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(two months later)
Hu gulped her first, blessed cup of coffee and glanced through the latest software add-ons for LiveAfter clients. LiveAfter’s in-house options were few and unambitious: confidence boosters, shortcuts to meditative states, shortcuts to REM sleep, shortcuts to orgasm. Outside vendors offered much more: gender swaps; religious experiences, up to and including direct contact with what would feel like The Divine; movement in either direction along the spectrum from selfishness to altruism, or from cynicism to idealism; a reproduction of the manic end of bipolar syndrome; even full-blown sociopathy, though only (so far) for three minutes at a time. Hu would have bet money that LiveAfter would be seeking an injunction against that last one, if no others.
At least Thea’s new business, inspecting the various products and rating their validity and safety, would be booming.
Enough stalling! Hu minimized the browser and called up her task list for the morning. First up: meet with the lawyer to whom she had referred Dane’s and Esther’s whistle-blower suit. Next, look over her testimony for two upcoming Congressional committee hearings. The one coming up sooner involved a bill to make potential stored people jump through various good-character hoops. Not surprising: virtual immortality was just too hard to swallow if all you had to do was buy your way in. Of course, once government had its say in who attained that status, the money could be spread around in other directions. . . .
Then there was the Criminal Division’s eager follow-up to the Lee footnote. Hu put down her coffee, wishing she had drunk it more slowly. Every time she thought about the idea of reviving the death penalty as a “therapeutic option,” her stomach turned over. She should probably rejigger her schedule to meet with the media consultant first: this notion needed a broad-based attack.
As she scrolled through her contacts, she noted Thea’s name. Neither Thea nor Max had stayed in touch. Clients rarely did, even after the big life-changing cases. She liked the couple and found Thea especially interesting; but she would let them move on.
Dane and Esther, on the other hand, did pop up from time to time. It helped that they were local and accessible. And perhaps they liked having an appreciative audience for their squabbles. They might be lovers, but they argued more like siblings.
When she got through with the media consultant, she might just invite them to lunch.
* * * * *
Thea’s new track finished playing, and Max applauded until his hands hurt. “Beautiful, baby! That’ll work perfectly with what I had!”
He had still not settled in his mind whether Thea’s style retained some foreign flavor, and if so, how he felt about the fact. But subjective qualms aside, her compositions just got better and better.
He snuck a glance at the time. Of course Thea caught him at it. “Got someplace to be?”
“I am supposed to get to the beach soon.” Had he forgotten to tell her? “It’s my first surfing competition. Baby league, of course.”
Now it was Thea’s turn to clap. “Congratulations, sweetie!”
He laughed. “You can save that for the day I actually win something.”
Thea suddenly dropped her smile. “Please be careful, lover. I don’t want to see you here for a long time yet. As much as I miss you.”
Well, he felt the same way. Thea kept him up to date on the digital environment, and apparently, it still more or less sucked. She was brushing up on her coding skills, so she could join a team of the stored who were pushing to improve things.
If he could change places with Thea and give her the real sun, the real ocean, would he do it? He could imagine himself as deciding either way, the hero or the coward, but there wasn’t much point. He couldn’t give her back the world. So he would try to appreciate it for the both of them, as long as he had that chance.
Thea seemed to be following his thoughts, because she chimed in, “And besides, your neighbor and surfing coach likes your company.”
Max tried not to wince. Thea could swear up and down that she wasn’t jealous, and that she hoped for a day far in the future when they could have a hot and heavy three-way—but Max hadn’t quite gotten used to sleeping with someone else. As great as it could be sometimes.
Thea’s arch expression softened. “I shouldn’t tease you. It’s okay. You, me, her, you and me, her and you. All of it.”
“Are you okay? Really?”
She stood up and gestured grandly from her head to her toes and back again. “I’m still here! I exist, when I could have been nothing but compost by now. That’s okay, in my book. That’s a win.”
* * * * *
Thea waved goodbye to Max, closed the call window, and then looked through the still shots she had taken during their chat. She hoped he hadn’t noticed her habit of capturing them. It might make him self-conscious, or twitchy, or sad, or all three.
She’d also been subtle about getting him to send her a picture with his neighbor in it. She wanted to picture the two of them together, to get used to the idea.
He hadn’t asked her about any new partners she might have. Whatever he might assume, he didn’t seem to have put the available clues together: he never asked about Jim. Who had ended up keeping that name, as well as some of the more attractive personal traits, though not too many of the beliefs, that had come with it.
As part of his determination to stay open to new ideas, Jim had asked Thea to help him play with his appearance. And Thea had managed to resist the somewhat sick temptation to make him over just a little in Max’s image.
But there had been plenty of sound reasons to make him hot. And when they spent an hour together, each suppressing their overactive intellects, she could forget almost everything else. Even Max, most of the time.
But never for long.
And that was fine. Because Thea intended to remain Thea, come what may. And Thea loved Max.
The End
