“That’s bullshit, Rho. Losing network addresses is a good thing? What’s next, the voltage protocols? What happens when the grid forgets to shunt power to Timmins?”
“There are risks,” she said gently. “I get it. The backups could fail. The Realists could strike. The AIRheads probably still want me for war crimes just on general principles, and I can’t say I really blame them. Every day in here could be my last, and how’s that any different from life out there?” Some tiny lens sent her the sight of Daniel Brüks opening his mouth; she rushed on, preempting him: “I’ll tell you. I don’t have anything anyone could want. I’m not a threat to anyone. My footprint’s a tiny fraction of yours, even factoring in your kink for spending so much time in tents. I can experience literally everything in here that you can out there, and a billion other things besides. Oh, and one other thing.”
She paused some precise number of milliseconds.
“I don’t have to kill intelligent beings to pay the rent.”
“Nobody’s saying you’d have to—”
“Now let’s look out there, shall we? Infectious zombieism running rampant in at least twenty countries I know of. Realists and Rearguard Catholics taking shots at any heretics they can lay their crosshairs on. Food poisoning on the rise for anyone who can’t afford a consumables-class printer. They haven’t even bothered tracking species extinction rates for a decade now, and—oh, and have you heard about that new weaponized echopraxia that’s going around? Jitterbug, they call it. Used to be pure monkey-see-monkey-do, but they say it’s mutating. Now you get to die dancing, bring a friend along for the ride.”
“The difference,” he said grimly, “is that when the power fails out here, you can curl up under a blanket. If it fails in Heaven you’re brain-dead in five minutes. You’re helpless in there, Rhona, and it’s all just a house of cards waiting for…”
She didn’t answer. He couldn’t finish.
He wondered how much she’d changed already, how much of her remained behind that gentle, utterly unyielding and unreal voice. Was he even talking to an intact brain, or to some hybrid emulation of neurons and arsenide? How much of his wife had been replaced over the past two years? That incremental cannibalism, that ongoing fossilization of flesh by minerals—it had always scared the living shit out of him.
And she embraced it.
“I’ve seen things,” he told her. “World-shaking things.”
“We all have. It’s a shaky world.”
“Will you just shut up and listen to me? I’m not talking about the goddamned news feeds, I’m talking about things that—I’ve seen things that—I know why you went away now, you know? I finally get it. I never did before, but right now I swear I’d join you in a second if I could. But I can’t. It doesn’t feel like transcendence to me, it doesn’t feel like rising into some better world, it feels like being—replaced. I mean, I can’t even stand to have a ConSensus augment in my head. It’s like anything that changes what I am kills what I am. Do you understand?”
“Of course. You’re scared.”
He nodded miserably.
“You’ve always been scared, Dan. As long as I’ve known you. You’ve spent your whole life being an asshole just to keep people from finding out. Lucky for you I could see through it, mmm?”
He said nothing.
“Know what else I see?”
He didn’t. He didn’t have a clue.
“That’s what makes you brave.”
It took a moment for that to sink in. “What?”
“You think I don’t know? Why you keep mouthing off to the wrong people? Why you sabotaged your own career every step of the way? Why you can’t help but face off against anybody who has any power over you?”
Climbing an endless ladder toward a hungry monster. Charging into a leghold labyrinth with living walls. Biting the head off a girl half his size when she told him he couldn’t go home.
Maybe not such a proud moment, that last one…
“You’re saying I overcame my fear,” he began.
“I’m saying you gave in to it! Every time! You’re so scared of being seen as a coward you’d jump off a cliff just to prove you weren’t! You think I never saw it? I was your wife, for God’s sake. I saw your knees knocking every time you ever stood up to the schoolyard bully and got your teeth kicked in for your troubles. Your whole damn life has been one unending act of overcompensation, and you know something, love? It’s just as well. Because people need to stand up now and then, and who else is going to?”
It didn’t sink in at first. All he could do was frown and replay and try to figure out when the conversation had switched tracks like that.
“That has to be the most heartwarming definition of asshole I’ve ever heard,” he said at last.
“I liked it.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, though. I still can’t—follow you…”
“Follow me.” Her voice was flat with sudden insight. “You think…”
She won’t come out, and I can’t go in—
“Dan.” A window opened on the wall. “Look at me.”
He looked away.
He looked back.
He saw something that resembled a pickled fetus more than it did a grown woman. He saw arms and legs drawn close against the body in defiance of the cuffs at wrists and ankles, of the contractile microtubes that pulled them straight three times a day in a rearguard battle against atrophy and the shortening of tendons. He saw a shriveled face and a hairless scalp and a million carbon fibers sprouting from the base of the skull, floating like a nimbus around her head.
“This is not what I’m talking about,” something said with her voice, and her lips did not move.
“Rhona, why are you—”
“You call this change, but it isn’t,” the voice said. “Heaven isn’t the future. It’s a refuge for gutless wonders who want to hide from the future, a nature preserve for people who can’t adapt. It’s, it’s wish fulfillment for passenger pigeons. You think I was lording this over you? This is nothing but a dumping ground for useless also-rans. You don’t belong here.”
“Useless?” Brüks blinked, stunned. “Rho, don’t ever—”
“I ran away. I threw in the towel years ago. But you—you may be doing everything for the wrong reasons and you may be pissing yourself when you do it, but at least you haven’t given up. You could be hiding with the rest of us but you’re out there in a world with no reset button, a place you have no control over, a place where other people can take your whole life’s work and twist it to such horrible ends and there’s no way to ever take back what they did.”
“Rhona—what—”
“I know, Dan. Of course I know. You didn’t have to hide it from me. You couldn’t hide it from me, I’m more plugged in than you are.” The voice was gentle, and kind, and still the face of that thing did not move. “The moment they quarantined Bridgeport I knew. I almost called you then, I thought maybe you’d finally give up and come inside but—”
A mountain smashed into the back of his skull. His forehead smacked the wall of the cubby, rebounded; he toppled backward in his chair and sprawled across the deck. A red-shifted galaxy ignited, pulsing, in his head: light-years away, an upside-down giant stood silhouetted in the doorway.