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 rat-like. He could have been the avatar of any boy on any space station anywhere in the galaxy.
“I didn’t think AIs were allowed to form their own avatars in ve-ar.”
“I’m not.”
“Iinge!” Dayan examined the width of Abacus’s nose, the crinkling fold of skin at the corner of his eyes. Rat or boy. Boy or rat. “You’re really weird, you know that?”
“Sorry.” Hands in his pockets, Abacus scuffed at the floor with one toe of his sneakers.
Shiit. “It’s all right, I think it’s kinda neat.” Dayan rested an arm around the other boy’s shoulder. “Come on. I have to take you back to your enclosure or I’ll get in big trouble. You are one expensive piece of biological computing, you know that?”
“I think I’d rather be worthless.”
And since then they’d been buddies. Dayan visited Abacus in his maze, to pet him and sneak him treats, meeting him in ve-ar, or sneaking him out of his enclosure for sleepovers. They played hologames, traded books, ate junk food, and watched holo-series. Ran around the overlay version of the station playing capture the flag with other youths from even more distant outposts. They were friends, sort of.
At least, Dayan thought they were friends. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Not since what happened last week.
THEY’D BEEN SPENDING more and more time together in ve-ar. Sometimes Dayan forgot Abacus wasn’t a real boy, that he was really an AI. Biologically, he was a rat. A super-intelligent rat, but still a rat. In avatar form, they went surfing, visited rainforests. Threw popcorn at old-timey theatre screens without holo-projection tech.
And in ar-el Dayan tucked the cuddly rodent into bed. A shipping crate, a water bottle with a drip, a small dish for food. Scraps of packing material for a bed.
“G-nisidotam na? You know what?” The floating, ghostly projection of his grandmother looked up from her latest beading project. “I think you’ve been spending far too much time with that wensiinh—how are you going to feel when his training is done and he gets sent off-moon? It’s better not to get too attached. He isn’t your computer.” Her face was deeply wrinkled, even more so when she frowned.
“It’s okay, Nokomis,” Dayan told her what she wanted to hear, “I promise not to get too attached.” A knot coiled painfully tight in his intestines. Only yesterday his mother had said something basically along the same lines. He’d been petting the cuddly little rodent in the Doppler Maze when his mother approached with a clipboard. Clinical white scrubs, hairnet, soft padded slippers.
“You know, you shouldn’t be playing with that engineered organism,” she said in a steady whisper. “He doesn’t belong to you. Why don’t you play with your human friends in ve-ar? It isn’t normal to spend so much time with an AI.”
MEET ME IN VE-AR OVERLAY. Abacus pinged privately, so only Dayan could see the message popping up across the inside of his lens implants. He could just imagine one corner of Abacus’s lips turning up in a smile. Dayan felt heat creep up into his cheeks.
Dayan flopped onto his bed and let his eyes flicker. Warm water immersion. A slight static pop of surface tension. When he opened his eyes again, he and Abacus were alone, in a ve-ar version of his room on the station. Plush red carpet soft under his toes, indistinguishable from ar-el. Except now it smelled like the pages of an old book. Pulp and paper, glue and fabric, and whatever else went into the binding. In ar-el the station was strictly climate controlled, and actual physical books were rare, the stuff of holo-programs. The room looked the same, the curved port window, the position of the walls, but the contents had changed; an overflowing bookcase, a small desk, a globe of the world (Earth), charts of distant star systems, a telescope, anatomical diagrams of the human brain, the human heart, acupressure points, Rorschach ink blots, sci-fi themed posters old and new.
Abacus and his various interests. Humanity inside and out. Today he wore his regular blue jeans, and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words AIs Do It Better.
“What’s up, ’Cus?” Dayan stretched the simulated muscles in his arms. He might have made them slightly bigger than in ar-el. Vanity.
The rat’s boy-avatar ran to him, locked hand to wrist below Dayan’s waist, hoisting him into the air, “It’s good to see you!” Dropped him back to his feet with a thud.
“Whoa. Chill, ’Cus.” Dayan tried to keep his smile under control. “I missed you too.” Dayan stroked the AI’s neck, feeling the equal smoothness of light and dark under his fingertips. His skin was so soft. Abacus shivered under the slight, tickling sensation.
“You did?” Abacus squeezing Dayan tight. Feeling his ribs compress.
“Yes.” Dayan admitted, hugging the shorter boy back, resting his chin on the top of Abacus’s head. Stroking his messy brown hair. As soon as he said it, he knew it was true. “I missed you.”
Abacus
