I stare at her. She stares at me.
“I’m sorry,” I say finally. “It’s a beautiful thumb, Nasha. In fact, it’s probably the nicest thumb anyone has ever given me. Thank you.”
At first her glare doesn’t break, and I have two or three seconds to wonder whether I’m going to need to shift from mock-apology to groveling—but then she smiles, shoves me hard enough to knock me back onto our bed, and says, “Damn right it is. You need to work on your gratitude, boy.”
She crosses the space between us in one quick stride, climbs onto the bed, and crouches over me. I pull her down on top of me and wrap my arms around her. She rolls us onto our sides, kisses me quickly, then pulls her face back far enough to look at me.
“If we do this,” she says, “you really think you’ll learn what you need to know?”
I close my eyes. When I open them again, the smile is gone from her face.
“I don’t know. If they’ve really been sending copies of me into the reactor, then maybe?”
She leans her forehead against mine. “And what if you don’t?”
I sigh. “If I don’t, then I guess we’re right back where we started.”
She pushes me onto my back, then settles her head into the nook between my shoulder and neck. Somehow, despite the fact that this entire dome smells like body odor eighty percent of the time, her hair smells of jasmine.
“By the way,” I say. “How did you do it?”
She stretches her arm across my chest. “Do what?”
“Convince somebody to let you make that thing. What possible reason could you give them for making a human thumb that wouldn’t have them pinging Security?”
She nuzzles a little deeper into me. “It was Rosales. We’ve always been friendly, and she’s been single since Midgard. She knows how it is.”
“Oh.” I run my hand down her back, then hesitate. “Wait, I think I missed something. She knows how what is?”
Nasha lifts her head. She’s grinning.
“I told her it was a sex toy.”
I DON’T REMEMBER a ton of stuff from the survey of ancient philosophy that I took during my first year at university, but there was one bit that stuck with me. It was about the execution of Socrates. He’s been ordered to drink hemlock, because apparently the ancient Greeks didn’t have access to cyanide and Socrates was too classy for a regular stabbing, and he’s got until sundown to do it. His friends all want him to wait until the last possible minute, but Socrates? He chugs it down. If you’ve got to go, there’s no point in waiting, right?
That’s basically how I feel about using a fake thumb to possibly fry my brain. No point in putting it off. We catch a quick nap, Nasha and I, then wake just after midnight and head down to the med labs.
Medical is on the bottom level, not too far from the cycler. We don’t talk on the way down. Nasha walks as if she’s got somewhere important to be, and I follow along behind, head down, eyes darting from side to side, probably looking like an escaped criminal. When we reach the entrance to Medical, Nasha turns to me and says, “Do I need to use the thumb now?”
I shake my head. “I don’t think so. I used to have unlimited access for uploads. Should still be active unless someone went to the trouble of locking me out.”
I step past her and show my ocular to the scanner. The door slides open. We step through, and it slides shut behind us. We have to pass through two more doors and a short corridor to get to the regen room. It’s a space a little bigger than a walk-in closet, crowded with equipment. Half the floor space is taken up by the tank, a gray metal coffin that can be programmed to churn out pretty much any kind of organic matter, but to my knowledge has never actually made anything other than copies of me. The rest is filled by a chair with binding straps for my forehead, wrists, and ankles, and the command console. The squid array sits on the seat of the chair, cables dangling to the floor.
“So,” Nasha says. “This is it, huh?”
“Yeah,” I say. “This is where the magic happens.”
I pick up the helmet, turn it over in my hands, and then settle it onto my head. The contacts scrape against my scalp. I’ve never had to deal with the cables before, but I’ve seen Quinn do it enough times. There are two of them, both braided microfiber, one red and one green. They plug into the console. There are two slots there, just to the right of the thumb pad that makes the whole thing go.
The slots are identical.
Which cable goes to which slot?
“Mickey?” Nasha says. “You’re not looking confident right now. Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Of course.”
I look at the ends of the cables. Identical. I look at the slots. Identical.
Maybe it doesn’t matter?
With a mental shrug, I shove the red lead into the top slot, and the green lead into the other. What’s the worst that could happen?
I could fry my brain. That’s the worst, I guess.
I take a seat.
“Okay,” I say. “Strap me in.”
Her face has taken on a look of concern, bordering on alarm.
“You sure about this, babe? This is starting to look an awful lot like an execution.”
I force a grin. “I’m sure. This is all routine, Nasha. Let’s do it.”
So, she does. First ankles, then wrists, then forehead, closing the buckle around the front of the helmet.
“You good?”
I give the straps a tug.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m good.”
She leans down to kiss me.
“Love you,” she whispers.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
She straightens then, and pulls the thumb from her pocket.
“Ready to see if this thing works?”
I close my eyes.
“Hit me.”
006
SO HERE’S A fun story about live memory downloads. Eleven years, seven-plus lights, and six deaths ago, I asked Jemma Abera why I was wasting my time studying schematics and procedures and technical specifications. We had a memory download system. I’d be using it every time I took a trip to the tank anyway. Why not just pull up an archived memory from some other Expendable who knew all this stuff, and drop it into my skull?
“That’s an excellent question,” Jemma said. This was something that Jemma said frequently, despite the fact that her answers made it crystal clear that ninety percent of my questions were absolute garbage. We were in the storage closet that she’d converted into a classroom for me at the time, sitting across from one another at a tiny metal table with a tablet open between us. “Why don’t you think about what you’ve been taught about memory downloads, and then tell me why that’s not what we’re going to do?”
I rolled my eyes. “Look, if it’s a stupid idea, just say so.”
“Okay,” she said. “It’s a stupid idea.”
She looked at me, a smug smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
“You know you can’t leave it at that,” I said. “You’re dying to tell me exactly why it’s a stupid idea.”
Her face split into a grin. “You know me too well, Mickey. The reason it’s a dumb idea is that memory uploads and downloads aren’t selective. We don’t know how to just pluck one thing out of your head—the schematics for an antimatter reaction chamber, for example—and we don’t know how to put just one thing into your brain either. We could give you a download that we’d recorded from some other person who already knew all this stuff, but you wouldn’t just get his technical knowledge. You’d get his favorite ice-cream flavor. You’d get his first kiss. You’d get the one thing in his life that he’s most ashamed of. You’d get everything, Mickey—his entire personality. And, sad though it may be, the fact is that you’ve already got one of those. His memories and knowledge would be overlaid onto yours, which would probably be confusing at worst, but you get a lot more than memories with a download. You get a worldview, you get opinions, you get biases—and what happens if those fundamental beliefs about how the world works conflict with yours?”