“Then I congratulate her,” Folly said stiffly.
Or maybe you’re just jealous, Jim wanted to say. But instead he said, “Something wonderful has happened.” And Folly said, “Indeed.” So that refrain went around the table. But the Alices looked reserved, and his own Alice said that no one had ever left the house for the city in the evening before, and Sondra’s Alice only shrugged emphatically when Jim’s Alice whispered something to her. When they had all gathered in the great room after dinner, he saw his Alice and Sondra’s Alice slipping away and followed them. “But couldn’t she just have departed without you noticing?” he asked when he caught up with them.
Sondra’s Alice shrugged, and his Alice said it would be very unusual.
Then maybe, he said, she just had a headache. Or maybe she had gone to the city in a unique manner because she was a unique person And then he said maybe she was gardening at night, and that before they knew it she’d be doing something amazing like gardening on the walls or in the air. But he knew before they got to her room that when he had said something wonderful had happened he had just been too afraid to say that he really had meant something horrible, and he was already crying before they knocked open her door, and before they found her alone in her bed, and well before he saw how she’d used an old-fashioned straight razor (and what was one of those even doing in the future) to cut her own throat down to the bone.
1.13
There wasn’t actually a bomb, and Jane, if she made it all the way into the Polaris Dewar of Dewars, need not actually blow them all up, or sacrifice her own life to reclaim her husband’s dignity. It was just a little powder Hecuba called the Kiss. All Jane had to do was puff it into a piece of the cryonics technology, and the rest was all small molecules riding on microscopic winds of chaos, getting in where they didn’t belong, thawing heads and, if you believed in that sort of thing, setting captive spirits free. It was Medea666, a university chemist in her offline life, who made it.
Jane didn’t say anything to Brian about applying; she just filled out the preliminary forms, which were more a declaration of interest than anything, a few pages of ordinary questions about her background and health that reminded her of hospital credentialing paperwork. Only at the very end was there anything like an essay question: In 120 characters or fewer, please tell us why you deserve to live forever.
She might have written, Because I am terrified of death. But she wrote, Because no one deserves to die, which was what Hecuba had told her to write.
Now we wait, Hecuba said after Jane submitted her preliminary application. It can take up to six weeks to process, so don’t worry about rejection until then. We usually make it past this stage. It’s the next one that kills us. But that same day Brian sent her a text, just a beaming smiley with his eyes screwed tight with pleasure.
A small box arrived. Inside there was a shiny silver thumb drive, labeled with the blue Polaris pyramid. Are you sure this is safe? Jane asked Hecuba before she inserted the drive. What if it’s a trap? Or it spies on us?
They’re far too arrogant to ever doubt your interest. Do it.
She plugged the drive into her laptop and when the icon appeared — it was another Polaris pyramid — she opened it. Her computer asked her if she was quite sure she wanted to open the program, because it was from an unrecognized source, and Jane hesitated again, but clicked yes. Her screen went dark for a moment before it turned Polaris blue. Jane pushed a few buttons in a panic, trying to get her desktop back, but her computer only responded by turning on its fan and making a long trill of high clicks. She stabbed at the escape button, and then pulled the plug, but the computer had a nearly full battery and didn’t notice. An animation was starting in the distance of the flat blue field. Jane had just remembered to push the power button when a woman’s face suddenly rushed to the foreground.
“Greetings and salutations!” the woman said, smiling as she spoke. “Greetings and salutations!” she said again, then closed her eyes in a long blink. “Please state your full name.” Jane hesitated. The woman asked again, so Jane told her.
“Text input!” the woman exclaimed. “Dr. Jane Julia Cotton Polaris Aspirant Number 617.460.666, welcome to Part Two of your application for membership at Polaris. My name is Alice. This is a virtual interview, which should take between fifteen and twenty hours to complete but may be terminated at any time. Shall we begin?” Her blind eyes searched the room for thirty seconds while Jane hesitated. “Shall we begin?” she repeated.
“Sure.”
“There are no right or wrong answers,” Alice said. “This is merely a process of discernment.”
“Are you a robot?” Jane asked.
“I am not a robot,” Alice replied, so quickly that Jane was sure everyone must ask that question. “I am a recording algorithm and a speaking face. All decisions regarding membership are made by the Polaris Membership Board, which receives my reports via continuous feed. Please tell me about the animals in your life. Pay special attention to pets, but do not exclude any animal to which you have had a strong positive or negative emotional attachment.”
“What has this got to do with the future?”
“All information is relevant to the future,” Alice snapped.
She’s very testy, Jane wrote later to Hecuba. Be nice, Hecuba wrote back. We need you to get close to the dewars. So you have to be nice to all of them! So the next day, when Brian called to leave his customary message, Jane picked up the phone.
“I’m so sorry for my negative tone before,” she said to him. “I suppose I took my anger out on you, but really I just miss my husband. I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course,” Brian said. “Of course I do. And now… and now you can…” His voice caught in his throat and he began to softly cry.
“I’m sorry,” Jane said. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
“Please don’t apologize. I’m just so happy to be able to finally help.”
“But is it okay that you’re talking to me, now that I’m making an application?”
“There’s no conflict of interest. I’m the director of family services, but I sit on the admissions board, too, and sometimes I wear both hats.”
“Did you take Jim’s application?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m just trying to understand what he saw in you,” she said, too harshly. So she added, “I mean, I think I know, but I want to be sure.”
“He saw the future in us,” Brian said. “And now—” His voice caught again, but he mastered himself. “And now he’s waiting for you.”
Jane didn’t respond to that. She only said she had better get back to the application, meaning she had to get back to Alice, though as it went on over the next couple of days, it felt to her more like all three of them — Alice, Hecuba, and Brian — were interviewing her at the same time, and when she went to bed at night she found herself muttering to them indiscriminately, in the space between waking and sleep.