"I won't." And he didn't. A harder shudder passed through her, as if she were about to have a fit. She became limp. Her chest continued to rise and fall, pushed in and out by the machines, but Otto had seen enough of death to know that she was gone. For an hour he held her, then gently he laid her down, smoothed her hair and stepped away.
"We have all of her post-augmentation data, all soul captured, together with impressions of her pre-mentaug organic memories," said Dinez to him, entering quietly through the door. "What shall we do with it?" She hesitated, examined his face, then went on carefully. "I, I am not inclined to lose life, Mr Klein, not when there is a way of preserving it. All lives… they are precious, every one. I have seen a lot of death." Her words hung on the air between them.
"The war?"
"The war."
A lifetime of memories. Every waking minute, every dream, recorded. And within, like a phantom, perhaps an echo of what Honour had been. He considered asking Dinez if she was really proposing that he break the law, and was tempted to say yes, upload her; only for a second, but that was long enough.
He exhaled a shuddery breath that tasted of tears. He tried to sound strong. He had never felt weaker, a weak child in a titan's body. "Archive it," he said.
Dinez raised an elegant eyebrow.
"I will keep the memories; her imprint. But I will not bring her back. It is not what she wanted."
"As you wish," said the surgeon.
Otto disengaged the mentaug, and realised with some embarrassment that his face was wet. The barman looked at him as if to ask if he were OK, but the returning glare Otto favoured him with changed his mind.
Otto downed his drink and left.
He'd left the hospital with nothing of Honour but a plastic lattice containing a terabyte of soulless events. It wasn't enough. It never would be.
It was not what he had wished. He wanted her back. If he had had his own way, he would have had her uploaded into a pimsim. In the course of the years to come, he would often wonder if he had done the right thing, putting the temptation there in front of him. That the pimsims he'd met seemed to be as real as the people they once were had made feeling that worse.
If he couldn't have her, at least he had his memories, and the mentaug helped with that. He knew why he ailed when he could simply turn the mem-refresh function off. As painful as it was to wake up to Honour's absence, the mentaug let him see her every night. While he slept, she lived. Ekbaum was wrong, to an extent. It wasn't the trauma of losing her that was fucking him up; he was doing this to himself. He couldn't let go.
Maybe it was time, finally time to lay her to rest.
He ascended the arco in a fast lift, using his and Richards' subscription key. To get to his apartment he had to go past the floor the office had occupied. He stopped off to look. The AllPass got him through the exclusion barriers. That part of the arco was dark, windows black. Light came from far below, glimmering from the active markings of construction drones repairing the damage. Otto stopped at the edge of the blast zone. They had a lot to do. He clambered over buckled floor plating, past main structural beams exposed to the air. Where the bomb had gone off was a radioactive void. The walls and floor glittered with tiny biolights, monotasked nanobots scouring the area for residual radioactives, lights going from green to red once they had retrieved dangerous particles, trooping dutifully off into shielded containers to patiently await disposal.
Otto looked into the blackness of the hole in the arco for a while. Amazing, he thought, that the whole damn thing hadn't come down. But away from where their office had once been the damage was minimal. A testimony to modern construction and woven carbons and, he thought, perhaps to k52's genuine but misguided attempts to work for the human race — he could have employed a much bigger bomb.
Otto doubled back, let himself be screened for contamination. He underwent a nanobot wash at the edge of the construction site, and went back home.
His apartment was neat, as he'd left it several weeks ago, keeping itself clean and biding its time, far away enough to be unaffected by the micro-nuke.
Otto caught a smell of himself. He hadn't changed in days. He decided there and then to have a shower, and then call Ekbaum. Damn the hour — if he was going to force him into his lab, he could lose a little sleep in return.
First there was one thing he needed to do.
He had to say goodbye.
He went into his room and opened the closet. He pressed the security switch to his gunlocker. It slid open.
Honour's memory cube was where it always was, ensconced in a specially cut recess lined with felt, like his guns.
He smiled, wondering what Honour would think of the man who kept his wife in the gun closet.
He hefted the cube in his hand. It was slightly smaller than Honour's fist, opaque and faulted in the way that memory cubes were, mysterious with potent fractals.
It was all he had of her.
That, and the memory of a Jerusalem built of trumpets upon a December night, and a smiling face, happy in the candlelight.
He closed his eyes and pressed the cube to his forehead for a moment, the memory of her strong in his mind. He stood like that for a long time.
He wiped his eye with the back of his hand and pushed the cube gently back into its recess.
He would call Ekbaum. Later.