A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2)(73)

‘I care.’

Jane turned around, and her mouth fell open. ‘. . . Owl?’

It was Owl’s face, but no longer flat on a wall. She looked like a person, a whole person, with a body and clothes and all of it. There was nothing real about her, not any more real than the Big Bug kids. But she was there. Owl smiled, kinda shy. ‘What do you think?’ she said, gesturing at herself.

Jane wiped her nose again. ‘How—’

‘I got the idea when you started playing the adult sims. I figured out how to build myself a character skin and paste it into the base code. No different from reorganising memory banks, really. And I’m not in here. This is just . . . a puppet.’ She sat down on the floor next to Jane. The kids, who had apparently run out of script, sat down too, smiling in stasis.

Jane couldn’t stop staring. ‘Can I—’ She reached a hand out, hoping.

Owl shook her head with a sad smile. ‘I couldn’t make this tangible. But we can share the same space, at least. That’s something, right?’

‘Why haven’t you done this before?’

‘I thought . . . see, you enjoyed the other sims so much, and I wanted to share them with you. I thought maybe if we could play together, you might . . .’ Owl’s voice trailed off. ‘I was worried you’d think it was a dumb idea. I’ve just been annoying you lately. I figured you’d rather play on your own.’

Jane almost threw herself at the Owl puppet before she remembered it couldn’t hug her back. ‘I’m sorry,’ Jane sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Shh,’ Owl said, sitting next to her. ‘Everything’s okay. You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.’

‘I’ve been such an *,’ Jane said. Owl laughed, and Jane laughed, too, through the tears. ‘And I was stupid out there, I was so stupid and I knew better, and I almost left you all alone.’

Owl put her puppet hand on Jane’s back. It didn’t feel like anything, but knowing Owl wanted to have a hand to put there was good enough. ‘When you didn’t come home that night, I thought I’d lost you. But I never thought you left. I know you wouldn’t do that, not without saying why.’ She placed an empty kiss on Jane’s scalp. ‘That’s not how family works.’





SIDRA


Sidra stepped into the workshop, her scrib in the kit’s hands. ‘Pepper, do you have a minute?’

Pepper looked up from the sim cap she was repairing. ‘I have several.’

The kit took a breath. She set the scrib down flat on Pepper’s workbench. ‘I was hoping this might be a good time to talk about the . . . thing I’ve been working on.’

Pepper grinned. She put her tools aside and sat down. ‘So, do I finally get to see the mystery project?’

‘Yes.’ Sidra gestured at the scrib; a set of blueprints appeared. Pepper leaned forward, studying. ‘This—’ Sidra began.

‘—is an AI framework,’ Pepper said, eyes darting from junction to junction. She raised an absent eyebrow and looked Sidra in the eye. ‘And it’s also my house.’

The kit swallowed.

Pepper gave a patient smile. ‘You’re not being presumptuous, if that’s what you’re worried about. I have no problem ripping walls open.’ She leaned back in her chair. ‘I’m all ears.’

Sidra regrouped. She was off-script now. A quick adjustment of the intro, and: ‘I’ve done a lot of research, and I think this could be accomplished rather easily. You’ve already got cable columns throughout the walls, so you could run the physical pathways alongside. My room could remain just that – my room. With some extra hardware and a cooling system, it would be an absolutely suitable spot for a core.’ She gestured at the scrib, and a new set of images appeared. ‘I could have cameras in all the rooms we share now – excluding your room and the bathroom, of course – and even’ – she gestured again – ‘a few outside.’ Another gesture brought up a table of numbers. ‘According to what I’ve found, I could buy all the supplies for the equivalent of eleven tendays on my current wages. If you’d be agreeable to starting on this project soon, I could work off the cost, no problem.’

Pepper tapped her finger over her lips as she thought. ‘You want to install yourself in my house.’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. How does this setup benefit me?’

‘For starters, increased security. I know you’ve got an alarmbot hive in case somebody breaks in, but it’s a very basic model. With me, you’d have a way of preventing trouble before it starts. If something was wrong, I could wake you up, call the authorities, and have all the lights in the house on in the blink of an eye. Same goes for medical emergencies. If something happened to you or Blue and the other wasn’t home, I’d be there to help.’

‘Interesting. What else?’

‘Enhanced communications and convenience. Want to order dinner? I can take care of it. Want to have all the newest sims downloaded to your hub before you come home? Give me a list of what you want, and I’ll have it done. Want me to read you your messages while you get ready for work? That’s a good twenty minutes I can shave off of your morning.’

Pepper laced her fingers together under her chin. ‘And what do you get out of this?’