The second day was also the day that Talis cut me open.
I did not particularly want to talk to Talis after talking to my mother, but I was in no position to disobey him, and I was afraid to leave him alone in my room, lest he get bored and paint it pink or sacrifice a goat in it or something. So I scrubbed up my blotchy face, tidied my hair, and went.
I found him lying on my bunk with his nose in my copy of the Meditations of Aurelius.
“What is this about surgery?” I said, to the book.
He lowered the book far enough to peer at me over it. “I thought you knew your history.”
“I’m a classicist.”
“Really? Wow, that’s useless.” He lifted the book. “Explains this, though. ‘You have power over your mind, not outside events,’?” he read. “?‘Keep to your own mind, and stand tall. Your life is what your thoughts make it.’?” He crossed his ankles and raised both eyebrows at me.
“You object to that?”
“I’d like to think I had something to do with your life.” He waved his hand around the little room—the two narrow bunks and one creaky table, the laundry and the white linens on hooks, the paper birds making the sky more soft and beautiful.
“Something,” I said. “But not everything. Which is rather the point.”
He sat up, letting my book slide to the floor. I rescued it as it fell.
Talis’s duster was tossed across Xie’s cot. I nudged it aside and sat facing him, the book in my hands. We were nearly knee to knee. I did not like to see him in this familiar place. He was like a knife in the spoon drawer. Like a torch in the barn.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For . . .”
“For giving me the out.” He put one thumb on top of the other and let his fingers steeple and unsteeple, rapid as shuffling cards. “I don’t actually want to blow up cities, you know. That’s what the Preceptures are for, so that I don’t have to. Obviously, therefore, I have to exact some kind of cost for touching the Preceptures. But I don’t want too much red on the books. I would just as soon . . . have the out.”
It was two parts explanation, one part threat. Just a little reminder of why I was doing this, and what might happen if I changed my mind.
I set my book on the table and patted it closed. Talis had cracked the spine. There was a little box on that table too. His? “Explain the surgery, Talis. I agreed to upload, and there was no mention of surgery.”
“Yeah, but it’s a package deal.” He ran his hands through his hair. There was blood, Wilma’s blood, in little dots on his shirt cuffs. “Okay. Remember, in my day, in Michael’s day, the upload was part of a general quest for immortality, which was dumb, but never mind that. The point was to get immortal, so obviously the upload’s not supposed to kill you, and yet your brain can’t survive the spooling. I mean, never mind riding a bicycle—your brain won’t remember breathing when the grey room is done with it. So.”
There was a faint pause there. Talis rubbed at a spot under his right collarbone the way a man might rub at a bruise.
“So. Your self. The essential data that the spooling records. It’s got to go somewhere. It goes here.” He curled his fingers and tapped the spot he’d been rubbing. Through the thin fabric of his shirt I could just see the structure of his collarbone and the soft curve of Rachel’s bound breasts. There was a shadowy shape between the clavicle and the binding wrap, a distension of the skin that was too rectangular to be anything natural.
“The datastore—the AI’s heart and soul. The surgery implants it. There’s some odds and ends, too—full-spectrum retinas, fingertip sensors and transmitters, the little things no self-respecting superior being would be without.” He spread his hands and tilted them to catch the light. There was something there, a faint silveriness to his palms and fingertips. You’d never see it without the just-so tilt, but it was startling in its slightly-off-ness, like Grego’s eyes. “Becoming AI is all about the brain, obviously, but you need a bit of body work, so to speak—a first step.”
“But—” I said. Xie’s newest folded birds were shimmering above me, and I swore I could still smell chocolate. “But, if you can’t breathe . . .”
“The surgery also threads inductive webbing in the brain. The datastore uses that to operate the brain, and the brain operates the body. Bit convoluted, but it generally works. You’ll be breathing, I promise.”
That thing under his shirt—that thing was going in me. Stuff in my fingers, stuff in my eyes, stuff in my brain. And he, he had it too? The woman he was being, borrowing, what about her? I tried to form the question. “The Riders—”
“Are universally brilliant at breathing. It’s part of my recruitment screening.”