Sylvia bit her lip. So much for avoidance. On the upside, if she was going to get chewed out, it could have been by somebody a lot worse. She took a deep breath. “Put her through.”
Pema’s angry compact face appeared in a close-up vid stream. Her overmanicured eyebrows made her look particularly pissed. Sylvia couldn’t stand that much self-righteousness that close to her, so she moved the stream to the room’s hologram projector. Her short coworker stood before her, arms folded, in a green pindot skirt and boxy business suit that definitely fell into James Bond–villain territory.
“What were you thinking, Sylvia?” She sounded exasperated. “Bill and Corina are freaking out. First you use Honeycomb, then you disable the hospital’s TC? Do you know how many laws you’ve broken?”
Sylvia nodded. “Comms were down. My husband was dead. I did what I had to do. And for all my efforts, he’s still barely alive!”
Her voice broke, and again she buried her face in her hands. Pema’s projection watched, her severe eyebrows softening slightly. Soon Sylvia raised her head.
“I made the call. I’m willing to face the consequences. If you’re here to fire me or arrest me, then go ahead. Anyone else in my position would have done the same.”
“I’m not here to fire you, Syl.” She looked over at the sleeping man in the hospital bed. “How is he?”
“It was touch and go for a bit. He was mostly intact, just his comms didn’t quite make it. That caused some damage to his spinal cord.” Focusing on the scientific details helped calm her. “The restore data from the glacier16 was incomplete because the Gehinnomites took out most of the networking infrastructure. I couldn’t access anything remotely. But—I think he’s going to be okay.”
“Good. Look, we will figure this out. But you need to get out of there. Now. Take your husband, go off comms for a day or two. IT is working up a solution, but it will take some time, and we need to keep this quiet. It is imperative that no one—no one—realize what really happened, do you agree?”
Sylvia nodded quickly.
“Good,” Pema said, relaxing her tone. “The Costa Rican police are so overwhelmed right now, you should be able to slip out unnoticed. But if the police find you, I don’t know what they’ll do. And we won’t be able to help. Do you understand?”
Sylvia nodded, looking from the dreaming doppelg?nger of her husband to her coworker. “Why are you doing this for me?”
“It is my belief that, given the circumstances, anyone might have done what you did. Anyway, no use dwelling in the past. We’re in damage control now. It doesn’t help anyone if you’re not in the loop. Corporations don’t make decisions; people do.”
While the two women were talking, Joel2 dreamed. He found himself standing on the stony shore of a dark flowing river. He felt as if he were in a cavern, but he couldn’t see the rock walls or ceiling that surrounded him. The ground beneath his feet was made up of small gray pebbles that crunched when he walked. Everything was dark.
He saw a light shining on the opposite shore. Joel2 felt a strong desire to go toward it. He stepped into the frothy fast-moving water, only to find it wasn’t water, not exactly. It was room temperature, and flowed around him like smoke, or foam. There was something relaxing about it. Soothing. He started to walk toward the light, as if gently nudged by an invisible hand.
But then a tune began to play from somewhere behind him. A familiar 1980s New Wave song, one of his favorites. Joel2 stopped in the middle of the river, turning back to the synth drums. The gray foam sloshed around him, as soft and quiet as whispers.
What happened was this: as Sylvia and Pema discussed life-and-death matters, Joel2’s freshly printed brain was being connected to my comms. Once they came online, he started auto-playing my—now his—1980s music playlist. Specifically, Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon.” The song resumed from the point where my comms had been disconnected. The melody filtered into Joel2’s dream, the electric harmonica echoing softly over the dark rushing foam to where he was standing. He knew the lyrics well.
I’m a man without conviction
I’m a man who doesn’t know
Joel2 bopped his head to the beat. Something made him want to sing along. So he did.
How to sell a contradiction
As he sang, he began to walk away from the distant, beckoning light. He ran through the gray foam, speeding back to the shore from which he had come. As the breeze ruffled his hair, he increased the volume of his singing.
You come and go
You come and go—oh, oh, OH!
Joel2 drew near the rocky shore and leaped out of the dark, foamy river, landing solidly on his feet and spreading his arms. Embracing the moment, he belted out the words along with the chorus.
“Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma chameleon!” he shout-sang in the hospital bed, making Sylvia and Pema jump. Joel2 sat upright, arms wide, then froze as he saw his stricken wife and the projection of a woman he didn’t know standing beside his bed.
He turned off the music on his comms. “Where am I? What happened?”
Tears sprang to Sylvia’s eyes. They were happy tears, but she was at a loss for what to say next.
“I’ll leave you now,” Pema told Sylvia quietly, giving Joel2 a once-over. “Remember: be as quick as you can. And no comms,” she cautioned. Then her projection vanished.
“Who was that? Is this Costa Rica?” Joel2 tried to get out of the hospital bed, but his body wouldn’t cooperate.
Sylvia rushed to his side. “Yes, but take it easy. They’re still fixing you, babe.”
“Did something break?” said Joel2, inspecting himself.
“Yes and no.” Sylvia sat next to her husband-copy, picking nonexistent lint from his bedsheet. “You, um—there was an accident at the San José TC. An attack.”
Joel2’s comms—previously my comms—filled with a frenzy of news feeds and social media alerts. “Holy crap. Was I in that?”
Sylvia shook her head, then nodded, then settled for a head motion somewhere in between. “But the important thing is, you’re here now, and you’re gonna be fine. Do you remember what happened?”
Joel2 blinked. He recalled sitting in the Escrow room in the Greenwich Village TC. He remembered the conductor, a ginger-haired guy with a Michigan-shaped birthmark on his face, and hitting agree on the legalese, and the lights going down in the foyer. But there had been no bright blinding flash, and his next memory was standing on the rocky shore of that dark, foamy river. There had been a light, too; he’d felt drawn to it, compelled—but evidently all that had been a dream. He’d made it to Costa Rica, with his wife, and he felt—actually, he felt pretty terrible.
“No,” he said, dropping back to the bed in exhaustion.
Sylvia took his hand, tears still running down her cheeks. “You know, I thought I lost you today,” she said, the corners of her mouth twitching. “I can’t go through that again.”