The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

shrugged again. "But that's okay. I mean, I don't miss it. I can always give myself a jolt to the pleasure center if I want."
    "Not the same thing," Becca said. "I've done both."
    "I wouldn't know."
    "I'll tell you about sex if you want," Becca said, "but that's not why I'm here."
    "Yes?"
    Becca hesitated. Licked her lips. "I guess I should just say it, huh?" she said. "Mom's dying. Pancreatic cancer."
    Jamie felt sadness well up in his mind. Only electrons, he thought, moving from one place to another. It was nothing real. He was programmed to feel an analog of sorrow, and that was all.
    "She looks normal to me," he said, "when I see her." But that didn't mean anything: his mother chose what she wanted him to see, just as he chose a mask—a werewolf, a giant—for her.
    And in neither case did the disguise at all matter. For behind the werewolf was a program that couldn't alter its parameters; and behind the other, ineradicable cancer.
    Becca watched him from slitted eyes. "Dad wants her to be scanned, and come here. So we can still be a normal family even after she dies."
    Jamie was horrified. "Tell her no ," he said. "Tell her she can't come!"
    "I don't think she wants to. But Dad is very insistent."
    "She'll be here forever! It'll be awful!"
    Becca looked around. "Well, she wouldn't do much for your Dark Lord act, that's for sure. I'm sure Sauron's mom didn't hang around the Dark Tower, nagging him about the unproductive way he was spending his time."
    Fires belched. The ground trembled. Stalactites rained down like arrows.
    "That's not it," Jamie said. "She doesn't want to be here no matter what I'm doing, no matter where I live. Because whatever this place looks like, it's a prison." Jamie looked at his sister. "I don't want my mom in a prison."
    Leaping flames glittered in Becca's eyes. "You can change the world you live in," she said. "That's more than I can do."
    "But I can't," Jamie said. "I can change the way it looks , but I can't change anything real . I'm a program, and a program is an artifact . I'm a piece of engineering. I'm a simulation, with simulated sensory organs that interact with simulated environments—I can only interact with other artifacts . None of it's real. I don't know what the real world looks or feels or tastes like, I only know what simulations tell me they're supposed to taste like. And I can't change any of my parameters unless I mess with the engineering, and I can't do that unless the programmers agree, and even when that happens, I'm still as artificial as I was before. And the computer I'm in is old and clunky, and soon nobody's going to run my operating system anymore, and I'll not only be an artifact, I'll be a museum piece."
    "There are other artificial intelligences out there," Becca said. "I keep hearing about them."
    "I've talked to them. Most of them aren't very interesting—it's like talking to a dog, or maybe to a very intelligent microwave oven. And they've scanned some people in, but those were adults, and all they wanted to do, once they got inside, was to escape. Some of them went crazy."
    Becca gave a twisted smile. "I used to be so jealous of you, you know. You lived in this beautiful world, no pollution, no violence, no shit on the streets."
    Flames belched.
    "Integra mens augustissima possessio ," said Cicero.
    "Shut up!" Jamie told him. "What the fuck do you know?"
    Becca shook her head. "I've seen those old movies, you know? Where somebody gets turned into a computer program, and next thing you know he's in every computer in the world, and running everything?"
    "I've seen those, too. Ha ha. Very funny. Shows you what people know about programs."
    "Yeah. Shows you what they know."
    "I'll talk to Mom," Jamie said.
    Â 
    Big tears welled out of Mom's eyes and trailed partway down her face, then disappeared. The scanners paid a lot of attention to eyes and mouths, for the sake of transmitting expression, but didn't always pick up the things between.
    "I'm