The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories Page 3

  Jamie felt as if he'd just been hollowed out, a void inside his ribs. "I'm not real?" he said. "I'm not a person?"

  "Wrong," Becca said. "You're real, all right. You're the apple of our parents' eye." Her tone was bitter. "Programs are real things," she said, "and yours was a real hack, you know, absolute cutting-edge state-of-the-art technoshit. And the computer that you're in is real, too—I'm interfaced with it right now, down in the family room—we have to wear suits with sensors and a helmet with scanners and stuff. I hope to fuck they don't hear me talking to you down here."

  "But what—" Jamie swallowed hard. How could he swallow if he was just a string of code? "What happened to me? The original me?"

  Becca looked cold. "Well," she said, "you had cancer. You died."

  "Oh." A hollow wind blew through the void inside him.

  "They're going to bring you back. As soon as the clone thing works out—but this is a government computer you're in, and there are all these government restrictions on cloning, and—" She shook her head. "Look, Digit," she said. "You really need to know this stuff, okay?"

  "I understand." Jamie wanted to cry. But only real people cried, he thought, and he wasn't real. He wasn't real.

  "The program that runs this virtual environment is huge, okay, and you're a big program, and the University computer is used for a lot of research, and a lot of the research has a higher priority than you do. So you don't run in real-time—that's why I'm growing faster than you are. I'm spending more hours being me than you are. And the parents—" She rolled her eyes. "They aren't making this any better, with their emphasis on normal family life."

  She sucked on her cigaret, then stubbed it out in something invisible. "See, they want us to be this normal family. So we have breakfast together every day, and dinner every night, and spend the evening at the Zoo or in Pandaland or someplace. But the dinner that we eat with you is virtual, it doesn't taste like anything—the grant ran out before they got that part of the interface right—so we eat this fast-food crap before we interface with you, and then have dinner all over again with you . . . Is this making any sense? Because Dad has a job and Mom has a job and I go to school and have friends and stuff, so we really can't get together every night. So they just close your program file, shut it right down, when they're not available to interface with you as what Dad calls a 'family unit,' and that means that there are a lot of hours, days sometimes, when you're just not running, you might as well really be dead—" She blinked. "Sorry," she said. "Anyway, we're all getting older a lot faster than you are, and it's not fair to you, that's what I think. Especially because the University computer runs fastest at night, because people don't use them as much then, and you're pretty much real-time then, so interfacing with you would be almost normal, but Mom and Dad sleep then, cuz they have day jobs, and they can't have you running around unsupervised in here, for God's sake, they think it's unsafe or something . . . "

  She paused, then reached into her shirt pocket for another cigaret. "Look," she said, "I'd better get out of here before they figure out I'm talking to you. And then they'll pull my access codes or something." She stood, brushed something off her jeans. "Don't tell the parents about this stuff right away. Otherwise they might erase you, and load a backup that doesn't know shit. Okay?"

  And she vanished, as she had that afternoon.

  Jamie sat in the bed, hugging his knees. He could feel his heart beating in the darkness. How can a program have a heart? he wondered.

  Dawn slowly encroached upon the night, and then there was Mister Jeepers, turning lazy cartwheels in the air, his red face leering in the window.

  "Jamie's awake!" he said. "Jamie's awake and ready for a new day!"

  "Fuck off," Jamie said, and buried his face in the blanket.

  Jamie asked to learn more about computer and programming. Maybe, he thought, he could find clues there, he could solve the puzzle. His parents agreed, happy to let him follow his interests.

  After a few weeks, he moved into El Castillo. He didn't tell anyone he was going, he just put some of his things in his car, took them up to a tower room, and threw them down on the bed he found there. His Mom came to find him when he didn't come home for dinner.

  "It's dinnertime, Jamie," she said. "Didn't you hear the dinner bell?"

  "I'm going to stay here for a while," Jamie said.

  "You're going to get hungry if you don't come home for dinner."

  "I don't need food," Jamie said.

  His Mom smiled brightly. "You need food if you're going to keep up with the Whirlikins," she said.

  Jamie looked at her. "I don't care about that kid stuff anymore," he said.

  When his mother finally turned and left, Jamie noticed that she moved like an old person.

  After a while, he got used to the hunger that was programmed into him. It was always there, he was always aware of it, but he got so he could ignore it after a while.

  But he couldn't ignore the need to sleep. That was just built into the program, and eventually, try though he might, he needed to give in to it.

  He found out he could order the people in the castle around, and he amused himself by making them stand in embarrassing positions, or stand on their head and sing, or form human pyramids for hours and hours.

  Sometimes he made them fight, but they weren't very good at it.

  He couldn't make Mrs. Winkle at the schoolhouse do whatever he wanted, though, or any of the people who were supposed to teach him things. When it was time for a lesson, Princess Gigunda turned up. She wouldn't follow his orders, she'd just pick him up and carry him to the little red schoolhouse and plunk him down in his seat.

  "You're not real!" he shouted, kicking in her arms. "You're not real! And I'm not real, either!"

  But they made him learn about the world that was real, about geography and geology and history, although none of it mattered here.

  After the first couple times Jamie had been dragged to school, his father met him outside the schoolhouse at the end of the day.

  "You need some straightening out," he said. He looked grim. "You're part of a family. You belong with us. You're not going to stay in the castle anymore, you're going to have a normal family life."

  "No!" Jamie shouted. "I like the castle!"

  Dad grabbed him by the arm and began to drag him homeward. Jamie called him a pendejo and a fellator.

  "I'll punish you if I have to," his father said.

  "How are you going to do that?" Jamie demanded. "You gonna erase my file? Load a backup?"

  A stunned expression crossed his father's face. His body seemed to go through a kind of stutter, and the grip on Jamie's arm grew nerveless. Then his face flushed with anger. "What do you mean?" he demanded. "Who told you this?"

  Jamie wrenched himself free of Dad's weakened grip. "I figured it out by myself," Jamie said. "It wasn't hard. I'm not a kid anymore."

  "I—" His father blinked, and then his face hardened. "You're still coming home."

  Jamie backed away. "I want some changes!" he said. "I don't want to be shut off all the time."

  Dad's mouth compressed to a thin line. "It was Becky who told you this, wasn't it?"

  Jamie felt an inspiration. "It was Mister Jeepers! There's a flaw in his programming! He answers whatever question I ask him!"

  Jamie's father looked uncertain. He held out his hand. "Let's go home," he said. "I need to think about this."

  Jamie hesitated. "Don't erase me," he said. "Don't load a backup. Please. I don't want to die twice."

  Dad's look softened. "I won't."

  "I want to grow up," Jamie said. "I don't want to be a little kid forever."

  Dad held out his hand again. Jamie thought for a moment, then took the hand. They walked over the green grass toward the white frame house on the hill.

  "Jamie's home!" Mister Jeepers floated overhead, turning aerial cartwheels. "Jamie's home at last!"

  A spasm of anger passed through Jamie at the sight of the witless grin.
He pointed at the ground in front of him.

  "Crash right here!" he ordered. "Fast!"

  Mister Jeepers came spiraling down, an expression of comic terror on his face, and smashed to the ground where Jamie pointed. Jamie pointed at the sight of the crumpled body and laughed.

  "Jamie's home at last!" Mister Jeepers said.

  As soon as Jamie could, he got one of the programmers at the University to fix him up a flight program like the one Mister Jeepers had been using. He swooped and soared, zooming like a superhero through the sky, stunting between the towers of El Castillo and soaring over upturned, wondering faces in the Forum.

  He couldn't seem to go as fast as he really wanted. When he started increasing speed, all the scenery below paused in its motion for a second or two, then jumped forward with a jerk. The software couldn't refresh the scenery fast enough to match his speed. It felt strange, because throughout his flight he could feel the wind on his face

  So this, he thought, was why his car couldn't go fast.

  So he decided to climb high. He turned his face to the blue sky and went straight up. The world receded, turned small. He could see the castle, the hills of Whirlikin Country, the crowded Forum, the huge oval of the Circus Maximus. It was like a green plate, with a fuzzy, nebulous horizon where the sky started.

  And, right in the center, was the little two-story frame house where he'd grown up.

  It was laid out below him like scenery in a snow globe.

  After a while he stopped climbing. It took him a while to realize it, because he still felt the wind blowing in his face, but the world below stopped getting smaller.

  He tried going faster. The wind blasted onto him from above, but his position didn't change.

  He'd reached the limits of his world. He couldn't get any higher.

  Jamie flew out to the edges of the world, to the horizon. No matter how he urged his program to move, he couldn't make his world fade away.

  He was trapped inside the snow globe, and there was no way out.

  It was quite a while before Jamie saw Becca again. She picked her way through the labyrinth beneath El Castillo to his throne room, and Jamie slowly materialized atop his throne of skulls. She didn't appear surprised.

  "I see you've got a little Dark Lord thing going here," she said.

  "It passes the time," Jamie said.

  "And all those pits and stakes and tripwires?"

  "Death traps."

  "Took me forever to get in here, Digit. I kept getting de-rezzed."

  Jamie smiled. "That's the idea."

  "Whirlikins as weapons," she nodded. "That was a good one. Bored a hole right through me, the first time."

  "Since I'm stuck living here," Jamie said, "I figure I might as well be in charge of the environment. Some of the student programmers at the University helped me with some cool effects."

  Screams echoed through the throne room. Fires leaped out of pits behind him. The flames illuminated the form of Marcus Tullius Cicero, who hung crucified above a sea of flame.

  "O tempora, o mores!" moaned Cicero.

  Becca nodded. "Nice," she said. "Not my scene exactly, but nice."

  "Since I can't leave," Jamie said, "I want a say in who gets to visit. So either you wait till I'm ready to talk to you, or you take your chances on the death traps."

  "Well. Looks like you're sitting pretty, then."

  Jamie shrugged. Flames belched. "I'm getting bored with it. I might just wipe it all out and build another place to live in. I can't tell you the number of battles I've won, the number of kingdoms I've trampled. In this reality and others. It's all the same after a while." He looked at her. "You've grown."

  "So have you."

  "Once the paterfamilias finally decided to allow it." He smiled. "We still have dinner together sometimes, in the old house. Just a normal family, as Dad says. Except that sometimes I turn up in the form of a werewolf, or a giant, or something."

  "So they tell me."

  "The advantage of being software is that I can look like anything I want. But that's the disadvantage, too, because I can't really become something else, I'm still just . . . me. I may wear another program as a disguise, but I'm still the same program inside, and I'm not a good enough programmer to mess with that, yet." Jamie hopped off his throne, walked a nervous little circle around his sister. "So what brings you to the old neighborhood?" he asked. "The old folks said you were off visiting Aunt Maddy in the country."

  "Exiled, they mean. I got knocked up, and after the abortion they sent me to Maddy. She was supposed to keep me under control, except she didn't." She picked an invisible piece of lint from her sweater. "So now I'm back." She looked at him. "I'm skipping a lot of the story, but I figure you wouldn't be interested."

  "Does it have to do with sex?" Jamie asked. "I'm sort of interested in sex, even though I can't do it, and they're not likely to let me."

  "Let you?"

  "It would require a lot of new software and stuff. I was prepubescent when my brain structures were scanned, and the program isn't set up for making me a working adult, with adult desires et cetera. Nobody was thinking about putting me through adolescence at the time. And the administrators at the University told me that it was very unlikely that anyone was going to give them a grant so that a computer program could have sex." Jamie shrugged. "I don't miss it, I guess. But I'm sort of curious."

  Surprise crossed Becca's face. "But there are all kinds of simulations, and . . . "

  "They don't work for me, because my mind isn't structured to be able to achieve pleasure that way. I can manipulate the programs, but it's about as exciting as working a virtual butter churn." Jamie shrugged again. "But that's okay. I mean, I don't miss it. I can always give myself a jolt to the pleasure center if I want."

  "Not the same thing," Becca said. "I've done both."

  "I wouldn't know."

  "I'll tell you about sex if you want," Becca said, "but that's not why I'm here."

  "Yes?"

  Becca hesitated. Licked her lips. "I guess I should just say it, huh?" she said. "Mom's dying. Pancreatic cancer."

  Jamie felt sadness well up in his mind. Only electrons, he thought, moving from one place to another. It was nothing real. He was programmed to feel an analog of sorrow, and that was all.

  "She looks normal to me," he said, "when I see her." But that didn't mean anything: his mother chose what she wanted him to see, just as he chose a mask—a werewolf, a giant—for her.

  And in neither case did the disguise at all matter. For behind the werewolf was a program that couldn't alter its parameters; and behind the other, ineradicable cancer.

  Becca watched him from slitted eyes. "Dad wants her to be scanned, and come here. So we can still be a normal family even after she dies."

  Jamie was horrified. "Tell her no," he said. "Tell her she can't come!"

  "I don't think she wants to. But Dad is very insistent."

  "She'll be here forever! It'll be awful!"

  Becca looked around. "Well, she wouldn't do much for your Dark Lord act, that's for sure. I'm sure Sauron's mom didn't hang around the Dark Tower, nagging him about the unproductive way he was spending his time."

  Fires belched. The ground trembled. Stalactites rained down like arrows.

  "That's not it," Jamie said. "She doesn't want to be here no matter what I'm doing, no matter where I live. Because whatever this place looks like, it's a prison." Jamie looked at his sister. "I don't want my mom in a prison."

  Leaping flames glittered in Becca's eyes. "You can change the world you live in," she said. "That's more than I can do."

  "But I can't," Jamie said. "I can change the way it looks, but I can't change anything real. I'm a program, and a program is an artifact. I'm a piece of engineering. I'm a simulation, with simulated sensory organs that interact with simulated environments—I can only interact with other artifacts. None of it's real. I don't know what the real world looks or feels or tastes like, I only know what simulations t
ell me they're supposed to taste like. And I can't change any of my parameters unless I mess with the engineering, and I can't do that unless the programmers agree, and even when that happens, I'm still as artificial as I was before. And the computer I'm in is old and clunky, and soon nobody's going to run my operating system anymore, and I'll not only be an artifact, I'll be a museum piece."

  "There are other artificial intelligences out there," Becca said. "I keep hearing about them."

  "I've talked to them. Most of them aren't very interesting—it's like talking to a dog, or maybe to a very intelligent microwave oven. And they've scanned some people in, but those were adults, and all they wanted to do, once they got inside, was to escape. Some of them went crazy."

  Becca gave a twisted smile. "I used to be so jealous of you, you know. You lived in this beautiful world, no pollution, no violence, no shit on the streets."

  Flames belched.

  "Integra mens augustissima possessio," said Cicero.

  "Shut up!" Jamie told him. "What the fuck do you know?"

  Becca shook her head. "I've seen those old movies, you know? Where somebody gets turned into a computer program, and next thing you know he's in every computer in the world, and running everything?"

  "I've seen those, too. Ha ha. Very funny. Shows you what people know about programs."

  "Yeah. Shows you what they know."

  "I'll talk to Mom," Jamie said.

  Big tears welled out of Mom's eyes and trailed partway down her face, then disappeared. The scanners paid a lot of attention to eyes and mouths, for the sake of transmitting expression, but didn't always pick up the things between.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "We didn't think this is how it would be."

  "Maybe you should have given it more thought," Jamie said.

  It isn't sorrow, he told himself again. It's just electrons moving.

  "You were such a beautiful baby." Her lower lip trembled. "We didn't want to lose you. They said that it would only be a few years before they could implant your memories in a clone."