"Rebecca, can you hear me?"
It was like listening through a straw, but yes, she could hear.
"Rebecca, if you can hear me, then answer."
Answer? How could she answer? She had no mouth. She tried to turn to look at her body, but there was no turning. There was no body. When she'd moved through the wall, she'd changed realities. Without a mouth, how could she answer?
"Tell her she needs to think the answer and force it towards her mouth."
But I have no mouth.
Rebecca's words came clear through tinny speakers set around the walls, her cadence and tone belonging to no one but her. Everyone stared at her for a moment, then cheered.
She'd thought the words, wishing she could respond to the inane directive, but had never imagined that it would be broadcast through speakers. Maybe this is what Panchet had meant.
Can you hear me?
"Of course we can hear you."
She watched Andy step towards her, pain and joy fighting for space on his handsome face. That could only mean one thing. She'd joked about it to herself, but the reality of it was more harsh than she'd expected.
Does this mean I'm dead?
Andy opened his mouth to speak, but shook his head instead, unable to bring himself to say anything. Panchet didn't have the same inhibition. "You're body is almost dead, Rebecca. They did too much damage to your brain when they took the hippocampi."
Then where am I? What am I?
That last she'd meant to keep to herself, but it broadcast as if she'd shouted to the sky.
"We moved your consciousness to a storage unit."
Explain.
"You currently reside in a five by five terabyte nodule connected to the internal communications of Velvet Dogma Earth, which is the name we have for this complex. Although you have access to all cameras in the facility, until you're able to handle basic interaction, we didn't want to inundate you with too much information."
But the information wasn't too much. She felt laconic in her responses only because the level of input seemed so low. She wanted more. She wanted to be connected to the ID.
I need more input
.
"We understand. But until you get the hang of living in server reality, you should be offline."
Panchet waved to the others around him, shooing them away. "Go on now, get back to your stations. There's still work to be done, especially now that she's back."
Turning to Rebecca he added, "Cody Larkins wants to speak with you when you're ready."
Cody. That's right—she'd commanded them to seek out the dead hacker. Something he'd said back at the Ack Ack Underground had made her bring the small server. She'd hoped that she'd been right. The very fact that she was here verified her judgment.
Is Cody okay?
"It took him a while to get used to being dead. He'd uploaded his consciousness four hours before he died, so Andy had to convince him that they had indeed met and that you'd spoken with him about Velvet Dogma."
She remembered giving him the password, the mischievous look in his eye, and then his death. He'd wanted to die. Was it so he could live in the online universe?
You still want the password, don't you?
"Most definitely."
Did you ask Cody for it?
"Yes."
And?
"He said to get it from you."
Cody had no other choice. He hadn't learned the password until four hours after he'd recorded this version of his consciousness.
Andy returned to Panchet's side, his red face sad proof of his tears. She felt sorry for him. If she were dead, he'd be able to move on. Instead, she was in some halfway, living-dead computer consciousness reality where her mind functioned without regard to her body.
"Rebecca, do you feel any pain?" he asked.
No, Andy. I'm okay.
"What does it feel like in there?"
Lonely. Sterile. Confined.
The same things she'd felt in solitary confinement.
"I'm sorry I couldn't protect you."
He stared at the ground, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He looked so much like a little boy.
You were overmatched. It wasn't your fault, Andy. This is just the way things turned out.
"Cody's wants to talk to you," Panchet interrupted. "I want to make sure we didn't do anything wrong."
Bring him on.
Suddenly Rebecca felt a presence fill the space beside her.
Looks like you're getting the hang of it,
came Cody's voice.
She tried to turn, but once again was reminded that there was no physical reality. She was in a server. He was in a server. Their only inputs were cameras to the outside world.
Cody Larkins? Is that you?
Of course.
Oh, Cody.
She felt her heart that wasn't there break a bit.
What have we done? We've gone and killed ourselves.
Yet we still live.
If you call this living.
Come to me, Rebecca, and let me show you what I mean.
How can I?
Close your eyes and you'll see.
But I have no eyes.
You have no mouth but you speak.
He was right. She thought about that for a moment. How would she do it, though? She had to somehow see inside the server. She'd used the camera to see Andy, but what would she use inside the server? But Cody spoke to her, guiding her past her doubts and misconceptions, until an entirely new world opened up to her and she stood face to face with him.
You look like hell, girl.
F
or the next several hours Cody taught her the limits of their new existence. A terabyte server seemed gigantic in concept, but in reality, the claustrophobic limits of the place were little different from that she'd felt in prison. Just like there she knew there was a great expanse of world outside, and she yearned to be a part of it. But access would remain closed until they were ready to deal with the Velvet Dogma program.
The single greatest dilemma about online living was how to tailor the input possibilities. On one hand, Rebecca found it difficult to rethink herself without the relevance of her body. She'd always seen with her eyes, therefore when she thought about sight, she thought about eyes. But in reality she had no eyes. Cody taught her how to be omnipresent. Unfettered by the limitations of the human body, she could see everything all the time if she wished. Her processing power slowed considerably as her mind strove to process the information, but it could be done. Within the server they conducted dozens of simulations until she felt confident that she could handle the interaction alone.
Do you miss it?
She asked.
My body? The physical world? No. I don't miss it at all.
Not even a little?
The only thing I miss is food. If there's a single kind of food I miss, then it would be pizza. The ID can take care of all your other senses except taste
.
I'll miss that too.
She'd just discovered curry and even now remembered the exotic taste.
I had cancer, you know.
I had no idea.
Everyone always made fun of me because I smiled all the time. I knew it, but I didn't mind. The alternative was to scream constantly. I was always hungry, you see. Not 'missed dinner' hungry, but starvation hungry.
What was wrong?
Besides the loss of my kidneys? Cancer of the pancreas that spread to the stomach. I wanted to eat, I loved to eat, but even the smallest amount of food exacerbated the pain to the point that I'd crawl into the bathroom and huddle on the floor for hours.
Oh, Cody.
Like a chasm that couldn't be filled, my hunger couldn't be abated. So you see, death, or rather this change in status, was welcome for me. I looked forward to it.
What about touch? What about feeling with your hands?
I was never a ladies' man, Rebecca, so I never had the opportunity to know what I missed.
I miss it. I miss Andy. There was a way he touched me that no one else ever duplicated.
There's nothing to be done about it.
There's always something to be done.
What? You can't return to your body.
No. But I can exact revenge.
Why would you want to do that? It isn't logical.
No. But revenge would make me feel better.
She paused.
You know I always imagined that this would be an emotionless existence, but I'm finding that some of my feelings are actually magnified.
Perhaps because here you aren't constrained by the limitations imposed by society. You can do what you want, to any degree you want, limited only by the physicality of your universe.
The ID goes everywhere, doesn't it?
She asked.
Essentially.
Then that's what I'll do. Once we corral Velvet Dogma, there are a few people I need to find.
Why, Rebecca? Do you miss them?
No, Cody. I hate them and I mean to kill them.
Soon after that Cody opened the firewall that had served as a trap door to their small server and allowed them the run of the mega-servers of Velvet Dogma Earth that were ensconced in the Mammoth Dome of Mammoth Cave. When she'd seen a wire-diagram of the place from the outside, she'd never thought she'd have this vantage. Inside she had no sense of direction, no sense of proportion. She traveled between packets of data, creating a path as she went, her speed regulated only by her willingness to exert herself blindly. Moving through the data reminded her of moving through a crowd of people, navigating by looking ahead and judging how other people moved, as much as how she should move through them.
Cody showed her how to flow through fiber optics and activate equipment attached to the server. One by one they turned the lights off then on inside the cave. Appliances started then stopped. Music skipped through songs. She locked a short, bald man in the bathroom for fifteen minutes, teasing him by unlocking then locking the door over and over. Eventually she let him go, and when she did she felt more confident and more at home in her universe.
She snapped all the cameras on at once. Although she was receiving input from thirty-one devices, the process felt no different than if it were one. She counted twenty-four people working at different stations throughout the cave. If she were to believe Andy, her brother had organized them to deliver her program from the ID. What a tremendous feat he'd accomplished.
The thing she most regretted was not being able to tell him how impressed she was, not being able to tell him that he'd grown into the sort of man to be proud of.
Andy.
"Rebecca?"
He turned from conferring with a pair of technicians and faced the nearest camera. "What is it?"
I am ready to proceed with Velvet Dogma.
"So soon?"
Velvet Dogma needs to find a home.
Andy nodded. "Let me get with—
Panchet is coming your way. He should be there in seven seconds.
Andy stared into the camera for a long moment, cold horror in his eyes. It only lasted for a moment, but Rebecca read it nonetheless, and in that moment accepted that they could never again be lovers. With his human perspective, he could not understand her existence. Unless he was to do something to his brain, he could never join her. He needed to move on. If she was forced to, she'd give him reasons to do so.
Panchet arrived, his hoverBoard purring into the room several feet off the ground. His haggard look fit him like an old sweater. He glanced at the camera, then surveyed the people around the room. He took a long moment before he spoke.
"Rebecca, we want to thank you in advance for doing this. We didn't expect it to turn out this way," He looked down at his hands as he gathered his thoughts. "You've given up so much. I hate it that this is how it will end."
He glanced quickly at Andy, who was staring at the floor. "You deserve better."
Seems to be the slogan for my life.
She hadn't meant to say it, but somehow her thoughts were spoken aloud through the system. Just as well.
"You've given so much already," Panchet repeated. "If we manage to contain Velvet Dogma, we'll be able to shine the light of truth on the dark corners containing the world's secrets. The knowledge will give us the upper hand as we try and help reform Earth's governments."