Thales holds his hand up to the screen’s light to see his fingers silhouetted, make sure his hand is still there.
Kern opens a fuse box and shines his cell onto a sort of crude snowflake made of fist-sized lumps of metal; it looks like industrial dross but must be some kind of device, because it’s wired for power, and now, at Akemi’s prompting, Kern is wiring it for data via a thousand feet of cable and a sat-phone.
“Where am I supposed to go then?” Kern asks.
“Just hang tight back up on the roof,” Akemi says. “I’ll do what I can to get back in touch. But break the phone now, okay?”
Kern’s need for Akemi is obvious, but Akemi, he thinks, cares only for her own goals. He’s surprised at how much this saddens him; not long ago he’d have taken in Kern’s simplicity and physicality and dismissed him out of hand. It’s in his mind to speak over Akemi, tell Kern that someone is genuinely interested in his fate, however helplessly, but he says nothing.
“Okay,” Kern says. “Any last instructions?”
“No. Thank you, baby,” Akemi says, mustering a semblance of flirtatiousness. “Please hurry.”
“Goodbye, then,” Kern says, his voice unnaturally harsh, and Thales is afraid Kern will cry but then the screen shows his hand slamming the phone into the wall, and then again, and with the third impact the screen goes dark.
Now all the light is gone.
“What now?” Thales asks the blackness where Akemi was. “Will he be all right?”
“Hang on,” she says. “He’ll be disconnecting the substrate from the phone’s battery. The substrate can hold a charge, but only for a few seconds.” Her voice is tight. “I guess we’ll see how that goes.”
Substrate? he thinks. Charge?
A terrible jolt, as though the ship had run aground, and then he realizes there’s something he’s forgotten.
He was making a journey, but to where?
There was a ship.
Was there a ship?
In any case, there was something he had to do.
There was something.
There was …
*
Wind on his face. He’s been listening to the incessant thundering of waves.
He’s sprawled on yielding ground. It’s sand, he finds, crumbling it between his fingers. He opens his eyes onto bright blue sky.
He’s on a curved sliver of beach, perhaps an atoll. Waves crash continually on one side—it looks like a place to drown—but on the other the water is calm. No shade at all. Ocean in every direction. No sign of the yacht except for a few broken lengths of lacquered wood, a torn white sail washing in the surf and a sodden mass of unidentifiable kelp-entangled electronics. It’s a relief to be back in the light.
Akemi is nowhere to be seen.
Sitting up, he props his hand on something hard in the sand by his hip. He excavates it, wipes it with his forearm—it’s the surgeon’s tablet, cracked and wet. A green crab the size of his thumbnail scuttles over the wet grey glass, hesitates at the boundary of his shadow, hurries back the way it came. He leans in, sees his face reflected in the dead screen, the delicate mottling on the crab’s claws, the tiny grains of sand the color of rust, coal, translucent milky quartz. For a simulation, the detail is remarkable. (But is the detail actually there, he thinks, or am I imagining it?)
The tablet’s screen illuminates.
He sits on the sand watching the tablet displaying his awareness of sitting on the sand watching the tablet, and his mild pleasure in the recursivity, and how he’s infinitely far from everything he’s ever loved, which he has not, till now, admitted, but now that it’s there before him it can no longer be denied. He tries to think of a way out, or some kind of clever technique, but of course there’s no way out and there never will be. Los Angeles was full of mysteries, was itself a mystery, but now the veils have fallen from his eyes and he sees that the solution is that it’s time his life was done.
No point in delaying. The tablet should make it easy. He has to be sure to erase things in the right order, lest he end up conscious but helpless—his technical acumen and goals have to be the last to go (and what will that be like, being nothing but a knot of skills and a need for self-destruction, and not knowing where any of it came from?). He’s about to start deleting the memories of his family but stops, surprised at his own tenderness toward these delicate structures, and, there, on the screen, is his tenderness as a glyph, which is keeping him from acting, and always will, which implies he’s trapped forever.
His despair is so strong it becomes a kind of clarity and he watches as though from a distance as his hand moves toward the tablet’s screen and the glyph is deleted.
He’d expected a sense of profound violation but in fact it feels like nothing, and he should have done it long ago—it would be a shame not to use this unprecedented degree of self-control. As his sadness serves no purpose he deletes that too, along with his fear and his attachment to his old life, for change will come, has come, must be accepted.
It occurs to him that, no longer being human, he need not die.
He stares out over the sea, blank but alert, a neutral intelligence devoid of purpose, impatience and suffering.
*
The wind’s tone changes. There’s a sense of looming mass behind him. He turns, sees the glass and steel towers of the city in the waves, rising without limit, its heights lost in cloud, the blue of distance. As he stares up into it, it changes, becoming clearer, manifesting detail, its complexity unfurling …
“Hey now,” Akemi says eventually, shaking him gently by the shoulder. The surf is lower, its voice subdued. “Still there?”
“I’ve seen this before.”
“It’s what the mathematician’s been making,” she says. “It’s his great work, the reason he bothers existing in the world.”
“Then why does it look like a city?”
“It’s like a translation, the magician said, of an ascending hierarchy of abstractions, assembled out of resonances and fragments of memory. It’s mostly the space elevator, and partly the Singapore of her youth, and this Metropolis, which was an anime from Germany. The mathematician is at the apex—he is the apex, in a sense—and I need you to help Irina find her way to him. If she can’t reach him, we’ve lost.”
Lost what? he thinks, but says, “Why do you need me?”
“Because Irina will have to transform herself to reach him, and become a kind of bridge to the AIs. You can help her find the way because you’re an intermediate kind of thing.”