Chapter TenThe Last Time

Atom had not been online all day, and that had never happened before.

He was there when she woke up, as a bird on the bedpost or a boy in the chair by the window, and he was there when she went to sleep. In between he came and went as he pleased, but he had never once been gone for a whole day without saying something about it first. Soph messaged him at nine, and again at noon, and again at three, from the back row of a lecture hall, in a whisper that made the girl two seats over turn and look at her. Nothing came back.

She drove home instead of going to Gideon's. The house was empty. She sat on the couch in her suit with her frames on and waited, and after a while she took the frames off, because the empty room was worse to look at through them.

It was dark when the two cars pulled into the driveway. Max and Richard came in together, which they never did, and Richard looked the way he had looked at the hospital, and Max asked her to come and sit down at the kitchen table. Soph knew before anyone said anything.

"Is he dead?"

"No," said Max. "No. Sit down. Sophia. Sit down."

She sat.

"His body is failing," said Max. "It's been coming for a while, and we've been managing it. His kidneys stopped working properly about a month ago and we've had him on dialysis. His heart is under strain. This morning he developed an infection, and we had to sedate him fully to keep it from getting worse, which is why you haven't heard from him. He's not conscious right now, and he isn't in any pain."

"Is he going to be okay?"

Richard put his hands flat on the table and looked at them.

"His body isn't going to be okay," said Max. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. That was always where this was going. I told you it was a bridge. This is the end of the bridge."

"So he's going to die."

"No."

Soph looked at her.

"We can keep him alive for much longer," said Max. "Decades. Longer than that, if I'm right. But it means letting most of his body go. We'll be controlling oxygen and blood flow to his brain with machines. The heart, the kidneys, the lungs– the machines will do what those used to do, and we'll stop fighting for the rest of it. What's left of him will still be there, but it won't be him keeping it going, and over time there will be less and less of it. Eventually he goes into Phase Three, and his optic nerves are fused to digital inputs, and then he won't need the eyes either. For all practical purposes he'll be non-physical. Only his brain. Everything else will be ours."

"You're going to cut his body off."

"We're going to let it go. It's already going."

"Does he know?"

"He knew before you did," said Richard. "We talked about it a month ago and he said yes. He said he wanted to tell you himself, and then he didn't, and then it was today."

Soph looked past them at the painting in the hall, the lake, the wrong blue. She tried to trace the edge of the frame with her eyes and couldn't hold the line.

"It's all going to be alright," said Max. "I know that sounds insane. But truthfully, Sophia, Adam could outlive all of us. Our technology is advancing rapidly enough that his experience of the world is only going to get better. But there are many people in society who would not approve of what we're doing. We've cracked a code, and honestly, it was not that difficult, relatively speaking, but only because nobody else had been willing to break through the moral barriers in front of it. Adam is going to have to exist in secrecy, maybe for a very long time."

"Can I see him?"

"Yes," said Max. "That's why we're here. If you want to see him before, you should come tonight."

The Lab was in the basement of the building in West Oakland, and from the outside it didn't look like anything at all. Inside there was a door with a badge reader, and then another, and then a room that was too cold and too quiet and full of machines that hummed at different pitches.

The chamber stood in the middle of the room. It was a tank, more or less, tilted up at an angle like a dentist's chair, with a lid of thick glass that was open now. Atom was in it, in a blue gown, with more wires and tubes coming out of him than she could count. A lot of them went into the back of his head, where his hair had been shaved, along with a thick black cable that was not like the others. The Link was over his eyes even now. It was how he saw.

He was thinner than she remembered. It had been a year since she had seen his body, actually seen it and not the boy standing next to her on a hill, and she had not let herself think about what a year in a tank did to a person. His hands lay on the blanket, and they were the same hands.

Max stood by the door. Richard sat in a chair against the wall with his head down.

"Can I take the frames off?" Soph asked.

"Yes," said Max. "He's not using them right now. He's under."

Soph lifted the Link off his eyes. It was heavier than hers. His eyes were closed, and then, after a moment, they opened, and they were his, blue and unfocused, looking at the ceiling and then at nothing and then, she thought, though she would never be sure about it, at her.

"Hi," she said.

He couldn't answer. She had known that for a year, but it had never felt true until now, with the helmet in her hands and his face bare.

"Hi, Adam."

She took his hand. It was warm, which she had not expected. It was warm and dry and it lay in hers the way it had lain on the shifter under her palm, and she let herself think about that for a second, and then she made herself stop.

"I'm not going anywhere," she said. "That's the first thing. You asked me on the hill if I still loved you and I said forever, and I'm saying it now with your actual hand, okay, so it counts. I'm going to be there when you wake up. I don't care what you look like. I don't care if you're a bird."

She was crying and she didn't wipe it.

"I want you to know I saw you. Your face. This one. I want you to know I looked at it, in case you ever wonder."

She held his hand until Max touched her on the shoulder. Then she put the Link back over his eyes, carefully, and she kissed his forehead where the hair had been shaved, and she went and stood by the door without looking back at the chamber. She had decided that his face was going to be the last thing she saw, and she meant to keep it that way.

Max told her later, not that week, how it had gone. She told her because Soph asked, and because Max had decided a long time ago that her daughter was owed the truth in the same measure as anyone else who had to live with it.

It took eleven hours. There were nine people in the room, and all of them had signed things that would not have held up for a minute in a courtroom. Max had spent six months preparing for a procedure that the medical literature described, when it described it at all, as a thought experiment, and she had done it with a team she had hired for their brilliance and their willingness not to ask what they were building. Rats first, then pigs, then a primate, once, which she did not talk about, and then a boy she had known since he was five years old.

There were moral hurdles, and she had stepped over every one of them at a run. If the experiments that had gotten them this far were ever discovered it would be the end of Solenoid and quite possibly prison for her and for Richard both. She had known that going in, and had decided that a boy in a tank was worth more than a company, and had not needed to think about it for very long. What she had thought about, at three in the morning with her hands inside the base of his skull, was the number. She had run the calculation herself, several times, because she did not trust anyone else to do it. On current technology, with maintenance, Adam Lee could live for something like eight hundred years. By then there would be other technology, and by then the word live might not mean anything she would recognize.

The other thing she thought about, and couldn't put down, was who else. There were a hundred thousand people in the world in some version of Adam's condition. She could save perhaps one a year, at a cost that only Richard could pay, and she had chosen Richard's son. Who would be allowed this? The rich, if she was being honest. And then what? How long did a person get? Could they choose to stop? What did you owe someone you had made unable to die?

She didn't have answers. She had a boy on a table and a clock.

Richard was not in the room. He sat in the cave under the lakehouse, three hours away, because it was the only place he could think of where he wouldn't be able to hear it, and he sat there with the mannequins in their suits and the paintings of bison on the walls and thought about Lauren. He hadn't been able to save her, and he had been able to save this, and he wasn't sure, sitting there, whether it was a good thing, or whether the two had anything to do with each other.

At six in the morning Max called and said that it had worked.

Atom woke up, and there was no bed to get out of.

He was used to waking up in Alius in the room he had built for himself on the mountain, in a bed, because that was how a person woke up. He would sit up and feel the sheets and put his feet on the floor. Now he was simply standing. He hadn't stood up. He was standing in the room with the window and the mountain outside it, and he couldn't remember having been anywhere else.

He held up his hands and they were fine. He touched his face and it was there. He walked to the window, and the floor was under him, and the glass was cold when he put his palm against it, and the mountain was blue in the morning light.

Before, there had always been something behind him that he had never been able to name. A pressure, a place where the body was, back there through the cable, going on being a body. He had learned not to look at it directly, the way you learn not to look at the sun. Now he looked, and there was nothing there. There was just the room, and him in it.

He sat down on the floor of the room, because he could, and he stayed there for a long time.

Soph waited at the trailhead. She had asked Max to drop her there and Max hadn't argued. She sat on the gate with her frames on and her hood up while the morning burned off the bay, and joggers went past her without looking, and she waited.

He came up the trail from below, which was wrong. He always came from wherever she was. He came walking up the gravel with his hands in his pockets, and he looked the same, exactly the same, blond and thin and translucent at the edges, in the duster he wore in the game, and he stopped in front of her.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi."

"You waited."

"I said I would."

He put his hand on her knee, and she felt it through the suit.

"How is it?" she said.

"I don't know yet. Different. There's nothing behind me."

"Is that bad?"

"I don't think so." He looked out at the water. "I think I'm going to have to figure out what I am now. I think that's going to take a while."

"Okay."

"You're going to be here for that?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

They sat. She noticed that he stood differently than he had before, and she couldn't have said how, and she didn't say anything about it.