Join (25 page)

Chance Four drinks a bit of the orange juice. She says, “I don't understand how he's doing it. If he's telling the truth, about the eight hundred, then he's got to be cycle starved—”

“To maintain awareness with only two drives, after that many joins.” Leap finishes the thought.

“He's a miracle and a horror,” Chance says.

“Yeah,” Leap One says, “like we are.”

“What do you mean?” Chance asks. Leap doesn't answer.

“Isn't Arcadia meant to be a kind of ideal place?” Chance says. “Where everything's simple and good? That sounds like the right place to find a cure.”

“That sounds like a place that doesn't exist.”

Leap's house in the Olympic
Archipelago is quiet. It's late afternoon, but Leap Three has just finished a shift at the ER and is sleeping. Most of his long body is underneath light covers, but one leg is kicked out to cool. While gathering her coat from the coatrack by the door, Leap Two pauses to gaze out of the living room's big picture window.

In this house, Leap remembers raising Ian and also remembers being raised by Josette. The memories from both sides of the relationship braid together into a single time line, filled with inconsistencies, doubt, bright moments, conflicting emotions. Sometimes Leap can untangle the different points of view and examine events fully, learning how each perspective saw things differently or how they agreed about what was happening. Sometimes the perspectives blur and can't be teased apart. Secrets and intimacies are threaded like bright baubles through the dark places. The secrets can inspire revulsion, fascination, dread; but over time they dull. As they're examined, their volatility fades.

From Ian's perspective, this big picture window has the solidity and permanence of landscape, a reliable thing that never changed its basic character—its height and width, its dusty transparency, the thick molding of the casement that holds the frame in place. The house and window were constants in a childhood shaken endlessly by the temblors of family strife.

In other memories, the window is a thing Josette planned and then had built. A thing painted four times over the years; twice, this same periwinkle blue. And then there are the incidental memories of it, contributed by Leap Three and Leap Four. In the union of those perceptions is yet another experience. As Leap Two gathers her scarf, each perspective fades and shifts into the others. Each is fully realized, independent, and also a part of a comprehending whole.

When choosing action in the face of conflicting desires, the push of desires informs a center, and the center chooses. Leap has become stronger after the join with Josette. The clarity of Josette's thought has buttressed Leap's courage, allowed Leap to handle and examine possibilities once perceived as limits. Choices that at one time might have remained unimagined are now within reach. The conversation with Rope left Leap asking herself—is there anything she can do, on her own, to treat the flip?

Josette and Mark Pearsun had talked about joining. Mark loved her mind. She was flattered but found the prospect of shaving the edges from even one of her sharply held beliefs, of subduing any bit of her individuality, distasteful.

Still, Mark had an uncanny knack for winning, and he worked on her in a simple, effective way that had her wondering whether staying in the world for a few more centuries might not be the more interesting of her options. Then, one late December evening, during the period when she was formulating an agreeable response to him, he called her. He was miserable, lonely. He sounded like a stranger, a shadow of himself. He refused to open video.

“There's no place for me anymore.” He started off sounding whiny and just got worse. “Joins are smart. There's nothing I can do. Nothing I can do. It's as if they see me coming. They've gotten so much better at it. They're designing themselves now to include different kinds of personalities.”

Josette tried to interrupt. “Mark, this is word soup. I don't understand. Start at the beginning.”

Undeterred, he talked over her. “And it's like they can anticipate all of my moves. I can't do what I used to be able to do. They understand me. Pieces of themselves, one from here, one from there, they put them together to figure out what I'm thinking. And the real-time communication. It's complete. It's uncanny. I can be talking with a join in New Denver, and one of his drives in Detroit will be trading on what I'm saying,
as I'm saying it
. And I don't know it. It's not like a
conference call
. It's not a
transfer of information
. It's really what they say, shared understanding. At first I thought there'd be a critical flaw. I just didn't believe it. But it's been so many years. And the things I've done.

“Josette, it's real. I can't fight it. I'm going to end up beaten. And it's unfair. They're better than I am. I'm good, but I'm losing. In the last few years, it's gotten worse. I think, really, it's like I'm a scrub in this world. That I almost don't even count. Before Join, I would have been a rainmaker until I retired. I would have been the best. A kingmaker. Today, I'm . . . I'm an endangered species, a dead end.”

Josette was repulsed. This was about him. “Are you telling me you want to return my retainer?”

There was a long silence. When he finally spoke they both knew that a join was no longer a possibility. “No, Josette. I'm not.”

“Good, Mark. Then we don't have anything else to talk about tonight.”

Now Leap Two is wrapping a belt around her long, green tweed overcoat. Beneath the coat, under her left shoulder, is the comfort of the handgun that she has strapped against her ribs. When the pod arrives, she directs it to Mark Pearsun's office.

Chance and Leap find that
Apple has disappeared. Of course, Civ Net has records of many joins named Apple, but none is the Apple they know. The bar where both of Apple's drives worked is closed. Building management won't acknowledge that it knows who he is.

Of Hamish Lyons, however, there are plentiful records. None of them appears to be useful. Endless hagiographies, reminiscences, explorations of the irony of his death as one of the first casualties of the new world that was made possible by his discoveries.

So Leap and Chance focus their effort on finding the place Rope mentioned—Arcadia. The name is from a region in Greece, but it's also used in Northern California and in other places. They search Civ Net and the areas of the darknet they are able to access. They discover no connection between a place named Arcadia and a feral community.

Which leads them to feral communities. Most trace their beginnings to a specific belief or concern that they felt was either ignored by civilization or was incompatible with Join. Many have religious roots. The response to Join from organized religions was fragmented and provoked several highly publicized schisms. There were Christians who felt joins were predicted by biblical passages or holy mysteries such as the Trinity; but others saw them as the work of the devil or an attempt to usurp the prerogatives of the Almighty or simply as unethical. Alternatively, some Hindus associated the technology with avatars of divinity. Some believed this was a good thing; some believed it was bad.

Most of the swiftly marshaled decisions about the meaning of Join left no room for revision. Forty years after the trial of one thousand, several groups of objectors have left the embrace of civilization and formed their own feral communities.

Feral communities are generally governed and inhabited only by solos. Some are violently opposed to Join; some are more tolerant. While their size and technological levels vary, they are typically isolated and poor. Most joins see them as eking out a near-subsistence existence without the hallmarks of modern life, such as pods, spires, and Civ Net. As long as they don't become too big or act out their hostility, civilization more or less lets them be.

But there is no scent of information that leads Chance and Leap toward any particular feral group. They all seem equally unlikely to be sheltering a founding developer of the very technology that defines their opposition to modern culture, assuming he still lives.

Chance suggests recruiting Mark Pearsun to help. Leap is evasive but clearly doesn't want to. Then Civ News reports on Pearsun's apparent suicide, by carbon monoxide poisoning. The death had gone undetected, the body sealed in Pearsun's garage for a few days. Leap says something like “I guess that settles it,” with a tone of voice that doesn't invite further inquiry.

Two weeks after their meeting
with Rope, as Leap's health continues to deteriorate, Chance and Leap admit to each other that they're not going to find Arcadia. At which point they receive a recorded audio greeting. When the message arrives, it announces itself through a very slight pulse on their retinal displays. They open and examine it at about the same moment. It's addressed to both of them.

They play it over their cochlear implants, so each of them is playing it privately. At first, it's difficult to hear the words being spoken through distortion and static; but it becomes easier after a few listens, and after they've found the thread of the voice, which is male.

“Hello. This is Shimah Snoyl. I understand you're looking for me. You'll have one opportunity to find me. To the join that's ill, bring all of your drives. You won't need to bring food, changes of clothes, or anything else. Your affairs should be okay without your attention for at least three weeks. Be ready in three days. Don't discuss this message over the net, or we will never meet.”

Chance One and Four and Leap One are sitting in Leap's kitchen. Chance One closes the audio message, which immediately disappears. “Don't close it!” he says, and Leap One hesitates.

“Why not?”

“Mine is gone. I think it self-destructed.”

“Ah,” says Leap One, “mine just disappeared too.”

Chance Four is finishing lunch. All three drives are silent as Chance One and Leap One open personal displays and begin to search their histories. The Civilization Network service automatically archives messages. Things don't get lost. But the audio file is not there.

Chance Four says, “Where is it?”

“I don't know. I had it.”

They keep looking. After a few moments, Leap says, “It was real. I saw that you had it too. We both heard it. Was it real?”

“Yes,” says Chance One.

“Then it should be here, shouldn't it? If it was real, it should be here.” Leap One stops looking and turns to Chance One. “What did you hear, verbatim?”

Chance One recites the message.

“That's exactly what I heard,” Leap says.

“We both heard it,” says Chance.

“So it's real.”

“But . . . ,” Chance One says, “but I don't have the message. It's not in my history.”

“You must have destroyed it,” says Leap.

“I didn't, but I checked the routing path too, and it appears to be gone from the servers.”