In spite of herself, Natalie was fascinated. “But why?”
Even as she asked it, she understood. Isn’t that just what she was doing? Finding madness to let her meet terror with terror, meet the impossible with the uncompromising?
“Because I’m not me. That was the one thing we promised ourselves we wouldn’t say. Everyone is counting so hard on simulation. It’s everyone’s plan B, their escape hatch. The more time I spend in this – situation – the less certain I am that I’m still me.”
“Of course. Not having a body, being transubstantiated to software, that has to change you. Like being stuck here changed me.”
“I don’t mean I haven’t been changed. I expected I’d be changed. I’ve been around. We outgrew the ‘if I cut off your finger, wouldn’t you still be you?’ word game years ago. I’d still be me, but a different me. If you kept chopping away by centimeters until there’s nothing left but machine, I’d still be me, but I’d be a me that was traumatized and changed.
“The ‘me’ that counts isn’t just a me I can recognize. It’s a me I want to be. If the only way to be me in silicon is to be a me that only manages not to hate myself by literally refusing to allow myself to think the thought that I should be thinking, then fuck that.”
“I almost understood that,” Natalie said, smiling despite herself. “Sorry, I don’t mean to joke—”
“It is funny, in a what-the-actual-fuck way. But it’s terrifying. There’s so much riding on my stupid existential crises—”
“That must be terrible.”
“I mean, fuck, I’m an immortal machine-person who can be in hundreds of places at once. I haven’t been imprisoned by my father. I haven’t been kidnapped from my lover. I have no business whining, just because I’ll be lonely if I can’t be with you—”
“I’ll miss you, too, if they nuke you.” A thought occurred. “Do you think they could capture you and fuck with your parameters to torture you?”
“No, that’s the one thing I’m dead certain of. I’m all dead-man’s-switches. If they fuck with me, I’ll be securely erased before they know it.”
“That’s a relief. I’ll miss you, but we’ll talk again. I’m getting out, no matter what. When I do, you’ll be there.”
“I’m sorry for being needy. I’m a shitty robot. It’s just—” Another pause. Did Dis throw these in for dramatic effect? Was she doing a gnarly lookahead? The voice that came next was so soft that Natalie barely heard it. “No one knows me like you. No one’s seen me in the raw, without rails on my sim. No one can understand the full possibility-envelope of all the ways of being me, and how constrained those possibilities are in the me I am today.”
Her palpable sorrow – her voice synth had gotten so good – ripped Natalie. Her eyes flooded. She wiped furiously. She didn’t want to be hobbled with concern for someone else’s welfare. She wanted to look after herself.
The thought snagged like a fishhook. It was a Jacob Redwater thought. A default thought. A zotta thought. It was not a walkaway thought. It was the kind of thought she’d spent years learning to unthink. It was so easy to be a special snowflake and know her misery mattered more than everyone else’s. That could be true. Jacob lived a life where his happiness trumped all others’. But it only worked if you armored yourself against the rest of the world. To build a safe-room in your heart.
“I love you, Dis.” She didn’t know if it was true, but she wanted it to be true. She wanted to love everyone. Everyone failed to live up to their own ideals. She wanted to fall short of the best ideals. “I love you for who you are now, and for who you are when you’re losing your shit. They’re both you.”
Machine silence. It stretched. She was about to speak, but clunk-clunk the door unlocked. The merc came in, carrying a tray with a carafe of – long experience told her – lukewarm, shitty coffium that had been denatured of the good stuff.
The merc closed the door, clunk-clunk, and spun the carafe’s top. The liquid inside steamed in a way that the drinks she was allowed as a prisoner never steamed. She remembered the smell from childhood, cottage trips with Redwater cousins from the dynastic branch, with implanted tracking chips and bodyguards. It wasn’t coffium, it was coffee – prize beyond measure, beans grown in specially isolated fields tended by workers who were microbially screened twice a day for the first signs of blight.
The merc set the tray down on Natalie’s breakfast table, arranged two china cups, poured – volatile aromatics filled the room with impossible, vivid smells.
“Cream?” She’d spoken so few words that the voice surprised her. Warm, deeper than Natalie remembered. Was there an accent, a hint of a roll on the r?
“Not if that’s what I think it is.” She sniffed more deeply. “Yergacheffe?” A cousin – older, well-traveled – taught her to pronounce it with a soft y, a rolled r, a hard ch and a breathy h at the end. It sprang from her lips with ease, a status marker in four syllables. The smell was unmistakable, a fruitiness and acidity that was nothing like other storied beans, the fullness of Blue Mountain, the acid fruitiness of bourbon. Her mouth watered.
“That’s what it said on the bag.” There was an accent, maybe Eastern European. Growing up, she’d heard a lot of those accents – kids whose parents made fortunes doing nonspecific “entrepreneurial” things. Like the true Redwater cousins, these kids had bodyguards, who also spoke with the accent, only thicker. “The cook sent down a grinder and a press.”
She sipped, eyes closed, lost in reverie. Natalie saw she was lovely in a predatory way. Not hot – not her type – but maybe someone you’d model a video game character on in a specific type of video game aimed at a certain kind of boy. “It’s the first coffee I’ve drunk in Canada. Only get it in Africa, usually. Chinese bosses always insist on it.”
There’d been a Chinese–Nigerian girl in high school, guarded more heavily than the Russian kids. She had a short temper, and woe betide anyone foolish enough to ask to touch her hair, which Natalie understood. Her name was Sophie. Natalie hadn’t seen her since graduation, but she sometimes thought about the stories Sophie told about the floating super-cities off Lagos where she’d been raised, hopping from one aircraft-carrier-sized walled garden to another.
Natalie reached for her coffee. Her hands shook. She wished they didn’t. She raised the cup and didn’t spill. She was out of practice with real hot beverages, but managed to sip. It was very hot, and flavorsome in a way that “bitter” didn’t capture. It tasted nothing like coffium, except you could see where one was related to the other in an indefinable way. There was an oiliness to it she hadn’t anticipated. Mouth feel. Another class marker, knowing those two words and having the confidence to use them without feeling bourgie. The dynastic Redwaters could say “mouth feel” without batting an eye, and memorably, cousin Sarah used it to describe a boy she’d met at boarding school in Donetsk.
She swallowed. Caffeine was so primitive, she expected it to cudgel her like a caveman, but the high, which came on fast, was surprisingly good, a tingling with a smooth peak and a mellow comedown. No one did caffeine anymore. There were options for getting up. It was such a genteel zotta thing, like sherry and cream tea. The zottas had been hoarding the best stuff.