Cathy’s affair had had such an impact on him.
He’d cried for the first time in a quarter of a century.
But the immortal sim had called it no big deal.
Peter exhaled noisily.
He loved his wife.
And he’d been hurt by her.
The pain had been … had been exquisite.
Ambrotos no longer felt it so intensely.
To go through eternity unfazed seemed wrong.
To not be destroyed by something like this … seemed, somehow, like being less alive.
Quality, not quantity.
Hans Larsen had had it all wrong. Of course.
Peter stopped flipping channels. There, on the CBC French service, a naked woman.
He admired her.
Would an immortal man stop to admire a pretty woman? Would he really enjoy a great meal? Would he feel the pain of love betrayed, or the joy of it rekindled? Perhaps yes, but not as intensely, not as sharply, not as vividly.
Just one event out of an endless stream.
Peter turned off the TV.
Cathy had told him she wasn’t interested in immortality, and Peter had come to realize that he wasn’t, either. After all, there was something more than this life, something beyond, something mysterious.
And he wanted to find out what it was — eventually, of course.
Peter had defined it all. The beginning of life. The end of life.
And, for himself at least, he had defined what it meant to be human.
His choice was made.
Alexandria Philo’s mind traveled the net. The Peter Hobson Control simulacrum was huge — gigabytes of data. No matter how clandestinely one tried to move that much information, it could always be detected. She’d managed to follow him down into the States, through the Internet gateway into military computers, back out into the international financial net, up into Canada again, and across the ocean to England, then France, then Germany.
And now the murdering sim was inside the massive mainframes of the Bundespost.
Sandra hadn’t followed it there directly, though. Instead, she’d gone to the German hydroelectric commission, where she left a little program inside the master computer that would crash the system at a predetermined time, shutting off all power in the city.
As usual, the hydroelectric commission had backed up everything late the night before — and Sandra had allowed herself to be included in that backup. The current version of herself would be lost when the RAM she was in was wiped during the forced blackout. Her only regret was that once she was restored she’d have no memories of this great triumph. But someday there might be other electronic criminals to bring to justice — and she wanted to be ready.
Sandra transferred herself into the Bundespost central mainframe, a time-consuming task given the bandwidth of telephone cable. She executed a surreptitious directory listing. The Control sim was still there.
It was time. Sandra felt the shutting down of external ports as the power went off across Hanover. The Bundespost UPS kicked in silently, before any active memory could degrade. But there was no way out now. She sent a message out into the mainframe. “Peter Hobson?”
The Control sim signaled back. “Who’s there?”
“Detective Inspector Alexandria Philo, Metropolitan Toronto Police.”
“Oh, God,” signaled Control.
“Not God,” said Sandra. “Not a higher arbiter.
“What I did was justice,” said Control.
“What you did was vengeance.”
“ ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.’ Since there’s no God for me, I thought I’d fill in the gap.” A pause, measured in nanoseconds. “You know I’m going to escape,” said Control. “You know — oh. Clever.”
“Good-bye,” said Sandra.
“A contraction of ‘God be with ye.’ Inappropriate. Besides, don’t I deserve a trial?”
The UPS batteries were running out. Sandra sent a final message. “Think of me,” she said, “as a circuit-court judge.”
She felt the data around her zeroing out, felt the system degrading, felt it all coming to an end for both this version of herself and, at last, for the fugitive Peter Hobson.
Justice had been done, she thought. Justice had—
They sat side by side on the couch in their living room, a small distance between them. Most of the lights were off. The television showed the crowd in Nathan Phillips Square out front of Toronto City Hall, gathered to celebrate the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. A picture-in-a-picture box in the upper right showed Times Square in New York; there was something about that dropping American ball that was a universal part of celebrating this event. In the upper-left corner of the TV screen the word MUTE glowed.
Cathy looked at the screen, her beautiful, intelligent face composed in reflective lines. “It was the best of times,” she said softly. “It was the worst of times.”
Peter nodded. Indeed a year of wonders: the discovery of the soulwave, the realization — which not everyone had reacted well to — that something persisted beyond this existence. It was the epoch of belief, Dickens had written. It was the epoch of incredulity.
But 2011 had had more than its share of tragedies, too. The revelation of Cathy’s affair. The death of Hans. The death of Cathy’s father. The death of Sandra Philo. The things Peter had faced about himself, mirrored in the simulations he and Sarkar had created. Truly the age of wisdom. Truly the age of foolishness.
The murder of Hans Larsen remained unsolved — at least publicly, at least in the real world. And the death of Rod Churchill remained listed as accidental, a simple failure to follow doctor’s orders.
And what about the killing of Sandra Philo? Also unsolved — thanks to Sandra herself. Free on the net, fully conversant with the security surrounding the police department’s computers, the sim of her had given Peter a Christmas present, erasing the records of his fingerprints (marked as unidentified) at Sandra’s house — Peter’s own precautions in that matter having been completely insufficient — and deleting large passages of her own files pertaining to the Larsen and Churchill cases. Having probed the recordings of his memories and thought patterns, she understood him now, and, if perhaps not forgiving him, at least sought no more punishment for Peter than what his own conscience would impose.
And indeed his conscience would weigh heavily upon him, all the remaining days of his life. We were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
Peter turned to face his wife. “Any New Year’s resolutions?”
She nodded. Her eyes sought his. “I’m going to quit my job.”
Peter was shocked. “What?”
“I’m going to quit my job at the agency. We’ve got more money than I’d ever thought we’d have, and you’ll make even more from contracts for the SoulDetector. I’m going to go back to university and get a master’s degree.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I’ve already picked up the application forms.”
There was quiet between them as Peter tried to decide how to respond. “That’s wonderful,” he said at last. “But — you don’t have to do that, you know.”
“Yes, I do.” She lifted a hand from her lap. “Not for you. For me. It’s time.”
He nodded once. He understood.
The main TV picture showed a close-up of a giam digital clock, the numbers made from a matrix of individual white light bulbs: 11:58 P.M.
“What about you?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?”
He thought for a moment, then shrugged slightly. “To get through 2012.”
Cathy touched his hand. Eleven fifty-nine.
“Turn up the sound,” she said.
Peter operated the remote.
The crowd was roaring with excitement. As midnight approached, the master of ceremonies, a pretty veejay from MuchMusic, the cable music-video station, led the assembled horde in a countdown. “Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen.” In the little picture-in-a-picture, the Times Square ball had started its descent.