Stories of Your Life and Others

Chapter 2
Blue Gamma's digients are a hit. Within the first year of release, a
hundred thousand customers buy them and - more importantly - keep them
running. Blue Gamma is gambling on a "razor and blades" business model,
because just selling the digients wouldn't recoup the development costs;
instead, the company charges customers each time they make digient food,
and thus maintains a revenue stream for as long as the digients remain
entertaining to their owners. And so far, the customers are finding them
enormously entertaining, keeping them running all day long. It's common
for customers to run the integration processing slowly, so the digients sleep
the entire night, but some run it at high speed, so their digients are awake
almost all the time; they share their digients in cooperation with people in
other time zones, enabling them to mature more rapidly. Scores of digient
playgrounds and daycare centers appear across Data Earth's social
continents, and public-events calendars become dotted with group
playdates, training classes, and talent contests. Some owners even bring
their digients to the racing zones and let them ride in their vehicles. The
virtual world acts a a global village for raising the digients, a social fabric
into which a new category of pet is woven.
Half of the digients that Blue Gamma sells are one-offs, having a
genome that's randomly generated while remaining within the parameters
chosen during the breeding process. The other half are copies of the
mascots, but the company takes pains to remind buyers that each copy will
develop differently depending on its environment. As an illustration of this,
Blue Gamma's sales team points to Marco and Polo, two of the company's
mascots. Both are instances of the exact same genome and both have panda-
bear avatars, but they have distinctly different personalities. Marco was two
years old when Polo was instantiated, and Polo latched on to him as a kind
of older brother; the two are inseparable now, but Marco is more outgoing

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while Polo is more cautious, and no one expects that Polo will turn into
Marco any time soon.
Blue Gamma's mascots are the oldest Neuroblast digients running, and
management originally hoped they would provide the test team with a
preview of digient behavior before customers encountered it. In practice, it
hasn't worked out that way; there's no way to predict how digients raised in
a thousand different settings will turn out. In a very real sense, each digient
owner is exploring new territory, and they turn to each other for help.
Online forums for digient owners spring up, filled with anecdotes and
discussion, advice sought and given.
Blue Gamma has a customer liaison whose job is to read the forums,
but Derek sometimes follows the forums on his own, after work. Sometimes
customers talk about the digients' facial expressions, but even when they
don't, Derek enjoys reading the anecdotes.