"Yeah, you might want to have a conversation with him when you get home." This leads to talking about the benefits and drawbacks of giving the digients access to social forums. The forums offer richer interaction than the owners can supply by themselves, but not all the influences the digients receive are positive ones.

After they've discussed digients for a while, Ana asks, "So aside from that, what's new with you?"

Derek sighs. "I might as well tell you: Wendy and I are getting divorced."

"Oh no. Derek, I'm so sorry." Her sympathy is genuine, and it warms him.

"It's been a long time coming," he says.

She nods. "Still, I'm sorry it's happening."

"Thanks." He talks for a while about what he and Wendy have agreed upon, how they'll sell the condo and split the proceeds. Thankfully the process is mostly amicable.

"At least she doesn't want copies of Marco and Polo," says Ana.

"Yeah, thank goodness for that," agrees Derek. A spouse can almost always make a copy of a digient, and when a divorce isn't amicable, it's all too easy to use one to get back at one's ex. They've seen it happen on the forums many times.

"Enough of that," says Derek. "Let's talk about something else. What's happening with you?"

"Nothing, really."

"You looked like you were in a good mood until I started talking about Wendy."

"Well, yeah, I was," she admits.

"So is there something in particular that's got you feeling so upbeat?"

"It's nothing."

"Nothing's got you in a good mood?"

"Well, I have some news, but we don't have to talk about it now."

"No, don't be silly, it's fine. If you've got good news, let's hear it."

Ana pauses and then, almost apologetically, says, "Kyle and I have decided to move in together."

Derek is stunned. "Congratulations," he says.

Chapter 6.

Two more years pa.s.s. Life goes on.

Occasionally Ana, Derek, and the other education-minded owners have their digients take some standardized tests, to see how they compare with human children. The results vary. The Faberge digients, being illiterate, can't take written tests, but they seem to be developing well according to other metrics. Among the Origami digients, there's a curious split in the test results, with half continuing to develop over time and half hitting a plateau, possibly due to a quirk in the genome. The Neuroblast digients do reasonably well if they're permitted the same allowances in testing that dyslexic humans are given; while there's variation between the individual digients, as a group their intellectual development continues apace.

What's harder to gauge is their social development, but one encouraging sign is that the digients are socializing with human adolescents in various online communities. Jax becomes interested in tetrabrake, a subculture focused on virtual dance ch.o.r.eography for four-armed avatars; Marco and Polo have each joined a fan club for a serial game drama, and each regularly tries to convince the other of the superiority of his choice. Even though Ana and Derek don't really understand the appeal of these communities, they like the fact that their digients have become part of them. The adolescents who dominate these communities seem unconcerned with the fact that the digients aren't human, treating them as just another kind of online friend they are unlikely to meet in person.

Ana's relationship with Kyle has its ups and downs, but is generally good. They occasionally go out with Derek and whomever he's dating; Derek sees a series of women, but nothing ever becomes serious. He tells Ana that it's because the women he dates don't share his interest in digients, but the truth is that his feelings for Ana refuse to go away.

The economy goes into a recession after the latest flu pandemic, prompting changes in the virtual worlds. Daesan Digital, the company that created the Data Earth platform, makes a joint announcement with Viswa Media, creator of the Real s.p.a.ce platform: Data Earth is becomming part of Real s.p.a.ce. All Data Earth continents will be replaced by identical Real s.p.a.ce versions added to the Real s.p.a.ce universe. They're calling it a merger of two worlds, but it's just a polite way of saying that, after years of upgrades and new versions, Daesan can no longer afford to keep fighting the platform wars.

For most customers, all this means is that they can travel between more virtual locations without logging out and in again. Over the last few years, almost all of the companies whose software runs on Data Earth have created versions that run on Real s.p.a.ce. Gamers who play Siege of Heaven or Elderthorn can simply run a conversion utility, and their inventories of weapons and clothing will be waiting for them on the Real s.p.a.ce versions of the game continents.

One exception, though, is Neuroblast. There isn't a Real s.p.a.ce version of the Neuroblast engine - Blue Gamma folded before the platform was introduced - which means that there's no way for a digient with a Neuroblast genome to enter the Real s.p.a.ce environment. Origami and Faberge digients experience the migragtion to Real s.p.a.ce as an expansion of possibilities, but for Jax and the other Neuroblast digients, Daesan's announcement essentially means the end of the world.

Ana is getting ready for bed when she hears the crash. She hurries out to the living room to investigate.

Jax is wearing the robot body, examining his wrist. One of the tiles on the wall display next to him is cracked. He sees Ana enter and says, "I sorry."

"What were you doing?" she asks.

"I very sorry."

"Tell me what you were doing."

Reluctantly, Jax says, "Cartwheel."

"And your wrist gave way and you hit the wall." Ana takes a look at the robot-body's wrist. As she feared; it will require replacement. "I don't make these rules because I don't want you to have fun. But this is what happens when you try dancing in the robot body."

"I know you said. But I try little dancing, and body fine. I try little more, and body still fine."

"So you tried a little more, and now we have to buy a new wrist, and a new display tile." She briefly wonders how quickly she can replace them, if she can keep Kyle - who is out of town on business - from finding out about this. A few months ago Jax damaged a piece of sculpture that Kyle loved, and it might be better not to remind him of that incident.

"I very very sorry," says Jax.

"Okay, back to Data Earth." Ana points to the charging platform.

"I admit was mistake - "

"Just go."

Jax dutifully heads over. Just before he steps on the platform, he says quietly, "It not Data Earth." Then the robot-body's helmet goes dark.

Jax is complaining about the private version of Data Earth that the Neuroblast user group has set up, duplicating many of the continents from the original. In one respect it's much better than the private island they used as a refuge from the IFF hack, because now processing power is so cheap that they can run dozens of continents. In another respect it's much worse, because those continents are almost entirely devoid of inhabitants.

The problem is not just that all the humans have moved to Real s.p.a.ce. The Origami and Faberge digients have gone to Real s.p.a.ce too, and Ana can hardly blame their owners; she'd have done the same, given the opportunity. Even more distressing is that most of the Neuroblast digients are gone as well, including many of Jax's friends. Some members of the user group quit when Data Earth closed; others took a "wait and see" approach, but grew discouraged after they saw how impoverished the private Data Earth was, choosing to suspend their digients rather than raise them in a ghost town. And more than anything else, that's what the private Data Earth resembles: a ghost town the size of a planet. There are vast expanses of minutely-detailed terrain to wander around in, but no one to talk to except for the tutors who come in to give lessons. There are dungeons without quests, malls without businesses, stadiums without sporting events; it's the digital equivalent of a post-apocalyptic landscape.

Jax's human friends from the tetrabrake scene used to log into the private Data Earth just to visit Jax, but their visits have grown increasingly infrequent; all the tetrabrake events happen on Real s.p.a.ce now. Jax can send and receive ch.o.r.eography recordings, but a major part of the scene is live gatherings where ch.o.r.eography is improvised, and there's no way for him to partic.i.p.ate in those. Jax is losing most of his social life in the virtual world, and he can't find one in the real one: his robot body is categorized as an unpiloted free-roaming vehicle, so he's restricted from public s.p.a.ces unless Ana or Kyle is there to accompany him. Confined to their apartment, he becomes bored and restless.

For weeks Ana tried having Jax sit at her computer in his robot body and log into Real s.p.a.ce that way, but he refuses to do it anymore. There were difficulties with the user interface - his inexperience with using an actual computer, compounded by the camera's suboptimal tracking of gestures performed by a robot body - but she believes they could have overcome them. The bigger problem is that Jax doesn't want to control an avatar remotely: he wants to be be the avatar. For him, the keyboard and screen are a miserable subst.i.tute for being there, as unsatisfying as a jungle videogame would be to a chimpanzee taken from the Congo. the avatar. For him, the keyboard and screen are a miserable subst.i.tute for being there, as unsatisfying as a jungle videogame would be to a chimpanzee taken from the Congo.

All the remaining Neuroblast digients are having similar frustrations, making it clear that a private Data Earth is only a temporary fix. What's needed is a way to run the digients on Real s.p.a.ce, allowing them to move freely and interact with its objects and inhabitants. In other words, the solution is to port the Neuroblast engine - to rewrite it to run on the Real s.p.a.ce platform. Ana has persuaded Blue Gamma's former owners to release the source code for Neuroblast, but it will take experienced developers to do the rewriting. The user group has posted announcements on open-source forums in an attempt to attract volunteers.

The sole advantage of Data Earth's obsolescence is that their digients are safe from the dark side of the social world. A company called Edgeplayer markets a digient torture chamber on the Real s.p.a.ce platform; to avoid accusations of unauthorized copying, they use only public-domain digients as victims. The user group has agreed that once they get the Neuroblast engine ported, their conversion procedure will include full ownership verification; no Neuroblast digient will ever enter Real s.p.a.ce without someone committed to taking care of it.

It's two months later, and Derek is browsing the user's group forum, reading the responses to an earlier post of his on the status of the Neuroblast port. Unfortunately, the news was not good; the attempts to recruit developers for the project haven't met with much success. The user group has held open-house events in their private Data Earth so that people could meet the digients, but there have been very few takers.

The problem is that genomic engines are old news. Developers are drawn to new, exciting projects, and right now that means working on neural interfaces or nanomedical software. There are scores of genomic engines languishing in various states of incompletion on the open-source repositories, all in need of volunteer programmers, and the prospect of porting the dozen-year-old Neuroblast engine to a new platform may be the least exciting of them all. Only a handful of students are contributing to the Neuroblast port, and considering how little time they're able to devote, the Real s.p.a.ce platform will itself be obsolete before the port is finished.

The other alternative is to hire professional developers. Derek has talked to some developers with experience in genomic engines, and requested quotes on how much it would cost to port Neuroblast. The estimates he's received are reasonable given the complexity of the project, and for a company with several hundred thousand customers, it would make perfect sense to go ahead with it. For a user group whose membership has dwindled down to about twenty people, however, the price is staggering.

Derek reads the latest comments on the discussion forum, and then calls up Ana. Having the digients confined to a private Data Earth has definitely been hard, but for him there's also been a silver lining: he and Ana have a reason to talk every day now, whether it's about the status of the Neuroblast port or trying to organize activities for their digients. Over the last few years Marco and Polo had drifted away from Jax as they all pursued their own interests, but now the Neuroblast digients have only each other for company, so he and Ana try to find things for them to do as a group. He no longer has a wife who might complain about this, and Ana's boyfriend Kyle doesn't seem to mind, so he can call her up without recrimination. It's a painful sort of pleasure to spend this much time with her; it might be healthier for him if they interacted less, but he doesn't want to stop.

Ana's face appears in the phone window. "Have you seen Stuart's post?" Derek asks. Stuart pointed out what each person would have to pay for them if they divided the cost evenly, and asked how many of the members could afford that much.

"I just read it," says Ana. "Maybe he thinks he's being helpful, but all he's doing is getting people anxious."

"I agree," he says. "But until we come up with a good alternative, the per-person cost is what everyone will be thinking about. Have you met with that fundraiser yet?" Ana was going to talk to a friend of a friend, a woman who has run fundraising campaigns for wildlife sanctuaries.

"As a matter of fact, I just got back from lunch with her."

"Great! What did you find out?"

"The bad news is, she doesn't think we can qualify for nonprofit status, because we're only trying to raise money for a specific set of individuals."

"But anyone could use the new engine - " He stops. It's true that there are probably millions of snapshots of Neuroblast digients stored in archives around the world. But the user group can't honestly claim to be working on their behalf; without someone willing to raise them, none of those digients would benefit from a Real s.p.a.ce version of the Neuroblast engine. The only digients the user group is trying to help are its own.

Ana nods without him saying a word; she must have had the exact same thought earlier. "Okay," says Derek, "we can't be a nonprofit. So what's the good news?"

"She says we can still solicit contributions outside of the nonprofit model. What we need to do is tell a story that generates sympathy for the digients themselves. That's the way some zoos pay for things like surgeries on elephants."

He considers that for a moment. "I guess we could post some videos about the digients, try tugging on people's heartstrings."

"Exactly. And if we can build up enough popular sentiment, we might get contributions of time as well as money. Anything that raises the profiles of the digients will increase our chances of getting volunteers from the open-source community."

"I'll start going through my videos for footage of Marco and Polo," he says. "There's plenty of cute stuff from when they were young; I'm not so sure about the more recent stuff. Or do we need heartrending stuff?"

"We should talk about what would work best," says Ana. "I'll post a message on the forum asking everyone else."

This reminds Derek of something. "By the way, I got a call yesterday that might help us out. It's kind of a long shot, though."

"Who was it?"

"Do you remember the Xenotherians?"

"Those digients that were supposed to be aliens? Is that project still going on?"

"Sort of." He explains that he was contacted by a young man named Felix Radcliffe, who is one of the last partic.i.p.ants in the Xenotherian project. Most of the original hobbyists gave up years ago, exhausted by the difficulty of inventing an alien culture from scratch, but there remains a small group of devotees who have become almost monomaniacal. From what Derek has been able to determine, most of them are unemployed and rarely leave their bedrooms in their parents' homes; they live their lives in Data Mars. Felix is the only member of the group willing to initiate contact with outsiders.

"And people call us fanatics," says Ana. "So why did he contact you?"

"He heard we were trying to get Neuroblast ported, and wants to help. He recognized my name because I was the one who designed the avatars for them."

"Lucky you," she says, smiling, and Derek makes a face. "Why would he care if Neuroblast gets ported? I thought the whole point of Data Mars was to keep the Xenotherians isolated."

"Originally it was, but now he's decided they're ready to meet human beings, and he wants to conduct a first-contact experiment. If Data Earth were still running, he'd let the Xenotherians send an expedition to the main continents, but that's no longer an option. So Felix is in the same boat as us; he wants Neuroblast ported so his digients can enter Real s.p.a.ce."

"Well...I guess I can understand that. And you said he might be able to help with funding?"

"He's trying to generate interest among anthropologists and exobiologists. He thinks they'll want to study the Xenotherians so much they'll pay for the port."

Ana looks dubious. "Would they actually pay for something like that?"

"I doubt it," says Derek. "It's not as if the Xenotherians are actually aliens. I think Felix would have better luck with game companies who need aliens to populate their worlds, but it's his decision. I figure that as long as he doesn't approach any of the people we're contacting, he won't hurt our chances, and there's a possibility he can help."

"But if he's as awkward as he sounds, how likely is it he can persuade anyone?"

"Well, it wouldn't be with his salesmanship. He's got a video of the Xenotherians that he shows anthropologists, to whet their appet.i.tes. He let me see a little bit of it."

"And?"

He shrugs, raises his hands. "I could've been looking at a hive of weedbots for all that I understood."

Ana laughs. "Well, maybe that's good. Maybe the more alien they are, the more interesting they'll be."

Derek laughs too, imagining the irony: after all the work they did at Blue Gamma to make digients appealing, what if it turns out that the alien ones are what people are more interested in?

Chapter 7.

Another two months go by. The user group's attempts at fundraising don't meet with much success; the charitably inclined are growing fatigued of hearing about natural endangered species, let alone artificial ones, and digients aren't nearly as photogenic as dolphins. The flow of donations has never risen above a trickle.

The stress of being confined to Data Earth is definitely taking a toll on the digients; the owners try to spend more time with them to keep them from getting bored, but it's no subst.i.tute for a fully populated virtual world. Ana also tries to shield Jax from the problems surrounding the Neuroblast port, but he's aware of it nonetheless. One day when she comes home from work, she logs in to find him visibly agitated.

"Want ask you about porting," he says, with no prelude.

"What about it?"

"Before thought it just another upgrade, like before. Now think it much bigger. More like uploading, except with digients instead people, right?"

"Yes, I suppose it is."

"You seen video with mouse?"