The Uploaded

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  My only consolation was that they were wheeling Izzy alongside me. Even though they’d hooked her up to an oxygen tank, she was still hacking up a lung. The chipfarm infections had made her sensitive to the toxic gas.

  “At least we’re together, brother,” Izzy coughed. “Together till the end…”

  “I don’t know if talking to Damrosch now is a good idea, sir,” Gumdrool continued. “We’re… hello? Sir, I… I can’t hear… The…” He removed his earputer, shook it angrily. “I told Him we needed to bulk up the infrastructure. We’ve been neglecting the living side of things so long, we’re paying that price…”

  He wiped tears from his eyes. “The biohazard was a clever ruse, Amichai. I warned him you’d come at us sideways. ‘You should gene-engineer us all,’ I told Him. ‘Make us as strong as Amichai’s beloved ponies, so he’ll stand no chance against us.’ But no. He’s terrified of progress. ‘One genetic experiment gone wrong,’ He keeps repeating, ‘And you wind up with another Bubbler…’”

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “We haul you back to an area with full power, and Wickliffe talks to you.”

  “No mindslavery?”

  “Mr Wickliffe believes he can convince you using mere words.”

  I tried to imagine what words would make me buy into Wickliffe’s scheme…

  …but stopped when I saw Mama Alex and Dare standing before Gumdrool’s spirocopter.

  Dare was bruised but unbroken, standing tall, the wind whipping through his hair. Mama Alex held out her hands, wearing nothing but a thin tie dyed dress.

  Gumdrool waved his troops to a halt. “Thought you’d have been killed.”

  “My guards got killed,” she replied. “Scary business. So I decided I don’t wanna void yet.”

  Gumdrool spat phlegm to one side, clearing his throat. “Drug her, search her, get her in the copter.”

  The guards raised their trankguns. She smirked. “You keep calling me an old woman. You know what you should ask?”

  “What?”

  “How’d she get to be so old, when she’s always flinging herself in death’s teeth?”

  The beads in her hair flickered. The room filled with a throbbing light that hurt my head. Gumdrool and his guards toppled over, convulsing.

  “You carry dazers in your braids?” I asked, delighted.

  Mama Alex didn’t look delighted; she looked grim. “Also a garrote in my dreadlocks, a hacking card embedded in my shoe sole, and five other tricks I’ll never tell anybody about. Come on, Amichai, help me load Gumdrool into the copter.”

  “Just cut his throat!” said Dare.

  “We can’t,” Mama Alex sighed. “Gumdrool told Wickliffe that Amichai is on the way. If Wickliffe doesn’t see this ship taking off soon, he’ll know we escaped. He’ll flood this area with troops… and he’ll catch you.” She closed her eyes, breathed through her nostrils. “No, we need to crash this ship. Make Wickliffe think everyone voided.”

  “OK.” I fired up the IceBreaker to plot a course for crashing.

  “You…” She put her hand over my IceBreaker. “You don’t understand. That ship is trifactor-secured – it won’t take off unless it registers Gumdrool’s brainwaves inside. And it’s autopiloted via satellite.”

  “So how do we crash it?”

  “Someone’s gotta be inside when it goes down. Smash the satellite feed, then crash it hard enough they won’t be able to count the bodies in the wreckage.”

  I’d survived one copter crash, but that had been from thirty feet up – and it had killed one person and crippled another. I imagined a drop from a mile up, crashing into the hard rock of a mountainside – and shuddered at that terrible, bone-shattering death.

  Who would do it? Dare, Mama Alex, or me?

  Then I realized: Mama Alex had already made that decision.

  Dare seized her, pulled her back from the spirocopter’s cockpit. “No! I’ll pilot it! I will not allow you to–”

  “Dare,” Mama Alex said gravely. “Look at me.”

  Lights strobed.

  Dare collapsed onto cold concrete.

  “Wish we had more time to argue,” Mama Alex said, dragging Gumdrool into the spirocopter. “Facundo’ll be back soon with a vehicle. You take everyone and get the void out of town.”

  “Mama, I–”

  “Don’t make me daze you, too, Amichai,” she said. “There’s troops inbound from all over New York state.”

  “But why’s it have to be you?”

  She knelt down. “Because everything good comes with an expiration date, Amichai. Everyone else who could do this is either too incapacitated or too necessary. I don’t want to void, but… This is a better death than lots of people get.”

  “I can’t–”

  She pulled me into one final hug.

  “We’ve got no other choice, Amichai. I’ve… It’s not like I want to do this. But…” She swallowed. “But don’t you give up. Peaches and Dare, they’ll do what’s necessary to keep the revolution running. Your job is to dream.”

  “Dream of what?”

  Mama Alex held me at arm’s length. “I think the dead are beyond saving. But you – you’re stupid stubborn, just like Wickliffe. You won’t give up on anyone. Peaches and Dare would just erase everyone, and so would I, but…”

  She gripped my shoulders hard. “You find a way to save everybody.”

  “I will, Mama.”

  “Or die trying?”

  “Or die trying.”

  She stood up, dismissing me, staring into the spirocopter’s cockpit. She brushed her dreadlocks back.

  “I’m gonna die, trying.” The tiniest of smiles crept across her face.

  I barely remember Mama Alex climbing into the spirocopter, though we have her final moments on film. I don’t remember Facundo screeching up in a stolen electric transitcar, the troops landing hot on our heels, the gunfire, the bursting through barriers, stealing new getaway vehicles, losing the LifeGuard in the mountains.

  Grief will erase your memories. Your brain gets overloaded. It just… stops recording.

  But I do remember watching that spirocopter arc high up into the air, becoming a small dot hovering over high mountain peaks. I remember seeing its smooth flightpath wobble, the copter spinning, plummeting, dropping.

  I remember watching that little copter, and imagining the strength it must have taken Mama Alex to keep the throttle down as the rocks rushed up at her. I imagined her hand steady on the controls.

  I like to think she met the void with a quiet dignity. I like to think she felt nothing but peace, serenity, and certainty in her final moments.

  I know that’s not true.

  But I like to think it.

  46: GOODBYE

  * * *

  I’d never have made it through Mama Alex’s funeral if it wasn’t for Izzy.

  Izzy was in bad shape, exhausted by having worked eighteen-hour days in a virus-laden hellhole. She kept dozing off midsentence. But I held her, so grateful to have her. We hugged each other tight – not too tight, given her ringwormed arms and the cast on my broken shoulder.

  “Everyone saw your adventures in the branch server,” Izzy told me. “It was scary, how fast that video spread. You’d get jailed for uploading it, but people copied it to memory sticks. People held showings at Blackout Parties. I got thousands of emails, asking if you were for real.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I told ’em you were a real pain in my butt.”

  Our laughter felt like lancing a wound. We hadn’t been on the same page in so long.

  “Then I saw you apologizing.” The puzzlement on her face reflected the concern she must have had back then. “I got a stiff videocall from you where you apologized for not dropping by, but… the words were wrong. It was like hearing a bad cover band do Amichai’s Greatest Hits. And I thought, your stupid brother smuggled a pony in here to cheer you up. He wouldn’t just abandon you. But the alternative – that the government was
faking your identity – it sounded…”

  “…crazy.”

  “This whole thing sounds insane if you haven’t lived it.” Izzy’s laugh dissolved into wet coughs. “Then Ian reassigned me to the chip manufacturing plant – and sweet void, he did not believe that hostages should have a vacation. He put me to work, gave me lectures on the glories of the Upterlife, made me stagger up and down those corridors taking samples until I passed out…”

  “Oh, sweetie.” I stroked her hair while she coughed again. It had been bad enough watching the Brain Trust probe her, forcing her through Shrive after Shrive to sift her thoughts for evidence of tampering – but seeing her newfound lung infections told me how badly I’d failed her.

  “They never taught us about those working conditions at the Academy. And – void, Amichai, all I could think about was killing everyone who put me there. Anyone who’d condemn another human to that existence deserves to void.” She bit a stubby fingernail, daring me to contradict her.

  I didn’t. Though I didn’t agree. Having watched Mama Alex plunge into oblivion, the idea of erasing billions more sickened me.

  If you take this job, Mama Alex had said, your best case is the worst choice a human being’s ever had to make.

  “We’ll never Shrive again, will we?” Izzy asked, heartbroken. “We’ll never meet up with Mom and Dad, we’ll never grow baby phoenixes with them, we’ll never reunite our family. We’ll just… void.”

  I wanted to tell her that wasn’t true. But lying to make her feel better was a Mom and Dad move. So I held her hand, the way I’d done in the hospital, in what seemed so long ago.

  “…yeah. We’ll… we’ll die a meat-death.”

  “Oh void.” She squeezed my hand hard. “The lack of the Upterlife – it’s a physical ache. Like an addiction. I feel like this could all make sense if I could just listen to Mom and Dad for a while longer – to hear them tell me about the glorious voyages that await me…”

  Izzy gazed at the dead monitors embedded in the mall walls. Even after the torture she’d been through, she still wanted Mom and Dad to tell her everything would be all right. Whereas I wanted Mama Alex to flicker back onscreen to say hello, she made it, things are great here on the other side.

  Neither of us could imagine someone just… vanishing.

  “Teach me to program, Amichai.” Izzy clenched misshapen fists. “I need to make something good with the time I have left.”

  * * *

  I’d watched a few Criminal meat-funerals out of morbid curiosity. They were embarrassing afterthoughts. The unShrived burials had been like flushing a toilet – ditch the waste and pretend the accident hadn’t happened.

  Mama Alex’s death made us angry.

  So Mama Alex’s funeral was dangerous.

  We made a pyre, even though there was no body left to burn. We masked the blaze as best we could, but maybe satellite photos could pick up our heat signature through the masking curtains. Maybe overhead drones would notice the movement of our dancing.

  Wickliffe had killed our Mama. We were too mad for tactics.

  People drank too much and pissed in the bonfires. They shattered bottles and vowed vengeance on Wickliffe. They danced, they screamed, they cut their hair.

  And after the rage dissipated, they told stories, trying to keep her alive by sharing memories.

  Mama Alex was always harsh, and always helpful. She’d helped get this one kid off drugs by locking him in a room until he went clean. She’d helped another by assigning her increasingly difficult programming tasks to distract her from her addiction. She was brutally efficient, dispensing custom-tailored solutions to problems…

  But lots of kids also told stories of the time Mama Alex had made them hot cocoa and hugged them.

  We all agreed: she had the best hugs.

  There were more rebels at the funeral than I remembered. They spread out across the four mall levels, dangling their feet over the sides, standing next to the NeoChristians pressing in. People had seen my videos. There was an underground railroad of techies trickling into Boston’s promised land.

  Peaches, clad in black wool, steered her chair next to the Brain Trust.

  “…so she told me that our alliance would fall apart at the first funeral,” Peaches said. “Did she say that to you?”

  A ripple of murmurs. Apparently, Mama Alex had had that conversation with just about everyone.

  “I… I think she was warning us.” Peaches wrung her hands. “She knew. And she wanted us to consider how ridiculous it would be for us NeoChristians and atheists to… to sunder right now. Because she, she…”

  Peaches thumped the Brain Trust’s scarred metal casing.

  “She won! We have the Mother Mentors! We killed Gumdrool! The world thinks Amichai is dead! All that for a single casualty! This feels like loss, but I assure you… it’s victory.”

  She hung her head. “All the same. If we start thinking a life is worth a cost, then… then we’re Wickliffe.”

  Wickcleft bowed his head, shamed by his parallel self.

  “Mama Alex, she… she told me forest fires seemed tragic, but secretly made the world better. That the flames that burned the old trees cleared brush to let young saplings grow twice as fast.”

  Peaches eased her joystick to the left, twirling her chair in a slow circle, meeting the eyes of every single person in that gallery.

  “Mama Alex thought you were worth burning for,” Peaches told them.

  * * *

  I stumbled into Dare after the funeral. He was making out with a young black guy, guzzling home-brewed booze between sloppy kisses. I didn’t notice him at first; there were a lot of makeout sessions that night.

  But Dare called after me, belligerent, drunk: “Where you going, Pony Boy?”

  Dare’s lover, sensing trouble, slipped away. Dare swaggered up.

  “So you gave in to guilt. Again.”

  “I didn’t–”

  “You surrendered.”

  “It’s not like I wasn’t looking for an escape…”

  “You gave up.”

  “He called her bluff, Dare. And…” I felt the bones in my broken shoulder grind. “He’d won. I couldn’t stop him.”

  “And if we could have blown up the factory? Would it have made a difference?”

  I studied my shoes.

  “I told you you’d make stupid choices,” Dare spat. “You’re perfectly fine watching my sister get shot, and yet the second someone hurts that NeoChristian bitch, you surrender! You handed over your precious brain and everything you know about Boston! Mama Alex had to go back to rescue your sad ass!”

  “Mama Alex thought rescuing Izzy was a worthy risk.”

  “That’s because Mama Alex was a real mother. You killed her. You crippled my sister. You’re destroying everything I love… and if it was all for the cause, I could deal with that! You want… you want this phony Upterlife paradise, where everybody gets saved!” He flailed. “You’ll do anything to avoid getting people killed, but that just makes more slaughter!”

  He flung his bottle at me.

  “No wonder Therapy’s your symbol.” He bumped my bad shoulder as he pushed past me. “A crazy pony stampeding through a hospital. Clueless.”

  * * *

  I found Evangeline in the woods. She stared up at the sky, hands laced over her belly.

  She was positioned like a corpse.

  I carefully eased myself onto the ground down beside her, my broken shoulder aching.

  I stared at the sky. The sky where Mama Alex had died.

  “…You couldn’t have done anything,” I said.

  Her voice was monotone. “That’s not the point.”

  “What is?”

  “When I threatened to kill him at the branch server, he embraced death. But… when he threatened me… I cried. I would have begged, if you hadn’t jumped in.” She swallowed. “Gumdrool – Drumgoole – has more faith than I do.”

  She turned to look at me. “You took that
faith from me, Amichai.”

  “How did I–”

  “If I’d walked away from you, I’d be dead and in Heaven, and everything would be OK. But I’m still here. Sinning. Sinning all the time. Not a moment goes by I don’t wish we’d both died in that crash.”

  “You want me to void?”

  “I want you to be in Heaven, Amichai.” She gripped my hand. “But you don’t believe in the Second Coming. You lay with women who aren’t your wife. You… Argh.” She scrubbed her face with balled fists. “Your beliefs make things complicated, Amichai. I keep thinking that I can only save myself by converting you…”

  I tried not to back away. “Even if your God existed, I… I don’t think he’d like me much.”

  “It’s not about belief, Amichai. Do you know why my people reject me?”

  “Ximena said you were a heretic…”

  “We call ourselves Eibonites. My people were a fragment of a fragment. Wickliffe targeted my sect because he knew no one would protect us. Ximena’s people – all the rest – they believe Christ was God’s son, born without sin, without sex – a neuter passed down from the Heavens to die for our sins.”

  I didn’t want to tell her how batshit that sounded. “And you believe?”

  “That Christ was an ordinary man, born of man and woman. When He placed Himself on that cross, Christ had no more guarantee of eternity than any of us have right now; He was scared, and confused, and uncertain whether this was the right thing to do. Yet He had the faith and the courage to sacrifice His life rather than cease His good works. Then, on the cross, when He had suffered more completely for His brother than any man before Him, God escorted Christ up to Heaven as a beacon to light the way for others. Christ wasn’t the Chosen One; He was the one who chose Himself. And nobody wants to hear that, because everyone’s waiting for a sign.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “It means if you do enough good works, then we both die saved, and we’ll go to Heaven together.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “You will. You have to, Amichai. Or I’ll go mad.”