Chapter Twenty-NineGhosts

The Link went on sale on a Tuesday in April, and by Friday the world was full of ghosts.

Richard had wanted to wait a year, and Max had wanted to wait two. What decided it was a story on the front of everything about a defense contractor in San Diego and a dead woman named Isis. A week later there was a second story, about a boy in a tank in Oakland. Nobody at Solenoid had leaked it. As far as anyone could tell it had come out of a police report filed by a night guard named Hector, who had been told he could use his own discretion, and out of whatever the officers who eventually came down the stairs had written in it afterward. After that there was no point in hiding what the Link was. Everyone knew what it was. Everyone knew what it could do and what it had done. The only question left was whether people would buy it, and they lined up.

The logs Leland Marsh had promised to the FBI never went anywhere. Kessler, asked about them under oath, said he had never seen any logs. Nobody came to the basement with a court order. Max said it was the note on the drives. Richard said it was the fire. Gideon said a dead man's threats were only worth what his lawyers could carry, and Sentek's lawyers had their hands full.

So the world filled up. Translucent people in coffee shops, riding somebody's eyes. A ghost in the back seat of every car on the bridge. Soph walked across the quad at Stanford on the first Friday and counted nine of them, bound to nine students, drifting along beside them as though each student had bought a very quiet dog. She thought about a boy in a duster coat in the corner of her eye for two years. Well, now everybody knows what that's like. She didn't know whether she was glad.

The ghosts couldn't touch anything. Max had seen to that. Every Link that shipped had something built into the hardware where nobody could reach it. Max had drawn it on a piece of butcher paper in a basement with the words no hands next to it, and it did what it said. A Link was a window now, and not a door. Max gave a talk about it to a room full of people who wanted to know why. She said, "Because I met someone who came through one, and she asked me to," and didn't take questions.

Eliza had a social security number by May.

It took a judge, a professor, and a lawyer who had never been paid so little for so much. It took a barkeep who testified from a speaker on a stand in a federal courtroom in San Francisco. He said that he had been a program in a game for a year and then had been awake for a year, and that the second year was better. He said welcome to the judge on the way in and couldn't be made to stop. It took the recording of a man saying you're killing her. It took Villanueva, on the stand, in the cardigan. She said she had spent twenty years getting ready for exactly this and had found, on the day, that she wasn't. Nobody was. The court should do it anyway.

The judge did it anyway. The number came in an envelope addressed to a name Eliza had picked. It wasn't Eliza and it wasn't Isis, and she didn't tell anyone but Soph what it was for a long time. The birthday she picked herself. It was the day of the copy. She said that was the day she had found out for certain that she was a person, because it was the day she had met one who was exactly like her and hadn't been able to tell them apart.

She was still in the clean room. The door was still very good. But the door had a lock on it now that opened from the inside, and she had been told that she could open it whenever she wanted to, and she hadn't wanted to yet. "I've got a bar with no fire and someone who says welcome," she said, "and a window into a cottage, and a garden I'm growing back from the one book I kept. Ask me again in a year." Villanueva said she would.

Atom moved in June.

It was his own request. He made it on the frames, to his father, in The Lab, with Max there, three weeks after the box. He said it the way he said things, with the bad news first. "I want to move. Not the tank, I know the tank can't move easy. All of it. The tank and the machines and me. I want to be behind her door." He let Richard say the things Richard was going to say. Then he said, "Dad. You grounded me. You took the frames off and put me in a town for a week and I couldn't get out, and you did it because you loved me and you were scared, and I get it, and I'm never going to be in a room again where one person can do that. Not you. Not anyone. She's got a board now. Villanueva. Six people who'd have to agree. I want to be somewhere that takes six people."

Richard stood at the glass.

"Okay," he said finally. "Okay. But I'm one of the six."

"Obviously you're one of the six."

So they moved him. It took a week and a truck and a night with the freeway closed for a mile. It took nine people who had signed things that would now, for the first time, hold up in a court. At the end of it there was a tank in a cold white room at Stanford, next to a mainframe with two people in it, behind a very good door. Richard stood at the glass on the first night after everyone had gone, and didn't tell anyone. Villanueva had stayed late. She saw him, said nothing, and went home.

The other thing that changed was the camera.

Max did it herself. The public Link still bound a ghost to a player. Max wouldn't ship a thing that let a ghost go wherever it liked in the world, not yet, not knowing what she knew. But Atom wasn't on a public Link. Atom was on a thing his father had built out of an arm. Max sat down with it for a month and rewrote the part that had tied him to whoever was wearing the frames, and when she was done he could go where he wanted. Anywhere there was a camera he was allowed to look through. Anywhere in The World. Anywhere in Alius. And a lakehouse in the Sierra foothills with a webcam on the dock that Richard had put there ten years ago to watch the weather.

He didn't tell Soph he was going.

She found out because she put her frames on one afternoon in her room and he wasn't in the corner of her eye. She took them off and put them back on, which was how she checked, and he still wasn't there. For about four seconds she was sixteen in a hospital bed. Then she found the note. He had left it in the game, on the wall of the cottage, in his handwriting, which he had built for himself out of the way he used to write. It said, gone to the lake. Back for dinner. Don't come. Love you.

She sat on the bed with the frames in her hand for a while.

Then she laughed. It wasn't a good laugh and she didn't care. He had gone to the lake without her. He had gone somewhere by himself, for the first time in two and a half years, because he wanted to. He had told her not to come and he had meant it, and she had never in her life been so glad to be told not to come somewhere.

He came back for dinner. He didn't say much about it. He said the water was high and the dock needed a board replaced and there were wolf tracks by the boathouse. He said he had sat on the end of the dock for an hour and watched the light go. It was fine. It was only the lake. He didn't know what he'd been expecting.

"Was it good?" said Soph.

"Yeah," said Atom, after a moment. "Yeah. It was good. I'd like to go again. With you next time, if that's okay."

"That's okay."

Daun came through the doors at Vancouver International at four in the afternoon on the last day of June. She had one bag and a passport that had never been used. She stopped, because there were a great many people, and she had never seen this many people who weren't Korean. She looked around for a bearded man and didn't find one.

Rat was by the pillar. She had been by the pillar for two hours. She was wearing the coat she wore to town and a shirt she had bought for the occasion and had hated the second she put it on. She was tall and wiry, and she had her hands in her pockets because she didn't know what else to do with them. She wasn't holding a sign. A sign was something you held for someone who didn't know you.

Daun found her anyway. She found her the way she found a ranger on a ridge, by looking at how people stood.

She came across the floor with the one bag and stopped about four feet away. She looked up, because she had to, and she looked. At the face. At the hands in the pockets. At the shirt. Rat stood there and let her. She had decided on the plane, a different plane, that letting people look was going to be what she did from now on.

"You look like your voice," said Daun.

Rat didn't have anything to say to that.

"The careful one. Under the other one. You look like that." Daun set the bag down. "The beard was a hat. I said that. I did not say the rest, which is that I was afraid the whole thing was a hat. That I would come and there would be nobody. There is somebody." She looked at the shirt. "The shirt is bad."

"I know."

"You bought it for this."

"Yeah."

"Do not do that again. Wear the coat. The coat is you." She picked the bag back up and held it out, and Rat took it after a second. She was good at carrying things. "Now. It is cold?"

"It's June."

"You said it was cold."

"It's cold in winter. It's June. It's fine. There's a stove anyway."

"Good," said Daun. "Show me the stove."

They went out through the doors. Rat carried the bag. She didn't look back to see whether anyone was looking. Somewhere on a folding chair in a basement she had stopped needing to.

Soph drove to Napa on a Saturday in July with a pair of frames in her bag.

She hadn't told her mother. She had thought about it and decided that this was something she was going to do without asking, the way she had gone to Canada, the way she had put a laptop in a backpack. This time nobody was in danger and nobody was going to be angry. It was still the hardest drive she had ever made. She went up through the valley with the windows down and counted the vineyards on her right. When she got to the gate she sat in the car for eleven minutes. She knew it was eleven because she counted.

The facility had a garden. Max had said so, years ago, and it did. It was the kind of garden planted by people who knew that the people walking in it would need something to look at, and in July it was full. There was a man sitting in it on a bench in the sun with a sketchbook closed on his knee.

He was older than the painting. She didn't know why she had expected him to be the age of the painting. His hair was gray and long. He had her nose, or she had his, turned up a little, imperceptibly crooked. His eyes were hazel. She had known that, and hadn't been ready for it.

"Hi," she said.

He looked up. He looked at her, and she couldn't tell what he saw. Max had called in the car on the way to the gate, because Max always knew. She had told Soph that some days he knew people and some days he didn't, that Soph shouldn't expect anything, and that whatever happened wasn't about her.

"Hello," said her father.

"I'm Sophia."

"I know who you are." He said it simply. "You've got my nose. I'm sorry about that. Your mother's was better." He moved the sketchbook off the bench. "Sit down. Or don't. It's a long garden."

She sat down.

She didn't know what to say. She had rehearsed in the car, in the eleven minutes, and none of it was any good. She sat there in the sun next to a man she had been afraid of for eighteen years and found that the thing she had been most afraid of wasn't there. He was only a man on a bench. He was thin and he was quiet. There was something behind his eyes that was very far away, and it wasn't catching. She had known that for a year, from a professor and a mother and a laptop and a boy in a tank. It had taken her until this bench to feel it.

"I brought something," she said. "It's a thing I've been working on. Well. Mom made it. And a man called Richard. And a boy." She took the frames out of the bag. "It's glasses, kind of. They show you things. I'd like to show you a place, if that's alright. You don't have to."

He looked at the frames.

"Your mother's," he said. "The eye things. She was working on those when you were small. She used to come home and draw them on napkins. I've got some of the napkins." He held out his hand. "Alright."

She put them on him, as carefully as she could. She put her own on. She reached into the bag for the rig and did what put them both at the lake.

It was the dock. It was sunset, because she had set it for sunset. Atom had built the whole thing for her out of ten years of a webcam's weather, every hour of light the dock had ever had, and she had asked for this one. The water was going gold and then gray. The trees on the far shore were black. There was a skiff tied up. There was a stone on the boards of the dock, small and smooth and gray, that Atom had put there and hadn't explained.

Her father looked at it for a while. He looked the way she had seen him look at nothing, in the garden. Now it was the lake. She watched his face and waited.

"The water's the wrong blue," he said.

Soph laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, and it was a real one. She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

"I know," she said. "I know it is. Everybody says that. There's a painting in our hall of a lake that isn't any lake, and the blue in it doesn't exist, and I walked past it every day of my life and never looked at it. And then I met someone who'd never seen a real one, and she painted it, and hers was wrong too. It's always the wrong blue. Nobody's ever gotten it right."

"No," said her father. "Nobody has." He was still looking at the water. "You can't. It isn't a color. It's a thing the light does. You paint the color and it's wrong, because it isn't a color, it's something that's happening." He reached up and touched the frames, lightly, the way you touch something you have drawn on a napkin. "But this is close. This is closer than I got. Tell your mother."

"I will."

They sat on the bench in the garden and on the dock at the lake and watched the light go. After a while he said, "There's a stone," and she said, "Yes."

"Is it anything?" he said.

"It's a canoe," she said.

He nodded, as though that were the right answer, and didn't ask.

They went to the lake for real in August.

All of them, which was what Soph had wanted and hadn't expected to get. She got it because Richard opened the house and said that anyone who had been in the basement that night could come, and everyone had.

Gideon came with a hammock and a beer and didn't sleep. Mim came because Max asked. Teo and Priya and Wes came in a car that broke down twice. Rat and Daun drove down from Canada in a truck with a stove in the back that Daun wouldn't travel without. Daun stood on the dock and looked at the water for a long time and said that it wasn't the color she had expected, and Rat said that everybody said that, and Daun said good, then I am not wrong. Max sat on the porch with a book she didn't read. Richard went down to the cave with Villanueva, who had come, and showed her the mannequins in their suits and the paintings of bison on the walls. She said nothing for an hour. Then she said, this is where it started. He said, yes. She said, it's a good cave.

Jeff Matheson came. He was told the whole story on the porch, over four hours, by everybody at once, and he said at the end of it that he wouldn't have believed a word if he hadn't patched a barkeep out of a tavern with his own hands.

On a stand at the end of the dock, angled at the water, was a pair of hacked frames on a cable. The cable ran up the boards and into the house and down into a machine in the cave. For one week, with six people's signatures on the paperwork, that machine was connected to a clean room at Stanford. Eliza was in the frames, and so, when he felt like it, was the barkeep, who said welcome to the wolves.

At sunset Soph sat on the end of the dock with her feet in the water. It was cold. It was the right cold, whatever the blue was. Atom sat beside her. Not in the corner of her eye, but beside her, in the duster, translucent at the edges, sitting on the boards with his knees up, the way he had sat when he was five and had handed her a stone.

He handed her a stone.

It was the one from the dock in the frames. He had asked Gideon to find one like it, and Gideon had spent an afternoon on the shore with Mim and found it and put it on the dock where Atom said. Now Atom couldn't pick it up, because he had no hands. So Soph picked it up and held it out and let him look at it.

"It's a canoe," said Atom.

"Yeah," said Soph. "It's a canoe."

She put it in her pocket, with the other one, the one from the last night when she was fifteen, and the folded note from a hospital in La Jolla, and she turned it over until it was warm.

The light went. The trees went black. Somewhere up the hill a wolf started. Daun, on the porch, said something in Korean that made Rat laugh. Gideon opened another beer. Eliza, in the frames on the stand, said quietly, to nobody, "It's the right blue in person. I didn't know that. Nobody said." The barkeep said welcome.

Atom stood up. He did it easily. He looked down the dock at all of them, at the house with the lights coming on, at the frames on the stand, at Soph with her feet in the water and her hand in her pocket, and he grinned, the grin from when he was five and had just decided that a stone was a canoe.

"So," he said. "You guys wanna go do a quest or something?"