“Digital plus,” he said drily.

  “Do you know any other good ones?” she asked.

  “Dozens.”

  “Share them with me, Cassique.”

  “Well…” He hesitated.

  “Go on. Just one more. Please?”

  “OK.” He thought for a moment and cleared his throat.

  “A digital one,” she said.

  “It is,” he assured her, then grunted, “Bollocks.”

  “Ball…?” she repeated uncertainly.

  “No. Bollocks. Boll. Ocks.”

  “Bollocks,” she said, trying it out. “Yes, it’s quite a filling word. What does it mean?”

  “It was a term that people used for testicles.”

  “Oh.” Her face fell. “That’s not really a swear word then.”

  “It was in the past,” he said. “References to genitalia were some of the crudest words our ancestors could imagine.”

  “How strange. Bollocks. Fuck that shit.” She laughed and clapped with delight. “What silly people they were, letting words assume so much power. As if a word ever really meant anything.”

  “Some words did,” he said. “Some words meant a lot. And not just the taboo words. They had powerful digital words too, which shaped societies and minds and generations.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like… freedom.”

  “Freedom?” Her face was a blank. “What does that mean?”

  He shook his head and grinned self-consciously. “No, bad choice. Forget it. I’d have to take you back there to make you understand. It’s not a relevant word any longer. So, tell me about the new realities that you’re playing. What’s so digital about them?”

  Nijin began babbling on about how real they seemed, how Father had introduced new smells, sounds, and colours, and how he was channelling the adrenalin flow like never before. She went on to describe how sex in the spas was more uplifting than ever, how many orgasms she’d had recently, and…

  Cassique listened and nodded politely when required, but he wasn’t genuinely interested in her journeys and experiences in the realities. He was thinking more about that word he’d brought up, the concept of freedom, which was no longer a part of the world, no longer applied, could not even be understood by anyone who hadn’t travelled back into the past. He was wondering, if freedom no longer existed as a concept, did that mean the people of the present weren’t really free? And if they weren’t free, what, by the past’s terms, were they?

  Unbidden, another word entered his thoughts, a short, nasty one, just as alien to the present world as the other, only in this case thankfully so. It was a word which humans had outgrown a long time ago. A word which supposedly could never apply again, not now that Father was running things and everyone was truly equal. A word he’d never thought of in this context before, which was beginning to trouble him mightily now that he had.

  That word was slaves.

  Curieshire.

  No humans parented children in the present. Father personally handled that messy reproductive business, taking eggs and sperm from clients in the sex spas, using them as he saw fit. He bred schools of children in giant nurseries all over the globe, regulating the number of births each year in order to compensate for those who had died, to keep the population numbers constant. Sometimes, when events demanded it, he’d breed extra numbers for special duties. For the past hundred and seventy-three years that had meant mostly breeding Fixers, since that was the area where human agents were currently most necessary.

  While biological parents no longer existed, brief foster parenting was a popular hobby among certain couples. Father was usually happy to loan out one of his children for a few days, or even weeks in extraordinary cases. He liked humans to experiment with parenting, to give them an understanding of how awkward and time-consuming it was. You had to take classes beforehand, and there were a lot of rules you were obliged to follow, but most determined people who applied were approved for the process and allowed to proceed with the fleeting adoptions.

  Cassique had wanted to act as a parent for many years before he hooked up with Nijin, but the opportunity hadn’t arisen, since he’d been without a partner, and Father almost never farmed out his little ones to lone humans. Nijin had been less than enthusiastic, but Cassique had talked her into considering it, and when Father in a counselling session had suggested it might be beneficial for her, she’d agreed to a trial run at once.

  It had been a nice day out, looking around several of the baby farms, choosing a child. Father sometimes made the choice, and always reserved the final say in the matter, but you were usually permitted to pick one yourself if you’d scored high enough on the tests.

  They’d debated whether to go for a girl, a boy, or a non-binary child. Cassique was open on the subject, but Nijin pushed for a male. She didn’t say as much, but he felt she was uncomfortable with the idea of having another female in the house, and most of her friends who’d parented had chosen non-binary children – Father had for a long time been breeding more of those than boys or girls, and they now outnumbered men and women – so he guessed she wanted to be different.

  In the end they’d settled on Zune, a boy approaching his ninth birthday. There was no tangible difference between him and any of the other boys, but Cassique thought he recognised something of himself in the child’s eyes (albeit while fully aware that it was a ridiculous notion) and Nijin was content to go along with his choice.

  Zune, like all children of the present, was reasonably polite but not overly respectful. Adulthood started at the age of fourteen, when the young were sent from their nurseries to begin their lives as fully developed members of society, to play in the realities and visit the sex spas and provide a human presence on all the major technical operations. (A concession to the times when humans still believed they were masters of the super-computer they had built, and demanded positions be created whereby they could keep an eye on its activities.) No children lived in awe of their elders. They knew Father was the only real superior being on Earth, so they treated older humans the same as members of their own age group.

  Zune hadn’t especially wanted to go with the couple and had ignored most of Cassique’s clumsy but friendly attempts to converse and interact during their time together. Still, he must have enjoyed himself on some level, because although a child always had the right to refuse to be adopted, he didn’t object when they requested further parenting dates with him.

  Cassique had relished having the boy around, despite them managing to build only a shallow, distant relationship. He took him round the world on the monorail, visited the reclaimed deserts, taught him how to build a snowman up in the frosty Alps (which had been re-layered with snow in the twenty-fifth century, after Father had got a grip on global warming and reversed what had up until then been a world-worrying downward trend). He’d been keen to demonstrate that there was more to life than the sex spas and the realities, an almost heretical notion in the current day and age but permitted by Father so long as one didn’t take the fancy too far.

  Zune went along with the ride, but rarely bothered to conceal his boredom. This real world of Cassique’s was a dull place compared to the worlds of the realities. Why waste time building a snowman when, once hooked up to Father, you could project yourself into a sphere where you were the one controlling every flake of snow, where you could be the blizzards in the upper atmosphere, the glaciers in the Ice Age, the cold devourer of some imaginary alien planet? The real world, he’d concluded – as had pretty much every human of the present – simply couldn’t compete with the virtual realities, and only a fool would choose the former over the latter.

  The only times Zune took a real interest in anything Cassique said was when he talked about his travels to the past, the Time Hole, and the strange Personal Time each Fixer had to learn to deal with when moving between the worlds of the present and the past. Those subjects fascinated the boy, as Cassique had known they would. Father could be an all-comprehensive teacher when he wished, but he chose to be secretive most of the time. Information in this world was issued strictly on a need-to-know basis. If you weren’t a Fixer, you couldn’t access the data banks and learn about their missions to the past. Everybody knew about the Time Hole, but only the Fixers knew anything technical about it. The corrupted past was common knowledge, but only the Fixers understood how deep that corruption ran, and how hard it was to bring the existing pasts into alignment with the original past, and what the consequences would be if the Time Hole collapsed and it turned out they’d failed to correct even a single alternate timeline.

  He hadn’t told Zune everything that he knew – there would have been severe repercussions if he had – but he was able to elaborate on what the boy had learned in school and enjoyed seeing the light in his eyes as he listened to tales of people long since dead and gone, and the tricky steps necessary to manipulate those who’d strayed from the path of true history.

  They’d played parents to Zune for seventeen days in total. None of their close friends or associates knew anyone who had kept a child that long, and it was a hot conversation piece whenever they chatted with them in the realities or sex spas. They’d achieved a small measure of mild infamy, easily won in a time where an eccentric was a person who stirred their cocktails in an anti-clockwise direction.

  Cassique would have liked to go on further trips with Zune and Nijin, but both the boy and woman had grown tired of the experiment. In the end Nijin was the first to call time on their arrangement, after a trip to the southern cape of Africa, which had left both her and Zune yawning. She wanted to return to her realities, without having to make any allowances for a child. He hadn’t taken up much of her time, but she’d started to resent the few hours she was being forced to devote to him. Once he was gone, she could concentrate wholly on herself again, without having to worry about asking Zune what he’d like for breakfast or dinner, and then having to pass that information on to Father, so that he could prepare and deliver the food.

  Cassique had seen Zune off to the nursery after their final outing, insisting on coming in the car with him, and had felt a strange sense of loss when the boy was gone, even though he knew it was silly to think that way. He’d called to see him twice in the months following, but Zune hadn’t appreciated the visits and had made his feelings clear. Then the partnership with Nijin came to its natural end – Father told them they should separate, and both were relieved – and Father sent him back on several long, arduous missions, and the months turned into years (for him). But he hadn’t forgotten about the boy, and the feelings his brief bout of parenting had left him with. Now that he was back in the present, and could think of nothing better to do, he decided to give their relationship another shot.

  Zune was stunned to see him. He was in the middle of a reality session when Cassique dropped in on him, having served no prior notice, and resented having to break away from the fun and games. “What do you want?” he snapped.

  “I just called to see how you were,” Cassique said awkwardly.

  “I’m fine,” Zune responded gruffly. “Father looks after me, just like he looks after everybody else. Was that all you wanted?”

  The boy wasn’t much older than when Cassique had last seen him. He was a bit taller and stouter, but Cassique had been expecting vast changes. It had slipped his mind that, while it had been seven years or so for him, less than a year had passed in Present Time.

  Cassique shook his head and forced a smile. “No,” he said. “I was wondering… Well, would you like to spend some time with me? I’m on leave, and I’ve got loads of credit to spend. We could –”

  “You want to adopt me again?” Zune asked sharply. “That’s impossible. Father wouldn’t allow it — no child has ever been loaned out for adoption a second time. Not that I’d want to be taken away again in any case.”

  “Not adopt,” Cassique said swiftly. “I know that’s out of the question. Father’s terminals, I’m not a complete crash-head! I’m not suggesting that at all. I just thought we could spend a few days together, as friends. See more of the world, go to some areas we didn’t make it to with Nijin, act like explorers of old.”

  “Boring,” Zune snapped. “I saw enough of the real world with you. Dull place. Oily mountains and rivers and deserts and lakes. Default on that!”

  “Well, maybe we could visit a few realities,” Cassique tried. “As a team. It’s been a while since I went on any virtual adventures. Maybe you could introduce me to your favourite games. I’m open to any kind of experience. I just thought it would be nice if we spent some time together, for… old time’s sake?”

  He finished meekly and looked away. He knew he was sounding like a fool, like something straight out of the twentieth century, but he couldn’t help himself. He was suffering from a disease which Father had for once failed to diagnose, a malady which was about to change his entire life. It could have been easily fixed if someone had noticed, and he could have resumed living as before with not so much as a scar to show for it, but everyone in this amazing world was too busy pleasing themselves to take note of other people’s predicaments, and so he was doomed by indifference and neglect.

  The disease, which had wrecked so many lives in the past, probably more than all the other illnesses and plagues lumped together, was that giant, ruthless killer of heart, spirit, and mind — loneliness.

  “Are you feeling alright?” Zune asked brusquely. “You sound scrambled. You haven’t touched any of those drugs you were telling me about, have you? The non-prescribed ones they used to experiment with in the past?”

  “No,” Cassique said. “I just have all this free time on my hands, and… Say, how would you like to visit a zoo?”

  “A what?” Zune blinked.

  “A zoo.”

  “I’m not cognizant of that word,” Zune confessed. “Explain.”

  “In the past, when there were animals on Earth… You know what animals are, don’t you?” Cassique checked.

  “I know them from the realities,” Zune confirmed. “And I’ve heard rumours that once such creatures were present in the real world as well.”

  “It’s true,” Cassique said. “There were more animals than humans once, some much bigger than us, some only the size of dust motes, all over the place.”

  “Where did they live?” Zune asked, curious despite himself.

  “Everywhere,” Cassique said. “In every country, the barren wilds, the built-up cities, up in the air, down in the seas and lakes. Many humans even let them live in their homes.”

  “Oh, come on!” Zune’s face crumpled disbelievingly.

  “It’s true,” Cassique protested, desperate not to lose the boy’s attention now that he had it. “Some of the animals were unwelcome lodgers, like rodents and insects, but others were kept as… as…” He tried to think of the word. “Pits!”

  “Pits?” Zune echoed.

  “Yes,” Cassique beamed, delighted to have recalled the word (and with no idea that he’d got one of the letters wrong). “They’d keep some of the tamer animals, feed and wash and play with them. They called them pits.”

  “And these pits,” Zune said. “They have something to do with this zoo you were speaking of?”

  “Well, no,” Cassique said. “Zoos housed exotic animals, tigers and lions and elephants, rare creatures which most people would never otherwise have seen. The staff captured these animals in the wild, caged and bred them, and kept them in huge complexes known as zoos, behind bars, so people could come and see them.”

  “And what did they do then?” Zune wanted to know. “After they’d looked at the animals?”

  “Well, they… took photographs, and bought stuffed toys of the animals, and then… went back home.”

  “That’s it?” Zune snorted and Cassique suddenly felt very small. “They came, stared, and went home? You’d give up time in the realities for that?”

  “It was fun,” Cassique insisted. “People enjoyed themselves. You might too if you tried.”

  “I doubt it,” Zune said. “Anyway, there are no zoos today, and I can’t very well go back to the past with you, can I?”

  “Ah, but you’re wrong,” Cassique said. “There is a zoo. Just one. It’s a small place, not at all like those of old, and it doesn’t have any of the larger, wilder animals – they died out centuries ago – but it’s interesting all the same, with cats and mice and a couple of dogs, even a snake and an old chicken. They’re very proud of the chicken. It’s the last of its kind, and there won’t be any more after it, unless they clone a replacement.

  “Come on, Zune, let me take you to visit it,” Cassique pleaded. “You won’t find it otherwise. While it’s not off-limits to the general public, Father doesn’t reveal its whereabouts to anyone except Fixers. It’s meant for educational purposes, for Fixers who are going to be dealing with creature corrections when they go back in time. Come with me, Zune. You’ll like it, I promise you.”

  “I don’t know…” The boy scratched his chin and pondered the perplexing proposal. “I’m in a digital plus reality at the moment and I don’t want to fall behind the others who entered the game around the same time as me.”

  “You can enjoy the realities whenever you want,” Cassique said. “There’s nothing special about those. Everybody visits the virtual worlds, but how many people can say they’ve seen a real live animal? How many of your friends can boast of that? You’ll probably be the youngest person living today who’s ever seen a chicken. Won’t that be some story to tell the others when you’re not plugged into the realities?”

  Zune was certainly tempted, but the latest reality was so engaging… He thought it over some more, then in a rare spontaneous rush, decided to gamble on the unpredictability of the real world over the guarantee of the virtual. “OK, I’ll come, but only for a couple of hours, and if it’s not as interesting as you claim, I never want to hear from you again, alright?”