keep their digients running as long as they like, but otherwise, the customers are on their own.

Most of the other employees have been through company collapses before, so while they're unhappy, for them this is just another episode of life in the software industry. For Ana, however, Blue Gamma's folding reminds her of the closure of the zoo, which was one of the most heartbreaking experiences of her life. Her eyes still tear up when she thinks about the last time she saw her apes, wishing that she could explain to them why they wouldn't see her again, hoping that they could adapt to their new homes. When she decided to retrain for the software industry, she was glad that she'd never have to face another such farewell in her new line of work. Now here she is, against all expectation, confronted with a strangely reminiscent situation.

Reminiscent, but not the same. Blue Gamma doesn't actually need to find new homes for its dozen mascots; it can just suspend them, with none of the implications that euthanasia would have. Ana herself has suspended thousands of digients during the breeding process, and they aren't dead or feeling abandoned. The only suffering created by suspending the mascots would be on the part of the trainers; Ana has spent time with the mascots every day for the last five years, and she doesn't want to say goodbye to them. Fortunately, there's an alternative: any employee can afford to keep a mascot as a pet in Data Earth, whereas keeping an ape in her apartment hadn't even been a possibility.

Given how easy it is, Ana's surprised that more of the employees don't want to adopt a mascot. She knows she can count on Derek to take one—he cares about the digients just as much as she does—but the trainers are unexpectedly reluctant. They're all fond of the digients, but most feel that keeping one as a pet now would be like doing their job after they've stopped being paid. Ana is sure that Robyn will take one, but Robyn preempts her with news of her own at lunch.

"We weren't going to tell anyone yet," Robyn confides, "but...I'm pregnant."

"Really? Congratulations!"

Robyn grins. "Thanks!" She releases a flood of pent-up information: the options that she and her partner Linda considered, the ova-fusion procedure they gambled on, their fabulous luck at having the first attempt succeed. Ana and Robyn discuss issues of job hunting and parental leave. Eventually they get back to the topic of adopting the mascots.

"Obviously you're going to have your hands full," says Ana, "but what do you think about adopting Lolly?" It would be fascinating to see Lolly's reaction to a pregnancy.

"No," says Robyn, shaking her head. "I'm past digients now."

"You're past them?"

"I'm ready for the real thing, you know what I mean?"

Carefully, Ana says, "I'm not sure that I do."

"People always say that we're evolved to want babies, and I used to think that was a bunch of crap, but not anymore." Robyn's facial expression is one of transport; she's no longer speaking to Ana exactly. "Cats, dogs, digients, they're all just substitutes for what we're supposed to be caring for. Eventually you start to understand what a baby means, what it
really
means, and everything changes. And then you realize that all the feelings you had before weren't—" Robyn stops herself. "I mean, for me, it just put things in perspective."

Women who work with animals hear this all the time: that their love for animals must arise out of a sublimated child-rearing urge. Ana's tired of the stereotype. She likes children just fine, but they're not the standard against which all other accomplishments should be measured. Caring for animals is worthwhile in and of itself, a vocation that need offer no apologies. She wouldn't have said the same about digients when she started at Blue Gamma, but now she realizes it might be true for them, too.

The year following Blue Gamma's closure involves many changes for Derek. He gets a job at the firm that employs his wife Wendy, animating virtual actors for television. He's fortunate to work on a series with good writing, but no matter how quick-witted and nonchalant the dialogue sounds, every word of it, every nuance and intonation, is painstakingly choreographed. During the animation process he hears the lines delivered a hundred times, and the final performance seems glossy and sterile in its perfection.

By contrast, life with Marco and Polo is a never ending stream of surprises. He adopted both of them because they didn't want to be separated, and while he can't spend as much time with them as when he worked for Blue Gamma, owning a digient now is actually more interesting than it's ever been before. The customers who kept their digients running formed a Neuroblast user group to keep in touch, and while it's a smaller community than before, the members are more active and engaged, and their efforts are bearing fruit.

Right now it's the weekend, and Derek is driving to the park; in the passenger seat is Marco, wearing a robotic body. He's standing upright on the seat—restrained by the seat belt—so he can see out the window; he's looking for anything that he's only seen before in videos, things that aren't found in Data Earth.

"Firi hidrint," says Marco, pointing.

"Fire hydrant."

"Fire hydrant."

"That's right."

The body Marco's wearing is the one that Blue Gamma owned. Group field trips came to an end because SaruMech Toys closed shortly after Blue Gamma did, so Ana—who got a job testing software used in carbon-sequestration stations—bought the robot body at a discount for Jax to use. She let Derek borrow the body last week so Marco and Polo could play in it, and now he's returning it. She's going to spend the day in the park, letting other owners' digients have a turn in the body.

"I make fire hydrant next craft time," says Marco. "Use cylinder, use cone, use cylinder."

"That sounds like a good idea," says Derek.

Marco's talking about the craft sessions that the digients now have every day. These began a few months ago, after an owner wrote software that allowed a few of Data Earth's onscreen editing tools to be operated from within the Data Earth environment itself. By manipulating a console of knobs and sliders, a digient can now instantiate various solid shapes, change their color, and combine and edit them in a dozen different ways. The digients are in heaven; to them it seems as if they've been granted magical powers, and given the way the editing tools circumvent Data Earth's physics simulation, in a sense they have. Every day after work when Derek logs into Data Earth, Marco and Polo show him the craft projects they've made.

"Then can show Polo how—Park! Park already?"

"No, we're not there yet."

"Sign says 'Burgers and Parks.'" Marco points out a sign that they're driving past.

"It says 'Burgers and Shakes.' Shakes, not parks. We've still got a little way to go."

"Shakes," Marco says, watching the sign recede in the distance. Another new activity for the digients has been reading lessons.

Marco or Polo never paid much attention to text before—there isn't a lot of it in Data Earth aside from onscreen annotations, which aren't visible to digients—but one owner successfully taught his digient to recognize commands written on flashcards, prompting a number of other owners to give it a try. Generally speaking, the Neuroblast digients recognize words reasonably well, but have trouble associating individual letters with sounds. It's a variety of dyslexia that appears to be specific to the Neuroblast genome; according to other user groups, Origami digients learn letters readily, while Faberge digients remain frustratingly illiterate no matter what instruction method is used.

Marco and Polo take a reading class with Jax and a few others, and they seem to enjoy it well enough. None of the digients were raised on bedtime stories, so text doesn't fascinate them the way it does human children, but their general curiosity—along with the praise of their owners—motivate them to explore the uses that text can be put to. Derek finds it exciting, and laments the fact that Blue Gamma didn't stay in business long enough to see these things come to pass.

They arrive at the park; Ana sees them and walks over as Derek parks the car. Marco gives Ana a hug as soon as Derek lets him out of the car.

"Hi Ana."

"Hi Marco," replies Ana; she rubs the back of the robot's head. "You're still in the body? You had a whole week. Wasn't that enough?"

"Wanted ride in car."

"Did you want to play in the park for a bit?"

"No, we go now. Wendy not want us stay. Bye Ana." By now Derek has gotten the charging platform for the robot out of the backseat. Marco steps on to the charging platform—they've trained the digients to return to it whenever they return to Data Earth—and the robot's helmet goes dark.