“I knew the moment I saw your wounds.”
He tilted slightly to the side in surprise, exactly the way he used to. “You knew what, exactly?”
“Which shortcuts you must have taken when you hacked our prototype. Which elements of your consciousness were lost when you first possessed Jackson.”
Luther squinted in thought. “Nothing was lost. My memory is intact. Test after test has verified that.”
“But I’m not talking about memory. There are layers of integration between mind and body that our prototype was never designed to bother with. If you decouple them by force—if you treat consciousness as nothing but data to be downloaded from one medium to another—you get irreversible degeneration of the psyche. Sensory atrophy, eventually progressing all the way to autonomic nervous system depression and death.”
He squinted. “It can’t be that simple. If that were true, you would have the same problem. You would have devised a cure.”
“No. I’m the gestalt of minds from other bodies, but this body has always been mine too. It was mine before unity. That gives me an intact bridge.”
He shook his head rapidly. “No, no. You’re mistaken. You’re leaping to conclusions with incomplete information. I haven’t even listed all the symptoms yet. I haven’t told you—”
“That you’re hypnotized by your own reflection,” I finished for him. “That you find it almost paralyzing. I’m sorry, Luther. I can’t help you. I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long.”
“No. No, you’re trying to deceive me.” There was growing agitation in his voice, and he was swerving erratically on the eroded remains of the old road into town. “When we unify, that won’t be a problem anymore. Your intellect will be mine too. Deception will be impossible.”
“You know that won’t work either. Even our crudest simulations could have told you that non-consensual unity is fatal. The shattered consciousness you’d splice us into won’t even be stable enough to regulate its own respiration.”
“I don’t believe you. It’s going to work. It has to.”
He braked hard: we’d arrived. Here was the last standing wall of the old student union building. There were the weathered bones of the lecture hall and the jutting iron ribs of the now-collapsed water tower. Flashbacks made my head swim.
“It’s going to work,” he said as he climbed out of the driver’s seat. “I don’t understand why you’re resisting. It’s what you wanted. It’s what we both wanted.”
He swung my door open and pulled me out. I fell hard on the sandy ground. He grabbed the short steel bar that joined my wrists together and started dragging me toward the nearest building with one hand. Swinging from his other was the hefty briefcase I hadn’t seen in all these decades: the original unifier prototype we’d built together.
“Why are you really doing this?” I asked.
“I’ve told you.”
“But you understand how unity works, almost as well as I do. You already know that if you do this, we’ll both die. We’ll die horribly.”
“You don’t understand,” he hissed, and he sounded less and less like the Luther I had known. His voice was almost inhumanly vicious. “You could never understand.”
“Understand what?” I cried out over the noise and the pain of my back dragging on the rocky ground.
“What I felt!” he shouted. “What it feels like to love you. What it felt like to watch you fawn over your imbecile boyfriend while I rotted from the inside out. You don’t know what it is to be so broken.”
I shuddered. “There was so much I didn’t understand about you back then. Sybil was naïve, and I was naïve when I was her. But I’ve lived hundreds of lives since then, and I’ve experienced misery and heartbreak even you couldn’t imagine, and I could still never do what you did. It wasn’t pain that made you murder Jackson. It wasn’t love. It was you. It was all just you.”
“I do not murder,” he corrected. “I merely borrow.”
“I loved you, Luther.”
He shook his head. “No. I loved you. You loved Jackson.”
“I was willing to risk my life to unify with you!” I shouted. “I wanted to share everything with you. Every thought and feeling and memory. Every last fucking nerve impulse. I was going to risk burning out every synapse in my head with an unproven technology because it was the only chance you had to survive. That’s how much I loved you. If anything, I loved you more than Jackson.”
“That . . . doesn’t make sense.”
“I wanted you to live forever. Through us, through me, no less than Sybil is still part of me now. Not like this. Not by using our creation to murder people and possess their hollowed-out corpses.”
He stopped dragging me. He turned and looked down in silent contemplation, lungs heaving with the effort; his face was pale from blood loss, glistening with cold sweat in the harsh white light. For a moment I thought he’d changed his mind. Then he picked me up and hoisted me into a rusted folding chair. We were in the center of what I could just barely recognize as our old workshop, now little more than a ring of broken cinderblocks. He sat down facing me.
“You have no idea what I’ve gone through,” he muttered. “You just don’t understand.”
Our eyes met in the harsh light and shadow of the crumbled walls.
“Oh, Luther.” I stifled a sob. “I understand perfectly. But that doesn’t mean I could ever, ever forgive you.”
He twitched. He shook his head rapidly. “I’ll make you understand,” he said. He lifted the heavy briefcase into his lap.
Something changed in him when he opened it. He shifted uncomfortably, and his voice shifted toward the human again to tell me, “This is the only way it could have ended, you know. We have always been each other’s unfinished business.”
He lifted the crown out of the case and set it on my head, aligning the first probe on the scalp above my ear. I clenched my jaw
