Chapter 1
The day they finally broke the news, I'd just spent a good part of the morning trying to carry on a live virtual chat with my youngest daughter. Jillian's the only one of the four not weirded out by the idea of talking to the digital ghost of her father. But even as geeky as she is, the lag between our exchanges was fairly unbearable. For me, it was a virtual day between words, not just sentences. I should explain. That's what it's like when you're not real. Real time is much slower than virtual anyway, but when you aren't meat-based—I mean, no longer connected to a physical body or brain—even virtual time is too slow. Most people tour the virtual web for entertainment, but there are those of us who exist purely as digitized, ethereal souls. We are so fast we easily make blurs of ourselves against the ho-hum backdrop of the regular meat-based minds you find here. Maybe that's why they keep us penned up, because there's no telling what we'd do if we got loose to our own devices on the virtual web. I could talk a long time about my escapades in learning to do just that, to bend the rules and get around virtual barriers during my stay here, but the point is, until a ghost gets back into a real body, he's completely dependent on machines and the construct to keep his soul earthside. So it doesn't matter how cool you are.
That morning, my nerves were wracked to their core. I finally got tired of waiting for Jillian's chat cube to update, excused myself and opened the connection. I could feel my mind starting to come apart at the seams, and when that starts happening the only remedy you've got is exercise. Yeah, I know, even exercise is an illusion in virtual, but it does soothe the mind. So I skimmed over to the equipment raft, chose a board and started surfing these big awesome waves just off the edge of the clinic's Tranquility pool.
It's pretty easy navigating the virtual web, but you've got to be on your guard. The only way they can keep the web "free" is with advertisements. Every object is also an icon. Clouds, schools of fish, boats, whatever. Every item may have one or more scrolling ads on its surfaces. If your gaze happens to fall on an object it gets brighter and expands, or if you're near enough it might turn and begin talking to you. Should something catch your eye, you just point at it, blink, and, off you go. I try not to look at much, but it is pretty impossible.
There are islands on that digital sea—small golden piles of sand rising from the water with palm trees and grass huts. I glided up on one beach, the friction of hot sand slowing the board beneath me until I stepped off, ran a few paces until I could walk, and ducked into an island bookstore. I was following an ad about some new construct novel coming out.
About a month before my demise I'd sampled a couple of c-books with my cyberphone which is what most people do unless they've got better gear. The c-books were on gardening, both non-fiction, but for a seventy-something guy they were still way cool. When you load a construct, you get this mind rushing thrill. It's totally sandlot, like you're really there and you can go anywhere. I got to experience pollination from the flower's perspective. Imagine the utter depths of helplessness you would feel, forced to invest your complete dependence of any chance of progeny in a visiting bee. Yawn, okay, I hear you.
Anyway, I hadn't tasted a fiction construct yet so, next thing, I'm standing in front of a row of those old Japanese fishing floats, the kind made of cheap colored glass. In this hut, turns out each float is a viewing portal into a different book construct you could buy.
I walked along, skimming titles until I came toThe Outsidersby SE Hinton. Cool, I thought. So, they are even reconstructing the classics. Standing there, I felt an old familiar twang on my heart strings. It had been decades, but slowly the memories all came trickling back. Ponyboy. Dally and Johnny. The whole gang. I stood over that glass buoy for a few minutes, just remembering. I could feel a smile starting to tug at the corners of my mouth. To be honest, it was really the first time I'd smiled since I got killed.
And that's where they found me. I was just registering for the clinic's free sample excursion intothe Outsiderswhen some dude in a white smock with a stethoscope around his neck screwed open the back hatch of my mind and broke the news.
"Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Kyler."
I spun around and blinked a few times, seeing the outline of a man whose entire body was enshrouded in light. I couldn't make out any features. You never realize how blinding white reality is until you've spent virtual years absorbed in false hues. Believe me, it takes a few moments to adjust, and even this wasn't reality yet.
He stood there with the door open until the grass hut and everything else had bled away like Kool-Aid draining through cracks. I felt exposed. We were standing on a hard white floor. The walls and ceilings were glowing white as well—all still virtual, but sterile as you'd expect any hospital to be. A weird shiver ran through his body and when I looked at my own hands I noticed my fingertips were just finishing a ripple as well. That meant the technicians upstairs were either tweaking down my normally amped up perspective or trying to bring his up to par with mine so we could carry on a conversation without lags. It's dangerous work, but I had to trust they knew what they were doing.
I could see the dude's face now and I got excited. "Doctor Jasper, good to see you again. I was afraid you'd forgotten me down here." I waited for an apology, decided it wasn't forthcoming and plowed onward. "I'll bet you've got news, right? Deal me in. It's about my new body, right?"
Jasper cleared his throat. He was a timid looking man with a nervous habit of tilting his head forward when he talked to you. It had the effect of making his eyeballs bulge and I could see the whites under his irises. Overworked, tired-looking eyes. I believe the term around here is "sanpaku."
"Yes, about your body," he said, speaking with a weird mechanical cadence. "We may have a small problem." He must have seen me raising eyebrows because he quickly muttered, "emphasis on 'small.' It's probably nothing. We just wanted to check everything over with you one last time before proceeding."
"Oh?" This didn't sound good. Here I'd been patient for what felt like years. Did I mention the dialysis between virtual and real times? I had been waiting in their carnival world for what already felt like four flap-jacking years, even though it hadn't even been four realtime months, and now all of a sudden they show up and say we've got troubles? "Okay," I said, trying really hard not to sound panicky. "What is this emphatically small problem?"
He bobbed his head in what could have been resolve, or maybe it was just the juice. "As you've guessed, we have your new body nearly ready for the download. And you are, according to your latest psukometrics reading, ready for upload—"
"Boot me," I said. I didn't need another dumb psukometric machine telling me when I was ripe. I'd been raring to go for a digital eternity. I narrowed my eyes at him. "Now, what small problem?"
Either I was making him nervous or he was beginning to twitch from all the drugs they were probably pumping into his body up top to propel his mind. At any rate he began stammering. "Yes, well, we have, uh, that is, noticed, ahhh—"
"Look, Doc, I'm an aged soul for crying out loud, I can take whatever it is you've got on your mind. Just spit it out."
And so he told me, blubbering it all forth like a load off his bulging bladder of a mind. All of it, the bad news which made any good news seem just as bad. Bad, like, bad-to-the-core, bad, you get me? So, here it is: the body they'd been growing from my reconstituted and re-engineered DNA, system by system in separate vats, had pieced together in seamless unity as planned. Perfect skin, perfect organs, perfectly straight, white teeth. My body was upstairs right now, running perfectly on simulation software they'd installed for diagnostics. Get this: It's got all the latest bells and whistles, virus-built organic circuitry and wetware interface all by Intequel. It's got a lifetime subscription to the virtual multiverse with free updates forever. It's all just sitting out there, waiting for that one human mind that can really make it sing.Me.All of that, so far, was the good news.
And then some bright punk of a technician finally notices, "Hey, we sure this duke really wants sorted back as a little kid?"
What the hippie-hair-doo? I'm flabbergasted. I was pretty sure I had specifically put in my will to be brought back as apparent twenty-one. But instead, now I get the stubby end of the stick—either wait right here another four virtual years for a new body, or I can take the apparent twelve year old in the morning. Neither choice was a very wonderful prospect. I'd been looking forward to being twenty-one again, had planned out my entire new life accordingly. And now this little alteration was about to have serious repercussions on those plans.
In the end, though, I knew I would end up tearing virtual hair out of my virtual head, waiting around that long again. After all, I told myself, the digit switch could have been my mistake and they were being generous.
In mere milliseconds I found myself agreeing to go with baby face, figuring that, hey, in another nine real-time years, I'd be better suited to life in the real world anyway. More time to adapt. Hey, I'd also have re-puberty to anticipate, and all that other fun stuff. But I didn't really think about those things. You never do. I was just way too motivated.
Doc Jasper cleared his throat, bobbed his twitching head once more, and held out a stylus and pad. I sighed and scrawled my John Hancock. He went out the way he'd come in, and I found myself back in the grass hut.
I began speed-moping around the Japanese fishing floats, kicking things. I was racing through the grief cycle. Denial zipped by, then anger. Then I tripped a bit on the bargaining stage. I got on the cube and summoned up my lawyer who came on, looking like I'd pulled him away from something really important. He listened to my tirade long enough to extract the salient details, and then said we might have a leg to stand on, just so long as I didn't do anything stupid, like sign anything. After that crushing news, it was all downhill from there. Acceptance came and I just looked back on my life. Maybe I could do a few things better this time around.
Usually by the time a person hits seventy, he's already lost a lot of good things in life, and I was no exception. You never really get good at loss, but you do get better. You learn to grieve and get it over with. Heck, I'd just lost my own life not too long ago and I was nearly over that one. I still wasn't exactly thrilled about having to come back as a kid, but you know what they say about the best laid plans.
I was in the middle of trying to tell myself that it was going to be okay, and a whole pack of other lies, when out of nowhere a thin muffled voice penetrated my thoughts. I went over and looked down into the Outsiders portal, and here was this small kid in a T-shirt with his fists in the air.
"It ain't fair!" he cried passionately. "It ain't fair that we have all the rough breaks!"
His words rang in my heart. "Brother, you said it," I told him, though I knew he couldn't hear me. It was a full second before I realized who he was.
Ponyboy just stood there, looking up at me with his eerie stare-right-through-you eyes. I zoomed in and saw that they were more green than gray. And in that moment I got…The Idea.
It was just the germ of it right then, mind you, not the whole, elaborate, illegal conspiracy it evolved into. But, if I ever get the chance, I mean, if I really ever get the chance to look back on all of this someday, I swear I will highlight that moment as the inception. That was the moment I looked into the soul of an AI-constructed personality, and a weird notion went to seed in my mind.
It's just, I didn't know how to be a kid anymore. I'd seen too much of life to go through it again. Besides, I'd just been majorly shackleforded here. Should I roll over and take it lying down? No. I could fight back. Strike a blow for the little people against blatant injustice. Here was Ponyboy himself, ready to take on the world. Surely he knew a thing or two about violence and people—things a fourteen year old should not have to know—and yet everybody knew he was still gold.
Maybe. Just maybe we could help each other.
As I watched those three greasers and their soc girlfriends walking down the sidewalk, the idea grew on me a little more. And I suddenly had a hunch, there were a whole lot of my old Outsiders fan pals that were going to thank me for this when it was all said and done.