“This is the boy,” Joe said, patting one of the active machines. “Looks like a solid lock, too. Should be good for a full ten or twelve days. I think this might be the one that does it for us.”
Mick glanced again at the bandage on the back of Joe’s neck. “You’ve had a nervelink inserted, haven’t you.”
“Straight to the medical center as soon as I got the alert on the lock. I was nervous—first time, and all that. But it turned out to be dead easy. No pain at all. I was up and out within half an hour. They even gave me a Rich Tea Biscuit.”
“Ooh. A Rich Tea Biscuit. It doesn’t get any better than that, does it. You’ll be going through today, I take it?”
Joe reached up and tore off the bandage, revealing only a small spot of blood, like a shaving nick. “Tomorrow, probably. Maybe Sunday. The nervelink isn’t active yet, and that’ll take some getting used to. We’ve got bags of time, though; even if we don’t switch on the nervelink until Sunday, I’ll still have five or six days of bandwidth before we become noise-limited.”
“You must be excited.”
“Right now I just don’t want to cock up anything. The Helsinki boys are nipping at our heels as it is. I reckon they’re within a few months of beating us.”
Mick knew how important this latest project was for Joe. Sending information between different realities was one thing, and impressive enough in its own right. But now that technology had escaped from the labs out into the real world. There were hundreds of correlators in other labs and institutes around the world. In five years it had gone from being a spooky, barely believable phenomenon, to an accepted part of the modern world.
But Joe—whose team had always been at the forefront of the technology—hadn’t stood still. They’d been the first to work out how to send voice and video comms across the gap with another reality, and within the last year they’d been able to operate a camera-equipped robot, the same battery-driven kind that all the tourists had been using before nervelinking became the new thing. Joe had even let Mick have a go on it. With his hands operating the robot’s manipulators via force-feedback gloves, and his eyes seeing the world via the stereoscopic projectors in a virtual-reality helmet, Mick had been able to feel himself almost physically present in the other lab. He’d been able to move around and pick things up just as if he were actually walking in that alternate reality. Oddest of all had been meeting the other version of Joe Liversedge, the one who worked in the counterpart lab. Both Joes seemed cheerily indifferent to the weirdness of the setup, as if collaborating with a duplicate of yourself was the most normal thing in the world.
Mick had been impressed by the robot. But for Joe it was a stepping stone to something even better.
“Think about it,” he’d said. “A few years ago, tourists started switching over to nervelinks instead of robots. Who wants to drive a clunky machine around some smelly foreign city, when you can drive a warm human body instead? Robots can see stuff, they can move around and pick stuff up, but they can’t give you the smells, the taste of food, the heat, the contact with other people.”
“Mm,” Mick had said noncommittally. He didn’t really approve of nervelinking, even though it essentially paid Andrea’s wages.
“So we’re going to do the same. We’ve got the kit. Getting it installed is a piece of piss. All we need now is a solid link.”
And now Joe had what he’d been waiting for. Mick could practically see the Nature cover-article in his friend’s eyes. Perhaps he was even thinking about taking that long train ride to Stockholm.
“I hope it works out for you,” Mick said.
Joe patted the correlator again. “I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”
That was when one of Joe’s undergraduates came up to them. To Mick’s surprise, it wasn’t Joe she wanted to speak to.
“Doctor Leighton?”
“That’s me.”
“There’s somebody to see you, sir. I think it’s quite important.”
“Someone to see me?”
“They said you left a note in your office.”
“I did,” Mick said absent-mindedly. “But I also said I wouldn’t be gone long. Nothing’s that important, is it?”
But the person who had come to find Mick was a policewoman. When Mick met her at the top of the stairs her expression told him it wasn’t good news.
“Something’s happened,” he said.
She looked worried, and very, very young. “Is there somewhere we can talk, Mister Leighton?”
“Use my office,” Joe said, showing the two of them to his room just down the corridor. Joe left the two of them alone, saying he was going down to the coffee machine in the hall.
“I’ve got some bad news,” the policewoman said, when Joe had closed the door. “I think you should sit down, Mister Leighton.”
Mick pulled out Joe’s chair from under the desk, which was covered in papers: coursework Joe must have been in the process of grading. Mick sat down, then didn’t know where to put his hands. “It’s about Andrea, isn’t it.”
“I’m afraid your wife was in an accident this morning,” the policewoman said.
“What kind of accident? What happened?”
“Your wife was hit by a car when she was crossing the road.”
A mean, little thought flashed through Mick’s mind. Bloody Andrea: she’d always been one for dashing across a road without looking. He’d been warning her for years she was going to regret it one day.
“How is she? Where did they take her?”
“I’m really sorry, sir.” The policewoman hesitated. “Your wife died on the way to hospital. I understand that the paramedics did all they could, but...”
Mick was hearing it, and not hearing it. It couldn’t be right. People still got knocked down by cars. But they didn’t die from it, not anymore. Cars couldn’t go fast enough in towns to kill anyone. Being knocked down and killed by a car was something that happened to people in soap operas, not real life.
Feeling numb, not really present in the room, Mick said, “Where is she now?” As if by visiting her, he might prove that they’d got it wrong, that she wasn’t dead at all.
“They took her to the Heath, sir. That’s where she is now. I can drive you there.”
“Andrea isn’t dead,” Mick said. “She can’t be. Not now.”
“I’m really sorry,” the policewoman said.
SATURDAY
For the last three weeks, ever since they had separated, Mick had been sleeping in a spare room at his brother’s house in Newport. The company had been good, but now Bill was away for the weekend on some ridiculous team-building exercise in Snowdonia. For tedious reasons, Mick’s brother had had to take the house keys with him, leaving Mick with nowhere to sleep on Friday night. When Joe had asked him where he was going to stay, Mick said he’d go back to his own house, the one he’d left at the beginning of the month.
Joe was having none of it, and insisted that Mick sleep at his house instead. Mick spent the night going through the usual cycle of emotions that came with any sudden bad news. He’d had nothing to compare with losing his wife, but the texture of the shock was familiar enough, albeit magnified from anything in his previous experience. He resented the fact that the world seemed to be continuing, crassly oblivious to Andrea’s death. The news wasn’t dominated by his tragedy; it was all about some Polish miners trapped underground. When he finally managed to get to sleep, Mick was tormented by dreams that his wife was still alive, that it had all been a mistake.
But he knew it was all true. He’d been to the hospital; he’d seen her body. He even knew why she’d been hit by the car. Andrea had been crossing the road to her favorite hair salon; she’d had an appointment to get her hair done. Knowing Andrea, she had probably been so focused on the salon that she was oblivious to all that was going on around her. It hadn’t even been the car that had killed her in the end. When the slow-moving vehicle knocked her down, Andrea had struck her head against the side of the c
urb.
By midmorning on Saturday, Mick’s brother had returned from Snowdonia. Bill came around to Joe’s house and hugged Mick silently, saying nothing for many minutes. Then Bill went into the next room and spoke quietly to Joe and Rachel. Their low voices made Mick feel like a child in a house of adults.
“I think you and I need to get out of Cardiff,” Bill told Mick, when he returned to the living room. “No ifs, no buts.”
Mick started to protest. “There’s too much that needs to be done. I still need to get back to the funeral home.”
“It can wait until this afternoon. No one’s going to hate you for not returning a few calls. C’mon; let’s drive up to the Gower and get some fresh air. I’ve already reserved a car.”
“Go with him,” Rachel said. “It’ll do you good.”
Mick acquiesced, his guilt and relief in conflict at being able to put aside thoughts of the funeral plans. He was glad Bill had come down, but he couldn’t quite judge how his brother—or his friends, for that matter—viewed his bereavement. He’d lost his wife. They all knew that. But they also knew that Mick and Andrea had been separated. They’d been having problems for most of the year. It would only be human for his friends to assume that Mick wasn’t quite as affected by Andrea’s death as he would have been had they still been living together.
“Listen,” he told Bill, when they were safely under way. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
“I’m listening.”
“Andrea and I had problems. But it wasn’t the end of our marriage. We were going to get through this. I was going to call her this weekend, see if we couldn’t meet.”
Bill looked at him sadly. Mick couldn’t tell if that meant that Bill just didn’t believe him, or that his brother pitied him for the opportunity he’d allowed to slip between his fingers.
When they got back to Cardiff in the early evening, after a warm and blustery day out on the Gower, Joe practically pounced on Mick as soon as they came through the door.
“I need to talk to you,” Joe said. “Now.”
“I need to call some of Andrea’s friends,” Mick said. “Can it wait until later?”
“No. It can’t. It’s about you and Andrea.”
They went into the kitchen. Joe poured him a glass of whisky. Rachel and Bill watched from the end of the table, saying nothing.
“I’ve been to the lab,” Joe said. “I know it’s Saturday, but I wanted to make sure that lock was still holding. Well, it is. We could start the experiment tomorrow if we wanted to. But something’s come up, and you need to know about it.”
Mick sipped from his glass. “Go on.”
“I’ve been in contact with my counterpart in the other lab.”
“The other Joe.”
“The other Joe, yes. We were finessing the equipment, making sure everything was optimal. And we talked, of course. Needless to say I mentioned what had happened.”
“And?”
“The other me was surprised. Shocked, even. He said Andrea hadn’t died in his reality.” Joe held up a hand, signaling that Mick should let him finish before speaking. “You know how it works. The two histories are identical before the lock takes effect: so identical that there isn’t even any point in thinking of them as being distinct realities. The divergence only happens once the lock is in effect. The lock was active by the time you came down to tell me about the squash match. The other me also had a visit from you. The difference was that no policewoman ever came to his lab. You eventually drifted back to your office to carry on grading tutorials.”
“But Andrea was already dead by then.”
“Not in that reality. The other me phoned you. You were staying at the Holiday Inn. You knew nothing of Andrea having had any accident. So my other wife...” Joe allowed himself a quick smile. “The other version of Rachel called Andrea. And they spoke. Turned out Andrea had been hit by a car, but she’d barely been bruised. They hadn’t even called an ambulance.”
Mick absorbed what his friend had to say, then said, “I can’t deal with this, Joe. I don’t need to know it. It isn’t going to help.”
“I think it is. We were set up to run the nervelink experiment as soon as we had a solid lock, one that we could trust to hold for the full million seconds. This is it. The only difference is it doesn’t have to be me who goes through.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I can put you through, Mick. We can get you nervelinked tomorrow morning. Allowing for a day of bedding in and practice once you arrive in the other reality...well, you could be walking in Andrea’s world by Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning at the latest.”
“But you’re the one who is supposed to be going through,” Mick said. “You’ve already had the nervelink put in.”
“We’ve got a spare,” Joe said.
Mick’s mind raced through the implications. “Then I’d be controlling the body of the other you, right?”
“No. That won’t work, unfortunately. We’ve had to make some changes to these nervelinks to get them to work properly through the correlator, with the limited signal throughput. We had to ditch some of the channels that handle proprioceptive mapping. They’ll only work properly if the body on the other end of the link is virtually identical to the one on this side.”
“Then it won’t work. You’re nothing like me.”
“You’re forgetting your counterpart on the other side,” Joe said. He glanced past Mick at Bill and Rachel, raising his eyebrows as he did so. “The way it would work is, you come into the lab and we install the link in you, just the same way it happened for me yesterday morning. At the same time your counterpart in Andrea’s world comes into his version of the lab and gets the other version of the nervelink put into him.”
Mick shivered. He’d become used to thinking about the other version of Joe; he could even begin to accept that there was a version of Andrea walking around somewhere who was still alive. But as soon as Joe brought the other Mick into the argument, he felt his head begin to unravel.
“Wouldn’t he—the other me—need to agree to this?”
“He already has,” Joe said solemnly. “I’ve been in touch with him. The other Joe called him into the lab. We had a chat over the videolink. He didn’t go for it at first—you know how you both feel about nervelinking. And he hasn’t lost his version of Andrea. But I explained how big a deal this was. This is your only chance to see Andrea again. Once this window closes—we’re talking about no more than eleven or twelve days from the start of the lock, by the way—we’ll never make contact with another reality where she’s alive.”
Mick blinked and placed his hands on the table. He felt dizzy with the implications, as if the kitchen was swaying. “You’re certain of that? You’ll never open another window into Andrea’s world?”
“Statistically, we were incredibly lucky to get this one chance. By the time the window closes, Andrea’s reality will have diverged so far from ours that there’s essentially no chance of ever getting another lock.”
“Okay,” Mick said, ready to take Joe’s word for it. “But even if I agree to this—even if the other me agrees to it—what about Andrea? We weren’t seeing each other.”
“But you wanted to see her again,” Bill said quietly.
Mick rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, and exhaled loudly. “Maybe.”
“I’ve spoken to Andrea,” Rachel said. “I mean, Joe spoke to himself, and the other version of him spoke to the other Rachel. She’s been in touch with Andrea.”
Mick hardly dared speak. “And?”
“She says it’s okay. She understands how horrible this must be for you. She says, if you want to come through, she’ll meet you. You can spend some time together. Give you a chance to come to some kind of...”
“Closure,” Mick whispered.
“It’ll help you,” Joe said. “It’s got to help you.”
SUNDAY
The medical center was normally closed on weekends, but Joe
had pulled strings to get some of the staff to come in on Sunday morning. Mick had to sit around a long time while they ran physiological tests and prepared the surgical equipment. It was much easier and quicker for tourists, for they didn’t have to use the modified nervelink units Joe’s team had developed.
By the early afternoon they were satisfied that Mick was ready for the implantation. They made him lie down on a couch with his head encased in a padded plastic assembly with a hole under the back of the neck. He was given a mild, local anesthetic. Rubberized clamps whirred in to hold his head in position with micromillimeter accuracy. Then he felt a vague impression of pressure being applied to the skin on the back of his neck, and then an odd and not entirely pleasant sensation of sudden pins and needles in every part of his body. But the unpleasantness was over almost as soon as he’d registered it. The support clamps whirred away from his head. The couch tilted up, and he was able to get off and stand on his feet.
Mick touched the back of his neck, came away with a tiny smear of blood on his thumb.
“That’s it?”
“I told you there was nothing to it,” Joe said, putting down a motorcycling magazine. “I don’t know what you were so worried about.”
“It’s not the nervelink operation itself I don’t approve of. I don’t have a problem with the technology. It’s the whole system, the way it encourages the exploitation of the poor.”
Joe tut-tutted. “Bloody Guardian readers. It was you lot who got the bloody moratorium against air travel enacted in the first place. Next you’ll be telling us we can’t even walk anywhere.”
The nurse swabbed Mick’s wound and applied a bandage. He was shunted into an adjoining room and asked to wait again. More tests followed. As the system interrogated the newly embedded nervelink, he experienced mild electrical tingles and strange, fleeting feelings of dislocation. Nothing he reported gave the staff any cause for alarm.
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