walking. His control over the body’s fingers had become so clumsy that his hands might as well have been wearing boxing gloves. He could hold something if it was presented to him, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to manipulate simple objects, even those that had presented no difficulty twenty-four hours earlier. When he tried to grasp the breakfast yoghurt, he succeeded only in tipping it over the table. His hand had seemed to lurch toward the yoghurt, crossing the distance too quickly. According to Joe he had lost depth perception overnight. The glasses, sensing the dwindling data rate, were no longer sending stereoscopic images back to the lab.
He could still move around. The team had anticipated this stage and made sure an electric wheelchair was ready for him. Its chunky controls were designed to be used by someone with only limited upper body coordination. The chair was equipped with a panic button, so that Mick could summon help if he felt his control slipping faster than the predicted rate. Were he to fall into sudden and total paralysis, the chair would call out to passersby to provide assistance. In the event of an extreme medical emergency, it would steer itself to the nearest designated care point.
Andrea came out to the laboratory to meet him. Mick wanted one last trip into the city with her, but although she’d been enthusiastic when they’d talked about the plan on the phone, Andrea was now reluctant.
“Are you sure about this? We had such a nice time on Thursday. It would be a shame to spoil the memory of that now.”
“I’m okay,” Mick said.
“I’m just saying, we could always just stroll around the gardens here.”
“Please,” Mick said. “This is what…I want.”
His voice was slow, his phrasing imprecise. He sounded drunk and depressed. If Andrea noticed—and he was sure she must have—she made no observation.
They went into town. It was difficult getting the wheelchair on the tram, even with Andrea’s assistance. No one seemed to know how to lower the boarding ramp. One of the benefits of nervelink technology was that you didn’t see that many people in wheelchairs anymore. The technology that enabled one person to control another person’s body also enabled spinal injuries to be bypassed. Mick was aware that he was attracting more attention than on any previous day. For most people wheelchairs were a medical horror from the past, like iron lungs or leg braces.
On the tram’s video monitor he watched a news item about the Polish miners. It wasn’t good. The rescue team had had a number of options available to them, involving at least three possible routes to the trapped men. After carefully evaluating all the data—aware of how little time remained for the victims—they’d chosen what had promised to be the quickest and safest approach.
It had turned out to be a mistake, one that would prove fatal for the miners. The rescuers had hit a flooded section and had been forced to retreat, with damage to their equipment, and one of their team injured. Yet the miners
By the time this happened, contact with that worldline had almost been lost. Even the best compression methods couldn’t cope with moving images. The pictures that came back, of the men being liberated from the ground, were grainy and monochrome, like a blowup of newsprint from a hundred years earlier. They’d been squeezed across the gap in the last minutes before noise drowned the signal.
But the information was useless. Even armed with the knowledge that there was a safe route through to the miners, the team in this worldline didn’t have time to act.
The news didn’t help Mick’s mood. Going into the city turned out to be exactly the bad move Andrea had predicted. By midday his motor control had deteriorated even further, to the point where he was having difficulty steering the wheelchair. His speech became increasingly slurred, so that Andrea had to keep asking him to repeat himself. In defense, he shut down into monosyllables. Even his hearing was beginning to fail, as the auditory data was compressed to an even more savage degree. He couldn’t distinguish birds from traffic, or traffic from the swish of the trees in the park. When Andrea spoke to him she sounded like her words had been fed through a synthesizer, then chopped up and spliced back together in some tinny approximation to her normal voice.
At three, his glasses could no longer support full color vision. The software switched to a limited color palette. The city looked like a hand-tinted photograph, washed out and faded. Andrea’s face oscillated between white and sickly gray.
By four, Mick was fully quadriplegic. By five, the glasses had reverted back to black and white. The frame rate was down to ten images per second, and falling.
By early evening, Andrea was no longer able to understand what Mick was saying. Mick realized that he could no longer reach the panic button. He became agitated, thrashing his head around. He’d had enough. He wanted to be pulled out of the nervelink, slammed back into his own waiting body. He no longer felt as if he was in Mick’s body, but he didn’t feel as if he was in his own one either. He was strung out somewhere between them, helpless and almost blind. When the panic hit, it was like a foaming, irresistible tide.
Alarmed, Andrea wheeled him back to the laboratory. By the time she was ready to say goodbye to him, the glasses had reduced his vision to five images per second, each of which was composed of only six thousand pixels. He was calmer then, resigned to the inevitability of what tomorrow would bring: he would not even recognize Andrea in the morning.
SATURDAY
Mick’s last day with Andrea began in a world of sound and vision—senses that were already impoverished to a large degree—and ended in a realm of silence and darkness.
He was now completely paralyzed, unable even to move his head. The brain that belonged to the other, comatose Mick now had more control over this body than its wakeful counterpart. The nervelink was still sending signals back to the lab, but the requirements of sight and sound now consumed almost all available bandwidth. In the morning, vision was down to one thousand pixels, updated three frames per second. His sight had already turned monochrome, but even yesterday there had been welcome gradations of gray, enough to anchor him into the visual landscape.
Now the pixels were only capable of registering on or off; it cost too much bandwidth to send intermediate intensity values. When Andrea was near him, her face was a flickering abstraction of black and white squares, like a trick picture in a psychology textbook. With effort he learned to distinguish her from the other faces in the laboratory, but no sooner had he gained confidence in his ability than the quality of vision declined even further.
By midmorning the frame rate had dropped to eight hundred pixels at two per second, which was less like vision than being shown a sequence of still images. People didn’t walk to him across the lab—they jumped from spot to spot, captured in frozen postures. It was soon easy to stop thinking of them as people at all, but simply as abstract structures in the data.
By noon he could not exactly say that he had any vision at all.
Sound had declined overnight as well. If Andrea’s voice had been tinny yesterday, today it was barely human. It was as if she were speaking to him through a voice distorter on the end of the worst telephone connection in the world. The noise was beginning to win. The software was struggling to compensate, teasing sense out of the data. It was a battle that could only be prolonged, not won.
“I’m still here,” Andrea told him, her voice a whisper fainter than the signal from the furthest quasar.
Mick answered back. It took some time. His words in the lab had to be analyzed by voice-recognition software and converted into ASCII characters. The characters were compressed further and sent across the reality
