"No information will be lost," Art said. "And if we don't, it's crash time anyway."
"I wish we had more time to consider this," Fez said doubtfully. "If you're such a grand topological acrobat, why has it always taken an entire net to host you?"
The flash of activity Mark felt from Art went on-screen as a grin. "If you had your choice of a shoe box or a hundred-room castle, where would you live?"
"Don't ask that of someone who's been in a squat space for months," Sam said, and moved out of cam range. She came back a few moments later with a couple of feeds. "We'll have to take my unit off batteries and put it back on me," she told Fez.
"Gross!" Rosa called, still off-cam.
"No, she's right," Fez said, sighing a little. "To be disgustingly honest, I wish we had several more of them."
"We'll work on it," Sam said. "Later. It'll be something to do while we wait for someone to reinvent macrotechnology."
"I want to monitor this while we still can," Fez said. "Put as much of the compression on-screen as possible."
Art was agreeable, and Mark echoed it, knowing that the process was already well under way.
He wished he had Art's certainty that it was possible. It seemed a bit too much like going down his own rabbit hole. Art shared that he was still suffering a meat hangover, a block that prevented him from perceiving how dimensions of meaning could overlap with no loss, whether it was a memory or themselves. It would mean at least a temporary loss of the redundancy that had always been the safety net of human intelligence, but Mark was no longer that kind of human, and Art never had been.
The process itself was actually soothing. They might have been a couple consolidating their belongings as they moved into the same living quarters, which was something else he'd never done, discarding duplicated items or placing them in storage, carefully identifying and arranging what was left. Redundancies were being downloaded to chip for later restoration if possible. If desirable.
If desirable. Mark began to understand that it might not be so desirable to him later. The old concepts of private property and individual were fast losing their importance to him as he and Art came closer to being two aspects of one consciousness rather than two separate intelligences. And at the same time his sense of identity intensified. He was approaching the state of essence, a balance point where the question of self had room for only one answer: yes or no. And the step following essence was implosion. The rabbit hole.
By himself he could not have maintained the balance, not in an unfrozen, dynamic state. But Art was there for counterbalance.
"Are you sure there's going to be enough power?" Rosa asked for the millionth time.
Fez smiled. "Nanoware takes nano-power. Didn't I always say you were a force to be reckoned with, Sam-I-Am?"
"No," Sam said honestly. "I've never heard you say anything like that."
"Well, didn't you always know it?" He pulled a chair over and sat down next to her at her work island. There was a feed running from the pump to the large monitor so they could keep track of the rest of the consolidation process, though Sam doubted that anyone understood the two columns of symbols scrolling so rapidly as to appear to be garbage. It was being recorded, in case of any difficulties in reversing the process later. She felt a little sad. She had a feeling the merge was going to end up being permanent, and she was going to miss Art-by-himself.
Fez seemed to have lost all his doubts in the last hour. It wasn't just compression, he'd said, it was compression and encryption combined; the first case of voluntary compression and encryption on record. Rosa had wanted to know if that called for another national holiday or just a media conference, if and when there was any media again.
Now Rosa was grimacing at her. "Maybe we do need a backup power source," Sam told Fez. "In case I drop dead of cardiac arrest. Or Rosa goes crazy and rips my wires out."
"Rosa will behave," Fez said mildly. "I don't expect cardiac arrest, unless you've been toxing out on the sly. Have you?"
She shook her head. "No. It's just that the more I think about it, the more sensible a backup seems. How much longer do we have?"
"Not quite an hour and a half. Art and Mark should be done long before the deadline."
Sam glanced at the monitor again. Just about every other program had been downloaded to chip and stored, leaving the system wide open and nearly empty. After a while they would shut it down, and that would be it. They'd be cut off from the rest of the world. Sam couldn't remember a time in her life when that had ever happened before; twenty-four hours a day every day for almost eighteen years, she had been within arm's reach of outside contact; the idea of not having anything made her feel claustrophobic, and she said so.
"I've never thought of it that way," Fez told her. "Though I must admit, I've felt antsy since the dataline went down. It bothers me that I can't press a button and check on the rest of the world, or at least the small parts of it that I'm interested in. I'm not the only one. You haven't been able to walk around and see it, dear, but the irritability threshold around here is lower than it used to be. We're not in our natural habitat anymore. We've become denizens of the net. Homo datum."
"Synners."
Gina was perched on the edge of a box, not far from the incomprehensible screen.
"Pardon?" Fez said.
"A word somebody came up with a long time ago," she said. "From synthesizer. That which synthesizes."
Fez's face took on a dreamy look. "You just pushed one of his buttons," Sam told Gina. "Now all he needs is a box of doughnuts, a couch, and all night to discuss it."
"I wouldn't mind a pot of gourmet coffee, either," he said. "We might actually have two species of humans now, synthesizing human and synthesized human, all of us being the former, and Art Fish being the latter."
"And Mark being the bastard offspring of both," Gina added.
Fez blinked. "Make that three species. And like all good life forms, we have a natural enemy that can prey on all of us." He sighed. "This would have been fascinating if it could have lasted. But we have slightly over an hour now before we all revert to homo sapiens. Temporarily but, alas, indefinitely."
There was a beep from the pump unit. The large screen lit up with the words Program Completed.
Sam looked from the screen to the pump unit and then to Fez. "That's it? Really?"
"That's it, really. They're compressed. Got your shades ready?"
Sam hesitated. "Why don't we keep running a high-res monitor on solar as long as we can? That way, there'll be more power for the unit."
Fez gave her a squeeze. "You're a genius, Sam-I-Am."
She squirmed away from him uncomfortably. "It just makes sense, is all."
"Sometimes that's all it takes to be a genius."
She made a face at him. Having forced herself to adjust to him with Gator, she found herself annoyed at the slightest show of affection for herself. Or maybe she was just irritable because the dataline was down.
Keely detached his own keyboard with the battery and connected it for her. "That'll be easier than your keypad. Might as well have all the comforts while you can."
She smiled her thanks at him. "Should we ask them how they're doing, or let them signal us when they're ready?" Sam asked.
The monitor lit up then with a message.
›Whatever you do, Sam,
DON'T JOGGLE
THOSE NEEDLES!‹
"Glad to see the sense of humor survived compression," Fez said.
"But whose," murmured Keely.
"Come on," Rosa said, "haven't you ever laughed when you were in a tight spot?" As Sam was looking for something to throw at her, she noticed Gina retreating to a far corner of the ballroom and Gabe following after. She looked up at Keely questioningly. He shrugged, making a to-and-fro waggle with one hand.