Domicile (IC)

[Avenger Assembled]

Sharl held up his hand, looked at Gina uncertainly, then decided to head up the stairs. "Okay, I won't go out of the kitchen," he promised, "and I'll yell and come back right away if anything strange happens. After all this work, the last thing I want to do is cause any problems." If she didn't want him to touch her, that was okay. Maybe she was worried he'd clip through her or shock her or something; either way, he didn't want to make anything of it. He slowly, carefully made his way up the steps, unconsciously clinging firmly to the handrail. He knew intellectually that if he fell here, he'd fall a long, long way, but it was still a natural impulse after a lifetime of being around things as real as he was.

[Electra]

Gina's kitchen was about twice as big as she needed it to be, considering she didn't cook so much as shove things in the microwave or warm them on the stove if she was really feeling ambitious. Broad expanses of granite countertops covered beautiful glass-fronted cabinets that revealed enough dishes for one person to get by on comfortably in one cabinet, cans and boxes with food pictures on them in another, and books, magazines, and bits of machinery filling most of the rest. There was a breakfast nook not far from the stairs with a small two-person table tucked into it, one of the two chairs was stacked high with yet more books and a cardboard box that said "Peapod" on it. The real attraction, though, was the windows.

The breakfast nook was all but glassed-in, surrounded on three sides by broad windows that overlooked an expanse of green growing plants! Sharl recognized grass by now, and he'd known of trees already. The yard, for that's what it was called, was surrounded by a tall wooden fence that was lined with trees, so that it was hard to see anything around or over it. The grass was cut neat and short, but otherwise there was no sign anyone spent time out there. It was just there, like a monument to nature.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Oh, wow..." Sharl breathed, staring out the windows in rapt fascination at the beautiful place where Gina lived. Just think! he exulted. She can go out there anytime she wants! It wasn't that he'd never grown up without seeing wild plants, of course; Tronik had plenty of pictures of the world they'd left behind, and expensive visits to one of the city's few arboretums were a family pastime. (His mother had treated the son of the owner for radiation poisoning, and so they could get tickets at no cost). But to see so many, and to know that Gina could walk into them whenever she wanted, do what she wanted there, and then leave when she wished. And that everyone else lived this way. This really is a wonderful place, he thought grandly. He walked around the kitchen, then decided to risk an experiment. If Gina had made him solid, why not?

Cautiously, he reached over and took a can of Mountain Dew, remembering seeing Gina drink it as well as the ads for it he'd encountered on television and the Internet. Drinking fizzy beverages from cans was something he knew how to do at home, and he'd drunk Mountain Dew in the computer thanks to Gina's programming. The pop cap was a little harder to figure out, but eventually he cracked it open, if at the cost of losing the little rim inside the can. "Wow..." he murmured, before raising the can to his lips and drinking! He tasted the sweet fizz going down, and whooped! "I'm drinking real drinks!"

[Electra]

He wandered for awhile and Gina let him, refraining from calling him back down while she made more finicky adjustments to the projector settings. When he finally came back down on his own, she did take the time to look up and over at him. It made her very antsy to have another human form in her home, human-looking eyes watching her, staring at her, even. She shifted in her seat and reminded herself that Sharl was a computer program, no matter how sophisticated his design. "Satisfy your curiosity?" she asked him.

[Avenger Assembled]

"I did!" said Sharl, looking relaxed but still happy. "You have a beautiful house," he added. "Your yard is gorgeous, and your kitchen is really neat. You're really lucky to live in a place like this. I can't believe so many people here can afford to live in so much space." He smiled, walking back and forth and poking the wall occasionally. "You're a genius," he complimented her. "It really feels like I'm really here. I even drank a Mountain Dew and could really taste it!"

[Electra]

"You drank a Mountain Dew?" Gina demanded, then forcibly modulated the sharpness in her tone when she saw his face. "Sharl, you're not designed to be able to digest actual food. You're a hologram, remember? That Mountain Dew is sitting inside a magnetic field within your torso, just waiting to spill out all over the floor the second you zip back into the mainframe. If you want food or drink, just wait till you're back there, okay? I've specifically programmed all that food to be compatible with your programming.

"Emerson!" she called suddenly, "we're going to need some towels."

[Avenger Assembled]

"Oh, I'm sorry," said Sharl, looking abashed. "I wasn't thinking about that! I thought..." How could he have been so stupid? He'd thought surely somehow his fake stomach would work just like a real stomach...but that was stupid. Too embarrassed to say anything further, he looked at his hands as Emerson scuttled upstairs and returned quickly with some fluffy white towels. When the robot returned, he dared to say, "It...it was really nice. I'm really glad you did this for me. It means so much to be able to walk out here, even though it's an alien place, and be part of it. Thank you."

[Electra]

"You're welcome," she told him, sounding a little rueful. "It's still rough now, but at least there's proof of concept. I should be able to create something a little more sophisticated, given a few more days. I'm still not going to be able to let you eat food and drink liquids though," she warned him. "Holograms just don't work that way. You'll have to go back to your partition habitat to do that, at least for now, and you'll always have to eat specially programmed foods. There's no way around it." Emerson rolled up with an armful of towels, spreading them out several layers thick on the floor. "Okay, you stand there," Gina told Sharl.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Okay," said Sharl, taking his place on the towels. "Next time," he promised Gina with the full assurance that there would be a next time, "I'll do a better job out here." It wasn't that Sharl had given up on the prospect of going home, for all that he missed his parents: he knew Gina was working on ways to send him safely back through the hellscape of the Internet. But there was so much to do out here, and so many stories he could take home! As Gina pressed a few buttons, Sharl thought back to that grim scene, and decided to do more than just be a passenger this time. He wasn't just a load: he could actually learn something! And as he disappeared, he concentrated, reaching out with his fingers as he passed through that assaultive vertigo of nothingness...

On the outside, Sharl's program disappeared neatly back into its partition. And as he did so, the contents of a full can of Mountain Dew splattered onto the floor, losing the shape of a human stomach as they hit.