Charlotte leveled him with a glare the likes of which he had never seen in a synthetic woman. It seemed to penetrate his every cell, as though she were watching him decay one picosecond at a time. She was silent for a full minute before whispering: "No."
Jack swallowed. His wife's eyes had never seemed so pale before. They were like jagged pieces of sea glass bleached by the abuse of sun and ocean. Despite the ageless skin surrounding them, they looked terribly old. "We've never talked about her, Charlie. Maybe we should."
His wife shook her head and returned to the feeds. "Nothing about Portia can be solved with conversation."
"Don't shut down on me now, I want–"
"Did you intend that pun, Jack? Or was it just a slip?"
Recognizing a no-win scenario when he saw one, Jack stood up and left.
? ? ? ?
In her room, Jack found Amy captaining a pirate ship and losing. A zombie virus had overtaken her crew, and she, the sole survivor, fired her limited weaponry from the crow'snest. Her little body swayed with the rocking of the simulated cruiser projected at her feet. She had run out of bullets for her blunderbuss, and now mimed loading the thing with gold doubloons straight from her pocket.
"The gold melts too fast," she said, "but it leaves a nice big hole."
Jack poked a finger through one of the miscreants' sucking chest wounds. The creature cast him an affronted glare. "I thought zombies were weakened by salt."
"They are, but I lost my loyalty round, so my first mate rebelled and bought women instead of supplies."
"You should have hired a better first mate. Now you'll have to find another one."
Amy shook her head. "It's the ship I mind losing. I worked really hard on this one."
Jack watched the zombies shambling over his shins. He thought about what Amy's principal had said. "You don't mind losing a friend?"
"He isn't a friend, he's the game."
"How can you tell?" Jack let a peg-legged zombie crawl over his hand. An undead parrot alit on his wedding ring and started pecking at it. Bright green feathers the size of rice grains molted away as its head bobbed. They dissipated into smoke in the time it took to blink his eyes. "I'm sure his programming is just as complex as yours."
Amy rolled her eyes. "Dad, please. I know the difference between adapted and automatic."
Jack nodded slowly. "Oh."
Amy made a pincer gesture to freeze the game. "Are you trying to give me a talk about being in trouble? Or about being vN?"
He closed his eyes briefly. "No, I'm not. You're a person just like anybody else, Amy. You know that."
"And people get in trouble, sometimes."
"Yes. People get into trouble, sometimes."
Amy thawed the game. He watched her fight the zombies as nobly as she could, until they were crawling all over each other to climb the mast and attain her perch. She waited until she could see the pixels of their eyes, and then used an ancient ruby amulet won on her last quest. Jack recognized it from his many trips through her treasure chest. She had played for weeks to find it. The gleaming cabochon inside granted her power over flame. With its projection clutched delicately in her tiny fist, she held it to the in-game sun and watched the light refract red and hot on her enemies. Fire blazed within the stone's bloody depths. It ran down the red rays and caught and spread among the moaning hordes.
They gibbered and screamed and jumped ship. But the damage was already done, and the loss total: the fire had spread to Amy, too, and had run down her sleeve onto the mainsail and mast. The ship was burning. She was going down with it.
"Oh, Charlotte! Hello!"
It was Liz, one of the other mothers. Her son Nate had attended the same daycare as Amy. The boy had nursed a crush on Amy all year and given her a special synthetic chocolate heart last Valentine's. Now he sat beside Amy in the front row, with the gold star students waiting onstage for kindergarten graduation to start, staring at her openly. Amy pretended not to notice.
"It must be so nice to have a boy," Charlotte was saying. She had brightened since they got in the car. Jack suspected Amy's unexpected willingness to wear the pretty new graduation dress Charlotte picked out had something to do with it.
Liz laughed. "You didn't have to potty-train him!"
Gary, Liz's husband, looked Jack up and down. "You think this is it for you, Jack? No more?"
Jack defaulted to his usual answer: "If Charlotte wants another, we'll have one."
"Hey, that's pretty handy. No worries about accidents, right?"
"Gary," Liz said in her scandalized voice. She used it on her husband a lot. "Amy is just like other kids."
Liz was one of those really informed human women with a habit of sometimes sounding like a public service announcement. "Oh, there are Nate's grandparents." She gestured toward the door. "Are your parents coming, Jack?"