He leans back and looks up, the way he does when is feeling guilty.
‘I had a hunch about something. I always thought there was a flaw in what the exchanges have been doing. I talked to the zoku. They gave me some hints. I … found the insurance gogol of a physicist they quoted. I’m afraid I have made him work very hard. He provided the details.’
‘Jean dear, I am sure you know I have little time or patience for details.’
‘I remembered that meeting with the others, where you said it would be better if people would follow us of their own free will. That the world worked too well.’
‘You are delightfully cryptic today, Jean. What is my birthday present? It’s the last one, so it had better be good.’
‘Well, I thought the world would make a pretty musical sound if we broke it,’ Jean says.
She takes a deep, rattling breath.
‘What do I have to do?’
‘Just think of something beautiful. Think of a secret. Something no one else knows.’
She sees on his face that he wants her to choose a shared, beautiful moment, the first night on the seastead, or the first time they met, in that awful stinky cell. He refused to come with her, saying that he liked her pearls and would come for them three days later. When the guard closed the door behind her, she could see in his eyes that he was free. And for the first time in a long, long time, so was she.
But she can’t help it: it is a different secret that rises up to swallow her and the world. It is the worst night of her life, long ago, that comes to her. Lying in bed, on rough, sticky sheets, holding the dead little red thing, being eaten by the emptiness that comes after enduring the world-filling pain. Looking into its tiny closed eyes, vowing to survive its death. Vowing never to die.
He sees it, sees the pain on her face, and flinches. But then it is too late: his machine is set in motion, and the world starts to unravel. He squeezes her hand gently, and they watch it together.
She cannot be sure what comes afterwards, how much of what she sees through the beemee and Jean’s little spime is a real memory. More likely it is a combination of fragments of Prime thought and data absorbed throughout the centuries, re-interpreted to fit the context of that birthday.
The markets that control life and death collapse.
Swarms of repo bots, come to reclaim bodies, descend upon a seastead off the shore of California.
Upload cities in China shut down, unable to purchase energy.
The great exodus begins. The infant zoku escape on desperately crowdfunded ships. Improvised transmitters beam gogols to the loving arms of the Sobornost in the sky.
She watches it all, exhilarated. The slate of the world is wiped clean, and it will be her writing that appears on it next.
She turns to Jean to thank him for a beautiful gift, to kiss him like she once did, to tell him how much she loves him.
That is the last moment she gives the partial. The rest, she keeps to herself: seeing the horror on his face, the sad eyes wide, all innocence and joy and freedom gone. She does not understand why, it is all like clockwork.
Something else is loose, engulfing gogol minds, burning, consuming.
The weather ghosts who control the climate of a warmed Earth go mad and make winds dance like whips.
There is a fiery arrow in the sky outside. She looks at it, and the faithful bed provides annotations in her field of vision. Sirr, the great city in the sky, is falling.
There are rains of miniature bodies above London, suddenly vacated and deactivated.
Wildcode, they would later call it, serpents that sting minds, madness that consumes a hsien-ku fleet in a great Cry of Wrath, beings born from the machine that Jean made.
‘No, no, no,’ he whispers. ‘That can’t be, I didn’t plan for this, I don’t understand.’
It is not a breaking, it is a burning, a cleansing. Joséphine closes her eyes. It is time to go, she tells the bed. The upload crown descends upon her head. The blades start whirring. The bed pumps optogenetic viruses into her brain. She grabs Jean’s hand as hard as she can.
‘Stay with me,’ she whispers. ‘I’m scared.’
He wrenches his hand away.
‘I can’t. I have to go, Joséphine,’ he whispers. ‘I’m sorry.’
And then he is gone, running footsteps echoing down the hall. How could she not see before that he was weak?
She has no voice left when the upload begins, so she just thinks so that the words will be preserved to all her selves that come after.
You can’t run away forever. You can’t help what you are.
You will come back to me.
11
MIELI AND THE REBIRTH PARTY
There is sunlight filtered through ice. The air is warm and moving in the slow flow of pumptree breath. The horizon is a pair of cupped hands.
A koto in bloom, in the Little Summer of passing close to a sun.
Mieli is floating high up, close to the Weightless Eye in the centre of the ice sphere, where the air medusas live. Her wings are open, catching the mellow thermals from below. She is whole again, unhurt, and the sudden absence of the pain is almost like a loss. Something else is different: she can’t feel her systems anymore. Or the pellegrini.
Did she sacrifice herself for me? What would make her do that? It doesn’t make any sense. But it is difficult to think. Flashes of the battle on Hektor’s surface are stuck in her brain like slivers of glass.
‘How are you feeling?’
Zinda is wearing Oortian garb, a black toga, floating in the middle of a medusa swarm. It does not suit her: she is shorter than native Oortians, and the large fabric is loose, billowing around her, making her look a little medusa-like herself.
Mieli finds herself smiling. It is good to see the zoku girl. Then she shakes her head. Don’t forget what you are, what you are here for.
‘Confused,’ she says aloud.
‘I hope you don’t mind that I made this Realm! I heard from the Huizinga-zoku that you had asked for a design like this. I was tempted to include some narrative element, but I tried to make it as Simulationist as possible, almost like a vir. What do you think?’
Mieli says nothing.
‘I mean, it’s a local one, only until we get into router network range, then we can just ’port you straight home and get you a new body. Trust me, you would not want to be seen dead in the one you had! We barely got you through the Realmgate in time.’
‘What happened?’
‘Well, Mik did some amazing flying. The raions chased us, but the Zweihänder has a really big antimatter drive: it’s not easy to stay on the tail of something that is shooting a plume of gamma rays at you, if you know what I mean.’ She pauses. ‘But I could ask you the same thing! What was that thing on Hektor?’
Mieli shudders. I can’t tell her. Not yet. I need to think.
‘A warmind, a new type. It took over my suit, wanted to upload me.’ She shrugs. ‘I dealt with it.’
‘I’ll say you did!’ Zinda grows serious. ‘When you blew the suit’s antimatter, I thought … I thought we lost you, Mieli. I’ve never known anyone who has been near truedeath before.’ She takes Mieli’s hand. ‘You don’t need to lie to me, Mieli. You look at me like I was your jailer. That’s okay. I don’t mind. But I want you to know that I’m glad you made it.’ Her smile is a mixture of sadness and joy. ‘We all are. The others are here, too, if you want to see them.’
Mieli notices her zoku jewels for the first time: they are here with her, only invisible, hidden beneath the blanket of Realm reality. The Liquorice jewel is sending a steady stream of subliminal qupts filled with concern.