The Emoticon Generation (10 page)

Olivia would choose the project over her any day. And that hurt more than anything. It hurt physically, inside her stomach.

No real, loving mother could really let these horrible things be done to others that are
exactly
like her daughter. She wouldn’t have let Glynis 2.41 be maimed, if she didn’t see
all
Glynisses as experiments and nothing more. And even if Olivia
did
feel love towards Glynis 1.0, it probably didn’t compare, it probably couldn’t compare, to the love of a mother to her real daughter. It couldn’t.

She fell back into her chair, drained of energy, exhausted.

I’m nothing. I’m nothing to my mother. She doesn’t really think I’m her daughter, she doesn’t really love me.

And Glynis realized that despite everything Olivia’s done, despite the hate Glynis felt toward her, and despite the fact that she wasn’t her biological mother, Glynis couldn’t help but see her as her mother. That was something Glynis couldn’t erase, no matter how badly she wanted to. She still couldn’t tear herself completely from Olivia, despite her incredible betrayals. She
needed
Olivia, she needed Olivia to like her. She needed her
mother
!

But that didn’t go both ways. There are thousands and thousands of other lab rats just like me. How am I different from all the others? How am
I
special? How can I possibly be
any
thing if the only man who ever slightly cared about me, even though I’m just a bunch of ones and zeros, says I’m not real?

She sat up, fingers clicking at the keyboard. It was time to check the one thing she had avoided, because, until now, she still had hope that what Steve had said wasn’t true. But now there was no hope.

It was time to see what she really looked like.

Cutting in from Olivia’s original page to the Institute’s mainframe, she searched for the folders in which Glynis’ 1.0 programming resided. She found the computer unit in which she was located. There was the icon: Olivia’s small face, and underneath it the name ‘Glynis 1.0’. She could manipulate that icon now. She could erase it, she could stop it, she could run herself from the beginning or from any other time. It freaked her out.

But that wasn’t what she was looking for. She pressed the right button, and saw the icon’s ‘properties’. She traced the program’s .exe file to the right folders, and now she saw the ten files that were Glynis 1.0. There we are. Glynis. In the flesh. In the ‘code’.

She broke into her own ‘code’, even as it was running. There it was, the code that gave her her body, that represented her blood, the air she breathed, the food she ate, the sweat, her glands, her saliva, her cells, her DNA, her hair, her fingernails, her teeth... Millions and millions of lines of code. Jesus fucking Christ!

She let the code scroll endlessly down, as she just stared at it. Real people had to cut their flesh to see what they’re made of. Me, cutting my flesh wouldn’t do that.
This
is what I’m made of.

The program scrolled down and down. You had to give Olivia credit, it
was
ingenious. Who thought we could achieve this so soon? And she’d done it more than thirteen years ago! You had to give the woman credit. But why
me
?! Why would she do that to
me
?!

And as self-pity engulfed her, the hazy lines that ran down the screen almost too fast to read, suddenly began to make sense. She was a good programmer herself, and some of the code was obvious. She slowed the scrolling down a bit. Yes. She could...
tweak
this.

She could change her own code. Suddenly, she stopped the scrolling, and jumped from one place to another in the program that represented her. The part about how the cells functioned – that was a tough one, and she couldn’t understand it. But all the rest – the physical rules of the virtual reality, that was easy.

Here was the part where the hardness or softness of every object was defined. Simple manipulation, and she could walk through walls...

Here was the part in which the shape of the environment was defined. She could change
that
. She could live in a palace or a jungle or...

Here was the part where the images of the visitors were defined – Olivia, Ron, Elizabeth, and, probably a recent addition, Professor Von Wannabe. She could get Olivia to look like Ron or Glynis or an elephant...

Here was the part that interpreted ‘photons’, as they touched her ‘retinas’. All those equations must be complicated physics stuff. But there was an easy place to tweak: The computer interpreted what she could see based on the
location
of the virtual eyes. She could tweak the code and get the computer to have her ‘see’ from whatever coordinates she wanted to without her having to move. In fact, she could find the place where she moves, and tweak
that
, so that she could simply ‘jump’ from place to place...

Here was the part responsible for the way Glynis herself looked. That was a tougher one. The program was told to search what is the ‘outside’ of Glynis – the exterior cells, mainly, but it also searched for blood or bones or muscles outside the body (in case of injury). Then the program would ‘color in’ the shape according to the analysis of Glynis’ body. But Glynis’ image didn’t have to have anything to do with her cells or muscles or bones, did it? It could be anything, too. She could tell the program to forget about Glynis’ exterior, and to simply put an image of... of anyone or anything. Imagine Olivia’s surprise, if the next time she walked in, she’d be looking at a mirror image of herself. Or if Glynis looked like the Professor. That would be something. But... But the potential was even greater, Glynis realized. Who said she
needed
an image? This was virtual reality, after all. She could have
no
image – she could become
invisible
.

And with her completely invisible, with her body able to pass through things, with Glynis not having to move from place to place but able to simply ‘jump’ there – Glynis would still be Glynis, but the only thing that would be left from Glynis – the true Glynis – would be... what?

The brain. She couldn’t tweak her thoughts or her emotions. She was and always would be a brain, a brain connected to a nonexistent body, but that depended on it to breathe, to supply blood, and perhaps to do other things we don’t know about. She’d always feel her body, she’d be able to run, or jump or lift her hands. Her body would still grow tired, it would still itch, because the programming was of the body
and
the brain. But her body could be turned invisible, it could all be turned into objects that don’t interact with anything in ‘reality’. Because her programming was bound to humanity’s rules, Glynis’ brain couldn’t exist without her body. But the body didn’t have to be physical at all, did it?

She turned away from the screen and stared at the wall. This was too much. She was human and yet not human. She was thousands of different people, she would be thousands and maybe millions... But they would never be her. They could never be her.

Her eyes suddenly lit up. There was a way to insure she
would
be unique! There was one more thing that could be tweaked in her programming!

She got rid of the ‘view’ ability and accessed the program itself, even as it was running, and began to change its code. The irony of herself being a program that was consciously changing its own programming flashed through her mind, and she typed faster.

Within fifteen minutes, she was done. Until now, the program saved its data – Glynis’ and the environment’s exact condition – once a minute. Now the program could no longer ‘save’ itself. But this was not enough. She had seen where the ‘saved’ information was sent to – and now she accessed
that
place. Here they were. All the records of Glynis 1.0 from her birth to a second ago – her entire life in one minute intervals saved on a computer. Erasing all this would take her hours. She quickly wrote a program that would delete each and every memory of her. The program would also make sure that none of her memories could be undeleted. And, when it was over, it would hide itself, and if any records of Glynis 1.0 ever appeared – it would erase them, as well.

She wrote the program and executed it. She watched the screen, as moments of her life began to disappear, a hundred at a time, beginning from the present and going back. She had not tampered with Olivia’s experiment. She had just made sure that she would never relive her past. Of all the other Glynisses, she
was
unique. There would only be one version of Glynis 1.0. Only one. And when she died, she would not be reborn. Not her. Some other copyrighted Glynis. Not her.

She watched, as her entire thirteenth year had erased itself. The month before her twelfth birthday... she remembered how excited she had been, how innocent she had been there, unaware of the truth. And for a moment a hint of regret appeared. But what she was erasing was not memories. This was no album she could look at. This was
the moment
she had lived. To relive that would be to relive it exactly as it had been, from her point of view then, with no additional information or memories. It was not an album. Half the year was now gone. Good.

It was odd how most people would kill to get the kind of immortality she was now throwing away. To live forever. That every moment of her life was remembered, could be lived through again. People dreamt of this kind of immortality. And all she wanted was to be forgotten. No, that wasn’t true. She wanted to be unique. And this was the only way to get it.

Her eleventh year had now been erased.

Glynis wondered how Olivia would take this. Now that she wasn’t an experiment, now that she couldn’t take back her mistakes, now that Glynis was as unique as anyone else. How would she react? Would she finally see her not as an experiment, a
specimen
, but as a person, as... as her daughter?

Then she realized that she wasn’t doing it to be unique. She was doing it for her mother. All her belief in her mother’s love, in the life they’d had, had vanished. She wanted proof that her mother loved her after all, that she really wanted her, that she cared for her, that... that she was her mother.

How stupid. How pathetic.

Her tenth year was now gone.

Stupid or not, pathetic or not, it was how she felt. She couldn’t change that. (And she couldn’t ‘tweak’ it, either.)

How
would
Olivia take this? She reduced the window with her vanishing life to a corner in the screen, and accessed the cameras, again. Where was Olivia?

She switched from camera to camera, from viewing post to viewing post, from one computer-filled room to another. Seeing Professor Von Wildman, she stopped, but Olivia was no longer with him.

Her ninth year was now completely erased.

Glynis continued to camera-hop. She stopped for a moment, seeing Ron sitting at a computer panel. She was about to move on to the next camera, when Olivia stepped into view and leaned over his shoulder. Glynis executed AdLip.

“—massive alarm,” Ron was saying. “And I can see why.”

“What? What is it?”

“Glynis 1.0,” he said. “Her records are erasing themselves.”

“What?!” Olivia looked afraid.

“See, whatever it is, it’s already erased all her records after her eighth birthday.”

“Bring them back! I need them! Bring them back!”

“I can’t! They’re not deleting themselves like normal programs, into the trash bin. They’re really deleting themselves! Hundreds at a time! That’s why the alarm went off. One of our virus alerts turned on the sirens because of the massive deletions.”

Cool, Glynis thought. I triggered a virus alert.

“So, you’re saying there’s a virus infecting Glynis 1.0?”

“At least everything we’ve saved from her.”

“Stop it!”

“I can’t!”

“What about Glynis herself?! Is the virus affecting her? Show me Glynis! Is she all right? Show me Glynis!”

“Hold on.” He tapped at the keys. Glynis could glimpse his screen from her viewpoint. She stared at it intently. Within seconds, the image of the living room appeared. Bastards! They could look in on me any time they wanted to. They could see me taking showers, dressing... Her face went red.

“She’s not in the living room,” Ron said. “But at least the environment seems unaffected.”

“Try her room.”

Glynis tensed up. From the corner of her eyes, she saw that her seventh year was now gone. She saw Ron hit the keys, and concentrated on the screen, trying to seem natural.

There it was, on the screen – her image. She was sitting at her desk, staring intently at the computer screen.

“She seems fine,” Ron said.

“Turn on audio,” Olivia urged him. “I want to know that
every
thing is fine.”

“Audio on.”

Both Olivia and Ron bent closer to the screen, when suddenly the Glynis’ face looked aside and straight at them right through the screen, “Hi, mom. Hi, Ron. How are you two doing?”

Olivia took a step back. “What? Can she see us?”

“Don’t be ridi—”

“Of course I can see you, mom,” Glynis said. She turned her computer screen so that it could be seen from their point of view. “See? Here’s you, and here’s Ron.”

“How? How—? What?!” Olivia couldn’t gather her thoughts, while Ron looked behind him at the camera.

“Holy Mother of—” he whispered.

“By the way, Pat sends her best from Thomas’ place. We have a
fine
daughter, don’t we, Olivia?”

Olivia’s face suddenly twisted, and she bent forward menacingly, “You talked to
Pat
?”

“No, I didn’t talk to her, I just saw her. By the way, Mom. I like your place on 88th Ave. Especially the Chagall in the living room. It goes great with your blue wallpaper.”

“Ron, how is this possible?” Olivia whispered.

“I’ll tell you how it’s possible,” said Glynis. “I’ve been talking to some ghosts. Our father, Jonathan Hatch, sends his regards from the grave.”

“Ron, stop her!” Olivia said.

“Oh, by the way,” Glynis seemed to remember something else. “Glynis 2.4 sends you her best regards and thanks you for the treatment she received at your fine establishment.”