“Why me?” I asked you one night, seventy-two years ago. The sharpness of my voice made you jump and almost burn your hand on the laser cutter. I watched you hesitate, betraying that you already knew what I meant when you nonetheless asked me to clarify my question, to which I responded, “Why would you ever want to unify with me?”
Every part of me trembled. To ask directly seemed like such a transgression. Surely it would devastate whatever possessed you to keep associating with me, night after long night in this cluttered workspace—but I couldn’t contain it anymore. With every daily scan, I watched the infection spread throughout the rotten chambers of my body. My time was short.
“You don’t need me,” I said. “You and Jackson are intelligent enough to do it all without me. If anything, you’d probably work faster without my interference.”
“That’s not remotely true.” You seemed genuinely taken aback. “We could never—! I don’t understand the neurochemistry or the math half as well as you do. Your equations are so elegant—”
“You’re evading my question. Why would you want to unify with me? How could you want to know what it feels like to be so . . .” I tasted the metal of my adrenaline. “Defective.”
You stared. “Is that really how you see yourself?”
“I don’t want your pity. I just . . . I need an answer.”
You had the nerve to tell me, “Listen, I know that you . . . you have some very hard feelings about yourself. I understand that you struggle with how you think other people see you, and I’ve—” You paused. “I’ve felt that pain myself. I’ve been in direct contact with those thoughts, however briefly, during our tests. I wish I knew how to tell you that you’re not defective. I wish I could put it into words that you could hear—and when we unify, you’ll be able to perceive yourself the way I have all along, and words won’t be necessary anymore. But until then, all I can say is. . . .”
You nodded your head down in thought for a time. I waited nervously. Finally you looked me in the eye and said:
“I want to unify with you because you have the most brilliant, most beautiful mind I have ever encountered.”
I swallowed. You had me in your thrall again, so effortlessly. Nothing in me could resist when you spoke in that voice or curled your fingers around mine. I forgot myself; I even believed you when you said:
“There is no intellect in the world that I admire more than yours. I don’t know if you felt it when you were in my mind, but I’m always trying not to show how much you intimidate me. Jackson feels the same way, probably even more so. You grasp things intuitively that it takes either of us weeks to learn. You throw out these world-shaking epiphanies like they’re trivial, like you just thought them up.” You laughed to yourself and shook your head. “There’s no way we could do this without you. We wouldn’t even have thought to try. Don’t you see? Even if I didn’t frankly covet your insight, a mind as beautiful as yours shouldn’t . . .” I thought you choked back a sob. “It shouldn’t have to die. I couldn’t stand to let that happen.”
I couldn’t speak. I could only sit there feeling wretched in my regret for how harshly I’d spoken a moment before.
You took both my hands and held them tightly and said, “If you don’t want to unify with me, you know that I would respect that. It’s your decision. It’s a sacred decision. But either way, you have to know that I don’t want to lose you. Not ever.”
All my envy seemed to dissolve in the hot glare of the work lamps. For an instant, I didn’t feel ugly at all. I didn’t even feel sick. You healed all my wounds, Sybil. Even if my lips would never meet yours, if my hands would never trace the slope of your neck or the curve of your hips, if I would never know your body the way Jackson did, I felt that you had given me a promise of love that swept all of that aside. We would be as one. We would be reborn together into a whole new form of consciousness.
For hardly the first time, I tried to tell you I was in love with you. As always, I couldn’t seem to find my breath.
I
The truck motors under me have stopped turning, and three people are there, standing over my two bodies. They don’t move or speak at first, but I can sense them. I can hear them breathing.
“Brain dead,” Jenna’s voice finally says.
“No,” Doc says.
“Concussed? Comatose? What?”
“I don’t know. Whatever this is, I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never heard of it. It’s creepy. It’s positively fringe.”
“What, damnit?”
“Okay. Just look at this.”
Fingers are on my face. Pulling one of my eyelids up. Then another. For a moment I can see them, their faces squinting down at me, and then a harsh light burns them away.
“His iris dilated. So what?”
“No. Look!”
The light flashes again and again.
“I shine a light in his eyes, her eyes dilate too. Shine it in hers, it’s the same thing in reverse. If I whack her right knee, his right leg spasms.”
I’m starting to understand what this is. I know what’s happened to me—what happened to us to bring me into existence. Somehow I have to make it stop. I have to find a way to wake up—but before the flow of memory carries me away again, I only have time for one more terrible thought:
I know I’m Danae and Alexei.
Where is Naoto?
ALEXEI
By the time I met her, the Empress of Epak had already cemented her dominion over half
