| |
Thea woke up. At least, that was how it felt, except that she was standing on her feet.
She had not known what to expect, even though she had tried to find out. She’d requested a face-to-face with the flutist, the only stored person with whom she already had a connection of sorts; but she had not yet received a response by the time she—what had happened? Had she drowned in some freak surfing accident? Or had it been the aneurysm?
Maybe she should have told Max about the aneurysm. She’d only found out about it during the exam that preceded her initial session with the storage company. They’d said it would be riskier to attempt a repair than to just leave it and hope for the best.
Thea was—had been—fairly skilled at putting unpleasant realities aside, if nothing remained to be done about them. But Max would have fretted, at the very least, and made pointless efforts to protect her; and that would have changed their lives in ways she didn’t want.
Well, their lives had certainly changed now.
If she’d had to guess, she would have guessed that she would awake disoriented, out of touch, maybe reliving some forgotten infant state. Apparently it didn’t work like that: her thoughts made sense. Her intellect seemed to be in its usual working order—or even a bit better, clearer. Was that the result of the analog-to-digital transition? Had there been some sort of tradeoff? She could think, but could she feel?
She had only to bring Max to mind to have that answer.
Poor, poor Max! What must he be going through? And how long had it been? How long had he been alone?
She had to talk to him. And she missed him, already, with an intensity that reassured her. The recreation of her brain had not omitted whatever signals would from now on substitute for hormones and other chemicals.
In fact, she could still cry. And crying felt wonderful and terrible at the same time.
She let herself cry for a few minutes, examining the process at the same time. There were tears, but her nose didn’t run. Had some programmer decided to clean things up?
How many other “improvements” would she discover in what it meant to be human?
But it was impressive that the programmers had analyzed the brain in enough detail to make such tweaks.
Not until she thought of wiping her tears did she discover that she had sleeves. Had clothes. They looked like the clothes she had worn to that initial screening. But while she could see them, she could scarcely feel them: they had minimal weight and texture.
Thea looked around at her environment, such as it was. The first thing she noticed was a chair, a swiveling desk chair; she poked at the back, then carefully sat down. The seat just barely registered as having any sort of mass, and lacked texture, just like the clothes. The walls around her were a light gray that reminded her of the background in dully designed software. And she heard nothing, nothing at all.
If the programmers could play with her nasal secretions, surely they could do more with clothes and interiors. Were they simply not bothering? Or would she have the chance to make tweaks of her own?
She could make her own aural background. At least she knew there would be some way to make music.
But all of that could wait. She had to talk to Max. How?
There! In the corner, on a table—something like a sturdier card table, but hard to see because its color matched the walls—sat a wristband with the usual controls. She rose from the chair; the movement felt different in some way she couldn’t immediately define, some subtle way, but it got her upright. And she was able to bend down, and to pick up the chair, and to lift it. It was absurdly light (another “improvement”?). She almost lost her grip and hurled it upward, but managed to move it over to the corner and drop it in front of the table.
Thea sat back down with some reluctance. The thing just didn’t feel like a chair. No matter. First, she would find out how long it had taken for them to . . . not to revive her. Resurrect her? Reboot her? She felt something like a laugh building, a hysterical laugh she did not want to hear.
She fought it back and flicked the controls on the band to the tablet setting. Help, FAQ, About, Search: options so familiar that the incongruity made her smile. At least, it felt like a smile. She would not worry just now about how it would look.
She touched the controls, which felt more like real controls than the chair felt like a real chair. A screen appeared, and she saw the small matter-of-fact numbers showing the date and time.
Four days. Four days had passed while they checked and double-checked and possibly debugged. Four days of purgatory for Max.
9:30 p.m. Nighttime, even in summer. (Was it summer here? Was there summer here?) She looked for a window and found one, a small window with white blinds pulled shut. She stood up again and braced herself for the sensation of walking.
One step, and then another. It felt the way walking had always felt, or almost. Perhaps she was already becoming accustomed to how movement felt. Or forgetting how it truly felt to move. . . . She closed her eyes, bit her lip, and shuddered. (She could still shudder, and feel something like fear.)
Then she forced herself into motion again, reached the window, and opened the blinds.
She saw darkness, interrupted by street lights along a winding foot path. The lights showed hints of trees, and the shape of a manicured lawn. Odd, for them to bother with lights at night; but of course, there would be no energy expended, no more than for any other feature of any other scene. Perhaps some customer had been wooed with the promise of evening walks. And walks by moonlight? Would there be a moon?
She allowed herself one sigh, then returned to the task at hand.
The FAQ proved satisfactory for her present purpose, and in fact went considerably beyond it. She had never been able to read just part of a FAQ, but this time was different. Max needed to hear from her as soon as possible. So she scanned the document quickly, finding out how to access a Contacts list based on the information she had already provided.
But now she had to face the problem she had pushed aside when she filled out the Contacts form. Max was something of a throwback where phones were concerned: he could not be counted on to wear one, even when she bought him a flattering earring or a detachable tattoo. Would it occur to him, confounded and troubled as he must be, to keep a phone handy?
* * * * *
Max had somehow fallen asleep. He must have, or the buzzing sound could not have awakened him. But it took him too long to locate its source, and the buzzing stopped. He let his head thud back against the pillow. It had probably been his phone, lying somewhere about. And no one who knew him well tried to reach him by phone, at least not right away. They always tried Thea first.
The bolt of memory blazed through him, and he jerked upright, gasping.
And then the buzzing came again.
A friend calling to offer sympathy? The hospital, with some new and horrible detail? Thea’s parents, ready to re-fight the battle over their daughter’s remains? Or the corporation, the one that held what remained of Thea in its digital depths?
Max staggered out of bed, tripping over garments, searching for the sound. He found the phone in a shirt pocket after five rings and jabbed at the answer button, looking for the caller’s image or logo.
Then he dropped the phone.
And scrambled frantically to pick it up again. And couldn’t speak.
“Max?” A pause. “Baby?”
Thea’s face, frozen in a still image; and her voice. Really her voice. Or as much like her voice as he could expect on the phone.
“Oh, baby, don’t cry.”
He must be crying again. He was sick of crying. And there was Thea, telling him to stop. What Thea wanted was usually the right thing to do.
“Thea. Oh, God. There you are. Here you are!”
A small chuckle. “Yup. Here I guess I am. Max, I’m sorry for how awful this must have been for you. I was hoping it wouldn’t happen—or not for years and years.”
That what wouldn’t happen? Her dying? Or—he started to blurt out a question, even an accusation. Maybe she had known about the aneurysm and hadn’t told him. Some time or other, he would ask, and ask why, if she’d known, she’d made a secret of it. And he’d ask what other secrets she had. Maybe they’d even have a fight.
He would rather fight with her than make love with any other woman.
But—“I wish you were here. Right here, in our bed with me.”
Another chuckle, or a small sob? “Me, too, baby.”
Before, when one of them had traveled and the other couldn’t go along, they had lain on their separate beds and talked each other into frenzy, then to satisfaction. They could try that now. Except . . . .
“Thea, do you have any, any privacy there?”
A moment of silence, then: “Hold on. Let me see if the FAQ covers it.”
“The FAQ??”
Now he could hear her laughing, though the still image remained static. “I know. It’s all so crazy, isn’t it? But give me a minute. Maybe it’ll really tell us. Hold on.”
And then, silence again. A silence, he could not help noticing, unlike any silence on any phone call, ever. Thea wasn’t moving a phone against her hair, or swallowing, or breathing.
No more breathing for Thea, ever.
Unless she could. Maybe she felt like she was breathing. And maybe she could learn how to make it sound as if she were.
And if he kept thinking like this, he might start screaming. Which would scare her, or upset her, even if it couldn’t hurt her ear.
Just in time, there came Thea’s voice again, as the still image morphed into motion. “I found out how to turn the camera on while I was looking! Anyway, I’ve found a sort of an answer. There’s a confidential setting. But there’s some sort of monitoring even then. Here’s a link to another document about restricted subjects. . . . Got it. I’m just going to skim it for now. . . . How would I even find out about proprietary info? Never mind . . . . Corporate business, blah blah . . . .” She was drifting off into a muttered monotone, the way she did when she was processing something at top speed. He stopped trying to follow the words and let the familiar tones wash over him.
“Well, we can’t be sure, of course.” Now she was actually speaking to him again. “Shit. That’s going to be our new refrain, isn’t it? But if they’re being straight with us, the system probably isn’t keyed to notice—personal private talk. And if someone is listening, well . . . .”
Max chimed in. “To hell with ‘em!”
They laughed together, and when they stopped laughing, Thea’s voice went soft and sultry, and she asked him, “Now, honey, are you lying back in bed?”
“Uh-huh.” He lay back to make it true. And then gritted his teeth, as he wondered what he could ask her, whether this made any sense, whether it could work, whether his idea had been a lousy one.
Once again, they were thinking the same thing at the same time. Her voice was still soft, but she had dropped the seductive tone. “This is going to be different, isn’t it? We’ll still be pretending. But we’ll be pretending in a whole new way, both of us. Do you think we can do it?”
Max took a deep, shuddering breath. “I want to. I want to try. We may never be able to —” He would not cry, not again. “— to touch each other again. But we know how it feels. I can help you remember, and you can help me.”
“I love you, baby.”
“I love you. Forever.”
He heard the sound of her kiss as her lips moved; then came her voice again. “Lie back, baby. Imagine me touching you. Imagine my hand, running down your chest, and lower, and lower . . . .”
He had guessed right. They could.
* * * * *
Thea awoke, this time in a bed.
She had made another quick scan of the FAQ the night before, even as she began moving Max toward arousal. It did include information about creating furniture; she settled for a bed she could manifest quickly, and then focused on herself and Max and what they could do for each other. Including what, to her relief if not really her surprise, he could still do for her. It made sense that a digital duplication of her brain would include all the portions necessary for arousal and orgasm, but it would not have astonished her if the lack of an actual body proved problematic.
Afterward, naturally, Max had fallen apart again; but not for long. She had switched gears and talked him to sleep, and disconnected the call as soon as she heard him breathing slow and steady. Then she had wrestled with her own emotions as she imagined the warmth of his sleeping body next to hers.
It might actually be possible for her to create some simulacrum of a sleeping Max. A ghoulish idea, perhaps, and one raising interesting if tricky issues of consent. Would she need to ask him first?
Instead, to distract herself, she had improved the bed. To avoid more frequent attacks of homesickness, she refrained from duplicating their bedding, instead designing an abstract and angular design in purple and black on white and applying it to an indulgently fluffy comforter. And she was able to create exactly the right thickness of pillow, which she had never managed (or bothered) to do before.
Then, she had settled in to find out if she could sleep. She had hoped so, and expected so. Humans needed sleep, and the ability to copy the massive intricacies of the human brain did not imply the ability to go beyond and substantially readjust it.
And here she was, waking up from what certainly felt like sleep. Or to be more precise, it felt like waking up, since sleep itself had that uniquely frustrating quality, an interlude she passed through repeatedly and yet could never consciously experience.
What should she do with what, in an utterly novel sense, constituted the first day of the rest of her life?
She would have to contact her parents. But before she did that, she needed to know what they knew. Max must have told them something. She bit her lip (which felt, well, like biting her lip) at the thought. Of all the things to have to do, and all the people to have to do it. . . .
It might be too early to call Max. And when she did call him . . . she needed to find the right balance, a way to stay in his life without letting him rely on her presence, such as it was, throughout his days.
Yes, it was too early. And in the meantime, she had a great deal to learn.
She had gone to sleep naked, after noting with only a touch of embarrassment that the program had faithfully duplicated her body, literal and figurative warts and all. But now she used the knowledge acquired yesterday to provide herself with some cozy flannel pajamas. Then she sat in the inadequate chair once again, called up the FAQ, and got back to work. She needed to learn how to make a flute.
Before long, however, she found herself distracted by a welcome sensation: hunger. When she had first wrestled with the decision to have herself stored, she had asked whether she would still hunger and thirst, and had hoped the positive response could be trusted. After all, she would apparently lose some functions, such as eliminating bodily waste. What focus group had led to eliminating elimination? . . . In any event, now that she was hungry, she checked the FAQ to find out what she could do about it.
Apparently the digital equivalent of room service required some special procedure. To start with, at least, she would need to venture forth and seek out a dining room—which would presumably mean meeting some of her fellow digital constructs.
The morning, if she could call it morning, looked appropriately sunny; but the sunlight failed to warm her skin as much as it should. And she could feel no breeze.
(Would there be seasons? Which clients’ norms, or what marketing decisions, would drive that decision? Would their actual location—somewhere in Idaho—make any difference? . . . As a Californian, she had been used to what others might regard as muted and minimal seasonal changes. If this bland and temperate morning proved the norm, she would have less to miss than those whose lives had featured bright autumns, frozen winters, and humid summer nights.)
The path she had seen the night before came equipped with helpful and somewhat tantalizing directional signs. “Tennis court,” “swimming pool,” “movie theater”—and “dining hall,” her current destination.
In a few minutes, she found herself at the door of a large building, one apparently containing several of the amenities she had seen on the signs. She opened the door and took a hopeful sniff; but if breakfast came with odors, they did not reach so far. The hallway did, however, include its own signage, and she followed that.
The door to the dining hall stood open. She stood in the doorway for a moment, reliving old memories of arriving at a new school and gathering the courage to enter its preexisting social circle. Then she took another sniff—there, a faint whiff of something like toast!—and stepped inside.
The food proved barely palatable, the company more welcoming than she had feared. With new arrivals frequent, there was little opportunity for cliques to form and harden. She did not, however, linger for long, but excused herself with the quite accurate excuse that she had social obligations not yet fulfilled.
By now—if her time had any connection to that of the world she had left behind—Max might have awakened.
* * * * *
Max woke up, his nose buried in a damp patch of pillow, and struggled to remember his dream. He had dreamed of Thea. A good dream, not one of the nightmares. Had they made love in the dream? But no, he could not remember touching her.
Looking around the room as if it held a clue, he saw his phone, lying on the empty side of the bed; and he remembered, all in a moment like a thunderclap.
Not a dream! He rolled over and grabbed the phone, fumbling for the call history. The most recent entry showed an unfamiliar number and nothing else. Did this uncanny arrangement work both ways? Could he call Thea?
He touched the phone, gently, as if touching Thea lying there in bed; touching her to see if she was awake, touching her without waking her if she slept.
And after waiting as long as he could stand, he called; and she answered.
Thea waved her new flute in the air. “It took me a while, but I figured out how to make it! And it sounds pretty good. Want to hear?”
“Of course, babe. Anything you want to play.”
Thea grinned and started the triumphal march from Aida. He laughed and listened. It did sound pretty good, even if didn’t sound just like her real flute, the one still sitting in its case on the bedroom shelf. He tried not to wince at the thought—Thea would see him.
Thea got to the end of a phrase and stopped. “All right, enough of me performing.” She smirked at him, if that cute an expression could be called smirking. “Your turn.”
Max had a better idea. “No, our turn. Let’s play together.”
Thea’s face lit up. “Yes! Pick something.”
There was a duet for flute and guitar, an arrangement of a flute concerto by, of all people, Frederick the Great, King of Prussia. It wasn’t the most inventive of pieces, but it managed to be both lively and soothing. He grabbed his guitar, resting against the nightstand, and played the first few notes. Thea laughed. “Why not!” She put her flute to her lips and joined in.
When they reached the end of the Allegro, she stopped and laid her flute aside. “Have you written anything new?”
Max split the screen and called up his composition program. “It happens I have. Want to hear it?”
Thea nodded vigorously and bounced in her chair. A faint grimace crossed her face, maybe because of something about the chair, and then disappeared. Max queued up the track and hit play.
He had used guitar and cello. Flute would have added to it, but he had left the flute part for Thea. And she would recognize the melody. They had never had a single song they called “theirs,” but songs often brought back shared memories. This one recalled one of their first road trips after they started getting serious, a trip to the wine country. Both of them had overestimated their capacity to taste and drive—hell, they were young and pretty new to drinking—and they’d ended up with an overnight motel stay that neither had planned. Which had been one of the best nights he’d ever had up to then.
Thea put a hand over her heart as the first notes played, then clasped her hands together and listened. Soon she was humming along, not so much a harmony as a complementary lyric line. It would sound great on a flute.
It was perfect.
* * * * *
The last thing Max said to her, before their closing exchanges of “I love you”s, was a question. “Have you called your folks?”
Her answer was an admission. “I will.”
In the old days of land lines, Thea could have called a phone jointly owned by both her parents, and left it to fortune which would answer. She was glad not to have that option. She needed her mother’s advice before she tried to talk to her father.
What would her mother see when Thea called? She had not thought to ask Max. She called him back. He looked startled as well as pleased to hear from her so soon.
“When I call you, what shows up before you answer? Is it any different from when I called you—before?”
“It’s different, but it’s still your picture. I had one of my favorites that popped up. This one looks like something that company—LiveAfter or whatever they’re called—might have taken.”
Thea thrust aside the temptation to linger, to let their conversation wander where it would. “I’m going to call my mother. That’s why I wanted to know.”
Max donned an encouraging expression. “It’ll be hard for both of you. But you’ll pull it off.”
He probably meant it. She would have to rely on his faith in her to shore up her own.
Her mother answered on the first ring; then stared, eyes wild and wide, and said nothing.
Up to Thea, then. “Mom? It’s me.”
Still nothing. She could not remember her mother ever being at a loss for words. But then, she had never faced a conversation remotely like this one.
Remotely. There was the right word.
“Mom, what can I say to help you with this?” To make you believe I’m here. That it’s me.
The image floating in front of Thea jittered as if her mother had dropped heavily into a chair. “Explain it to me. Please. Tell me how they . . . copied you, or whatever they did. Tell me how it works.”
That was Mom, analytical even in crisis. Once she understood the process, she would assess whether she was in fact talking to her daughter, or at least a close enough facsimile.
“They used nanobots. . . .” She ran through the summary she had memorized when she was deciding how to talk to Max about storage, before she concluded that such details would make little impression on him.
Her mother listened quietly, then asked, “Did you ever see it tested, this—this software, this model?”
What a good idea that would have been. If she had consulted her mother back then . . . . Too late now. “No. I never gave the matter that much thought. I didn’t expect it to matter so soon.”
Mercifully, her mother made no comment, this time, on the dangers of surfing. “Of course not.”
“But you know I’m thorough about things. Like you. I looked into it enough to verify the essential claims.”
Silence again.
“Mom, have you . . . have you decided? Do you believe I’m me?”
Now her mother was crying. She so rarely cried. But probably that had changed. . . . Thea fought back a sob of her own, closed her eyes, and waited.
The softly percussive sounds of crying faded away. Thea opened her eyes.
“Yes, Dandy. I believe it.”
Dandy, short for dandelion, a reference to Thea’s light and fluffy hair. The only nickname her mother had ever bestowed on her, or on anyone. And at this moment, the most precious of gifts.
“Thank you. Thank you so much. And I’m so sorry for how hard this is.”
“I hope you never know how hard.” Then she gasped. “Oh, my God. You never will. You never can. You’ll never . . . . And we’ll never . . . .”
They wept together, the young woman and the older, one never to be a mother, the other never a grandmother.
Thea’s mother regained her self-control first. “Hush, love, hush . . . .”
Thea focused on her breathing (and she could not let herself think about breathing and not actually breathing, not now) until it was steady. For a few minutes, neither of them spoke. Then, while the subject still hung in the air, her mother asked quietly: “Would you have?”
Thea gulped and nodded. “I think so, in a few years. Max would have loved it, even though the idea still scared him. And he’d have been wonderful with children—though not very much like Dad was with me.”
Her mother’s gaze flicked away, probably to another room, and back again. “You haven’t tried calling your father. He’d have told me. Have you thought about how to approach him?”
Thea rubbed her forehead with one hand. “I didn’t even know how to start with you. He’ll be a hundred times worse.” She hated to ask, but she desperately needed the help. “Will you talk to him first? Tell him to expect my call? Or if he’s willing—do you think you can get him to call me?”
Her mother heaved a heavy sigh. “That might be best. He can work himself up to it. And honey, he won’t want to hear the details, the way I did. He’ll care about memories: the special times, and those little moments you wouldn’t have mentioned to anyone else but never forgot.”
Thea might well have told Max about such moments; but her father would not know that, nor need to know. “I’ll go sit myself down, right now, and start remembering.”
When Thea reminisced about her mother, it was her words that came to mind: so many words, about so many things, spoken in so many moods (though rarely, very rarely, in any histrionic mode).
Her father was not exactly taciturn, but words, for him, were secondary. She could talk to him, rattling on about anything or nothing, but only because he enjoyed watching her speak.
It had never before mattered so terribly much what she said.
When he called, his voice hesitant and hoarse, his face pale, she dove into the memories and let her tongue follow.
Fireflies flickering in the trees like escaped and feral Christmas lights.
Stars, dozens of them or even hundreds, up in the hills beyond the city lights.
The ocean, her first true sight of a horizon, blue-gray under clouds, then translucent and startling blue-green in sunshine; and her father’s large hand reaching down to point at the sandpipers scuttling up and down the beach, their spidery footprints left behind in the sand.
Those hands, so firm in their grip, holding her in the surf, letting her ride lightly at the surface, bobbing up and down.
Those hands, squeezing her arms in reassurance and letting her go, to be tossed and tumbled toward shore.
A campfire, and a crowd of families around it, and her father playing some wild, stirring tune on his grandfather’s balalaika while the wood popped sparks into the air.
Another night, another campfire, and Thea improvising along with her father, playing her first flute.
Her father looming over her and shouting, the night she wandered off into the woods in a thunderstorm and a tree fell across her path home, and she had to climb over it, scraping her hands and tearing her clothes.
Her father looking out the window at Max and their loaded car, standing in front of the door with his back to it, unconsciously blocking her way, as they made ready to move into that first apartment.
“Not exactly. I knew I was doing it.”
She had almost forgotten, riding the river of memory, that she was speaking to her father, and why. What had she been saying? Oh! “You did? What was the point?”
Her father gazed at her, and it was the same gaze she remembered from that day. “I needed one more moment with my little girl. I wasn’t ready to let her go.”
“I’m here, Daddy. I’m still here.”
He closed his eyes, heaved a heavy sigh, and opened them again. “I know.” But he looked at her, still, as if she were lost instead of found.
