Kids Can Fly: A Real Mother

A Real Mother

Were they alive or dead?

Did they have real feelings, or were they ghosts?

It was something which scientists debated endlessly over the InterNet. It would never be resolved, because those who took part in it, that is, those who filled the leading role, were neither able to reply, or even legally recognized as human. They were even denied the vote.

They were holograms.

Thanks to the compression of data and the vast capacities of computers, the whole life of a human could be stored and used on a single Prestige Power Computer. This meant that, after the client died, their shape and character could be reinvented, in the form of a hologram. It lasted until the money ran out. This meant that, by and large, only the rich survived, but there were still a few of the earlier, experimental forms running.

Client 33476/7, alias named Barbara Ford, was one of these. She strolled the streets of the Holo-City, dressed as she was always dressed, speaking as she always spoke, going about her business as she always did. Yet she was very slightly semi-transparent. Like coloured cellophane. A mere projection from the many laser-guided lenses around the walls of the huge city. An experiment in air. Not real, but real enough to fool the casual glance.

Nothing in the Holo-City was real. It was all a trick of light, like the tumbling dust, caught in the bars of white when the sun streams through a crack in the curtains. Ephemeral. A computer's dream world.

Barbara walked down the main street, turned at the first corner, skirted a car which pulled into a driveway in front other, and went on as far as her own house. She opened and closed the gate and went to the front door. Everything she did looked and sounded right. It was all there, except it wasn't, because Barbara had died ten years earlier. The cancer had beaten her. Twenty one was too young. Her death had come as a surprise, even to the hospital.

But before she passed into the darkness of death, computers had plotted and measured her. They had recorded everything about her, inside and out. They had stored this information and added to it the speech patterns, clothing, mannerisms, likes, dislikes and every other feature about her, until a clone of Barbara was manufactured in the workings of the computer's