Chance Three attended Advocate’s famous lens lecture when he was sixteen. Advocate’s clarity and passion for Join spoke directly to him. Excited by Advocate’s vision, his father, a corporate lawyer and poet, worked to integrate Advocate’s ideas into an ethical framework that emphasized the struggle of individual life and the constant renewal fundamental to living systems. Chance appreciated his father’s efforts but also saw that, as Advocate said, both of his parents and all solos were tied to the wheel of suffering. No previous technology offered a fundamentally alternative vision of what it meant to be alive.

Advocate said that, in centuries to come, humanity would create additional alternatives. Each join was a reimagining of life’s basic assumptions. Each join had the potential to create a new universe, an internal dimension in which life meant something entirely different. The challenge of Join was to have the courage to try it, to cross the threshold. Everyone who crossed the threshold was a pioneer. The promise was infinite potential.

Since that time, Chance has come to believe that Advocate’s metaphor fudges a crucial point. Joins live in the same physical world as solos, and depend on it. Chance’s awareness has not become a lens between equivalent worlds. In fact, as Chance experiences it, the beefed-up, hyper-resourced awareness of a join just continues to do the same old job—help the mind order information and address priorities.

It’s suddenly pouring rain. Quame and Lisa are laughing. A freak downpour, out of nowhere. Torrential, drenching. As if they live in the tropics, and this is the rainy season. They run the last block to the pod. By the time they get there, there’s an inch of rushing water on the street. On top of that, no matter how he presses, the gate pad isn’t picking up Quame’s handprint. The pod won’t wake. Lisa shouts, “What’s going on?” over the roar of the falling water. Lisa has no idea what Quame is doing, but whatever it is, it’s funny. It’s all funny—the rain, the inert pod, Quame’s look of confusion as he swipes his palm over and over on the pad. The water’s too thick for them to use their retinal projectors, and neither of them even has a hat. They’re completely soaked through.

They squint at each other, both of them standing in the torrent—the falling, flashing water—and laugh. And they struggle with it and then see that they shouldn’t laugh too hard because—well, Lisa laughs too hard and chokes on the heavy rain. With her sputtering and laughing, torn between enjoyment and coughing, Quame completely loses it and is bent over with uncontrollable laughter. He’s pointing at her weakly. When she stops her choking and laughing, she bats his hand away, and they look at each other and start another uncontrollable fit of laughter.

Rope remembers spreading the cremated remains of both of those drives into the River of Reflection in New Denver. New Yorkers, both of them. Both possessed of the hardened realism of the remaining denizens of that now-ramshackle lagoon of drowned personal ambition. Getting past all of that and into hilarity is no mean feat. Rope relishes those memories. Rope has so many memories like that, from so many lives.

Rope remembers the sudden downpour clearly from the perspective of each of them, and within their memories, the storm is suffused with wistful, earnest longing; a slightly fearful anticipation that at that moment they may be on the verge of actually doing something that will be meaningful to them, that will make a difference in the struggles they care about, that will make things better in the world. That sudden, unexpected storm was a symbol for both of them that they may have finally broken open the floodgates of hope. That’s what they wanted it to mean. That’s what Rope wanted it to mean. Every time.

The difference they were making—that was their decision to join Rope. So now, Rope is each of them. Just as Rope is each of the other souls who have joined to create it. And each one of those souls has grown older with Rope. And at this remove, with the intervention of time and events, Rope can clearly see the truth they willfully and uncharacteristically turned away from at those moments. The truth they knew, but chose to avoid. It was really just another freak storm. Another savage, inarticulate spasm of the rapidly changing world.

Leap Two is taking a long vacation from work. The death of Leap Five and her cremation, combined with the irregular licensing, has created some potential issues for Leap’s civilization ID. Leap will talk her supervisor at the airline through what happened after she sorts out what happened.

Chance Two is on leave and has time to accompany Leap One to a meeting with Mark Pearsun about Leap’s ID. When the door to Pearsun’s office opens, he stands impassively behind it, waiting for something from them.

Chance says, “Hello, I’m Chance.” She extends her hand, but he ignores it.

“You’re the murderer,” he says.

“No, Mark,” Leap One says. “No one’s dead. I’m right here.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean you, Ian. I was referring to Josette, your dead mother. And by the way”—Mark motions toward Leap One’s shaved head—“the skinned look suits you. There’s less of your natural weirdness.”

Leap is calm. “No, Mark. This is me. Though in a way, you’re right. I’m not only Josette. Not anymore. I’ve changed my name. My name is Leap. And I am Ian, as I am Josette. And I am Aurora. And I am Brian. And I am also Himiko. So yes, today, right now, this is actually me. And in, what, a month? With your help, this will be me legally.”

Mark turns his back on them. He waves them into the office as he walks around his desk and sits down.

They sit in guest chairs in front of his desk, Mark slouched in his chair, watching them both.

“You know what I want,” Leap says.

“Sure,” Mark says. He sits forward, puts his elbows on the desk. “We have all the technical means we need to require perfect adherence to sensible and ordered laws around Join licensing.” He smiles sourly and leans back again in his chair. “So to avoid that enlightened, functional, and overly regulated state of affairs, we’ve had to use the law to generate a more appropriate situation, one with a more appropriate measure of confusion. Within that appropriate confusion resides the flexibility that is sometimes required by people of means. You, whoever you are at this point, are still a person of means.”

“Thank you, Mark,” says Leap.

“I think this can be managed. The whole thing,” Mark says it as if the fact that he can manage it upsets him.

“The licensing?” Leap asks.

“Yes.”

“The forward dating on the samples?”

“Yes, but we won’t know for sure for a couple of months.”

“Thank you.”

Mark seems ready to say something but then appears to change his mind. He says, “So, you flipped.”

Leap sighs. “Yes.”

“It’s unfortunate. I’m sorry for you. But I’m not surprised. Josette would never have wanted this.”

“Mark, I am Josette.”

“Well, okay. Shit! Okay. I’ll talk with your son as if he’s you, Josette!” Mark’s face is red, but his voice softens again, and he continues, “You told me you didn’t want to join.”

“Yes,” says Leap.

“So you changed your mind.”

Leap can’t look at Mark. “Yes, I . . . the arthritis, the pain. I never, never imagined it could be that difficult. That painful.”

“You didn’t talk to me again. You didn’t ask me.”

“I wasn’t thinking. The pain was terrible. My body was going to die. I needed a join with more drives.”

“And then you flipped.”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t have had doubts.”

“I don’t think”—Leap glances over at Chance—“with you I don’t think I would have either. And it may not have been Josette who flipped.”

“What, you then? Ian? Or . . . Leap?”

Leap doesn’t respond.

Mark turns away dismissively, looks out the window. “And killing her slowed it down,” he says.

“I didn’t kill her.”

“No,” Mark says. “She did.”

“No, I am still here, Mark. Goddammit, you bloodsucking twit!”

Mark is surprised into silence. After a moment he laughs lightly. “I’m gonna miss you,” he says.

“Mark, I am going to keep working with you,” Leap says. “I’m right here. I haven’t gone anywhere, and I’m going to keep working with you.”

“It’s not the same,” Mark says.

Leap is tight-lipped. He nods.

“One of my contacts mentioned the flip as a possibility, early on,” Mark says. “The potential for complications of any sort was one of the reasons we chose that particular adviser. She took some legal precautions. She did a few things that will help me.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” says Leap, her voice prickly. “I was beginning to think she was just incompetent.”

“It was your choice,” Mark says.

“Yes, it was.”

The anger rekindles in Mark’s eyes as he says slowly, “You’re here telling me we’re going to work together, as if this is something you can just get through. But you, one of you, flipped. And now you’re going to be torn apart, very, very slowly, at a subatomic level. Your body tissues will disintegrate. Your mind will erode. You’ll experience unimaginable pain, full-blown insanity, and then the whole join, all of Leap, will die.”

“Yes,” says Leap, coolly meeting his gaze. “I am almost literally going to melt. Like ice cream.”

The pod passes smoothly and quickly over the greensward, between spires. They’ve just lifted off from Pearsun’s office and are flying back toward Leap’s home.

A paid subscription covers the use of the whole, unified fleet of pods. Even at rest, the vehicles are impressive—ovoids whose gyroscopic stabilizers maintain their equilibrium despite minimal contact with the ground. The bottom half of the pod is typically a single color with a smooth metallic finish. The top half is most often transparent, but passengers can use controls inside the cabin to increase opacity on any portion of the dome, turning it a glassy, bluish color. When they’re traveling, pods are pure, distilled technical wizardry—from the beauty of the shape in motion to the torturously abstruse theory that explains their flight.

As Chance understands it, a pod moves by creating a rip in space and then allowing space to pull it forward to fill the rip. That apparently requires absolute bilateral symmetry in the distribution of the vehicle’s mass. As passengers move in the top half, a “shadow mass”—managed by a mass calculator that manipulates a spongy gelatin, compressed air, and force generators—compensates with shifts beneath, keeping the vehicle balanced. The bilateral symmetry also enables the vehicle’s energy translators. No one has figured out how to scale the flying cars up beyond a device capable of carrying a few hundred kilograms.

Leap One gazes out of the transparent upper dome, idly running his hand over the stubble that’s emerging on his recently shaved pate. Chance Two, settled into her sofa seat, watches the faint cirrostratus above them, unmoving as they float along beneath.

“You need to find Rope,” Leap says at last.

Chance has been trying not to think about her own situation, focusing instead on what’s happening with Leap. Chance’s drives have woken in a cold sweat five or six times in the last week, and Chance has been fantasizing about bringing all the drives to the Olympic Archipelago to hide out in Leap’s house, behind Leap’s surveillance. She’s surprised to hear Leap ask about the nightmare they would be living in if they weren’t living in Leap’s nightmare.

Chance says, “I think we should leave that to the Directorate.”

“Maybe. But you said yourself that he has a way to elude them.”

“After everything that’s been happening,” Chance says, “I don’t think we should go looking for more trouble. I just scattered the ashes of my Three. We did the ritual for you. I want to get back to normal life.”

“Chance, I know you don’t believe this. But just hear me out. Please. The network—the quantum network—has properties, usable, important properties that Vitalcorp doesn’t make public.”

“No, not that again, Leap. Not here. Not now.”

“Please, Chance. Consider it.”

Chance closes her eyes. She sees a faint red afterimage of the bright sky above.

“Chance, I’m going to die.”

They pass several minutes in silence.

“I know you’ve met a couple of the first five hundred,” Leap says. “You’ve read papers by them, about them. Did any of that prepare you for Rope? You said Rope is one of them and that he knew Music. Rope is different. What if he knows something that could help me?”

They’re approaching the steep, wooded shore of a small island. In a neat clearing, set back a hundred yards from the water, are the blue-and-slate-gray angles of Leap’s home.

“It’s a fantasy,” Chance says. “Rope is a sick fuck who’s incredibly dangerous. He doesn’t know anything that can help you. There is no way to treat what you have. Finding Rope will just get me killed along with you.”

Chance can hear that last sentence tailing away in the still air of the pod, along with its implications: You’re going to die. I am not going to die. I won’t help you.

Directorate staff eventually get in touch again through the office where Chance One works. They want Chance to come in and answer some questions, but they don’t seem to be in a hurry. A join named Interest, who identifies himself as Chance’s contact at the Directorate, collects a statement by video. After that, he becomes very difficult to reach. He sends Chance a list of requests that need immediate attention but lets several days go by without answering clarifying questions. When Interest finally does respond to Chance, he says the investigation is proceeding, but there are legal issues. Chance asks what they are, and Interest says he can’t go into them.

Frustrated, Chance demands to know what’s being done about Rope. Interest sympathizes, but he can’t offer anything further at this time. Chance insists—Chance’s drive was killed, and the Directorate doesn’t seem to be taking the situation seriously. Interest understands that Chance is concerned and will see what he can do.

Chance wants to follow the news, which makes the self-imposed, protective isolation from the net difficult to maintain. Several people—colleagues and friends—have made an effort to reach out. Chance finally augments the auditing of personal activity, creating a more complete record of all online contacts in case Rope makes an appearance. Then Chance One logs in to Civ Net and gives up trying to hide. Maybe Leap is right and Rope is busy trying to survive.

Chance connects with people who worked on research projects with Chance Three, hoping one of them can help get information from the Directorate. They listen. A few try to help, but nothing comes of it.

Days later, Interest finally suggests a date for a follow-on interview. It’s in three more weeks. The Directorate doesn’t think it needs additional information until almost a month and a half after the killing.

Leap Four and Leap Two are running over a woodland trail, a six-mile loop. The air is crisp, with a very mild savor of coastal spray. The Doug firs are widely spaced, the underbrush thinner than in the ungroomed native rain forest. An occasional sunlamp hovers above, brightening a limpid, mellow gloom.

Leap loves running through the forest, and today it’s better than on any other day Leap can remember. Her bodies’ arms are pumping, right arms forward together and left arms forward together. With Leap Four, who is a bit shorter, but healthy and young, Leap stretches her stride. With Leap Two, whose extraordinary proprioception makes her balance effortless, Leap runs at a relaxed pace. Their feet touch the uneven duff at the same moment and lift away together.

Leap fills her lungs, her two drives breathing deeply in near synchrony, and fills her awareness with details—the smell of moss, the seemingly crafted perfection of slices of sunlight falling between the shoulders of the forest giants, the pleasurable impact of landing without worrying about her footing, the freedom from pain as the joints of her two bodies flex and strain. Her physical confidence.

Since joining with Josette, Leap’s appreciation of sensual experience has intensified. And the loss of Josette’s body, devastating initially, has also been an unbelievable gift. Leap sometimes becomes aware of reveling in simple physical tasks like lifting a basket of clothes or running down a staircase, mundane moments filled with something close to a sense of flying.

But the join has given many of Leap’s intimate memories an almost frightening quality. Memories as simple as Josette enjoying the touch of her own hand on her waist can waver with a queasy uncertainty, or Ian intently searching his damp teenage face in the mirror for blackheads.

And surrounding everything is a creeping fatigue, a pain whose borders advance day by day, so that even as the movement of drives takes on a shine of fresh interest and wonder, Leap aches with the trickling return of decay.

The airliner’s cabin is quiet, the passengers either sleeping or immersed in stories, their fingers, wrists, and mouths twitching to control the interfaces on private systems. Leap Four is finding sleep elusive under a thin wool airline blanket. She shifts position and then is still again, her mouth slightly open. Leap has continued to dye her hair red, even now, when it’s stubbly and only beginning to recover from being shaved for the Ritual of Retirement.

With her blond hair tied in a low ponytail, Chance Two’s eyebrows arch as she elaborates energetically on techniques for cycle management that might help Leap with the effects of the flip. Leap One, on the other side of Chance from Leap Four, leans forward, listening carefully, occasionally pulling on his beard.

The practice and central tenets of cycle management were an early attempt to address unforeseen consequences of Join. Initial marketing described Join as an evolutionary step that would help the human race meet intractable challenges, like global warming and interstellar travel. The mind would no longer be limited by a resource design evolved to protect a grasslands animal. But as millions paid licensing fees and created the new race of enhanced beings, it became evident that when left to their own devices joins were happy and unambitious, given to noodling. Art and science blossomed, but in curiously unfocused ways. In the first few years, it seemed that every join was a conceptual artist working on an intimate scale. Many became collectors of whatever type of oddment struck their fancy.

The world thickened with a baroque density of minutely elaborated objects, mathematics and theoretical physics made great strides, but progress on large engineering projects actually slowed. This was bad for Earth’s living creatures. Global water levels continued to rise, and the weather convulsed. To keep the developed world on its feet, to keep productivity from cratering when so much of civilization’s attention was focused on the confusing opportunities of the new technology, environmental regulations were actually eased.

Joins also helped puzzle out new nanomaterials and a variety of printing processes designed to assemble everything from lattices formed of individual molecules to towering, purpose-built habitats. Heretofore undreamed of miracles were mass-produced and widely released, but a small percentage of those miracles were profoundly toxic. There were three worldwide plagues. New revelations in genetic science bent links in the food chain. The consequences of so much change multiplied, and the world began to witness massive die-offs. In coastal cities, millions of bodies drowned as hurricanes and tsunamis delivered the news of increasing change. Growing swaths of the planet became hostile to life.

Joins made two critical adjustments. First, they realized that they weren’t prioritizing their activities well. They could think more clearly than most solos but weren’t being good about managing their fascinations. They needed to improve their judgment.

Cycle management, as practiced by joins, is the science and discipline of remaining present. The nearest analog for solos might be stress management. Every drive has cognitive potential beyond what it needs for moment-to-moment operation. When a join is stressed, it can find a drive that isn’t at capacity and “borrow cycles.” Additional cycles clarify the join’s awareness. A clearer awareness means a greater reserve of willpower with which to make and take considered choices. Some degree of cycle management happens naturally, but joins realized that they needed to improve it and developed a formal practice.

Chance has always been good at it. Both Chance Two and Three studied it before they joined.

The second adjustment was more difficult. As stories of drives dying from gross negligence began to pile up, a joke circulated. How do you know if two bodies are joined? Put one in mortal danger. If the other tries to save him, they’re not joined.

The second adjustment was born from the realization that, on average, solos simply cared more about survival. Given a long-range plan to clean up the environment, solos would work harder to figure out how to implement it. For the time being at least, until the legacy problems of human evolution could be addressed, a portion of the population would remain solo, to actually do things the joins thought of. Of course, because solos are naturally xenophobic, many of them resented being directed by joins. Tension developed.

An older man in an aisle seat across from Leap Four leans toward her.

“You’re all joined, aren’t you?” the man says, meaning her, Chance Two on her left, and Leap One. The three of them fill the row’s three center seats. He’s about sixty-five, medium build, wearing a dark blue tank top, with a broad, bristly jaw and a walrus mustache. His gray hair shows remnants of an auburn color.

Leap Four, sitting closest to him, says, “Video-ID us.”

“Ah, nah, I wouldn’t be much if I couldn’t tell,” says the man. “The three of you are joined. Two women and a man. ‘You are not a gendered entity.’” He puts the last sentence in air quotes.

During the trial of one thousand, Hamish Lyons had tried to popularize the phrase “It is not a gendered entity” as a way to counter the sloppy use of gender pronouns when referring to a join. But people didn’t stop using gender pronouns, and the saying lost currency. Now, pronouns are chosen to emphasize the action of a particular drive or to highlight an idea. There’s still wide variation in their use, influenced by fashion and regional differences. The old phrase is considered something between cutely and clumsily ironic.

Leap can’t quite smile at the man’s joke and instead says, “Have you ever guessed wrong?”

To Chance’s left, Leap One sits back and closes his eyes. Chance smells sour alcohol from the man whom Leap is talking with.

“Not that I know of,” the man says, with a smile that’s actually charming.

“Well, I guess your intuition is pretty good,” Leap Four says, and turns to face forward, hoping to end the conversation.

“I like your music,” the man says.

Surprised, Leap says, “What?” And immediately regrets reengaging the man in conversation.

“You know,” he says, “the music that joins make, I like it. I think it’s sexy.”

Leap Four turns to him again. “You’re solo?”

“Like the good Lord made me.”

Leap thinks it over, then says, “Sounds like you think we’ve done something wrong.”

“Oh, no, no. Not at all. I’m all for it, Join. But not for me. I don’t swing that way, but, you know, whatever floats your boat.”

Leap nods and turns to face forward again.

“I think it’s kind of sexy,” the man says. “The three of you. The one of me.”

Leap Four is ignoring him.

“Anyway,” the man continues, “I like your music. Your a cappella music. Harmonies are unbelievable. Unbelievable. Yeah. And jazz. Don’t get me started. I wanted to play jazz, but nobody listens to jazz from solos anymore. How about that? We invented it. We invented jazz.”

Leap Four pointedly closes her eyes, her broad face tense. Chance faces forward as well.

“Even people who want more than one perspective in their music still think having a lot of different joins is better than solos,” the man says. “Can you believe that?”

In the face of silence from Leap and Chance, the man’s voice softens, becomes reflective. “I am a musical genius,” he says. “I think. I think I am. Alto sax. I am a damn alto sax musical genius, and I can’t get a job.”

Leap Four opens her eyes; something that the man has said has gotten to Leap. She turns toward him. “I’m sorry,” she says.

After observing her for a moment, he says, “You’re a musician, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it. I just knew it. You three are all joined, and you’re probably an all-alto-sax musical trio! Aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

Leap laughs. “No, no,” she says. “That’s me,” she indicates Leap One on the other side of Chance. Then points to Chance. “She’s a friend.”

“Ah,” says the man. “Two alto saxes and percussion.”

Leap laughs again, “No. I play guitar. I was a fanatic for it, in one of my childhoods. With that drive I’m pretty good. With the rest, well, I can plunk around.”

“One of your childhoods,” the man says. “Huh. That’s such a strange phrase, ‘one of my childhoods,’ you know? I mean, I only had those years once. I spent them learning alto sax. Because I loved it. It was everything to me, you know?”

“Yes,” says Leap.

“No, you don’t,” says the man. “Nothing has ever meant that much to you. You know, I’ve thought about moving to a feral community. Really. To fight for solos. But, nah, I’m just too old. I’m not serious enough about things, you know? But I sure do hate what the world has become. And I mean it. Your kind. Everything.”

Leap turns away from the man, stares forward again, and closes her eyes. The drive’s pulse was quickened by the bitterness in the man’s last few words. With many solos, there are topics that are understandably painful, often around decisions they’ve made or regrets they have about what might have happened if they had chosen some other path in life.

Leap believes they’re often thinking, If I were a join, I could have tried both options. But you can’t rerun time, no matter how many drives you have. They don’t understand that. Even if they’re sensitive and listening closely. And if they do experience insight that’s similar to real understanding, it’s only temporary. And the truth is, joins do experience choice differently. After a join, each choice is still final, but no choice is as critical. There’s a difference; it’s just not the difference that solos imagine.

Within that distinction lies a gap that separates joins and solos utterly. Joins have lived on both sides of the gap. For solos who resist joining—because they can’t afford it, because they’re proud, they’re afraid, or they just don’t want to—the gap can become a cipher, encoding what they desire, what they’ve lost, what they want to destroy.

Apple Two is tending bar at Whatever You Want with someone Chance doesn’t recognize backing him. Leap One—a bit worn, his beard scruffier than usual, his hair darkening the top of his head again—has accompanied Chance One to the bar. Of Chance’s drives, Chance One has the most natural charisma. It might help cover for Leap One’s intensity.

It’s late afternoon, the beginnings of a happy-hour crowd. These are people who worked at the hospital with Chance Three. Some may know Chance One. Chance has set a privacy flag on his status, if anyone bothers to check.

A woman named Relief, in one of the booths in back, catches his eye. Her mouth half opens, and she turns away quickly to say something to her two companions. She starts to rise from her seat. Then she hesitates—she probably viewed his profile. She stops, looks over toward him, and nods her sympathy. He acknowledges her. She smiles sadly and sits back down. So, some people do check profiles before saying hello. He’s always liked her.

Chance and Leap have agreed that a search for Rope is likely to be fruitless, but what choice does Leap have? Leap has also mentioned reaching out to some of the better-known names in alternate quantum research for leads on either flips or on Rope. Chance thinks Leap is probably doing that, but Leap hasn’t shared any results.

Chance believes that the likelihood of Leap finding a treatment is nil, whether they locate Rope or not. For Chance, this search is about spending time with a friend who is dying.

Apple gestures at Chance to wait for a moment. At first, Chance is surprised that Apple recognizes Chance One. Then he realizes that after what happened, Apple would have looked up Chance and his drives.

Apple hands off a drink, then moves toward Chance One and Leap One. He peers at them both closely and then turns away and says, “I’m glad you came back.” He doesn’t look at Chance as he continues, “Look, I thought he—Rope—was all talk. I don’t know what else to say. I’m just really sorry.”

For a moment, Chance can’t respond. The memory of the violent disconnection from Chance Three in this same building blinds him. Each of his drives pauses.

“He wasn’t all talk,” he says, and anger settles on him.

It’s a crueler response than he’d like. Apple had warned him about Rope; Apple certainly isn’t to blame. But that reply is the best Chance is capable of at the moment. He realizes two things: that he does blame Apple, though he can’t understand why, and that he should have prepared for this conversation, left a couple of drives sleeping so he’d have more cycles available to manage his emotional response. But he didn’t. It will be more of a struggle to say things the way he’d like to.

“Yeah,” Apple says, then waits for Chance to regain his composure. He asks whether Chance wants a drink.

“No,” Chance says. Apple points at Leap One, who also declines.

“Okay,” says Apple, and waits to find out why Chance has come.

“I’d like to find him,” Chance says.

“You want to find who?”

“Rope,” Chance says. “I’d like to find him.”

Apple shakes his head slowly. “Doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

“Maybe not,” says Chance.

“He’s been picked up,” Apple says.

“Reports are that two of his drives are unaccounted for,” Chance says. “No one knows where they are.”

“Fuck!” Apple says. Then he holds up a hand in the face of surprise at his outburst. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he says. “Look, I’m scared he’s gonna come back, you know. I told you he threatened me. Threatened to kill my drives. I thought he was just an asshole, but then, when he did that to you—” Apple’s face flushes. He looks down at the bar as he keeps talking. Chance has the stray thought that looking away might be a habit Apple picked up while working in bars, to help endure the reckless confidences of strangers.

“I wouldn’t want my path, or yours, to cross that guy’s again,” Apple continues. “Anyway, you were a join doctor. I’ve heard it’s not that hard to find drives and maybe even kill them without getting close. Is that true?”

“It’s complicated, but there’s a lot of truth to it, yeah,” says Chance. “And that’s the thing. They can’t find his drives. My friend”—Chance indicates Leap—“thinks maybe Rope has found a way to mask his drives.”

“Is that possible?” asks Apple. “Do you think it would work?”

“I don’t know. I’ve seen things in the last few weeks . . . maybe I don’t know as much about it as I thought.”

Apple is still looking away. “Why do you think Rope would know anything unusual?” he asks. “He’s just a regular guy.”

“That’s not what you said before.” Chance is a bit taken aback. “You said he was one of the first five hundred. That he knew Music. I think you said he was connected. It sounded like he knew some of the original researchers or people high up at Vitalcorp.”

“Maybe,” Apple says. “He said a lot of things. I don’t know. I mean, he was a big talker.”

Leap says, “You look scared.”

Apple glances at Leap. “Yeah, I am. I’m—I can’t lose a drive.”

“Look, I understand,” says Chance, surprised that he’s suddenly trying to make Apple feel better. “I just have a problem. I need to talk with someone . . . For my friend. If there are things that aren’t commonly known about the quantum network. My friend is sick. You know, I helped invent a technique for finding drives. It should work. But Rope might be out there still. At least, according to Civ News. So maybe he knows something. We’re grasping at straws.”

Leap is watching Apple closely. Chance wishes Leap would sit back and acknowledge that this is a blind alley. But Leap is nowhere close to giving up.

“You’ve talked with Rope,” Chance One says. “He flirted with you. He told you about himself. Can you help me find him?”

“I really don’t think so,” Apple says. “I told the Directorate what I know. He talked about fooling around with my One. Mentioned a hotel, but he never said which one. I don’t even have that. Why do you think you could find him if the Directorate can’t?”

“I keep remembering him, watching me,” Chance says. “He said something. He said he was playing a game. I was paying an ante.”

“A game?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, poker?”

“That’s what I was thinking of. But I don’t know. Was he a gambler? Did he talk about games, or do you have any idea what else that could mean?”

“I really don’t know,” Apple says. “That guy said a lot of things.”

Leap leans forward on the bar, then has one of his seizures. He spasms backward but stays on the barstool as his arms go up and back. He doesn’t hit anything, and it’s over quickly.

“Ah,” he says, a hand to his mouth. “I bit my tongue.”

“Is it bleeding?” Chance asks.

“No, I don’t think so. Was . . . that one of my . . . things?”

“Yeah,” says Chance.

“Shit.”

“What was that?” Apple asks, surprised.

“It’s a thing I do,” Leap says. “I don’t know when it’s happening.”

“Well, can I get you anything? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. Just need to sit. My tongue hurts.”

“You didn’t break anything,” Apple says.

Leap, clearly not finding the assurance too comforting, says, “I’m going to the restroom.”

As he rises and gingerly makes his way through the crowd, Leap looks defeated. They just don’t have much of a plan.

When Leap has gone, Apple says, “That looked like a flip.”

Interactive vids, soaps, all the morbid narratives of the day go directly to worst-case scenarios. Incurable, deadly, mysterious—even though they’re rare enough to make people doubt their reality—flips still make appearances in popular media.

“I don’t think he’d like me to talk about it,” Chance says.

“You sure you don’t want a drink?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Look, I gotta get back to the bar.”

“Apple, there’s nothing else? You can’t think of anything else?”

“No.”

“You asked why I think I might find him, even though the Directorate couldn’t. I guess I don’t think I’ll find him if he doesn’t want to be found. But I think he might want to find me.”

Apple hesitates, considering something. He shakes his head violently as if trying to clear it. Chance says, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine!” Apple snaps back, then says, “Sorry.”

Apple moves closer and lowers his voice. “There is something you don’t know. I told the Directorate, but they didn’t listen. I don’t think it will help, but . . . He did come back. In here, with a drive I didn’t recognize. After the Directorate had been in and everyone had cleared off. He says, ‘Hey, Apple, it’s me, Rope.’ I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was someone, maybe, making a joke. But a credit token popped up in his name, with a picture of the drive. I didn’t know why he would come here. I was scared of him. You know—”

“What happened?”

Apple leans in even closer. “Nothing,” he says. “He ordered my twenty-one-year-old Hibiki. Absolutely topflight whiskey. Rare. I have one bottle that I bought from another customer. I’d told him about it, I guess. He had three shots, fast. That’s just wrong. Shouldn’t drink that whiskey fast. Then he left.”

“You told the Directorate?”

Apple nods.

“So?”

“Well, I don’t know whether they cared,” says Apple.

“Then I don’t see how that could help,” Chance says.

“No, but wait. The thing is, he likes his whiskey. Rope. And I don’t mean that in a good way. The guy’s a drunk, you know what I mean? A real one, I saw it. I mean, I’m a bartender and even I’ve never met a join who’s a real drunk before. Even if both my drives are drinking, I don’t get drunk. But there’s a reason he started drinking drives to death, instead of going another way. Something about him, must be. What I’m saying is, he’s not going to stop.”

Common wisdom considers joining a treatment for many addictions. There was a short period in the early days when people with virulent drug addictions joined with other drug addicts in a mistaken belief in a kind of dependency cancellation. But that effort is now considered a disaster and an object lesson in the theory of join variety. Stated without nuance or qualification, the theory of join variety says it’s better to join people with unlike characteristics. In his years of practice, Chance never treated a join for alcoholism.

Chance notices that Leap One is standing beside him. He’s not sure when Leap returned.

“I told the Directorate,” Apple is saying, “but they didn’t pay any attention. How could he be an alcoholic? So here’s the thing I didn’t say to them. If I wanted to find him, I’d look in the bars where the real drinkers are. Solo quarter, the short spires. That’s where I’d look for him.”

Chance and Leap take in what Apple is saying. They have no other leads. “Thank you,” Chance says.

“But if he does have drives left,” Apple says, “why would they be in New Denver? They might not even be on this continent.”

“Yeah,” says Chance. Nonetheless, he and Leap can check out the solo bars in New Denver. It’ll keep them busy while they’re waiting for Mark Pearsun to work out the licensing problems.

even though Chance Five’s perceptions are muffled by painkillers, he’s available to accompany Leap Four as she explores the short spires. They’ve both toured the area through interactive documentaries, and each has visited a handful of times.

The two of them land their pod on the rooftop of a seven-story faux-brick building. They find the roof-access staircase, press their palms to the security plate, and, when the electronics of the steel door slide its thick bolts back with a high-pitched hiss, they step into a stairwell lit by only a faltering, pallid LED. The stairwell absorbs sound in a way that drains vitality from the space.

When joins started building spires, they often found new locations where there had been no earlier city. Because access by pod made differences in altitude less important, and the evolving megastorms were devastating large open regions, many spire communities grew in mountainous areas.

Cities began to lobby for spires to help them maintain relevance and energize renewal efforts. New architecture slowly replaced the old, and cities changed from the inside. Solos, who remained more comfortable in earlier styles of architecture or who didn’t have the money to move, stayed concentrated in the older parts of cities. The term “short spires” began to be synonymous with neighborhoods inhabited mostly by solos.

New Denver’s short spires cluster around the west side of Lake Everwild, a massive artificial reservoir. Even though these short spires are only a couple of decades old, they already have the hard-used look of neglected urban areas, built on a grid to accommodate the automobiles that solos are only now giving up and the big twenty-four-wheeled articulated container trucks that so many solos are employed in piloting across the continent.

The stairwell smells of urine. Its walls are stained by slashes and blossoms of graffiti. The first door they reach is sealed off, boards nailed to the walls. The decay and disarray are otherworldly. Things improve slowly as they descend the stairs. On the ground floor, they enter a small, crowded, indoor shopping area.

On each side of them, tiny, packed storefronts belly up to a long, narrow corridor. A coin shop, colorful trinkets of indeterminate purpose, handcrafted ceramics. A couple of the shops display crosses prominently, their entrances draped with brown cloth in lieu of a door.

Apple named six places they could visit and warned them about each. They pass a small, narrow, and dimly lit pub, the Single Stamen. Chance steps in, but it’s deserted. Just past that is the larger bar they’re looking for, One Eye. Its long window is covered over with heavy gray paper. A large eye has been clumsily painted on the paper above two small yellow X’s.

In his brown slacks and gray artificial silk sweater, Chance Five is dressed like a join. His dark hair is short, with a shallow strip shaved clean from one side of his forehead to the other, a style that never took hold among solos. Leap Four is in worn blue jeans and a light green T-shirt that complements her tan skin. She’s dressed more like a solo but still moves and somehow looks like a join.

There are solos who are good at spotting joins. In addition to obvious differences, like a collapse of personal boundaries, there are subtler signs. In some solo parodies, joined drives never let their field of vision overlap. Joins called impersonators make a special effort to pass as solo, but neither Chance nor Leap has ever practiced the art.

One Eye is a dark place with an open floor plan, a pool table, and a few bright pinball machines in a game area that makes up roughly half of the pub’s space. In the other half are two booths, a couple of tables, and a bar lined with seven barstools.

As Chance Five and Leap Four enter, they get suspicious looks from the handful of sagging patrons and an open glare from the bartender, a thin, fiftyish solo of medium height. He interrupts his conversation at the bar with a heavier man to call out to them.

“Drinks?”

“A couple of pilsners, please. Something local,” answers Chance.

“Middle Finger okay?” asks the bartender. “They make that just down the street.”

“Yeah,” says Chance. He walks toward a back booth. Leap is using a button camera to take a quick vid of each patron, to index them on Civ Net. Once she has them all, she and Chance will walk through their network profiles as they finish the beers.

Leap’s notes pop up on Chance’s retinal display with three profiles marked for him to focus on. The bartender brings them drinks.

“We don’t get a lot of joins in here,” says the bartender in a tone that’s only slightly unfriendly.

“We were just visiting an aunt,” Leap lies. “We wanted to get some work done.”

The bartender grunts. “Joins usually want to work in brighter places.”

“This is just fine,” says Leap Four, smiling.

Retinal displays can get awkward for in-depth work. Leap and Chance unroll their personal displays, which then light up with the profile information. To discourage unwelcome interest, personal displays can make fine adjustments to their viewing angles, blurring content for people other than their owners. Chance has added the bartender’s profile to the five Leap collected. It only takes a few minutes for them both to review all six sheets without finding anything interesting.

They ask the bartender about Rope. Nothing. They leave, dropping by the Single Stamen briefly on their way out. When they get back to the stairs, Leap Four is tired and has a headache that painkillers won’t help. She tells Chance Five that it’s just the light that was getting to her. She hides a minor tremor in her right arm and hand from him as best she can. They have five more bars on their list, then they might just explore a bit.

If Rope is in New Denver, he could be anywhere in the city. Apple said the bars he listed were guesses. Even if Rope patronized one of them, they have no idea when he’d be there, they don’t know what he’d look like, and asking about him might just alert him. They visit four bars the first day and stop by the final two the next.

Then they decide to map out all of the bars in the solo areas and create a time line for regularly visiting them. While they’re doing that, Chance gets a vidcall from Apple Two. Apple would like to meet at One Eye that evening. He looks nervous and unhappy.

The workday is over, so Chance decides to go with his One, as well as his Five, to watch Apple from different angles. If Apple is hiding something, Chance wants to know. Chance, uneasy after their other visits to solo neighborhoods, considers bringing Four, as the drive best equipped to handle herself in trouble, but decides the two male drives should be enough. Leap Four goes with them.

The same bartender watches them as they enter. Three of the patrons who were in the bar when they first visited are still rooted to the same locations. Three new people are gathered around the pool table. Two patrons have one of the booths, and Apple Two is sitting in the other, a beer and four full shots of whiskey on the table in front of him.

Apple doesn’t greet them as Leap Four and Chance Five sit across from him. Chance One gently touches his shoulder to alert him to the need to make room on his side of the booth. Apple Two says softly, nervously, “This has all gone to shit.” Apple’s face is reddened. His eyes are bloodshot. His breath is heavy and sour. He’s clearly been here for a while.

“What?” asks Chance. “What’s happening?”

Apple glances up at Chance One. “You don’t have to read through me. I’m not going to lie to you,” he says. “Just the opposite. You didn’t have to bring two.”

“What’s happening?” Chance One says again.

Apple downs one shot, then shifts over to make room for Chance One. Apple pulls the other three shots and his beer down the table, one hand protectively cupping the beer mug. “They’re gonna find me,” he says morosely.

“Who is?” asks Chance.

“The Directorate. You don’t know the half of it.”

Chance is watching him closely with both of his drives. He quickly realizes that there’s no reason to. It’s not just the drive, Apple Two, who is drunk. Apple is drunk.

Chance remembers Apple Two saying that he could drink without getting drunk. He seems to be proving himself wrong about that, and he’s obviously not thinking clearly. A pall of misery hovers around the drive. He’s not able to take his eyes off the drinks in front of him.

“I thought you would enjoy it,” Apple says. “I’ve been doing it for years. People who come and talk with me, they want it.”

“What are you talking about?” Chance says, annoyed at what sounds like rambling.

Apple scoffs at the three of them, then looks back at his drink. “I thought it would just be a temporary problem. But they’re cleaning me up. Reason isn’t talking to me anymore. He’s blocked the encrypted line.”

Apple eyes one of his shots. He picks it up and tosses it back, turns the glass upside down and sets it on the table. He smiles sadly at Leap and Chance.

“Chance,” Leap says calmly, “it’s him. This is Rope.”

The drive they’d thought was Apple says, “Yeah, it’s me. Still giving your life meaning.”

Chance’s sight blurs. It’s as though he sat down next to a scorpion. Both of Chance’s drives flinch away from the drunk in the booth. Rope regards Chance One, who is closest to him.

“This one’s okay,” he says. “The data modeler. And that’s the sick one, isn’t it? The one with cancer, that’s gonna die?”

“Yes,” says Leap.

Rope’s face has gotten redder; his eyes more bloodshot. He nods toward Leap Four. “And you’ve flipped,” he says.

“Yes,” she replies.

“Ahhh, this is all such a joke,” Rope says, shaking his head at the drinks on the table. “It just makes no difference at all.”

He turns to Leap. “I am Rope. I am Apple. Apple is a fiction. You guessed it. You’re a smart cookie. Apple doesn’t exist, except as a hiding place for two of my drives. My emergency escape route, if you will. But in fact, this”—he motions at his body—“is my eight-hundred-twenty-eighth drive. I think. I’ve probably lost count.” He motions vaguely with one hand. “Things . . . shift.”

Leap is stunned. “Eight hundred . . . How?”

“Just by doing it. By joining. Though that makes it sound easy, and it’s been a lot of work. I’ve joined with a lot of small joins, threes, fives, sevens, you know. That’s helped.”

Chance finally regains his voice. Bile is burning in the throat of his One as he says, “Why did you kill my drive?”

Rope looks slightly sideways at Chance One, as if he’s been reminded of something annoying. “You got over it,” he says. “I knew you would. Back in the bar I warned you, but then you came over to talk to me. I know what kind of person you are. If things had gone according to plan, this would be a very different kind of conversation.”

Leap says, “I don’t believe it. What about the risk of running more than twenty drives?”

“Yes,” Rope says. “I’ve only ever run more than twenty drives for a very brief time. I always keep the number of drives down.”

Leap’s eyes are wide. She says slowly, “Then, you’ve killed—”

“Yes, I have. No one else would.”

As Chance and Leap sit, stunned into silence, Rope adds, “And we had to know what it means.”

Chance One says, “I don’t understand.”

Rope looks at Chance Five, who is watching him in horror. “Would either of you like a drink? No? Well.”

He hoists his beer, nods at Chance One and at Leap Four, then drains the glass. It takes him several gulps to do it. When he’s done, Rope studies the empty mug. He sets it down carefully and pushes it toward the end of the table. He wipes his lower lip with the back of his hand, takes a deep breath, and widens his eyes briefly. “Now we’ll see how long I can do without another.”

Leap says, “You’re looking for the vanishing point?”

Rope laughs, lifts an empty shot glass off the table, and watches it as he turns it in a circle. “The vanishing point. Stupid. That was my original goal. I was working to answer the question, at what point is joining just the same as dying? The answer? I don’t know. I think I’ve passed the vanishing point. I think that these days, when I join, the part of me that comes from the new join essentially disappears, but I just don’t really fucking know. I mean, I think I’m still here, all of my selves. But I don’t know. If I were to join with you, I don’t think it would change me much. You would just become me, though you would still think you were you. That’s what I think, but it’s hard for me to know. I’m inside the picture so I can’t”—he sets down the shot and then moves both his hands in circles as if against an invisible wall—“see the whole picture.”

He turns back to Chance Five. “What I told you before is true, but it leaves a little out. Way back when, I was two of the original team, a psychologist and the only philosopher. We, the two of us, never believed in the immortality that everyone else was squawking about. We’re all gonna live forever, blah, blah, blah. I mean, people have always imagined immortality, but the world, the real world, never worked that way. So, physically, something like it is clearly possible, as long as the Earth survives. But we didn’t think a personality could persist through endless joins.” He smiles. “Personality. Who cares? No one really bothered to disagree with us. They just didn’t think it was an interesting question.”

Chance Five says, “Perspective coheres through time.”

Rope turns a look of utter disdain on him. “So what? What does that mean? Your perspective coheres through time. Softheaded commercial-marketing crap. So you remember yesterday, and the day before. And then you’re part of me, and you experience today. And to you, it seems like it’s all the same, except now you remember eight hundred childhoods, and you like things you didn’t like and dislike things you used to like. And to you it all just feels like you’ve grown, you’re different. And then you see all of the days as they arrive out of the future and you remember each one as it passes, each one”—he snorts out a sudden laugh—“to the last syllable of recorded time. But who are you? The things that you did, the things you believed, the people you loved? You”—and Rope leans over the table to drunkenly poke Chance Five in the chest—“are one tiny perspective among my more than eight hundred. That ‘perspective coheres’ crap just means you don’t notice that you’re already dead.”

“That’s been said,” Chance One says coldly, “mostly by solos, who haven’t experienced join and don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“But that’s where I’m different, isn’t it? Aren’t I different?” Rope takes a moment to carefully steady himself. He says, “I’m going to be serious now.” He downs the third of his shots. His face becomes still. In a moment he appears temperate, tranquil.

“You see,” he continues, “I am, literally, over eight hundred dead people. And I know they’re all dead. Despite the fact that none of them experienced death, I know it beyond a shadow of doubt. Despite the fact that each of them is me, and I am alive. Despite their experience of living through me.”

“I don’t know what you are,” says Chance Five. “There are no real records of who you are on the network. We could just be speaking to a three, or to a developing meme virus.”

“Of course,” Rope agrees. “You could be. But you know you’re not, don’t you. I know more about life than any living thing before me ever has known.” Rope puts a finger to his temple and presses, hard. His voice has risen, and he spits as he speaks. “I remember living over eight hundred lives. I know everything worth knowing. And that makes me, what?”—with a flourish that the table prevents from becoming a drunken bow or a forward tumble—“A gateway to the underworld.”

“Why?” Chance Five says. “Why are you doing it?”

At the question, Rope stretches his neck and makes a visible effort to relax again. “I might be insane. I might be. I started just trying to find the vanishing point. For every one of who I am, the vanishing point was an important question. I watched what people did online and found people who had the same questions, the same needs, as I have. I would join, then kill drives, then join. Everyone I join with knows what I’m doing and agrees to do it. The network requires agreement. And we join, and I kill a drive. And so we become an experiment.”

“I don’t see how you ran an experiment at all,” Chance Five says. “Your perspective should shift with each join. You add the new life experiences, you add the new ideas. How could you maintain a plan through hundreds of joins? This just isn’t believable. You either used a fixative, or you’ve got some kind of virus.”

“Either way,” Leap says, “you’re not whatever it is you say you are. You’re something else. You’re a bogeyman, someone who just enjoys killing bodies.”

As Leap says this, it suddenly strikes Chance as unlikely that Rope would have come to meet them with only a single drive. He quickly gets Chance One out of the booth and looks around the bar. But none of the other patrons is paying attention to them.

The bartender has seen him jump up and is clearly annoyed. Chance ignores the unspoken question of whether they want a round.

Rope, watching Chance One, says, “Don’t worry, I really only have this drive left. And one more that’s down. You know her. The waitress. I’m borrowing cycles from her. So this is it. This is all I have. If I had other drives, you’d be in trouble. I’ve killed a few others, like yours. I might be starting to like it. But the Directorate took my supplies, my things.” Rope’s eyes widen with a parody of scary intensity that actually is scary. “They found me in my lab-o-ra-tory,” he says. “They’re not interested in my experiment anymore.”

“Why now?” asks Chance Five. “Why not before?”

“They don’t tell me. Changes to the network? I don’t know.”

He drinks the fourth shot, then turns to Leap. “As to what you said before, I don’t have a virus. I’m not using a fixative. I autopsy drives, or did. No prions. I’m careful because the work is important, the search for a join’s natural life span. If a join lives thousands of years, tens of thousands, it’s the sum of many, many people. As I am. I’m a simulation, as close as science can come to immortality, but without the wait. And I found the vanishing point, or maybe it found me. But I don’t know where it is, or what it means.”

“You’re saying that you’re what we’re heading for?” Leap asks.

“Yes. That is what I’m saying.” He glances at Chance Five and Chance One, then looks back at his empty shot glasses and continues, “At first, ferals joined me because they understood. They believe join is murder. Wanted to prove it. For a while, they were enough. But everyone I am shares one particular thing. A two-sided coin, hope on one side, hate on the other. Hope for a better world. Hatred for this one. That is what I am now. It’s all that’s left. So I have become a drunk.”

Leap asks, “How did killing Chance’s drive help the experiment?”

Rope is becoming even more bleary eyed. He speaks slowly and carefully. “Look, nothing personal. I killed you because you wanted me to. And because it’s what I do. Maybe. Or no, I killed you because killing is . . . killing is a funny thing. It has meaning. It’s real change.”

Chance Five shouts, “Killing my drive didn’t change anything!”

“Well, it changed my legal standing, for one thing. You’d think we’d have sorted that out by now.”

The last few words are nearly inaudible, spoken through a yawn. Rope looks very tired, and his head is slumping toward the table. Leap Four rises quickly off the bench, leans across the table, puts a hand on both of Rope’s shoulders, and pushes him savagely up against the back of the booth.

“You know I’ve flipped,” she says. “Can anything be done?”

“Hey, hey!” shouts the bartender.

Rope regards Leap, blinks, but it’s clear that he’s still fading. Leap slaps him, hard, snapping his head to the right.

“What do you know?” she demands. Rope doesn’t respond. Leap grabs the back of his head, gripping what she can of his hair, and shakes him.

“Hey!” yells the bartender.

“What do you know?” Leap shouts again, and now she’s just hitting him, his shoulders, face, and head, leaning as far as she can across the table. At first, her blows slide off, then, just as Rope appears to be shaking himself awake, she lands a bruising punch to his chin and one to his cheek. Chance Five throws himself against her, knocking her into the back of the booth.

Chance One turns toward the open room just as the bartender is coming around the bar with a sawed-off shotgun.

Leap has managed to knee Chance Five, knocking him far enough back to give her another shot at Rope. She’s stretching across the table when the bartender, who has reached the end of their booth, starts yelling.

“Get out! All of you! I don’t need fights. I don’t need your kind.”

He racks a round in the shotgun, and the room becomes very still.

Rope has been slowly lifting himself in the booth. His head lolls, and then he raises it up. He smiles.

“Flipped,” he says.

“Get out!” snarls the bartender.

“I do know someone,” says Rope, slurring, barely audible, “to meet you. Ask Hamish Lyons. He’s with . . . ferals . . . in Arcadia.”

His eyes close. Leap Four stretches across the table and shakes him, but he doesn’t respond. Leap lowers him slowly to lie on the table.

“Get out and take that trash with you!” growls the bartender. The three of them slowly slide out of the booth. The bartender steps back and watches as they start toward the exit.

Rope shudders and sits up. “I’m gonna stay,” he says. “Need a drink.”

Leap asks loudly, “Where is Arcadia?”

Rope can’t remain upright. He begins to slump toward the back of the booth.

“Don’ know,” he says, “but I tell ’em yer comin’.” His eyes close again.

Team Teenager is back on the planes of Uyuni: Chance One— Ashton. Chance Two—Renee. Chance Three—Jake. Chance Four —Shami-8. And Chance Five—Javier. Which, Chance realizes, means all of the drives must be asleep. Chance tries to ignore that, tries to avoid waking up by focusing too much on the fact of the dream.

“Hamish Lyons was joined with Music.” Jake, Chance Three, is speaking.

They’re standing shoulder to shoulder in a circle, their backs to one another, facing the endlessly receding white salt plains. Each of them throws a long, distinct shadow that extends outward, as if the sun were in the center of their circle. But there is no heat from behind them. Their bodies are cool.

Jake’s voice is felt as much as heard. It is audible like the sound of wind hissing across the plain. Then with each syllable, his voice takes a firmer shape, until at last it detaches from the sounds of the wind and becomes more fully the sound of breath shaping words.

“There’s no record of him among ferals.”

“Before he joined Music, what did he do?” Shami’s voice is sweet and comforting, high and strong. The five of them are clothed in loose denim and fleece. There is no concern about misunderstanding, no worry about perception, no work to say things well. They can each feel the bodies of two others touching the sides of their own, and the whole shifts gently as each of them breathes.

“He’s the neurophysicist whose work is most closely identified with the quantum network,” Jake answers. His words sound like an article Chance once read, but Chance’s mouth is speaking them. “He created experiments to demonstrate the effect of consciousness on the physical world. He was twenty-nine when he joined Music.”

“Should we tell Leap?” It’s Renee who asks, her curly hair shifting slightly in the breeze.

“Tell Leap what?” asks Javier.

“That he can’t help her,” says Ashton thoughtfully, considering the most likely shape of events. “That Hamish Lyons is gone. That whatever he was disappeared a long time ago into the meme virus that claimed Music. That I don’t think our conversation with Rope provided anything useful.”

“Why say that?” insists Javier. “How do we know that?”

At the far edges of Uyuni, miles across the salt plain, in a distant gray dimness, each of them sees very slight movement. They each notice it at the same moment and strain to see it better. Javier realizes that he really should be seeing mountains rising up at that distance, at least in that direction, but the mountains aren’t there. Instead there is a shifting, as if a storm were shuffling dark clouds very slowly toward and then away from a vanishing point on the horizon. With a chill they each have the same realization at the same moment: that movement is of bodies pressed together, people perhaps, so distant that they are indistinguishable from one another and indistinguishable from the weather that is moving them.

The five teenagers know that the faraway bodies are both familiar and alien. They are sure that they understand what the people who move those bodies long for, what they want, what the people see, and how they decide, why they shift so slowly on the far horizon. But they also know that the distant cloud of bodies is not them, is different from them, and that the clouds of people on the horizon are moved not by weather but by hunger, an essential hunger that each of the five of them standing in the circle shares.

Shami says, “It’s getting cold.” And her voice sounds distant.

“Rope knows more than we do,” says Javier. “We think Hamish Lyons was part of Music, but how can that be if he’s living with ferals now?”

“Arcadia isn’t a real place.” Ashton speaking.

A cold breeze carrying the strong, sharp taste of salt brushes over each of them, blowing in from every direction.

“Why did we leave Rope?” asks Renee.

“He was in pain. He couldn’t help us.” Shami.

“The bartender forced us out.” Ashton, remembering a sting of fear as the bartender pumped the shotgun.

“Hamish Lyons knows more about the network than anyone else alive.” Jake.

“We should find him.” Javier.

Their shadows are fading on the white plains. The gray shifting clouds in the distance are closer and the distance is smaller. In the whistle of the high wind on the plain they begin to hear voices.

“Rope can’t help us,” says Ashton forcefully. “He’s gone. He’s mad.”

Now they hear snatches of voices, each asking a piece of a question, and the questions themselves are indecipherable, the questions are the sound of the wind and the scraping of wind-borne salt crystals against the flat plain.

“We have to help Leap,” says Shami.

“I practiced for years. There is an enormous amount of research. There’s nothing to be done.” Jake’s voice is restrained, sad.

All of Chance’s drives awaken at the same moment. The world floods in through four sets of senses. Chance One, Two, and Five are lying across one another in a tangle of limbs that includes Leap Four. Chance is aware of many pulses beating, the warmth off the skin of limbs, chests, and stomachs, the shifting and sounds of many bodies breathing. It takes a few moments to sort through which of them doesn’t belong to Chance; which belongs to Leap.

Chance’s drives are each experiencing a pulse of adrenaline as the dream, which felt preternaturally real and sharp, recedes from experience into softer memory. Chance carefully stretches and flexes limbs, moving out from under and moving off of Leap, trying not to wake her while finding spots on drives that have gone numb—feet, hands, and arms—and working them slowly to reduce the tingling. Return them to normal feeling.

Chance Four sits upright on the couch in the living room where she’d fallen asleep. It’s still dark out, and the room smells of soft leather. She stands slowly and stretches. She arrives in the kitchen at the same time as Leap One.

Chance One and Five roll out of bed, and they and Leap Four form a line for the bathroom.

In the kitchen, Chance Four says, “I didn’t want to wake you up.” From the way she rocks slightly forward as she walks, to the constant movement of her hair, Chance Four always conveys the impression of being about to do something.

“My Four’s going back to sleep,” Leap One says. “She’s beat.”

“Ah, I’m so sorry about that,” says Chance Four. “I didn’t mean to tackle her that hard. Is anything hurt?”

“No. And I was out of control, so you had to. Good thing your Five knows enough karate to stop me. Guess I’m lucky he doesn’t know more.”

“This drive would have restrained you more effectively,” says Chance Four.

“Without beating me up?”

“I can’t guarantee you wouldn’t have been hurt.” Chance smiles.

“I’m gonna join with a professional wrestler,” says Leap.

“So,” Chance says, “have you been able to hide the flip?”

“Up until yesterday, yes. But that was bad, what happened while we were shopping. Autonomy marked the video for review. I’m surprised it took this long. I thought Autonomy was stricter. Made me wonder how much we might have gotten away with.”

“Who were you flying with?”

“Regal. I don’t think he even noticed.”

Chance Four laughs.

“He’s such a piece of work,” says Leap One. “He invited me for a mixer and suggested I not bring One or Four. He said, ‘It would work against the aesthetic vision.’ I thought, God, if I could have just shown up with my Five.”

Leap and Chance share a further laugh. Then Leap suddenly stops. At first he holds his breath, then he exhales cautiously, his eyes closing in pain as he leans back against a counter. After a moment, he breathes in slowly. He opens his eyes and says, “I can actually feel it now, all the time. Before, I didn’t notice the spasms. I just felt a pain if my hand banged against something. The last couple, though, I’ve experienced them. It’s like having razors in my mind, separating me. Like being cut by numbness. The worst thing is, it almost feels like the same thing I had as Josette.”

“Leap, I don’t know if this lead, this Hamish Lyons thing, is going to work out.”

“Yeah, I know. He was part of Music, right? So, he’s gone.”

Chance Five has entered the kitchen and is getting orange juice. He sets a glass on the counter in front of Leap One and one near Chance Four.

“How is your treatment going?” Leap One says, directing the question to Chance Five.

“As expected, I guess,” says Chance Five. “Not good.”

Chance Five drains his juice and shuffles slowly out, Leap One watching him go.

“I’m sorry about that,” says Leap One.

“I just had a nightmare inspired by that talk with Rope,” says Chance Four.

They had returned to the house in a state of shock, eaten dinner with minimal conversation, sat about the house for an hour or so, and then all went to bed. Chance was surprised but pleased when Leap Four decided to spend the night with Chance’s three drives. While leafing through Civ News reports, Chance Four fell asleep on the couch.

“I’m going to turn him in,” Chance Four says. “Turn Apple in.”

“That’s probably the right thing to do,” Leap says, “and I know it might be dangerous not to. But he said himself, he would have hurt us if he could have. He doesn’t have the resources anymore, to hurt people. Can we wait, just a day or two? What if he does . . . help?”

Chance Four drinks a bit of the orange juice. She says, “I don’t understand how he’s doing it. If he’s telling the truth, about the eight hundred, then he’s got to be cycle starved—”

“To maintain awareness with only two drives, after that many joins.” Leap finishes the thought.

“He’s a miracle and a horror,” Chance says.

“Yeah,” Leap One says, “like we are.”

“What do you mean?” Chance asks. Leap doesn’t answer.

“Isn’t Arcadia meant to be a kind of ideal place?” Chance says. “Where everything’s simple and good? That sounds like the right place to find a cure.”

“That sounds like a place that doesn’t exist.”

Leap’s house in the Olympic Archipelago is quiet. It’s late afternoon, but Leap Three has just finished a shift at the ER and is sleeping. Most of his long body is underneath light covers, but one leg is kicked out to cool. While gathering her coat from the coatrack by the door, Leap Two pauses to gaze out of the living room’s big picture window.

In this house, Leap remembers raising Ian and also remembers being raised by Josette. The memories from both sides of the relationship braid together into a single time line, filled with inconsistencies, doubt, bright moments, conflicting emotions. Sometimes Leap can untangle the different points of view and examine events fully, learning how each perspective saw things differently or how they agreed about what was happening. Sometimes the perspectives blur and can’t be teased apart. Secrets and intimacies are threaded like bright baubles through the dark places. The secrets can inspire revulsion, fascination, dread; but over time they dull. As they’re examined, their volatility fades.

From Ian’s perspective, this big picture window has the solidity and permanence of landscape, a reliable thing that never changed its basic character—its height and width, its dusty transparency, the thick molding of the casement that holds the frame in place. The house and window were constants in a childhood shaken endlessly by the temblors of family strife.

In other memories, the window is a thing Josette planned and then had built. A thing painted four times over the years; twice, this same periwinkle blue. And then there are the incidental memories of it, contributed by Leap Three and Leap Four. In the union of those perceptions is yet another experience. As Leap Two gathers her scarf, each perspective fades and shifts into the others. Each is fully realized, independent, and also a part of a comprehending whole.

When choosing action in the face of conflicting desires, the push of desires informs a center, and the center chooses. Leap has become stronger after the join with Josette. The clarity of Josette’s thought has buttressed Leap’s courage, allowed Leap to handle and examine possibilities once perceived as limits. Choices that at one time might have remained unimagined are now within reach. The conversation with Rope left Leap asking herself—is there anything she can do, on her own, to treat the flip?

Josette and Mark Pearsun had talked about joining. Mark loved her mind. She was flattered but found the prospect of shaving the edges from even one of her sharply held beliefs, of subduing any bit of her individuality, distasteful.

Still, Mark had an uncanny knack for winning, and he worked on her in a simple, effective way that had her wondering whether staying in the world for a few more centuries might not be the more interesting of her options. Then, one late December evening, during the period when she was formulating an agreeable response to him, he called her. He was miserable, lonely. He sounded like a stranger, a shadow of himself. He refused to open video.

“There’s no place for me anymore.” He started off sounding whiny and just got worse. “Joins are smart. There’s nothing I can do. Nothing I can do. It’s as if they see me coming. They’ve gotten so much better at it. They’re designing themselves now to include different kinds of personalities.”

Josette tried to interrupt. “Mark, this is word soup. I don’t understand. Start at the beginning.”

Undeterred, he talked over her. “And it’s like they can anticipate all of my moves. I can’t do what I used to be able to do. They understand me. Pieces of themselves, one from here, one from there, they put them together to figure out what I’m thinking. And the real-time communication. It’s complete. It’s uncanny. I can be talking with a join in New Denver, and one of his drives in Detroit will be trading on what I’m saying, as I’m saying it. And I don’t know it. It’s not like a conference call. It’s not a transfer of information. It’s really what they say, shared understanding. At first I thought there’d be a critical flaw. I just didn’t believe it. But it’s been so many years. And the things I’ve done.

“Josette, it’s real. I can’t fight it. I’m going to end up beaten. And it’s unfair. They’re better than I am. I’m good, but I’m losing. In the last few years, it’s gotten worse. I think, really, it’s like I’m a scrub in this world. That I almost don’t even count. Before Join, I would have been a rainmaker until I retired. I would have been the best. A kingmaker. Today, I’m . . . I’m an endangered species, a dead end.”

Josette was repulsed. This was about him. “Are you telling me you want to return my retainer?”

There was a long silence. When he finally spoke they both knew that a join was no longer a possibility. “No, Josette. I’m not.”

“Good, Mark. Then we don’t have anything else to talk about tonight.”

Now Leap Two is wrapping a belt around her long, green tweed overcoat. Beneath the coat, under her left shoulder, is the comfort of the handgun that she has strapped against her ribs. When the pod arrives, she directs it to Mark Pearsun’s office.

Chance and Leap find that Apple has disappeared. Of course, Civ Net has records of many joins named Apple, but none is the Apple they know. The bar where both of Apple’s drives worked is closed. Building management won’t acknowledge that it knows who he is.

Of Hamish Lyons, however, there are plentiful records. None of them appears to be useful. Endless hagiographies, reminiscences, explorations of the irony of his death as one of the first casualties of the new world that was made possible by his discoveries.

So Leap and Chance focus their effort on finding the place Rope mentioned—Arcadia. The name is from a region in Greece, but it’s also used in Northern California and in other places. They search Civ Net and the areas of the darknet they are able to access. They discover no connection between a place named Arcadia and a feral community.

Which leads them to feral communities. Most trace their beginnings to a specific belief or concern that they felt was either ignored by civilization or was incompatible with Join. Many have religious roots. The response to Join from organized religions was fragmented and provoked several highly publicized schisms. There were Christians who felt joins were predicted by biblical passages or holy mysteries such as the Trinity; but others saw them as the work of the devil or an attempt to usurp the prerogatives of the Almighty or simply as unethical. Alternatively, some Hindus associated the technology with avatars of divinity. Some believed this was a good thing; some believed it was bad.

Most of the swiftly marshaled decisions about the meaning of Join left no room for revision. Forty years after the trial of one thousand, several groups of objectors have left the embrace of civilization and formed their own feral communities.

Feral communities are generally governed and inhabited only by solos. Some are violently opposed to Join; some are more tolerant. While their size and technological levels vary, they are typically isolated and poor. Most joins see them as eking out a near-subsistence existence without the hallmarks of modern life, such as pods, spires, and Civ Net. As long as they don’t become too big or act out their hostility, civilization more or less lets them be.

But there is no scent of information that leads Chance and Leap toward any particular feral group. They all seem equally unlikely to be sheltering a founding developer of the very technology that defines their opposition to modern culture, assuming he still lives.

Chance suggests recruiting Mark Pearsun to help. Leap is evasive but clearly doesn’t want to. Then Civ News reports on Pearsun’s apparent suicide, by carbon monoxide poisoning. The death had gone undetected, the body sealed in Pearsun’s garage for a few days. Leap says something like “I guess that settles it,” with a tone of voice that doesn’t invite further inquiry.

Two weeks after their meeting with Rope, as Leap’s health continues to deteriorate, Chance and Leap admit to each other that they’re not going to find Arcadia. At which point they receive a recorded audio greeting. When the message arrives, it announces itself through a very slight pulse on their retinal displays. They open and examine it at about the same moment. It’s addressed to both of them.

They play it over their cochlear implants, so each of them is playing it privately. At first, it’s difficult to hear the words being spoken through distortion and static; but it becomes easier after a few listens, and after they’ve found the thread of the voice, which is male.

“Hello. This is Shimah Snoyl. I understand you’re looking for me. You’ll have one opportunity to find me. To the join that’s ill, bring all of your drives. You won’t need to bring food, changes of clothes, or anything else. Your affairs should be okay without your attention for at least three weeks. Be ready in three days. Don’t discuss this message over the net, or we will never meet.”

Chance One and Four and Leap One are sitting in Leap’s kitchen. Chance One closes the audio message, which immediately disappears. “Don’t close it!” he says, and Leap One hesitates.

“Why not?”

“Mine is gone. I think it self-destructed.”

“Ah,” says Leap One, “mine just disappeared too.”

Chance Four is finishing lunch. All three drives are silent as Chance One and Leap One open personal displays and begin to search their histories. The Civilization Network service automatically archives messages. Things don’t get lost. But the audio file is not there.

Chance Four says, “Where is it?”

“I don’t know. I had it.”

They keep looking. After a few moments, Leap says, “It was real. I saw that you had it too. We both heard it. Was it real?”

“Yes,” says Chance One.

“Then it should be here, shouldn’t it? If it was real, it should be here.” Leap One stops looking and turns to Chance One. “What did you hear, verbatim?”

Chance One recites the message.

“That’s exactly what I heard,” Leap says.

“We both heard it,” says Chance.

“So it’s real.”

“But . . . ,” Chance One says, “but I don’t have the message. It’s not in my history.”

“You must have destroyed it,” says Leap.

“I didn’t, but I checked the routing path too, and it appears to be gone from the servers.”

“You did a full delete, accidentally, maybe?”

“No, I didn’t. I don’t even think that’s possible. Do you have it?”

“No.”

“Did you do a full delete?”

“No.”

They look at each other in disbelief. Leap One says, “It’s as if the table disappeared.”

“This is all fucking crazy.”

“It can’t really be that simple to bypass the audio filters,” says Leap. “Just lowering the resolution of the recording, adding in some garble, and saying your name backward?”

“Oh,” Chance One says slowly, “yeah, Shimah Snoyl, Hamish Lyons. And the name Hamish Lyons is probably a flag for net sensors. No, I don’t think it’s that simple. I bet that audio distortion wasn’t random at all. A lot of work went into that message.”

“How would he know we’re looking for him?” Leap asks.

“Our research?”

“Okay,” says Leap, unconvinced.

“Or Rope told him.”

“Maybe,” says Leap, “in which case, how do we know this message was from Hamish Lyons?”

“We don’t.”

After a few moments, Chance says, “He can’t authenticate it because use of his authentication would trip the net sensors.”

“I’m supposed to pack up my drives without any assurances?”

“Who else would it be?”

“Rope.”

“Yeah, it could be Rope.”

Leap One throws up his hands and says, “Okay. Can you put my Two and my Three up here for a day?”

“Yes,” Chance says.

Chance One and Four are both watching Leap One. Chance One says, “We never really talked about Mark Pearsun’s suicide.”

Leap One looks at Chance One, on his right, then across the table at Chance Four. Leap’s jaw clenches. Then he relaxes and says, “I think it’s terrible. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Chance realizes with surprise that Leap is hiding something.

Three days later, at 4:30 p.m., Leap One, Two, Three, and Four and Chance Four are waiting in Chance’s spire apartment. Chance receives a delivery notice. They’ve been there all day.

They have agreed that Chance Four will try to accompany Leap but that Chance’s other drives should be elsewhere. For protection, Chance has spread them out, putting distance between them. Chance Five is at a hotel, Chance One has gone to Leap’s house in the Olympic Archipelago, and Chance Two is now en route to Barcelona.

They’ve been keeping the exterior walls of Chance’s apartment opaque. A pod-approach video opens on a wall display. It shows a short middle-aged man with a slight potbelly exiting a pod that’s just come to rest on Chance’s balcony. Recognition routines identify him as Don Kim, a code-green truck driver. He has dark, thinning hair, is wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He stuffs his hands in his front pockets. He’s rocking back and forth on his heels with the habitual impatience of a solo delivery driver. He does not appear to have brought anything to deliver.

Chance motions for the door to open.

“Hi,” the man says. His voice is gravelly, worn. His face is pale and unhealthy looking. “I’m here for a pickup.”

At his hotel, Chance Five is searching the man’s profile information on Civ Net, but there’s nothing unusual. He’s self-employed, with a leased rig. Based out of Detroit. Married. One eight-year-old boy.

“I don’t have anything,” Chance Four says. Leap Two is now standing behind Chance.

“Yes, you do,” Don Kim says. “You have at least part of what I’m looking for. I just need her and the other three.”

Leap Two says quietly to Chance, though Don Kim can certainly hear it, “A truck driver. Really?”

“You’re Leap, right?” the truck driver says. “I’m Don, but you should already know that. Look, this isn’t a joke. I’m going to send you coordinates for my truck. Send over one pod with two of your drives. Land it behind the truck. I’ll open the doors. Those drives’ll come into the truck. The pod comes back here. Fifteen minutes later—and you have to wait at least fifteen minutes—the pod picks up your other two drives. Then, same thing. Don’t worry about clothes, food, whatnot. You’re covered. Don’t bring anything.”

“I’m coming,” Chance Four says.

“This is the drive that fights, right?” Don says. “Jai Kido? There won’t be any need for that. I really wish you’d chosen a different drive . . . All right. Okay. Then you’re gonna come fifteen minutes after the second group. We’ll be waiting for you.”

Don’s upper lip and forehead are both shiny with perspiration. He says, “Now I’m going back. Give me fifteen minutes, then send two of Leap’s drives. Got it?”

“Yes,” says Chance.

“Okay, look. This is probably scary, but the reality is that both of you are safe. Please don’t vid or in any way record anything. Please set your location to mask. And two things. First, the precautions are about avoiding notice. If they want to find us, they will. We want to avoid looking interesting. Second, I’m the only one who’s really putting his neck on the line here. If one of you screws up, my rig’ll get confiscated, and they’ll fish around in my brain. Leap has money. You’ll both be fine. I’ll be SOL. So please, do as I say for my sake. Okay?”

Chance and Leap both nod.

Don Kim returns to his pod.

As Chance closes the door, Leap says, “Fish around in his brain?”

“I don’t think anyone does that,” Chance says. “That would be a prime violation. Unconstitutional.”