them—had ended differently, with one team even being dropped from the rankings.
Afterward Mick walked on his own to the tram stop and caught the next service into the city center. Already he could feel that he was attracting less attention than the day before. He still moved a little stiffly, he could tell that just by looking at his reflection in the glass as he boarded the tram, but there was no longer anything comical or robotic about it. He just looked like someone with a touch of arthritis, or someone who’d been overdoing it in the gym and was now paying with a dose of sore muscles.
As the tram whisked its way through traffic, he thought back to the evening before. The meeting with Andrea, and the subsequent day, had gone as well as he could have expected. Things had been strained at first, but by the time they’d been to Starbucks, he had detected an easing in her manner, and that had made him feel more at ease as well. They’d made small talk, skirting around the main thing neither of them wanted to discuss. Andrea had taken most of the day off; she didn’t have to be at the law offices until late afternoon, just to check that no problems had arisen in her absence.
They’d talked about what to do with the rest of their day together.
“Maybe we could drive up into the Beacons,” Mick had said. “It’ll be nice up in the hills with a bit of a breeze. We always used to enjoy those days out.”
“Been a while though,” Andrea had said. “I’m not sure my legs are up to it anymore.”
“You always used to hustle up those hills.”
“Emphasis on the ‘used to,’ unfortunately. Now I get out of breath just walking up St. Mary’s Street with a bag full of shopping.”
Mick looked at her skeptically, but he couldn’t deny that Andrea had a point. Neither of them was the keen, outdoors type they had been when they met fifteen years earlier through the university’s hill-walking club. Back then they’d spent long weekends exploring the hills of the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains, or driving to Snowdonia or the Lake District. They’d had some hair-raising moments together, when the weather turned against them or when they suddenly realized they were on completely the wrong ridge. But what Mick remembered, more than anything, was not being cold and wet, but the feeling of relief when they arrived at some cozy warm pub at the end of the day, both of them ravenous and thirsty and high on what they’d achieved. Good memories, all of them. Why hadn’t they kept it up, instead of letting their jobs rule their weekends?
“Look, maybe we might drive up to the Beacons in a day or two,” Andrea said. “But I think it’s a bit ambitious for today, don’t you?”
“You’re probably right,” Mick said.
After some debate, they’d agreed to visit the castle and then take a boat ride around the bay to see the huge and impressive sea defenses up close. Both were things they’d always meant to do together but had kept putting off for another weekend. The castle was heaving with tourists, even on this midweek day. Because a lot of them were nervelinked, though, they afforded Mick a welcome measure of inconspicuousness. No one gave him a second glance as he bumbled along with the other shade-wearing bodysnatchers, even though he must have looked considerably more affluent and well-fed than the average mule. Afterward, they went to look at the Roman ruins, where Rachel Liversedge was busy talking to a group of bored primary school children from the valleys.
Mick enjoyed the boat ride more than the trip to the castle. There were still enough nervelinked tourists on the boat for him not to feel completely out of place, and being out in the bay offered some respite from the cloying heat of the city center. Mick had even felt the breeze on the back of his hand, evidence that the nervelink was really bedding in.
It was Andrea who nudged the conversation toward the reason for Mick’s presence. She’d just returned from the counter with two paper cups brimming with murky coffee, nearly spilling them as the boat swayed unexpectedly. She sat down on the boat’s hard wooden bench.
“I forgot to ask how it went in the lab this morning?” she asked brightly. “Everything working out okay?”
“Very well,” Mick said. “Joe says we were getting two megs this morning. That’s as good as he was hoping for.”
“You’ll have to explain that to me. I know it’s to do with the amount of data you’re able to send through the link, but I don’t know how it compares with what we’d be using for a typical tourist setup.”
Mick remembered what Joe had told him. “It’s not as good. Tourists can use as much bandwidth as they can afford. But Joe’s correlators never get above five megabytes per second. That’s at the start of the twelve-day window, too. It only gets worse by day five or six.”
“Is two enough?”
“It’s what Joe’s got to work with.” Mick reached up and tapped the glasses. “It shouldn’t be enough for full color vision at normal resolution, according to Joe. But there’s an awful lot of clever software in the lab to take care of that. It’s constantly guessing, filling in gaps.”
“How does it look?”
“Like I’m looking at the world through a pair of sunglasses.” He pulled them off his nose and tilted them toward Andrea. “Except it’s the glasses that are actually doing the seeing, not my—
“What about all the rest of it? Hearing, touch…”
“They don’t take up anything like as much bandwidth as vision. The way Joe puts it, postural information only needs a few basic parameters: the angles of my limb joints, that kind of thing. Hearing’s pretty straight forward. And touch is the easiest of all, as it happens.”
“Really?”
“So Joe says. Hold my hand.”
Andrea hesitated an instant, then took Mick’s hand.
“Now squeeze it,” Mick said.
She tightened her hold. “Are you getting that?”
“Perfectly. It’s much easier than sending sound. If you were to say something to me, the acoustic signal would have to be sampled, digitized, compressed, and pushed across the link: hundreds of bytes per second. But all touch needs is a single parameter. The system will still be able to keep sending touch even when everything else gets too difficult.”
“Then it’s the last thing to go.”
“It’s the most fundamental sense we have. That’s the way it ought to be.”
After a few moments, Andrea said, “How long?”
“Four days,” Mick said slowly. “Maybe five, if we’re lucky. Joe says we’ll have a better handle on the decay curve by tomorrow.”
“I’m worried, Mick. I don’t know how I’m going to deal with losing you.”
He closed his other hand on hers and squeezed in return. “You’ll get me back.”
“I know. It’s just…it won’t be you. It’ll be the other you.”
“They’re both me.”
“That’s not how it feels right now. It feels like I’m having an affair while my husband’s away.”
“It shouldn’t. I am your husband. We’re both your husband.”
They said nothing after that, sitting in silence as the boat bobbed its way back to shore. It was not that they had said anything upsetting, just that words were no longer adequate. Andrea kept holding his hand. Mick wanted this morning to continue forever: the boat, the breeze, the perfect sky over the bay. Even then he chided himself for dwelling on the passage of time, rather than making the most of the experience as it happened to him. That had always been his problem, ever since he was a kid. School holidays had always been steeped in a melancholic sense of how few days were left.
But this wasn’t a holiday.
After a while, he noticed that some people had gathered at the bow of the boat, pressing against the railings. They were pointing up, into the sky. Some of them had pulled out phones.
“There’s something going on,” Mick said.
