“What about all the rest of it? Hearing, touch…”
“They don’t take up anything like as much bandwidth as vision. The way Joe puts it, postural information only needs a few basic parameters: the angles of my limb joints, that kind of thing. Hearing’s pretty straight forward. And touch is the easiest of all, as it happens.”
“Really?”
“So Joe says. Hold my hand.”
Andrea hesitated an instant, then took Mick’s hand.
“Now squeeze it,” Mick said.
She tightened her hold. “Are you getting that?”
“Perfectly. It’s much easier than sending sound. If you were to say something to me, the acoustic signal would have to be sampled, digitized, compressed, and pushed across the link: hundreds of bytes per second. But all touch needs is a single parameter. The system will still be able to keep sending touch even when everything else gets too difficult.”
“Then it’s the last thing to go.”
“It’s the most fundamental sense we have. That’s the way it ought to be.”
After a few moments, Andrea said, “How long?”
“Four days,” Mick said slowly. “Maybe five, if we’re lucky. Joe says we’ll have a better handle on the decay curve by tomorrow.”
“I’m worried, Mick. I don’t know how I’m going to deal with losing you.”
He closed his other hand on hers and squeezed in return. “You’ll get me back.”
“I know. It’s just…it won’t be you. It’ll be the other you.”
“They’re both me.”
“That’s not how it feels right now. It feels like I’m having an affair while my husband’s away.”
“It shouldn’t. I am your husband. We’re both your husband.”
They said nothing after that, sitting in silence as the boat bobbed its way back to shore. It was not that they had said anything upsetting, just that words were no longer adequate. Andrea kept holding his hand. Mick wanted this morning to continue forever: the boat, the breeze, the perfect sky over the bay. Even then he chided himself for dwelling on the passage of time, rather than making the most of the experience as it happened to him. That had always been his problem, ever since he was a kid. School holidays had always been steeped in a melancholic sense of how few days were left.
But this wasn’t a holiday.
After a while, he noticed that some people had gathered at the bow of the boat, pressing against the railings. They were pointing up, into the sky. Some of them had pulled out phones.
“There’s something going on,” Mick said.
“I can see it,” Andrea answered. She touched the side of his face, steering his view until he was craning up as far as his neck would allow. “It’s an aeroplane.”
Mick waited until the glasses picked out the tiny, moving speck of the plane etching a pale contrail in its wake. He felt a twinge of resentment toward anyone still having the freedom to fly, when the rest of humanity was denied that right. It had been a nice dream when it lasted, flying. He had no idea what political or military purpose the plane was serving, but it would be an easy matter to find out, were he that interested. The news would be in all the papers by the afternoon. The plane wouldn’t just be overflying this version of Cardiff, but his as well. That had been one of the hardest things to take since Andrea’s death. The world at large steamrolled on, its course undeflected by that single human tragedy. Andrea had died in the accident in his world, she’d survived unscathed in this one, and that plane’s course wouldn’t have changed in any measurable way (in either reality).
“I love seeing aeroplanes,” Andrea said. “It reminds me of what things were like before the moratorium. Don’t you?”
“Actually,” Mick said, “they make me a bit sad.”
WEDNESDAY
Mick knew how busy Andrea had been lately, and he tried to persuade her against taking any time off from her work. Andrea had protested, saying her colleagues could handle her workload for a few days. Mick knew better than that—Andrea practically ran the firm single-handedly—but in the end they’d come to a compromise. Andrea would take time off from the office, but she’d pop in first thing in the morning to put out any really serious fires.
Mick agreed to meet her at the offices at ten, after his round of tests. Everything still felt the way it had the day before; if anything he was even more fluent in his body movements. But when Joe had finished, the news was all that Mick had been quietly dreading, while knowing it could be no other way. The quality of the link had continued to degrade. According to Joe they were down to one point eight megs now. They’d seen enough decay curves to be able to extrapolate forward into the beginning of the following week. The link would become noise-swamped around teatime on Sunday, give or take three hours either way.
If only they’d started sooner, Mick thought. But Joe had done all that he could.
Today—despite the foreboding message from the lab—his sense of immersion in the counterpart world had become total. As the sunlit city swept by outside the tram’s windows, Mick found it nearly impossible to believe that he was not physically present in this body, rather than lying on the couch in the other version of the lab. Overnight his tactile immersion had improved markedly. When he braced himself against the tram’s upright handrail, as it swept around a curve, he felt cold aluminum, the faint greasiness where it had been touched by other hands.
At the offices, Andrea’s colleagues greeted him with an unforced casualness that left him dismayed. He’d been expecting awkward expressions of sympathy, sly glances when they thought he wasn’t looking. Instead he was plonked down in the waiting area and left to flick through glossy brochures while he waited for Andrea to emerge from her office. No one even offered him a drink.
He leafed through the brochures dispiritedly. Andrea’s job had always been a sore point in their relationship. If Mick didn’t approve of nervelinking, he had even less time for the legal vultures that made so much money out of personal injury claims related to the technology. But now he found it difficult to summon his usual sense of moral superiority. Unpleasant things had happened to decent people because of negligence and corner-cutting. If nervelinking was to be a part of the world, then someone had to make sure the victims got their due. He wondered why this had never been clear to him before.
“Hiya,” Andrea said, leaning over him. She gave him a businesslike kiss, not quite meeting his mouth. “Took a bit longer than I thought, sorry.”
“Can we go now?” Mick asked, putting down the brochure.
“Yep, I’m done here.”
Outside, when they were walking along the pavement in the shade of the tall, commercial buildings, Mick said: “They didn’t have a clue, did they? No one in that office knows what’s happened to us.”
“I thought it was best,” Andrea said.
“I don’t know how you can keep up that act, that nothing’s wrong.”
“Mick, nothing is wrong. You have to see it from my point of view. I haven’t lost my husband. Nothing’s changed for me. When you’re gone—when all this ends, and I get the other you back—my life carries on as normal. I know what’s happened to you is a tragedy, and believe me I’m as upset about it as anyone.”
“Upset,” Mick said quietly.
“Yes, upset. But I’d be lying if I said I was paralyzed with grief. I’m human, Mick. I’m not capable of feeling great emotional turmoil at the thought that some distant counterpart of myself got herself run over, all because she was rushing to have her hair done. Silly cow, that’s what it makes me feel. At most it makes me feel a bit odd, a bit shivery. But I don’t think it’s something I’m going to have trouble getting over.”