“Please,” Sari whimpered.
There was no one to stop him, no one to punish him. It was the city: no rules, no consequences. And if there were no consequences, it was almost like it hadn’t happened.
No one would miss her, I thought.
Riley had been her only ally—and she’d erased him.
I’m a machine, I thought, as Jude raised a fist, this one not aimed at the innocent floorboards, but at her face, her soft, pliable, breakable org face, the one that was so good at lying and pretending to be someone else, someone good. I have no soul; that’s what they say.
All I had to do was not act. No one would ever know, except the three of us.
“Stop.” I didn’t know I was going to say it until the word was out of my mouth. “Jude, don’t.”
He didn’t let her go. But his fist dropped to his side.
“She killed him,” Jude said.
I knelt beside him, put a hand on his shoulder, half expecting him to send me flying across the room. But he didn’t move. Neither did Sari, still prone beneath him, waiting for me to decide her fate. I hoped she didn’t think I was doing this for her.
I hoped she knew I wanted her to die.
“Don’t do this,” I said.
“I have to.”
“This isn’t you.”
At that he did shrug me off, weakly, and it was unconvincing enough that I tried again, but he grabbed my arm, squeezing tight. “You don’t know everything about me.”
“He did.”
“Shut up.”
“Riley told me, that night before the temple, that you couldn’t do… this.”
“He wouldn’t have said that.”
“He did.”
“I can do this,” Jude said. “For him.”
“This wouldn’t be for him.”
I felt dirty, invoking him like that. Dirty or not, it worked.
Jude stood up.
Sari didn’t wait around for him to change his mind. She streaked past us like a feral cat, disappearing into the shadows. Long, silent seconds passed.
Jude’s shoulders slouched. His head lolled on his neck. His arms hung limp at his sides. For the first time it was easy to picture him as he’d been before the download: slumped in a chair, body defeated. Except that in the one pic I’d seen from that time, his eyes had still been alive—something in him had been fighting, strong. Unbowed by its prison of atrophied muscles and sagging flesh. Now, when I tipped his head up and forced him to see me, those eyes were dead.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he whispered.
I didn’t say anything.
“I hate you,” he said.
I put my arms around him, and he let me, and, dry-eyed and heartless and mechanical, we held each other up.
So what do you do?
What do you do when there’s nothing to do next? When it’s over, when whatever rage and panic drove you from one moment to the next disappears, and there’s no more must do this, must go there, must stop him, must save him? When you can’t let the day end, because today was the last day you saw him, the last day you heard his voice, the last day he knew? Today, when the sun came up, when you opened your eyes, he was still in the world; today is still a world he knew, and so is still a world you understand. Today he’s still an is, his loss something still happening, an unfolding event, a sentence with a question mark; today there’s still a what happens next.
What do you do when today ends and you know tomorrow will open on a world in which he’s dead? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, until he’s a thing that once happened, a thing you used to know.
People use words like “unthinkable.” But what do you do when the unthinkable happens, and refusing to believe it won’t bring him back?
How can anything seem unthinkable anymore, when you’re a machine, a living impossibility, a stack of memories in a head-shaped box, when you, the real you, died almost two years ago, just like he did?
How could you be stupid enough to forget that the unthinkable happens all the time?
Happens to you.
Which is why you should know exactly what to do: what you always do, what you have to do. Nothing. Because reality doesn’t need your permission to exist; tomorrow doesn’t need your approval to dawn. You go home, to a place that was never your home, with a sister who by her own choice is no longer your sister and a brother whose shared grief makes him family in a way that shared skin, shared circuitry, shared manufacturer never could. You go home and you lie in a bed that used to be his and you think about uploading the way he uploaded, following his lead, wherever it takes you. You think that if you really loved him, you wouldn’t hesitate; you would want his infection burning through your artificial veins.
You would, but you don’t, and so you close your eyes and are grateful that you don’t have to try to sleep with memories of his face burning the insides of your lids, that you don’t have to bury your face in a pillow so the others don’t hear you sob and scream, that your hands are still and unshaken. You’re grateful, for once, that your body can’t feel, that the truth stays lodged in your mind, where it can’t hurt, that you can close your eyes and shift your consciousness in that familiar, deeply inhuman way, flicking an internal switch. It’s not like falling asleep, fading away. It’s like one moment you’re awake and in agony and wondering how long it will be before you forget the sound of his voice.
And the next moment—
You’re gone.
When I woke up the next morning, Riley was still dead.
Zo was curled up next to me in bed, her eyes slitted and fixed on Jude. I suspected he had been up all night. Maybe watching me, to make sure I followed through on my promise not to upload a backup, just in case Riley’s wasn’t an isolated case. Or he just hadn’t been able to face the end of the day. Riley’s last day.
He sat with his back to the wall, eyes open but darting sightlessly back and forth. It was the telltale flicker of his long lashes that gave it away: He was linked into the network, staring at us but seeing his zone or a vidlife or, for all I knew, the president’s latest sex vid. Anything to keep the world away.
I poked Zo. “I know you’re awake.”
For a moment she didn’t move, like she could fool me. Then she threw in an admirable pantomime of “waking up.” “I am now.”
“Uh-huh.”
She jerked her head at Jude. “Can he hear us when he’s doing that?”
“With perfect clarity,” Jude said, gaze still blind.
Zo flinched at his voice. I wondered how long it would be before she stopped seeing him the way he’d been in the city, like an animal.
“Get up,” Jude said abruptly, closing his eyes in the long, slow blink that I knew would disconnect him from the network. “We’ve got a problem.”
I almost laughed.
He smiled weakly. “I mean a new one.”
It was the lead story on every news zone. Ben’s virus analogy had been more apt than he knew: Riley was patient zero. The infection had spread through the system, and any mech who connected their uplink before word got out had been wiped. Backing up, the process that was supposed to be our ticket to eternal life, now meant death. The permanent, org kind, from which we were meant to be exempt. Jude was already flying across the network, checking in with every mech he knew—and too many of them didn’t answer. The rest of us—the “lucky” ones—were dying too, just more slowly. The virus had wiped out our stored backups, and obviously we couldn’t make more. These bodies were now all we had.