Key stared at her, thinking as hard as he ever had in his whole life. Yesterday, even this morning, he would have bet she couldn’t break the survival and command imperatives hardwired into her systems and threaded all through the arcane symphony of her software. But now? She’d surpassed herself and surpassed him. God alone knew what she was capable of doing. She was, in short, magnificent.
The thought of his own death was rather unpleasant, but hardly new. The thought of her death, the end of such uniqueness and perfection was appalling. There had to be some way to bring her around. Had to be.
“Look, I’ll probably die… in a couple… years anyway. But I couldn’t live… with myself if… it was at… your expense.”
Her gaze was unflinching. “You just said you’d get over it one way or another in a couple years.” Her voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “You said I could live forever. Do you really hate me that much?”
Where had that come from? “I don’t… hate you!”
Her anger was sudden, unexpected and blazing. “No? Then how the hell could you condemn me to living a hundred—maybe even hundreds—of years with the guilt of letting you die?”
They stared at each other, a man and a woman at the sort of impasse men and women have found themselves facing each other across as long as the race had been human. Her jaw was set and her eyes crackled with challenge. Through it all her finger remained poised over that off button.
For the second time that day Key found that he’d painted himself into one hell of a corner. In the end all he could do was laugh.
“What’s so funny?” she whispered.
“You,” he gasped breathlessly. “Me. Us.” He shook his head in amazement. “I don’t know… what I expected… from the first one… through Capra’s Keyhole, but—”
The respirator was running even slower now, barely giving him the breath to speak. And laughing was going to kill him. But he couldn’t help it. It was absurd and in its own way beautiful.
“—But I… never expected… back talk!”
“I’m not—”
He shook his head. “No. You. Win.” He fumbled around, located the cord, then found that he was barely able to hold onto it because the cold had turned his already weak hands into nerveless icicles. “We’ll stick… it out—”
He moved his chair so he could reach the outlets on the UPS, tried to connect the cord. The plug slipped out of his numb fingers. “—To the… bitter end. Together.”
He made the connection on the third try. The respirator began to whuff faster, filling his leaden lungs with air once more. It tasted sweet as a Twinkie and heady as wine.
“You really mean that?” she asked hopefully.
“Yes. You and me… whatever happens.”
Her smile was sweet and sad and achingly beautiful. “I don’t really want to die.”
“I know.”
“I just couldn’t stand the thought of living without you.”
“Me either.”
“I—” she made a helpless gesture. But her face told him what she wanted to say. Words which were hard for anyone to voice, artificial or not. Words he’d figured he’d end up saying at about the same time he ran the three-minute mile.
“I know. I love you too, Ursula.” They came out easily, like they’d been waiting to be said for a very long time. Maybe he had just passed through a Keyhole of his own.
“Do you really mean that?”
Key smiled at the woman, at the love he had waited his whole life for. His lungs were heavy, sludgy. He still felt the cold acutely, felt it gnawing at his flesh and sinking into the marrow of his bones.
Yet he also felt a warmth and happiness beyond any he’d ever felt in his entire life. He felt whole.
“Really truly absolutely.”
Nightfall steals what little heat and light there had been in the world outside the window. The wind blows ceaseless and cruel, and still the snow falls. The birds have already sought shelter, feathers puffed up against the frigid air and metabolisms slowing to conserve energy.
Inside the house darkness reigns. The deepening chill tightens its deadly grip.
The eyes of the stick-limbed man in the wheelchair grow heavy with the sleep which comes before the death of all dreams. His head lolls, lifts, slowly sags again.
Through the eyes of a small computer screen a woman watches over him, tirelessly whispering to him that he has to hold on, even as she feels her own resources dwindling to a vanishing point she can already sense all too clearly.
Speaking draws power, but she will not abandon either of them to silence until that is all there is left for them.
The indicators on the power supply have dimmed. Memory has become sluggish, thought painfully difficult. Much of her mind is grimly locked on the task of rationing what little power remains between the two of them, keeping them both alive.
She still could purge herself and shut down the cybernetic body she dwells in, leaving more power for him. Could, but she cannot bring herself to leave him alone. Together, he said. That is all she has ever wanted, the light she grew up to meet.
In spite of dwindling voltages and abandoned subsystems still she thinks, still she learns. She comes to understand that there is one other quality an AE finds when she passes into the mansions of existence on the other side of Capra’s Keyhole. Perhaps the most human and illogical quality of all.
Hope.
It does not compute, any more than love.
But it is, and that is enough.
A battered old Jeep appeared out of the blizzard’s fury and shouldered its way into the driveway, the growl of its engine and the chatter of the chains on its tires muffled by the bumper-deep snow it was pushing through.
Inside the snow-covered cab Rafe hunched over the steering wheel, grimly peering through the ice-crusted windshield into the cones of swirling white created by the headlights, navigating more by memory than by sight.
The house finally came into view, a deeper darkness against the night. When he saw that there was no lights here either, he felt even more of a chill than that which had come from over three hours creeping along at under 5 MPH in the Jeep’s all but unheated cab.
He’d gotten here as soon as he could, using his RN and EMT credentials and a lot of fast talking to get him past the roadblocks the police had thrown up to keep people off the treacherous where not impassible roads. For five and ten minutes at a time he’d been forced to stop and wait while the winds gusted into a frenzy, whipping the snow into the air and reducing visibility to exactly zero. Several times the drifts had been hood-high and nearly stopped him. Three miles back he’d come onto a tractor trailer which had jack-knifed and sheared off two utility poles. That explained the lack of lights in any of the houses he’d passed, and increased his sense of urgency. The driver of the truck had been dead and already half frozen. Rafe had called it in on his cellular, shoveled a path through the snow drifted shoulder high around the rig and continued on.
More than once he’d been afraid he wasn’t going to make it. Now as the Jeep clawed its way up the last few feet of driveway his fear was that he hadn’t made it in time.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” he whispered to the trusty old vehicle, giving the wheel a fond pat for a nearly impossible job well done as he shut off the engine. Then he grabbed a flashlight and his emergency medical kit, took a deep breath and stepped out into the storm one last time.
The snow had drifted chest-deep across the walk leading up to the garage’s side door. He fought his way through it, squinting against the gritty wind-blown snow hammering at his face and eyes. The flashlight’s beam barely reached five feet in front of him, swallowed up by white.