28

ABEL APPEARS TO HAVE NO PHYSICAL FORM. THIS IS peculiar, but he thinks he can adjust.

It surprises him how difficult it is to order his thoughts without anchoring them in physical space. Learning to do so would no doubt be an excellent long-term goal, but he’s eager to figure out precisely how it is he still exists. Therefore a mental shortcut is in order.

He visualizes his surroundings, trying to come up with images that would match the vague sensations at the edge of his consciousness. After an immeasurable while, the oblivion acquires a sort of grayness. The grayness coalesces into fog, and finally, as he concentrates, the fog dissipates into a fine mist. Abel finds himself standing in a kind of grotto, where both water and stone are in soft shades of greenish gray. Light of some sort allows him to see, but he can find no obvious source for it.

Then he realizes that, in this place, his body seems to glow. It is, perhaps, the illumination of thought.

“How can I possibly continue to exist?” Abel says. The grotto is solid enough for his voice to echo slightly. “My memories were removed from my body. That should have destroyed my consciousness.”

His first thought is that maybe Burton Mansfield didn’t manage to get Abel entirely out of his head. Maybe he’s still in there, being forced to operate as Mansfield’s subconscious. If so, he intends to fill his creator’s dreams with enough horrors to keep a Freudian analyst busy for years.

But Abel senses that he’s left his former body completely.

Perhaps Noemi’s right about the existence of an afterlife, he thinks. Does the soul live on after death? Is there some kind of heaven, even for mechs? If so, it seems mechs must construct their own. Abel looks around the grotto, which isn’t the most compelling location he’s ever seen. He might want to try creating something more festive.

In the mist, he glimpses a kind of shape, more solid than the others. It moves, and Abel realizes he isn’t alone.

Is this God? If so, how interesting.

The figure speaks with a female voice. “It’s not so dark anymore.”

“No,” Abel answers. “I appear to be glowing. Is that by design?”

“Design,” she repeats. Although her tone is uncertain, the word could be interpreted as a reply to his question. It seems possible that this indeed is some manner of deity.

He straightens. “May I ask if you are an entity, or a representative of entities, that could be understood as godlike or divine? If so, can you tell me whether you were ever accurately understood and worshipped by a human religion, and if so, which one?” Identification is important. If he’s dealing with a deity that resembles the Christian Holy Spirit, Abel will conduct himself differently than he would with, say, Hel, the Norse goddess of death.

After a long moment, the voice laughs. “No. No. I’m no god. No god at all, no god anywhere. I just got stuck here by someone who pretends to be a god.”

Disappointing, but not uninteresting. Abel resets to agnosticism and carries on. “Can you explain exactly where we are?”

“Are you real?” She sounds somewhat more focused. “Your accent is rather similar to mine. I’ve imagined so many things, so many, many things. Wonderful and horrible, over and over, all these years. But I never imagined another voice before. So maybe you are real.”

“I believe myself to still be real,” Abel says, “though the nature of my existence is currently in some doubt. It’s entirely possible that I exist only within another person’s mind, but you are not that person. Do you also believe yourself to be real?” Abel has never had another conversation where so little could be taken for granted.

She replies, “I was once. I was, wasn’t I? I was real, and then Burt made me something else entirely.”

Burt. Abel remembers what he’d seen in Gillian’s laboratory, remembers her story of a broken, half-stored consciousness forced to communicate via Ouija board. “Are you the late Robin Mansfield?”

“My name. You said—oh, I had no idea how good it would be to hear my name again!”

The shape in the fog moves as though to stand, and as it does so, it clarifies into human form, glowing as brightly as his own. Although Robin Mansfield died before he was constructed, Abel has seen many images of her, so he recognizes her long face, high cheekbones, and soft auburn hair. Is she asserting her own appearance, or is Abel constructing her image from those long-ago photographs and videos? Either way, she stands before him, an uncertain smile on her face, wreathed in some sort of garment that might be made of nothing more than fog. Whatever he and Robin Mansfield are now, they are no longer alone.

The moment of recognition seems to have focused Robin considerably. “Who are you?” she asks.

“I’m called Abel. Model One A of the Mansfield Cybernetics line.”

Her face falls. “Oh no. Burt said—he said Model One A would be for him, a mech that wouldn’t be a person until he lived in it, but would also somehow be a person even before that—somehow—”

“I am a mech with a soul,” Abel confirms. He could argue that the existence of a soul has now been scientifically proven. Noemi would be proud. “I attempted to escape Professor Mansfield to lead my own life, but your daughter, Gillian, recaptured me. She’s grown into a cyberneticist as well, by the way. She downloaded Mansfield’s consciousness into my body, and now I’m… here.”

“Wherever here is,” Robin says. Her tone has become distant again.

“The likeliest hypothesis is that we’re both trapped in a complex data solid.”

“It falls pretty short of paradise.” With a sigh, she steps closer to Abel, examining him. “You look so much like him when he was young. Before he got hardened, while he could still relate to his fellow human beings. Burt made you in his image. I guess he’s still playing god.”

“It’s one of Professor Mansfield’s favorite pursuits,” Abel says.

“So he captured your soul, too, put you here—”

“Actually, I believe both Mansfield and Gillian intended to erase my soul. But I traveled out of my body under my own power somehow.”

It’s the Tether, Abel realizes. Tether technology is both hardware and software. But Abel’s software is more than just programming; it is part of his essence, his self. When Gillian upgraded him for her father’s convenience, she didn’t think about what it would mean for Abel. Hardly surprising, since she never considered Abel’s well-being at all.

However, it appears Gillian has altered Abel’s consciousness on the most basic level. He isn’t just able to transfer messages with the Tether; he can subconsciously transfer his very soul, to anywhere in the galaxy.

Abel corrects himself. He can transfer his soul to any receptor with sufficient bandwidth and memory storage that happens to be within range. Not quite anywhere.

But it was enough to save him from death.

Robin Mansfield is staring at him dazedly. Already she’s losing focus again. Abel quickly resumes the conversation. “My survival was accidental, an instinctive reliance on my Tether technology.” This is the likeliest hypothesis by far, so Abel speaks as though it were certain. “Whereas you were transferred into a data solid, I appear to have transmitted myself into one.”

“It’s horrible, isn’t it?” she says, sorrow in every syllable. “Not yet, for you. Not at first. But wait a month. Or a year. Or a decade. Or—or—forever, I think I’ve been in here forever—”

“You died approximately thirty-four years ago. Have you been conscious all this time?”

She nods. “You can’t imagine how it’s been.”

“I can, actually.” He says this as kindly as he can, because he knows how much this hurts. “Mansfield abandoned ship during a battle in the Liberty War. He stranded me inside it for thirty years, entirely alone. My surroundings were at least concrete and physical, but that wasn’t much consolation.”

Robin shakes her head mournfully, and her glow dims. The shadows within the grotto deepen. “Burt could look at me like I was the most precious thing in the worlds,” she murmurs. Thinking of her husband seems to focus her—probably through the pain it causes her. “That look would keep you with him long after you knew better. But finally you’d realize that he wasn’t smiling at you, wasn’t loving you. He was only loving his own brilliance in using you.”

“Unfortunately,” Abel says, “I didn’t know better until he told me himself.” How cheerfully Mansfield had announced his plan for Abel. How happy he expected Abel to be at the chance to die in his creator’s service. “I understand what you mean about him. The way he could smile through you.”

“I went mad so many times.” Robin gazes around the grotto. “Sometimes that was easier. The time didn’t quite seem real then. Or every once in a while, I’d pull myself together enough to have fun in here. I could picture the French Alps, or the Scottish Highlands, or even imagine myself looking up at the stars. But it never held. The constellations would shift, or the mountains would melt, and always, always, I was left alone with my own mind. No one should ever be so alone.”

Abel couldn’t manipulate his reality within the Daedalus equipment pod bay. Which alternative is better? He peers intently into the mist, willing it to change shape.

The grotto floor flattens; the cave overhead soars up into infinite darkness. What had been mist turns into clouds overhead and low, rolling fog on the ground. Greenish gray fades into shades of silver. Abel stands on an airplane runway, wearing a trench coat and fedora, and Robin wears the uniform of a French officer during World War II.

She looks down at herself in bemusement. “What is this?”

“It’s the end of my favorite movie. Casablanca. You appear to be in the role of Captain Renault.”

“Casablanca. I know that one. I remember!” Robin’s laugh turns out to be beautiful. “Shouldn’t I be dressed like—like—the one in white, who was so pretty—”

“Ilsa,” Abel says. “But Noemi would always be my Ilsa.”

“Noemi,” Robin repeats, wonder in her voice. “You love this person?”

He nods as he stares into the fog surrounding the airstrip. Maybe, if he thinks hard enough, Noemi will come walking toward him in one of Ingrid Bergman’s costumes—

But no. It would not really be Noemi, just an illusion of her. Spending time with an illusion who couldn’t truly love him back would only drive him mad.

Robin adjusts her cap, then nods toward the propeller plane that’s waiting farther down the runway. “This time, I think Rick should get on board.”

“Are we going to continue the story?” In no religion listed in any of his databanks has Abel ever seen a theory of the afterlife that involved spending all eternity making up movie sequels with near strangers. It could, he supposes, be worse.

“Don’t you understand?” Robin asks, her eyes alight. “If you brought yourself here, then you also have the power to leave.”

“True.” Abel ought to have understood this before. Then again, dying and entering the afterlife is something of a shock. It hampers comprehensive analysis. Abel decides not to make a habit of it.

Robin’s soul is currently nestled in an ornate wooden box sitting on Gillian Shearer’s desk. It seems possible, maybe probable, that he’s in there with her. But can he remove himself from the box as easily as he arrived? Is there another potential holder for his soul—one from which he might be able to take action?

“They haven’t always left me alone in here,” Robin murmurs. “I could tell they were trying to talk to me. But their voices were only echoes, without any real words, and they made me move around this—this triangular thing that pointed to letters—”

“It was a Ouija board.”

Robin huffs and rolls her eyes, and it’s such an ordinary human gesture that she seems, for an instant, truly alive. “Well, they know I’m in here, at least. Which means they could potentially figure out you’re in here, too. I don’t think you want them to do that.”

“No.” Surely Robin’s data solid is periodically scanned for deterioration. If he were detected within it, Abel anticipates he would be immediately deleted. “We ought to travel to another, more recent data solid. We could find one that’s already installed for direct interface with the Winter Castle computer systems, which would give us both access to much more information—”

“No,” Robin says softly. “Not we. Just you. I can’t make that journey anymore, if I ever could.”

“Why not?” Abel realizes that he understands, in some instinctive way, how to exist as data. Perhaps that’s natural for anyone whose soul is fundamentally software. Robin Mansfield cannot share those instincts. After this long, however, she ought to have some idea how to do it, and he could teach her the rest. “There are possibilities for our future existence outside of this data solid—which admittedly are all more theoretical than immediate. Still, we have reason to hope.”

“I’m not really myself any longer.” Robin paces around him on the tarmac, her boots shiny in the glare of the airport lights. “I remember Burt—remember loving him, then almost hating him—but I don’t recall where we met. Did he ever tell you? I think he proposed to me at his PhD ceremony, but I don’t have any idea how long we were together before that. Did we have a wedding? It’s just… a blur. I think I knew all of that when I first woke up in here, but I don’t anymore. It’s all gone.”

Data degradation, he realizes. The changes Gillian feared are real, and perhaps worse than she knew. Mansfield stored his dead wife’s consciousness in a far more primitive form, generations of tech back from what he used for himself. While enough of Robin remains for them to have this conversation, this is still only a fragment. She’s incomplete, becoming more and more so as time goes by.

“When you say the name Gillian”—Robin’s voice quivers with pain—“I know that’s my daughter. I remember being pregnant with her, I put my hands on my belly and loved her even before she was born, but I don’t remember her face. I must’ve seen her face sometime, but I can’t think of it at all. If I were myself, I’d know my own little girl. Wouldn’t I?”

Gently, Abel says, “Yes. I think you would.”

They can build no mech body for Robin’s soul to dwell in. Mansfield has no genetic samples fresh enough to successfully create an Inheritor for his late wife. Barring a major leap forward in technology—which might be decades or even centuries away, if it ever came at all—Robin is eternally trapped, with no end in sight.

It’s very like Mansfield to assume he’ll conquer all obstacles sooner or later. Abel cannot share this delusion. Apparently, Robin can’t either.

Robin straightens, tugs on her French uniform jacket, and turns to face him. “I’m so tired of it now. So tired of feeling my mind break down, bit by bit. I thought in the beginning that maybe I’d been freed from death itself. Now I understand that it wasn’t perfect freedom I’d been given. It’s only perfect isolation.”

“Isolation is worse than any death.” Abel thinks back to those thirty years in the pod bay. The only thing that makes the memory bearable is the knowledge that it ended.

He reaches out with his consciousness, instinctively, and senses a way out. Maybe not his final destination—but it would work for now. And from there, he can continue the search.

When his eyes next meet Robin’s, she obviously knows their time together is at an end.

“Please,” she says. “When you talk with Burt and Gillian, tell them to please, finally, let me go. Let me find peace. Tell them it’s what I want.”

“They’re unlikely to agree,” he says.

“Then please, find a way to kill me. Or delete me. Whatever you’d call it.” Robin’s hand rests against his chest for a moment. It’s the only touch they share, startlingly real. “Just promise me you’ll end this, however you can.”

Abel nods. She steps away from him, turns toward the phone booth, and walks away, perhaps to round up the usual suspects.

He turns up the collar of his trench coat and walks toward the plane. There’s no pilot, and yet somehow he knows he has to generate the feeling of movement. The sense that a transition is not only necessary but also allowed.

So he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his papers. To the ether he says, “Signed by General Weygand himself.”

The papers worked in Casablanca. They work here. The propellers spin, and the airplane begins to rumble forward on the runway. Abel sits back, and at the moment he feels the plane’s wheels leave the ground, he closes his eyes.

He can’t imagine where he’s going. He can only reach out—out past this data solid, past this room, past the Winter Castle itself—searching for something he’ll only know when he finds it.

And then he does.