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What’s the moral they’re trying to teach? he wondered.

But all he could do was go in circles, around and around the empty stadium.

“Hey, Digit. Wake up.”

Jamie came awake suddenly, with a stifled cry. The room whirled around him. He blinked, realized that the whirling came from the colored lights projected by his birthday present, Becca’s lamp stand.

Becca was sitting on his bedroom chair, a cigarette in her hand. Her feet, in the steel-capped boots she’d been wearing lately, were propped up on the bed.

“Are you awake, Jamie?” It was Selena’s voice. “Would you like me to sing you a lullaby?”

“Fuck off, Selena,” Becca said. “Get out of here. Get lost.”

Selena cast Becca a mournful look, then sailed backward, out the window, riding a beam of moonlight to her pale home in the sky. Jamie watched her go, and felt as if a part of himself was going with her, a part that he would never see again.

“Selena and the others have to do what you tell them, mostly,” Becca said. “Of course, Mom and Dad wouldn’t tell you that.”

Jamie looked at Becca. “What’s happening?” he said. “Where did you go today?”

Colored lights swam over Becca’s face. “I’m sorry if I spoiled your birthday, Digit. I just got tired of the lies, you know? They’d kill me if they knew I was here now, talking to you.” Becca took a draw on her cigarette, held her breath for a second or two, then exhaled. Jamie didn’t see or taste any smoke.

“You know what they wanted me to do?” she said. “Wear a little girl’s body, so I wouldn’t look any older than you, and keep you company in that stupid school for seven hours a day.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t do it. They yelled and yelled, but I was damned if I would.”

“I don’t understand.”

Becca flicked invisible ashes off her cigarette, and looked at Jamie for a long time. Then she sighed.

“Do you remember when you were in the hospital?” she said.

Jamie nodded. “I was really sick.”

“I was so little then, I don’t really remember it very well,” Becca said. “But the point is —” She sighed again. “The point is that you weren’t getting well. So they decided to —” She shook her head. “Dad took advantage of his position at the University, and the fact that he’s been a big donor. They were doing AI research, and the neurology department was into brain modeling, and they needed a test subject, and—Well, the idea is, they’ve got some of your tissue, and when they get cloning up and running, they’ll put you back in —” She saw Jamie’s stare, then shook her head. “I’ll make it simple, okay?”

She took her feet off the bed and leaned closer to Jamie. A shiver ran up his back at her expression. “They made a copy of you. An electronic copy. They scanned your brain and built a holographic model of it inside a computer, and they put it in a virtual environment, and—” She sat back, took a drag on her cigarette. “And here you are,” she said.

Jamie looked at her. “I don’t understand.”

Colored lights gleamed in Becca’s eyes. “You’re in a computer, okay? And you’re a program. You know what that is, right? From computer class? And the program is sort of in the shape of your mind. Don Quixote and Princess Gigunda are programs, too. And Mrs. Winkle down at the schoolhouse is usually a program, but if she needs to teach something complex, then she’s an education major from the University.”

Jamie felt as if he’d just been hollowed out, a void inside his ribs. “I’m not real?” he said. “I’m not a person?”

“Wrong,” Becca said. “You’re real, all right. You’re the apple of our parents’ eye.” Her tone was bitter. “Programs are real things,” she said, “and yours was a real hack, you know, absolute cutting-edge state-of-the-art technoshit. And the computer that you’re in is real, too — I’m interfaced with it right now, down in the family room—we have to wear suits with sensors and a helmet with scanners and stuff. I hope to fuck they don’t hear me talking to you down here.”

“But what —” Jamie swallowed hard. How could he swallow if he was just