Dorothy From Kansas, Part 10
And now we're back to Faye's viewpoint. Sorry this one took so much longer. I spent most of this week trying to rewrite part 8, and it just has me stumped. I'm completely unsure as to how to tell Georgia's story. I am open to any suggestions. Anyway, I decided to just leave Georgia alone for now and move on to part 10. That was good move, 'cause part 10 came easy. Writing as Faye always comes easy. I find it very natural to get in her head. Feel free to joke about what that says about me. Anyway, here's part 10!
NOTE : I got a job! As such, I will soon not have nearly as much free time to spend writing, so updates to this story may come more slowly than before. Sorry, but I needs money.
March 23, 2100
I’ve had an amazing morning. OK, so I just got back from my trip. Literally, today. I went from Japan to Mars to Kafka to Islandia. Tanaka tells me it’s about 200 million kilometers total. I still can’t believe that. I can’t wrap my head around all the distance I’ve traveled, much less the fact that I can actually travel at the speed of light. It was an amazing trip, but I’ve already written about that. If you’ve been reading my journal regularly, you’ve had to put up with endless pages about how amazing Mars was and how mind-blowing the asteroids are and blah blah blah. I’m sorry. Anyone reading my journal is probably used to all of that stuff, but everything is still amazing to me. Anyway, I’m done writing about my trip. For now. I want to tell you all about what happened when I got back.
OK, so I arrived at Islandia at about 2 AM. I was exhausted. It still weird to me that I not only have to sleep, but my program actually has to be running in order for me to sleep. The time that my program is turned off doesn’t count because my brain has to go through a whole sleep cycle with dreams and whatnot. Incidentally, getting turned off never stops feeling creepy. As I was saying, I had just gotten back, and I was exhausted, but I had to spend about an hour in line at customs. This is digital customs, mind you. It’s all one big simulation and they still can’t get it any faster than it was in my day! Anyway, I get past customs and I get myself transferred over to Tanaka’s new server here on Islandia. I start up my White House simulation, and all I want to do is go to bed. I get into the bed, and in only a few minutes, Tanaka is knocking on my door. Instantly, I’m awake again. I throw on a robe and go running down to the front door. I really should think about living in a smaller house. I get to the front door, open it, and there he is. I instantly threw my arms around him. It was such a relief to see him again. When I’m not with him, I feel so alone in this world, so like I don’t belong. This world is still strange and frightening to me sometimes. I like knowing I have Tanaka to show me around. I like knowing how much he cares about me. I like knowing I can depend on him. When I’m with him or on his server, I feel like I’m at home. It doesn’t matter if we’re in Japan or in orbit or on this new ship he’s building. For me, for now, Tanaka is home.
“I missed you,” I said. “I missed you so much.”
“I missed you, too,” he sighed. “Why didn’t you tell me when you got in?”
“Well, it was 2 AM when I got here. it’s more like 3 now. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I am not tired,” he said, smiling. “I knew when you were getting in, so I went to bed at 5 in the afternoon. I’m wanted to make sure I was wide awake to welcome you to Islandia. Are you tired?”
“No,” I lied. “I’m wide awake.” I’m sure he would have had no problem with letting me sleep, but it had been over a month since I’d left, and I’d only been able to talk to him in light speed delayed emails. I wanted some Tanaka time.
“Good!” he said. “We have much to discuss! I want to hear all about your trip, and all about our crew.” He then started looking around the White House absent-mindedly. “I... I have forgotten the layout of this place. Where should we go to talk?”
“Let’s go to the Green Room,” I said, taking his had and leading him around the White House. We settled into the Green Room, he simulated up some tea, and I simulated up some very, very strong coffee. He started asking me all sorts of questions about Miguel, Lee, and Georgia. I told him that Miguel seemed nice, but a little rough around the edges.
“He seemed to be a first rate engineer,” I said, speaking as if I had any idea how to evaluate a fusion/robotics engineer. I then went off on a tangent about Miguel’s ranch and how amazing it was to fall asleep under the Martian sky under the glow of the solar reflector.
“Have you ever been to Mars?” I asked.
“No,” Tanaka said, looking a bit sheepish. “I’ve only ever been into orbit a few times, I’ve barely even left Earth. But I’m sure our travels will take us there.” He then started asking me about Lee. He was extremely excited that I managed to find us a “Spike” as he kept calling him. He kept using the term like it was a job title. It was actually a little unnerving. I’m kind of counting on Tanaka for everything right now, and it bothers me when I realize that he’s a little... well... off. OK, a lot off. Just so everyone reading this knows, I’m fully aware that this whole idea of the bounty hunting ship is completely insane. Selling everything you own in order to buy a spaceship so that you can try and make your life more like the TV shows you watched as a kid, yea, it’s totally insane. So why am I going along with it? I’m not sure. I guess I’m just not sure what else to do. I’ve looked into it, there are programs that help people like me integrate into society, and I’m sure Tanaka would pay for me to go to college, but what do I do then? What job would I get? What job would be available to me? Are there any jobs out there I’d want? I understand this world so little, I’m really not confident about stepping out into it on my own. That makes it sound like I’m just going with Tanaka because I’m afraid to be alone. That sounds pretty pathetic, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not just that. I know I called his new bounty hunting career is insane, but at the same time, it’s kind of intriguing. I watched all the same shows he did, I romanticize all the same things he does, I just never would have thought of actually trying to do it. It’s a crazy thing to do, but this whole world seems crazy to me. I don’t think it’s really set in yet that this world is real and not some crazy dream. Nothing seems real to me right now, and I guess that makes it easier to do the crazy thing. Maybe I’ll regret it later. Maybe it’ll grow on me. Maybe I’ll find out I was meant to be a bounty hunter. I don’t know. All I know is that I have to do something with myself. I can’t just sit around in Tanaka’s server for the rest of my life, and this is something that at least seems exciting. Exciting and crazy, but exciting.
Anyway, I was telling him about Lee. I told him all about Lee’s connections to the Triads, and I told him I thought he’d be a good source of information for us. I left out the part where I flirted with him and thought he was kind of cute. I wasn’t comfortable telling Tanaka that. I’m actually not that comfortable with it myself after what happened with Garth. I’m really not ready to get involved with anyone after what happened. Man, why did I flirt with him? Now he’s gonna think that I’m interested, and I’m gonna have to spend weeks stuck on a ship with him. Why did I do that? Because I am interested, that’s why. Lee was cute, and he seemed like a nice guy, especially for a career criminal. Huh. That’s interesting. Lee is a career criminal, and Garth was all bad ass revolutionary. Do I have a thing for bad boys? Two isn’t really enough to make a pattern, so maybe I’m over thinking it. God, I am so tired of having such basic questions about who I am. When am I gonna get my memories back? Wow, I’m really rambling. OK, back on track.
So then we started talking about Georgia. I told him that she seemed right for the ship. That seemed to be the best way I could put it. Georgia seemed nice enough, but we didn’t click like I did with Miguel and Lee. In fact, I think Georgia found me a little annoying. Georgia had this whole I-don’t-have-time-for-bullshit vibe to her and I think that, unlike Miguel and Lee, she found my lack of knowledge and curiosity about the world to be irritating instead of endearing. I also think that Tanaka’s whole idea here might have been a little insulting to her. I mean this is someone who actually does have a career as a bounty hunter. Well, contract enforcer, but close enough. Point being, she actually does this kind of work, so I think she was a little insulted by the fact that Tanaka was thinking of it as a fun way to spend his retirement years. Even still, I’m glad I managed to get her onboard. We needed at least one crew member who actually has experience in this field, even if I don’t think she’s someone who will get along well with the rest of the crew.
Once I was done telling him about my trip and all the people I’d interviewed, Tanaka started telling me what had been going on with him. He told me that he had spent the time I had been gone selling off his assets and arranging for the construction of the Bebop-Maru here in Islandia. It was at this point that I asked him what Islandia was, exactly. I knew it was a space station, and I knew that we were on it, but that was about all I knew. Turns out Islandia is the biggest space station in existence. It’s made up of two cylinders 8 kilometers long and 1 and a half kilometers in diameter, both of them rotating to simulate gravity. I quickly converted that to miles in my head. I’ve got to get used to the metric. He went on to tell me that it was in the Lagrange 4 point. Then he started to explain about Lagrange points, but I barely understood it. If you really want to know, look it up on the internet. He told me that Islandia is home to about half a million people, and that it is actually a sovereign nation, which I had actually figured out when I was going through customs. Islandia was also home to the biggest, most expensive, and most respected shipyards in the solar system and those were the same shipyards that were going to me making the Bebop-Maru. As Tanaka started to tell about the construction of the Bebop, I realized that he was probably the construction crew’s worst nightmare. It turns out he’s been spending most of his spare time at the shipyards, overseeing the construction of our ship. He’s been there every single day. He then told me about all of the “long and productive discussions” he’d had with the chief construction engineer, and I almost instantly got the feeling that the Islandia shipyards hated us. Tanaka sounded like he was probably a very irritating back seat spaceship builder. I thought about telling him that maybe he shouldn’t bother them so much, but then I figured he’s paying them millions to construct this ship, and for that kind of money they can put up with an overly eager old man. He told me that he’d been able to spend even more time at the shipyards since the other project he was overseeing had been completed.
“What other project?” I asked. He looked up from his tea with a mischievous grin on his childlike face.
“Oh, did I not tell you?” he said, smiling from ear to ear. “Your body is finished. It’s in my house in Islandia, you can upload into it anytime you like.”
“What?!” I screamed, jumping up and knocking my tea onto the floor. I didn’t even bother having the computer clean it up. I ran over and threw my arms around Tanaka.
“It’s really ready?! I can upload into it right now?!”
“If you want,” he said with that big giant grin still covering his face.
“Oh my God,” I yelled. I think I hopped a little bit too. “Let’s do it now, let’s do it right now!” I knew at that moment that sleep was going to have to wait for a while. Tanaka laughed at me and got up from his chair.
“If that is your wish,” he said. “Then that is what we will do. I’m going to disconnect from this simulation and get your cybershell ready. When I’m ready to upload you, I’ll signal you, and I’ll put you in the cybershell.”
“I can’t wait to see you,” I said. “The real you, not this simulation.” He looked a little uncomfortable after I said that.
“Yes, well, you are about to get your chance. I am going to disconnect now but I will be seeing you very soon.”
“I can’t wait!” I said, and with that, he disappeared. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said I couldn’t wait. I don’t know how long he was gone, but it felt like an eternity. I kept pacing back and forth in the Green Room, wondering about my new body. I had been uploaded into a cybershell before back on Mars, but that was a rental. The body didn’t look like me, it didn’t move like me, it didn’t feel like me. It was a thoroughly uncomfortable thing to move around in. This was going to be my body, custom-built for my program and sculpted to look just like me. Then I started to worry about how good the body would actually be. The only cybershell I had ever been uploaded into was that rental, and I had just assumed that it was uncomfortable simply because it was a rental, but I had nothing to compare it to. What if all cybershells felt like that? What if I just couldn’t get used to moving around in a body that wasn’t made of flesh and bone? What if Tanaka screwed something up in the design? He was a good friend, but I had noticed he was a little forgetful. What if I upload into it and I’m too short or too tall or too whatever? What if it doesn’t feel like me? I kept pacing back and forth, asking those kinds of questions over and over to my self until, I swear, I was about to induce my own little simulated panic attack. I couldn’t help it. I became so extremely nervous. The idea of being stuck in a body that wasn’t the body I wanted filled me such an incredible sense of dread. Eventually, Tanaka’s disembodied voice called to me.
“I am ready to upload you,” he said. “Are you ready?”
“Um... I don’t know,” I said, nervously. “I’m not sure about this, I’m worried. Are you sure you got everything right?”
“If there is anything you do not like about it, I promise I will return it to the factory and have the proper alterations made.”
“OK,” I said. “But I’m still not sure I’m ready. Maybe we should-”
And with that he uploaded me.
At first, I was so nervous, I didn’t even open my eyes. I just laid there and tried to get a sense of my new body. To my great relief, it felt right. I don’t know why, I don’t know how you program a cybershell to “fit” a particular infomorph, but this one felt like it fit me. It felt like my body. Well, it felt close to my body. There were some things missing, some things that would always be missing in a mechanical form. I didn’t have a heartbeat. I didn’t breathe. Those things felt awkward and wrong, but I didn’t think there was anyway I could ever get those things back. That was something I was just going to have to get used to. Other than those two things, the body seemed perfect. However, I wasn’t really in a position to make a judgment at that point. I hadn’t even opened my eyes or moved around.
“Are you all right?” I heard Tanaka yell. His real voice sounded different from his simulated one. It came from deeper in the throat. It was an older man’s voice, but I still recognized it as his. “Are you having trouble moving?”
“No, I’m just taking my time.” I said, nervously. “I’ll be up and about in a moment.” And with that I opened my eyes and took my first look at Tanaka.
I know it sounds like a stupid thing to be surprised by, but he looked so old! I know, I know, he’s a hundred and twenty, how did I expect him to look, right? Still, the Tanaka I had dealt with was always his Icon, which was either an image of himself at the age of twenty five or an image of Spike. Plus, the spirit of the man that I knew was that of a young man, if not that of a child. Tanaka was someone I watched cartoons with. Tanaka was someone who had just abandoned his whole life in order to try and become a hero. The Tanaka I knew never seemed like an old man. As I looked up at him, I started thinking about the eighty years that he lived and I skipped. I looked at the wrinkles on his face and thought about the decades of office work and drudgery that put them there. It finally hit me, emotionally, that my best friend had spent one hundred years living a life he really didn’t want to live. I felt terrible for him. I felt like I might have shed a tear if that were possible. Then I looked in his eyes. I looked into his big brown eyes and there I saw the Tanaka I knew. I saw that inside his aging body was the childlike hero wannabe that I had always known. In those eyes, I saw my best friend. As I starred into his eyes, a big smile crept it’s way across his wrinkled face.
“What are you smiling about?” I asked. As I did, I listened to my own voice and realized it was exactly what I had wanted it to be. I sounded just like I did in the simulation. My voice fit me perfectly as well, so I had one less thing to worry about. As I was thinking about my voice, his smile widened further.
“I am smiling because you are smiling,” he said. “It is your first smile in this body, and it looks right. It looks like Faye’s smile.” We just froze there for a while, starring into each other’s eyes, best friends seeing each other for the first time.
Then I noticed his hair. Tanaka’s hair was a dark, anime-colored green that was totally and completely unnatural. I looked up at it and I couldn’t stop myself from laughing.
“You dye your hair!” I yelled, laughing out loud and thoroughly enjoying the sound of my own laugh. “You never told me you dye your hair!”
“That is because I don’t,” he said, smiling but still managing to sound slightly indignant. “This is a transgenic feature. I used a retrovirus to alter my genes so that my hair would grow this color. This is my natural color now.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, laughing even harder. “You don’t dye your hair an anime color, you just altered your DNA at the cellular level so that your hair would grow an anime color. Yes, that’s much better. Much, much better. Not weird and fanboy-ish at all. Totally normal thing to do.”
“Excuse me, I am not the one named after an anime character!”
“You named me!”
“Yes, and you accepted it!” He had me there. I did like the name.
“Fine,” I said. “We’re both dorks. Dorks and proud of it. Now getting back to important stuff, I’m assuming you have a mirror for me?”
“Well, I have something close enough.” With that, one of the walls suddenly rippled and turned into a mirror.
“Video wall with a reflection option. Have a look at yourself.”
I got up off the couch and walked over to the wall. I looked myself up and down. Tanaka had certainly come through on his promise. It looked like me. It looked exactly like me. It had my long blond hair and my green eyes and my complexion and everything. It had my figure down perfectly as well. I starred at myself in the mirror for a while, not quite believing it. I started running my hands over my skin and marveling at the sensation. I felt so real. I started poking and prodding at myself, especially in the fleshy parts like the breasts and the ass. I reached under the T-shirt and jeans I was dressed in, feeling every inch of me. Everything felt perfectly right, except for one thing.
“I don’t have a vagina,” I said, with more than a little surprise in my voice.
“Oh,” said Tanaka, sounding kind of surprised. “Uh, no, no you do not. I did not have one installed.” There was a long pause there as Tanaka looked embarrassed and I stood there repeatedly running my hands over my barbie-doll like crotch in disbelief. Tanaka finally broke the tension.
“Do you want a vagina?” It was a strange question. The future gets weirder everyday.
“Well... kind of.” I said awkwardly. “I mean there’s stuff I’d like to be able to do that requires one.”
“I see,” said Tanaka, suddenly getting all uptight. “Well, most infomorphs prefer to experience, um... pleasure... in the sims, so there is not that big a market for mechanical genitals. I... I could probably get one installed, but it would mean taking your body out of commission for a few days.” Tanaka started looking at his feet, his cheeks blushing. “I am sorry I did not think of that. I hope I did not ruin this moment for you.”
“No, not at all!” I said, still starring in the mirror with my hand in my pants. I thought about it for a while. This was a bit of a big deal. It was a bigger deal than no heartbeat or no breathing. I wanted a vagina. It was something I wasn’t going to feel complete without. But then I started thinking about Garth and what he did to me. That night still bothers me, and I think it’s going to be a while before I want to have sex again. It was weird. I wanted what was missing, but at the same time, I was kind of afraid to have it. With Garth I had been able to at least partially console myself with the fact that it was a simulation, that none of it happened in the real world, regardless of how real it might have seemed to me. If I was used like that in the real world, it would feel different. I know it shouldn’t, but to me, it would. I wanted genitals, but at the same time, I was so afraid of sex that I was kind of scared to get them. I couldn’t make up my mind.
“We’ll forget about it for now,” I said, trying to brush it aside. “The body is wonderful, Tanaka. I couldn’t be happier, regardless of any... additions we might have to make in the future. Thank you. Thank you very much.” I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him tight. Apparently too tight, as he started gasping for breath. I let go and jumped back.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry!” I yelled. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” he said, still wheezing a bit. “You just don’t know your own strength. You are much stronger and faster than a human being. You just have to get used to your new body, break it in.” He then got that same mischievous smile he’d gotten on his face when he first mentioned my body to me. “And I know just how to break it in. Follow me.” He then walked to the front door, it opened, and we went outside.
We stepped outside of his house, and I was immediately awestruck by my surroundings. This was not what I expected a space station to look like. I had expected that when we left the house it would lead to a hallway which would lead to some more hallways like some great big building. This was not a building. Our house had a lawn. A lawn with grass growing on it. I looked down the street and I saw a rows of houses that looked just like ours. I could see some palm trees growing. I looked in the other direction and off in the distance I swear I could see farmland. I looked up at the sky and I saw clouds drifting about. This wasn’t a space station. This was a suburb. It felt just like being in a suburb on Earth. Tanaka could have told me I was on Earth, and I would have believed him for quite a while. The only thing that was strange was that there were no stars in the night sky.
“This is amazing!” I yelled, probably way too loudly for what must have been about 3:30 AM. “It’s just like Earth! I would have thought we were on Earth if you hadn’t told me.”
“There are some ways to tell,” Tanaka said. “It’s harder now that it’s dark, but look straight up. Look very closely.
I looked up at the sky, and after a few seconds of starring, I saw what he was getting at. Off in the distance, through the clouds, I could see the other side of the cylinder. I saw all the houses and streets laid out on a grid, the way you do when you look down at the ground from a plane. For a moment, I had a strong sensation of vertigo. The ground was floating above me, and up looked like down. It seemed like I should be falling, but I wasn’t. It made me extraordinarily dizzy and I decided not to look straight up again for a while. Instead, I looked over at Tanaka, who appeared to be stretching out his legs.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I am going for a run around the cylinder,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Do you care to join me?”
“You run?” I said, rather surprised.
“Every morning since I was twenty five,” he said, with more than a little pride in his voice. “I probably won’t be able to keep up with you, but I can keep a decent pace. Are you coming?”
“Sure!” I yelled, again, probably too loud for 3:30 AM. Almost immediately after I said that, Tanaka started sprinting down the street. I followed and quickly caught up to him. To be honest, I was pretty impressed. Tanaka was in very good shape for a man his age, for any man, really. Jogging with Tanaka this morning really made me feel better about what we were about to do. I didn’t feel so much like I was taking a feeble old man out on to get his ass handed to him by our very first bounty. As I watched him run, I could tell Tanaka took very good care of his body, and he was in better shape than many men a fourth of his age. It got me wondering what else he did to stay in shape.
“Hey Tanaka,” I asked. “Do you practice any martial arts?”
“Third dan in Shotokan Karate, fourth dan in Kendo,” he replied, following up his declaration with a surprisingly high jump kick. I laughed at him a bit.
“Go Tanaka!” I yelled.
“Now you try,” he said.
“Try what?”
“Jump.”
“Why?”
“Just jump.” So I did. I jumped off the ground, and something strange happened. I stayed in the air longer than I should have. This wasn’t just me not being used to my powerful new legs, I could tell. Something about the jump itself seemed unnatural.
“What was that?” I asked.
“We are running in the opposite direction of the cylinder’s spin,” Tanaka explained. “The station generates gravity by spinning and by going against that spin, we’re spinning more slowly, therefore, the artificial gravity affects us less.”
“Are you telling me that the faster I run, the lighter I become?”
“Exactly.” He then smiled at me with that same old mischievous grin. “And before you ask, I do not mind if you run ahead.” I immediately started sprinting as fast as I could.
“Meet me back at the house!” he yelled after me. “It’s on this street, number 1314!”
I started running as fast as my new legs could carry me, which turned out to be pretty damned fast. I left Tanaka behind very quickly. When I had gotten to what I thought was my top speed, I leapt into the air. I leapt so much higher than I was expecting to that I completely lost my coordination and fell flat on my face. It didn’t hurt. I was oddly upset by that. It felt like another reminder that my body wasn’t real. Anyway, I got myself up and went back to running and defying gravity. It was a lot of fun, and kind of a rush, but not the kind of rush I would normally get from jogging. I was getting a rush off of the idea that the faster I went, the lighter I became. It was totally an intellectual rush, a rush off the coolness factor. What was missing from the run was any kind of physical rush. There were no endorphins, no runners high, no wall that I had to break through, none of that. I told my legs to run and they obediently ran, never complaining and never getting tired. I could have run like that all day if I cared to. After a while, it actually became sort of boring. By the time I had gone all the way around the cylinder and gotten back to our house, I was a little disappointed. The jog was a fun physics experiment, but it was also just another reminder that my body wasn’t real.
I waited for about twenty minutes in front of our house before Tanaka managed to catch up to me, covered in sweat. “That was impressive,” he said to me. “I have never seen a cyberdoll in full sprint before.”
I was about to ask him if there was some way I could get a real body, a body that was flesh and bone, but I just couldn’t do it. I felt like a spoiled little kid complaining because his parents didn’t get him the right Transformer for his birthday. Tanaka had worked really hard on getting me this body, and he’d spent a lot of money, too. I couldn’t just tell him I wanted a different one after everything he’d done for me. Besides, this body was everything I had asked for, and a super strong armored robot body is probably better for chasing down criminals anyway.
“Are you all right?” Tanaka asked. I had apparently made it pretty obvious that I was lost in thought.
“Yea, I’m fine,” I said. “What do you want to do now?”
“Well I would show you around the station, but at this time of night, there is not much open. Want to watch anime until the sun comes up?” That last part confused me.
“What do you mean ‘sun comes up’?” I asked. “I thought we were in a giant tube.”
“Well, technically, it’s not a sunrise,” he said. He then pointed down a street perpendicular to the one we’d been jogging on. “That end of the tube is transparent, and mirrors reflect sunlight in here at the appropriate times in order to give us a normal day/night cycle.”
“Sweet!” I yelled. “We totally have to see mirror rise this morning. That sounds amazing. And anime sounds like as good a way to pass that time as any other.”
So we went into our house and started watching Trigun on the video wall. While we were watching, Tanaka started telling me about this place called Margaret. Margaret was another space station in the Lagrange 4 spot. It’s a feminist collective that doesn’t allow any men onboard the station. It’s mostly home to wealthy women who want to experience an existence completely without men. They also offer women the chance to visit for empowerment workshops and vacations and such. Tanaka kind of brushed over that stuff. I got the impression that he thought the station’s attitude about men was a little outdated. Anyway, Tanaka wasn’t interested in Margaret because of feminism. Tanaka was interested in it because it was home to Dancing Crane Studios, widely regarded as the best martial arts studio in existence, especially in the field of low and zero gravity martial arts. Tanaka was interested in it because he wanted me to study there.
“It will be a full month before our crew arrives in Earth orbit, and about a month and a half before the Bebop is finished being built,” he said. “In that time, I would like to send you to Margaret to train. I would like to make sure that before we embark on our voyage, you are able to handle yourself in a fight.”
“Isn’t that what my super strong robot body is for?” I asked.
“Your body will help you, but you still have no technique,” Tanaka explained. “Your body may be strong, but we may come across things that are stronger. I want to know that you will be able to handle yourself in a fight, and Dancing Crane is the best. I would go with you if it weren’t for the strict gender rules.” I thought about it. It made a lot of sense. I did feel pretty unprepared for what we were about to do. Lessons in a bad ass orbital feminist dojo would probably help with that. Still, I had been away from home for a long time, and I didn’t really feel like I wanted to go away again.
“How far away is Margaret?” I asked.
“Only a few hundred miles from here, so we will be able to interact in the sims. I will visit you in the White House everyday.”
“Well, all right,” I said, hugging him, this time managing to do it without hurting him. “As long as I can still have my Tanaka time. I missed you.”
“I missed you, too, my dear.”
We then sat there watching Trigun until the first glimmer of sunlight started to shine down the tube. I rushed outside to see what was happening. It was amazing. At first, you see a tiny bright line spinning at the end of the tube. Well, it’s not spinning, you’re spinning, but that’s how it looks. Then, slowly, that line starts to fatten in the middle as the mirror turns towards you more. It was a little like watching the phases of the moon go by really fast. After a while, the mirror is fully in place, and there is this glowing disk just above the horizon that looks just like the sun. As the sunlight filled up the cylinder, I managed to get a much better look at the sky. It still amazes me that there are clouds in here drifting around. I noticed one that looked darker than the others, and a thought occurred to me.
“Tanaka, does it rain in here?”
“Of course. There is farmland just down that way. We could not have farms without rain.” That kind of made me feel like I had just asked a really stupid question, so I kept all of my other weather questions to myself. I just sat there with Tanaka, marveling in amazement at this environment. From the grass on up to the clouds, it was completely Earth-like. It was a far cry from the beehive settlement I had visited on Kafka. That was just a bunch of tunnels dug into the asteroid. No artificial gravity, no clouds, no plant life, just a maze of 3D tubes. That place seemed so alien to me that I didn’t understand how people could live in space. This, however... this I could understand calling home.
“Well, I have to get going,” said Tanaka after we had been sitting on the porch for I don’t know how long. “I have an early morning karate class, and then I have to go meet with our construction engineer.” Tanaka then went into the house and came back out with a katana hung across his back.
“Are you practicing weapons in your karate class?”
“No,” he said, very simply, and offered no further explanation for the katana. “The house is all yours, do whatever you like, and feel free to explore Islandia as well. There’s a radio in your cybershell, so you should be able to command everything in the house with your thoughts. Your White House simulation is also programmed into your cybershell, so you do not have to upload yourself onto the mainframe to experience it. You can just close your eyes and wish yourself there. Just make certain that the cybershell is in a safe place when you do. Oh, and when you get a chance, make sure to update your backup file, OK?”
“Backup file?”
“Yes, I kept a backup file of you while you were gone, just in case anything happened to you. You should update it with your new memories.” I guess it should have occurred to me before, but I had never really thought about anyone copying my program. I wasn’t sure how I felt about there being another me around.
“Did you ever run my backup file while I was gone?”
“No, that would be illegal.” He then looked at the time and said he had a few minutes to spare. He took those few minutes to explain to me what a xox was. Apparently, it’s illegal for an infomorph to have more than one copy of itself running at the same time. I guess normal humans are scared that we Ghosts and AIs are gonna start multiplying like crazy by copying ourselves and begin to out number humanity. Anyway, If you copy yourself for anything besides a backup file, both copies of you are known as xoxes, and you are both guilty of the crime of xoxing. Apparently, the laws about this are very strict. That made me feel a little bit better about the whole backup concept. I liked that there could only be one me at any given time. Still, the fact that I had a backup file made me feel strange. Obviously, a backup is there in case you loose the original. So if I died, does that mean Tanaka would just start my backup file up and replace me? Would he grieve? Would he even feel like I had died? The knowledge that I had a backup file suddenly made me feel very disposable. I was very uncomfortable with the idea. Unfortunately, Tanaka had to go before we could get into it any further.
“One more thing,” Tanaka said as he gave me a hug. “Milo, our ship’s AI, is running on my server. Just leave it be for today. It is a little... strange, and I want to make sure I introduce you to it under, well, controlled circumstances.” Obviously, this meant that I immediately wanted to go meet Milo. I started wondering why Tanaka wouldn’t want to introduce me to him. Is he afraid that Milo won’t like me? Why wouldn’t he like me? Also, why did Tanaka keep referring to Milo as “it”? Isn’t that rude? I was gonna ask him all of these questions, but he was already walking down the street, presumably to his dojo.
“Have a good day, Faye!” he yelled back to me.
“Same to you!” I responded. I then went back into the house and pondered what to do with myself. That’s when the rush of seeing Tanaka again and getting uploaded into a new body finally started to wear off. The exhaustion that I was feeling when I got home had returned. I did want to explore Islandia some more, but I was beat. I didn’t want to go to bed without recording everything that happened this morning, though. I wanted to write it down while it was still fresh in my head. So, I logged in to my White House simulation and started writing this entry. And... yea, that pretty much covers it. I’m exhausted, and now that I’ve gotten this down, I’m off to bed. Good night, whoever ends up reading my journal. I’m sure I’ll have more for you in a few days, but for now, I need to go simulate a REM cycle. TTFN!
NOTE : I got a job! As such, I will soon not have nearly as much free time to spend writing, so updates to this story may come more slowly than before. Sorry, but I needs money.
March 23, 2100
I’ve had an amazing morning. OK, so I just got back from my trip. Literally, today. I went from Japan to Mars to Kafka to Islandia. Tanaka tells me it’s about 200 million kilometers total. I still can’t believe that. I can’t wrap my head around all the distance I’ve traveled, much less the fact that I can actually travel at the speed of light. It was an amazing trip, but I’ve already written about that. If you’ve been reading my journal regularly, you’ve had to put up with endless pages about how amazing Mars was and how mind-blowing the asteroids are and blah blah blah. I’m sorry. Anyone reading my journal is probably used to all of that stuff, but everything is still amazing to me. Anyway, I’m done writing about my trip. For now. I want to tell you all about what happened when I got back.
OK, so I arrived at Islandia at about 2 AM. I was exhausted. It still weird to me that I not only have to sleep, but my program actually has to be running in order for me to sleep. The time that my program is turned off doesn’t count because my brain has to go through a whole sleep cycle with dreams and whatnot. Incidentally, getting turned off never stops feeling creepy. As I was saying, I had just gotten back, and I was exhausted, but I had to spend about an hour in line at customs. This is digital customs, mind you. It’s all one big simulation and they still can’t get it any faster than it was in my day! Anyway, I get past customs and I get myself transferred over to Tanaka’s new server here on Islandia. I start up my White House simulation, and all I want to do is go to bed. I get into the bed, and in only a few minutes, Tanaka is knocking on my door. Instantly, I’m awake again. I throw on a robe and go running down to the front door. I really should think about living in a smaller house. I get to the front door, open it, and there he is. I instantly threw my arms around him. It was such a relief to see him again. When I’m not with him, I feel so alone in this world, so like I don’t belong. This world is still strange and frightening to me sometimes. I like knowing I have Tanaka to show me around. I like knowing how much he cares about me. I like knowing I can depend on him. When I’m with him or on his server, I feel like I’m at home. It doesn’t matter if we’re in Japan or in orbit or on this new ship he’s building. For me, for now, Tanaka is home.
“I missed you,” I said. “I missed you so much.”
“I missed you, too,” he sighed. “Why didn’t you tell me when you got in?”
“Well, it was 2 AM when I got here. it’s more like 3 now. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I am not tired,” he said, smiling. “I knew when you were getting in, so I went to bed at 5 in the afternoon. I’m wanted to make sure I was wide awake to welcome you to Islandia. Are you tired?”
“No,” I lied. “I’m wide awake.” I’m sure he would have had no problem with letting me sleep, but it had been over a month since I’d left, and I’d only been able to talk to him in light speed delayed emails. I wanted some Tanaka time.
“Good!” he said. “We have much to discuss! I want to hear all about your trip, and all about our crew.” He then started looking around the White House absent-mindedly. “I... I have forgotten the layout of this place. Where should we go to talk?”
“Let’s go to the Green Room,” I said, taking his had and leading him around the White House. We settled into the Green Room, he simulated up some tea, and I simulated up some very, very strong coffee. He started asking me all sorts of questions about Miguel, Lee, and Georgia. I told him that Miguel seemed nice, but a little rough around the edges.
“He seemed to be a first rate engineer,” I said, speaking as if I had any idea how to evaluate a fusion/robotics engineer. I then went off on a tangent about Miguel’s ranch and how amazing it was to fall asleep under the Martian sky under the glow of the solar reflector.
“Have you ever been to Mars?” I asked.
“No,” Tanaka said, looking a bit sheepish. “I’ve only ever been into orbit a few times, I’ve barely even left Earth. But I’m sure our travels will take us there.” He then started asking me about Lee. He was extremely excited that I managed to find us a “Spike” as he kept calling him. He kept using the term like it was a job title. It was actually a little unnerving. I’m kind of counting on Tanaka for everything right now, and it bothers me when I realize that he’s a little... well... off. OK, a lot off. Just so everyone reading this knows, I’m fully aware that this whole idea of the bounty hunting ship is completely insane. Selling everything you own in order to buy a spaceship so that you can try and make your life more like the TV shows you watched as a kid, yea, it’s totally insane. So why am I going along with it? I’m not sure. I guess I’m just not sure what else to do. I’ve looked into it, there are programs that help people like me integrate into society, and I’m sure Tanaka would pay for me to go to college, but what do I do then? What job would I get? What job would be available to me? Are there any jobs out there I’d want? I understand this world so little, I’m really not confident about stepping out into it on my own. That makes it sound like I’m just going with Tanaka because I’m afraid to be alone. That sounds pretty pathetic, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not just that. I know I called his new bounty hunting career is insane, but at the same time, it’s kind of intriguing. I watched all the same shows he did, I romanticize all the same things he does, I just never would have thought of actually trying to do it. It’s a crazy thing to do, but this whole world seems crazy to me. I don’t think it’s really set in yet that this world is real and not some crazy dream. Nothing seems real to me right now, and I guess that makes it easier to do the crazy thing. Maybe I’ll regret it later. Maybe it’ll grow on me. Maybe I’ll find out I was meant to be a bounty hunter. I don’t know. All I know is that I have to do something with myself. I can’t just sit around in Tanaka’s server for the rest of my life, and this is something that at least seems exciting. Exciting and crazy, but exciting.
Anyway, I was telling him about Lee. I told him all about Lee’s connections to the Triads, and I told him I thought he’d be a good source of information for us. I left out the part where I flirted with him and thought he was kind of cute. I wasn’t comfortable telling Tanaka that. I’m actually not that comfortable with it myself after what happened with Garth. I’m really not ready to get involved with anyone after what happened. Man, why did I flirt with him? Now he’s gonna think that I’m interested, and I’m gonna have to spend weeks stuck on a ship with him. Why did I do that? Because I am interested, that’s why. Lee was cute, and he seemed like a nice guy, especially for a career criminal. Huh. That’s interesting. Lee is a career criminal, and Garth was all bad ass revolutionary. Do I have a thing for bad boys? Two isn’t really enough to make a pattern, so maybe I’m over thinking it. God, I am so tired of having such basic questions about who I am. When am I gonna get my memories back? Wow, I’m really rambling. OK, back on track.
So then we started talking about Georgia. I told him that she seemed right for the ship. That seemed to be the best way I could put it. Georgia seemed nice enough, but we didn’t click like I did with Miguel and Lee. In fact, I think Georgia found me a little annoying. Georgia had this whole I-don’t-have-time-for-bullshit vibe to her and I think that, unlike Miguel and Lee, she found my lack of knowledge and curiosity about the world to be irritating instead of endearing. I also think that Tanaka’s whole idea here might have been a little insulting to her. I mean this is someone who actually does have a career as a bounty hunter. Well, contract enforcer, but close enough. Point being, she actually does this kind of work, so I think she was a little insulted by the fact that Tanaka was thinking of it as a fun way to spend his retirement years. Even still, I’m glad I managed to get her onboard. We needed at least one crew member who actually has experience in this field, even if I don’t think she’s someone who will get along well with the rest of the crew.
Once I was done telling him about my trip and all the people I’d interviewed, Tanaka started telling me what had been going on with him. He told me that he had spent the time I had been gone selling off his assets and arranging for the construction of the Bebop-Maru here in Islandia. It was at this point that I asked him what Islandia was, exactly. I knew it was a space station, and I knew that we were on it, but that was about all I knew. Turns out Islandia is the biggest space station in existence. It’s made up of two cylinders 8 kilometers long and 1 and a half kilometers in diameter, both of them rotating to simulate gravity. I quickly converted that to miles in my head. I’ve got to get used to the metric. He went on to tell me that it was in the Lagrange 4 point. Then he started to explain about Lagrange points, but I barely understood it. If you really want to know, look it up on the internet. He told me that Islandia is home to about half a million people, and that it is actually a sovereign nation, which I had actually figured out when I was going through customs. Islandia was also home to the biggest, most expensive, and most respected shipyards in the solar system and those were the same shipyards that were going to me making the Bebop-Maru. As Tanaka started to tell about the construction of the Bebop, I realized that he was probably the construction crew’s worst nightmare. It turns out he’s been spending most of his spare time at the shipyards, overseeing the construction of our ship. He’s been there every single day. He then told me about all of the “long and productive discussions” he’d had with the chief construction engineer, and I almost instantly got the feeling that the Islandia shipyards hated us. Tanaka sounded like he was probably a very irritating back seat spaceship builder. I thought about telling him that maybe he shouldn’t bother them so much, but then I figured he’s paying them millions to construct this ship, and for that kind of money they can put up with an overly eager old man. He told me that he’d been able to spend even more time at the shipyards since the other project he was overseeing had been completed.
“What other project?” I asked. He looked up from his tea with a mischievous grin on his childlike face.
“Oh, did I not tell you?” he said, smiling from ear to ear. “Your body is finished. It’s in my house in Islandia, you can upload into it anytime you like.”
“What?!” I screamed, jumping up and knocking my tea onto the floor. I didn’t even bother having the computer clean it up. I ran over and threw my arms around Tanaka.
“It’s really ready?! I can upload into it right now?!”
“If you want,” he said with that big giant grin still covering his face.
“Oh my God,” I yelled. I think I hopped a little bit too. “Let’s do it now, let’s do it right now!” I knew at that moment that sleep was going to have to wait for a while. Tanaka laughed at me and got up from his chair.
“If that is your wish,” he said. “Then that is what we will do. I’m going to disconnect from this simulation and get your cybershell ready. When I’m ready to upload you, I’ll signal you, and I’ll put you in the cybershell.”
“I can’t wait to see you,” I said. “The real you, not this simulation.” He looked a little uncomfortable after I said that.
“Yes, well, you are about to get your chance. I am going to disconnect now but I will be seeing you very soon.”
“I can’t wait!” I said, and with that, he disappeared. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said I couldn’t wait. I don’t know how long he was gone, but it felt like an eternity. I kept pacing back and forth in the Green Room, wondering about my new body. I had been uploaded into a cybershell before back on Mars, but that was a rental. The body didn’t look like me, it didn’t move like me, it didn’t feel like me. It was a thoroughly uncomfortable thing to move around in. This was going to be my body, custom-built for my program and sculpted to look just like me. Then I started to worry about how good the body would actually be. The only cybershell I had ever been uploaded into was that rental, and I had just assumed that it was uncomfortable simply because it was a rental, but I had nothing to compare it to. What if all cybershells felt like that? What if I just couldn’t get used to moving around in a body that wasn’t made of flesh and bone? What if Tanaka screwed something up in the design? He was a good friend, but I had noticed he was a little forgetful. What if I upload into it and I’m too short or too tall or too whatever? What if it doesn’t feel like me? I kept pacing back and forth, asking those kinds of questions over and over to my self until, I swear, I was about to induce my own little simulated panic attack. I couldn’t help it. I became so extremely nervous. The idea of being stuck in a body that wasn’t the body I wanted filled me such an incredible sense of dread. Eventually, Tanaka’s disembodied voice called to me.
“I am ready to upload you,” he said. “Are you ready?”
“Um... I don’t know,” I said, nervously. “I’m not sure about this, I’m worried. Are you sure you got everything right?”
“If there is anything you do not like about it, I promise I will return it to the factory and have the proper alterations made.”
“OK,” I said. “But I’m still not sure I’m ready. Maybe we should-”
And with that he uploaded me.
At first, I was so nervous, I didn’t even open my eyes. I just laid there and tried to get a sense of my new body. To my great relief, it felt right. I don’t know why, I don’t know how you program a cybershell to “fit” a particular infomorph, but this one felt like it fit me. It felt like my body. Well, it felt close to my body. There were some things missing, some things that would always be missing in a mechanical form. I didn’t have a heartbeat. I didn’t breathe. Those things felt awkward and wrong, but I didn’t think there was anyway I could ever get those things back. That was something I was just going to have to get used to. Other than those two things, the body seemed perfect. However, I wasn’t really in a position to make a judgment at that point. I hadn’t even opened my eyes or moved around.
“Are you all right?” I heard Tanaka yell. His real voice sounded different from his simulated one. It came from deeper in the throat. It was an older man’s voice, but I still recognized it as his. “Are you having trouble moving?”
“No, I’m just taking my time.” I said, nervously. “I’ll be up and about in a moment.” And with that I opened my eyes and took my first look at Tanaka.
I know it sounds like a stupid thing to be surprised by, but he looked so old! I know, I know, he’s a hundred and twenty, how did I expect him to look, right? Still, the Tanaka I had dealt with was always his Icon, which was either an image of himself at the age of twenty five or an image of Spike. Plus, the spirit of the man that I knew was that of a young man, if not that of a child. Tanaka was someone I watched cartoons with. Tanaka was someone who had just abandoned his whole life in order to try and become a hero. The Tanaka I knew never seemed like an old man. As I looked up at him, I started thinking about the eighty years that he lived and I skipped. I looked at the wrinkles on his face and thought about the decades of office work and drudgery that put them there. It finally hit me, emotionally, that my best friend had spent one hundred years living a life he really didn’t want to live. I felt terrible for him. I felt like I might have shed a tear if that were possible. Then I looked in his eyes. I looked into his big brown eyes and there I saw the Tanaka I knew. I saw that inside his aging body was the childlike hero wannabe that I had always known. In those eyes, I saw my best friend. As I starred into his eyes, a big smile crept it’s way across his wrinkled face.
“What are you smiling about?” I asked. As I did, I listened to my own voice and realized it was exactly what I had wanted it to be. I sounded just like I did in the simulation. My voice fit me perfectly as well, so I had one less thing to worry about. As I was thinking about my voice, his smile widened further.
“I am smiling because you are smiling,” he said. “It is your first smile in this body, and it looks right. It looks like Faye’s smile.” We just froze there for a while, starring into each other’s eyes, best friends seeing each other for the first time.
Then I noticed his hair. Tanaka’s hair was a dark, anime-colored green that was totally and completely unnatural. I looked up at it and I couldn’t stop myself from laughing.
“You dye your hair!” I yelled, laughing out loud and thoroughly enjoying the sound of my own laugh. “You never told me you dye your hair!”
“That is because I don’t,” he said, smiling but still managing to sound slightly indignant. “This is a transgenic feature. I used a retrovirus to alter my genes so that my hair would grow this color. This is my natural color now.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, laughing even harder. “You don’t dye your hair an anime color, you just altered your DNA at the cellular level so that your hair would grow an anime color. Yes, that’s much better. Much, much better. Not weird and fanboy-ish at all. Totally normal thing to do.”
“Excuse me, I am not the one named after an anime character!”
“You named me!”
“Yes, and you accepted it!” He had me there. I did like the name.
“Fine,” I said. “We’re both dorks. Dorks and proud of it. Now getting back to important stuff, I’m assuming you have a mirror for me?”
“Well, I have something close enough.” With that, one of the walls suddenly rippled and turned into a mirror.
“Video wall with a reflection option. Have a look at yourself.”
I got up off the couch and walked over to the wall. I looked myself up and down. Tanaka had certainly come through on his promise. It looked like me. It looked exactly like me. It had my long blond hair and my green eyes and my complexion and everything. It had my figure down perfectly as well. I starred at myself in the mirror for a while, not quite believing it. I started running my hands over my skin and marveling at the sensation. I felt so real. I started poking and prodding at myself, especially in the fleshy parts like the breasts and the ass. I reached under the T-shirt and jeans I was dressed in, feeling every inch of me. Everything felt perfectly right, except for one thing.
“I don’t have a vagina,” I said, with more than a little surprise in my voice.
“Oh,” said Tanaka, sounding kind of surprised. “Uh, no, no you do not. I did not have one installed.” There was a long pause there as Tanaka looked embarrassed and I stood there repeatedly running my hands over my barbie-doll like crotch in disbelief. Tanaka finally broke the tension.
“Do you want a vagina?” It was a strange question. The future gets weirder everyday.
“Well... kind of.” I said awkwardly. “I mean there’s stuff I’d like to be able to do that requires one.”
“I see,” said Tanaka, suddenly getting all uptight. “Well, most infomorphs prefer to experience, um... pleasure... in the sims, so there is not that big a market for mechanical genitals. I... I could probably get one installed, but it would mean taking your body out of commission for a few days.” Tanaka started looking at his feet, his cheeks blushing. “I am sorry I did not think of that. I hope I did not ruin this moment for you.”
“No, not at all!” I said, still starring in the mirror with my hand in my pants. I thought about it for a while. This was a bit of a big deal. It was a bigger deal than no heartbeat or no breathing. I wanted a vagina. It was something I wasn’t going to feel complete without. But then I started thinking about Garth and what he did to me. That night still bothers me, and I think it’s going to be a while before I want to have sex again. It was weird. I wanted what was missing, but at the same time, I was kind of afraid to have it. With Garth I had been able to at least partially console myself with the fact that it was a simulation, that none of it happened in the real world, regardless of how real it might have seemed to me. If I was used like that in the real world, it would feel different. I know it shouldn’t, but to me, it would. I wanted genitals, but at the same time, I was so afraid of sex that I was kind of scared to get them. I couldn’t make up my mind.
“We’ll forget about it for now,” I said, trying to brush it aside. “The body is wonderful, Tanaka. I couldn’t be happier, regardless of any... additions we might have to make in the future. Thank you. Thank you very much.” I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him tight. Apparently too tight, as he started gasping for breath. I let go and jumped back.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry!” I yelled. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” he said, still wheezing a bit. “You just don’t know your own strength. You are much stronger and faster than a human being. You just have to get used to your new body, break it in.” He then got that same mischievous smile he’d gotten on his face when he first mentioned my body to me. “And I know just how to break it in. Follow me.” He then walked to the front door, it opened, and we went outside.
We stepped outside of his house, and I was immediately awestruck by my surroundings. This was not what I expected a space station to look like. I had expected that when we left the house it would lead to a hallway which would lead to some more hallways like some great big building. This was not a building. Our house had a lawn. A lawn with grass growing on it. I looked down the street and I saw a rows of houses that looked just like ours. I could see some palm trees growing. I looked in the other direction and off in the distance I swear I could see farmland. I looked up at the sky and I saw clouds drifting about. This wasn’t a space station. This was a suburb. It felt just like being in a suburb on Earth. Tanaka could have told me I was on Earth, and I would have believed him for quite a while. The only thing that was strange was that there were no stars in the night sky.
“This is amazing!” I yelled, probably way too loudly for what must have been about 3:30 AM. “It’s just like Earth! I would have thought we were on Earth if you hadn’t told me.”
“There are some ways to tell,” Tanaka said. “It’s harder now that it’s dark, but look straight up. Look very closely.
I looked up at the sky, and after a few seconds of starring, I saw what he was getting at. Off in the distance, through the clouds, I could see the other side of the cylinder. I saw all the houses and streets laid out on a grid, the way you do when you look down at the ground from a plane. For a moment, I had a strong sensation of vertigo. The ground was floating above me, and up looked like down. It seemed like I should be falling, but I wasn’t. It made me extraordinarily dizzy and I decided not to look straight up again for a while. Instead, I looked over at Tanaka, who appeared to be stretching out his legs.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I am going for a run around the cylinder,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Do you care to join me?”
“You run?” I said, rather surprised.
“Every morning since I was twenty five,” he said, with more than a little pride in his voice. “I probably won’t be able to keep up with you, but I can keep a decent pace. Are you coming?”
“Sure!” I yelled, again, probably too loud for 3:30 AM. Almost immediately after I said that, Tanaka started sprinting down the street. I followed and quickly caught up to him. To be honest, I was pretty impressed. Tanaka was in very good shape for a man his age, for any man, really. Jogging with Tanaka this morning really made me feel better about what we were about to do. I didn’t feel so much like I was taking a feeble old man out on to get his ass handed to him by our very first bounty. As I watched him run, I could tell Tanaka took very good care of his body, and he was in better shape than many men a fourth of his age. It got me wondering what else he did to stay in shape.
“Hey Tanaka,” I asked. “Do you practice any martial arts?”
“Third dan in Shotokan Karate, fourth dan in Kendo,” he replied, following up his declaration with a surprisingly high jump kick. I laughed at him a bit.
“Go Tanaka!” I yelled.
“Now you try,” he said.
“Try what?”
“Jump.”
“Why?”
“Just jump.” So I did. I jumped off the ground, and something strange happened. I stayed in the air longer than I should have. This wasn’t just me not being used to my powerful new legs, I could tell. Something about the jump itself seemed unnatural.
“What was that?” I asked.
“We are running in the opposite direction of the cylinder’s spin,” Tanaka explained. “The station generates gravity by spinning and by going against that spin, we’re spinning more slowly, therefore, the artificial gravity affects us less.”
“Are you telling me that the faster I run, the lighter I become?”
“Exactly.” He then smiled at me with that same old mischievous grin. “And before you ask, I do not mind if you run ahead.” I immediately started sprinting as fast as I could.
“Meet me back at the house!” he yelled after me. “It’s on this street, number 1314!”
I started running as fast as my new legs could carry me, which turned out to be pretty damned fast. I left Tanaka behind very quickly. When I had gotten to what I thought was my top speed, I leapt into the air. I leapt so much higher than I was expecting to that I completely lost my coordination and fell flat on my face. It didn’t hurt. I was oddly upset by that. It felt like another reminder that my body wasn’t real. Anyway, I got myself up and went back to running and defying gravity. It was a lot of fun, and kind of a rush, but not the kind of rush I would normally get from jogging. I was getting a rush off of the idea that the faster I went, the lighter I became. It was totally an intellectual rush, a rush off the coolness factor. What was missing from the run was any kind of physical rush. There were no endorphins, no runners high, no wall that I had to break through, none of that. I told my legs to run and they obediently ran, never complaining and never getting tired. I could have run like that all day if I cared to. After a while, it actually became sort of boring. By the time I had gone all the way around the cylinder and gotten back to our house, I was a little disappointed. The jog was a fun physics experiment, but it was also just another reminder that my body wasn’t real.
I waited for about twenty minutes in front of our house before Tanaka managed to catch up to me, covered in sweat. “That was impressive,” he said to me. “I have never seen a cyberdoll in full sprint before.”
I was about to ask him if there was some way I could get a real body, a body that was flesh and bone, but I just couldn’t do it. I felt like a spoiled little kid complaining because his parents didn’t get him the right Transformer for his birthday. Tanaka had worked really hard on getting me this body, and he’d spent a lot of money, too. I couldn’t just tell him I wanted a different one after everything he’d done for me. Besides, this body was everything I had asked for, and a super strong armored robot body is probably better for chasing down criminals anyway.
“Are you all right?” Tanaka asked. I had apparently made it pretty obvious that I was lost in thought.
“Yea, I’m fine,” I said. “What do you want to do now?”
“Well I would show you around the station, but at this time of night, there is not much open. Want to watch anime until the sun comes up?” That last part confused me.
“What do you mean ‘sun comes up’?” I asked. “I thought we were in a giant tube.”
“Well, technically, it’s not a sunrise,” he said. He then pointed down a street perpendicular to the one we’d been jogging on. “That end of the tube is transparent, and mirrors reflect sunlight in here at the appropriate times in order to give us a normal day/night cycle.”
“Sweet!” I yelled. “We totally have to see mirror rise this morning. That sounds amazing. And anime sounds like as good a way to pass that time as any other.”
So we went into our house and started watching Trigun on the video wall. While we were watching, Tanaka started telling me about this place called Margaret. Margaret was another space station in the Lagrange 4 spot. It’s a feminist collective that doesn’t allow any men onboard the station. It’s mostly home to wealthy women who want to experience an existence completely without men. They also offer women the chance to visit for empowerment workshops and vacations and such. Tanaka kind of brushed over that stuff. I got the impression that he thought the station’s attitude about men was a little outdated. Anyway, Tanaka wasn’t interested in Margaret because of feminism. Tanaka was interested in it because it was home to Dancing Crane Studios, widely regarded as the best martial arts studio in existence, especially in the field of low and zero gravity martial arts. Tanaka was interested in it because he wanted me to study there.
“It will be a full month before our crew arrives in Earth orbit, and about a month and a half before the Bebop is finished being built,” he said. “In that time, I would like to send you to Margaret to train. I would like to make sure that before we embark on our voyage, you are able to handle yourself in a fight.”
“Isn’t that what my super strong robot body is for?” I asked.
“Your body will help you, but you still have no technique,” Tanaka explained. “Your body may be strong, but we may come across things that are stronger. I want to know that you will be able to handle yourself in a fight, and Dancing Crane is the best. I would go with you if it weren’t for the strict gender rules.” I thought about it. It made a lot of sense. I did feel pretty unprepared for what we were about to do. Lessons in a bad ass orbital feminist dojo would probably help with that. Still, I had been away from home for a long time, and I didn’t really feel like I wanted to go away again.
“How far away is Margaret?” I asked.
“Only a few hundred miles from here, so we will be able to interact in the sims. I will visit you in the White House everyday.”
“Well, all right,” I said, hugging him, this time managing to do it without hurting him. “As long as I can still have my Tanaka time. I missed you.”
“I missed you, too, my dear.”
We then sat there watching Trigun until the first glimmer of sunlight started to shine down the tube. I rushed outside to see what was happening. It was amazing. At first, you see a tiny bright line spinning at the end of the tube. Well, it’s not spinning, you’re spinning, but that’s how it looks. Then, slowly, that line starts to fatten in the middle as the mirror turns towards you more. It was a little like watching the phases of the moon go by really fast. After a while, the mirror is fully in place, and there is this glowing disk just above the horizon that looks just like the sun. As the sunlight filled up the cylinder, I managed to get a much better look at the sky. It still amazes me that there are clouds in here drifting around. I noticed one that looked darker than the others, and a thought occurred to me.
“Tanaka, does it rain in here?”
“Of course. There is farmland just down that way. We could not have farms without rain.” That kind of made me feel like I had just asked a really stupid question, so I kept all of my other weather questions to myself. I just sat there with Tanaka, marveling in amazement at this environment. From the grass on up to the clouds, it was completely Earth-like. It was a far cry from the beehive settlement I had visited on Kafka. That was just a bunch of tunnels dug into the asteroid. No artificial gravity, no clouds, no plant life, just a maze of 3D tubes. That place seemed so alien to me that I didn’t understand how people could live in space. This, however... this I could understand calling home.
“Well, I have to get going,” said Tanaka after we had been sitting on the porch for I don’t know how long. “I have an early morning karate class, and then I have to go meet with our construction engineer.” Tanaka then went into the house and came back out with a katana hung across his back.
“Are you practicing weapons in your karate class?”
“No,” he said, very simply, and offered no further explanation for the katana. “The house is all yours, do whatever you like, and feel free to explore Islandia as well. There’s a radio in your cybershell, so you should be able to command everything in the house with your thoughts. Your White House simulation is also programmed into your cybershell, so you do not have to upload yourself onto the mainframe to experience it. You can just close your eyes and wish yourself there. Just make certain that the cybershell is in a safe place when you do. Oh, and when you get a chance, make sure to update your backup file, OK?”
“Backup file?”
“Yes, I kept a backup file of you while you were gone, just in case anything happened to you. You should update it with your new memories.” I guess it should have occurred to me before, but I had never really thought about anyone copying my program. I wasn’t sure how I felt about there being another me around.
“Did you ever run my backup file while I was gone?”
“No, that would be illegal.” He then looked at the time and said he had a few minutes to spare. He took those few minutes to explain to me what a xox was. Apparently, it’s illegal for an infomorph to have more than one copy of itself running at the same time. I guess normal humans are scared that we Ghosts and AIs are gonna start multiplying like crazy by copying ourselves and begin to out number humanity. Anyway, If you copy yourself for anything besides a backup file, both copies of you are known as xoxes, and you are both guilty of the crime of xoxing. Apparently, the laws about this are very strict. That made me feel a little bit better about the whole backup concept. I liked that there could only be one me at any given time. Still, the fact that I had a backup file made me feel strange. Obviously, a backup is there in case you loose the original. So if I died, does that mean Tanaka would just start my backup file up and replace me? Would he grieve? Would he even feel like I had died? The knowledge that I had a backup file suddenly made me feel very disposable. I was very uncomfortable with the idea. Unfortunately, Tanaka had to go before we could get into it any further.
“One more thing,” Tanaka said as he gave me a hug. “Milo, our ship’s AI, is running on my server. Just leave it be for today. It is a little... strange, and I want to make sure I introduce you to it under, well, controlled circumstances.” Obviously, this meant that I immediately wanted to go meet Milo. I started wondering why Tanaka wouldn’t want to introduce me to him. Is he afraid that Milo won’t like me? Why wouldn’t he like me? Also, why did Tanaka keep referring to Milo as “it”? Isn’t that rude? I was gonna ask him all of these questions, but he was already walking down the street, presumably to his dojo.
“Have a good day, Faye!” he yelled back to me.
“Same to you!” I responded. I then went back into the house and pondered what to do with myself. That’s when the rush of seeing Tanaka again and getting uploaded into a new body finally started to wear off. The exhaustion that I was feeling when I got home had returned. I did want to explore Islandia some more, but I was beat. I didn’t want to go to bed without recording everything that happened this morning, though. I wanted to write it down while it was still fresh in my head. So, I logged in to my White House simulation and started writing this entry. And... yea, that pretty much covers it. I’m exhausted, and now that I’ve gotten this down, I’m off to bed. Good night, whoever ends up reading my journal. I’m sure I’ll have more for you in a few days, but for now, I need to go simulate a REM cycle. TTFN!