After Mick’s discharge from the medical center, Joe took him straight down to the laboratory. An electromagnetically shielded annex contained the couch Joe intended to use for the experiment. It was a modified version of the kind tourists used for long-term nervelinking, with facilities for administering nutrition and collecting bodily waste. No one liked to dwell too much on those details, but there was no way around it if you wanted to stay nervelinked for more than a few hours. Gamers had been putting up with similar indignities for decades.
Once Mick was plumbed in, Joe settled a pair of specially designed immersion glasses over his eyes, after first applying a salve to Mick’s skin to protect against pressure sores. The glasses fit very tightly, blocking out Mick’s view of the lab. All he could see was a blue-gray void, with a few meaningless red digits to the right side of his visual field.
“Comfortable?” Joe asked.
“I can’t see anything yet.”
“You will.”
Joe went back into the main part of the basement to check on the correlation. It seemed that he was gone a long time. When he heard Joe return, Mick half-expected bad news—that the link had collapsed, or some necessary piece of technology had broken down. Privately, he would not have been too sorry were that the case. In his shocked state of mind in the hours after Andrea’s death, he would have given anything to be able to see her again. But now that the possibility had arisen, he found himself prone to doubts. Given time, he knew he’d get over Andrea’s death. That wasn’t being cold, it was just being realistic. He knew more than a few people who’d lost their partners, and while they might have gone through some dark times afterward, almost all of them now seemed settled and relatively content. It didn’t mean they’d stopped feeling anything for the loved one who had died, but it did mean they’d found some way to move on. There was no reason to assume he wouldn’t make the same emotional recovery.
The question was, would visiting Andrea hasten or hamper that process? Perhaps they should just have talked over the videolink, or even the phone. But then he’d never been very good on either.
He knew it had to be face to face, all or nothing.
“Is there a problem?” he asked Joe, innocently enough.
“Nope, everything’s fine. I was just waiting to hear that the other version of you is ready.”
“He is?”
“Good to go. Someone from the medical center just put him under. We can make the switch any time you’re ready.”
“Where is he?”
“Here,” Joe said. “I mean, in the counterpart to this room. He’s lying on the same couch. It’s easier that way; there’s less of a jolt when you switch over.”
“He’s unconscious already?”
“Full coma. Just like any nervelinked mule.”
Except, Mick thought, unlike the mules, his counterpart hadn’t signed up to go into a chemically induced coma while his body was taken over by a distant tourist. That was what Mick disapproved of more than anything. The mules did it for money, and the mules were always the poorest people in any given tourist hotspot, whether it was some affluent European city or some nauseatingly “authentic” Third World shithole. No one ever aspired to become a mule. It was what you did when all other options had dried up. In some cases it hadn’t just supplanted prostitution, it had become an entirely new form of prostitution in its own right.
But enough of that. They were all consenting adults here. No one—least of all the other version of himself—was being exploited. The other Mick was just being kind. No, kinder, Mick supposed, than he would have been had the tables been reversed, but he couldn’t help feeling a perverse sense of gratitude. And as for Andrea…well, she’d always been kind. No one ever had a bad word to say for Andrea on that score. Kind and considerate, to a fault.
So what was he waiting for?
“You can make the switch,” Mick said.
There was less to it than he’d been expecting. It was no worse than the involuntary muscular jolt he sometimes experienced in bed, just before dozing off to sleep.
But suddenly he was in a different body.
“Hi,” Joe said. “How’re you feeling, matey?”
Except it was the other Joe speaking to him now: the Joe who belonged to the world where Andrea hadn’t died. The original Joe was on the other side of the reality gap.
“I feel…” But when Mick tried speaking, it came out hopelessly slurred.
“Give it time,” Joe said. “Everyone has trouble speaking to start with. That’ll come quickly.”
“Can’t shee. Can’t see.”
“That’s because we haven’t switched on your glasses. Hold on a tick.”
The gray-green void vanished, to be replaced by a view of the interior of the lab. The quality of the image was excellent. The room looked superficially the same, but as Mick looked around—sending the muscle signals through the nervelink to move the body of the other Mick—he noticed the small details that told him this wasn’t his world. Joe was wearing a different checked shirt, smudged white trainers instead of Converse sneakers. In this version of the lab, Joe had forgotten to turn the calendar over to the new month.
Mick tried speaking again. The words came easier this time.
“I’m really here, aren’t I.”
“How does it feel to be making history?”
“It feels…bloody weird, actually. And no, I’m not making history. When you write up your experiment, it won’t be me who went through first. It’ll be you, the way it was always meant to be. This is just a dry run. You can mention me in a footnote, if that.”
Joe looked unconvinced. “Have it your way, but—”
“I will.” Mick moved to get off the couch. This version of his body wasn’t plumbed in like the other one. But when he tried to move, nothing happened. For a moment, he felt a crushing sense of paralysis. He must have let out a frightened sound.
“Easy,” Joe said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “One step at a time. The link still has to bed in. It’s going to be hours before you’ll have complete fluidity of movement, so don’t run before you can walk. And I’m afraid we’re going to have to keep you in the lab for rather longer than you might like. As routine as nervelinking is, this isn’t simple nervelinking. The shortcuts we’ve had to use to squeeze the data through the correlator link mean we’re exposing ourselves to more medical risks than you’d get with the standard tourist kit. Nothing that you need worry about, but I want to make sure we keep a close eye on all the parameters. I’ll be running tests in the morning and evening. Sorry to be a drag about it, but we do need numbers for our paper, as well. All I can promise is that you’ll still have a lot of time available to meet Andrea. If that’s what you still want to do, of course.”
“It is,” Mick said. “Now that I’m here…no going back, right?”
Joe glanced at his watch. “Let’s start running some coordination exercises. That’ll keep us busy for an hour or two. Then we’ll need to make sure you have full bladder control. Could get messy otherwise. After that—we’ll see if you can feed yourself.”
“I want to see Andrea.”
“Not today,” Joe said firmly. “Not until we’ve got you house-trained.”
“Tomorrow. Definitely tomorrow.”
MONDAY
He paused in the shade of the old, green boating shed at the edge of the lake. It was a hot day, approaching noon, and the park was already busier than it had been at any time since the last gasp of the previous summer. Office workers were sitting around the lake making the most of their lunch break: the men with their ties loosened and sleeves and trousers rolled up, the women with their shoes off and blouses loosened. Children splashed in the ornamental fountains, while their older siblings bounced meters into the air on servo-assisted pogo sticks, the season’s latest, lethal-looking craze. Students lolled around on the gently sloping grass, sunbathing or catching up on neglected coursework in the last week before exams. Mick recognized some of them from his own department. Most wore cheap, immersion glasses, with their arms covered almost to the shoulder in tight-fitting, pink, haptic feedback gloves. The more animated students lay on their backs, pointing and clutching at invisible objects suspended above them. It looked like they were trying to snatch down the last few wisps of cloud from the scratchless blue sky above Cardiff.