Kids Can Fly: A Real Mother

circuits. Even as she slipped away, the hologram had begun to form the replacement.

In those early days, first attempts to re-create a whole human were clumsy and wooden and full of problems. There were many failures. Computers struggled to assemble all the relevant pieces fast enough to synchronize the words with the actions. There were blanks, when the hologram disappeared completely, and moments when parts of the body broke off and went in a different direction.

But Barbara was the first fully functional holo-unit. She was able to answer questions, and act in a way that seemed like she had genuine independence, and she even behaved with a sort of originality. She was complex enough to make simple decisions by herself. She acted, sometimes, as if she was actually aware her surroundings.

Trent Coverdale was the founder of Holo-City. It had been his idea, right from the start. He raised the money, mainly from big business, and convinced many wealthy people that to become a hologram after death was the way of the future. If it was refined enough, he said, it could give the client eternal life.

Some people are willing to stake everything they own on the chance that they might get to live a little longer. Trent had many such hopeful, rich gamblers calling on him over the first year. Billions of dollars rolled in.

Within months of starting the project, the plans were drawn up and the site for Holo-City was selected - a stretch of cleared land many miles from a real city. The ground was scraped and levelled and rolled flat and covered with asphalt. To the people of the neighborhood, it was nothing but a huge car-park, but soon the curving walls around the circular perimeter began to grow. On all sides, rising to about the height of a fifty story building, the area was surrounded by steel scaffolding, to which was fastened the electronic equipment, the cladding, the thousands of miles of wiring, and then the whole was covered by an almost flat roof, with a peak running along the center. To the outsider, it looked like a vast, iron ball.

But to those who were admitted, it was a three-dimensional dream-world, with houses, trees, cars, busses, cats, dogs, birds, clouds, sky, and everything else a real-world city contains. It was a slice of real city, made of air. It was populated by the images of people, still going about their daily lives, whose real bodies were buried kilometers away, in the cemetery.

And Barbara was one of them.

She opened her front door with the bright, chromium