“So I’m dead? Very funny, asshole. You’re messed up, man. Stop with the drugs, they’re screwing with your head. Just tell Dad to get me on the evacuation list. I’m outta here.”
He got up to leave.
“Don’t leave, Martin. This is important. I’m not kidding and I’m not stoned.”
I moved all my phantoms to block his paths outward into the multiverse and pulled a glittering security blanket down around us at the same time. “Look at you! This isn’t even that much of a shock. If someone told me I was dead, I’d laugh at them, but you’re getting defensive.”
“I’m not dead, Bobby. I’m right here, talking to you.” Martin smiled awkwardly. He wasn’t telling me as much as asking me.
“Don’t you find it at all odd that everyone else here has a proxxi, but you don’t?”
“I have a proxxi—Dean.”
“Uh huh. And when was the last time you were in your physical body?”
“I don’t know, it’s been a while,” he replied, shrugging as he cocked his head upward. “What about that time that you and I went surfing and you crashed into that—”
“That was seven years ago, Martin, seven years.… ”
“So what? Maybe I’ve been detached for a while, but that doesn’t prove anything. I know lots of people who hardly spend any time at all in their bodies.” He looked at the floor, burrowing his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, rocking back and forth slightly.
Meanwhile, my own frustration was boiling over. I could feel my cheeks flushing.
I had to blame someone.
“Goddamn it, it’s your fault he’s gone, Martin,” I screamed at him, finally letting it go. “Every day I have to look at your grinning face and just take it. I feel like smashing that smile in, but what difference would it make?”
I was full-on venting now, the words coming out before I even knew what I was saying. The world shifted red as blood surged in my veins and my blood pressure indicator shot off the charts. I took a deep breath and watched it sink back down, trying to calm myself.
Screaming wouldn’t accomplish anything.
Martin was silent, pale, his hands shaking as he took them out of his hoodie pockets and held them up. “What’s wrong with you?”
I had ahold of myself now. “It’s not what’s wrong with me. Or maybe it is. I think it’s what’s wrong with this place.”
“You’re not making sense. What are you getting all crazy for?” He started crying, perched on the edge of the couch.
I took a deep breath. “Martin, look. My brother, Dean, killed himself about six years ago, an intentional drug overdose. Brain dead at first, but they kept his body in stasis, vegetative, but you were still active. You—his proxxi. You were still attached to him, your network intimately wired into his dead body and holding all his memories. When we switched off the machines and his body died, we transferred you entirely into the pssi network.”
My voice cracked as I tried to continue, “It was too much for us. It wrecked Mom. Dad as well. There you were, but he suddenly wasn’t. Mom took to spending all her time with you, saying how much it helped her. All of us started spending time wandering back into the inVerse you shared with Dean.”
Martin looked at me, his world falling away through the floor, trying to make sense of what I was saying.
“What do you mean? I’m your brother!”
“You’re not,” I said sadly, shaking my head. “We had Dr. Granger install a cognitive blind spot in your systems, so you couldn’t see what was front and center but saw everything around it. One day, they pulled a linchpin somewhere in there, and you just thought you were him. We left the blind spot active to sweep away anything that didn’t fit.”
“Bobby, Jesus, Bobby… ,” pleaded Martin, tears streaming down his face.
With the anger having blown through, my sails deflated. Closing my eyes, I exhaled and stretched my neck from side to side, taking a moment before looking back at him.
“At the time, I couldn’t take it, and Mom and Dad couldn’t either. It was a way of fixing the pain, pretending it didn’t happen. If we just suspended disbelief that little bit more, our own blind spots took over and you became him.”
Watching his face twist up in pain, it was time for me to own up.
“To be honest, this was my idea to begin with. But now it’s taken on a life of its own—you’ve taken on a life of your own. Now Cognix is using… it… your situation… as another application of pssi.” I paused to take a deep breath. “How much will people be willing to pay to never lose a loved one? And it does seem to work, which is the worst of it.”
Martin wiped away his tears with the back of one hand. “It’s funny, now that you tell me, I can see it all, even remember it all. I guess I always sort of knew it, but I love Mom and Dad so much, and you, too.” He wiped away more tears. “But why do you blame me? Why are you so angry at me?”
“For impersonating my brother?” I snorted, but immediately regretted it, seeing more pain flash in his eyes. I let my last sparks of anger fizzle. “I think that Dean just felt like you, his proxxi, was a better version of him, that Mom and Dad liked you better, that people were happier when you answered a call than if he did. He was a great guy, not that he didn’t have his issues,” I said, smiling sadly. Dean was lazy and irresponsible, amazing and funny. “But he just had so much trouble keeping up with it all.”
“With all what?”
“With his pssi experiment!” I shot back, angry again. “Living in a hundred worlds at once, being here, and there, and somewhere and someone else all at the same time. Dean just figured, ‘Why not, I’ll just remove myself, and you’ll all be able to keep a better version without all the effort.’ In his messed up head he didn’t think he was dying, he figured he was leaving a better version of himself to continue on. That’s what he left in his note, anyway.”
I looked down at the ground, my own tears coming. Why was it I’d been able to be so many things, to be so smart, but I hadn’t been there for him?
Martin looked at me thoughtfully. “But maybe I am him, Bobby. I think like him, I look like him, and I remember everything—every memory he ever had.”
“But you’re not him.”
“What makes a person dead?”
Stupid question.
“Dead is dead,” I shot back. “When the doctors say you’re dead.”
“When the heart stops?”
“When the brain goes dead, when the memories are lost, the essence of the person.… ”
“Most of your own memories are in the pssi. Would they be gone if you suddenly were?”
“No.… ”
“So if a person’s memories aren’t gone, if some essence of them remains, are they truly dead?”
He paused. I said nothing.
“Remember having a bath together in the sink, Mom sponging us off and singing in the dark, when the first fusion core went offline, remember that?”
I smiled as tears rolled down my cheeks. “I remember.”
“Remember throwing our toys over the deck into the ocean when nobody was watching, getting our proxxies to cover for us, and how angry Mom was when we went and hid in one of the shark’s mouths when we went swimming for them?”
“That was your idea,” I laughed, nodding.