“Hrm.” He squinted knowingly. “Well, I suppose it’s what you must do now that you’ve vilified me. Want me to tell you what these new taxes will do in the long run? What damage this sloppy bicameral legislature will cause in a century or two? Oh, I’ve foreseen all the possibilities.”
“I’d like to know.”
He shook his head. “No. That’s my secret.”
“If you’re bargaining for a better sentence–”
“No.” He looked at me with pity. “Thing is, Amichai, if you live long enough you’ll find out there are no good answers. If I tell you what will happen, you’ll find another course that looks good now, and that will backfire in a century or two. You’re smart enough to topple me – but nobody’s smart enough to fix things forever.” He stared at the bottle as though it were his only friend, took a good long pull, coughed up hot booze.
“‘One experiment gone wrong, and we wind up with another Bubbler,” Gumdrool had said.
“Sir,” I asked. “Was the Bubbler a virus that got released prematurely? Was that…how you’d planned to flood the Upterlife with newly brainwashed activists?”
He turned from me to stare at his mother’s tombstone. “I’ll let you make your own mistakes.” He took another drink. “Just so you can see how far good intentions get you.”
58: SIX MONTHS LATER
* * *
I’d reenabled my simulated body’s shock trauma, activating the adrenaline rushes and blood sugar crashes – all the little things that made triumphs sweeter.
“We got the votes?” I asked Peaches, my heart in my throat.
Peaches slapped her hand against the monitor in a virtual high-five. “We got the votes, Amichai. Our new government structure is complete. You’ve got forty percent of the power, I’ve got sixty.”
I slapped my hand against the screen. It was as close as we could get to touching each other these days. Not that we tried much; Peaches was always a physical girl, and I hadn’t expected her to stay faithful to someone she couldn’t dance with. Neither of us discussed it.
This time, however, we left our hands touching the monitors – hers to real glass, mine to simulated.
The tabloids hinted she’d moved on to other physical pursuits. Some of the pictures were nice – she’d created the sport of wheelchair offroading, and people would clear the floor for her at formal gatherings to let her waltz with a variety of partners.
I wanted to ask her how often she thought of our final kiss – but no matter what her answer was, it wouldn’t have made me feel better.
I pulled my hand back. “So it’s ‘you’ and ‘me’ now, is it?”
She had the decency to look shocked. “No, I mean – we’re a team, Amichai. I work the living, you work the dead. Together, we accomplish miracles.”
Neither of us were politicians – me because I had no interest in running for office, Peaches because she was too young to hold official power. Still, a word from us could topple institutions.
“You know we’re together.” She looked sad. “Right?”
“…Yeah.” I forced a smile to my face. “And we’re rocking the worldchanging, right?”
She brightened. “We are killing the worldchanging.”
She was right to be jubilant. I’d been worried that opening up a loophole for the living to step into the Upterlife would cause mass suicides… Though as it turns out, once you offer challenges that mean something, the living step up. Tell them they might choose their own careers and own their own businesses – and suddenly, the American living were completely revitalized.
(The foreign governments had their own legislative hurdles. There were heated calls to our diplomats, warning us we were setting a bad example. And when those calls got forwarded to us, Peaches told them, “We’re your future. Get on board or be left behind.”)
But we had so much to do. Peaches struggled to find materials – we’d mined the planet dry, so the rare earth metals she needed to forward her technological agenda had to come from somewhere. And that somewhere was us. The Upterlife would have shortages – but when I saw the videos of factories being retooled to create Mother Mentors for orphanages, I thought shortages were a small price to pay.
Me, I was tasked with revitalizing the Upterlife’s infrastructure – a position many said was more powerful than any politician. Wickliffe’s whole “subconscious vote” schemata had worked back when the Upterlife was a lot less forgiving about their neighbors’ crimes, but my engineered Liminal Shrive had shown a system rife for exploitation.
I was devising a complete overhaul dedicated to fighting what the press now called “Good Ol’ Boy syndrome,” wherein the dead would subconsciously authorize anyone like themselves. This overhaul would take years: it had to be foolproof enough not to exclude based on human error, scalable enough to judge trillions of votes, and above all secure against sneaky bastards like me trying to exploit it.
There were protests, of course. The Upterlife is a fundamental human right! people shouted, flooding my inbox with billions of emails. I explained the Upterlife was still going to be open to everyone – we just needed to make entry a little less dependent on who liked you.
I tried not to think too hard about how Gumdrool’s agenda and mine overlapped.
Still. It’d be insanely great, given time. The one thing I had in surplus was time.
“She’s OK, isn’t she?” I asked Peaches.
“For the thousandth time, Amichai, Izzy’s fine.”
“But she won’t talk to me!”
“She’s trying to wean off the urge to call her parents. Any connection to the Upterlife, well… it’s reinforcing bad habits, is all. She’s going through a detox process. She’ll come around.”
“That’s what you said about Dare.”
She flinched guiltily. “And I was… kind of right…”
“The scurvy architect prances along the rim of Saturn!”
Peaches winced, then cut the connection before Dare saw her. She’d told me a thousand times that I should force Dare to pass a knock protocol before he could enter my private spaces… But I couldn’t deny Dare anything.
He walked down my mansion’s curved stairway, wearing flipflops and swim trunks, trailing his fingers along the carved mahogany railing. He’d designed my mansion himself, telling me, “A man of your caliber can’t live in a dingy apartment.”
I looked up at Dare – except it wasn’t Dare. Not the worn and beaten Dare who’d died back in Paradise. This Dare was offensively smooth of scars.
The government had decided Dare’s Criminal status was unfair, and so had uploaded Dare from his last Shrive Point. A point hours before he’d even gone to the Blackout Party where we’d met Gumdrool.
“You don’t need the passphrases any more,” I told him.
“They’re still fun, Amichai.” He had a beach towel draped over one shoulder, a fizzing drink in his hand. “How’re those NeoChristians coming along?”
“Pretty good. They’re a little worried about being reservationed to death down in New Mexico – but the Native Americans didn’t have half the firepower the NeoChristians’ve built up.”
Evangeline was wielding political firepower, too, but she refused to talk to me; to her, my existence was a mockery of my memory. She would only talk to Peaches, and (I’m told) lectured Peaches on the foolishness of treating “the Amichai program” like a human being…
Dare nodded. “Good, good. Listen, I was gonna do a walkthrough of the new Harmony Center – a literal walkthrough. I’ve designed it, the plans are ready, but I have no idea how it looks from the inside. And I figured, why not make it fun? So I’ve got some hot bartenders lined up, the best DJs, let’s hold a party in the place. Whaddaya say?”
I grimaced. “It’s kind of informal for a serious project, don’t you think? And besides, I’m working on the specs for this new morality-checking architecture…”
He set his drink down. “Look. Would it be easier if I stopped dropping by?”<
br />
I swallowed back guilt. “No, no, I’m always happy to… to see you. You’re my best friend.”
“I have this weird definition of ‘friend.’ One where friends actually, you know, spend time together.”
“It’s not you,” I lied. “Ask my family. I’m not returning my Mom and Dad’s calls either…”
He chuckled. “I blocked all my ancestors. That’s when I knew this was heaven.”
“I… I wanna hang out with you, Dare. But I need to spamproof the Shrive channels, and the current servers need to be optimized now that we’re not building new ones…”
He grabbed my shoulder – an interaction I’d also authorized. “You think I’m not working hard on my career, man? I am. But we’ve got so much to do, this work will crush you if you don’t escape once in a while. If you don’t enjoy the Upterlife, you’ll become the next Wickliffe.”
“I just–”
“Amichai.” He grabbed my chin, forced me to look him in the eyes – eyes too trusting to be Dare. “I watched the footage. I saw what happened. I know what you did… and it’s OK. I’m here.”
You’re not the same, I wanted to say. I’d watched the footage of my own death a thousand times, always wondering what I’d muttered to myself. What if I’d had some last-minute revelation about things that I’d lost?
Was I me?
This Dare found it easy to forgive me because he’d never lived through my betrayal – but the Dare back at that final assault on the mall, the real Dare, had looked at me with disappointment. Such unflinching disappointment.
This is the sacrifice I make for future Dare, he’d said. He’ll never even know I did it.
“…I’ve got a project meeting in an hour. Maybe I’ll stop by after that?”
Dare sighed. “You gotta get over your posttraumatic transition syndrome, man. I did.”
He had less trauma to transition past – but I didn’t say that. Because this Dare was happy, and… that’s what Dare would have wanted. Right?
“You better stop by,” he said. “You’d watch me build meaningless bullshit all the time back at the orphanage – and when I get a chance to design the new Capitol building, you ghost out on me? You gotta see the work I’m doing, Amichai! I’m collaborating with living artists, creating the new look for our new nation – and it’s gonna be built. Living people will bring my work into reality – and Peaches will get to wheel through my building. This is everything I’ve ever dreamed of, man.”
It was everything I’d ever dreamed of, too – at least back when I’d been alive. The idea that the dead could work with the living to create something new was something that would never have happened before the revolution.
You set them aflame, Evangeline whispered. Now you find out what it means to lead them.
“I’ll stop by,” I told him. “I promise.”
Dare closed the door behind him. I turned back to the screens, watching the living, making sure they were OK.
Watching. Endlessly watching.
Acknowledgments
Welcome to the book I never should have written. If I’d understood just how challenging this novel would be when I started the first draft back in 2011, I would have realized that I wasn’t talented enough to write it.
Because honestly? I’d created a fascinating world to explore, but there’s a huge challenge in explaining to people, “Yo, he wants to murder his sister – but when there’s an actual Heaven you can point to, murder’s a wonderful gift!” Screw it up, and you’re lost in the Sea of Mucky Infodumps.
Which is, I suppose, the glory of ignorance – you lean way over the side of the horse, grabbing for brass rings that saner people would pass up. And you either level up as an artist to become worthy of the Impossible Project, or you fall face down in a pile of pony poop.
And oh man did I level up here. I’m glad I did. Every once in a while, somebody who’d beta-read a version of this would corner me at a con to ask, “So what happened to that crazy electronic afterlife book you wrote? I still think about that story sometimes.” And I was like, “It’s not ready yet.”
I got it ready by swelling herculean muscles as an artist. This book made me swole. Thanks, book!
Yet the lengthy development of this manuscript does present a problem: if you’ve read my ’Mancer trilogy – Flex, The Flux, and Fix – you’ll know that I thanked every beta-reader personally, marking their unique contributions. Which isn’t possible here, because this novel outlasted two laptops, each taking my archived emails crashing down with them. I don’t have a record of everyone who gave me critique, except I know it was a lot of people over a lengthy development process. So I’d love to thank everyone who beta-read this for me in the early stages - but your emails are lost to history. So if I see you at a convention, buttonhole me to say, “Hey, you sonuvabitch, I gave you good critique for The Uploaded”, and I will apologize meekly and say yes, yes, of course you did, let me buy you a beer. (Please: do not abuse this loophole to extract free drinks from me. I’m generally happy to buy my friends a beer without faked emotional blackmail.)
But the people I do have remaining records of critique for are Daniel Starr, EF Kelley, Miranda Suri, Keffy Kehrli, Amy Sundberg, Kat Howard, Erin Cashier, Morgan Dempsey, Nayad Monroe, Paul Berger, Erin Cashier, Sarah Gailey, Cassandra Khaw, Rebecca Galo, and Jeremiah Fargo – all of whose critiques made this better, and most of whom will probably be surprised to realize how little this book has in common with That Thing They Read In 2012.
I also must thank all the people who helped me in my Clarion Write-a-Thon – the fine people who donated money to my Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop fundraiser and, in return, got to see me live-write an early draft of this novel. Their feedback, chapter-by-chapter, gave me hope.
I know I have to thank my agent, Evan Gregory, for giving me some of the most valuable advice: ensuring that the third act of my books answer the questions I raised in the first two-thirds. That gentle nudge let me rewrite the last third to become something more fitting. So if you read an early live-written draft and you thought you knew where this was going, sucker! You’ve been hogswoggled, thanks to the efforts of one Mr Gregory!
Also thanks to my, uh, best friend Angie, who refused to read the first draft. Angie likes strong beginnings. The first draft had a crappy beginning, so Angie got bored and walked away, which is often the best critique an honest friend can give you. She likes the new beginning, so if you don’t like it, you can corner Angie at a bar and say, “Hey, why weren’t you meaner to Ferrett?”
And while we’re at it, I should acknowledge the influence of one Jennifer Melchert, who may or may not be insulted when I say she’s been kiiiiind of an inspiration for certain parts of Peaches’ personality.
And much thanky-juice to Marna Carney, who made a magnificent effort to do a last-minute sensitivity read even though artificially inflated deadlines were approaching and she had honest-to-God tornados to wrangle. Also thanks to Shakira Searle, who also helped me with some of the trickier bits of handling the bits involving Izzy and Peaches. If you can have someone cuddle you while they critique you, I recommend it. (Also thanks to Aileen, Kalita, and Laura, who may have generously donated snuggle time.)
Thanks to God. Seriously. My heart’s with the NeoChristians, guys – and any time I stumble on a book’s progress, I ask, “So, Big Fella, if you’ve got anything in particular You want me to say, please, help me to say it better.” That’s gotten me through a lot of blocks. If you’re not getting your story written the way you want, maybe try some prayer.
(Or you could try listening to Rise Against’s “Re-Education (Through Labor)” over 300 times like I did, making it the unofficial theme song for The Uploaded. But that hard-rock shout of rebellion is probably less applicable to your tale than mine.)
And thanks to everyone at the monstrously efficient company of the mighty Angry Robot – Marc Gascoigne, Michael Underwood, temporary Robot pal Simon Spanton-Walker, Paul Si
mpson, Nick Tyler, and Penny Reeve made this book not only better, but, you know, possible.
And finally, as we approach the end of the novel, if y’all wanna see what I’m up to, you can hit up my personal blog at www.theferrett.com – that’s two “R”s, two “T”s – or just follow me on Twitter as @Ferretthimself. I yammer a lot. Some people even consider this a bonus.
But those who’ve followed me through several books know where my acknowledgments always end. Because there’s only one woman who’s consistently hugged me when I was on the verge of giving up writing. There’s only one woman who’s calmly endured my panicky frenzies when I’m not quite sure how to fix this book but I know I have to. There’s only one woman who, back in those crazy days of 2008, said, “Sure, take six weeks off and pay several thousand dollars to go to the Clarion Writers’ Workshop even though you’ve spent fifteen years selling precisely bupkiss – because I want you to follow your dreams.”
I dream of being a writer. But I also dream of being the best damn husband in the world to my wife, Gini, because damn if she hasn’t been a far better wife to me than I (or any man) have ever deserved.
I love you, Gini.
Arf.
* * *
Ferrett Steinmetz
April 2017
About the Author
Ferrett Steinmetz is a graduate of both the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and Viable Paradise, and has been nominated for the Nebula Award, for which he remains stoked. Ferrett has a moderately popular blog, The Watchtower of Destruction, wherein he talks about bad puns, relationships, politics, videogames, and more bad puns. As well as the acclaimed ’Mancer trilogy – Flex, The Flux and Fix – he’s written four computer books, including the still-popular-after-all-these-years Wicked Cool PHP. He lives in Cleveland with his wife, who he couldn’t imagine living without.
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