Upgraded

by Peter Watts

  “We die if we don’t, too. Was there anything behind the refiners?”

  “The tunnel ended after about a hundred meters. It was just a branch.”

  “So it’s back the way I came.”

  There’s a whine—the familiar sound of a drill. I drag my carapace over scattered bits of not-yet-assembled refiners (and the exploded one) to get a look at what you’re doing. The tunnel out is closed with a big slab of rock, and I realize that you’re not trying to drill through it, or drill it to pieces. You’re going around.

  “The tunnel was wider on this side,” you explain. “And the rock is fractured. Maybe it won’t go too far back.”

  It does.

  Finally, wearied, you cling to the rocks. I don’t need to read your exhaust to know your consumables are running dangerously low. Power barely humming, you lower your carapace to the tunnel floor and ask, “You got something to live for?”

  I don’t mean to tell you—I’ve heard it all—but I must be tired too because it just comes out bald. “I’m a single parent.”

  You stop, shocked. I’m used to this. Tired of it, but accustomed. What will come next is a flurry of questions—why I have no creche, no family network, no partners. Who would be so irresponsible as to bring a child into the world alone. Questions I save my breath to deflect. I had partners. I thought two were enough. But one died, and the other one turned out to have been sticking around for something other than a relationship with me, or with the kids.

  So what are you going to do?

  Whatever you need to to take care of the kids. And to grow a thicker skin, and move on.

  Whatever you have to do.

  But you don’t ask. You just crouch there, humming. So I fill in the silence, because the pressure of the answers I called up in anticipation has to be released.

  If only I’d had the sense to do that with the refiner.

  “I had partners. I don’t anymore. And before you ask why I didn’t surrender my kids to a creche—they’re my kids. They’re my only family.” They’re all I have left of Oam. “I’m going to trust somebody else to raise them?”

  “Who’s raising them while you’re—” You make a cursory wiggle of your manipulators. Here. Downstairs. Dying at the bottom of a gravity well.

  Touché. “They’re in school.”

  “Ah,” you say.

  But you don’t make it sound like an insult, somehow.

  “Wait,” I say, seventy-two minutes later. Because I just thought of something.

  The dust has settled. We’ve been lying in silence, watching the remaining minutes of our lives tick by on various wetware monitors. Having used up your consumables digging, Chi, you’re going to die before I do. And though I hardly know you, I’m just not ready for that.

  I don’t want to die alone. Why is it better to have company?

  The dust of the explosion and your digging has settled. And that’s what ticks the idea over in my brain. Because it’s settled over the scattered remains of the refiners—the casings, the bits, the burr grinders, the things I don’t know what they are but I know how to plug them in to make slag and ingots come out of the other end, the power cells—and it’s settled over the visible edge of the big block of collapsed tunnel ceiling that’s trapping us.

  And there, by that edge . . . there’s a ripple.

  Not a big one. But a sharp one, a defined edge. Something that shows the path of a current. Air, if you can call it that—okay, atmosphere—is moving through that blockage.

  I reach out and touch your carapace with my ruined manipulator. I draw your attention to it. You look, but you don’t comment. I wonder if that’s because you don’t dare hope, or because you’re too new to the mines to understand what it signifies.

  I say, “Where air can go, we can go.”

  Okay, that’s a lie. But we all need a good encouraging lie every once in a while.

  “You were right, Kely,” you say. “We don’t have the juice to drill our way ou—”

  Your sensors focus, then, on my non-ruined manipulator. And on the refiner power cell I’m holding high for your examination.

  Well, we dig. We’re still hurting for oxy, but the power cells mean that the suits can move for us rather than the other way around, so we use less of it. And I manage to browbeat you into letting me transfer some of my H2O over to your carapace. Even if I do have to play the “don’t make me die alone” card to get you to agree.

  I think the fact that authentically, one of us has to prop and brace the slab for the other to dig without being crushed to death makes the difference. You might nobly sacrifice yourself for me. Especially since I notice you didn’t answer your own question about having anything to live for. But you’re not willing to kill us both in order to refuse sharing resources.

  And then, I’m a little dubious about going down into that hole with nothing holding up the tons of rock except your locked-out hydraulics.

  “You have to trust me,” you say, and sure that’s problematic for a lot of reasons. Not the least of them all the ones why I’m down in this hole in the first place.

  But I don’t just have to trust you. I have to trust all those fuckers who engineered your shell, and all the ones who built it.

  But hell, it’s your life too. And what choice have we got?

  It’s not good. It’s none of it good. The space I’m digging in is just as big as I am—the flat cross-section of my carapace, and no taller—and I can feel that slab shifting over me, groaning against your locked manipulators. I scrabble with my fused claw, using it to push the drilled chips of rock out behind me, and then kick it back with my legs like a burrowing scarab. If anyone had ever asked me how I wanted to die, this would have been down the list somewhere under drowning in caterpillars.

  I know there’s a level where we’re lying to ourselves, where this is just a way to get it over with faster. To run through our resources so it’s done that much quicker.

  Right now, under this big slab of rock in the hot dark—right now, I’m okay with that.

  And I’m okay with it—my carapace scraping rock, hoping I won’t throw a spark and boom something else, worming through the crawlspace like a roach—right up until the moment when my forward manipulator breaks out into air.

  Well, atmosphere. Space, anyway.

  Gently, gently, I back out of the hole. I face you, expressionless shell reflected in your expressionless shell in turn. “We’re through,” I tell you. Before you can crank at me to get back in there.

  Then I say, “You go first.”

  Dust shifts from under your manipulator.

  You say, “Not happening.”

  “The longer we sit here arguing, the more unstable the tunnel gets.”

  I think if you weren’t busy holding up the rock, you’d fold your manipulators and stamp one insectile leg. It’s a pity you have the goddamn I Win card: “I let you give me your water.”

  Emotional blackmail. What can I say? It works.

  “Shit,” I say, and go back in as fast as I can, because your huff outhuffs my huff, and I’m already figuring that out.

  When I get to the other side, I snake my manipulators back in, and I brace the big slab best I can from the wrong end. “Chi,” I yell back to you. “Do it! Run!”

  Or bellycrawl as fast as your six legs can scrape you through, anyway.

  You almost make it. I can feel the big fucking rock teetering. And I can only grip it with one manipulator, because the other’s still fused to a chunk of chipped-out ore. So I think of all the big slabs I’ve seen jammed on rocks no bigger than my fist, and I do that—jam the rock into the crevice and hope. Hope the wedge will hold. Hope you make it through. Hope I can keep the whole fucking slab from falling on my head when I try to pull loose again, and hope for that matter that I can pull loose.

  Well, it nearly works. The things slips, and teeters, but it doesn’t crunch you. It wedges on my claw, and the ridged middle of your carapace. You’re caught like a turtle in a
nutcracker, whereas I’m more like the stop in a door.

  “Pop your hand,” you say then, after assessing the situation. “Get out and leave me.”

  “Maybe,” I answer. Actually, I’m thinking, I could pop the hand. It’s wedged too hard to be going anywhere—I’m not leaving with it either way. So with or without you, I’m going to leave it behind, like a lizard’s tail in a hawk’s mouth. Except if I let go of the other side the slab before you’re out, the whole damn planet might come down on you and pop your carapace like the shell of a particularly tasty crab.

  “Hey,” you say. “Data.” You touch a manipulator to my intake, and there’s not much I can do to stop it. My claws are busy.

  You dump, and what you dump in me is money. Or as good as—coordinates, access codes, account numbers, balances. Your offworld cache.

  Chi, damn. You’re a pretty good smuggler. There’s enough in there to cover . . . anything. New bodies, sure. And a nice long retirement, for that matter.

  “Go,” you say. “You’ve got no reason to help me now.”

  If I were a better person, I wouldn’t be tempted. But I am. For two, maybe three long seconds.

  Then I say, “You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  And I pop the claw at the shoulder—sacrificing a little more meat-me, what can it hurt now?—then wedge my carapace where my other manipulator was—jamming myself under the rock with you, even though you push at me with both damned claws, because that’s helping—then grab the severed end in the now-freed manipulator and jam it against the tunnel floor. I trigger a full extension and it springs taut, like a jack.

  Dust sifting on every side of us, metal and stone grinding, groaning—it gets the slab up, oh, a whole three centimeters.

  Enough to send you sliding backwards when suddenly you’re pushing at my shell and not braced. I snag your claw in my one remaining one and scoot backwards as fast as my dented, frayed, scrabbling legs can carry me.

  We fetch up against the far wall, beyond the rock slide, just as my detached, improvised arm-jack fails. The big slab crumps the tunnel shut with a whumpf like a soft explosion. For a moment I’m sure that that impact is going to bring the tunnel down on us one more time.

  It doesn’t. I’d planned to laugh if it happened. Can’t get rid of an unused laugh any other way, so when we don’t die, I have to dry-fire it. You click your claws at me, but after a minute, you start laughing too. You’re on your back, legs waving in the air like an overturned sow bug.

  Eventually, we stop. And then, after a while, it occurs to me that our problems aren’t over—because we still have to get upstairs, either past the Company or past the Syndicates. Without letting them know we’re not dead in the cave-in, because we’d both really rather they didn’t come looking.

  I figure I’ll ask. You seem to have good ideas sometimes. “So how the hell do we get out of the mine?”

  You roll over onto your treads and shake rock dust off your manipulators. “I’m confident,” you say, “that—between the two of us—we’ll think of something.”

  Married

  Helena Bell

  The last part of himself my husband will lose to his ghost will be his teeth. There will be a graying out, a glint of silver as the calcium is absorbed, repurposed. A few may be pushed out to fall onto his pillow like pale, rotten splinters. The process will take days or only hours depending on the molecular compatibility between the human and Sentin. My husband has excellent compatibility, they tell me. We are so lucky.

  When my husband and his ghost sleep, I lift the corners of his mouth and peer inside him with a dim flashlight. Incisor, cuspid, molar. I count the line of them and wonder at what age each came in. I think of his older brothers tying one end of a string around one of his baby teeth, the other to a brick to be thrown from a second floor balcony. I think of the first apple he ever tried to eat, of pulling back to find a tiny bump of white against the red skin. Sometimes I count his teeth twice, itching to run my finger along his gums to feel for the metal threads racing through his body. The doctors tell me we have decades left, but they have been wrong before.

  My husband’s ghost began as a silver fist clenched at the center of his spleen. A team of technicians placed it there, a tangle of wires and other bits which they claimed would absorb and reconstitute his damaged tissue. Sentin is not self-aware, they said; it is not alive in the usual sense. It can neither feel nor understand, merely mimic the thing which came before. When it senses potential failure, it stretches its roots like a weed, eliminating the weak and buttressing the strong.

  We each held the ball of putty in our hands, pulling and stretching it to see if we could break it. We marveled at how it snapped back to its original, perfect shape each time.

  “It is not yet FDA approved,” the surgeon warned. “But we’ve had remarkable success thus far.”

  Lungs, heart, liver: these are still my husband’s. The saphenous vein in his left leg, his kidneys, arteries, left hand, and his lips: these things are the ghost’s. There is nothing in the body which does not eventually fail, and thus the Sentin reaches out, settles in the crevices of age, and seeks to change it.

  In the morning, my husband’s ghost showers and dresses. He cooks four eggs: sometimes scrambled, sometimes fried. He undersalts. He reads the paper on his computer while I scrub the dishes in the sink. We compare schedules. He has meetings all day but should be home in time for dinner. I have three operations scheduled: all wisdom teeth extractions. I should be home in time to cook dinner.

  “Good,” he says. “I’ll see you then.”

  He kisses me with his ghost mouth. I let him.

  In the evening, my husband’s ghost looks at me through my husband’s eyes, and speaks to me with my husband’s tongue. When I close my eyes, they are resolved into a singular wave function. He doesn’t like it when I listen to him with my head down, or turned to the side. He wants me to watch him, to see his ghost lips move while he tells me about a timing error regarding the statute of limitations.

  “The client is fucked,” he says.

  “SOL!”

  “What?”

  “Shit out of luck. Statue of Limitations. They have the same acronym. I thought it was amusing.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  My husband never found me funny. Neither has the ghost. Something they have in common.

  At night, the ghost rests with my husband’s right arm dangling over the side of the bed, fingers barely brushing the floor. His other hand folds into mine and though this is his ghost hand, cold and hard and pulsing with electricity, I cling to it because I do not know how to let go. Our therapist says this is a good sign; we must tread in our familiar forms of intimacy. I simply do not know how to sleep any way else. Sometimes fumbling in the dark, there is a brushing, an unbuckling, and I pretend the metal in his kiss is not the ghost, but a metaphor for desire. I breathe on him, pant until his lips are the same temperature of my skin and after we have been drawn out, mixed together and poured back into our bodies, I pull away from him, shivering and awake.

  Other nights he wraps his arm around me and talks into my hair. When did I feel loved today? Did I feel appreciated? We talk, and we argue. He hates the movie I made him watch last week. He loves that I made him watch it twice just so we could discuss it.

  My husband’s ghost is very clean. He scrubs the glass tile in the bathroom and runs a metal finger beneath the lip of the drain to catch any hairs or epithelials. My husband is coming out of himself in drips and pieces, and once I thought if only I could collect them all, I could be happy again. I could stitch his body anew from its fractions and leave. But there is so little of him to keep: hair, nails, a crescent of skin and blood snagged by the gleaming metal of a cheese grater. I dream of cutting him open, peeling away his skin and removing his organs as the Sentin races to fill the divots I have made. Other nights I dream that after I leave with my knitted husband, my husband’s ghost rebuilds me in its own image: silver hair, hard
skin and the glimmer of binary in my eyes.

  Not all Sentin patients are as lucky as we have been, they tell us. Others have been suffocated in their beds because something grew where it should not: a hand wedged in the larynx, a thousand alveoli reborn as toenails. A medical student in New Orleans cut open his cadaver and found a stomach full of glistening metal ears. My husband and his ghost share a unique molecular compatibility. They move into and through each other. The ghost never takes more than is needed to maintain proper function. A perfect symbiosis culminating in my husband’s disappearance.

  When I realize I am pregnant, I do not tell them. I do not wish to give birth to a ghost child who will grow ghost teeth, whose hair will be silver and cold and will resist the care of my hands. I have no lessons for ghosts, no wisdom to impart on the dating of ghost boys.

  I beg my husband’s physician to refer me to a Sentin specialist in another city. The night before the appointment, I count my husband’s teeth three times. I tap on the enamel with my fingertips, an act I have done so many times, I do not worry about waking him. I almost do not notice the fluttering of his lashes, or the way his chest constricts with a suppressed cough. When I release his lips, they fall back too quickly and he turns over on his side. I whisper an apology, but he says nothing.

  The specialist shares a building with three other medical practices, yet the waiting room is completely empty when I arrive. A nurse stares at me as the specialist ushers me down the hall to her office.

  “Slow day?” I ask, and the specialist shakes her head.

  “Slow year. It’s an interesting problem,” she says. “Some think there won’t be a need for medical schools within one or two generations, but that’s nonsense.”

  She draws my blood and pulls two gray hairs from the root. Her hands never stop moving as she talks about studies and research she has read, about how excited she is for the future. “They think Sentin is the answer to a thousand problems, rather than the catalyst for a thousand new types of failures. It’s a very exciting time.”

  When she finally asks about the progress of my condition, I tell her about counting my husband’s teeth at night, of insisting that he walk without shoes or socks through the house so he will remember the feel of wood and linoleum against his bare feet.