by Sean Platt
Micah stared at the wall. While he watched, the Directorate number clicked up to fifty. Any moment now, the final two Senate votes would tick in, and it would all be over. Either it would go fifty-two to forty-nine or fifty-one to fifty, and the Directorate would win as predicted, or the Enterprise would pull off a streak and tip the scales to fifty-one to fifty in their favor.
Clive shook his head in a way that almost seemed sad.
“If you’d had a stellar record, things would be easy. But whether you think any of this is your fault or not, a lot has happened under your watch. And now, with both Rachel and Isaac dead?” He sighed.
Micah forced himself to respond, but it didn’t come easily. He’d always fought with Isaac, and there were even times he’d considered having him dealt with, but he’d always backed off because brothers were brothers. Rachel had it coming. But Isaac? Isaac, in his own way, had been an innocent.
“What does…” He paused to reset, moistening his lips. “My mother’s death frees a spot, but — ”
“And that’s just about the only thing saving you, Micah. You did slash a knot in Panel by getting rid of her, whether she was respected or not. And in a twisted way, the fact that you had the guts to do it proves to a lot of us that you’re able to make hard decisions if you must.”
Before Micah could respond, the Enterprise wall ticked up. Fifty to fifty. Next tick decided for everyone.
“But Isaac,” he said. “What does Isaac have to do with any of this?”
“You were always yin and yang. In the public’s eye, you might as well have been the presidents. The sheets ate it up: the quarreling Ryans. But now there’s no Isaac for you to square off against. So what use is Micah?”
“Now wait just a goddamned min — ”
Micah stopped speaking as a yellow bar appeared above the blue and red windows. In the bar, there was a single numeral. A one.
Clive turned. “Well, I’ll be buggered,” he said.
Micah looked at Clive, at the wall, and back to Clive.
“What? What does that mean?”
“Too close to call,” he said. “The swing senator is unwilling to cast her vote.”
Micah was about to ask for more, but Clive spoke first.
“It means party memberships are within a half percent of each other. By law, if I remember my obscure statues correctly, there will be a district-by-district recount.”
Micah looked again at the wall. The big red square. The big blue square. And the indecisive yellow bar across them both.
“So who controls the Senate?” Micah asked.
Clive turned to meet Micah’s gaze.
“Until the count is in,” he said, “nobody does.”
Chapter Twenty
Leah poured tea for herself and Sam then set the pot down as she felt a wave coming. She was alone in her kitchen, and nobody would see. Which was good, because she wasn’t ashamed…but this was private.
She put her palms flat on the countertop, let her head hang, and cried into the fragrant chamomile steam. Her chest hitched. Her body shook. She let it happen. Then she wiped her eyes and took a moment to let it all settle.
This was her kitchen. For better or worse, she currently had nowhere else to go. Even if any of the Organas had made their way back to the village, Leah didn’t feel strong enough to face them. She was both afraid of and sorry for them.
If she was right about what had happened with Leo — what she’d first guessed from the Underbelly wireframe, then more or less confirmed by waving his body with her handheld — he’d been implanted with some sort of mnemonic command, programmed to home in on Stephen York for reasons unknown. He hadn’t been himself. His death hadn’t even been a total tragedy; Leah’s wave had seen a new set of triggers trying to stop his already-stilled heart as his body’s electrochemicals dispersed. He would have died anyway, even without Braemon’s security — which, it seemed in retrospect, had only shown up to defend Nicolai Costa.
It hadn’t been Leo’s fault. And, thanks to the network he’d formed with them, it likely hadn’t been any of the others’ fault, either. They’d all been infected, and unable to fight it.
But now, with the virus’s source gone and the network broken, those who’d fled would be themselves again — only, they’d probably still have memories of the terrible things they’d done. According to the sheets, thirty-one people had died at the Violet James Respero fundraiser. Even Shift had taken a backseat to the ongoing story on The Beam. Officially, the Organas had been driven insane by “acute Lunis withdrawal.” The NPS, Leah knew, would have a different story in mind: that Leo Booker had revived Gaia’s Hammer for one last stab at the elite before going out with a bang. But the truth, Leah knew, was far sadder. Now they were all just people. They wouldn’t hurt anyone. And her old peaceful friends would be deathly remorseful, paralyzed by guilt.
Just as Leah was, because she’d released them. She and Dominic — who’d also gone missing.
She couldn’t let herself believe Dom might be dead, too. He had to be lost. Or maybe whatever had happened to turn York into Crumb had happened to him, too.
But the lie tasted sour. Leah kept thinking of how she’d sent the Organas through that scanner, supposedly deactivating all that made them deadly. And she kept thinking of how Dominic had lit up the same sensor, revealing the presence inside himself of something he’d obviously not known was there. Something that, in hindsight, looked like bio-encoded software. The kind of thing someone must have hidden there without his knowledge…and, consequently, might someday want back.
Where was Dominic? Where was York? And where were the other Organas? Several had been reported dead; she’d known most by nicknames and had to look up the real ones. There were so many left. Would they scatter? Would they keep their enhancements or try to dig them out with clawed fingers? Would they survive as reconnected Luddites, taking doses of the disease they’d once fled? Or would they instead somehow find a new dust supply, and try again?
Leah didn’t know. And for now, she didn’t entirely care. She had other problems to worry about. Maybe this was the end of Hippie Leah. And maybe this was to be the true dawn of Leah the Adept.
She walked into the living room. Sam was on one side of the couch, and the holographic Violet James — looking solid, save the fact that she didn’t have weight to compress the cushions — sat on the other. Leah had uploaded the strange, semi-mortal and semi-corporeal new form of SerenityBlue into the apartment’s canvas then set up a real-time sync with the back-worn proton pack so the girl could be in two places at once. The way Serenity/Violet had explained it, she could truly only be the copy of her file on the canvas or the pack at any given time (either as a hologram or a disembodied consciousness), but the sync gave her options. If they needed to go anywhere, Sam would strap on the pack and be her carrier. They’d been pretending it was for convenience or recreation — for the purposes of just getting out — but after three days of feeling like fugitives in this scotoma-masked apartment in DZ, Leah knew the truth: they kept Serenity on the canvas so she’d be able to access The Beam, and they kept her on the pack because they never knew when they might have to run.
Leah handed a cup of tea to Sam. She hadn’t asked if he wanted it. To Leah, Shadow had always seemed like a hypercaffeine abuser. Only recently — under the twin influences of reimmersion in native, always-on connection and an initial hit of Lunis — had he seemed calmer and more focused in his communications. Leah liked him steady. The tea was decaf.
“Thanks,” he said.
Leah sat in the chair opposite the couch. A loose spring poked her in the back.
“Do you remember me, Violet?” she asked.
The girl nodded. She didn’t look like she’d looked to Leah before, in the school. But the good news — if there was any in all of this — was that at least she looked the same to everyone now, and like Leah to no one.
“Of course.”
“I mean, more than you did?”
; Violet shook her head and gave her a kind smile that was very Old SerenityBlue. The girl’s memory had slowly fleshed out during the first day, but then plateaued. She seemed to (but didn’t entirely) remember Sam from an immersive deception loop they’d shared at some point before the benefit, and she seemed to (but didn’t entirely) remember Leah and Leo and York from the school. Her children, at the school, were all she seemed to remember almost fully as both Violet and Serenity — though if Leah was reading her right, it was more of an intense soul-familiarity than a true remembering.
“What about Respero? Do you remember your Respero?”
“A little. Sam showed me the vidstreams. And as much as I could, I watched the noise from inside.”
“‘Noise’?”
“Inside, when I watch The Beam without using my eyes, it feels like noise. Except I can see it.”
“How can you see it without eyes?” Sam asked.
“To be fair,” Leah said, “she doesn’t actually have eyes now.” She gave an apologetic shrug. “No offense.”
“It’s fine.” Violet seemed to think. “I feel real. It’s what I remember life being like. I don’t know how different it might be if I had a solid body, but this — ” she gestured down at her holographic self, “feels like a body. I guess that doesn’t make much sense if I’m a file now.”
It made fair sense to Leah. If amputees could feel their absent arms and legs between the amputation and replicant replacement, then maybe Violet felt a full-body phantom limb. The mind got used to its original state, and had trouble saying goodbye.
Leah sighed. She had a question to ask, but it was the definition of forward. But she simply had to know.
“Do you remember a discussion we had? About how we’re connected, me and you?”
The girl thought. “Maybe. A spoon. Chocolate?” She shook her head. “But that’s silly.”
“No, that’s it,” Leah said. “I told you how once I was deeply immersed, and it felt like parts of me were shedding off. You’d had the same sense, as SerenityBlue, from the other end — of something dissolving away then coming together as you. But now that I know who you are, none of it really makes sense to me.”
“You already knew who I was.”
“I mean, you’re a person. You’re Violet James. You’re the most famous Respero case in history. The way I figure, Respero was always a cover. The news has already buried it all, and you can bet Respero will continue, but now that I know what to look for, I get a good feel for it. Of the millions of people sent to mercy killings over the years, it looks like they kept throwing them all at The Beam. Only a few stuck, like you. The rest fell apart while you lived on. But that’s what I don’t understand. If you’re Violet, how were you SerenityBlue? And if you were Violet all along, why does it feel like…” She sighed. “Well, like I made you?”
Violet shrugged. “Maybe you just helped me come together. Maybe you were there when I was lost, and you helped me become something else.”
“You mean, maybe I helped you coalesce somehow? I encountered you floating around after Respero, and let you get your bearings?”
She seemed to think again. “No. I think it’s as I said. You helped me become something else.”
“But you’re SerenityBlue. And SerenityBlue is you.”
“Only a little,” she said.
Leah wanted to ask further, but this felt like talking to Crumb during those first days, in the limbo between Crumb and York. He’d known he knew something, but not what it was. The schism had sounded painful to reconcile. So Leah let it go.
Still, something itched beneath her skin.
Because as well as Leah remembered helping SerenityBlue coalesce, she remembered a second coalescence, too. Something that in many ways felt like Serenity’s inverse. The black to her white. The up to her down. A coalescence that, until recently, she’d barely remembered, as if it was trying to hide and had erased itself from Leah’s mind in one way so it could appear fresh in another.
Sam’s handheld blipped.
“Who is that?” Leah snapped, suddenly sure that someone had read her mind, and that the malicious presence — which they’d shared even as n33t and Shadow — was checking back in on its chaos. The id to someone else’s ego, just as Serenity was id (or something kinder) to Violet James.
But Sam was already pocketing the handheld with a smile.
“It was my mother,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-One
Killian picked his patient’s hand up, squeezed it, then began to massage the web of flesh spanning thumb to forefinger. The hand was cold, but the vitals were all green.
He turned the hand over then used a small, dull pin to tap the index finger at the pad.
“Do you feel that?” Killian asked.
“Yes.”
He tapped the middle finger, same place.
“And this?”
“Yes.”
“Good, good.”
He circled the cradle and then, with a feeling of ripping off a bandage, began to disconnect peripherals. He knew for sure that everything was solid across the board, and that there were a copious number of redundant copies regardless. But unplugging cords felt like yanking life support, and he had a superstitious certainty that he wasn’t supposed to pull a single one.
“Do you want to try standing?”
The patient sighed. “Not yet.”
“Would you like to see your readout?”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It just seems like something that might be done at a time like this. Kind of like showing a new mother the nanograph image of her fetus.” Killian’s smile felt forced. He was chattering for the sake of noise. He had no reason to fear this man, but he’d had plenty of reason to feel nervous around the avatar. Killian wasn’t a Null hacker, but in the right circles, Integer7’s reputation seemed to have spread like a virus. Even then, Integer7 seemed more mischievous than malevolent, but still it gave him nerves. And there was no playbook for something that had never been done.
“No. Thank you.”
“File integrity is complete in all of the redundant buffers,” Killian said, running through the stats despite the man’s clear disinterest. “And of course in the body. It’s all wetware, so it’s not apples to apples, and you can expect some disorientation as you adjust. Your brain — your mind, sorry; you didn’t have a brain before — isn’t used to containment, but the simulations predict it will adjust.”
“‘Predict.’” The word was flat and almost seemed to carry a sense of menace.
“Well, you’re patient zero. Sorry, patient alpha; saying ‘zero’ makes it sound like a disease.” Killian forced a smile that probably came out looking like a grimace. “We don’t have actual results. I’m sorry, I thought Sally made that clear. Did she not make it clear? I’m so sorry. I was under the impression you specifically requested to be moved now, without waiting for testers to inhabit the other fabricated bodies. If I’d known there was any scintilla of doubt, I’d have — ”
“It’s fine.” He raised the hand Killian had recently been squeezing to life and flexed it in front of his eyes. It looked exactly like a natural hand, like everything about the body. But creating organic parts had never been the problem. “It was important that I be first.”
“Oh,” Killian said. “Well then. Good. We aim to please. And I’m not seeing much evidence of dislocation?” It came out as a question, which he hadn’t intended. He was supposed to project certainty. Yes, the download seemed to have gone just fine, but almost all of Xenia’s experience — and literally all of Killian’s — was in uploading minds, not downloading them. Mindbender’s purpose was supposed to be escape from the mortal plane, the promise of immortality, all that. The wider applications that involved a move in the other direction (flesh vacations for digital beings, light speed travel, bulk transit for the Mars terraforming project) were supposed to be decades or, likely, centuries down the pike.
Killian forced himself to breath
e. It had all gone perfectly. Things were fine. It didn’t matter how nervous he’d been or how many nightmares he’d had about downloading poorly and then being haunted by the angry ghost of The Beam’s most infamous man for the rest of his days. It had worked out okay in the end. The patient could feel his hands and feet. He sounded coherent.
“Why would there be dislocation?” Integer7 asked.
“Oh. Well. I was just checking.”
“But why would there be?”
“Well, we had an issue with the dislocation paradigm for uploads, as I’m sure you know. Of course you know! But really, that issue more or less went away once the key sequence to the integration software was inserted. Once the sequence was extracted from Captain Long, your archive became fully holographic, as would any other uploaded minds in the system.”
“Which means Mindbender is now open for anyone who knows how to upload.”
“Yes, sir. But as you requested, we’ve kept the matching upload technology confined to your indicated group. You understand it’s a two-piece puzzle? The insertion of the key, from Long, was like a master decrypt cypher that unlocked the decoding, hologram-making end of the process. But any mind that’s not uploaded using the correct encoding will still fragment, with rare exceptions as we’ve seen with batch testing, in the range of zero point zero — ”
“I know all of this,” Integer7 said.
“Oh. Yes. I’m sorry.”
“So what about dislocation?”
“Oh. Well, maintaining the integrity of the uploaded file was always comparatively simple. Comparatively. We knew there was a cypher out there. But the notes said the original cypher vanished with Mr. Hawes, so we’ve been attempting to recreate it?” Another sentence coming out as a question. Killian wanted to slap himself. He must sound so weak.
“Hawes gave it to Dominic Long.”
“Long knew Colin Hawes?”
“In a manner of speaking.”