Join (30 page)

As Don says it, Chance hears the logic of it. When Don asked for a decision earlier, this was what it meant for Chance. If the Directorate moves on Chance, Chance will tell Don, and Don will kill Chance Four. After the link to Chance Four is severed, Chance would have nothing to offer the Directorate. This new clarity almost carries a sense of relief.

A light in the distance
quickly becomes a chamber whose ceiling is only a few inches higher than the top of the hovercraft. Two other craft are parked within. Don pulls up beside one of them, sits back in the driver's seat, and sighs deeply.

“So this is Arcadia?” Chance Four asks.

“Every place has a name,” Don says.

“I thought it would be . . . it sounds . . . prettier,” Chance Four says.

“Different strokes,” Don says. Then he presses a button, and the side door slides open.

A tall black woman, a frail-looking olive-skinned woman, and a medium-height black man meet the hovercraft. All of them are wearing heavy faded-yellow parkas over loose gray trousers. The tall woman takes a step toward the open door and says, “I'm Elicia. Welcome.”

“I'm sorry. I'm feeling very ill,” Leap Four says.

She gasps, and Chance Four turns toward her. Leap Four is looking down at the worn floor of the hovercraft, her face reddening. Leap Three, just behind Chance, and Leap One both look drained; their eyes are closed, their breathing shallow.

Leap Four looks up and then turns her head jerkily, like a startled animal. Her broad face is damp, and she is squinting with nausea, pain, or both. Leap is beginning to panic, and then her gaze finds Chance Four and holds.

Leap doesn't blink. She keeps her eyes on Chance while striving to regain her composure. She says, “All of my drives are sick. I need to eat and sleep. Is that possible?”

It's Elicia who responds. “Yes. Of course. We'll find you some food,” she says, “and then take you to a place where you can sleep.”

Don jumps down from the driver's seat. He steps up beside Elicia, who is reaching into the hovercraft to help steady Leap Four. Leap Four seems to have recovered.

Elicia leans toward Don, and he gently kisses her cheek. “My wife,” he says to Chance, by way of explanation.

The eight of them walk through well-lit narrow tunnels to a large mess area where Chance and Leap sit. The other two people who met the hovercraft, Marco and Emily, work with Elicia to quickly prepare a meal of mushrooms, potatoes, and leeks.

As they work, they talk to Chance Four, sensitive to and attempting to provide distraction from Leap's obvious misery. They describe their underground garden under full spectrum light and talk about smuggling in an occasional pallet of canned food. They're obviously proud of their underground haven, Arcadia.

Fresh water is filtered out of an aquifer, whose flow also provides some electric generation, supplemented by high-quality fuel cells. There's a constant, very low hum of an air-rejuvenation system that Elicia says is their largest power drain. After the meal, Marco shows Leap and Chance to a room with eight empty bunks, and they quickly fall asleep.

Chance is happy to focus Chance Four on food and sleep while using other drives to address an inflow of questions from friends and colleagues. They want to know where Chance's drives are, why they're missing appointments, why they're taking sick days, whether Chance needs any help.

After the conversation with Don, Chance is especially vague in response, carefully crafting messages meant to allay concern without informing. Chance says drives are sick or had a planned vacation or are working on special projects or whatever helps end the conversation as quickly as possible. Chance streams a few vids of Barcelona and the Olympic Archipelago, giving credence to the stories of vacations. People are satisfied enough to stop asking questions.

Twelve hours later, after they've
had another meal, Chance Four is in the mess area with Leap One. Leap is keeping Leap Three and Four asleep to borrow cycles, but Leap One is still groggy, scattered. He tries to smile but his lower lip puckers out a bit and the smile goes awry, becoming a grimace before he gives up.

“I was glad to sleep,” he says, pressing his beard, massaging the tension in his jaw, “but I'm too old for this.”

Chance is a little surprised. She says, “Yeah.” Then “I guess, I don't know how old you are anymore.”

Leap gives a half laugh, says, “That's right, you don't. Anymore. I was born seventy-three years ago. Josette was.”

“You remember the world before Join.”

“Yes, I do. And it wasn't what you think it was. It was quiet. It's a good thing to have those memories.” Leap One steeples his fingers in front of his face and says in mock seriousness, “You are but a child, Chance. But don't worry, I know you. I know the kind of creature you really are, and the promises you will fulfill.”

Chance laughs drily. “Yeah, okay.”

Then Leap One notices something behind Chance, and Chance turns around. Elicia and Don have arrived. They're followed by a tall white-haired black man in a loose red shirt and black jeans. The three of them cross to Chance and Leap.

“Oh, my God,” whispers Chance, under her breath.

The tall man smiles as he's introduced to them. His voice is low and soft. He gives the impression that each word he uses has been carefully chosen. “I'm sorry about your Two drive,” he says to Leap One.

Panic—the same look that Chance saw on Leap Four in the hovercraft—flashes briefly across Leap One's face. Leap One struggles to manage a somewhat-grim smile. He says, “I am too.”

Hamish Lyons watches Leap One for a moment, then says, “I might not have made the same choice Don did. But then, left to myself, I probably wouldn't have maintained my independence this long.”

Chance had recognized him instantly, the high forehead, the heavy chin, the mild look of his clear eyes. Among the developers of Join, Hamish Lyons is said to be one of the few who was truly essential and is widely praised for his specific contribution, a deep understanding of the fundamentals of quantum networking.

During the trek in the cargo truck, Chance and Leap had asked Don whether the apocryphal stories of Hamish joining Music were true. Don was evasive, answering with a shrug. So they asked how Hamish Lyons could still be able to do anything after the meltdown that Music became. Don simply told them to “ask him yourself.” Leap asked again, a bit later, and Don said the same thing.

Hamish has a slightly disconcerting, open gaze. He turns it now on Chance. “I understand you have some technical knowledge of Join.”

“It was the specialty of my Three drive.”

“Yes, the one Rope killed.”

“Yes,” says Chance.

Hamish hesitates. “I'm very sorry about that as well,” he says. “You know by now, I'm sure, that Rope is mad?”

Leap One scoffs softly, and Hamish turns back to him.

“I'm just not sure what difference that makes,” Leap says.

“I don't know what Rope is,” Chance says.

Hamish frowns. “Yes. Rope is one of many new types of consciousness, I suppose. We don't yet have a name for what it is. But I do think it's safe to say that, at least by the standards by which we judge each other, Rope is now insane. It has become a volatile, fragmented personality, the combination of many lost and courageous souls. You know, it told me about both of you.”

“No, we didn't know,” Leap One says. “Don didn't tell us. Rope said something, but we thought you might have contacted us because you saw we were looking for you.”

“Yes, we did see that. But many people are looking for us, or for one of those among us in Arcadia. Rope was several of my colleagues. It has ways to contact us directly.”

Leap says, “The last time we saw him, he seemed terrified, was drinking himself to death.”

Hamish thinks for a moment, then says, “Yes. You know, of course, that it's incorrect to ascribe a gender to Rope. It is not a gendered entity.”

Chance is surprised to hear the phrase actually used by Hamish, who acknowledges Chance's recognition with a rueful smile. “Indeed,” Hamish says, “I coined the phrase. I think it's still useful, and accurate, so I haven't given up on it.”

“Rope,” Leap One says, “said that eventually all joins would be like him.” Leap pauses for a moment to give the pronoun a very slight emphasis, then continues, “He said he was searching for the vanishing point.”

“Yes,” Hamish says. “I've heard it say things like that. It has an endless closet of reasons to wear to explain why it has done what it has done. But every one of them is transparent. The naked truth is Rope is a mercenary. Rope took a Directorate contract, promising to deliver a method of safely joining an unlimited number of drives, without a subnet.”

Leap says, “I don't think Rope is interested in more money.”

“I agree. Rope's appetite, Rope's ambition is not for money. Rope wants to teach us something, to be judged brilliant by history, and to create an irrefutable legacy.”

“Which you think won't happen,” Leap says, “because Rope is crazy.”

“Rope has a secure place in the history of our species for other reasons. But, yes. That is basically how I see it.” Hamish turns from Leap to Chance and continues, “Rope hypothesized that a meme virus results from competing personal preferences. What we in the trade would call ego codes. Rope believed that personal preferences could be diluted through the creation of a very large join, until they would no longer have a meaningful impact on the overall system. Rope's method was to create an enormous join while keeping the number of active drives low. It believed that at some point, it would contain so many ego codes that no individual would possess enough influence on the join to precipitate a meme virus. Then it could safely add as many active drives as it wished.

“It tried several times to increase its number of active drives above twenty. But it kept panicking. The science simply doesn't support Rope's hypothesis. In fact, it's actually ridiculous on the face of it because there is no reason to believe psychological phenomena alone can generate prion growth. And there are many other substantive complicating factors. Eventually, I think a desire to join and kill drives became Rope's only clear motivation.”

Leap says, “Rope said it was the product of over eight hundred joins.”

“Yes. I believe, as I suspect you do, that that may be an exaggeration. Though there are no records. It's been working on the project for four decades, however. It's not too difficult to find join candidates among terminally ill bodies or among the poor or the dispossessed if you promise them eternal life or an opportunity to help shape an important scientific breakthrough. I'm sure Rope promised other things as well. Rope, without doubt, underwent several hundred joins.”

“But if those promises weren't true,” says Leap, “and Rope kept that fact a secret until the join procedure . . .” Leap leaves the thought unfinished.

Hamish is clearly surprised, his brows lowering briefly, and his eyes clouding with a look of hurt—all of which quickly dissolves back into the same equanimity he had been showing.

“If I understand what you're implying,” he says, “then as far as I know, and this seems to be the fact of the matter, during all of those joins, Rope did not experience a flip. Flips are rare, even among elderly joins, and Rope chose candidates in low-risk demographics. Pressure adequate to create a flip would have been highly improbable.”

Chance says, “The Directorate, did they recruit bodies—”

“The Directorate is not evil,” Hamish says. “None of Rope's joins, of course, were coerced. They were all freely entered into, as the network requires. The Directorate simply made an exception to allowable size limits in order to make Rope's activities legal. In any case, Rope had a Directorate contract. But they do seem to have shut it down now, since Rope . . . branched out and has killed so many bodies that were not part of its join. There is simply no way to dress such acts as scientific progress.”