The Uploaded

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Everyone knew we didn’t have enough countermeasures to stop a full-on Wickliffe onslaught. His actual question was, should we prepare to void?

  “Won’t matter by the time we’re done,” I told him. “This is a coup. Come nightfall, they won’t have one single hold on us.”

  “What about us?” Evangeline asked, blocking my way. Rumor was she’d left the spirocopters behind to fight her way to a safe haven in the mountains. Her single cross tattoo was now a reddened ring of delicately inked sergeant’s crosses, half-hidden by the bazooka strapped across her back.

  “What about you?”

  Ximena and Facundo and the rest of the NeoChristians crossed their arms, stepping behind Evangeline to form a wall. “What happens if we win, Amichai?”

  “You’ve earned your place at the table,” I told them. The Boston rebels nodded, having fought side-by-side with the NeoChristians. But the New York rebels made gurgles of dissent – not quite contradicting me, but evidently nervous about working with tattooed barbarians. They shuffled their feet, eyeing my necklace of crosses – nobody’d had time to defuse Evangeline’s suicide switch, but to the newer rebels it must have looked like a declaration of faith.

  Evangeline jerked her chin towards the nervous New Yorkers, as though they proved her point. “You don’t dare alienate us when you need us. But tomorrow? Would you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?”

  This was the fracture point Mama Alex had foreseen. And Evangeline refused to let me give her private reassurances, forcing me to make all my promises before an audience.

  I’d intended to, anyway.

  “If we win, I’ll get your people their own land. We’ll find a space where you don’t have to listen to any orders from the dead. If you keep your peace, we’ll keep ours.”

  A NeoChristian I’d never met before yelled, “How do we know you’ll keep your word?”

  “Because I kept my word when I rescued your people from the branch server,” I said. “I don’t care who you worship. Everyone deserves a good life.”

  I wished that had been met with a better response from the NeoChristians. But Evangeline, who’d somehow become the bridge between her people and mine, nodded as if that was good enough.

  She tugged a knife from a sheath, carved a cross into my cast.

  “You don’t believe,” she said. “It was foolish of me to think that you might believe. But… not everyone who cries ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of Heaven, yet the one who does the will of the Lord will pass. You do the will of the Lord, Amichai, whether you intend it or no.”

  “So… you’ll protect the rooftops?”

  “We’ve brought extra firepower for the Tribulation.” She slapped her bazooka.

  Her enthusiasm was frightening. She was eager to die. Her faith had made her deadly.

  More proof we’d never really been suited for each other.

  54: IN THE IZZY-PRISON

  * * *

  Izzy was stashed deep in the underground warrens, at Peaches’ request. It was probably safer that way; lots of people had died in Wickliffe’s onslaught, and the rebels were hot for vengeance. Most folks understood that what happened wasn’t really Izzy’s fault, but…

  People had a tendency to beat up whoever was within arm’s reach when they couldn’t get a shot at the real villains. And though Izzy hadn’t been responsible for her actions, she had given away our position. Maybe she was still a danger.

  Nobody wanted to be friends with someone like that. Even I was a little nervous going to see her.

  Therapy nickered. She knew something was up. But I wanted both Izzy and Therapy out of harm’s way; besides, Therapy had always comforted Izzy.

  My palms sweated the whole trip down. How much of my sister was left?

  I tied Therapy to a post – she could snap any rope, but she’d come to accept my tether as a request to stay put for a while. I nodded to the two security guards, who unlocked the doors to a small green room.

  Izzy was curled in a corner, hugging her knees, rocking back and forth. Her unwashed hair hung over her face like a greasy curtain. They’d rounded up some old paper books for her to occupy her time – but she ignored them. Instead, she muttered apologies over and over again to Dare, to Wickcleft, to everyone who’d died in the raid.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She flung herself into my arms, weeping.

  “I’m not me,” she whispered.

  “No, Izzy.” I squeezed her shoulders for emphasis. “This is you. A little pinched at the edges, but… mostly you.”

  She burst into tears. “I called them. I’d still call them, Amichai. That’s why they had to take away my electronics and lock me down here. It’s… an instilled madness. I wake up, and I itch to see Mom’s face, I crave Dad’s voice – the only thought that makes me happy is the idea of being with them some day in the Upterlife. I hate them, but… even now, I’d call them because I need them, I need them…”

  “That’ll fade,” I told her – but her quivering need made me itch.

  She saw my reluctance, reached out to caress my cheek.

  “I held myself together when Mom and Dad left us,” she said. “I didn’t cry when the Bubbler hit. I kept going when they kicked me out of the LifeGuard Academy. I prided myself on my strength, Amichai – and yet they broke me. They broke me so easily. I’ve got this implanted addiction that affects everything I do – and with the Brain Trust and Wickcleft gone, there’s no way to fix it…”

  “I can stop it from happening to anyone ever again.”

  “You’re going to kill them all?” Izzy asked, fearful. “You’re going to topple the Upterlife?”

  “I’m just going to change some rules, Izzy,” I muttered, repeating the words again elsewhere. “Some really… fundamental rules, I think.”

  “What’s that, sweetie?” Peaches asked, looking up from her earputer. She was coordinating hackers all over Greenwich Village – getting cameras into place, fixing inactive Shrive Points, making sure we had backup power.

  “…Nothing,” I said. She smiled, kissed me on the cheek, returned to her preparations. I stroked the wires of the detcord locked around my throat; once activated, the NeoChristians had designed it to be impossible to remove. We had bigger problems to solve. Yet whenever I swallowed, I felt cold silver and warm explosives pressing against my neck.

  Peaches made my plan work, but I could tell from the way she chewed her lip she wasn’t sold on it. Only she knew what was supposed to happen. Everyone else trusted me blindly, partially because we needed to surprise Wickliffe, partially because we had no other choice.

  It was me, or get Bostonized.

  And I was fine with that. Dare had asked how I expected to lead a revolution without getting blood on my hands… And he was right. I had to accept that innocents could die.

  I just hoped I wouldn’t void the Upterlife in the process.

  “Whatever I do has to be an improvement,” I’d told Izzy. “Sometimes, all you can do is smash things with a hammer and hope to rebuild them better.”

  “You can’t take the Upterlife away from me!” Izzy cried.

  I stood, shocked by how broken down she was. Izzy had screamed at me, she’d demanded, but she’d never begged. And beg she did; she fell to her knees, grabbed clumsily at my shirt, cried…

  “Without the Upterlife, what do I have?” she yelled. “Parents who left me! An aborted career cut short by plague! A kidnapping and a brainwashing! Everyone hates me – I’m the traitor who got everyone killed at Boston! And if I die… this is all I got!”

  Was that desperation Izzy’s natural fears, or Gumdrool’s amplified urges?

  Our brains were such fragile things. A stroke could undo decades of learning, the right pills could drive you mad or soothe you. Who’s to say Izzy wouldn’t have panicked anyway? She’d always been a Liminal Shrive, right up to the moment of her rebellion – and even then she had still believed the LifeGuard would follow suit if they only knew her.


  Revolution was an option for her, not an inevitability.

  “Without the Upterlife,” she said, her words dissolving into sobs, “everything that’s happened to me is random, and cruel, and stupid. You can’t take that away from me! There has to be some reward for what I’ve been through!”

  I muttered some vague reassurances, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do would leave the Upterlife intact. And in that moment, I wanted to toe the line, get my sister the eternity she needed – I’d seen how welcoming Wickcleft had been. Maybe if I defected, I could change Wickliffe’s system from within, preserve the status quo so Izzy’s life wouldn’t be a brutal series of cruelties, but the prelude to a peaceful forever…

  All I had to do was pretend a few thousand NeoChristians and billions of brainwashed kids were a necessary sacrifice.

  “It’s time to leave, Mr Damrosch,” a guard had told us. Izzy had grabbed my arm.

  “Please,” she’d begged. “You can’t knock it all down, Amichai! You can’t void them all, we need the Upterlife – I need my parents – I need more time to make things right–”

  Was that Izzy’s panic, or Gumdrool’s tampering? Or both?

  How could we ever know who we really were?

  As I marched up the stairs to the rooftops, a hundred people filing obediently behind me, I heard the clack of Izzy’s doors closing forever. I stopped by the entrance to the blacktopped roof, closing my eyes – trying to convince myself this plan would not only work, but was right.

  I helped haul Peaches’ wheelchair through the doorway. She squeezed my hand. I’d seen many Peaches in my day – efficient bureaucrat Peaches, furious out-of-control Peaches, placating-crazy-people Peaches, Blackout Party Peaches.

  This Peaches, however, looked at me with concern, caring, love; a look that said, if you need to call this off, I will never blame you.

  That was, I think, the real Peaches.

  I cupped her cheek. “We should probably have, you know, done the sex thing. When we had the time.”

  She pulled me close. “You were the idiot who scheduled the revolution for tonight.” She kissed me for as long as I wanted, and a little more. And when we were done, she added, “But I have some time in my schedule for you tomorrow.”

  She didn’t, as it turned out.

  55: SHOWDOWN

  * * *

  I’m pretty sure the roof was hot enough to make me dizzy. I can see the wavering tar fumes in the video footage; my stomach must have churned, because I kept biting my lip in what I’m pretty sure was an attempt to keep from fainting.

  What’s clear is that everyone filed past me to sit on the coralline ledges, hanging their battered feet off the edge.

  The sunset lit up Greenwich Village’s roofs with the golden shine of a Liminal Shrive. On each roof, people walked out to stare at a sky filled with spirocopters, then perched on the edge – each one shove away from falling.

  They all carried Shrive Points, dragging cables behind them. Peaches had burned our last technological miracles to splice our wiring into diamond-hard Upterlife cable, but she’d managed it – and extended our network to cover Greenwich Village, despite burned-out buildings and scarce supplies.

  The spirocopters, bellies filled with LifeGuard soldiers, buzzed overhead in attempts to scare us off. These were military copters, their turbojets intermingled with guns and gasjets and void knew what else. A few flickered dazers experimentally, but Peaches waved a hand and counterfrequency signals lit the sky.

  The spirocopters swooped in from all horizons, descending in greater numbers, preparing for the onslaught.

  That’s when the booming noises sounded across the rooftops.

  Every time I see the footage, I think it’s gunfire. That noise must be gunfire. Then Peaches wheels around to bump me, and yanks me to my feet, then hauls herself up into my arms. You can see the surprise on my face as I realize what she’s doing:

  She’s dancing.

  They’re drumming.

  The rest of Greenwich Village rises to their feet.

  In our final moments left alive, we do what only the living can do.

  I am never prouder of Greenwich Village than I am in that moment.

  Peaches is dancing with me, one last time, and I know it’s because that’s what she does when she’s nervous – but she’s not letting go as everyone else sways and exchanges partners. Her legs dangle, her toes scuffing against the roof, but it is beautiful because she’s mine. I’m hers.

  This is our anthem. Our defiance.

  Four spirocopters break formation and buzz the rooftops, their turbojets’ backwash almost strong enough to shove us off the roof. But they keep a wary distance, fearful of our countermeasures.

  Then I realize: they’re afraid of me.

  Sure enough, Gumdrool’s leaning out of a spirocopter’s door, pointing at me and barking orders. Guns swivel into position, bathing me in targeting reticles.

  I reach down to touch my IceBreaker, verifying that it’s still tethered through the Shrive links to the Upterlife servers. I could have just queried the connection mentally… But I wanted to touch it. I know that.

  The copters swoop into position. The Greenwich rebels continue to dance, as at least a hundred army vehicles cordon off Greenwich Village.

  Peaches squeezes my hand.

  “Showtime,” she says.

  Lights flicker on; Wickliffe stands as tall as an Upterlife server, his holographic image knitted together by several copter projectors working in conjunction. He’s clad in a somber black suit, his glimmering feet stretching down to tread on fresh graves.

  Gumdrool stands in a copter jittering inside Wickliffe’s torso – as though he were Wickliffe’s stilted heart.

  “Amichai Damrosch,” Wickliffe booms. “Will you admit to your monstrous lies?”

  I check the IceBreaker. Sure enough, all the wireless signals in the area are flooded out by the copters’ jamming shrieks – it’s like a thousand people yelling to shout down a single person’s conversation. Every camera in the area goes dim – except for Wickliffe’s. He’ll edit the footage to look good later.

  The copter’s gunports fire up, ready to kill.

  “Shrive,” I say into the IceBreaker. My word booms across the Village, loud as Wickliffe’s. There’s a rattle and clank as everyone lies upon the tarmac, puts on the helmets, starts the Shrive sequence.

  Peaches kisses my cheek before she goes under. The NeoChristians patrol among the Shriving thousands, brandishing bazookas to ward off the LifeGuards.

  Wickliffe looks down, perplexed, trying not to go offscript. “Are they… Are they confessing their crimes?”

  “Not their crimes, no,” I say, looking up defiantly at Wickliffe and his copters. “Don’t you feel it? I’d think you of all people would feel it.”

  “Feel what? I–” He pats his chest, as though he’d forgotten a pen, then looks down at me in horror. “Oh, no.”

  Void help me, I can see it clear as day in the footage: I began to strut.

  “I know your problem, Wickliffe. Let me spell it out for you: you made the Upterlife too good, didn’t you?”

  Wickliffe flickers out of meat-space to stop my Upterlife onslaught – but it’s too late.

  The poison’s in the well.

  Wouldn’t stop me from monologuing, of course. You can’t be a good supervillain without a good monologue.

  “You had to make it workfree to get everyone onboard, back in the day. You sold the afterlife like it was the best show ever, making it so good everyone would write their local politicians to pass whatever law they could to get access to it. You needed perfect reviews – so you used every neurological trick you could find, pushing our pleasure centers, making the games so good they’d lure anyone with the slightest trace of imagination…

  “But how could you protect yourself when you were a ghost? I mean, you’re nothing more than a signal bouncing around a circuit; what happened if the government cut funding to the Upterli
fe? Or the public’s sentiment soured on consciousness uploading?

  “So you made your big error: you gave the dead real-world political power. You pushed through measures to let the postmortemed vote… and put them into a cost-free playground.

  “Centuries later, the dead outnumbered the living fifteen to one. Not many of them voted… but not many of them had to, with numbers like that. The Upterlife had the votes to push through any foolish measure it wanted… Even if those measures caused real-world riots.”

  The copters shift into position. Gumdrool’s shouting, “Take Damrosch down before he talks more heresy!”

  And Wickliffe flickers back into life, his hands spread wide as though he were calling a runner safe at second base: “NO ONE SHOOT! ALL GUNS DOWN NOW!”

  The rebels groan, returning to consciousness.

  Wickliffe points an accusing finger at me. It quivers. “You did this,” he says. “You did this.”

  “That’s what Sins of the Flesh was, wasn’t it?” I ask. “It was your last-ditch attempt to get the ghosts interested in the living. All the smart people had flitted away into your games! The only people who paid attention to the living world were the most tedious, incompetent bottom of the barrel scrapers. So you tried to lure the competent back to real life. You offered fabulous prizes, turning our antics into tawdry entertainment, all so a handful might pay any attention to what was going on outside the servers.”

  “They were drifting,” he pled. Even now, it’s terrifying to see that face, so familiar, broken and begging. “I made the games too addictive. The postmortemed have gone mad in isolation, Amichai. They don’t have to eat, to work, to breathe – they’ve forgotten what it’s like to suffer. They think they can do anything to the living as long as they threaten to take away your Upterlife. A few generations from now, that won’t work. You’ll revolt and tear down the servers, and everything will be gone.

  “Amichai,” he begs. “I’m on your side.”

  “If you were on our side, you’d hold them accountable!” I yell.