Part 17 (1/2)
2.
Benjamin did not want to go for even a short walk on the beach, but she insisted. The day's events had been unsettling, as usual, and he felt the old island softness creep into him as they made their way through palms and onto the broad, warm sand. The sunset was a spectacular streaked composition in purple and orange. She could barely manage making her way in the white sand.
”When will we be able to see it as a naked eye object?” she asked, gazing up.
”Inside a week, I believe, if its deceleration continues as is.”
”Should be pretty.”
He turned to her suddenly, back to the sunset. ”Look, I can step down from running things, spend these days together. Here on the beach, as much as we can.”
”Your heart wins out over your head,” she said abstractly, gazing at the fading fingers of deepening red that arced over them.
”Sure, sure, for you.” They embraced and he felt a warm wave of relief. ”I'll see Arno tomorrow, quit-”
”No, I need you to talk to him, but not about that.”
He blinked, seeing something strange come into her face. ”But...”
Fervently she grasped his arms, hugged him, stepped back. ”I want to go.”
”'Go'? Where? What-” Then he saw it.
”Upload me.”
”That's...that's-” His throat tightened painfully.
”Crazy, as crazy as what's already happening.”
He scrambled for rational reasons. ”It's untried, chancy-”
”It's not to evade death,” she said in a straightforward, businesslike voice. ”I know that a copy is not the original. I'll be gone, as far as the little 'me' that rides around behind my eyes. And I'm not going to discuss whether an uploaded 'person' has free will, either-philosophy doesn't ring my chimes, not now. I've got another reason, one you can argue for with Arno and the others.”
”If you think I'll-”
”Hear me out, lover. I want to control a Searcher s.p.a.cecraft, fly it into the Eater. They need onboard guidance to do that. I can be uploaded into a control module.”
”Not like those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in the tropics.” He was trying to see what drove her to this, but his mind didn't seem to be working very well. Did she think some digital replica was like becoming one of those sculptures, the alien ones?
She abandoned the business voice and pleaded nakedly. ”I can help, even after I'm gone.”
”And you are an astronaut,” he said lamely. ”You'll get back into s.p.a.ce, sort of.”
”I hadn't thought of it that way.” She hugged him.
He recoiled from her grasp, confused. ”You're saying, 'Kill me early'? No.”
”It is is my life.” my life.”
”No!”
She reached out with a soft, tentative hand. ”Something of me will come through. Maybe.”
He looked at her trembling lips and kissed them. It was wrenchingly hard to resist her. ”But I want every remaining moment with the real real you, d.a.m.n it.” you, d.a.m.n it.”
Channing picked up a handful of sand and let it run through her hands, trickling into the pa.s.sing breeze like an hourgla.s.s. ”Time runs out for all of us. I just want to control my end.”
”But this method, it's bound to wear you down. You could easily die sooner.”
”Saving what, a few weeks of wasting away? No-I want win-win, remember? This way, we get the Searcher swarm to work better. And I get...something n.o.body's done.”
”They don't know what the h.e.l.l they're doing with this stuff, it's just parts of technology slammed together, it's...” He ground down into silence.
”I've read the reports, preliminary and sketchy but promising.” Back to the business voice, crisp and NASA all the way. ”They get lots out of the cerebral cortex. Trouble is, reading the deeper parts of the brain.”
”But they won't capture you you.”
”The body won't be worth much. I'm a walking ruin already.”
He had never liked her talking about herself this way, especially not the body he had learned to wors.h.i.+p in so many ways. ”I can't believe they can read you like some neuronal book.”
”All of me is beautiful and valuable,” she said, tone now light and brittle. ”Even the ugly, stupid, and disgusting parts.”
Was part of him drawn to the idea of giving her some form of digital immortality? A last flight?
Confused, his mouth working with unrelieved strain, he turned and walked on. Without them noticing, the sun had glimmered away and the sky slid into purple darkness.
3.
At dawn she was weak with a numbing hollowness in her bones that cried out to be left alone. A separate child-self, wanting only the comfort it remembered from an impossibly distant time.
Channing gave it a few minutes to get used to the idea, and then very slowly and silently got out of bed. Going out through the kitchen, she grabbed a banana for energy. Opened slowly enough, the back door did not creak. In shadowy silence, the car started suddenly and she got out of the driveway before he could come running out, in case he woke. She drove up the hill behind one of the behemoth jobs from the cheap-gas decades, its plate proudly announcing VANZILLA. A hastily made sign on it carried the logo of a news network and she tromped down, enjoying the surge of acceleration as she shot around it.
Arno wasn't in yet. Summoning more of what appeared to be her last energies, she snagged a m.u.f.fin and coffee and found Kingsley. He wore the same clothes as yesterday. He even sat and listened to her whole case, his fingers steepled before him as if he were wors.h.i.+pping. Amy Major came in, looking equally bedraggled, touched Kingsley's sleeve, then had the good sense to leave.
At last she was done, her voice trailing away before she could make herself frame a naked plea.
”I guessed yesterday,” he said from behind his fingers.