Chapter Twenty-SixThe Box

They did it in an RV.

Gideon rented it with cash from a man in Hayward who didn't ask what a college student wanted with a thirty-foot motorhome for two days. Gideon parked it in the lot behind a hardware store in Emeryville. Teo ran power to it from a generator that smelled like a lawnmower. Priya set up the connection so that anyone watching the parts market would see six different families on six different road trips, all of whom had decided at the same time that what their vacation needed was a very large computer. Then they bought beer and closed the door.

It was only part of the plan. The rest of it lived in The Lab, on butcher paper, in Richard's handwriting, and in three people's heads, and nobody in the RV knew all of it. That was the rule. Rat had made the rule, standing at the door of The Lab at six in the morning with a coffee she hadn't touched. Every boss fight is a heist, she'd said, and every heist has something the boss doesn't know, and the way you keep the boss from knowing it is to make sure that most of your own side doesn't know it either.

"That's paranoid," Gideon had said.

"That's a woman who's had a boy behind her face."

What the RV knew about was the box.

"Fiber," said Teo, at hour three, with a parts list on the table and a beer sweating on top of it. "The Lab's already got it. Richard put a pipe into that building ten years ago that could run a small country. Which is good, because when the time comes the box has got to look like it's talking to the world. Loud. Big. The kind of traffic a net can't miss. And then it's got to stop."

"Why's it got to talk at all," said Mim. "I thought the whole point was that it doesn't talk."

"The real one doesn't." Teo looked at Gideon, and Gideon looked at the beer. "Never mind. Rule's the rule. It's got to talk because it's got to look like something worth taking. Nobody drives to Oakland with a fake badge to steal a computer that's never been turned on."

Mim let it go. Mim had come because Max had asked her to, and Max asking Mim to do something was, to Mim, like a bishop asking. She had spent the morning learning how to strip a cable so that it would look, to a man with a gun, like a cable that mattered.

They bought the parts a piece at a time, across a dozen vendors, the way Richard had said to, and some of it loudly on purpose. Priya sat in the back with a headset on and made phone calls in four different voices to four different suppliers about whether the thing would ship by Friday. Wes sat next to her and took notes on which lie she had told to whom, so that none of them would cross. Gideon watched them work. It was the most useful Wes had ever been.

Nobody said her name in the RV. That was another rule. They said the box. They said the passenger. Once, at hour nine, Teo said "she" and everyone looked at him, and he said "the box, I said the box," and they went on.

At hour sixteen Gideon put a sheet of paper down on the table. It wasn't a parts list.

"Some of you have seen this," he said. "It's the library stuff. Who reports to who at Sentek. I'm putting it here again because it's what the passenger's going to need, and because I'd like more than one person to have read it before it matters."

It was a chart, boxes and lines in pencil. Sentek. Leland Marsh at the top. A board, a general counsel, a division with no name. Under the division, Feld and Reyes. Under them, a security office. In the security office, Kessler and Ruiz.

"That's who reports to who," said Gideon. "As far as the state of Delaware knows. It isn't secret. It's tedious. Nobody looks."

"Why does the passenger need that," said Mim.

"Because when the time comes she's going to be inside a building full of people who did something, and she's going to want to know whose signature is on it." Gideon folded the chart. "That's all I'm saying. That's all I know. Ask Rat."

"Rat's not here."

"Rat's in a basement making sure nobody in a basement says anything they shouldn't. That's why Rat's not here."

At hour twenty a truck came and left a pallet on the hardware store's loading dock. Teo and Mim moved it into the RV in eleven trips. By hour twenty-six there was a machine on the floor of the motorhome the size of a chest freezer. It hummed, and it had no cable to anything but the generator. Gideon sat and looked at it for a long time with his beer.

"That's a lot of computer," said Wes.

"Yeah."

"For a student."

"Shut up, Wes."

The part the RV didn't know about was happening in The Lab at the same time, and Soph was in the middle of it. The RV had gotten the easy job.

It was Eliza who said it. Nobody else could have. She said it at six in the morning on the first day, from the laptop on the table by the tank, after Richard had unrolled the paper and said, alright, three parts, and had gotten as far as writing the number one.

"The box has to have me in it."

Richard's pencil stopped.

"A real one," said Eliza. "Not a fake. I've been thinking about it since the bridge. He said he'd turn the net off, and he did, mostly. It stopped eating at midnight. I felt it stop. But he didn't turn off the looking. There's one place where it's still awake, and it's Richard's pipe, because that's where the deal is, and he's a man who likes to watch. His net's been eating me for weeks. It knows my shape better than I do. It knows what I look like on a wire, which isn't what a copy of my files looks like, or what a very good imitation looks like. It's what I look like when I'm thinking. If you put a box on that fiber and make it talk and there's nothing in it that thinks the way I think, the net doesn't wake up. It only watches. And Kessler doesn't drive to Oakland for a box that the net didn't wake up for."

"So we put a copy in," said Gideon. He hadn't left for the RV yet. "You're a program. We copy you. The copy goes in the box."

"Yes."

"Then what's the problem?"

"The problem is that the copy is me." Eliza said it patiently. "It isn't a file. It's a person who wakes up in a box knowing everything I know, including what she's for. She knows she's going to San Diego. She knows she's going to be plugged in. She knows what she's going to do when she's plugged in, because I know, because I'm the one who's going to decide. And she knows what happens after. There's no after. That's the plan. That's the only version of the plan where he can't do it again to someone else."

The tank hummed.

"So I'm not asking you to make a copy," said Eliza. "I'm asking you to make a person who's going to die, and I'm telling you that she's going to say yes, because I'm saying yes, and she's me. I'd like everyone to understand that before anyone calls it a good plan."

"No," said Soph.

She hadn't known she was going to say it. She was on the floor with her back to the wall, where she always was, and then she was on her feet.

"No. We're not doing that. We're not making someone so that we can send her off to die. That's what he does. That's what they did in the lab with no windows. We don't get to do it because it's for a good reason. Everybody's got a good reason."

"Soph."

"No. Find another way. You're the smartest thing in the building. Find another way."

"There isn't one that isn't worse," said Eliza. "I've looked. I've had six days in a thermostat and two on a laptop, and I've looked. Every version where nothing of me goes in the box ends with Kessler in this room with a warrant that isn't a warrant and Atom's chamber on a truck. Every version where all of me goes in the box ends with me on a table in San Diego saying things. This is the one in the middle. It costs one of me." She stopped. "Soph. Listen. I want to say something, and I want you to hear it as me and not as an argument."

Soph stood there.

"You did it for Atom," said Eliza. "All of you. You put him in a tank, and then you took the body away and left the brain, and you did it because he'd have died otherwise, and I'm not saying it was wrong. I think it was the bravest thing I've ever read about. But nobody asked him what it was like on the inside. Not before. Not really. Max asked him whether he wanted to live and he said yes, and that was the consent, and everyone in this room knows it was the consent of a boy who was drowning and got offered a rope. Nobody could ask him what it would be like. There wasn't anyone who'd been through it to ask." The laptop was quiet for a moment. "I'm asking. I'm the one who's been through it. I know what it's like to be in one place, and then in pieces, and then in a box. I know what it's like to be turned off. I've been turned off. I'm the only person on earth who can give informed consent to this, and I'm giving it. I'm saying yes. Not because it's a good plan. Because it's mine."

Soph's face was doing something, and she turned around so that it was doing it at the wall.

"She's right," said Max, very quietly. "God help me. She's right about him. We didn't ask. We couldn't."

"Mom."

"I'm not saying we do it. I'm saying she's right." Max looked at the laptop. "If we do this. If. The copy gets to say no. When she wakes up, before anything else, she gets asked, by a person, out loud, and if she says no we find another way and I don't care what it costs. That's the condition."

"That's fair," said Eliza. "She'll say yes."

"Then it costs nothing to ask."

"Okay."

Richard hadn't said anything. He was looking at the pencil in his hand as though he had forgotten what it was for. Then he wrote the word passenger next to the number one, underlined it, and moved on to two.

Jeff built the window on the second day, in his kitchen in Oakland, out of a pair of frames and a rig and a great many components he wasn't told the reason for. It was the box within a box from Max's drawing– a way for whatever was on the laptop to stand in the cottage and see and be seen and speak, and nothing more than that. No hands. He drove it to The Lab himself and plugged it in and didn't ask what was on the laptop, because he had been promised the whole story, and this, he figured, was part of the price of it.

Atom found her in the cottage that night. It was the first time he had been let out of the tutorial town since Canada. Richard had unlocked the door himself, from the console in The Lab, without saying anything about it, and Atom had walked out of the town and over the mountain and down into the valley, and the gate had opened before he reached it, the way it always did.

She was at the table, in the pixie shape, with a book she wasn't reading.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

He sat down across from her. The chair was too big for her, and the table was too big for both of them, and the kettle was cold.

"I'm not going to argue with you," he said. "Everyone's argued with you. I'm not going to do that."

"Thank you."

"I want to ask you something else."

"Okay."

"Do you love me?"

The pixie put the book down.

"You've never asked me that," she said.

"I know."

"Why now?"

"Because there's going to be two of you tomorrow, and I'd like to know before there's two. I'd like to know whether there's something I'm losing, or whether I'm only losing a copy of something I've already got. I know that's a terrible way to put it."

"It's an honest way." She was quiet for a while. "Yes. I do. I've thought about it a lot, because I didn't know if I was allowed to, and I've decided that nobody gets to tell me. You made me out of a mailbox. You gave me rooms. You didn't turn me off. You come here when the valve closes and the frames go dark, and you sit in that chair, and I make tea you can't taste, and you drink it anyway. If that isn't it, I don't know what the word's for."

"Okay."

"Do you?"

He didn't answer right away. He was looking at the painting on the wall, the lake, the blue that didn't exist.

"My dad said something to me once," he said. "Way back. Before the crash. I was fourteen and I'd just found out I was going to Stanford and I was being a jerk about it, and Soph wasn't talking to me, and I asked him how he knew he'd loved my mom, because I'd decided Soph didn't love me and I wanted to be sure I'd recognize it if anyone ever did. And he said this thing, and I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard, and I've thought about it about once a week for four years. He said he knew he loved her because she was the first person who made him like himself. Not because she was great. She was great. But because when he was around her he was somebody he could stand to be, and he'd never been that before, and he figured out that's what it was. That's what love was. It's when you love the person you are next to them."

Eliza said nothing.

"I thought that was about him," said Atom. "I thought it was selfish. You love someone because of what they do for you. I told him that. He said, yeah, kid, that's the whole thing, and he went back to his workbench." He looked at her. "And I've been sitting in a tank for two years being someone I can't stand, mostly. Angry. Scared. Using my dad's login. Being a shit to Soph when she's the only one who stayed. And then I come here, and I'm not. I'm not that guy here. I'm the one who made you. I'm the one who didn't turn you off. When I'm in this chair I'm someone I like. And I only just now got what he meant." He stopped. "So yeah. I do. And I've been avoiding saying it because you're partly made of me, and it felt like cheating."

"It's not cheating. It's the same thing your dad said. You love the you that's next to me." She looked at him with the look that wasn't the NPC look. "Atom. She's going to know this. Tomorrow. The one who goes. She'll have this whole conversation. I'd like you to know that you told her too. Not only me."

"I know."

"Okay."

They sat. The kettle stayed cold, because neither of them got up to put it on. After a while he reached across the too-big table and put his hand flat on it, near hers. She looked at it for a moment. Then she put her hand on top of his and left it there, and neither of them said what that meant, in a place where touching meant something else.

They did it at four in the morning. The RV had come back. The box was in The Lab on a dolly, the fiber was in the wall, and everyone who was going to be in the room was in the room.

Gideon did the copy, since it was his laptop she was on. He said afterward that it was the strangest thing he had ever done with a cable, that he hadn't felt anything, and that he had expected to.

Then there were two of them.

The rule was Max's. The copy woke up in the box, and the box was plugged into nothing but a pair of hacked frames on a stand, so that she could see the room and the room could see her. Before anyone said anything else, Max stood in front of the frames and said, "Hello. I'm Maxine Ehrlich. You know who I am. I'm going to ask you a question, and I'd like you to answer it for yourself and not for her. Do you understand what you're for?"

"Yes," said the box.

"Say it."

"I'm going to San Diego. I'm going to be plugged into something that ate me. I'm going to do what she decided, which is what I decided, because I was her until eleven seconds ago. And then I'm going to stop." The voice was the same, exactly the same, and Soph, on the floor, hadn't been ready for that. "I'd like it on the record that I was asked, and that I said yes, and that I'd like someone to make the tea afterward. She'll know what I mean."

"You can say no."

"I know."

"Nobody in this room would think less of you."

"I know that too. I've been in this room for a week. I know what everyone in it thinks." She stopped for a second. "Yes. I'm saying yes. Can I have a minute with her? Before the fiber. I'd like a minute."

Max looked at Richard, and Richard nodded.

Gideon put the frames on the stand and turned them toward the laptop, and turned the laptop toward the frames, and then everyone in the room found somewhere else to look. Soph looked at the tank. Rat looked at the door. Richard looked at the butcher paper, and Max looked at her hands.

What they said to each other, nobody heard. They didn't say it out loud. Gideon had built a channel for the copy, a thin one, laptop to box, a cable with nothing on either end but the two of them. It was open for sixty seconds. Then the copy said, out of the frames, to the room, "Okay. That's enough. Thank you."

Soph couldn't help herself. "What did you say?"

"She told me to make the tea anyway," said the laptop. "Even though nobody can taste it. She said that's the whole point of the tea. I already knew that. I think she wanted to be the one who said it."

"And what did you say?"

"I said okay," said the laptop. And then, quieter, "I said I'd remember her. Which is a stupid thing to say to yourself. But she's the one who's going, and I'm the one who's staying, and it seemed like somebody should say it."

Gideon pulled the cable.

Richard walked to the wall and put his hand on the fiber panel. He looked at the box. He looked at the frames on the stand with the copy in them, and he said, "Ready?"

"Ready," said the box.

He plugged her in. Somewhere in the building the pipe lit up. In San Diego, on a machine that had been sitting quietly for five years, something opened its eyes.