by Patrick Ness
“There are other ways, Mrs. Wearing,” Officer Rashadi said. “All prisoners are now automatically placed into –”
“Shut up,” his mother said. “Just please, shut up. How will anything ever matter again?” She turned to his father, still glassy eyed, as if barely there. “I was going to leave you.”
His father didn’t seem to have heard her.
“Are you listening to me?” his mother said. “I was going to leave you that day. I’d stashed money away. That’s what I went back to get that morning. I’d managed to leave it on the counter of that stupid bank.” She turned to Officer Rashadi. “I was going to leave him.”
Officer Rashadi looked back and forth between them, but his father wasn’t reacting and his mother remained in a kind of terrifyingly still anger, like a leopard waiting to pounce.
“I’m sure that’s something that can be worked out later,” Officer Rashadi said. She paused, then her voice changed slightly. “Or maybe it’s something you don’t have to work out at all.”
The other officer piped up at that and said what must have been Officer Rashadi’s first name. “Asma –”
“I’m just saying there may be a way,” she said. “A way so that none of this ever happened.”
For the first time, she had the attention of both his mother and father.
“The world was changing,” Seth says quietly, his eyes still on the tombstone. “Had changed. Become almost unlivable.”
“Well, that much is obvious,” Regine says. “Just look at this place.”
Seth nods. “For a long time, people had been living two lives. And at first, I think, it was two. You could do both. Go back and forth. Between the online world and this one. And then people started staying online and that seemed less weird than it was even a year before. Because the world was getting more and more broken.” He looks back at Regine and Tomasz. The sun is shining behind them, and they’re almost in silhouette. “At least it’s what I think happened.”
Regine hears the question. “I don’t remember anything from before,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s how we made it, I think,” Seth says. “So we’d forget there was ever anything else. Your own memories rewritten to make it all work, and then your life was there in front of you. Online. The real one, as far as you ever knew.”
Seth turns back to the tombstone. He runs his fingers across the carved letters of Owen’s name.
“He died,” Seth says simply. “The man who took him murdered him. He never came home.”
Seth can sense grief stirring in his stomach, his chest, but the weight of new and old knowledge is still too heavy to deal with, and all he feels at the moment is numb.
“Oh, Mr. Seth,” Tomasz says. “I am so sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Regine says. “But I don’t understand. How can this be your brother? You said he was –”
“Still alive,” Seth says. “I grew up with him. I sat through his clarinet lessons. Tomasz reminds me of him so much I can hardly look at him sometimes.”
“But . . .” He can hear Regine trying to keep the impatience out of her voice. “But he’s here. He died. In the real world.”
“If this is real,” Tomasz says.
“We’re going to have to say it is sometime,” Regine snaps. “I know I’m real, and that’s all I’ve got to go on. You’ve got to hang on to something.” And then she says it again. “You’ve got to hang on to something.”
“So how can this have happened?” Tomasz says.
Seth doesn’t turn away from the tombstone. “My parents,” he says, “were given a choice.”
“You’ve heard about Lethe?” the woman from the Council asked them over the same dinner table where Officer Rashadi had broken the news just three nights before.
Seth’s mother frowned. “The place in Scotland?”
“No, that’s Leith,” his father said, his words slurred. He nodded at the woman from the Council. “You mean Lethe.” He pronounced it Lee-Thee. “The river of forgetfulness in Hades. So the dead don’t remember their former lives and spend eternity mourning them.”
The woman from the Council didn’t look too happy to have been corrected, but Seth saw her choose to ignore this. “Indeed. It’s also the name of the process people have started to undertake when they enter the Link.”
“Enter and don’t come out again,” his mother said, her voice even, her eyes on the table in front of her.
“Yes,” said the woman from the Council.
“They just give up their lives,” his mother said, but it was a question, too.
“Not give them up. Exchange them. For a chance to make something out of themselves and their futures in a world that hasn’t been so damaged.” The woman’s posture changed to a less formal one, one that seemed to suggest she was going to share something secret with them, off the record. “You’ve seen how things are. How they’re going. And it’s only getting worse and faster. The economy. The environment. The wars. The epidemics. Is there really any question about why people are wanting to start over? In a place where at least they’ve got a fair shot?”
“People say it’s as bad as this world –”
“Not even close. You can’t stop a human from acting like a human, of course, but compared to what we have now, it’s paradise. A paradise of second chances.”
“You never get old and you never die,” his father said, sounding as if he was quoting something.
“Actually, no,” the woman from the Council said. “We can’t perform those kinds of miracles. Yet. The human mind can’t quite take it. But everything else is fully automated. You’ll be under permanent guard. You’ll get medical treatment when you need it. Your bodies will remain physically viable, including keeping your muscles toned, and we’ve just developed a hormone to keep your hair and nails from growing. We’re even on the threshold of actual reproduction and childbirth. This really is our best hope for the future.”
“What’s in it for you?” his mother asked. “Who gains?”
“We all do,” the woman from the Council said immediately. “It takes power, sure, but far less than humans walking around do. We shut off everything except the connection to the chambers, and we take what we’ve got left and put it to proper use. At the very least, we sleep our way through disaster and come out the other side.” She leaned forward. “I’ll be honest with you. There’ll come a day, and soon, when you may not have a choice, when even I don’t have a choice. Best to do it now, on your own terms.”
His mother looked at her carefully. “And you’re saying we’ll have Owen back?”
The woman got a funny little smile on her face. It was meant to be kind, understanding, but even Seth, sitting unobserved at the far corner of the table, could see that it was also a smile of triumph. The woman from the Council had won, and Seth hadn’t even known they were fighting.
“The simulation programming is a prototype,” the woman said. “I want to stress that.”
“‘Yet’,” his father said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said ‘yet’ earlier about miracles. This is the ‘yet’, isn’t it?”
“If you like,” the woman said, in a way that made it clear she didn’t like it. “But I can tell you two things. One, Lethe will make sure you never, ever know the difference, and two, the results we’ve had so far in initial testing have been beyond the participants’ wildest dreams.”
“And we’ll just . . . forget this all ever happened?” his mother said.
The woman from the Council’s mouth went tight. “Not quite.”
“Not quite?” his mother said, suddenly harsh. “I don’t want to remember anything. What the hell do you mean, not quite?”
“Lethe is a subtle process, one with amazing properties. But it has to work with what’s already in you. It can’t erase memories as big and important as what’s just happened –”
“Then what’s the goddamn point of it?”
“ – b
ut what it can do is give you an alternative outcome.”
There was a silence. “What do you mean?” his father finally asked.
“Any detail I would give you here would be speculation until we got your nodes implanted and did a full actualization, but I suspect that you would probably remember the abduction of your son –”
His mother made a scoffing sound.
“ – but that it would have a much happier ending. He would be found, alive, possibly injured, possibly in need of recovery and rehabilitation – this would be what Lethe would have you believe as you adjusted to the new Owen – but he would no longer be dead. He would be created from your memories of him, and he would grow and develop and respond to you, just as your son would have. For all intents and purposes, he’d be alive again. So much so, you’d never know the difference.”
His mother started to speak but needed to clear her throat. “Would I be able to touch him?” she asked, her voice rough. “Would I be able to smell him?” She covered her mouth with her hand, unable to go on.
“Yes. You would. The Link isn’t just a variation of the world. It is the world, put into a safe place. Your jobs would be the same, your house would be the same, your family, your friends – the ones who have already entered it anyway, and again, that’s going to be everyone very soon. It feels and looks completely real because it is completely real.”
“How would we interact with people who aren’t in it, though?” his father asked. His mother scoffed again, as if this was the stupidest question she’d ever heard.
The woman from the Council didn’t blink. “The same way you interact with people who are in it now. That’s one of the cleverest things about it. We’ve flipped it. When you’re there, it’s this world that seems online, and that’s how you interact with it. You send the same e-mails and messages. And if someone in the real world tries to tell you that you’re online, well, Lethe makes you forget again and again.”
Her voice turned more serious. “But, and I mean this, we really are nearing a tipping point. Pretty soon these questions won’t matter, because there won’t be a world here to interact with. We’ll all be there, living out happier lives, in a world that isn’t already used up.”
“I don’t want to live here,” his mother said. “In this town, I mean. In this stupid country. Can you arrange that?”
“Well, again, we can’t just plant you in a whole new life, there’d be no memories to work from, but moving around there is the same as moving around here. If you want to leave, then you can leave.”
“I want to leave.” His mother looked around the sitting room again. “I will leave.”
“The practicalities are simple,” the woman from the Council said. “We get the nodes implanted, get your memories actualized, and then we place you in the sleeping chambers. We’re reaching capacity in our current facility, but we’re expanding all the time. If we need to, we can easily install one here in your own home and move you when space becomes available.”
“That easy?” his father asked.
“I could manage it within the week,” the woman said. “You could see your son again, and all this pain you feel now would be gone.”
His mother and father were silent for a moment, then they looked at each other. His father took his mother’s hand. She resisted at first, but he held on and eventually she let him.
“He wouldn’t be real,” his father whispered. “He’d be a program.”
“You wouldn’t know,” the woman from the Council said. “You’d never ever know.”
“I can’t take this, Ted,” his mother said. “I can’t live in a world where he’s gone.” She turned back to the woman. “When can we start?”
The woman smiled again. “Right now. I brought the paperwork. You’ll be amazed at how quickly we can get things moving.” She took three large packets out of her briefcase. “One for you, Mrs. Wearing. One for Mr. Wearing. And one for young Seth.”
His parents turned to look at him, and Seth was certain they were surprised to find him sitting there.
“The woman from the Council must have been right,” Seth says after he’s told Regine and Tomasz this story. “There was some kind of tipping point, when the final parts of it happened faster than they expected. No one ever moved me out of my house to the prison.” He looks at Regine. “Or you, either. And no Driver ever came to guard me or you. Whatever systems they meant to set up, they obviously didn’t get all the way done. They had to protect what they could and hope for the best. The world must have been right on the point of collapse.” He breathes. “And then it collapsed.”
“But,” Tomasz says, “you cannot just replace a whole person. Your brother –”
“Yeah,” Regine demands, heat in her voice. “Why would my mother marry my bastard of a stepfather if she could have had my father back?”
“I don’t know,” Seth says. “It’s like you said, every time we find something out, there are a hundred brand-new things we don’t know.” He turns back to the grave. “But you can imagine what happened, maybe. It started as a fun thing to dip in and out of. And then people began staying there, leaving the real world behind, and the governments of the world think, Hang on, this could be useful. Then people started being encouraged to stay, because hey, you’ll save us money and resources and maybe, as a bonus, we’ll try offering you things that aren’t even there anymore. But then maybe everything just got too bad too fast. People were forced to stay, like the woman said, because the world became unlivable.”
“And now everyone is there,” Tomasz says. “Even the ones who wrote the programs that made your brother. No one to fix it. No one to make it better.”
“No,” Seth says, “he never did get better.”
“But no one there knows any different,” Regine says, still sounding angry.
“I’m not sure that’s true, actually,” Seth says. “I think they do know, on some level. They feel something’s not right but refuse to think about it. Haven’t you ever felt like there has to be more? Like there’s more out there somewhere, just beyond your grasp, if you could only get to it . . .”
“All of the time,” Tomasz says quietly. “All of the time I feel this.”
“Everyone does,” Regine says. “Especially when you’re our age.”
“I’ll bet my parents knew,” Seth says. “On some level. That he wasn’t real, no matter how real he seemed. How can you truly forget making a choice that awful? It was there in how they treated me. Like an afterthought. Like a burden, sometimes.” His voice drops. “And I thought they just didn’t forgive me for being there when Owen was taken.”
“Ah,” Tomasz says. “When you said it was little bit your fault.”
Seth places his hand on top of Owen’s grave. “I’ve hardly ever told anyone. The police, who told my parents, but no one else.” He looks up into the sunshine and thinks of Gudmund. “Not even when I could have.”
“What can it matter now, though?” Regine asks. “The truth as you knew it isn’t true.”
He turns to her, surprised. “What do you mean, what can it matter? It changes everything.”
Regine looks incredulous. “Everything’s already changed.”
“No,” Seth says, shaking his head. “No, you don’t understand.”
“Then help us to understand,” Tomasz says. “You have seen my worst memory, after all, Mr. Seth.”
“I can’t.”
“Won’t,” Regine says.
“Oh, yeah?” Seth says, growing angry. “How did you die again? Freak accident falling down the stairs?”
“That’s different –”
“How? I just found out I killed my brother!”
A small group of pigeons flaps out of the grass nearby, startled by Seth’s raised voice. Seth, Tomasz, and Regine watch the birds fly off, too small to be a flock, disappearing deeper into the cemetery, into overgrown trees and shadows, until they’re nothing but a memory.
And then Seth begins to speak.
&nb
sp; He was still holding Owen’s hand. Their mother had said, “Don’t move!” and they’d obeyed her almost to the letter, sitting down on the floor next to the dining-room table when they got tired.
And then came the knocking. Not at the front door, but on the kitchen window at the back, in the garden that led nowhere except to fence after fence.
Where a man in a funny-collared dark-blue shirt was now looking at them.
“Hello, lads,” he said, his voice dampened by the glass. “Can you help me out?”
“Seth?” Owen said, worried.
“Go away,” Seth said to the man, trying to sound braver than he was. But he was eight and never sure why adults did any of the things they did, so he also said, “What do you want?”
“I want to come in,” said the man. “I’m hurt. I need help.”
“Go away!” Owen shouted, echoing Seth’s words.
“I won’t go away,” said the man. “You can count on that, lads. I will never, ever go away.”
Owen gripped tighter onto Seth. “I’m scared,” he whispered. “Where’s Mummy?”
Seth had a sudden inspiration. “You’ll get in trouble!” he shouted at the man. “My mum will catch you! She’s here. She’s upstairs. I’ll go get her now!”
“Your mother left,” the man said, unbothered. “I watched her go. I thought she might pop back in, because who would leave two youngsters like yourselves on their own, even for a few minutes? But no, it really does seem like she’s gone. Now, I’m going to ask you again, lads. Unlock this back door here and let me in. I need your help.”
“If you really needed help,” Seth said to him, “you would have asked for it when Mummy was here.”
The man paused, almost as if acknowledging this mistake. “I don’t want her help. I want your help.”
“No,” Owen whispered, still panicky. “Don’t do it, Seth.”
“I won’t,” Seth said to him. “I never would.”
