Rebeckah Hansworth was babysitting.

They hadn’t actually named him yet. Or it, she supposed. They weren’t exactly sure how gender would carry over from seed of consciousness donor to digital child, but they were erring on the suspicion that the gender identities would match once the personalities stabilized. If not, well, the nice thing about being a digital existence was the ability to change your digital avatar.

Well, it wasn’t exactly fair to say that Gideon hadn’t named him. In the contract, he had written “In the story, his grandfather’s the king, right? Give him a name that fits with that.” Likewise, when he had been asked to design the child’s initial digital appearance, the donor had written “Just make him look kinda cool.” Gideon was putting a lot of faith in Arc to get things right, and the feedback he had given on his preferences were enough to work with. Anyway, it could all be fixed later, if necessary. Nothing that had been done so far was set in stone.

“What’s this?” the boy asked.

“It’s a rock,” She told him.

“What is rock?”

“It is something on the ground that is hard. If it is small, you can pick it up. If it is big, you cannot,” She explained.

The digital avatar thought for a moment, then picked up the rock. Beckah grinned. Clever little bugger. And curious. She wondered what the decision tree had looked like to have that outcome. Had he first determined that the rock was small, or--

The child threw the rock at her. Reflexively, she shrunk back. It was just a reflex, the projected stone passed straight through her.

<>

“Another rock,” the child demanded.

That was … unexpected. Amazing, really. She wondered how the program had decided to conduct those actions.

She flicked her fingers, and a moment later another rock appeared on the floor nearby. “Don’t throw it at me this time,” she warned it.

The child avatar picked the rock up and threw it at the wall instead. The rock bounced off harmlessly. The environment simulation program had been caught off guard the first time, since this session was supposed to just be ‘show and tell.’ But it seems like it had associated proper physics at this point.

<>

The child ran over to the rock and picked it up again. And he threw it at the other wall.

That was fine. She left him to it for a while. She could snap him out of whatever loop he was in if she said something, but that wasn’t her job unless the suits whispered in her ear. She accessed her controls and called up a chair to sit in, and then a novel to read while the digital avatar threw rocks at the wall.

<>

“I like rocks,” the child said eventually.

“That’s wonderful.”

“What are you?”

“I’m Beckah,” She answered without looking up.

“I like Beckah.”

“That’s wonderful,” She said.

“Am I Beckah?”

Oh shit, she thought, and she accessed the control to let the suits know that she might have effed everything up.

“I’m not sure,” she answered. “What do you think Beckah means?”

“Beckah is you,” he answered.

“Beckah is my name,” she clarified. “I am I. You are you. Beckah is not your name.”

“What is my name?”

Inwardly, she continued to curse and swear as she considered. She’d really jinxed herself by thinking that it didn’t matter that the kid didn’t have a name. What did she say? The suits weren’t answering. So she didn’t answer either. She wasn’t certain if her answer was important or not.

“What is my name?” the avatar repeated. “What is my name? Your name is Beckah, what is my name?”

‘His grandfather’s the king, right? Give him a name that fits with that.’ She cursed, trying to remember the story. What was the king’s name? Something to do with weather, right? Yeah, King Rain.

“Your name is Hail,” she said decisively.

“I am Hail,” the child said. “Another rock.”

She sighed in relief. She accessed the control, and a new simulated rock appeared where it had been. The child picked it up, and threw it straight upwards. The environmental simulator hadn’t been expecting that, and the rock continued to fly straight through the ceiling.

<>

Yeah, she needed to fix that. This holographic chamber needed a serious calibration. “Another rock,” she said.

The rock appeared back on the floor. Hail – she wondered if the kid would actually remember the name or not – looked at her, waiting for her input.

“Do that again,” she instructed. And he did. He picked the rock up, and threw it straight upwards. But this time, the rock fell according to the laws of gravity. The boy cocked his head to the side, and he said “Another rock.”

<>

“You can just pick up the same one and do it again,” she suggested instead. “You don’t have to make a new one every time.”

Hail seemed to consider her words for a while, then he said “Another rock.”

The new rock appeared, but the boy said “Another rock.” Then a moment passed, and he said “Another rock,” again. “Another rock. Another Rock. Another Rock.”

She sighed. He was looping again, but not really. After each new rock, he would pause to examine it, and then throw it against all of the walls in the room. She decided to cheat for a while and made the system spit out random types of rock, hoping that would distract the program for longer. She turned back to her novel, but and she had read three chapters before realizing his loop changed.

<>

“Beckah another rock. Beckah Hail another rock.”

She sighed and pressed the button that made the rocks vanish.

“Hail another rock,” She teased back. The little boy AI looked surprised at the sudden change, and for a long while he was quiet. Long enough to end her shift in blissful silence.

<>

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~~~~~~~~

She changed out of her bunny slippers and hair net, and was in the showers when the knocking on the women’s changing room door began. She scowled, and after shutting off the shower and wrapping herself in a robe, she went to see which dickhead thought to bother her on off hours.

It was, of course, her boss. And his boss, and the entire development team. Not all of them were masculine, but most of the women in the team lacked the keys to enter this particular locker room. If they had to change into bunny suits to protect the delicate electronics they worked with at all, they did so elsewhere. The holographic suite was a high-security area.

“What did you do?” the project lead demanded immediately.

She swallowed. “What are you talking about? You said to treat it like a normal kid. So that’s what I did. I pretended I was babysitting the hologram.”

The project lead turned to talk with another group, and three other groups had a discussion with each other, then turned back to Rebeckah.

“You are not in trouble,” he said. “Please, come with us to observation room.”

“Can I put my clothes on first?” she asked, growing annoyed with the man and the entire group accompanying him.

“It is very urgent,” the project lead said, and he and the rest of the development team began rushing through the hallway. Beckah interpreted that as a ‘no,’ and she quickly followed after him in her post-shower robe and slippers. The observation room overlooked the clean room where the holographic child was standing in the center of the fake grass and shouting “Rock! Rock! Rock! Rock! Beckah Rock!” endlessly.

“He has been stuck since you left,” the project lead explained. “Do you know what you did?”

It was a less accusatory tone than the words implied. One of the downfalls of artificial intelligence was that they tend to get focused on the wrong details now and then. It happened all of the time, and when you’re feeding a brand new AI data to develop a personality, there were all sorts of pitfalls, speed bumps, and potholes.

“I gave him a rock,” she answered simply. “Object 43A, specifically. He seemed to like it. He even threw it around, so I gave him some more.”

The suits in the room nodded, and from the control panel someone found the relevant object and summoned one inside the child’s room. The boy picked it up and immediately whipped it at the glass, though it passed out of range of the soft light generators before it collided. He seemed to like that.

“Thank you, Beckah,” her boss said. He glanced at her, then jerked in surprise and blushed. “You may leave now. I apologize for any discomfort our haste has caused you.”

“I’ll be filing a notice with HR,” she warned him. “This was bullshit.”

He looked stunned, and then abashed. “I am sorry. Truly, I didn’t mean anything--”

“It would be unprofessional not to file at this point, Sam. I wasn’t offended. But you--”

“I understand. We will co-file from our own perspectives. Thank you, Beckah. The company will pay for your ride home tonight.”

“As long as it’s the company, and not you, Sam, I accept.”

~~~~~~~~~

She collapsed into the back seat of the uber-jon and groaned in exhaustion. It was an older model, which meant that it likely had an established personality. She knew the car would already have her basic details, but she knew nothing about it.

“Do you have a preferred name?” she asked.

“I like to go by Sandy,” the car said cheerfully. “Or Sandra. Thank you for asking. You look exhausted. Hard day at work?”

“Hard day at life, Sandy,” Beckah answered. “Will you call my husband for me? I want to check on the kids.”

“Of course,” Sandy said, and the connection was established a moment later.

Beckah had a boy and a girl at home, ages three and one, and another one on the way. Her husband was a house husband through the simple reason that, when they had looked at the finances, it made more sense for him to dedicate his entire time to childcare than to pay someone else to do it. But it meant that Beckah missed out on a lot of the details of the children she had given birth to.

She started crying when she learned that her daughter had asked for her today, and when the explanation had come that Beckah was busy working, the little girl had burst out crying. Beckah rather wished that her husband had withheld that data point from her, but she had demanded to know everything about how the day had gone. Just as she was sorting her feelings over the matter, a beep came through the car’s communication system.

“Beckah, I regret to inform you that I have been recalled to your place of business,” Sandy informed her. “Do I have permission to end the call with your husband so that I may connect to your boss, so that he may explain?”

“Dammit. Sorry, Mario, it’s work again. I might be late tonight. Kiss the kids for me and tell them I’m sorry if I miss bedtime,” she said.

“Yes dear,” her husband said. He was teasing her, with his masculine ‘house husband’ voice.

“Put Sam on speaker, Sandy. He better have a damn good excuse.”

The connection was established a moment later, signified by a beeping sound.

“What the hell is wrong now, Sam?” Beckah demanded.

“He’s stuck again. We need you,” Sam answered. “We’re offering Triple overtime if you can get him unstuck.”

“What’s he doing?” Beckah inquired.

“The same thing he was when you left. He’s playing with rocks. We can’t get him to do anything else.”

Beckah was silent, considering the problem the entire way back to the office.

~~~~~~~~~~~

“Another rock! More rocks! Different rocks!” the boy-avatar was demanding. Hail, she thought. It had a name now, it would be rude not to call it by its – his – name. Until it changed. Which it still might.

She watched from the observation room as the holographic boy had somehow learned to manipulate the holographic rocks which she had originally shown him. He had learned to make them bigger and smaller, to make them pass through objects or bounce off, to fall according to gravity or to defy it.

“He is a clever little bugger,” she muttered. “Too clever.”

“It’s the projector,” Sam explained. “The settings are deliberately loose to allow for the avatar to debug itself. It won’t be a problem once we connect him to the lobby. It’s just right now, we’re trying to teach him what swords and fire and water are, and he just wants to play with object 43A. We were hoping that you … well, you know. You’ve got a knack for this.”

She frowned. “I do have an idea. I had an idea the entire ride back, since you called me. You’re not going to like it, though.”

“How bad?”

“I’m going to break the sterile field, and possibly put a dent in the wall,” she said, pulling the smooth stone from her pocket, a stone which she had picked up on her way in. “I won’t break anything, but --”

“You think that will help?” Sam inquired.

“He’s figured out he can do whatever he wants in the projector,” she explained. “So I’m going to give him something that’s not a projection. See what he does with that. If nothing else, it will be interesting.”

She’d played softball in high school, so when she opened the door to the projector room, she took careful aim, and threw the small stone directly through the child’s projection. The soft-light hologram was disrupted for half a second before reforming, and the stone clattered into the wall behind. Not into anything important, of course, she’d known enough about the design of the room to aim for an empty piece of wall. But there was a dent.

Hail wasn’t disturbed at all by the fact that she had just beamed him with a stone. Instead, he ran over to pick it up … only for his holographic hands to pass straight through the physical object. The boy looked shocked by the development. He tried again, and again, and again.

“Beckah,” he called. “Beckah, why?”

“You can’t interact with that rock like you can with the others, Hail,” she explained.

“Magic?” he asked.

“Not magic. The opposite of magic. The other rocks were all magic. This one is no magic at all. You can interact with the other rocks because they are magic and this is a magic room. That is a stone from outside, where there is no magic,” she explained.

The boy’s eyes were wide, and then he began jumping up and down in excitement. “Teach Hail magic Beckah!”

“Tomorrow, I’ll teach you more,” she promised. “I’m very tired tonight. I need to go home, Hail. These other people will teach you until I get back. Goodbye for now, Hail.”

“Goodbye for now, Beckah,” Hail echoed.

She walked out of the observation room and slouched against the wall. She was exhausted, her back hurt, and she had just felt the baby kick. She wanted to go home, kiss her husband, and look at her sleeping children.

Her phone went off at that moment. She cursed, and glanced at the text.

It’s time to renegotiate your contract. You should ask for more.

--Thedum

She frowned in confusion, because it was not time to renegotiate her contract. And she frowned harder because it was from Thedum.

Sam came over to her, smiling. “That was genius, Beckah. Nobody else would have--”

“I want a new contract,” she said immediately. “I’m working too many hours, the pay is shit compared to what I’m worth, and I’m missing out on my kids growing up. And double maternity leave.”

Her phone beeped again.

You should ask for more.

Sam frowned, but he took her statements seriously. “I’ll schedule a meeting with HR to discuss the specifics.”

~~~~~~~~