The Uploaded

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  “They won’t… The ghosts, they… they used to be us!”

  “Whatever they were, they are parasites now.”

  “No. There must be another way.”

  “There is no other way, Amichai. The Upterlife schema are spread across the globe, redundant, backed up a thousand times over. Our only choice is to destroy the Upterlife. That’s why the heretics died for you. They’d hoped you’d guide your people to tear down this monstrosity!”

  “That would kill the dead too. I can’t allow that.”

  “So you’ll let our people die for you?”

  “Yes – no! There are people in those servers. We can reason with them–”

  “And if you can’t?”

  I slumped. “…The living. I’d side with the living.”

  Mara arched her eyebrow. “And your sister?”

  “What about Izzy?”

  “She’ll die, too, if this goes the way it must. You’re good at getting others to sacrifice themselves – our people, the Korean girl, the rioters in New York. You’ll even sacrifice yourself. But can you condemn your sister to the void?”

  “That’s not fair! You’re making an–”

  Mara pulled herself up to her full height. “If it comes down to you or the world, will you let Izzy die?”

  “I don’t know! I can’t–”

  “You see?” Mara whirled to face the pastors, who stood grim-faced, a jury ready to convict. “He lacks faith! And without faith, he lacks the conviction to lead the battle to tear down this false Heaven. Oh, my brethren, he claims he’ll lead you into battle… yet when the time comes, this boy will fail you.”

  “Bullshit!” A voice rang loud and pristine from the other side of the clearing.

  Peaches.

  Mara flinched. Dare, puffing, pushed Peaches’ wheelchair down the path to the gathering.

  But Peaches didn’t look like a girl in a wheelchair; she looked like a queen on a throne.

  “A fine appeal to terrible emotions.” Peaches crossed her arms. “Now let me make you the counterproposal.”

  29: PEACHES ON THE PODIUM

  * * *

  “Here’s what I think you need to do.” Peaches gestured for poor, sweating Dare to push her closer to the pastors. “Forget Amichai. You already know Wickliffe plans to manufacture mindslavers in Lacuna Springs. I think you need to capture that technology, then reprogram the living.”

  “To do what?” Mara asked.

  “To make everyone in the world NeoChristian.”

  The crowd spluttered. Guards moved in, then paused, unwilling to haul off a postoperative patient in a wheelchair. She’d counted on that, I was sure.

  “You’ve got Dr Hsiang’s knowledge right here!” Peaches shouted, her voice ragged. “With a little research, you could rewrite every living mind to worship God in the purest fashion!”

  The pastors stepped forward, furious. Mara held them back.

  “Brainwashing,” Mara replied loftily, “is not faith. Faith comes from choice.”

  “Really?” Peaches raised an eyebrow. “Then what choices have you given Amichai?”

  “What?”

  “This meeting’s not about whether you should fight Wickliffe – you know you have to. That’s why you gathered here. This meeting is all about whether you can trust Amichai.”

  She slapped her immobile legs. “Well, I trusted him. Because he’s too noble to compromise and too stupid to lie. That’s the kind of man you’d better protect, because he’ll get his ass killed.

  “For years, Amichai’s been told that the servers are heaven and you NeoChristians are the devil – and despite that, he risked his life to save Evangeline, refused to kill the crazies in the warrens, and went back to free your prisoners.

  “Amichai has done nothing but good for your people, more good than I would have done… and you’re rejecting him because he’s not willing to burn it all down four days after he’s discovered the downside to the Upterlife?”

  The pastors glanced away, shamed. Mara looked furious, but stayed silent; Peaches had outplayed her.

  “If Amichai is not a good person…” Peaches bit her lip to stop the hitch in her voice. “Then no one is. And you might as well break into Lacuna Springs. Because if all it takes for you to write someone off is for them to doubt you, well… you’re gonna have to brainwash everyone.”

  She slumped forward in her chair. I knew Peaches well enough to know a mic drop when I saw one. Applause erupted.

  Peaches made a subtle gesture; Dare pushed her back to the settlement. A small crowd of pastors followed, offering to help Peaches.

  Though I couldn’t see her face, I knew Peaches was smiling.

  30: WHAT GROWS FROM THE KILLING FIELDS

  * * *

  Dare had wedged his arms into the canvas straps attached to the spirocopter’s loading bay wall. He looked like a drooling marionette as he tried to catch some sleep on the way to Boston; his legs flopped as the copter bounced through the crosswinds.

  The NeoChristian family who’d offered us a ride in their spirocopter gave him admiring glances. He’d refused to sleep until Peaches got safely loaded.

  Dare napped, unconscious – but he was in the same copter with me. Progress.

  I sat wedged between Dr Hsiang and Peaches, wrinkling my nose at the stench of pus rising from Hsiang’s body. She lolled on a portable surgical table, muttering in delirium. The veins on her chest had swollen dark black; postsurgical infection had taken root.

  Even in a morphine-induced sleep, she looked terrified. Each breath edged her closer to meat-death. And though she’d tried to kill me, I couldn’t wish the void upon anyone.

  And then there was Peaches…

  “Amichai.” Peaches’ voice brought tears to my eyes. “Amichai, look at me.”

  “I can’t–”

  She grabbed my chin, forcing me to look at her in her wheelchair. Her legs were strapped, motionless, into the footrests.

  How could she be smiling?

  “I’ll never walk again, Amichai.” Her words were gentle as a hug. “I’m a paraplegic.”

  “Don’t say that! These NeoChristians are, they’re… they’re battlefield doctors. Back in New York, there’s–”

  “Zero interest,” Peaches finished. “They hadn’t figured out how to regrow nerves by the time Wickliffe invented the Upterlife, and nobody was much interested after that.”

  “We’ll find a way–”

  “We’ll find a way to bring down Wickliffe, stop the dead from using the mindslavers, bring joy back to the living – and then, if we have time, maybe we fix my legs.”

  I scrubbed my face, my cheeks raw. “How can you be so cavalier about this?”

  “Because I made the decision.” She moved the treads on her chair experimentally, wincing from her wounds. “I thought I’d die forever when I got shot. I get to keep breathing. Losing my legs is a small price to pay.”

  “…I don’t know if I could be grateful for that.”

  Peaches shook her head. “You don’t understand, Amichai. Neither does Dare. But… when I looked down that gun barrel, it answered a question I’d wondered my whole life: if it came down to it, did I really believe in the cause? I talked big, but… I was a spoiled rich kid. Maybe my relatives were right. Maybe everyone toes the line.” She chuckled. “I didn’t.”

  “And now you’ll never toe anything again.”

  “My scars are life.” Peaches pulled up a woolen sleeve to reveal her puckered, tongue-red Bubbler scars. “They remind me how fragile my body is. They remind me to get shit done before everything breaks down.”

  “So you’re… driven?”

  “I’ve got maybe sixty years left. When Hsiang trained the gun on me, I had six seconds.” She sagged back in the chair, a cryptic smile blossoming across her face. “I made each one count.”

  “You just seem so… at peace with all of this.”

  She gripped her thighs hard enough to leave marks. “Oh, I’m angry. Angr
ier than you could ever imagine. But my anger runs cold, Amichai. Every day I give into despair is a day I’m not making Wickliffe pay for his sins.” Her face darkened. “And I’m going to shut down his server personally.”

  “I get that.” I looked back towards Dare’s sleeping form, jiggling in the canvas. “Now can you explain that to him?”

  She looked away, exasperated. “Dare’s always run from his problems.”

  “Dare’s no coward.”

  “He won’t run from my problems. He’s loyal.” Peaches pulled up her robe to slap her stitches, trying to stop the fresh itching without breaking open the wounds. “He’s changed both my bandages and my bedpans. It’s not easy for him to look at my sutures, but he does it. For all his specialized bravery, though… he’s not a risk taker. He can’t understand that I chose to sacrifice myself for a cause; to him, everything that happened in Little Venice was you, thrusting me into danger…

  “And speaking of thrusting,” she said, muffling a giggle, “It doesn’t help that he’s seen how hot you are for that Evangeline girl.”

  I jerked as though she’d kicked me. She winked, happy to have the drop on me.

  “…I’m not trying to hide her from you…”

  “That’s obvious. You two sneaking into the woods, her looking after you with those big green puppydog eyes… She flinches like I’ve whipped her every time I make eye contact. Have you kissed her?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Oh, Amichai.” She patted my hand. “Why hold back? Me? You know I’ll dance with anyone.” She frowned down at her wheelchair. “Well… maybe not now. But this won’t stop me from flirting. And I’m no hypocrite. So have fun.”

  Peaches telling me to go kiss Evangeline mixed me up. I wanted to kiss Evangeline, but I wanted to kiss Peaches, too.

  “…I don’t know if Evangeline’s a good girl to ‘have fun’ with.”

  “Nonsense.” Peaches swatted my objections away like mosquitoes. “It’s all in the setup. Just make it clear you’ll only kiss her on the dance floor, metaphorically speaking. I made out with tons of boys at the Blackout Parties.”

  “Yeah, but you’re special.”

  She leaned in closer. She smelled of blood and disinfectant. Yet a hint of that musky Peaches scent wafted up from below – a promise Peaches would be all right again.

  “Don’t talk to me about special,” she purred. “Do you know how many boys I brought up to the rooftop to kiss, alone, by the sunset?”

  “…no.”

  “One.”

  She glanced over at Dare to make sure he was still asleep, then pulled me down into a long, slow kiss.

  We could have kissed forever… until we heard NeoChristians laughing at us. Peaches pulled away reluctantly, staring out the windshield towards Boston.

  “We have a long fight ahead, Amichai. But when it’s all over… I’ll be waiting for you, on that rooftop.”

  We held hands, feeling an uncertain future rush towards us. The spirocopter banked in a wide arc towards another endless forest.

  The pilot leaned back, smirking – it was Ximena, the Mexican woman who’d stood up for me at yesterday’s pastor meeting. She steered her copter the same way she led her family: confidently moving forwards, never looking back.

  “Wouldn’t believe it from the newscasts, would you?” she asked.

  I started to say I didn’t know what “it” was when I realized that forest was Boston.

  The only signs the woods below had once been one of America’s greatest cities were the humped dinosaur-like skeletons of collapsed skyscrapers in the trees. Clusters of pines had erupted through the organic girders in contorted boughs, fusing into beautiful wood-and-bone sculptures. Flocks of birds chased each other through the mazes.

  “How did the skyscrapers fall?” I asked. “Little Venice is a nightmare of growing coral. Why…”

  “They stopped seeding the clouds here,” Dare said, leaning out of the copter to admire the beauty. “The skyscrapers starved. Nature took over.”

  “God reclaims everything,” Ximena said serenely. Her family caressed their tattoos for emphasis.

  “But Boston…” I stammered. “They razed it. They seeded the clouds with herbicides so the rebels couldn’t grow food…”

  “That was fifty years ago,” Ximena chuckled. “A short time for a computer program, a long time for nature. They show you bloodsoaked footage taken hours after the Culling so you won’t investigate. But give a city fifty summers of growth, and…”

  “It’s beautiful,” Peaches said.

  Dr Hsiang gripped my shoulder. “…I killed you, didn’t I?”

  “Can someone put this bitch down?” Peaches asked.

  “Give her any more painkillers and we risk killing her,” Ximena’s son Facundo said. “The poor woman’s body is reaching her end.”

  “Isn’t she your enemy?”

  “Perhaps. But it stains the soul to rejoice at damning someone.”

  I tried to process that mixture of kindness and superstition. Hsiang grabbed me like she was drowning.

  “I didn’t mean to kill you!” she cried. “You got in the way, that’s all. Mr Wickliffe would have killed us all…”

  “Yes, yes, that’s fine,” I said, too weirded to answer properly.

  “He’s got to forgive me. He has to let me Shriiiiive…”

  She sobbed, moaning how she didn’t want to die, how she had to get to the Upterlife, how she’d been promised paradise…

  I pushed her away. I wanted her to be dignified in her last hours – but her muddled confusion reminded me that I was a leaking sack of chemicals, one injury away from raving incoherency.

  “Step away from the bitch, Amichai,” Peaches said. “If she dies, she dies.”

  “If she dies, we lose our last edge on Wickliffe.”

  “Why do you think I haven’t stabbed her?” Peaches snorted, looking at Hsiang with disdain. Hsiang’s delirium made me want to lecture Peaches that not even our worst enemies deserved meat-death… but Hsiang was our worst enemy, and Peaches thought otherwise.

  “Prep for landing.” Ximena dipped the copter down. The suburbs around Boston had been taken over by federal troops when the Culling had started, then abandoned afterwards when people didn’t want to live near a graveyard half a million deep.

  “Shouldn’t there be garrisons?” Dare asked, pointing down at some overgrown troop bases. “To shoot looters?”

  “There were.” Ximena deftly threaded the copter into a grove of trees. “Guess the Bubbler hit.”

  Peaches unconsciously traced the Bubbler-scars on her shoulders; Dare wrapped a blanket around her. “I heard the Bubbler was less fatal out here.”

  “Killed nine out of ten in New York, where they pack ’em tight. Still got four out of ten out in the sticks. Left Wickliffe short on living troops. And there’s not enough metal left in the planet to build drone armies the way he used to. He kept his victory symbol secure as long as he could… but the Wickliffe-program’s pulled out enough for us set up shop.”

  “The ‘Live Local, Die Global’ initiatives shut down most travel anyway,” Peaches said. “Most people see the world through video. Guess who controls the video?”

  Ximena brought the copter to a halt in a landfill, seagulls scattering at our approach. Or maybe they scattered at the stench the jets kicked up, as the miniature whirlwinds knocked over garbage heaps, unleashing the slimy fester of microenvironments.

  “Did we have to land here?” I asked.

  “Secret entrance is around here, according to the Wickcleft.”

  Mara settled the copter into a crevice between two great stacks of rubbish. The spirojets kicked up splatters of composted muck. Everyone’s face got spattered with sewage-scented compost, and it got no better when Dare puked and the jets flung vomit into the air.

  The NeoChristians stormed out of the copter in brisk formation, setting up a guard perimeter around the landing site. Evangeline slunk out afterwards, clutc
hing her rifle like a teddy bear.

  She looked shamed to be here. Ximena’s NeoChristians worked around her, accepting her help without acknowledgment.

  We unloaded everyone, which got tricky when Dr Hsiang started bellowing deranged apologies to President Wickliffe and we had to gag her. Peaches rolled down the landing ramp, but her wheelchair’s tanklike treads spun in the mushy soil, forcing Ximena’s sons to carry her.

  “Where do we go from here?” I asked.

  “The Wickcleft told us of a tunnel,” Ximena said. She was stoic, but her tanned face was turning green from the smell. Which was, in its own way, comforting; if hardcore NeoChristians couldn’t tolerate the landfill, it was doubtful that anyone else would follow us.

  Searching turned up an old, dark highway tunnel cut into a cliff face. The cracked pavement of the entryway was barely big enough to push Peaches through.

  The smell dissipated as we pushed deeper into darkness. Mara lit a torch.

  “Don’t you have flashlights?” Peaches asked. “You know, actually good options for fighting the darkness?”

  “Why use precious electricity when trees grow for free?”

  I’d never seen anyone shut Peaches up before.

  We rounded a corner. Dare made a happy “ooh!” noise.

  “It’s the Big Dig!”

  “…What?”

  “A big engineering project from centuries ago. They had to dig a freeway underneath a living city – and void, what a fiasco.” It was good to see Dare’s old love of architecture surging to the fore. “The Dig didn’t stretch out this far into the suburbs, but I bet some people found ways to interconnect with it over the years. Secret military tunnels, or maybe rebel projects…”

  Dare lectured about the Big Dig’s political challenges; it almost felt like old times. Except it wasn’t a conversation – Dare was so lost in reverie, he would have talked to a stump.