“Couldn’t do that on short notice. But I brought you fresh interface things, rings and such. I keep a stash, factory sealed and bought through anonymizers and dead-drops, just in case. They’re old, so you’ll want to bring up their patchlevels before you expose them to wild network traffic.”
“That will do,” Nadie said. To Iceweasel’s surprise, they shared a long embrace, almost a mother-daughter thing.
“Look after yourself. And take care of our little Iceweasel. She seems a nice person. Besides, it wouldn’t look good for either of us if…”
“As far as I’m concerned, she’s a client. I don’t lose clients.”
“I know it.” She drummed her fingers and the door locks popped and the lights came up, making the windows into dark mirrors.
“Come on,” Nadie said.
Tan held out her hand. Her skin was dry, her hand frail, an old woman’s hand, much older than her face. “Best of luck. God knows if I was your age, I’d do the same. This all can’t last. Even if it can, it shouldn’t.”
Iceweasel met her eye, nodded. She didn’t understand exactly what was going on, but she had an inkling now.
She stepped out, zipped up the parka, pulled up the hood, found a pair of thin, plasticky gloves that were fantastically warm while being so membranous they were almost surgical gloves.
Nadie had already zipped up. She raised a hand to the police interceptor, more a-okay semaphore than bye-bye wave. It pulled away smoothly. They watched the taillights disappear, then stood in the closed-in, frigid dark.
“Now what?” Iceweasel said.
Nadie’s voice was full of ironic cheer. “Now we walk away. What else?”
5
transitional phase
[i]
The first thing Etcetera said: “This wasn’t what I expected.”
Kersplebedeb whooped, and Gretyl smiled and rubbed her eyes.
“Welcome back, buddy.”
“Am I dead?”
“That,” Kersplebedeb said, “is the million-dollar question.”
“Why only a million?”
“It’s not inflation-adjusted. I’m a walkaway hippie, can’t be bothered to keep track of money.”
“I feel—” The voice stopped. There was a long pause. Gretyl looked at the infographics, saw the processor loads spiking across the cluster. She’d downloaded the latest lookahead patches and they were supposed to radically reduce loading, but their performance so far had been unimpressive. But then, they’d had to recruit 30 percent more compute-time to get Etcetera running than they’d banked on, and so maybe he was an outlier. That was the problem of optimizing all simulation using a single sample—Dis—for benchmarks.
“You feel?” she prompted, shooting a look at Kersplebedeb to stop him quipping, which he did when he was stressed and holy shit, had he ever been stressed since they’d started this project.
“Numb, I guess. Seriously, am I dead? I mean the me that was made of meat and skin, is that body dead?”
“That body is dead,” Gretyl said. “Murdered.”
“Executed,” Kersplebedeb said.
“Shit.”
The infographics went crazy.
“I can see you’re freaking,” Gretyl said. “That’s understandable. You wouldn’t be you if this news wasn’t upsetting. But the numbness, that’s the sim, it’s trying to keep you from going nonlinear. It’s damping your reactions. There’s a danger you’ll end up in a feedback loop where you get more damped, which makes you feel weirder, which triggers further damping.”
“What do I do about it?”
“We’re still figuring it out. You’re a beta-tester.” She didn’t want to think about what would happen when they told him Limpopo was gone. If they told him. No, definitely when. “But we’re hoping it’s one of those things where if you know it’s happening, you can inoculate yourself. Recognize it. Like cognitive behavioral therapy. Realize you’re freaking, and the thing you’re freaking about is the fact that you’re freaking.”
“You’re asking me to take deep breaths?”
“Without the breathing part,” Kersplebedeb said.
Gretyl shot him a look.
“I feel like I’m breathing.”
That’s good, Gretyl thought. Iceweasel’s notes from Dis’s awakening said introspection about sensations of embodiment correlated with metastable cognition. She missed Iceweasel so much. Reading her notes was like chewing glass. The local instance of Dis that shared time on Etcetera’s cluster tried several times to make contact with her sister at Jacob Redwater’s house, but hadn’t reached her.
“You should be able to feel it. It’s a basic part of the sim, feeding ‘all clear’ data to your autonomous nervous system. It’s a replay attack against it, running a loop of everything at the time you were scanned.”
“That would explain why I’m thirsty. I remember when I sat down, I really wanted a drink, I had cotton mouth for the whole scan. Feels like just a few minutes ago.” The infographics showed emergent stability, fewer oscillations, more green bars and blossoming charts.
“Seems like you’re calming.”
“I guess I am. I feel calm, but weird. Still numb. It’s—”
They waited.
“It’s scary, Gretyl. I’m dead. I’m inside a box. When I wasn’t like this, I could play word-games about whether this was death, but Gretyl, I’m dead. It’s weird. Back when I was alive, I thought the problem with being a sim—in a sim? Am I a sim or in a sim? Shit. I thought the problem would be the conviction that you were alive. Now I see it’s the opposite. I know I’m dead. I still feel like me, but not alive me. Why didn’t I ever talk to Dis about this? Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’m dead, Gretyl.”
“Dis is here, if you want to talk to her. She helped prep your sim. The cluster’s ad hoc so we weren’t sure if there’d be enough capacity to run both of you, but if you want to talk to her, we can boot her.”
“A native guide. Like the guy who takes Dante through Hell.”
“Virgil,” Kersplebedeb said. “Did you ever see the Nigerian anime? It was amazing.”
To Gretyl’s surprise, Etcetera laughed. “I can’t imagine.”
“I’ll find a copy. It used to be way seeded on walkaway net, a classic of its kind.”
“What kind?”
“Nigerian animated epic poetry. They did a series on the Norse sagas. And Gilgamesh.”
“You’re shitting me.”
Kersplebedeb laughed. “I’m shitting you. There’s no such thing as Nigerian anime, far as I know. But wouldn’t that be awesome? We should invent it.”
“Wouldn’t we need to be Nigerian?”
“There’s plenty of walkaways in Nigeria. We’ll find collaborators.”
“Guys?”
“Sorry, Gretyl.”
Kersplebedeb squeezed her hand. “You doing okay?”
Gretyl and Etcetera said “Yes” at the same moment, laughed together. It felt like talking to him on a voice-link, not to his spirit beyond the grave. The moment passed.
“You know the weirdest thing?”