Joe was upbeat about Mick’s progress. Everything, from the host body to the hardware, was holding up well. The bandwidth was stable at nearly two megabytes per second, more than enough spare capacity to permit Mick the use of a second video feed to peer back into the version of the lab on the other side. The other version of Joe held the cam up so that Mick could see his own body, reclining on the heavy-duty immersion couch. Mick had expected to be disturbed by that, but the whole experience turned out to be oddly banal, like replaying a home movie.
When they were done with the tests, Joe walked Mick over to the university canteen, where he ate a liquid breakfast, slurping down three containers of fruit yoghurt. While he ate—which was tricky, but another of the things that was supposed to get easier with practice—he gazed distractedly at the television in the canteen. The wall-sized screen was running through the morning news, with the sound turned down. At the moment the screen was showing grainy footage of the Polish miners, caught on surveillance camera as they trudged into the low, concrete pithead building on their way to work. The cave-in had happened three days ago. The miners were still trapped underground, in all the worldlines that were in contact with this one, including Mick’s own.
“Poor fuckers,” Joe said, looking up from a draft paper he was penciling remarks over.
“Maybe they’ll get them out.”
“Aye. Maybe. Wouldn’t fancy my chances down there, though.”
The picture changed to a summary of football scores. Again, most of the games had ended in identical results across the contacted worldlines, but two or three—highlighted in sidebars, with analysis text ticking below them—had ended differently, with one team even being dropped from the rankings.
Afterward Mick walked on his own to the tram stop and caught the next service into the city center. Already he could feel that he was attracting less attention than the day before. He still moved a little stiffly, he could tell that just by looking at his reflection in the glass as he boarded the tram, but there was no longer anything comical or robotic about it. He just looked like someone with a touch of arthritis, or someone who’d been overdoing it in the gym and was now paying with a dose of sore muscles.
As the tram whisked its way through traffic, he thought back to the evening before. The meeting with Andrea, and the subsequent day, had gone as well as he could have expected. Things had been strained at first, but by the time they’d been to Starbucks, he had detected an easing in her manner, and that had made him feel more at ease as well. They’d made small talk, skirting around the main thing neither of them wanted to discuss. Andrea had taken most of the day off; she didn’t have to be at the law offices until late afternoon, just to check that no problems had arisen in her absence.
They’d talked about what to do with the rest of their day together.
“Maybe we could drive up into the Beacons,” Mick had said. “It’ll be nice up in the hills with a bit of a breeze. We always used to enjoy those days out.”
“Been a while though,” Andrea had said. “I’m not sure my legs are up to it anymore.”
“You always used to hustle up those hills.”
“Emphasis on the ‘used to,’ unfortunately. Now I get out of breath just walking up St. Mary’s Street with a bag full of shopping.”
Mick looked at her skeptically, but he couldn’t deny that Andrea had a point. Neither of them was the keen, outdoors type they had been when they met fifteen years earlier through the university’s hill-walking club. Back then they’d spent long weekends exploring the hills of the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains, or driving to Snowdonia or the Lake District. They’d had some hair-raising moments together, when the weather turned against them or when they suddenly realized they were on completely the wrong ridge. But what Mick remembered, more than anything, was not being cold and wet, but the feeling of relief when they arrived at some cozy warm pub at the end of the day, both of them ravenous and thirsty and high on what they’d achieved. Good memories, all of them. Why hadn’t they kept it up, instead of letting their jobs rule their weekends?
“Look, maybe we might drive up to the Beacons in a day or two,” Andrea said. “But I think it’s a bit ambitious for today, don’t you?”
“You’re probably right,” Mick said.
After some debate, they’d agreed to visit the castle and then take a boat ride around the bay to see the huge and impressive sea defenses up close. Both were things they’d always meant to do together but had kept putting off for another weekend. The castle was heaving with tourists, even on this midweek day. Because a lot of them were nervelinked, though, they afforded Mick a welcome measure of inconspicuousness. No one gave him a second glance as he bumbled along with the other shade-wearing bodysnatchers, even though he must have looked considerably more affluent and well-fed than the average mule. Afterward, they went to look at the Roman ruins, where Rachel Liversedge was busy talking to a group of bored primary school children from the valleys.
Mick enjoyed the boat ride more than the trip to the castle. There were still enough nervelinked tourists on the boat for him not to feel completely out of place, and being out in the bay offered some respite from the cloying heat of the city center. Mick had even felt the breeze on the back of his hand, evidence that the nervelink was really bedding in.
It was Andrea who nudged the conversation toward the reason for Mick’s presence. She’d just returned from the counter with two paper cups brimming with murky coffee, nearly spilling them as the boat swayed unexpectedly. She sat down on the boat’s hard wooden bench.
“I forgot to ask how it went in the lab this morning?” she asked brightly. “Everything working out okay?”
“Very well,” Mick said. “Joe says we were getting two megs this morning. That’s as good as he was hoping for.”
“You’ll have to explain that to me. I know it’s to do with the amount of data you’re able to send through the link, but I don’t know how it compares with what we’d be using for a typical tourist setup.”
Mick remembered what Joe had told him. “It’s not as good. Tourists can use as much bandwidth as they can afford. But Joe’s correlators never get above five megabytes per second. That’s at the start of the twelve-day window, too. It only gets worse by day five or six.”
“Is two enough?”
“It’s what Joe’s got to work with.” Mick reached up and tapped the glasses. “It shouldn’t be enough for full color vision at normal resolution, according to Joe. But there’s an awful lot of clever software in the lab to take care of that. It’s constantly guessing, filling in gaps.”
“How does it look?”
“Like I’m looking at the world through a pair of sunglasses.” He pulled them off his nose and tilted them toward Andrea. “Except it’s the glasses that are actually doing the seeing, not my—his—eyes. Most of the time, it’s good enough that I don’t notice anything weird. If I wiggle my head around fast—or if something streaks past too quickly—then the glasses have trouble keeping up with the changing view.” He jammed the glasses back on, just in time for a seagull to flash past only a few meters from the boat. He had a momentary sense of the seagull breaking up into blocky areas of confused pixels, as if it had been painted by a cubist, before the glasses smoothed things over and normality ensued.