“Who told you I was here?” she said.
“Quinn.” I waited for a wince that never came. Her face was empty.
“I didn’t want anyone to come,” she said. But she nodded at the bed. “You’re here. Might as well stay. Sit down.”
The room looked exactly like the one I’d had. Featureless white walls, but Ani had posted no pics to remind her of the people waiting for her in the outside world. Before, she’d been one of the most avid zoneheads I knew, taking pics of everything, posting them to all of our zones and guilting us into pretending we cared. But now there wasn’t even a ViM screen in sight. It was just the bed, the chair, the desk, and her. She sat so still, she could have been another piece of furniture.
“So, are you… doing okay?” I didn’t know what to say. But stupid seemed better than silent.
“Would you be?” she asked dully.
“I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“For, you know. All this.”
“Why do people do that?”
“What?”
“Apologize for crap they didn’t do. I’m the one who should be sorry, right?”
“Are you?
She shrugged.
When I’d found her in the hidden lab, she’d been stretched out on a gurney, naked, her skull peeled back, her eyes staring at nothing, her lips forming a constant stream of nonsense syllables. Sloane and the others had been in the same condition—because of Ani, I reminded myself—but they’d long since been downloaded into new bodies. Only Ani had stayed trapped in the strange digital limbo, a fugue state that call-me-Ben had assured me was painless. Probably.
“So… how bad was it?” I asked. “Did it hurt?”
“Which part?” Her face twisted into a scornful un-Ani-like expression she could only have picked up from Quinn. “The Brotherhood experimenting on my brain? Or BioMax experimenting on my brain? Or dying all over again and coming back to life?”
“Any of it,” I said lamely. “All of it.”
“None of it,” Ani said. “Unfortunately.”
I didn’t ask what that meant.
“Last time I uploaded a backup was at Quinn’s estate,” she said, and I knew what that meant, at least: that when they’d rebooted her in a new body, they’d used Ani’s last stored memory. One she’d uploaded before the ambush at the Brotherhood. “But they told me what happened. And I saw some stuff on the network.” Stuff like archived vids of Savona preaching while Sloane, Ty, and Brahm hung limply from wooden posts. While the camera flashed to Ani in the audience, Savona’s pet skinner.
“It’s weird,” she said. “Knowing you’ve done things that you can’t remember. It’s like, I’d never do that—but I did it. Didn’t I?”
“Yeah. You did.”
“Except it wasn’t me,” Ani said. “Just a copy of me. And now I’m a copy of a copy.”
“Don’t,” I warned her. If she started spouting Savona’s crap about how we were nothing more than computer programs deluded into thinking we were real, I didn’t know what I’d do, but it would end with her shutting up.
“It doesn’t matter.” Then, the ghost of a tentative smile, almost like the old days. A little shy, more than a little playful. “I watched your vidlife. It was… different.”
“The same, you mean,” I said. “As ridiculous as the rest of them.”
“I meant, different for you.”
“That was the point, I guess. Show the orgs we could be the same as them.”
“Acting something out doesn’t make it real.”
“We’re hoping the people who watch vidlifes are too dumb to figure that out.”
“I figured it out,” Ani said.
“Well… you know me.”
“Do I?” The last trace of the smile faded away. “I saw you with him.”
“Riley? He’s waiting outside, but he can come in if you want to see him—”
“Not Riley.”
I knew she didn’t mean Riley.
“Have you heard from him?” I asked.
Ani shook her head. “What did he whisper to you?”
I shrugged. “Same old Jude. Everything’s need-to-know, right? And I guess I didn’t need to know anything.”
“Didn’t look that way,” she said.
“He said: ‘When you want to find me, I’ll be a mile past human sorrow, where nature rises again.’ Mean anything to you?”
“No. But then nothing he says means anything to me.”
I knew better than to antagonize her when I needed her help, but there was only so long I could keep pretending that Ani was the wronged party. “Look, I know he screwed up, but—”
“If you’re going to tell me it doesn’t matter, and it was a long time ago, don’t. Long time for you, maybe. For me it’s been a week.”
“No. I was going to tell you that if you wanted to get back at him, you should have done it. To him. Sloane, the others, they didn’t do anything to you.”
There was a long silence. I waited to see what would come next, anger or acceptance. I suspected she didn’t know either, until she spoke.
“It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” she said, with a weak smile. “That’s what I said, when they told me. I thought they were lying. Then they showed me the vids.”
“They weren’t lying.”
“I remember wanting to hurt him,” she said. “And I knew how to do it. He doesn’t care about what happens to him. You can’t do anything to him that someone hasn’t already done. I needed something that would… I don’t know.”
Make him feel responsible.
Make him feel deceived. Betrayed. Lost.
Make him give up on trusting anyone, including himself.
She was right; she did know him.
“It was just an idea,” Ani said. “I didn’t think I would actually do it.”
I couldn’t imagine how strange it must be to wake up and learn you’d become a different person, somewhere in that dark space between one memory and the next. That you’d done the unthinkable, and you would never remember enough to know why.
Then again, maybe she was lucky: She got to forget.
“I’m not sorry,” she said.
I didn’t know how I was supposed to respond.
“You can’t be sorry for something you didn’t do,” she added.
“But you—”
“Not me,” she said. “Not really.”
I wondered whether she actually believed it. I could understand why she wanted to.
“Do you know what you’re going to do, when they let you out of here?” I said. Small talk seemed the best defensive maneuver.
“Throw a party?” she said dryly.
“I mean, do you have anywhere to go? Because you could stay with me… .” I tried to picture that, Ani bunking in the doily-draped guest room Zo used as a dump site for discarded junk, the three of us gaming, shopping, giggling like it was a fifth-grade sleepover. “Or Riley has some space, and I know he’d—”
“I’m going back to the Brotherhood.”
“What?”
She spoke slowly, enunciating for my benefit. “When I leave here, I’m going back to the Brotherhood of Man. Auden has agreed to take me back.”
“You’ve talked to—” I stopped myself. Auden was beside the point. “You can’t.”
“Actually, I can.”
“They hate us,” I told her. “They’re against our very existence. They’re trapped in an archaic, delusional, Dark Ages philosophy and can’t accept the fact that consciousness is transferable, humanity is fluid, that life isn’t defined by flesh and blood, it’s defined by our nature, and our nature is human. They think—”