“Oh, right. I guess that might be a problem, huh?”
She laughed. “You think? It’s hard enough navigating this world with just one personality inside your skull. Nobody likes a rear-seat pilot.”
I smiled. She smiled. I was about to say that we could go back to talking about antimatter rockets when she said, “I actually did try it once, you know.”
“Tried? That doesn’t sound promising.”
She grinned and leaned back in her chair. “Depends on what you consider promising. This was maybe six years ago, just about a year after I signed on as a trainer here. We got clipped by a micrometeorite, and we needed someone to do an emergency patch job near one of the power cores. Problem was, the strike had punctured the radiation shielding, and the hole was wicked hot. Physics said it would be survivable, but none of the techs were willing to take on the gamma dose that would have been required to make the fix.
“Our Expendable at the time was a guy named Doran Gauss—a real prince, by the way. He came to us by way of a diversion program after his second conviction for sexual assault, and at one point during one of our training sessions he tried to … anyway, let’s just say I wasn’t too worried about frying his cortex. We had our chief technician do a full upload, then ran the download on Doran. The results were interesting.”
“I’m going to assume you don’t mean interesting in the sense that it worked great and everyone was really happy?”
She laughed then. Jemma had a great laugh. It’s one of the few things I miss about my time on Himmel Station.
“Well,” she said. “He got the patch done, and it held, so I guess Command was mostly happy. Doran, though … as far as I could tell, he had two different people in his head after that, and the part of him that was Chief Yahontov really, really didn’t like the part of him that was Doran Gauss. At first he just had trouble sleeping. After a while, though, he started hurting himself. If he didn’t pay attention all the time, his hands would creep up on him and go for his throat. A week or so after the download he managed to gouge one of his eyes out with a shrimp fork while he was supposed to be in his rack. After that, we had to sedate him and put him into restraints while he slept. It took about a month for him to walk out of an air lock in his underwear.”
She looked at me. I looked at her.
“So,” I said. “What you’re saying is, this is not actually a good idea?”
She shrugged. “Not necessarily. You’re no Doran Gauss. That man was a monster, and I can see why Yahontov’s personality wouldn’t want to share a skull with him. The way that manifested was pretty surprising—the case wound up getting a big write-up in the scientific press, and for a while they were even talking about trying to replicate the experiment with our next Expendable, before the bioethicists shut that idea down—but the basic problem was pretty predictable. What I’m saying, mostly, is that you wouldn’t invite someone to live in your apartment without making sure you’re going to get along first, right? You should probably apply at least that much thought to inviting someone to live in your head.”
SO THAT’S WHAT I’m thinking about when Nasha mashes the pad with her fake Quinn thumb: I wonder if these other Mickeys are going to hate me. It’s not like they wouldn’t have totally valid reasons to. I resigned, after all. If I hadn’t, I would have been the one going into the reactor to do whatever it was that Ling and Marshall wanted done, and at least one of them would have gotten to take over my life. From their perspective I’m the worst kind of shirker—the Expendable who decided he didn’t want to die. I’ve been spending the past two years tending bunnies and picking tomatoes and snuggling with Nasha. Their entire lives probably consisted of coming out of the tank, getting irradiated, and bleeding out. If I were in their shoes, I could see wanting to borrow one of my hands one night to shank me in my sleep.
I’m just starting to think that maybe this isn’t such a great idea after all, that maybe I should tell her to stop, when she says, “Should something be happening right now?”
I open my eyes. The restraints won’t let me turn my head far enough to see her. “Did you press the thumb onto the pad?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m doing it right now.”
I’ve never been conscious for a download, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t it.
“Sorry,” I say. “I guess it’s not a print reader after all. What now?”
She sighs. “Time to get the pinking shears, I guess.”
The door slides open behind me.
“Pinking shears?”
“Oh shit,” Nasha says. “Hey, Quinn.”
I try to turn my head again, but the restraints are cranked down tight and the helmet won’t budge. Doesn’t matter, though. Quinn comes around and squats down in front of me.
“Mickey? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Oh,” I say. “Hello, Quinn. What, ah … what brings you here?”
He glares at me. “You brought me here, idiot. The AI that monitors the facility pinged me to tell me that you’d come in for an upload.” He looks up at Nasha. “Is that a thumb?”
“Not a real one,” she says, and slides it into her pocket.
“Seriously,” Quinn says. “What are you doing?” He stands and walks around behind me. “You’ve got the cables wrong, you know. They’re set for download. What the hell, man? Are you trying to fry your brain?”
I hear the click of the restraints releasing, and my head comes free. Quinn pulls the helmet off of me, stows the cables, and then squats again to open the straps on my wrists and ankles.
“Look,” I say. “I know this looks weird, but…”
Quinn stands and looks down at me. “But what, Mickey? If you wanted to upload for the first time in two years, why didn’t you just ask me? That’s my job, you know. And if you were actually trying to do a download … well, I have no idea what to say to that except that you need to get some help.” He turns to Nasha. “And you, Adjaya. You’re supposed to actually like this guy, right? You should have been talking him out of … whatever this is. Instead, you … actually, I don’t know what you’re doing here. And seriously, was that a fucking thumb?”
Storm clouds are gathering on Nasha’s face, and it occurs to me that if I don’t step in here it’s likely that I’m about to see a man get beaten to death. I get to my feet and step between them.
“Look, Quinn. You’re right, I should have asked you about this. The thing is, though—I actually tried to, the other day in the cafeteria. You remember? You wouldn’t even let me get the question out.”
His face goes blank for a moment.
“The caf? You didn’t ask about an upload. You wanted drugs.”
I roll my eyes. “No, Quinn. I did not want drugs. I told you that. I also didn’t want an upload, though. I wanted a download.”
Quinn looks at me, then over at Nasha, then back at me.
“A download.”
“Yeah,” I say. “A download.”
“I … what the hell, Mickey? What the actual hell? You want to do a download into an active cortex—and it’s of your own memories. For what possible reason could you want that? You’ve got early-onset dementia? You forgot where you left your wallet two years ago? You want to reminisce about freezing your ass off? What?”
I shake my head. “I don’t want my own memories, Quinn.”
“You…” He stops, glances over at Nasha again, then back to me. “Oh.”