By the early afternoon they were satisfied that Mick was ready for the implantation. They made him lie down on a couch with his head encased in a padded plastic assembly with a hole under the back of the neck. He was given a mild local anaesthetic. Rubberised clamps whirred in to hold his head in position with micromillimetre accuracy. Then he felt a vague sense of pressure being applied to the skin on the back of his neck, and then an odd and not entirely pleasant sensation of sudden pins and needles in every part of his body. But the unpleasantness was over almost as soon as he'd registered it. The support clamps whirred away from his head. The couch tilted up, and he was able to get off and stand on his feet.
Mick touched the back of his neck, came away with a tiny smear of blood on his thumb.
'That's it?'
'I told you there was nothing to it,' Joe said, putting down a motor-cycling magazine. 'I don't know what you were so worried about.'
'It's not the nervelink operation itself I don't approve of. I don't have a problem with the technology. It's the whole system, the way it encourages the exploitation of the poor.'
Joe tut-tutted. 'Bloody
Guardian
readers. It was you lot who got the bloody moratorium against air travel enacted in the first place. Next you'll be telling us we can't even
walk
anywhere.'
The nurse swabbed Mick's wound and applied a bandage. He was shunted into an adjoining room and asked to wait again. More tests followed. As the system interrogated the newly embedded nervelink, he experienced mild electrical tingles and strange, fleeting feelings of dislocation. Nothing he reported gave the staff any cause for alarm.
After Mick's discharge from the medical centre, Joe took him straight down to the laboratory. An electromagnetically shielded annexe contained the couch Joe intended to use for the experiment. It was a modified version of the kind tourists used for long-term nervelinking, with facilities for administering nutrition and collecting bodily waste. No one liked to dwell too much on those details, but there was no way around it if you wanted to stay nervelinked for more than a few hours. Gamers had been putting up with similar indignities for decades.
Once Mick was plumbed in, Joe settled a pair of specially designed immersion glasses over his eyes, after first applying a salve to Mick's skin to protect against pressure sores. The glasses fitted very tightly, blocking out Mick's view of the lab. All he could see was a blue-grey void, with a few meaningless red digits to the right side of his visual field.
'Comfortable?' Joe asked.
'I can't see anything yet.'
'You will.'
Joe went back into the main part of the basement to check on the correlation. It seemed that he was gone a long time. When he heard Joe return, Mick half-expected bad news - that the link had collapsed, or some necessary piece of technology had broken down. Privately, he would not have been too sorry were that the case. In his shocked state of mind in the hours after Andrea's death, he would have given anything to be able to see her again. But now that the possibility had arisen, he found himself prone to doubts. Given time, he knew he'd get over Andrea's death. That wasn't being cold, it was just being realistic. He knew more than a few people who'd lost their partners, and while they might have gone through some dark times afterwards, almost all of them now seemed settled and relatively content. It didn't mean they'd stopped feeling anything for the loved one who had died, but it did mean they'd found some way to move on. There was no reason to assume he wouldn't make the same emotional recovery.
The question was, would visiting Andrea hasten or hamper that process? Perhaps they should just have talked over the videolink, or even the phone. But then he'd never been very good on either.
He knew it had to be face to face, all or nothing.
'Is there a problem?' he asked Joe, innocently enough.
'Nope, everything's fine. I was just waiting to hear that the other version of you is ready.'
'He is?'
'Good to go. Someone from the medical centre just put him under. We can make the switch any time you're ready.'
'Where is he?'
'Here,' Joe said. 'I mean, in the counterpart to this room. He's lying on the same couch. It's easier that way; there's less of a jolt when you switch over.'
'He's unconscious already?'
'Full coma. Just like any nervelinked mule.'
Except, Mick thought, unlike the mules, his counterpart hadn't signed up to go into a chemically induced coma while his body was taken over by a distant tourist. That was what Mick disapproved of more than anything. The mules did it for money, and the mules were always the poorest people in any given tourist hotspot, whether it was some affluent European city or some nauseatingly 'authentic' Third World shithole. No one ever aspired to become a mule. It was what you did when all other options had dried up. In some cases it hadn't just supplanted prostitution, it had become an entirely new form of prostitution in its own right.
But enough of that. They were all consenting adults here. No one - least of all the other version of himself - was being exploited. The other Mick was just being kind. No kinder, Mick supposed, than
he
would have been had the tables been reversed, but he couldn't help feeling a perverse sense of gratitude. And as for Andrea . . . well, she'd always been kind. No one ever had a bad word to say about Andrea on that score. Kind and considerate, to a fault.
So what was he waiting for?
'You can make the switch,' Mick said.
There was less to it than he'd been expecting. It was no worse than the involuntary muscular jolt he sometimes experienced in bed, just before dozing off to sleep.
But suddenly he was in a different body.
'Hi,' Joe said. 'How're you feeling, matey?'
Except it was the other Joe speaking to him now: the Joe who belonged to the world where Andrea hadn't died. The original Joe was on the other side of the reality gap.
'I feel . . .' But when Mick tried speaking, it came out hopelessly slurred.
'Give it time,' Joe said. 'Everyone has trouble speaking to start with. That'll come quickly.'
'Can't shee. Can't see.'
'That's because we haven't switched on your glasses. Hold on a tick.'
The grey-green void vanished, to be replaced by a view of the interior of the lab. The quality of the image was excellent. The room looked superficially the same, but as Mick looked around - sending the muscle signals through the nervelink to move the other Mick's body - he noticed the small details that told him this wasn't his world. Joe was wearing a different checked shirt, smudged white trainers instead of Converse sneakers. In this version of the lab, Joe had forgotten to turn the calendar over to the new month.
Mick tried speaking again. The words came easier this time.
'I'm really here, aren't I?'
'How does it feel to be making history?'
'It feels . . . bloody weird, actually. And no, I'm not making history. When you write up your experiment, it won't be me who went through first. It'll be you, the way it was always meant to be. This is just a dry run. You can mention me in a footnote, if that.'
Joe looked unconvinced. 'Have it your way, but--'
'I will.' Mick moved to get off the couch. This version of his body wasn't plumbed in like the other one. But when he tried to move, nothing happened. For a moment, he felt a crushing sense of paralysis. He must have let out a frightened sound.
'Easy,' Joe said, putting a hand on his shoulder. 'One step at a time. The link still has to bed in. It's going to be hours before you'll have complete fluidity of movement, so don't run before you can walk. And I'm afraid we're going to have to keep you in the lab for rather longer than you might like. As routine as nervelinking is, this
isn't
simple nervelinking. The short cuts we've had to use to squeeze the data through the correlator link mean we're exposing ourselves to more medical risks than you'd get with the standard tourist kit. Nothing that you need worry about, but I want to make sure we keep a close eye on all the parameters. I'll be running tests in the morning and evening. Sorry to be a drag about it, but we do need numbers for our paper, as well. All I can promise is that you'll still have a lot of time available to meet Andrea. If that's what you still want to do, of course.'
'It is,' Mick said. 'Now that I'm here . . . no going back, right?'
Joe glanced at his watch. 'Let's start running some coordination exercises. That'll keep us busy for an hour or two. Then we'll need to make sure you have full bladder control. Could get messy otherwise. After that - we'll see if you can feed yourself.'
'I want to see Andrea.'
'Not today,' Joe said firmly. 'Not until we've got you house-trained.'
'Tomorrow. Definitely tomorrow.'
MONDAY
He paused in the shade of the old, green boating shed at the edge of the lake. It was a hot day, approaching noon, and the park was already busier than it had been at any time since the last gasp of the previous summer. Office workers were sitting around the lake making the most of their lunch break: the men with their ties eased and sleeves and trousers rolled up, the women with their shoes off and blouses loosened. Children splashed in the ornamental fountains, while their older siblings bounced metres into the air on servo-assisted pogo sticks, the season's latest, lethal-looking craze. Students lolled around on the gently sloping grass, sunbathing or catching up on neglected coursework in the last week before exams. Mick recognised some of them from his own department. Most wore cheap immersion glasses, with their arms covered almost to the shoulder in tight-fitting, pink, haptic feedback gloves. The more animated students lay on their backs, pointing and clutching at invisible objects suspended above them. It looked like they were trying to snatch down the last few wisps of cloud from the scratchless blue sky above Cardiff.
Mick had already seen Andrea standing a little further around the curve of the lake. It was where they had agreed to meet, and true to form Andrea was exactly on time. She stared pensively out across the water, seemingly oblivious to the commotion going on around her. She wore a white blouse, a knee-length burgundy skirt, sensible office shoes. Her hair was shorter than he remembered, styled differently and barely reaching her collar. For a moment - until she'd turned slightly - he hadn't recognised her at all. Andrea held a Starbucks coffee holder in one hand, and every now and then she'd take a sip or glance at her wristwatch. Mick was five minutes late now, and he knew there was a risk Andrea would give up waiting. But in the shade of the boating shed, all his certainties had evaporated.
Andrea turned minutely. She glanced at her watch again. She sipped from the coffee holder, tilting it back in a way that told Mick she'd finished the last drop. He saw her looking around for a waste bin.
Mick stepped from the shade. He walked across the grass, onto concrete, acutely conscious of the slow awkwardness of his gait. His walking had improved since his first efforts, but it still felt as if he were trying to walk upright in a swimming pool filled with treacle. Joe had assured him that all his movements would become more normal as the nervelink bedded in, but that process was obviously taking longer than anticipated.
'Andrea,' he said, sounding slurred and drunk and too loud, even to his own ears.
She turned and met his eyes. There was a slight pause before she smiled, and when she did, the smile wasn't quite right, as if she'd been asked to hold it too long for a photograph.
'Hello, Mick. I was beginning to think--'
'It's okay.' He forced out each word with care, making sure it came out right before moving to the next. 'I just had some second thoughts.'
'I don't blame you. How does it feel?'
'A bit odd. It'll get easier.'
'Yes, that's what they told me.' She took another sip from the coffee holder, even though it must have been empty. They were standing about two metres apart, close enough to talk, close enough to look like two friends or colleagues who'd bumped into each other around the lake.
'It's really good of you--' Mick began.
Andrea shook her head urgently. 'Please. It's okay. We talked it over. We both agreed it was the right thing to do. If the tables were turned, you wouldn't have hesitated.'
'Maybe not.'
'I know you, Mick. Maybe better than you know yourself. You'd have done all that you could, and more.'
'I just want you to know . . . I'm not taking any of this lightly. Not you having to see me, like this . . . not what
he
has to go through while I'm around.'
'He said to tell you there are worse ways to spend a week.'
Mick tried to smile. He felt the muscles of his face move, but without a mirror there was no way to judge the outcome. The moment stretched. A football splashed into the lake and began to drift away from the edge. He heard a little boy start crying.