‘Get up! Get up!” the high pitched, robotic voice sounded through the room. “Get up! The bus will be at the stop in forty-five minutes! Everyone up and to the bathroom.”
Bailey didn’t move. He knew he had time to close his eyes and appreciate the warmth under his covers before everyone else in the long room, that is filled with bunk beds and other boys his age of around thirteen years, was out of bed and headed to the bathroom to prepare for school. He nestled under the covers and even if his bed wasn’t the most luxurious bed in the world, it was heaven compared to the cool of the room that made the linoleum floor cold against the soles of his feet. He slept in his underwear and a t-shirt, and the government dorms where he lived were cooled like most government buildings with air conditioning that ran at a constant temperature throughout the summer months with no regard for the temperature outside. Bailey wanted to avoid that cold for as long as possible.
“Get up! Bailey, you will miss your bus if you are not showered in five minutes! If you miss your bus, you will have to report for school instruction in the computer lab.”
This made Bailey flip the thin blanket off of his body and he dug though his trunk for his toiletries.
“Today’s instructor in the lab is Mr. Milligan, the county magistrate.”
Bailey hated Mr. Milligan more than he hated the cold in the morning. All orphans under city care left the dormitory each morning to attend the nearby school. If an orphan is unable to attend school for any reason other than illness or injury, they were expected to follow the day’s lesson remotely in the dorm computer lab with an instructor who was a government employee, who mostly just supervised the children to ensure they behaved and stayed on track. Mr. Milligan was not a teacher, but he liked to act like one, doing much more than was required.
Bailey rushed to the bathroom and he was ready in about five minutes.
“Oh good,” the robot said, “now hurry. You have less than a minute…”
“Where’s Good?” Bailey asked as he slipped on his shoes and grabbed his bookbag.
“Already at the bus stop with everyone else, now go!”
The southern North Carolina city where the orphanage was located was busy in the morning. The sidewalk was packed with pedestrians going in every direction, though most rushed to the various stops to catch public transportation to their jobs. So few people in the city owned cars that it was illegal to drive single passenger vehicles in the city center. Not that anyone needed a car of their own, there were hover buses that constantly whipped around the city, and magnetic light rails and trains, all completely free to access by city inhabitants, that made individual car ownership obsolete. Bailey saw the group of boys that shared his dorm at their bus stop, and he rushed over to his friend Good. The two were seventeen years old, though Bailey would reach his eighteenth birthday soon. It was a day that only one of the boys looked forward to.
“You always the last one out,” Good said. He frowned with his eyebrows, but he had a smirk on his face. “You had to get a kiss from your mama before you left?”
Bailey shook his head and looked down the street where pedestrians mostly dominated the road and vehicles zoomed along above them. The bright, yellow school bus zoomed over the avenue and came to hover at the bus stop. The boys of the orphanage were the first ones on the bus, and Bailey and Good always sat up front behind the window display that showed the route that the self-driving bus took before arriving at school.
“Why you always talking shit about the Emma?” Bailey asked as they sat in the bus. There was no legal adult on the bus and there wouldn’t be for the entire ride, everything was remotely monitored by the school and local law enforcement.
“Cause you act like it’s your mama,” Good said. “When you turn eighteen next month and leave the orphanage, you ain’t never gone hear from the Emma again.”
“But if I cross the Firewall, I can work with the Emma.”
“You need to stop saying that. You know what crossing the Firewall mean? The only way you can upload your mind to the Community is to let your body die. You gotta die to cross the Firewall. You really want that?”
Good had a look of sad confusion on his face as he asked. Bailey shook his head and looked out the window at the green hills below, lined with streets and sleek buildings that reflected the natural green. He didn’t know how to explain himself any better than he had already; that losing his parents when he was very young had cast a pall over his life and he only felt happy when he was able to leave the reality on the other side of his irises and slip into virtual reality via a headset and a bodysuit that captured his movements. His life at the orphanage wasn’t unpleasant. The state that paid for their care was well funded and viewed the orphans as potential future employees that they could indoctrinate, so Bailey was well fed and clothed, and he had access to the best education the state funded. Good had been an orphan for as long as Bailey and the two had grown up as brothers from a young age, though Bailey was old by three years. Bailey had a decent life, but his only vision of a happy future was to have the surgery that would allow him to plug directly into cyberspace so that he could become part of the Emma that had raised him since he was child. The Emma was a parenting AI that had been developed by a private internet company. The Emma had a motherly feminine voice and visage that appeared on screens throughout the orphanage, ushering the boys throughout their day and peppering their conversations with details that it had learned over the years to make the boys feel seen and heard. Even though there were adult human employees of the orphanage, most of the nurturing was done by the Emma that smiled at the boys, gave them encouragement when they were sad, and helped them with their homework. Bailey loved the Emma not just for what it was able to do for him, but for the real comfort he witnessed it providing to his peers. He saw real purpose in the Emma and he wanted to be apart of it permanently. Which was possible with new scientific breakthroughs that allowed humans to download their brain from their bodies into cyberspace forever. Most people chose to do it if their bodies suffered an incurable malady, but there was a significant number of people who were happy to leave their lives for the perceived freedom of life inside the internet. The procedure involved wiring the brain to computers that effectively replicated the complexity of the human mind and stored all of its memories. The consequence of this procedure was the death of the body because the process of downloading the brain fried the brain and rendered it inoperable.
“I don’t want you to do it,” Good said sincerely, and grabbed Bailey’s hand in his own. “I want you to be out here in the real world with me.”
Bailey looked at Good and he saw a tear wet his cheek that he disappeared as fast he could.
“We can still talk if I cross the Firewall, Good, you know that,” Bailey said softly.
“But I won’t be able to touch you like this.”
“You ain’t never touched me before. Why it matter now?” Bailey was legitimately confused.
“What if we talking, you in the computer and I’m at my house, and I choke? You ain’t gone be able to save me. You just gone watch me die.”
Bailey shook his head.
“You don’t want me to be happy?” Bailey asked Good sincerely. “This is what I want. I been looking forward to it for years now. And pretty soon, it’ll be my choice. I’ll be a man.”
“Don’t go,” Good said and he started to cry, burying his face in Bailey’s chest. He was loud and others on the bus were staring.
Bailey didn’t know he cared so much. He didn’t think anyone would miss touching him, hugging him.
“I’ll think about it, bro,” he said and put an arm around Good’s shoulder. Bailey didn’t care who was watching, he only cared to console his brother.
PRL Serials 