With a gruff voice, pretending to be José Meroni, Teresa had ordered the BIE escort guards to take up alternate stations. Acting the part of a man still sour from the embarrassing defeat of the night before, she bullied them into leaving her alone with the upload technicians busily making their final double checks.
A hungry COM waited to receive Eduard's soul into its labyrinth. Cables and conduits were already connected to the old woman's body, electrodes attached, power sources primed.
Two quick sprays of Scramble had taken care of the techs. Everything would begin to fall apart soon. Succeed or fail, she had to be done in the next few minutes. . . .
Teresa hammered at the computer access pads, trying to shut down all power to the area, to the entire building if necessary. If she could crash the system locally, she would save Eduard—at least for a while.
Beyond that, she hadn't thought of what she would do. Maybe she could shout out the story of what had really happened between Eduard and Mordecai Ob, maybe she could expose the Bureau's cover-up, how they had refused to consider that their heroic Chief might be a monster inside.
Doing so would destroy Daragon, too. But it might buy Eduard a second chance.
Now, on the monitor, she saw Eduard engaged in a hushed but heated conversation with the old woman who would soon receive his body. Maybe he could resist the transfer somehow, cause a delay. That would give Teresa the few minutes she needed.
She wished she could talk to him, explain her plan—as pathetic as it was—but she didn't understand how the BIE computer system worked. She didn't know what she was doing, which commands to enter. She pounded on the polymer touchboard in dismay, cracking its coverplate.
She scanned through the system, selecting tangential items, meeting dead end after dead end. Finally, she found the right command string, a set of glowing letters that would act as a binary guillotine blade to shut down the facility. She looked down at the cracked control plate, hoping she hadn't damaged anything in her outburst.
Lights flickered on the upload panels. Frantic, Teresa skittered clumsy fingers over the board, punching in the first part of the instruction set.
“You don't want to do that, Teresa,” Daragon said, standing in the doorway. He looked imposing in his Inspector's uniform. He had known all along. “It won't help him, and it'll only delay what has to be.”
Through the observation port, she saw Eduard and the old woman hopscotching. She had to act now.
Unwilling to accept defeat, Teresa finished her command string. Daragon sprang toward her, but couldn't react fast enough. COM accepted the precise override instructions.
All the power went out. The termination facility shut down, swallowed in sudden blackness. . . .
Daragon sealed himself and Teresa inside the control chamber. “I'll keep them out for now.” His face was ruddy in the emergency backup lights, full of anguish and never-forgotten love. “I don't know how much I can protect you, Teresa—but I can't let you get away with this. I have to stop you.”
“Why? Just because it's your duty?”
Quickly and efficiently, he worked to restore the power, all the while talking to her. His patience and confidence were maddening.
“This silly stunt will only delay the end by a few minutes—and for what? Do you think it makes any difference to Eduard? This will only get you convicted, as well—and I . . . I can't allow that.” His fingers flurried over the keyboard, trying to reestablish a link with the power supply and reconnect the termination facility to COM. “Eduard wouldn't want that to happen.”
Guards hammered at the sealed door to the control center, but Daragon did not release the locks. He wouldn't relinquish his control of the situation.
Teresa realized that in José Meroni's body she outweighed him. She could pound him senseless using the guard's muscles . . . just as Eduard had done for her, intimidating Rhys with the huge Samoan's physique.
But the thought made her sick. She simply couldn't do that, not to Daragon, not using the same abusive methods the Sharetaker had used. The violent thoughts drained out of her.
The power came back on, crackling through light tiles, dazzling bright. Daragon toggled the facility-wide intercom and spoke in an authoritative voice. “Our apologies for the inconvenience. The problem has been identified and resolved. We will now proceed without further delay.”
She looked up in panic at Eduard again, to fix his face—Garth's face—in her memory. Teresa wanted to scream. Instead, she asked for help.
“Soft Stone . . . oh, Soft Stone, are you there?” She leaned closer to the terminal, begging the equipment, as if it could hear her. “I can't do this myself. I'm trying, but I don't know what to do.”
After an interminable moment, the COM screen blurred, and the old monk's blunt-featured visage appeared. Daragon stared in amazement, his cool BTL demeanor melting away.
“I always taught you and Eduard to follow your own paths . . . even if they lead you to a cliff.” Soft Stone's synthesized voice carried layered implications, questions, warnings.
Teresa could not allow herself to think beyond the simple inquiry. “Oh, please help me stop this.”
The placid monk looked at her from the depths of the filmscreen. “Do you truly think that is best? For him and for yourself? And for Daragon? Let me take him, little Swan. I will watch over Eduard, and you can live your life.”
Daragon had always been calm and reasonable, not impulsive like Eduard, not passionate like Garth, not uncertain and questioning like Teresa. “We have to finish this,” he said to Teresa, and to Soft Stone.
Teresa couldn't answer, not even trying to fight back tears. She thought of the administrator monk at the Falling Leaves, poor Chocolate dead in his sleep before he could upload himself into COM. She remembered the beautiful ceremony in the monastery library, when Soft Stone had departed into the vast unexplored network. If only it could be like that for Eduard. Not this . . .
“After today, I will be gone, little Swan,” Soft Stone said. “I've interfered enough.”
Daragon stood with Teresa by the console, refusing to look into the execution chamber. He input the commands to prepare the forced upload into COM, then spoke into the private channel intercom. His words reverberated in the execution chamber. “Are you ready?”
Teresa bit back a moan. Inside the chamber itself, Eduard and Madame Ruxton sat anticipating, dreading, hoping.
“Don't worry about Eduard.” The monk vanished into the screen, drowned out by gray static.
Daragon turned to her, his fingers poised above the controls. He lifted his eyebrows for her benefit. “I could call in another guard, but if it has to be done, don't you think Eduard would rather have a friend do this? With compassion, rather than malice? I'll have to live with the knowledge for the rest of my life.”
Before he could do anything, though, lights on the consoles flashed all by themselves. Daragon and Teresa looked at each other. The connection to COM was ready. The upload began of its own accord.
“Soft Stone,” she whispered. “Please.”
Through the observation port, Teresa watched Madame Ruxton's body twitch and jerk, resisting the pull on Eduard's consciousness, dragging him into the computer network in a final, irrevocable hopscotch. Eduard's mind would add to the ever-expanding network, helping it grow in its own mysterious ways.
After a long, impossible moment, Teresa watched the old woman's now empty and useless body die.
Daragon stood next to her, his back now turned to the execution chamber. He looked crushed, but said nothing. The glimmer of a tear in his eye looked startlingly out of place on his stony visage.
Finally, he unsealed the door and walked away, leaving Teresa to stare through the recorder glass. Ruxton's unwanted form sat motionless, wickerlike arms akimbo, drained and dead.
Eduard was gone. . . .
EPILOGUE
Later, much later, Teresa went to Club Masquerade, alone.
The three of them had always gathe
red here. With youthful optimism, she and Garth and Eduard had promised never to miss a meeting . . . but all that had changed. No one here would recognize her in Jennika's physique, not even the bartender.
She was back in her athletic female body again. It had taken her two days of sweet-talking and lovemaking to convince José Meroni not to report her unauthorized switch. Though incensed, he was even more mortally afraid that his buddies would learn how easily she had duped him even after the arm-wrestling defeat. He couldn't stand that humiliation.
In the aftermath of Eduard's upload execution, Teresa had been willing to face the consequences of her attempted sabotage, but Daragon had intervened again. He kept her involvement quiet, saying the right words and using his remaining connections in the BTL to “take care of things.”
She was now free, and by herself. Back to normal, but she would never be the same.
Ducking through one of the Club's myriad doorways, Teresa passed under the arch into the exotic, synthetic environments. Without consciously choosing where she went, she found herself inside the Sequoia Room, its floor strewn with dried needles and tiny fir cones. The recorded birdsong, the smells of pitch and sun-warmed evergreens, made her sigh.
Long ago, this was the first room she and her friends had entered. Away from the Falling Leaves, they had dared each other to slip into the Club. Maybe she could find peace and calm here for a while.
Sitting alone in the main bar area, she listened to the ever-present music, elbows on the table, face averted. This would have been their regular meeting date. She remembered the last time they had followed their routine, the last normal moment, when Eduard had rushed in, fleeing for his life.
From then on, everything had changed.
Signaling the tablescreen, she ordered a drink—Eduard's slushy blue concoction—and when she paid for it with her credit chip, Bernard Rovin's beaming face appeared in front of her. “Teresa! I haven't seen you in ages.” He smiled at her. “New body, I see. Looks nice.”
She sank her chin in her hands. “A lot of things have changed, Bernard.”
His expression grew serious. “I may be stuck here in the Club, but I can still read COM reports. My sympathies to you.”
“Thanks. I really want to have some time to be by myself and think.”
“Gotcha.” When her blue drink appeared, the first sour sip stung her tongue and nostrils. After that, she didn't taste it at all. Teresa was drowning in thoughts. All her life she had ineffectively tackled unanswerable questions, but found no answers. Why are we here?
Each person had a different answer to that question, and Teresa needed to find her own. Instead of searching for someone to hand her the solutions, she should have been searching inside herself.
Could it possibly be as simple as “To do the best we can”? The things a person left behind, her friends, her accomplishments, the marks she made on the future, were the reasons to be alive in the first place.
The meaning of life is to make life have a meaning. . . .
She took another drink, savoring it this time, experiencing the sensations, letting the taste affect her. Unfortunately, she didn't have her friends here to share this new insight, simple as it might sound.
Teresa stared across the shifting floor toward the Club entrances. To her astonishment, she saw a broad-shouldered, blond-haired man walk in, the form she had known as Garth for so many years, the face Eduard had worn when he was captured by the Beetles, the body he had swapped with Madame Ruxton on his execution day.
Teresa felt a wash of resentment at the vindictive rich woman for having the gall to wear it in here, their special place. When she looked at those features, Teresa could only see Garth, and Eduard. But now she knew it was a stranger inside.
However, the blond-haired man walked up to the main bar, spoke into a screen and chatted with the bartender's image. He turned to look toward the cluster of isolated tables where Teresa sat. One of the cybernetic, mechanical arms rose up above the lip of the bar to point at her. At her.
Teresa sat rigid and uneasy as he worked his way past shifting, dancing bodies, climbing the two steps. He came straight toward her. She couldn't believe it. “Are you Teresa?” he asked, looking at her high-cheekboned face, her dark eyes and smooth ebony skin.
She didn't invite him to sit, keeping her barriers up. He grinned with an open, wonder-filled expression that looked so familiar, especially on that face. He gave her a bearlike hug. “It's me—Garth!”
“What? Who?”
“Garth. In my old body again.” He pulled up a floating chair.
Speechless, Teresa listened as he leaned across the table and jabbered out his story. “Then, after I told Eduard who I was, when we had a chance to exchange a few words, things were different. When the power went out—”
“I did that.”
“I thought that was too much of a coincidence.” Garth gave her a faint smile. “In the darkness, for just a minute, we had a chance to talk. Eduard and I. It was a good talk.”
Teresa swallowed hard and listened.
During that final moment, Eduard had spoken to him in an urgent whisper, figuring out exactly why Garth was trying to sacrifice himself. But Eduard had refused to allow it. “Garth, I don't buy your claim that you have nothing left to live for, nowhere else to go. Look at you—you can always make more and better art. Who's to say any artist is entitled to only one masterpiece?”
“But Eduard, I want to help you. I've already accomplished everything I expected to.”
“Then do more!” Eduard had practically shouted. “You can always learn new things. There is no stopping point. Surrender is for cowards and fools.”
Now, in the Club, while dance music droned in the background, Teresa listened with tears of amazement in her eyes.
“Eduard insisted on completing the hopscotch, the way we were supposed to.” Garth's blue eyes held a sheen of tears. “He said it was high time for him to do a selfless act of his own. I think . . . I think I felt Soft Stone there for a moment, at the end.”
“She was,” Teresa said. “I know it.”
Heads turned in the Club as a uniformed BTL Inspector strode across the floor, looking for someone. He came toward Garth and Teresa, as if it required all the courage he possessed.
“I hoped you two would be here.” Daragon raised his eyebrows.
“Still spying on us, I see.” Teresa didn't know how to react, but Garth automatically offered him a seat, looking confused.
Daragon flashed him an uncertain smile. “Yes, I know it's you, Garth. You don't think your little scam with Madame Ruxton could stay hidden from me?”
Abashed, Garth looked at Daragon. “I think I'm going to need a bit of help from the Bureau to get my identity straightened out again.”
“Consider it done . . . my friend.” Daragon leaned toward Teresa, his face more open and anguished than she had ever seen it. “I know you won't believe me . . . in fact, I know you probably hate me. But I miss Eduard, too.”
Teresa drew a deep breath. “He accepted death and gave life back to his friend—exactly the same thing Garth was trying to do for him.”
Garth swallowed hard. “Yes, but he didn't need to. I owed him so much already. I wanted . . . wanted to pay something back.”
“You've been doing that sort of thing all the time, Garth, without realizing it. Don't you think?”
He looked up at her, distant and disbelieving, then turned to Daragon. “Eduard helped me figure out how to be alive again. It was the last thing he ever said. He gave me a new window on human nature and on love. I guess no one can ever completely understand every side of humanity.”
“Giving up is the worst possible thing,” Daragon said. “A waste.”
Garth's lips formed a wan smile. “One of these days I may even contact Juanita Cole, to see what insights she might be willing to share. Maybe I can learn from her.”
Teresa reached over to grasp Garth's hand. “I'm looking forward to all the new works of
art you're going to create.”
Garth had decided he would dedicate his new panorama experience to Eduard. And Pashnak. Already in his mind he planned an ambitious new display of images and experiences, a complex and heartfelt work depicting the things that had meant the most to him all through his life.
He would call it FRIENDSHIP.
CODA
The walls around him shone with crystal data, passages and alternatives spread out with a complexity no single human mind could ever comprehend, not in a million years.
Now, though, Eduard might actually have that much time.
He found himself unfolding, flowing, exploring. COM must have its limits—somewhere—but it seemed to him that all of infinity awaited him, now that he was inside.
Her form shimmering and indistinct, yet still perfectly recognizable, Soft Stone came to greet him as soon as the upload was completed. “Welcome, Eduard. Join me, join us—all of us.”
He had felt no pain, no sense of dying. It had been just like hopscotching into another body, another mind. A boundless one. Never before had he experienced something so vast.
The monk's luminous shadow reached out, beckoning him. His guide. He didn't see the pastoral images or hear the heavenly chorus he remembered from when she had uploaded herself in the Falling Leaves library. But even without the trappings, he couldn't imagine anything more wondrous.
“There are many inside here, and we're all part of the same overall mind woven through an organic matrix and computer network. At least it started out that way. Now COM has evolved into something else.”
“Am I trapped in this place?” he asked tentatively.
“The same way you're trapped in the whole universe, little Swan.”
COM was like a hive mind filled with people he had known, everything he had imagined learning or experiencing. Another step in evolution, a new group consciousness, which now watched over the childlike remnants of humanity.
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