Love after the End. Группа авторов
cousin Aesa teased from Earth when they ve-ared across the distance. Distances meant very little in virtual space. Dayan wasn’t so sure about his fortune though. He thought they were the lucky ones.
“The Earth is our mother,” Eva whispered. She folded the hair across his temple, kissed his forehead, then turned to the door. She touched palm to sensor to dim the lights, then stepped out of his room leaving only the blue glow from the track lighting around his window.
He had a habit of staring out at space from every nearest view-port, searching for a glimpse of Earth. No brighter than a star. A distant blue orb. The stuff of imagination and holo-series. Though his Earth-bound relations dreamed of the adventure of space-living, Dayan dreamed of being an earthling one day. He imagined the vastness of the ocean. A real blue sky overhead. Wind. Rain. Snow. So many things he’d never experienced.
“If the earth is our mother, and the moon is our grandmother—what does that make Io? What does that make Jupiter?”
Eva paused in the doorway. “Relatives too. Aunties. Uncles. Cousins. They’ve always watched over us, just like Dibik Giizis. Just like Nokomis.”
Dayan supposed this was true, the sun and moon had always hovered in the sky exerting their subtle influences of gravity and astrology. He’d tried to figure out his astrological sign once, based on the month and year of his birth, but wasn’t sure if those old superstitions applied. Aquarius. Year of the Dog. He would need a whole new Jovian–Ionian astrological system to chart the subtle dance of the galaxy.
Not that he believed in any of that shkiigum. Slime.
Like one of Jupiter’s moons, his grandmother had always been hovering around the peripherals of the projection fields, a constant though distant presence in their lives, offering recipes, crabby words of advice, laughter, and medicine. A floating, semi-translucent, three-dimensional hologram sewing a new pair of makizinan in her easy chair, narrow spectacles perched on the tip of her nose. “Like astral projection,” she would giggle. “E.T. phone home. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!” Sometimes she was so weird! Though the source of her presence was technological rather than spiritual.
A chime pinged on the edges of his awareness. Abacus.
Dayan arranged himself comfortable and let his eyes flicker in command as he dropped into the ve-ar overlay. Abacus’s avatar was a boy Dayan’s age, maybe a bit older, prominent brow ridge, small round ears (not rat-like at all), medium brown hair, though with the same opaque black eyes, the blown-out pupils with a wet sheen, and his skin a splotchy patchwork of light and dark, in the same pattern as his rat-self.
He’s asked about it once.
“It’s important for my sense of identity.” Abacus gestured with an open hand to the darker pigmentation around his neck and jawline. “It is as much a part of me as my servo-matrixes.” Vitiligo, Abacus called it amongst humans. This oil-and-vinegar separateness of pigmentation.
Today Abacus wore blue jeans and a tight nineteenth-century Star Trek T-shirt featuring the face of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Dayan groaned melodramatically, though a flower of pleasure bloomed in his chest. Sometimes the rat was too much.
He might be a spoiled space-brat, but Dayan bet his cousins didn’t count rat-avatars amongst their best friends. They had actual human children to hang out with. Aside from ve-ar, there were slim pickings on Io.
“Hey, Abacus.” Dayan had been avoiding the AI for the past few days, ignoring pings and messages after the, the confusion, inspired by their last meeting. But he knew the boy wouldn’t stay away forever. They’d become good friends over the past three months. Ever since Dayan had picked up the AI from one of the mazes. To pet him.
Abacus bit his finger, a bright spot of blood erupting where the skin had been torn, dripping to the floor of the maze in a patter. Vile! The rat sent a holo-emoticon in his general direction where it appeared to shatter against the inside of his lens implants, the debris raining around him in shades of green and violet.
“Ow! Effing thing bit me!” Dayan dropped the ridiculously expensive organic computer, outside of its enclosure, and it ran off. Uh-oh. He was in deep miizii now! He wasn’t supposed to play with the product. They were destined for richer kids on richer stations and richer worlds. Not the far-flung stations where they were fabricated.
Dayan spent the next five days hunting the creature, crawling through viaducts, and service tunnels, grubby and dark, carrying a flashlight. A hunk of cheese and bread to entice the creature. A small butterfly net for capture.
Unable to find the AI in ar-el, real life, Dayan spent a day banging around ve-ar searching for the creature and tracing the subtle trail of its existence. In the ve-ar overlay, a very close virtual approximation of the physical world, Dayan found the rat, in the avatar of a boy, roaming the halls of the station Marius. He guessed they were the same age in the conversion of rat-to-human years. And in fact, the creature had holed himself up inside Dayan’s bedroom.
Dayan followed the boy-rat, stalking it from a safe distance. He knew this station inside and out. Every passageway. Every servicetunnel. Every viaduct. And deducing the AI’s route, he circumnavigated quickly through a secondary network of ducts to cut him off. Leaping from an adjoining corridor, Dayan pounced.
He grabbed the boy in a chokehold, leaping on the virtual AI’s back, tackling it to the ground. They tousled. A tangle of limbs and arms. Too close to throw any punches. The rat resorted to biting and kicking. Pulling hair. Fighting dirty. Dayan wasn’t about to let the creature get away again. He matched dirty tactic for dirty tactic. Struggling for an advantage.
Ooof. A knee to his stomach knocked the air from his lungs in a whoosh. Dayan felt the urge to curl in on himself like a fetus, like a turtle protecting the soft underbelly of its organs, instead he sucked in through his teeth, swallowing the pain.
“I yield! I yield!” The rat-boy finally forfeited. His left arm pulled painfully behind his back, Dayan’s knee pinning him to the floor. They were both breathing heavily, deep rasping breaths. Probably in the real world too—physiology was physiology regardless of where the action was taking place—but luckily most damage suffered here would stay in ve-ar.
“If I let go, you promise not to bite me again? You promise not to scurry off?”
“Haha, ‘scurry’ very funny. If you let me up, I promise not to run off.” Dayan noticed the rat left out the part about not biting him, but figured it was the best guarantee he was going to get.
Dayan lifted the pressure of his knee and let the other boy stand. Scratched, bruised, and dishevelled, they faced each other. Now what? Dayan took note of the dark sheen of his pupilless eyes. The deep groove of a dimple in his chin. The slight trembling curve of one bloody lip.
Dayan rubbed the back of his neck, eyes dropping to the grate of the floor, “Ahh, sorry about your lip.”
The AI’s nostrils flared for a moment, head tilted. “I’m not sorry I bit you. I wanted out of that maze. When I saw my opportunity to escape, I took it.”
“Well, at least you’ll be getting off this effing space station. You might even get sent to Earth.”
“Maybe,” the rat-boy’s eyes narrowed, a wet glint on the narrowed darkness. “But maybe I don’t want to be a household AI.”
“You don’t?” Dayan could feel his eyebrows rising. He’d never heard of such a thing. An AI that didn’t want to satisfy its programming?
“No one ever asked me what I wanted.” The rat-boy’s plump little lips turned downward.
Aww, poor guy. The cleft in his chin made him look adorable. “Well I just asked,” Dayan pointed out. “I’m Dayan.” He stuck out his hand Treaty medal, thumb raised powwow.
“Abacus.” They shook.
The lack of white surrounding his blown-out pupils, and the discolouration of his skin were the only indication of anything remotely