gap, bit by bit. In the other version of the lab—the one where Mick’s body waited in a wheelchair, the one where Andrea hadn’t died in a car crash—equivalent software decompressed the character string and reconstituted it in mechanically generated speech, with an American accent.
“Thank you for letting me come back,” he said. “Please stay. Until the end. Until I’m not here anymore.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Mick.”
Andrea squeezed his hand. After all that he had lost since Friday, touch remained. It really was the easiest thing to send: easier than sight, easier than sound. When, later, even Andrea’s voice had to be sent across the gap by character string and speech synthesizer, touch endured. He felt her holding him, hugging his body to hers, refusing to surrender him to the drowning roar of quantum noise.
“We’re down to less than a thousand useable bits,” Joe told him, speaking quietly in his ear in the version of the lab where Mick lay on the immersion couch. “That’s a thousand bits total, until we lose all contact. It’s enough for a message, enough for parting words.”
“Send this,” Mick said. “Tell Andrea that I’m glad she was there. Tell her that I’m glad she was my wife. Tell her I’m sorry we didn’t make it up that hill together.”
When Joe had sent the message, typing it in with his usual fluid speed, Mick felt the sense of Andrea’s touch easing. Even the microscopic data-transfer burden of communicating unchanging pressure, hand on hand, body against body, was now too much for the link. It was like one swimmer letting a drowning partner go. As the last bits fell, he felt Andrea slip away forever.
He lay on the couch, unmoving. He had lost his wife, for the second time. For the moment the weight of that realization pinned him into stillness. He did not think he would ever be able to walk in his world, let alone the one he had just vacated.
And yet it was Saturday. Andrea’s funeral was in two days. He would have to be ready for that.
“We’re done,” Joe said respectfully. “Link is now noise-swamped.”
“Did Andrea send anything back?” Mick asked. “After I sent my last words…”
“No. I’m sorry.”
Mick caught the hesitation in Joe’s answer. “Nothing came through?”
“Nothing intelligible. I thought something was coming through, but it was just…” Joe offered an apologetic shrug. “The setup at their end must have gone noise-limited a few seconds before ours did. Happens, sometimes.”
“I know,” Mick said. “But I still want to see what Andrea sent.”
Joe handed him a printout. Mick waited for his eyes to focus on the sheet. Beneath the lines of header information was a single line of text: SO0122215. Like a phone number or a postal code, except it was obviously neither.
“That’s all?”
Joe sighed heavily. “I’m sorry, mate. Maybe she was just trying to get something through…but the noise won. The fucking noise always wins.”
Mick looked at the numbers again. They began to talk to him. He thought he knew what they meant.
“…always fucking wins,” Joe repeated.
SUNDAY
Andrea was there when they brought Mick out of the medically induced coma. He came up through layers of disorientation and half-dream, adrift until something inside him clicked into place and he realized where he had been for the last week, what had been happening to the body over which he was now regaining gradual control. It was exactly as they had promised: no dreams, no anxiety, no tangible sense of elapsed time. In a way, it was not an entirely unattractive way to spend a week. Like being in the womb, he’d heard people say. And now he was being born again, a process that was not without its own discomforts. He tried moving an arm and when the limb did not obey him instantly, he began to panic. But Joe was already smiling.
“Easy, boyo. It’s coming back. The software’s rerouting things one spinal nerve at a time. Just hold on there and it’ll be fine.”
Mick tried mumbling something in reply, but his jaw wasn’t working properly either. Yet it would come, as Joe had promised. On any given day, thousands of recipients went through this exact procedure without blinking an eyelid. Many of them were people who’d already done it hundreds of times before. Nervelinking was almost insanely safe. Far safer than any form of physical travel, that was certain.
He tried moving his arm again. This time it obeyed without hesitation.
“How are you feeling?” Andrea asked.
Once more he tried speaking. His jaw was stiff, his tongue thick and uncooperative, but he managed to make some sounds. “Okay. Felt better.”
“They say it’s easier the second time. Much easier the third.”
“How long?”
“You went under on Sunday of last week. It’s Sunday again now.” Joe said.
A full week. Exactly the way they’d planned it.
“I’m quite hungry,” Mick said.
“Everyone’s always hungry when they come out of the coma,” Joe said. It’s hard to get enough nourishment into the host body. We’ll get you sorted out, though.”
Mick turned his head to look at Joe, waiting for his eyes to find grudging focus. “Joe,” he said. “Everything’s all right, isn’t it? No complications, nothing to worry about?”
“No problems at all,” Joe said.
“Then would you mind giving Andrea and me a moment alone?”
Joe held up his hand in hasty acknowledgement and left the room, off on some plausible errand. He shut the door quietly behind him.
“Well?” Mick asked. “I’m guessing things must have gone okay, or they wouldn’t have kept me under for so long.”
“Things went okay, yes,” Andrea said.
“Then you met the other Mick? He was here?”
Andrea nodded heavily. “He was here. We spent time together.”
“What did you get up to?”
“All the usual stuff you or I would’ve done. Hit the town, walked in the parks, went into the hills, that kind of thing.”
“How was it?”
She looked at him guardedly. “Really, really sad. I didn’t really know how to behave, to be honest. Part of me wanted to be all consoling and sympathetic, because he’d lost his wife. But I don’t think that’s what Mick wanted.”
“The other Mick,” he corrected gently.
“Point is, he didn’t come back to see me being all weepy. He wanted another week with his wife, the way things used to be. Yes, he wanted to say goodbye, but he didn’t want to spend the whole week with the two of us walking around feeling down in the dumps.”
“So how did you feel?”
“Miserable. Not as miserable as if I’d lost my husband, of course. But some of his sadness started wearing off on me. I didn’t think it was going to…
“Whatever you felt, don’t blame yourself for it. I think it was a wonderful thing you agreed to do.”
“You, too.”
“I had the easy part,” Mick said.
Andrea stroked the side of his face. He realized that he needed a good shave. “How do
“Except how it feels to lose a wife. And I hope I don’t ever find that out. I don’t think I can ever really
