So much for protocol violations, Symat said to himself. Those Virtuals were creepy. He didn’t understand where they had come from, what they wanted. But he reminded himself they were artificial; and like all artefacts they were here to serve humanity - him. He huddled down in his clothes and went back to sleep.

When he rose and walked out of the apartment into the unchanging sunlight, the three Virtuals were waiting for him. They were sitting on a low stone wall, or at least they looked like they were doing so, Mela in the centre with the two boys to either side.

‘Um, thank you for bringing me to this place. The food.’

‘You’re human. That’s our job,’ Mela said.

‘I suppose it is. Thanks anyhow.’ He walked off down the street towards the canal.

When he looked back they were following. Perhaps they were waiting for him to give them more commands. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but he was glad to have some company.

Walking along the line of the canal they soon left the city behind. The canal continued to head towards the immobile sun, but now the water looked turbid, muddy.

While Mela walked with Symat, the two boys ran by themselves. They played elaborate games of hide and seek, which could involve hiding inside the fabric of a wall, which evidently didn’t hurt that much; the air was full of warning pings, and the laughter of the boys. It reminded Symat uneasily of their odd behaviour in the bedroom last night. Maybe they had been inhibited about violating their protocols around him. If so, the inhibition was wearing off.

They came to a small township, as empty as the city. The boys ran off to explore. Mela and Symat sat on a low wall.

He asked her, ‘How come I didn’t see you yesterday, before you found me in the canal?’

‘We didn’t want you to see us.’

He wondered what a Virtual had to hide from. ‘Why does Chem talk about “parents”? Virtuals don’t have parents.’

‘We did.’

It had been a craze, a few generations back. It began after humans had been pushed back to Sol system.

‘People still wanted kids,’ Mela said. ‘But you don’t want to bring kids into a defeated world. So they had us instead.’

A Virtual child could be a very convincing simulacrum of the real thing. You could raise it from infanthood, teach it, learn from it. It would have been trivial to realise a child physically, downloading complex sensoria into a flesh-and-blood shell, but such ‘dolls’ were unpopular, apparently violating some even deeper set of instincts. It was more comfortable to be with Virtuals, even if you couldn’t cuddle them.

And Virtual kids actually had advantages. You could back them up, rerun favourite moments. You could even wipe them clean if you really made a hash of raising them, though sentience laws discouraged this.