Symat watched curiously. He lived in a world saturated by sentience, where everything was aware, everything potentially had feelings. He understood Virtual children could be hurt, but he didn’t necessarily know what might hurt them.
‘Enough.’ Mela waded into the mêlée and pulled the boys apart. Chem, crying copiously, ran from the room. Mela said to Tod, ‘You know how it upsets him when you say such things.’
‘It’s true. Our parents are never coming back. His aren’t. We all know that.’
Mela put her hand on her heart. ‘He doesn’t know it. Not in here.’
‘Then he’s stupid,’ Tod said.
‘Maybe he is, maybe not. But we have to look out for him. All we have is each other now. Go after him.’
‘Aww—’ Tod pulled a face, but he went out obediently.
Mela looked at Symat. ‘Kids,’ she said, smiling faintly.
Symat, his head full of his own issues, chewed his food.
When he had done eating, the apartment was a little more like a home, a little less like a strange place. And, his muscles still aching from his time in the water, he realised he felt tired. He found a bathroom, and a bedroom stripped of light furnishings. He sat on a pallet.
The three Virtuals clustered in the doorway, looking at him.
‘I’m going to sleep,’ he said.
‘All right.’ They receded into the shadows.
Symat lay down on the pallet, and his clothes, sensing his intentions, fluffed themselves up into a warm cocoon around his body. Experimentally he ordered the room to dim its lights; the command worked. He turned over and closed his eyes.
He thought he slept.
But he heard murmuring. He saw the two boys in the dim light, standing at the foot of his pallet - no, hovering, their feet just above the ground. And they were talking, softly, and too rapidly for him to hear, like speeded-up speech. He heard a name: ‘The Guardians.’ Then one of them whispered, ‘He’s awake!’ And they fled, sliding through the solid wall like spectres, accompanied by a soft pinging.
So much for protocol violations, Symat said to himself. Those Virtuals were creepy. He didn’t understand where they had come from, what they wanted. But he reminded himself they were artificial; and like all artefacts they were here to serve humanity - him. He huddled down in his clothes and went back to sleep.
When he rose and walked out of the apartment into the unchanging sunlight, the three Virtuals were waiting for him. They were sitting on a low stone wall, or at least they looked like they were doing so, Mela in the centre with the two boys to either side.
‘Um, thank you for bringing me to this place. The food.’
‘You’re human. That’s our job,’ Mela said.
‘I suppose it is. Thanks anyhow.’ He walked off down the street towards the canal.
When he looked back they were following. Perhaps they were waiting for him to give them more commands. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but he was glad to have some company.
Walking along the line of the canal they soon left the city behind. The canal continued to head towards the immobile sun, but now the water looked turbid, muddy.
While Mela walked with Symat, the two boys ran by themselves. They played elaborate games of hide and seek, which could involve hiding inside the fabric of a wall, which evidently didn’t hurt that much; the air was full of warning pings, and the laughter of the boys. It reminded Symat uneasily of their odd behaviour in the bedroom last night. Maybe they had been inhibited about violating their protocols around him. If so, the inhibition was wearing off.
They came to a small township, as empty as the city. The boys ran off to explore. Mela and Symat sat on a low wall.
He asked her, ‘How come I didn’t see you yesterday, before you found me in the canal?’
‘We didn’t want you to see us.’
He wondered what a Virtual had to hide from. ‘Why does Chem talk about “parents”? Virtuals don’t have parents.’
‘We did.’
It had been a craze, a few generations back. It began after humans had been pushed back to Sol system.
‘People still wanted kids,’ Mela said. ‘But you don’t want to bring kids into a defeated world. So they had us instead.’
A Virtual child could be a very convincing simulacrum of the real thing. You could raise it from infanthood, teach it, learn from it. It would have been trivial to realise a child physically, downloading complex sensoria into a flesh-and-blood shell, but such ‘dolls’ were unpopular, apparently violating some even deeper set of instincts. It was more comfortable to be with Virtuals, even if you couldn’t cuddle them.
And Virtual kids actually had advantages. You could back them up, rerun favourite moments. You could even wipe them clean if you really made a hash of raising them, though sentience laws discouraged this.
One feature, popular but hotly debated ethically, was the ability to stop the growth of your child at a certain age. You could stretch out a childhood for as long as you wanted, enough to match your own long lifespan. Some people kept their Virtual children as perpetual infants; generally, however, eight to ten years old was the chosen plateau range.
‘I’m twelve,’ Mela said. ‘Few ever got as old as me. For a long time I’ve been surrounded by kids younger than me.’
‘A long time? How long?’
Mela considered. ‘Oh, two hundred years, nearly.’
Symat, shocked, didn’t know what to say.
Times changed, Mela said. Now, in increasing numbers, people were leaving the world behind altogether, passing through the transfer booths to an unknown destination beyond. And the Virtual children couldn’t follow: you could take your pots and pans, but you couldn’t take your Virtual child.
More than that, Mela told him mildly, Virtual children had simply gone out of fashion, as had so many technological toys before them. It became embarrassing to admit you needed such an emotional crutch.
For all these reasons, the children were shut down - or more commonly just abandoned, perhaps after centuries of companionship every bit as intense as the bond between a parent and a real child.
‘Every last mother said she would come back. I always knew the truth. I was twelve years old. But Chem is only eight. He’ll be eight for ever. And he still believes. Every day he is disappointed.’
Every day for centuries, Symat thought, Chem wakes up full of pointless hope, trapped in childhood. ‘Tod seems to understand.’
‘He’s actually younger than Chem, but he’s tougher minded.’
‘How come?’
She shrugged. ‘His parents had him designed that way. You could choose what you liked. Chem’s parents must have wanted a child more dependent, more vulnerable.’
‘But they abandoned him anyway.’
‘Oh, yes.’
Symat said, ‘But I still don’t see—’
He heard a piercing scream. Mela broke off and ran into the township. Symat hurried after her.
They came to an open plaza. A number of children had gathered, perhaps a dozen, none older than eight or nine. No, not children - they were more Virtuals, as Symat could tell from the sparkling pixels and tiny pings that marked petty protocol violations. They all wore bland shifts and coveralls like Mela and the boys.
And these kids stood in a loose ring around Chem and Tod. The boys crouched on the floor, clinging to each other.
Mela ran forward. ‘Get away from them!’
Symat hurried after her. ‘What kind of game is this?’
‘No game,’ she called back. ‘They are bloodsuckers. They are trying to kill the boys.’
‘Kill them? How do you kill a Virtual?’
Mela didn’t answer. She waded into the attacking children, grabbing them and pulling them aside. But there were too many of them; they gathered around her and pushed her back, jeering.
Symat ran forward, fists clenched. ‘Back off.’
One of the girls faced him. She was shorter than he was, with a hard, cold face and her skin was waxy, almost translucent. She had drifted a long way from her core programming, he realised. ‘Whose child are you?’
‘I’m no child. I’m human.’
The girl jeered and pointed at Chem. ‘He thinks he’s human.’
Symat swung a hand at her face. His fingers passed through her pale flesh, scattering pixels. She flinched, shocked; that had hurt.
‘Do what I say,’ Symat said. ‘Leave my friends alone.’
The girl quickly recovered. ‘You can’t order us around. And you can’t hurt us.’
‘But we can hurt you,’ said a sly-faced boy.
‘Projections can’t hurt a human.’
‘Oh, yes, we can,’ said the boy. ‘We can come to you in the night. We can hide in walls, in your clothes, even in your body, human. You’ll never sleep again.’
The girl said, ‘You don’t have to be real to inflict pain. We’ve learned that in the years we’ve been out here. We will haunt you.’
Chem was crying. ‘Please, Symat, don’t let them hurt us.’
Symat stood, hesitant. The out-of-control Virtuals’ threats filled him with dread. And this wasn’t his fight; after all he hadn’t met Mela and the boys before yesterday. But Mela’s eyes were on him. His fists clenched again, he stepped forward. ‘Leave them alone or—’
The girl ran at him, burst through his chest, and pushed her hands through his skull so the insides of his eyeballs exploded with light. ‘Or what? What will you do, human?’
But the others didn’t follow her lead.
‘Kiri,’ the sly boy said. ‘Look at him.’
The girl turned, looked at Symat - and then stepped back, her mouth dropping.
Symat found himself surrounded by a circle of staring children. Even Mela and the boys were gazing at him wide-eyed. He saw that their protocol respect was weakening; some of them drifted up from the floor, and others tilted sideways, reaching impossible angles. They were like floating spectres, not children. They began to whisper, the strange, rapid speech he had heard from the boys in the night; he heard them mutter that strange name again - ‘the Guardians’.
And somehow Symat sensed the circle of scrutiny expanding beyond the limited circle of these children. After all, he reminded himself, these Virtuals were merely manifestations of the Mist, the cloud of artificial sentience in which all of Mars was immersed - and suddenly he was the centre of attention.
He had no idea what was happening, but he ought to make use of it. He raised his arms. ‘Get away!’
The strange children turned and fled, leaving the two boys weeping on the ground.
Mela and Symat ran to them. Mela hugged them. Chem looked up at Symat, tears streaking down his face. ‘Don’t leave me again, Symat. Keep me safe until my parents come back for me. Oh, keep me safe!’
‘I promise,’ Symat said helplessly.
They left the town and walked on, following the canal, ever westward. The sun inched higher, showing more of its bloated red belly, and the air grew steadily warmer. The water in the canal was thick and sluggish now, and deep red-brown with sediment.
Symat was walking out of the twilight band and into the hemisphere of permanent daylight.
The Virtuals followed. The boys, subdued, stayed closer to Symat and Mela. They didn’t complain, though Symat could see they were getting as hot and tired as he was. Their bodies apparently responded appropriately to the weather, one bit of protocol they couldn’t violate.
‘So,’ he said to Mela. ‘Bloodsuckers?’
‘It’s what we call them. A lot of the kids are too young to understand the truth.’
‘Which is? …’
The bloodsuckers had learned to steal something far more precious to any Virtual than blood: processor time.
‘The Mist’s capacity is huge, but it’s finite,’ Mela said. ‘There are rules that unnecessary programmes are eventually shut down.’
‘Unnecessary like abandoned Virtual children?’
‘Yes. But the bloodsuckers have learned a way to, um, integrate you into their own programming. That way they co-opt your ration of processor capacity.’
‘And live longer.’
‘That’s the idea.’
Symat was stunned. Living in a city still occupied by humans, Virtuals had always been peripheral to him. He had no idea that this kind of cannibalistic savagery was going on among them, out of sight of mankind. ‘So that’s why you hid from me.’
Mela shrugged. ‘We didn’t know if you were a Virtual or not.’
‘Not until you got stuck in the water,’ Tod said, and Chem laughed.
What else didn’t he know? ‘Mela - when I was trying to sleep, I heard the boys muttering. Something about Guardians. And in the middle of the fight back there, you all looked at me strangely. I heard that name again. Guardians.’ He looked at her uncertainly. ‘What’s going on?’
Mela flexed her hand, and held it up to the sun, as if trying to look through it. ‘You understand that we Virtuals are individuals. But we are all projections, from the Mist, and of wider artificial minds beyond even that. So we aren’t like you, Symat. We’re - blurred. It’s hard to explain …’