Chapter 10

Mr. Saunders was waiting in the lobby. "The others are already here," he said. "How was your trip?"

"Pretty good," Jared said. "I didn't realize how big the country is until yesterday. And flat, too. That was a surprise."

"Most of the Midwest and Great Plains were ground flat by the last Ice Age," Mr. Saunders said. He checked them through Security and called for the elevator.

"This morning we'll get acquainted and try to determine the scope of your project. After lunch we'll lay out what the four of you need to learn."

"I'm surprised you'll be letting them mess with the code for the Construct," Jared's father said.

"We have small copies that people can use for research," Mr. Saunders said. "We do make changes, but we have a long approval process. Assuming they find something that needs to be changed, or that they would like to see changed, it'll be several months, minimum, before we could implement it."

"Good. I have some experience in IT, though I'm a psychologist, and I wouldn't want to see changes made in haste."

They got off at the 15th Floor. Mr. Saunders led them down a carpeted hallway to a meeting room. The others were there, each with a parent. Jared felt his father stiffen as they entered.

"Janice," he said. "I didn't expect to find you here."

Shannon's mother—she looked a lot like Shannon, which is how he knew—nodded, her face stiff. "Ted. I ... this has to be an accident. There's no way either of us could have planned this."

"You two know each other?" Mr. Saunders asked.

"We were married at one time," Shannon's mother said. "We ... parted ... right after Shannon's birth. This is ... I didn't think that..."

"This is awkward," Mr. Saunders said. "Do you need time alone, or something? Perhaps a word or two in private?"

"I think anything we were going to say to each other got said a long time ago," Jared's father said. "However, we're here because of the children. I don't anticipate any problems as long as we keep that in mind."

Shannon's mother nodded, her face still stiff. "I agree. My first thought was to pull Shannon out of this, but she had no knowledge, no way of telling, and she's talked of nothing but this project for weeks."

Jared's father sat on the same side of the table as Shannon and her mother, and pulled Jared down beside him. Jared turned his head, catching Shannon's eye. She stared back at him, her eyes wide.

My God, he thought, I've been fucking my sister. And I didn't even know it. Will either of us continue at Claiborne? Does this mean we can't... ? And if so, how will that work?

Mr. Saunders had been saying something. Jared had to force himself to pay attention, but his thoughts kept straying back to Shannon, and how much fun they'd had together at Claiborne.

"This is the last thing I expected," Shannon said when they took a break. She'd gone off to the Ladies Room with Cynthia, where, no doubt, they'd talked about this whole thing. Now they stood next to the window, both clearly visible to their parents, who were themselves keeping on opposite sides of the room. That's where Jared and Alex joined them.

"Dad never talked about the divorce," Jared said.

"Neither did my mother. She didn't put her married name on the Birth Certificate when I was born. I guess it was ... I guess she didn't want to think about him."

"It sounds like a bad break-up."

"I'm not sure she won't nix the whole thing and yank me out of Claiborne." Shannon looked out over the city. "I'm going to have to convince her to let me stay at Claiborne."

"Same here."

"Some problem," Cynthia said, joining them. "This whole thing may fall flat on its face. That's a shame, too. I think we were on to something."

"Maybe Mr. Saunders can do something," Shannon said. "He seems to be working at it." Mr. Saunders had been shuttling between the two parents like a ping-pong ball going from paddle to paddle.

"It's not like you two knew you were related," Cynthia said. "I mean, it's incest, but in a lot of ways it isn't."

"We're brother and sister," Shannon said. "That makes it incest. It's fairly cut and dried."

"Um, okay, but hear me out. Biologically, incest leads to retarded babies, which is why you don't want it. But socially, the law assumes there was some use of a superior position. You know, he forced you into it, or vice versa, though the law generally assumes the guy did the forcing.

"As I recall, I introduced you two, and there was no force involved."

"That's not how the lawyers would look at it."

"Pooh. The lawyers will look at it in different ways only because they're paid to. A judge, it depends on the judge you get. I've been doing some studying of individual judges, and I hate to say that the law gets decided by a judge's biases, but that happens more than people realize."

"So Judge A will think it was incest," Shannon said, "while Judge B won't."

"That's it exactly," Cynthia said, nodding. "But the whole thing happened in the Construct, and while we were researching things, I ran across some precedents."

"You mean this has happened to others?" Jared asked.

"Not exactly your situation, but sometimes somebody will want a fantasy where they have sex with their brother or sister. A Judge in Minneapolis ruled that this was all fantasy, it wasn't real life, and so the laws against incest didn't apply. He added that in his own personal opinion it was sick, but there were no legal barriers to it."

"I'm surprised he didn't create some," Jared said. "A lot of judges do that."

"Yeah, but there's less of that than there used to be." Cynthia glanced over her shoulder at the parents. "Apparently a few judges went too far. I know neither of you follow politics, but if you did, you'd know."

"So what we did wasn't incest." Shannon seemed adamant about that.

Cynthia shrugged. "Only if you two think it is. There's no way you could make a baby, not at Claiborne. If you recall your Orientation, you'd remember that. And there's no dominance games, either, where somebody uses their position of authority to coerce the other."

"I—I guess I'll have to think about it," Shannon said. She stared down at the street, biting her lip. "It's a good thing our parents can't learn about the ... you know." She straightened slightly.

"You kids are awfully serious," a woman said from behind them. "What's up?"

"Hi Mom," Cynthia said. "We're just discussing things."

"Your friend said something about the parents not learning something. What is it?"

"They danced at that dance we had," Cynthia said. "And I think they were getting awfully close to kissing."

"I thought you went with Jared."

"I did, but things got a little confused near the end of the dance. Alex and I ... and Jared and Shannon..."

"I see." It was plain her mother didn't, but she shook her head slightly. "You're still going with Jared to all of the dances and other things."

"Mother!" Cynthia sputtered. "We don't have social events at Claiborne, so someone can't really 'go' with someone."

"But if you were at the same school outside, you would." She smiled. "No, don't answer. You don't have to, I can see it in your face."

"Mothers," Cynthia muttered after hers had walked away.

"And we did have a play that we all attended," Shannon said. "Remember? Cinderella, Claiborne Style?"

"How could you forget," Jared said. "The Prince had to find the girl who fit him perfectly, which meant he had to meet everyone who went to the ball, and..."

"Connie Jacobs was in that," Alex said. "She said they got the story from some old movie: Cinderella, the Adult Version. The only thing they changed was the fairy godmother. In the movie he was black."

"He?!"

Alex nodded. In the play the fairy godmother used a dildo as a magic wand, and..."

"They can be magic wands," Shannon said. "And you don't have to tell us the rest, we all saw it. It only proves my point: we do have social events at Claiborne."

"I think half the student body didn't see how it came out," Jared said. "They were under some other student."

"But it was a social event."

"Which doesn't invalidate my point," Cynthia said. "You don't officially 'go' with someone like you do in a high school in the outside world."

"So we aren't an item?" Jared asked, grinning.

"You... !" Cynthia sputtered, laughing. She pushed at him with her hand. "If you can't go with Shannon, then you only have me. Or at least that's the way you've been acting."

"If I don't count all of the other girls at Claiborne." He sobered up after a moment. "Anyway, what about the reason we came here?"

"It may have to wait until our parents settle things," Shannon said. "Which, from the looks of things, might be a while."

"You wore a skirt," Jared told Cynthia after a bit. "I wasn't sure you'd remember."

"I felt more dressed up in one," she said. "Of course if I'd known Shannon was going to wear a dress..."

Shannon snapped something back, and Cynthia bristled.

"You two don't sound like this when we're at school," Alex said, interrupting them.

Both girls shut up. "I guess," Shannon finally said, "that our natural competitiveness is lessened at Claiborne."

"What's there to compete with?" Jared asked.

Cynthia and Shannon both laughed. "Lots of things," Shannon said. "Hair and make-up, mostly. It's certainly not boys, at least in the traditional sense. And what's the use of flirting if you're going to get nailed anyway. Flirting is supposed to be an end in itself."

"Well I think you both look nice," Jared said.

"Oh, our hair's different," Cynthia said, "and our boobs aren't as big, and—"

"And you're both pretty," Alex said quietly. "And I mean that."

"Really?" Both girls looked at each other, and then looked away, color on their cheeks.

"I like seeing you like this," Jared said. "Clothed," he added when Cynthia looked puzzled. "I mean I really enjoy what happens at school, but this is kind of special."

"Yeah," Shannon said. "By now we'd have jumped each others bones and be resting."

"Or going at it again," Alex said. He plucked the sleeve of Shannon's dress. "That's a pretty color."

"Hard to picture any of us clothed," Jared said, drawing Cynthia to one side.

"I know. I feel so ... awkward. Or something. This doesn't seem normal."

About then Mr. Saunders called a break. After the parents had left, he came over. "I'm sorry about that," he said. "Nobody had any idea."

"It happened," Jared said. "We wanted to get back to talking about why we were here."

"All right," Mr. Saunders said. He ran his hand through his hair. "In a nut shell, the four of you need enough programming to understand what you're seeing. We can't let you make changes, but—"

"Actually we didn't want to make changes," Cynthia interrupted. "Except for that afternoon thing on the last day of the term. None of us liked that, and we'd like to eliminate it."

"I'll put a change request in," Mr. Saunders said.

"What about setting up a test environment?" Shannon asked. "We could try things there, and see how they worked long before we wanted to implement them for real."

"And not just a duplicate of Claiborne," Alex added. "We'd want a barebones type place. You'd want us to work with it," he added, "as we learned your programming protocols."

"We have all of that," Mr. Saunders said. "In effect, you want us to take you on as programmer trainees, and you'd be focused on one area."

"At first," Jared said. "Later on, as we gained more knowledge, we'd be available for other work."

"I don't suppose you wrote anything down," Mr. Saunders asked.

Shannon took a dozen folded pages from her purse. "Here's what we have."

Mr. Saunders scanned through them. "I'll have to pass these by the people upstairs."

"We'd be surprised if you didn't," Jared said.

"Can I get back to you on these? Our meeting today got off to a rocky start, and it's apt to be awhile before things settle out."

The four teenagers looked at each other. "I think we don't have much choice," Jared said, and the others nodded.

The barebones test environment was a room. No doors, no windows, no furniture, no decoration of any kind. They each had one, viewed through a monitor. They had tutorials they had to work through, and after several hours Jared leaned back and smiled tiredly.

This had all been a form of virtual programming. They'd had to learn how to "imagine" the object they wanted, say a chair, and then describe it. That was the hard part, and pieces of the chair would vanish as they worked on other things. Finally, though, he had a chair, a couch, and a table. The pictures on the wall were harder, but the crown molding wasn't. He added a door, and then had to flip through the manual to find a description of a hall. When he couldn't find one, he worked out how he would describe it, and there it was. He let the others know, and as they linked to the hall, doors appeared.

"What do we have here?" he asked as he opened the door to Shannon's. Neither of them had an avatar present, but they had an eye-level view of the room.

"Just a homey little place," Shannon said, and it was. Pictures on the walls, a table, two chairs, an armoire, and a bed filled the rest of the place.

"Is the bed in the corner supposed to be suggestive?"

"That's up to you. You know I'm still a little uneasy about it—us—and everything that happened."

"We'll work it out in time. Let's go see what Alex and Cynthia have done."

While they toured the other two rooms, Alex and Cynthia worked out the program for a house to contain their rooms. About then their session was over. They all saved their work, and logged off.

"Not a bad day's work," Alex said as he took off the VR headset. "Have to learn more about stabilizing the image."

"Yeah," Jared said, "mine kept fading in and out." He glanced at the clock. "I think we'd better be going."