Five Days Later

The SolSys arcology housed a variety of corporate shops. Prices weren't the best but the location was convenient and leaving the arcology too frequently was looked down upon anyways. Perhaps then, it was because people lived their lives in this same building that in-person shopping was more popular then ordering over the net, contrary to what the soc. analysts had projected.

Built according to those erroneous projections, with delivery as priority one and the in-person shopping experience secondary, Good Food was laid out like a small warehouse. A small provision that had eventually been made for the in-person shopper was the viewing area, a corner of the store with seating and windows looking out upon the Denver megalopolis. It was a popular destination, as windows were rare in the arcology, and had justified itself in purchases encouraged.

Among the fruit bins, Brendan turned the new Crimson Tangapple in his hand. It was another inaugural fruit of the season, one of many new gene sequences spliced and sliced to weather the ever-worsening environment. It had been a success, enjoying a plentiful crop despite the heat. Unlike many others, it had also proven resistant to this year's mites and fruit bugs.

Thin, red skin–a modified, edible pericarp–encased the flesh of the Crimson Tangapple. AgriCo proudly advertised that the fruit, like that of an apple, was divided into the segments of an orange. Pre-sliced! The sales pitch graphic pulsed in his glasses. Brendan bought the fruit with his glasses and pulled off the band around it, loosening the segments. He pulled out a slice. The inside was coated with the same red pericarp except at the very edge of the slice, where it clung to the other segments and seperated with the sound of tearing flesh. The pre-sliced fruit gimmick was old, bu it never got old.

The slice was sweet and slightly starchy, and the pericarp gave him a contrasting tingle of sourness. It had flavor like a hard candy.

Brendan had had a hard week and the sweet, starchy fruit helped him relax. He worked as a programmer for SolSys and the Iapetus launch incident five days earlier had meant all hands on deck. At first he had done a thirty hour shift, and then sixteen hour days the rest of the week. The energy and alertness stimulants administered mandatorily to keep him and the other employees working efficiently during those long hours had been deducted from his paycheck. It was tough, he admitted inwardly, but programming was his Calling and SolSys was his Master; he was grateful to pursue his Calling and serve his Master. For that privilege he thanked the hands of God, Commerce and Dedication each day–although he might have forgotten prayer during that first thirty hour shift.

He finished the Crimson Tangapple. It had, quite conveniently, no core and, conveniently for the company, left him craving another. The word 'yum' flashed in his glasses and he couldn't help but agree before frowning and dismissing the AgriCo advertisements. Wandering across the store, surveilling the other new fruits, he found his children at the windows of the viewing area. He frowned.

Colton and Charlotte. They were almost corporate children. They dressed in the same clothes and attended the same classes, but the way they spoke and acted set them apart jarringly. When Brendan had adopted Colton, and later Charlotte, he had thought they had common ground: he was a programmer and they were v-children. All three of them were familiar with virtual environments and technology. The children had dismissed the notion immediately.

"You use the WIMP environment." Colton, then a ten year old, had sneered. WIMP stood for window, icon, menu and pointing-device. An archaic, derogatory term for graphic user interfaces. "That's good. Wouldn't want to lose track of your file folders."

"If I need drool-proof paper, I'll come to you." Charlotte had deadpanned just ten months ago.

Apparently v-children despised the traditional graphic user interfaces. Brendan had tried approaching them with command line next, but they made little distinction.

"Listen to me." The kid Colton had explained, handsome vat-grown face staring up at Brendan. His features were a subtle blend of the decade's popular child-actors. "Cyberspace is the superior interface. Cyberspace allows you to process data with all of your sensory input channels. If you're too much of a pansy to use wetware, which you couldn't use well anyways, you should at least look into pseudo-stim interfaces."

Pseudo-stim interfaces were technologies that recreated sensory inputs without jacking into the nervous system. Like virtual headsets and holographic rooms. They were mostly used for enjoying media and to Brendan, the idea of programming with them was a little ridiculous. Yes, Colton and Charlotte insisted it was a) the closest analogue to their mythical 'cyberspace' and b) far superior to anything he'd ever touched in his life, but Brendan doubted. He doubted the efficacy of the illegal virtual child projects in general: Colton and Charlotte had never been the cogs of an anti-AI technology. They had been abused. They were warped children playing-acting as things they were not.

Those children stared out the viewing area window, silently. Ordinarily the Good Food viewing area afforded an impressive sight of Denver, but mites and nanobots had blown in from the north this past week and the air was darkened dreadfully with the invisible creatures. Black haze covered the sky, the Rocky Mountains and even the further reaches of the megalopolis fully obscured by the air pollution.

"Colton, let's take a look at the fruit." Said Brendan. He often brought them to the Good Food to help them learn about the different foods and–particularly at first–encourage them to eat. It had become a ritual fieldtrip.

Only Colton's mouth moved. "Father. Charlotte is older than me, we decided that. Have her look." In response Charlotte nudged him and the two started a private conversation, still watching the blackened, dreadful sky. Strands of dark grey and black shifted in the wind, even this high up. The nanobots were neutrally buoyant.

Brendan sighed. V-children were strange. The concept of a family didn't click with them emotionally. God knew he tried to make bonds with his children despite working the night-shift, but he kept coming up empty.

The clinics had advised him to give them space. V-children need peers and hands-off parenting, he'd been told. Brendan gave that to them and the result? Last week, half an hour or so after the Iapetus launch, they'd somehow exited the arcology in a sidelock that should've been in crisis mode. It was a monumental security breach and people had been breathing down his neck for it: they were your children?

The cause of the security breach was still undetermined. Everybody in the SolSys Computation Division was worried.

And when Brendan had returned from work two days later, both children had been covered in mite bites and diseases. Now Colton told him, dead serious, that Charlotte was older than he was.

"I agree. We both believe that I am older than Colton" Charlotte herself conceded the point. Brendan had noticed they'd become somewhat closer after their sidelock security breach.

"Alright, let's all go look at the fruit." Brendan didn't want an explanation. Ordinarily he took Colton, the oldest child, first and then Charlotte second. It was to teach them the importance of hierarchy: they looked like corporate children but were not corporate children. "Colton, I want you in the front."

Charlotte didn't seem to mind.

Touring the fruits, Brendan bought both of his children a Crimson Tangapple and smiled as they ate the slices. "Nice, right?"

"I'm surprised the genome's lasted this long." Said Charlotte. She seemed interested in bioengineering. It was a good Calling.

Brendan had his children identify fruits and packaged foods to him, although they were very good at it these days and it was hardly necessary, and then they picked up some groceries for home. A practical fieldtrip.

They were walking back in the long arcology hallways, the hum of people filling the clean air, when Colton spoke up. "Father. I'm going to apply to study abroad in Britain."

Brendan came from a long line of SolSys employees. Leaving your arcology, even if it was for another, was a radical idea for the corporate family, who had had loyalty and gratitude carefully hammered in by the cultural engineers for generations. Now, that lineage condensed into a single thought. "Why?"