Mirabel had been unwrapping the sandwich: now she held it out to him. He took it, looked up at her, seeing for a moment not the curly hair, but long straight darkness: not the adult face, but the child’s eyes, shadowed.
“What?” Mirabel said. And after a second longer of Dev’s gaze, “What? Is there something on my face?”
“No,” he said. “You just—look good after a day like today.”
She smiled slightly, but was not fooled by his attempt to cover. “Eventually,” she said, “you’ll get around to telling me what you meant by that. But not right now. Just eat.”
He ate.
“And the ice cream didn’t do anything bad to you?” Mirabel said, after the first half of the sandwich was gone.
Dev shook his head as he picked up the second half. “No.”
“Good,” Mirabel said. “Lolo was happy.” She looked at him closely as he continued eating. “So. You still have a company?”
“Looks that way,” Dev said. “Jim and Tau will give me the details later. But I don’t think Tau’d have told me we were going to have the switch-throwing party tomorrow otherwise.”
She nodded and sighed. “This takes so much out of you when things go wrong,” Mirabel said. “Sometimes—”
Dev finished his last bite of the sandwich. “Don’t start telling me you wish we were still living in the little apartment above the Italian place!”
Mirabel snickered at him. “It was easier on your nerves,” she said.
Dev leaned back in the chair and pushed the plate away. “You’re kidding, right? My nerves were always in shreds back then because I didn’t know how I was going to keep you eating. And then the baby . . .”
“I had complete faith in you,” Mirabel said, coming around to sit on his lap.
“That was what scared me,” Dev said under his breath.
“Well,” Mirabel said, “it’s okay now. You survived that, and now you’ve survived this. Not that I understand all the technical details, but I understand enough of them. So tomorrow, all through that big party, we’ll smile at each other and inside we’ll be saying ‘Nyah, nyah!’ to all those nasty people who tried to ruin your life. Because you and Omnitopia have too much life for them to ruin.”
“You know,” Dev said, putting his arms around her, “I think you’re right.”
He paused, glancing past her. Mirabel rolled her eyes at him. “Yes, I locked it.”
“Good,” said Dev. But then he glanced up at the webcam up in one corner of the ceiling.
“System management,” he said. “It’s Dev. Camera off.”
The red light went off . . . after just the slightest pause.
Dev pulled Mirabel close and closed his eyes, hoping for the best.
a cognizant original release september 22 2010
THIRTEEN
THE KIDS WERE IN BED AND SOUND ASLEEP, and Angela was sitting next to the den computer in a beanbag chair.
At least, she knew her real body was doing that. But her present body—which felt bizarrely like her real one: it’s gonna take me a while to get used to this RealFeel thing—was sitting on a rock at the edge of a flowery meadow, under Indigo’s closed- in sky. The sunlight shone down buttery yellow on the landscape, an afternoon color, even though the little interior sun was at a height which normally would have been associated with noon. It can’t help that, Angela had thought when she’d come in earlier this evening and had first had time to just sit still and look at things without Rik chattering at her. It’s stuck in the middle of everything, after all. So you can’t get the change in light from the change in angle, the way it is in the real world. But the color, that you could mess with. . . . And so she had spent the early evening (home time) fiddling with the one modular piece of the universe’s ARGOT stack that controlled the way sunlight displayed over any given spot. She had finally managed to get it to the point where it started out low-level and slightly dim as if seen through dawn haze, then brightened up through morning levels and noontime heat and brilliance: then slowly diminished to an afternoon glow, and then faded out entirely. Now all I have to do is figure how to roll this effect right around the inside of the sphere. With seasonal changes . . .
Angela sighed and stretched as she looked out over the meadow, amused as always by the way it slowly sloped up into the odd upturned interior