The Uploaded

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Evangeline scrubbed the tears away with the heels of her palms, knotted her hands in her tangled red hair. She pulled hard enough that I heard her scalp ripping.

  “We don’t have time for this… luxury!” Her words were muffled by sobs. “The guards know our location! I have to… have to rescue you…”

  I looked at the scientists peeking out at us through the reinforced glass, wondering whether they could take us. They’d kill us if they could.

  “Rescuing would be nice,” I said.

  I knew I could pull the old military routine, yelling to get on her feet. But ultimately, it’d be the death of her.

  Evangeline was tightly wound to begin with; if she didn’t acknowledge this hurt now, she never would. She’d bury the death deeper, like a ticking bomb she kept shoveling dirt on in the hopes of tamping it down when it exploded… And it would explode later, in a big messy batch of misdirected suicide.

  Unless I vented this now, she’d keep seeking out the most dangerous missions – because whenever she stopped dodging bullets, she’d have to start burying her parents all over again. Better to lose yourself in stupid, overblown acts of crazy than face that remorse.

  I knew, because that’s what I’d done when Mom and Dad had left.

  So I put my arm around her, glaring death at the scientists. They retreated.

  Evangeline shoved me away, but didn’t mean it – she could have flung me into the next state. I extended my hands again, and this time she grabbed me, biting my shoulder to hold back her tears.

  “You… You did the right thing,” I said, stroking her hair awkwardly. “You ended their suffering. And they’re, they’re in a better place…”

  She kissed me.

  It wasn’t like Peaches’ kisses. The one time I’d made out with Peaches, it had been on a rooftop, just before sunrise. Peaches had snuggled closer and closer, nuzzling me, waiting for me to approach. But what if I’d misread the signs? Peaches wasn’t kind to those who made unwanted advances.

  It was kiss Peaches or go mad. She’d smirked, as if she’d been waiting for me all along, and opened up her soft, soft lips. She kept her tongue at the back of her mouth, rewarding me with tiny snakelike licks, teasing me deeper.

  Once I committed, Peaches cut me off. “Look at that beautiful sunrise” was her signal the festivities were over – another test, I knew. Would I be oafish enough to keep pressing her? No. So I agreed it was a nice sunrise, and ignored the throbbing in my crotch that stayed for about a week afterwards.

  Peaches was a delicate rose, waiting to be cultivated.

  Evangeline was a tiger.

  She wrapped her arms around me; our bulletproof vests clunked against each other. She searched my eyes, reading the terror in there as I wondered what I’d done wrong – and then, slowly, she pressed her full, red lips against mine, giving me time to understand as a part of me went oh.

  Then she kissed me. And she kissed me, no doubt about that; she grabbed my neck, taking the lead, sliding the tip of her tongue into my mouth.

  It was a fierce kiss, one that stole the breath from me. All I could do was sit back while she took what she needed.

  But there was one thing Evangeline had in common with Peaches: when she was done, she was done. She broke off the kiss to shove me aside.

  “Hey!” I protested – and noticed the three guards rounding the corner, their boots scrambling for traction on the foam-slicked floor.

  “Amichai Damrosch,” they said, “Set down your weapons and–”

  Evangeline shoved herself down the slippery hallway, hooking their ankles with her arms. They toppled, trying to bring their rifles around to bear – she flipped over on her back, stomping on each guard’s trigger hand.

  The third guard wrestled Evangeline into his sights – and then his kneecap exploded as she shot him. He fell, clutching his ruined leg. She snatched the rifle out of one guard’s broken hands and smashed the other in the face with it.

  “Wait,” the third, remaining guard said. “I–”

  She drove the stock into his nose. She checked their necks for pulses, plucked the excess ammunition from their bodies, then extended her hand to me.

  I was still sitting down.

  I let her pull me to my feet, puffing out my chest to make it seem like… what? Like I would have challenged them to a duel if she hadn’t beaten me to it?

  “That kiss wasn’t… wasn’t two becoming one flesh.” Evangeline avoided my gaze as she shifted her armor back into place. “You were just there.”

  I wanted to pull her back to me, foolish though that might be. That had been a lifechanging kiss right there, a kiss that promised whole other worlds of kissitude.

  But I also understood the grief that kiss had sprung from.

  I adjusted some meaningless settings on the IceBreaker; I didn’t want to look her in the eyes. I liked her too much to see regret there.

  She jerked her chin towards the guards. “They had orders to capture, not kill. That made it easier.”

  “For you.”

  Was that a grin? I couldn’t tell.

  We bolted for the front door, which was blocked by a heap of corpses, all shot dead in mid-brawl. Six guards were sandwiched in a crowd of ragged prisoners, bloody hands still wrapped around the guards’ throats.

  They were riddled with bullets, guards and prisoners alike – and I understood what had happened.

  The server had been designed to withstand almost any outside assault. Yet the principles that made it defensible – two reinforced doors – meant that it was equally easy to keep people trapped inside. The guards had found themselves in the tenuous position of needing to track down the escaping NeoChristians before they got too far – a difficult thing when the remaining prisoners pressed themselves against the doors, ready to bash your skull in with a rock when you poked your head out.

  The six guards had been the sacrifice squad sent ahead to draw out the prisoners, while the rest of them stayed down the hallway and shot at everything.

  Nobody on either side’d had an ounce of hesitation; their bodies were disposable, their memories already preserved. I noted the uniforms on the dead soldiers had epaulets; the officers had usurped the privilege of sacrifice.

  I threw up.

  “Why are you sick?” Evangeline asked, puzzled. “Is it the sight of blood?”

  “They all died for me.” I wiped my mouth. “Some to keep me in, others to get me out, but if it wasn’t for me… They’d all be alive.”

  I laughed. Everyone, NeoChristians and guards alike, were convinced they were going to a better place. They’d thrown their lives away willingly.

  That shouldn’t bother me, but it did.

  I staggered past the bodies, headed for the courtyard. Evangeline hauled me back as a hail of bullets ricocheted off the entryway. “It’s him!” someone cried. “Suppression fire only! Don’t let them out!”

  “All my brethren are with God,” Evangeline said, doubling back.

  It took me a moment to realize she meant dead. “How do you know?”

  “Because the courtyard still has gunmen in it.”

  “Too true,” Wickliffe said. “Time to give up, Amichai.”

  The monitors embedded in the hallways flickered on. Wickliffe-faces turned to face us as the remaining guards – some limping – emerged from the interior hallways, rifles ready. They had the cautious look of hospital orderlies surrounding a pony.

  Wickliffe looked wise, unruffled, sympathetic – just the kind of man you’d want to surrender to.

  “I’ve examined your Shrives, Amichai.” His voice was filled with admiration, tinged with regret. “And I know what you’re thinking now.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I do. You’re thinking if you go out in a blaze of glory, you’ll live on as a memory.”

  I felt like a cold breeze had blown straight through me. What else did he know about me?

  “I’m not some backwater orphanage administrator, Amic
hai,” Wickliffe said. “I created the Upterlife. I’ve spent years protecting the entire world, and you? You’re a momentary concern, I agree – but don’t overestimate yourself.”

  He chuckled. “Now, the Supreme Court session where they decided whether the postmortemed had the right to vote? Now, that’s a moment to give me nightmares. You, my dear boy, are an error that will be corrected. Once you’re gone, not even your parents will miss you. Not that they do now…”

  If a bodiless man could punch me in the heart…

  “I’m sorry, Amichai. We’re on the same side – I wish you could understand how much I admire you. The fact that your parents ignore you isn’t your fault – it’s proof of how badly your parents have been corrupted. You? You’re everything I want the living to be – bold, moral, intellectually curious. Not to flatter you overmuch, but… I see too much of myself in you.”

  I moved to protect Evangeline. “So let us go.”

  “In a better world, I could. But you’re in my way.”

  “Of doing evil!”

  “Such a small perspective, Amichai. A young perspective. After five hundred years, you come to understand what works. This brainmeddling is unpleasant, but it will work in time.”

  “Don’t give me the old ‘ends justify the means’ speech…”

  “You know who tells you the ends don’t justify the means? People who mean nothing and end poorly. Trust me, Amichai. I haven’t changed. I created the most peaceful society this world has ever known – and if I say a few living brains is the cost for paradise, then that is the cost.”

  “You’re not dissecting brains!” I said. “You’re torturing people.”

  “If I could use lab rats, I would. But that’s how the real world works, Amichai. It feeds you constant choices between moral compromise or destruction – and there’s never a third way out. That’s why I created the Upterlife – I wanted a place where all the choices were good…”

  “Don’t talk to me about choices – you’re trying to take away our choices…”

  “I won’t debate. But you don’t have to void. Surrender, and I’ll ensure your last Shrive – the ignorant one – gets to the Upterlife.”

  “I thought the dead got to vote on who got in,” I said.

  “They’ll welcome you with open arms once I announce you died quashing a branch operation in Little Venice.” He gave me his kindly old man’s smile. “Peaches was right; noble sacrifice is a tale the dead always love to hear.”

  “Stop talking about her like you know her.”

  “But I do, Amichai. I know everyone who’s Shrived. Better than they know themselves.”

  “So what am I thinking now?”

  “You’re thinking of Therapy.”

  Evangeline gave me a confused look. My face must have given me away, though, because Wickliffe nodded sagely.

  “This time, Amichai, the pony lives. I know you respect your NeoChristian friend, there – it’s a little deeper than that, actually, but we won’t go into that now – and you’d never surrender unless you knew she was safe. So she’ll be safe. We’ll lock her in a prison, and you have my word she will not be – how do my scientists so clumsily put it? – doggified.”

  “Unacceptable.” Evangeline cocked her rifle. The guards at the end of the hallway raised their weapons.

  “Amichai.” Wickliffe spoke quickly, his voice low and urgent, “My simulations show you both have a 78 percent chance of voiding. We can’t subdue Evangeline without killing her. You have to talk her out of it – it’s the only way to protect your sister…”

  I turned to Evangeline, who glanced between the guards on the inside of the server, the guards on the outside of the server, and me. Would I betray her?

  If Wickliffe got ahold of my recent brainscans, he’d know the path we took here. That would make tracking Dare and Peaches down among Little Venice’s ruins that much easier – he’d capture them before they could make it back to tell the living. And then the NeoChristians would keep getting brainfried until he discovered how to mold the living to his needs.

  The servers won’t be any fun for me without my little brother there.

  “Do you believe in things beyond death?” I asked Evangeline.

  “…what? Of course I do.”

  “Then say a prayer for my sister.”

  She pulled down her armor to press one palm against the black cross tattooed on her breastbone, then touched her fingers to my lips. It felt intimate, a benediction.

  I turned to Wickliffe. Exultant. Triumphant. Embracing my insanity.

  “You lie like a politician, Wickliffe!” I cried. “You’ve got a horde of NeoChristian prisoners on the run – and my friends with video evidence. If one of them testifies to what you’re doing, you’re dead. You wouldn’t be trying so hard to get my brain unless you thought I knew something you didn’t. You can’t kid a kidder, man – you’re shitting e-bricks. Oh, you’re gonna remember my name.”

  “As someone who brought down civilization!” he spluttered.

  “You built it on our backs. Let it tumble.”

  The guards outside the server shouted in panic. I said a prayer to no one in particular, hoping Peaches and Dare had made it out safe.

  Then I said a final prayer for Izzy.

  “Fire,” I said.

  A roar blew down the corridor.

  Things moved very quickly after that.

  23: 500 FEET AND RISING

  * * *

  Being shot should be painful, I thought. I expected bullets punching through muscle. Instead, I felt weightless, a leaf in the wind…

  …at least until my shoulder slammed into a door that had flown open. I was being carried along in the wind. I grabbed at the doorway as the guards were blown away from me, rifles flying from their hands.

  It was like someone had dropped a tornado into the hallway.

  My ears popped from the pressure differential. Someone yelled – Evangeline? – and the wind reversed course. I was sucked back towards the server’s entryway, my hands clawing at the floor, until I slammed into what felt like a wall of metal spikes.

  “Get in!” someone said. Peaches? It couldn’t be. I turned to look…

  …and there was Peaches, waving at me from the cockpit of a military spirocopter. The spirocopter hovered outside the entryway, bristling with stiff metal miniturbines – each quivering in minute computerized adjustments, sucking in air and shoving it out through supercharged jets. It looked like a tapdancing millipede, but it kept the spirocopter perfectly in place.

  Bullets spanged off the cockpit glass. Dr Hsiang flinched, looking distinctly unhappy in the copilot’s seat – which was no wonder, because Dare had a gun pressed against her neck.

  Peaches pulled the spirocopter’s doors open and hauled me inside.

  “How are you…?” I shouted, looking up at the narrow gap above us. The four collapsed buildings teetered overhead, leaving us with what looked like a chimney’s width for escape. “You can’t fly!”

  “It’s self-correcting!” Peaches said happily, vaulting into the pilot’s seat.

  As if to illustrate, she yanked the throttle straight back just as Evangeline leapt in. The copter whirled madly up the sliver of space between the collapsed buildings and the server, a dandelion seed caught in a storm. Peaches veered too close to a wall; safety jets shoved us back to center with a roar of airfoils.

  Peaches drummed on the steering wheel with her palms, laughing like this was the time of her life. Me? I’d never flown before, and discovered I hated it.

  I wondered what Peaches’ parents would think of her if they saw her giggling, her freshly shaved head still bleeding, steering a hijacked military copter.

  I looked down. The soldiers had piled out into the courtyard to take potshots at us, picking their way among the dead NeoChristians.

  We popped out of the gap between the four collapsed buildings like a cork, but moving too slow to escape an aerial pursuit. This thing was built to carry tons of p
refabbed steel beams; speed had been a secondary design concern.

  “Where to?” Peaches yelled, the merry shout she used to announce that the drinks were on her.

  “Southeast.” Evangeline steadied herself against Peaches’ chair to peer out the front window. “I have brethren in Passaic.”

  Peaches seemed to register Evangeline’s presence for the first time. She shot me a quick look, as if to ask, who brought in the yokel? but then shrugged amiably: whatever it takes to save your life, babe. She punched directions into the navcomputer.

  Evangeline slapped her hand away.

  “You want to broadcast where we’re headed?” Evangeline shouted, rolling her eyes. “Don’t give our landing coordinates to their GPSes. Fly manually. That direction.”

  Peaches’ good mood evaporated.

  Well, they’re off to a fine friendship, I thought. But we had to follow Evangeline’s lead; she was the only one who’d never Shrived. How could I outwit someone who knew everything I’d ever thought up until two days ago?

  Despite the turbulence, Dare’s gun was still pressed to Dr Hsiang’s neck. “There’s no need for that,” Dr Hsiang said, so calmly she might have been discussing the weather. “We’re in the same boat, now. I shan’t do anything rash.”

  “How in the void did you get the spirocopter?” I asked Dare.

  “They’d blocked off the exits,” Dare explained, not taking his eyes off the good doctor. “So Peaches figured if we couldn’t go out, we’d go up. And guess who we ran into on the roof?” He waggled the gun.

  “I’m not your enemy,” Hsiang said. “I’m an employee.”

  “The doctor here was frantic to get out.” Dare laughed. “She’s got no ticket to the Upterlife unless this project succeeds. So this gun was quite the incentive.”

  “I gave you administrative access to this spirocopter…” Hsiang said.

  “You would have betrayed us in a heartbeat. And I suspect you’re already engineering your escape from us…”

  “Good on you,” I said, slapping Dare’s back. The infuriated gaze he directed at Peaches spoke of the argument they’d had over whether to come back for me… and how badly Dare had lost.