Stories of Your Life and Others

Chapter 7
Another two months go by. The user group's attempts at fundraising
don't meet with much success; the charitably inclined are growing fatigued
of hearing about natural endangered species, let alone artificial ones, and
digients aren't nearly as photogenic as dolphins. The flow of donations has
never risen above a trickle.
The stress of being confined to Data Earth is definitely taking a toll on
the digients; the owners try to spend more time with them to keep them
from getting bored, but it's no substitute for a fully populated virtual world.
Ana also tries to shield Jax from the problems surrounding the Neuroblast
port, but he's aware of it nonetheless. One day when she comes home from
work, she logs in to find him visibly agitated.
"Want ask you about porting," he says, with no prelude.

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"What about it?"
"Before thought it just another upgrade, like before. Now think it much
bigger. More like uploading, except with digients instead people, right?"
"Yes, I suppose it is."
"You seen video with mouse?"
Ana knows the one Jax is referring to: newly released by an uploading
research team, it shows a white mouse being flash-frozen and then
vaporized, one micrometer at a time, into curls of smoke by a scanning
electron beam, and then instantiated in a test scape where it's virtually
thawed and awakened. The mouse immediately has a seizure, convulsing
piteously for a couple of subjective minutes before it dies. It's currently the
record-holder for longest survival time for an uploaded mammal.
"Nothing like that will happen to you," she assures him.
"You mean I not remember if happens," says Jax. "I only remember if
transition successful."
"No one's going to run you, or anyone else, on an untested engine.
When Neuroblast has been ported, we'll run test suites on it and fix all the
bugs before we run a digient. Those test suites don't feel anything."
"Researchers ran test suites before they uploaded mice?"
Jax is good at asking the tough questions. "The mice were the test
suites," Ana admits. "But that's because no one has the source code to
organic brains, so they can't write test suites that are simpler than real mice.
We have the source code for Neuroblast, so we don't have that problem."
"But you don't have money afford port."
"No, not right now, but we're going to get it." She hopes she sounds
more confident than she feels.
"How I help? How I make money?"
"Thanks, Jax, but right now there isn't a way for you to make money,"
she says. "For now your job is to just keep studying and do well in your
classes."
"Yes, know that: now study, later do other things. What if now I get
loan, then pay back later when earn money?"
"Let me worry about that, Jax."
Jax looks glum. "Okay."
In fact, what Jax suggests is almost exactly what the user group has
attempted recently by looking for corporate investors. It's an avenue opened
up by VirlFriday's success in selling digients as personal assistants. It took

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several years, but Talbot finally managed to raise an instance of Andro that
would work for anyone; VirlFriday has sold hundreds of thousands of
copies. It's the first demonstration that a digient can actually be profitable,
and several other companies are looking to duplicate Talbot's achievement.
One of those companies is called Polytope, who've announced plans
for launching an enormous breeding program to create the next Andro. The
user group contacted them and offered them a stake in the Neuroblast
digients' future: in exchange for paying to port the Neuroblast engine,
Polytope would get a pecentage of any income generated by the digients in
perpetuity. The group was more hopeful than it had been in months, but the
company's answer was no; the only digients that Polytope is interested in
are Sophonce digients, whose obsessive focus is a necessity if they're going
to replace conventional software.
The user group has briefly discussed the possibility of paying for the
port out of their own pockets, but it's clearly not feasible. As a result, some
members are considering the unthinkable: