At hour eleven of the application, Alice asked, “If you could send a message to the future, what would it be?” Then it was Jane’s turn to cry, so she was glad Alice’s blind eyes could not discern her tears. Her mind filled with all the things she might say to Jim, if she could believe for a minute that he was alive somewhere on the other side of time. She pondered over an answer, attempting to ignore the desperate accusations and shrill questions that came immediately to mind—Always together, never apart! and What am I supposed to do now? and Why? Why? Why?
“Are you still thinking about the question?” Alice asked, and Jane settled on I hope you are all very well indeed.
“Do you really believe we’re going to wake up?” Jane asked Brian. She knew he wanted her to ask that, and that she could ask it as many times as she wanted. It was like asking a Jehovah’s Witness whether they really believed that Jesus was their Personal Savior.
“As certainly as I believe I myself will wake up tomorrow morning.”
“But you might die in the night,” Jane said.
“If I did, a Polaris team would be at my house five minutes after my heart stopped beating. And then I would sleep just a little longer. It’s one of the advantages of living on campus, but we hope that one day everyone in the world will be so close to a doorway.”
Doorway! Jane wrote to Hecuba. They’re living in a graveyard!
It’s a cult, Hecuba wrote. Of course they say things like that.
But do you think it could possibly be true?
Who cares? Not me. I might almost forgive them for mutilating Albert’s body, but they mutilated the very idea of my marriage, and for that I’m going to destroy them if it’s the last thing I do.
At hour seventeen, Alice asked, “What is the purpose of life?” And Jane thought of all the things she could say that would immediately end her application: The purpose of life is to not think too much about the future or The purpose of life is to do justice to the past or The purpose of life is to die one day. Or even: That’s not really something you ever really know, except temporarily, the answer changes as your life changes or That’s not something you know in just your head, it’s something you figure out, day by day, in relation to one other really important person. These were all things that Jim had actually said to her, at one time or another. But she knew that none of them could have been what he had said to Polaris. Barely any of it was really amenable to articulation, anyway. “Do you need more time for the question?” Alice asked, and Jane said, “Yes, please.”
She couldn’t write: I try not to think about this sort of thing without my husband around, though that was still the truth. Or even, Life doesn’t have any purpose now that my husband is dead. Alice asked her a few more times if she needed more time, and Jane pressed her snooze button while she tried out her answers in pencil on the back of a grocery receipt. She wished she had time to call Hecuba, but Alice was starting to seem impatient, the intervals between her repetitions steadily decreasing. So at last Jane went with what seemed like her best answer.
The purpose of life, she wrote, is to live more life. Alice closed her eyes and looked thoughtful for a moment. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, but Jane thought it must have been forever, in computer time.
“Dr. Jane Julia Cotton,” Alice said, “your application is terminated. Congratulations, you are invited for a personal interview on the Polaris Campus in Oviedo, Florida 32788. A Polaris representative will contact you shortly to arrange your appointment. It has been a pleasure conducting your interview. Good luck to you!”
1.14
Everyone in the house promised Jim they’d come to Sondra’s funeral service, though none of them seemed too troubled by her death. “She’d made such progress this time,” Sondra’s social worker had said, tsking over the corpse.
“Wait, what? This time?” Jim had asked. He’d seen plenty of death in the hospital, but he’d never visited a crime scene. He’d turned away from the horrible gaping wound in Sondra’s neck, from the dull glint of bone deep in the cut, and buried his face in his Alice’s shoulder.
“This was not her first incarnation,” his Alice said, a little sadly.
“Or even her second,” said Sondra’s. “Though she stayed with us two weeks longer this time.”
Alice patted Jim on the head and explained that they would begin the process of waking Sondra again tomorrow. “Don’t be sad,” she said. “It’s not like she’s exploded. Sondra’s connectome endures.”
She led Jim out of the room, and the three of them went back downstairs to break the news to the others. Heads shook but no one shed a tear, and dinner went on as if nothing of particular note had happened. Jim got very drunk, and moved around the table, gathering rsvps for the funeral service and saying, “Someone has died!” To which the reply was always, “But not really,” and eventually Alice asked him, politely but firmly, to stop saying that, and when he didn’t stop, she escorted him up to bed.
“But what about the latest part of her?” Jim asked her as she tucked him in. “The part since you woke her up. Isn’t that part dead?”
“Well,” Alice said thoughtfully, though she looked a little exasperated at the question. “I suppose it is.”
“But isn’t that terrible?” he asked. “Don’t you think that’s terrible?”
“No,” she said. “It’s not particularly terrible. This iteration of Sondra wished to destroy itself, and now it has got what it wanted. Tomorrow, the iteration of her that wants to live forever will awaken again. What’s terrible about that?” Alice’s smile was so genuine and unconflicted that Jim wondered for a moment before he fell asleep if it wasn’t so terrible after all. But he woke three hours later, sober and ill, to remind himself that at least the latest iteration of Sondra should have a funeral. He turned on his light and walked softly to his desk. Turning his book over and flipping to the end of it, he spoiled page after page with a funeral sermon for his minimally deceased friend.
The next day was a holiday (which nobody would hear of canceling): a new client had come to the house in the night. Jim asked stupidly if it was Sondra come back again already, but Alice only shook her head. Still, he sneaked out of his room when the social workers told them all to disappear so the new client could have a tour, but all he saw was a head of short dark hair disappearing down the central staircase, followed by a social worker whom he’d never seen before.
No one volunteered to help with the service. “I like a Viking service best,” Jim said to Alice, “and I think Sondra would have too. Though of course we didn’t talk about it. What do you think?”
Alice said the manufacture of loveliness was always to be encouraged, but asked him if he really thought a funeral was strictly necessary.
“Yes!” he said crossly. “It really is!” He calmed down as he set up the chairs outside. He supposed he couldn’t expect Alice to really understand anything about a funeral. They probably didn’t have them anymore, in the future.