But as I watched you hug him in the fading light, I had a painful moment of clarity: my goals had changed. Disembodiment wasn’t what I wanted anymore.
When you finally entered, I turned away. I told myself you couldn’t possibly be there to see me—but you shocked me with a shout across the room:
“Luther, you are amazing!”
I was so startled that my magnifier glasses fell off my nose and nearly shattered on the work bench. My sick heart fluttered.
“I . . . I am?”
“I just got the equations you sent me this morning. They all work beautifully! Memory is not linear. Of course! But I never thought to use an algorithm like that to describe it. How did you ever think to borrow equations from the chaos theory of galactic orbital mechanics?”
You smiled so earnestly, and I felt the rush of blood burn my cheeks.
“I . . . I was only building on your work,” I said. “You would have realized the solution without my help.”
“For Pete’s sake, don’t you remember who you’re talking to? I have literally been inside your head, if only for a few seconds. I’ve experienced your thought process firsthand, and I am telling you it fills me with awe. I’m not making this up.”
I opened my mouth to protest again.
You cut me off. “Fine. We’re both geniuses, if you absolutely insist. But do you realize that we’re going to change everything? You and me and Jackson, we’re on the verge. We’ll be the first true post-humans.”
For a moment I drifted in the bliss of believing that you and I had some real and unfrayed connection—but I unthinkingly sighed, and the sound wiped the smile from your lips. You looked at my chest as if you could see through it.
“It’s still not better? Oh no. That means the infection is phage-resistant now.”
“I know.” I let myself cough into my forearm.
You pulled up a screeching metal stool and sat next to me at the work bench, hands stuffed into the pockets of your vest. You tried to comfort me by saying, “We’re so close now. Thanks to you, we have the software. We can send and receive an entire brain’s worth of memories, synchronously. All we need now a higher-bandwidth interface between the cerebral probes and the CPU. That’s it. Jackson has been following leads with every salvager from here to Norpak, trying to dig up every pre-collapse interface he can get his hands on. We just have to find one that meets our specs.”
My gravelly breaths blew white clouds in the dark blue air.
“Hurry,” I said.
Then, so unexpectedly, you hugged me. Your head nestled against the side of mine, warm and unflinching. We had never touched that way before. Somehow I knew, even in that moment, that we never would again.
This is not my first memory, but it seems to be my innermost. It’s the first one that will pass through the link: the first one that this other brain, in forgetting everything it now knows, will remember all anew.
For the first time in my ninety years of life, I am wearing the flesh of a man above the age of thirty. The comparative dimness of his senses makes me shudder. His muscles are not as responsive as I’m used to.
There are footsteps in the sand outside the truck. Somebody knocks on the metal sides of the bed.
“Hey, you want I should fill up your fuel cells?” a woman’s voice yells.
“Just a second,” I say, holding the flap shut. We sit together in the darkness: my alpha copy in the rich man’s body, my gamma in Scuttle’s body, and I, the delta, now in the old driver.
“More,” we whisper in broken unison.
One by one we climb out into the night.
“Oh, it’s you,” the woman, a fuel station attendant, tells me. “You got here just in time. The whole place is just about packed up. Only a few of us left, not counting all the Medusas who just rolled in.”
“Yes,” I say.
She takes a shard and a stylus out of her hip pocket and waits. “So?”
“So.”
She laughs. “So, your account number?”
A few steps behind her, my alpha and gamma copies stand ready, but all of us are wincing. I’ve never made a woman the vessel of my consciousness before, and I truly don’t wish to do so now—but if she keeps asking questions I can’t answer, I’ll have no alternative.
Finally she throws up her hands. “I’ll look it up for you, okay? Jeez, Mars. Ever think you’re getting too old for this job?”
I try not to show my relief. “Long drive,” I say. When her head is turned, I nod to my other copies, and they walk off between the sparse tents with my briefcase. Hunting for better flesh.
I keep the wave pistol ready behind my back. I keep careful watch over the attendant while she plugs in the power cable and starts charging the truck’s cells. I pray for no more complications. If I have to kill or assume her, my problems will multiply as the distance between you and me, Sybil—already intolerable—continues to increase. I can bear anything but that.
My very existence matters less to me now than my need to find you. It’s partly that my condition is worsening. It’s been worsening for a long time, and only you can help me. You’re the only person who has ever been able to help me. But in the end, I know my need to find you now is deeper than my need to be helped or to be cured of my afflictions, or even saved from death.
I have to find my way back to you, Sybil, at any cost.
