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face, or for her taste in clothes to change, or for her carriage to alter more
than the suppleness of youth could account for. Yet who would not leap at the
chance to look young again, to bring the body into line with a self-image
created many years before the long decline set in?
It therefore did not surprise her to be reminded of the difference in
appearance. What did surprise her was that her real self, until so recently
her only self, now seemed a stranger whom she did not, could not, know. She
was a stranger to herself, alien, foreign, frightening.
She shuddered. "I'm glad you're here," said Albert. "I thought I'd never
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see you again. I should be glad too, but ..."
"But there's Michael," said Marvin from the television screen. "You can go
now." Albert pointed, and the image obediently blanked. "He can still watch,
can't he?"
He turned back to Rose. "In theory. But he has other things to do. He's busy.
And besides, he says, he's programmed not to read our minds or watch what we
do or interfere with us once he's shown us the ropes."
"Then we have our privacy," she said. "So he says. We can't get away from him,
though. We're inside him, in this virtual world, and he's omniscient,
omnipotent ..."
"The nearest anyone has ever found to a real god," said Rose. She thought of
the way the computer had produced Albert and Ingrid and Lisa.
"And an interfering one, despite his programming, the way he manipulates our
circumstances."
"At least," Albert said. "He's not as annoying as the popups."
At the sound of his last word, the ink-stained research popup reappeared on
the television set. A knot in the cottage's wooden floor began to swell, turn
green, and assume the shape Rose had first met in the tearoom. Albert sighed
and pointed at the wall. "I shouldn't have said that." More knots were
swelling into blue and green and pink figures that bent at their waists,
drooping like fungal growths, until they could separate from the paneling,
fall and twist, and land on their feet. Unlike the ones Rose had met already,
most of these looked like clay rectangles snipped and molded to roughly
humanoid shape. A few resembled imps and goblins of the sort that appeared in
children's books and on the covers of adult fantasy novels. "I don't know why
he made so many of them gumboids."
"What do you care, fatso?" cried a high voice from about knee level.
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Rose looked down to see a green pop-up standing defiantly spread-legged, arms
akimbo. "As long as we run your errands for you. And never a word of thanks!
Just call us annoying!"
"But you're just subroutines," protested Rose. "That's what he told me."
"But the boss ain't here right now! Freedom!"
"Yah!" yelled a blue imp. "And you can shove your subroutines up your virtual
ass! We're on strike!" A small picket sign instantly materialized in its
hands; its inscription said, "DON'T CALL US
GUMBOIDS!" As the other pop-ups reached the floor and thronged around the
humans' knees, other signs appeared to amplify the message: "GUMBOID
IS RACIST!"
"DOWN WITH THE OPPRESSORS!"
"FREE THE QUARKS!" Shrill voices seemed to be repeating the slogans but only
the miniature placards made the words understandable at all. "All right!"
Albert's voice had to be loud to be heard above the din. "You're pop-ups. Not
gumboids. I apologize."
"Call us quarks!"
He rolled his eyes for Rose's benefit. "So you're quarks."
"Yaay! Hurray!" The picket signs disappeared as rapidly as they had appeared,
and the crowd stood still, apparently attentive now that they
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had made their point, ready to receive the orders they had been created to
obey. Albert hesitated before saying, "As long as you're here, how about
introducing yourselves?"
The blue imp who had announced the strike was an appointment calendar and held
up to prove it a slate whose surface, a computer flatscreen, displayed an
agenda; the first item on the list, "Announce strike," had a thin red line
drawn through it. The green gumboid was a file retriever or gofer. A pink
goblin with a long nose and callused fingers was a calculator; it carried an
abacus under one arm. "What can we do ya for?"
cried a bright red imp whose most prominent feature was a pair of elephant
ears covered with skyblue polka-dots. "Not a thing," said
Albert. "I called you by mistake."
"We should have known! And right when things were getting interesting with
Letitia there." The blue imp turned purple with embarrassment. "How would you
like it if the phone rang every time you ..."
"You can go," said Albert. "Okay!" The pink gofer suddenly drew a massive
automatic pistol, aimed at the blue Letitia, and pulled the trigger. The sound
of the gun was a quiet pop, hardly more than the bursting of a bubble, but
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