"No." Botão glared at the three of them, and Remeny was ashamed to be lumped with the boys. "I was just saying that I like the real world
and
VR." She had to raise her voice to be heard over the music and now people were eavesdropping. That only made her talk louder. "I don't know about you jerkoffs, but I like sex, oldschool sex, the kind you probably can't get, you know with touching and kissing and... and sweetness." Her anger blip soared. "And I'm going to have my own kids someday."
In her room, Remeny felt tears come. She agreed with everything Botão was saying—except maybe the part about having kids. But it would hurt Robby if she spoke up and he had been hurt so much already. Not fair,
not fair,
but then nothing in her life was fair. She had been so busy being Robby's sister that she had forgotten how to be herself.
"But we're doing your kids a favor," said Silk. "And your grandchildren."
The caller had stopped and the music shut down. Now the entire playground was listening to them. Remeny was pretty sure they were about to be kicked out. Or worse.
"We've got nine billion people crowded onto this planet," he continued. "Most of us stashed aren't ever going to have kids. We say that's a good thing. And the stashed don't burn through scarce resources like you and your kids. We're saving the planet. All we ask is that we get to live the life we want."
"Avatars Silk and Botão, you are disrupting this playground."
The caller's warning pierced the argument like a fire alarm.
"Stop now or there will be consequences."
"Okay." Botão raised her hands in surrender
. "
So you have some ideas. But a revolution? No. You haven't seen what evil a revolution does. I have." Then she brought her hands together with a sharp clap and her avatar popped.
Everyone but Silk seemed to be holding their breath. He knelt, picked up her discarded T-shirt and held it up. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," he said.
"Someday. That's all. In the meantime, I apologize."
The music started again. The crowd in the playground buzzed.
"Please." A kid in a foolish wizard's hat touched Sturm's elbow. "What was that all about?"
Sturm waved him off and snatched the T-shirt out of Silk's hands. "You and I still have something to settle."
"We do. But what about your sister?"
Sturm froze. "What did you say?" A blip shimmered but he suppressed it.
"We don't play by the rules, remember? That's how revolutions work." Was Silk smirking? "But we should really take this elsewhere. I have a place."
"You smug bastard. Why should we trust you?"
"Because you're smart? Because you need us?" He was ignoring Remeny. "We can leave her behind if you want."
"I'm right here," said Remeny, although she felt like she was in someone else's dream.
"Don't pretend I'm not." She poked Sturm. "Either of you."
"Fine," said Silk. "Now, we should go."
Remeny was surprised that Toybox could afford a domain, although his taste in decoration was about what she would have imagined. The floor of his space was bone, the walls fire, the ceiling smoke. His temporarily abandoned avatar, dressed in garish vestments, perched at the edge of a gilt Baroque throne, obviously a copy of something. Remeny queried and it turned out to be the Chair of Peter from St. Peter's Basilica, part of some altar designed by Bernini. It didn't seem like Toybox's taste until she found the sublink: some people called it Satan's Throne. In front of the throne were couches and chairs that seemed to have been made from writhing bodies. These gathered around a glass coffin, on top of which were an open bottle of absinthe, a crystal decanter of water, four matching goblets with slotted absinthe spoons, and a dish of sugar cubes. Inside the coffin was the stashed body of Jason Day, or at least what she assumed was a fairly accurate copy. It wasn't too hard to look at: the breathing mask and feeding tube hid most of the face and the body had not degenerated as much as some of the stashed she had seen images of. He still had all his arms and legs, but then Jason Day was under age and would have to log off and leave his coffin for several hours a week. This meant he wasn't yet eligible for an intercranial interface like Sturm's. His Deveau had a larger array of sensors than her Neurosky 3100 and it was connected to the body sock which monitored his vital signs.
"Where is he?" Sturm flicked a finger against Toybox's idle avatar.
"Don't know," said Silk. "Wobbling around hardtime? I'm sure he'll show up before long. Meanwhile, you need to promise that you won't rat us out."
"Rules?" said Remeny. "Wasn't there something about revolutions not having any?"
"Sorry, but either you promise or we're done."
"Sure, sure. We promise." Sturm bent and pretended to examine the Chair of Peter. "Just get on with it."
"Johanna?"
"Remeny to you. How do you know I'll keep my word?"
"We've done our homework." He tried a smile on her. "Which means I trust you more than you trust me." She was embarrassed that, just a few hours ago, it would have worked.
She morphed one of Toybox's repulsive couches into a park bench and sat. "Promise."
"Thank you. The first thing to know is that there are a lot of us. Not enough, but more all the time. Did you know that when Jefferson wrote that first declaration, only about a third of the colonists favored independence? A third were loyal to the king and another third were on the fence. The point is that we don't need to convince everybody, okay?"
Toybox jerked on his throne and opened his eyes. "What did I miss?"
Remeny swallowed her blip of chagrin.
"We just started." Silk seemed annoyed at the interruption.
"The contact went well?"
"About what we expected. Botão bailed."
"But these two bit after all." Toybox rubbed his hands together. "I wanted to be there but the damn overlord... well, you know. Besides, Silk says I'm not quite ready for a contact. I need to work on my issues." He came off his throne to the coffin. "Absinthe?"
Remeny scooted away from him on her bench. She opened the private channel with Robby.
=Does he have to talk?=
=Humor them. They're taking a risk.=
Sturm joined him. "I'll have some." He laid a sugar cube on one of the slotted spoons and set it on a glass.
"Could we please get to the point?" said Remeny. It felt good to close her hands into fists, like she had control of
something
at least. "What are you asking us to do?"
"Recruit," said Silk. "What we were doing in coop—that's what we're doing all across the entire county. You talk to kids. Make friends. Get our point across."
"I signed on last month," said Toybox. "Easiest thing I ever did."
"Okay," said Sturm. "But we're graduating."
"Are we?"
Remeny and Sturm stared at one another.
=Oh shit.=
"We flunk coop." Toybox's glee was (.7). "On purpose. Isn't that crush?"
Remeny couldn't help herself. "Shouldn't be hard for you."
Sturm drained his virtual absinthe at a gulp. "So we're stuck in EOS hell forever."
"There are only so many times you can repeat coop," said Silk, "although we can help you extend your time here. We can arrange it so that most of the kids assigned to your teams are sympathetic to the stashed. Changing avatars can buy time. Eventually you
will
have to graduate. There will be another assignment waiting, if you want."
Remeny was stunned by the enormity of what Silk was saying. And who was he, really? How old? Did he even live in Jefferson County?
"All of this is voluntary, understand, drop out any time. But you won't want to.
We're busy everywhere, working in every demographic group. Lots of us are over-clocked and can think rings around those who lived the majority of their lives in hardtime. And Remeny, we're not all stashed. There are lots of us out and about in the real world. Maybe they have brothers or sisters or mothers or fathers...."
"Wait," Remeny said. "Aren't our parents going to get suspicious if we keep flunking coop?"
"Some do." Silk nodded.
"My parents don't give a shit," said Toybox. "They're stashed too."
"Sometimes kids convert their parents," continued Silk.
"Let me guess." Robby held up a hand to stop him. "And sometimes you try for entire families at once."
Toybox chuckled.
"Special families get special consideration."
Remeny thought about Steve Spencer in his house in Vermont and a sixty million dollar Vicente Gonsalves flix and Robby's ultimatum. Which was more important to Dad, the part or his son's pursuit of happiness? Wondering about it made her head ache.
"So that's pretty much the deal," said Silk. "I'm happy to tell you more, but I'd like to hear what's on your mind now."
The silence stretched. Remeny couldn't look at Robby. She closed their private channel. She felt like curling up into a ball. He had to speak first. But she knew. He was her brother. She
knew.
"I'm interested."
"Good man." Silk came over and sat on the couch beside her. "Remeny?" What had she seen in him? "We definitely want you, too." She thought that if he tried to touch her, she would slap his hand away.
On an impulse, she pulled the Neurosky off her head and Silk, Toybox, and Sturm disappeared. It was almost midnight. She was going to owe her overlord big time for this night. She stood and stretched in the dark of her room. Her home. She didn't bother with lights or a headset. Mom and Dad were almost certainly asleep but she opened the hall door as if it were made of glass and slunk down to Robby's room. She was glad now that she hadn't left ForSquare with Botão. It was important that she understood what Silk was offering Robby. The pursuit of his happiness. As Sturm.
But his happiness wasn't hers, and that was okay. Silk had given her something, even though she couldn't accept his offer. She would have life and her liberty from her brother's pain.
Johanna leaned close to Robby and blew on his face. Goodbye. He stirred but did not wake.
Mike Resnick has won five Hugos from a record thirty-six Hugo nominations (most of which came from
Asimov's
), and is, according to
Locus,
the all-time leading award winner for short fiction. Mike was the 2012 Worldcon Guest of Honor. His two most recent books are
The Trojan Colt
(a mystery) and
The Doctor and the Dinosaurs.
Ken Liu (
http://kenliu.name
)is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in
F&SF, Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed,
and
Strange Horizons,
among other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Although it will be awhile before Ken accumulates as many awards as Mike, these decorated authors join their formidable talents to examine what it's like for an older couple forced to make choices about their new life on a space station.
It's not easy to live with guilt for sixty years. Not even when you made the right decision.
Ask me. I know.
"Is that a Droran snapclaw?" asks Cheryl. "I saw a documentary about them."
I notice her putting her hands on the table to steady herself as she leans down to examine the small fishbowl, half filled with water. We don't like to admit it, or even think about it, but we're both over a hundred, and neither of us has yet gotten used to the way gravity changes as we move around the spinning space station.
I say the first words that come to mind: "I thought they were illegal." Write it off to my usual good humor.
"Maybe back on some planet like Earth or Pele, but we don't have as many rules out here around Tyche IV," the nursery owner explains, just a bit smugly. "This is one government that knows how to stay out of people's lives."
On the surface of the water float three oval, copper-red leaves. Out of the middle of the three leaves a finger-thick stalk rises, ending in a fist-sized spherical flower head made up of narrow petals terminating in sharp thorns. As Cheryl leans closer, the head lunges at her and snaps shut an inch from her nose, the thorns lining its flowery jaw interlocking and emitting a hiss.
"It's cute!" says Cheryl with a chuckle. She's a nature lover, but this is going a little too far.
"I don't think I'd feel safe napping with that damned thing around," I say (well, I
grump)—
but you really have to be pretty desperate to love a plant that might bite your face off. Then the anger drains out of me, because I realize that of course Cheryl is just that desperate.
"All right, Robert." Her voice is resigned, dampened by the invisible gulf that's always between us. She looks around. "Then how about some of these Ropsto jumping beans?"
She points at a small planter, covered by a clear glass bell jar on the table next to the snapping jaws. Inside, a bunch of beans are jumping up and down like a flea circus. A few high-energy beans strike the glass of the bell jar from time to time, making a tinkling sound.
"That's lovely!" she enthuses. "It sounds like a glass harmonica—or maybe a wind chime."
"Sounds like hailstones to me," I answer. "What happens when they get bigger? Are they going to break the glass?"
"I can sell you a bigger terrarium," says the owner. "Did you know that there are five varieties of Ropsto jumping beans? Each one is shaped like a different Platonic solid."
Yes,
I think,
that's exactly what we need—alien plants to teach me a geometry lesson.
I turn to Cheryl, unable to hide my frown. "I thought we agreed we don't want any animals, just plants." I try to sound pleasant and reasonable. I don't quite pull it off.
"I don't carry any animals here," interjects the nursery owner, who actually has the
chutzpah
to sound offended. "You think I don't know the difference? Everything here at Dave's Plantimals is a certified plant, backed up by the opinions—and the signed certificates—of reputable botanists."