SEQ_440 // STATUS: LINKED
The coffins lay against the rear bulkhead of the crypt—on what would be the floor during those moments when up and down held any meaning. We'd slept for years on the way out. We'd had no awareness of time's passage—undead metabolism is far too sluggish even to support dreams—but somehow the body knew when it needed a change. Not one of us had chosen to sleep in our pods once we'd arrived. The only times we'd done so had been on pain of death.
But the Gang had taken to coming here ever since [Szpindel] had died.
His body rested in the pod next to mine. I coasted into the compartment and turned left without thinking. Five coffins: four open and emptied, one sealed. The mirrored bulkhead opposite doubled their number and the depth of the compartment.
But the Gang wasn't there.
I turned right. The body of [Susan James] floated back-to-back with her own reflection, staring at an inverse tableau: three sealed sarcophagi, one open. The ebony plaque set into the retracted lid was dark; the others shone with identical sparse mosaics of blue and green stars. None of them changed. There were no scrolling ECGs, no luminous peak-and-valley tracings marked cardio or cns. We could wait here for hours, days, and none of those diodes would so much as twinkle. When you're undead, the emphasis is on the second syllable.
The Gang's topology had said [Michelle] when I'd first arrived, but it was Susan who spoke now, without turning. "I never met her."
I followed her gaze to the name tag one of the sealed pods: Takamatsu. The other linguist, the other multiple.
"I met everyone else," Susan continued. "Trained with them. But I never met my own replacement."
They discouraged it. What would have been the point?
"If you want to—" I began.
She shook her head. "Thanks anyway."
"Or any of the others—I can only imagine what Michelle—"
Susan smiled, but there was something cold about it. "Michelle doesn't really want to talk to you right now, [Siri]."
"Ah." I hesitated for a moment, to give anyone else a chance to speak up. When nobody did, I pushed myself back towards the hatch. "Well, if any of you change—"
"No. None of us. Ever."
[Cruncher].
"You lie," he continued. "I see it. We all do."
I blinked. "Lie? No, I—"
"You don't talk. You listen. You don't care about Michelle. Don't care about anyone. You just want what we know. For your reports."
"That's not entirely true, Cruncher. I do care. I know Michelle must—"
"You don't know shit. Go away."
"I'm sorry I upset you." I rolled on my axis and braced against the mirror.
"You can't know Meesh," he growled as I pushed off. "You never lost anyone. You never had anyone.
"You leave her alone."
He was wrong on both counts. And at least Szpindel had died knowing that Michelle cared for him.
[Chelsea] died thinking I just didn't give a shit.
It had been two years or more, and while we still interfaced occasionally we hadn't met in the flesh since the day she'd left. She came at me from right out of the Oort, sent an urgent voice message to my [inlays]: Cygnus. Please call NOW. It's important.
It was the first time since I'd known her that she'd ever blanked the optics.
I knew it was important. I knew it was bad, even without picture. I knew because there was no picture, and I could tell it was worse than bad from the harmonics in her voice. I could tell it was lethal.
I found out afterwards that she'd gotten caught in the crossfire. The Realists had sown a fibrodysplasia variant outside the Boston catacombs; an easy tweak, a single-point retroviral whose results served both as an act of terrorism and an ironic commentary on the frozen paralysis of Heaven's occupants. It rewrote a regulatory gene controlling ossification on Chromosome 4, and rigged a metabolic bypass at three loci on 17.
Chelsea started growing a new skeleton. Her joints were calcifying within fifteen hours of exposure, her ligaments and tendons within twenty. By then they were starving her at the cellular level, trying to slow the bug by depriving it of metabolites, but they could only buy time and not much of it. Twenty-three hours in, her striated muscles were turning to stone.
I didn't find this out immediately, because I didn't call her back. I didn't need to know the details. I could tell from her voice that she was dying. Obviously she wanted to say goodbye.
I couldn't talk to her until I knew how to do that.
I spent hours scouring the noosphere, looking for precedents. There's no shortage of ways to die; I found millions of case records dealing with the etiquette. Last words, last vows, instruction manuals for the soon-to-bereaved. Palliative neuropharm. Extended and expository death scenes in popular fiction. I went through it all, assigned a dozen front-line filters to separate heat from light.
By the time she called again the news was out: acute Golem outbreak lancing like a white-hot needle through the heart of Boston. Containment measures holding. Heaven secure. Modest casualties expected. Names of victims withheld pending notification of kin.
I still didn't know the principles, the rules: all I had were examples. Last wills and testaments; the negotiation of jumpers with their would-be rescuers; diaries recovered from imploded submarines or lunar crash sites. Recorded memoirs and deathbed confessions rattling into flatline. Black box transcripts of doomed spaceships and falling beanstalks, ending in fire and static. All of it relevant. None of it useful; none of it her.
She called again, and still the optics were blank, and still I didn't answer.
But the last time she called, she didn't spare me the view.
They'd made her as comfortable as possible. The gelpad conformed to every twisted limb, every erupting spur of bone. They would not have left her in any pain.
Her neck had torqued down and to the side as it petrified, left her staring at the twisted claw that had once been her right hand. Her knuckles were the size of walnuts. Plates and ribbons of ectopic bone distended the skin of her arms and shoulders, buried her ribs in a fibrous mat of calcified flesh.
Movement was its own worst enemy. Golem punished even the slightest twitch, provoked the growth of fresh bone along any joints and surfaces conspiring to motion. Each hinge and socket had its own nonrenewable ration of flexibility, carved in stone; every movement depleted the account. The body seized incrementally. By the time she let me look at her, Chelsea had almost exhausted her degrees of freedom.
"Cyg," she slurred. "Know you're there."
Her jaw was locked half-open; her tongue must have stiffened with every word. She did not look at the camera. She could not look at the camera.
"Guess I know why you're not answ'ring. I'll try'nt—try not to take it pers'n'lly."
Ten thousand deathbed goodbyes arrayed around me, a million more within reach. What was I supposed to do, pick one at random? Stitch them into some kind of composite? All these words had been for other people. Grafting them onto Chelsea would reduce them to clichés, to trite platitudes. To insults.
"Want t'say, don' feel bad. I know y're just— 's'not your fault, I guess. You'd pick up if you could."
And say what? What do you say to someone who's dying in fast-forward before your eyes?
"Just keep trying t'connect, y'know. Can't help m'self…"
Although the essentials of this farewell are accurate, details from several deaths have been combined for dramatic purposes.
"Please? Jus'—talk to me, Cyg…"
More than anything, I wanted to.
"Siri, I…just…"
I'd spent all this time trying to figure out how.
"Forget't," she said, and disconnected.
I whispered something into the dead air. I don't even remember what.
I really wanted to talk to her.
I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit.