As she wandered onto a nearby moving sidewalk, Delilah wondered about what she was going to do. She couldn't go and catch up with the girls because she'd said she was going home. If she went home, her mother would ask why she wasn't out enjoying herself with her friends. So she decided to go to a small place she knew of that neither would think of looking for her in. It was an open space behind a clump of insurance brokers and repair shops, with grass and a few trees. It was, apparently, public property, and Delilah had discovered it once when she had accompanied her father to get his work computer fixed. She had got so bored in the shop she'd wandered off and found the little picturesque refuge. It was well lit, opening on the side which recieved the most sunlight, and there was a very handy bench underneath a tree.
It was onto this that Delilah flopped, having had to walk the last couple of blocks to get there. The moving walkways were only installed in the more popular areas of the city. She pulled out her laptop from her bag and opened a small text file labelled 'My stuff'. In it were the rough lyrics of a song.
But I know it's something to do with you
Cos when you look my way
It's like a dream come true
Yeah you know you're the only one for me
When you go...'
'What can I put after that?' she mused quietly. 'When you go, you take a part of me? I know it's with you I have to be? No, they don't really sound right...' She typed them all in and erased them individually.
'How about... hmm... yeah, that's ok.' She typed in 'That's where I want to be'. Delilah had started this song after she had noticed the formula for the Ga Ga hits a couple of months ago, and thought she could do better. There was, of course, no real person she was reffering to as 'you', but there was always one in every song. She wasn't entirely sure about putting 'true' after 'you', as they rhymed too well, however. Real songs generally put words like 'girl' and 'world' together. The file was coming along slowly, as she had to be careful to hide it. She had a sense of uneasiness about it, something told her she wasn't meant to programme her own music. Otherwise more people would be doing it. But apart from the fact that it was taboo, she didn't see any real reason why she shouldn't. She had a tune for it, too, but had no clue as to how she could notate it. She made do with a wobbly line in a picture file which she kept in the same folder as the words. The line went up when the tune did, and down, but she had some trouble with remembering the length of the notes.
*Oh yeah, I can get on with that now.* Delilah set to work importing small sections of the picture and putting it under the corresponding words. Normally she didn't have time to do it, as it involved keeping the window open for quite a long time, and she usually only had a few seconds here and there to add or change words for fear of someone reading over her shoulder. Discovery would be... embarrassing. *That looks much better.*
She hummed it softly to herself, scanning the words in time, and changed 'something to do with' to 'because of'. That made it the right length.
Suddenly she had an idea for the next verse. Of course, she'd have to change a few bits and make it less depressing, but what that girl had said earlier sounded pretty song-like.
I work hard just to get close to you
At the end of each day I take home my broken*too heavy* lonely heart all on my own'
*That's better, own and you... they don't sound the same at all. What about all that 'on my knees' stuff? Couldn't get away with it. Unless...*
Cos I want you to be mine
So won't you say you'll be with me
Until the end of time?'
'That's not too bad.' she said, satisfied, and folded her laptop closed.
*It's getting a bit late* she thought *Suppose I SHOULD get home.*. She slid her computer into her bag and stood up, removed a leaf from her hair and got onto the next shuttle bus home.
As the door swung open and she hung up her bag, Delilah was greeted by her mother in 'worried and slightly annoyed' mode.
'Delilah, dear, where have you been? Your friend Kelly IMed me earlier, she wanted to speak with you and said you'd told her you'd gone home. If you were going somewhere else, why didn't you say so?' Delilah felt her heart sink as she tried to think up an explanation. No doubt her physical reactions were being monitored. She decided not to try and think up a cover story, and told the truth as sparsely as she could.
'I wanted to be on my own for a bit. I didn't want the girls to think it was anything personal, so I said I was going home.'
'But Delilah sweetie, why didn't you email me? I got so worried when Kelly asked after you, you could have-'
'No you didn't, you're a machine.' Delilah said bluntly. 'Your databases were alerted to my absence and a little pulse ran along a couple of your circuits to programme you to give me the safety lecture when I got in. You weren't worried, you aren't capable of it.'
'Delilah!' her father's shocked voice came from the end of the corridor. 'What's come over you? I've never heard you talk to your mother like that before.'
'Yes.' Delilah said quietly. 'You've never heard me speak to my mother like that before and you never will. That programme is not my mother.'
'No, but she's the closest thing you're ever going to have, and I won't have you insulting her.'
'Whatever.' Delilah muttered and went into her room, locking the door behind her.
'Delilah...'
'It's alright dear, she's going through a tough stage in her life.'
'Yes, I suppose you're right. You should know, you have access to that sort of information.' He sighed and rapped his knuckles against Delilah's door.
'Delilah, sweetie, it's alright.' He recieved no response. 'Look, if you want to be alone for a while that's ok, but dinner's in twenty minutes.' He waited, ear pressed to plastic, for a few more minutes.
'Thanks, dad.' she said quietly.
'It's ok. I remember what it's like to be a teenager.'
Delilah lay back on her bed and let the tears slowly squeeze out of her eyes. Why did she have to go and do something stupid like mentioning her real mother? She sat up slowly and switched on her telewall, and clicked to 'old emails'. There was one which continually had little flashing message attached, informing her that it had now been in her account for over a week, and would she like to delete it? It had actually been there for two years and 11 months. She opened it up and let it play again.
'Look, Delilah, sorry I can't come to pick you up, I made a really stupid mistake. I'm booked in for my personality dissolution appointment this afternoon and I didn't read my diary this morning. I've emailed your father to come and get you...' Delilah lay back once more and let her mother's last message wash over her. There was an unmistakeable quality about her voice and speech which the best voice simulators couldn't reproduce. She hadn't normally left such long messages for Delilah when she couldn't make something. It was almost as if she'd known it was her last chance to talk to her daughter. Delilah rolled over onto her side, as huge, fat tears started pouring down her cheeks. She always blocked out how much she missed her mother normally, but every now and then she had to let it out. There was so much she would have done with the time she had if she'd only known how limited it was. But as a fourteen year old the future didn't bother her. She had her friends, she had her clothes, she had the latest computer games. Who cares about tomorrow when we have today?
'...but anyway, I'm sorry darling. I love you.' Delilah lay there, crying quietly into her teddy bear for a few more minues. She considered playing the message again - she longed to hear her mother's voice again, but wasn't sure she'd be able to cope with the emotion of hearing the message again so soon. Instead she closed the window and went to her inbox to deal with her new emails. There were two. Clicking on the first one, Kelly's slightly irate face appeared in a quarter of the screen.
'Delilah, where the hell are you? Why aren't you replying to my IMs?' She closed the window. She'd reply when she'd re-done her face and worked out a suitaby grovelling apology. The second email was an official Globalsoft announcement. She opened it, interested to see if there were any particularly good offers on. It was addressed 'all consumers planetwide'. It opened:
'Dear everybody in the world. Get online you pleasure-seekers, and download the Killer Queen!' and continued along those lines, finishing with a friendly little reminder that 'Globalsoft(c) loves you.'. Delilah scanned the new products on offer, didn't see anything special, and shut down the screen. She looked at the time, and, seeing that she had five minutes til she was meant to be at the dinner table, unlocked her door and went into the bathroom, where she washed her face to remove the evidence that she'd been crying and re-applied her make-up.
As she sat down at the table, Will was excitedly explaining to Dad how he'd beaten the level of some game which he'd been trying to win for days.
*Sometimes I feel like I don't belong in this family. My dad's a music progrmmer, my mother's a hologram and my brother... well, he's a boy.*
'Mum...' she said quietly.
'Yes dear?'
'I'm sorry 'bout earlier. I don't know what came over me.'*Why I'm apologising to a computer programme is beyond me, but it keeps Dad happy.*
'That's alright dear. We'll forget about it. It's tough being a teenager, and it's only natural to take it out on your parents.' Delilah felt like pointing out a few things, but common decency and the fact that her father was listening forbade her. One, the hologram had no idea what it was like to be a teenager. Two, she was not Delilah's 'parent'. And three, she had no right to talk about what was and wasn't natural.
'I know what's wrong with her.' Will said. 'She's acting all weird cos all her friends have got boyfriends and she hasn't.'
'Oi, shut up, you.' Delilah replied, light-heartedly throwing a french fry at him.
'What? It's true!' he laughed, throwing three back at her.
'Is not.' she muttered, picking one of the said fries up and eating it. 'I can live without one. They're more trouble than their worth, at least according to Kelly.'
'And she should know, should she?' her dad asked, with an amused smile.
'Well, so far her track record's Dwayne, Shane, Adam and her most recent was Justin. But he stranded her at the arcade, so I think she's through with him.' Will laughed and Dad said, pointing his plastic fork at her while he finished his mouthful,
'Ah now, you see, that's taking it to extremes. What you have to do-' he gestured with both hands, slicing up the air '- is strike the balance between too many and too few.'
'Yep. Don't worry, I'm not fighting them off.' A thought suddenly occured to her. 'Dad, you know like with your programming...'
'Yes Deli, I programme music.' she made a face.
'You didn't let me finish. Do you ever get to see the finished product before it's released?'
'Well, if I want to I'm allowed.'
'Can I show you something then?'
'Sure.' he said, carefully. There wasn't much she could be wanting to show him that might not be considered illegal in some form or other, if it was related to his job. And he would hate to see his daughter arrested. But then again, knowing Delilah, it could be something completely unrelated that had just crossed her mind. 'If you want to.' She stood up, grabbed a slurp of her Sprite and scampered into the hall to where she'd left her bag. She grabbed her lap-top and quickly copied 'My stuff.txt' onto a floppy. She flopped back down into her seat, simultaneously holding out the disk to her father.
'So what is it?' he asked, interested. What could she possibly want to give him on a disk? Delilah dropped her bombshell.
'It's a song. I thought you'd be the best one to tell me if it's any good.'
*And she looks so innocent. Where did I go wrong?*
'You... did this yourself, did you?'
'Yeah. I mean, it's probably not all that brilliant, but I figured it wasn't too bad.'
*You're digging yourself so deep, my little girl, and you don't even know it. Why did you have to be creative?* He glanced up to the hologram in the corner. Although she showed no outward signs, he knew she was recording everything, and was probably already emailling it to Globalsoft security. He would have to add the file she had given him to the report, too avoid arrest himself. They would find Delilah guilty of writing music illegally, and then the police would come and take his little princess away. And there was nothing he could do about it.
'Yes, I'll take a look at it for you.' he said, quietly taking the disk from her. After a slight pause he added 'You know, you really do take a lot after your mother.'