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at Blue Gamma, but now she realizes it might be true for them, too.
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Chapter Four
    The year following Blue Gamma's closure involves many changes for Derek. He gets a job at the firm that employs his wife Wendy, animating virtual actors for television. He's fortunate to work on a series with good writing, but no matter how quick-witted and nonchalant the dialogue sounds, every word of it, every nuance and intonation, is painstakingly choreographed. During the animation process he hears the lines delivered a hundred times, and the final performance seems glossy and sterile in its perfection.
    By contrast, life with Marco and Polo is a never ending stream of surprises. He adopted both of them because they didn't want to be separated, and while he can't spend as much time with them as when he worked for Blue Gamma, owning a digient now is actually more interesting than it's ever been before. The customers who kept their digients running formed a Neuroblast user group to keep in touch, and while it's a smaller community than before, the members are more active and engaged, and their efforts are bearing fruit.
    Right now it's the weekend, and Derek is driving to the park; in the passenger seat is Marco, wearing a robotic body. He's standing upright on the seat—restrained by the seat belt—so he can see out the window; he's looking for anything that he's only seen before in videos, things that aren't found in Data Earth.
    "Firi hidrint," says Marco, pointing.
    "Fire hydrant."
    "Fire hydrant."
    "That's right."
    The body Marco's wearing is the one that Blue Gamma owned. Group field trips came to an end because SaruMech Toys closed shortly after Blue Gamma did, so Ana—who got a job testing software used in carbon-sequestration stations—bought the robot body at a discount for Jax to use. She let Derek borrow the body last week so Marco and Polo could play in it, and now he's returning it. She's going to spend the day in the park, letting other owners' digients have a turn in the body.
    "I make fire hydrant next craft time," says Marco. "Use cylinder, use cone, use cylinder."
    "That sounds like a good idea," says Derek.
    Marco's talking about the craft sessions that the digients now have every day. These began a few months ago, after an owner wrote software that allowed a few of Data Earth's onscreen editing tools to be operated from within the Data Earth environment itself. By manipulating a console of knobs and sliders, a digient can now instantiate various solid shapes, change their color, and combine and edit them in a dozen different ways. The digients are in heaven; to them it seems as if they've been granted magical powers, and given the way the editing tools circumvent Data Earth's physics simulation, in a sense they have. Every day after work when Derek logs into Data Earth, Marco and Polo show him the craft projects they've made.
    "Then can show Polo how—Park! Park already?"
    "No, we're not there yet."
    "Sign says 'Burgers and Parks.'" Marco points out a sign that they're driving past.
    "It says 'Burgers and Shakes.' Shakes, not parks. We've still got a little way to go."
    "Shakes," Marco says, watching the sign recede in the distance. Another new activity for the digients has been reading lessons.
    Marco or Polo never paid much attention to text before—there isn't a lot of it in Data Earth aside from onscreen annotations, which aren't visible to digients—but one owner successfully taught his digient to recognize commands written on flashcards, prompting a number of other owners to give it a try. Generally speaking, the Neuroblast digients recognize words reasonably well, but have trouble associating individual letters with sounds. It's a variety of dyslexia that appears to be specific to the Neuroblast genome; according to other user groups, Origami digients learn letters readily, while Faberge digients remain frustratingly illiterate no matter what instruction method is used.
    Marco and Polo take a reading