'Are you sure about this? We had such a nice time on Thursday. It would be a shame to spoil the memory of that now.'
'I'm okay,' Mick said.
'I'm just saying, we could always just stroll around the gardens here.'
'Please,' Mick said. 'This is what . . . I want.'
His voice was slow, his phrasing imprecise. He sounded drunk and depressed. If Andrea noticed - and he was sure she must have - she made no observation.
They went into town. It was difficult getting the wheelchair on the tram, even with Andrea's assistance. No one seemed to know how to lower the boarding ramp. One of the benefits of nervelink technology was that you didn't see that many people in wheelchairs any more. The technology that enabled one person to control another person's body also enabled spinal injuries to be bypassed. Mick was aware that he was attracting more attention than on any previous day. For most people wheelchairs were a medical horror from the past, like iron lungs or leg braces.
On the tram's video monitor he watched a news item about the Polish miners. It wasn't good. The rescue team had had a number of options available to them, involving at least three possible routes to the trapped men. After carefully evaluating all the data - aware of how little time remained for the victims - they'd chosen what had promised to be the quickest and safest approach.
It had turned out to be a mistake, one that would prove fatal for the miners. The rescuers had hit a flooded section and had been forced to retreat, with damage to their equipment, and one of their team injured. Yet the miners
had
been saved in one of the other contacted worldlines. In that reality, one of the members of the rescue team had slipped on ice and fractured his hip while boarding the plane. The loss of that one man - who'd been a vocal proponent for taking the quickest route - had resulted in the team following the second course. It had turned out to be the right decision. They'd met their share of obstacles and difficulties, but in the end they'd broken through to the trapped miners.
By the time this happened, contact with that worldline had almost been lost. Even the best compression methods couldn't cope with moving images. The pictures that came back, of the men being liberated from the ground, were grainy and monochrome, like a blow-up of newsprint from a hundred years earlier. They'd been squeezed across the gap in the last minutes before noise drowned the signal.
But the information was useless. Even armed with the knowledge that there was a safe route through to the miners, the team in this worldline didn't have time to act.
The news didn't help Mick's mood. Going into the city turned out to be exactly the bad move Andrea had predicted. By midday his motor control had deteriorated even further, to the point where he was having difficulty steering the wheelchair. His speech became increasingly slurred, so that Andrea had to keep asking him to repeat himself. In defence, he shut down into monosyllables. Even his hearing was beginning to fail, as the auditory data was compressed to an even more savage degree. He couldn't distinguish birds from traffic, or traffic from the swish of the trees in the park. When Andrea spoke to him she sounded like her words had been fed through a synthesiser, then chopped up and spliced back together in some tinny approximation of her normal voice.
At three, his glasses could no longer support full colour vision. The software switched to a limited colour palette. The city looked like a hand-tinted photograph, washed out and faded. Andrea's face oscillated between white and sickly grey.
By four, Mick was fully quadriplegic. By five, the glasses had reverted back to black and white. The frame rate was down to ten images per second, and falling.
By early evening, Andrea was no longer able to understand what Mick was saying. Mick realised that he could no longer reach the panic button. He became agitated, thrashing his head around. He'd had enough. He wanted to be pulled out of the nervelink, slammed back into his own waiting body. He no longer felt as if he was in Mick's body, but he didn't feel as if he was in his own either. He was strung out somewhere between them, helpless and almost blind. When the panic hit, it was like a foaming, irresistible tide.
Alarmed, Andrea wheeled him back to the laboratory. By the time she was ready to say goodbye to him, the glasses had reduced his vision to five images per second, each of which was composed of only six thousand pixels. He was calmer then, resigned to the inevitability of what tomorrow would bring: he would not even recognise Andrea in the morning.
SATURDAY
Mick's last day with Andrea began in a world of sound and vision - senses that were already impoverished to a large degree - and ended in a realm of silence and darkness.
He was now completely paralysed, unable even to move his head. The brain that belonged to the other, comatose Mick now had more control over this body than its wakeful counterpart. The nervelink was still sending signals back to the lab, but the requirements of sight and sound now consumed almost all available bandwidth. In the morning, vision was down to one thousand pixels, updated three frames per second. His sight had already turned monochrome, but even yesterday there had been welcome gradations of grey, enough to anchor him into the visual landscape.
Now the pixels were only capable of registering on or off; it cost too much bandwidth to send intermediate intensity values. When Andrea was near him, her face was a flickering abstraction of black and white squares, like a trick picture in a psychology textbook. With effort he learned to distinguish her from the other faces in the laboratory, but no sooner had he gained confidence in his ability than the quality of vision deteriorated even further.
By midmorning the frame rate had dropped to eight hundred pixels at two images per second, which was less like vision than being shown a sequence of still pictures. People didn't walk to him across the lab - they jumped from spot to spot, captured in frozen postures. It was soon easy to stop thinking of them as people at all, but simply as abstract structures in the data.
By noon he could not exactly say that he had any vision at all.
Something
was updating once every two seconds, but the matrix of black and white pixels was hard to reconcile with his memories of the lab. He could no longer distinguish people from furniture, unless people moved between frames, and then only occasionally. At two, he asked Joe to disable the feed from the glasses, so that the remaining bandwidth could be used for sound and touch. Mick was plunged into darkness.
Sound had declined overnight as well. If Andrea's voice had been tinny yesterday, today it was barely human. It was as if she were speaking to him through a voice distorter on the end of the worst telephone connection in the world. The noise was beginning to win. The software was struggling to compensate, teasing sense out of the data. It was a battle that could only be prolonged, not won.
'I'm still here,' Andrea told him, her voice a whisper fainter than the signal from the furthest quasar.
Mick answered her. It took some time. His words in the lab had to be analysed by voice-recognition software and converted into ASCII characters. The characters were compressed further and sent across the reality gap, bit by bit. In the other version of the lab - the one where Mick's body waited in a wheelchair, the one where Andrea hadn't died in a car crash - equivalent software decompressed the character string and reconstituted it in mechanically generated speech, with an American accent.
'Thank you for letting me come back,' he said. 'Please stay. Until the end. Until I'm not here any more.'
'I'm not going anywhere, Mick.'
Andrea squeezed his hand. After all that he had lost since Friday, touch remained. It really was the easiest thing to send: easier than sight, easier than sound. When, later, even Andrea's voice had to be sent across the gap by character string and speech synthesiser, touch endured. He felt her holding him, hugging his body to hers, refusing to surrender him to the drowning roar of quantum noise.
'We're down to less than a thousand useable bits,' Joe told him, speaking quietly in his ear in the version of the lab where Mick lay on the immersion couch. 'That's a thousand bits total, until we lose all contact. It's enough for a message, enough for parting words.'
'Send this,' Mick said. 'Tell Andrea that I'm glad she was there. Tell her that I'm glad she was my wife. Tell her I'm sorry we didn't make it up that hill together.'
When Joe had sent the message, typing it in with his usual fluid speed, Mick felt the sense of Andrea's touch easing. Even the microscopic data-transfer burden of communicating unchanging pressure, hand on hand, body against body, was now too much for the link. It was like one swimmer letting a drowning partner go. As the last bits fell, he felt Andrea slip away for ever.
He lay on the couch, unmoving. He had lost his wife, for the second time. For the moment the weight of that realisation pinned him into stillness. He did not think he would ever be able to walk in his world, let alone the one he had just vacated.
And yet it was Saturday. Andrea's funeral was in two days. He would have to be ready for that.
'We're done,' Joe said respectfully. 'Link is now noise-swamped.'
'Did Andrea send anything back?' Mick asked. 'After I sent my last words--'
'No. I'm sorry.'
Mick caught the hesitation in Joe's answer. 'Nothing came through?'
'Nothing intelligible. I thought something was coming through, but it was just . . .' Joe offered an apologetic shrug. 'The set-up at their end must have gone noise-limited a few seconds before ours did. Happens, sometimes.'
'I know,' Mick said. 'But I still want to see what Andrea sent.'
Joe handed him a printout. Mick waited for his eyes to focus on the sheet. Beneath the lines of header information was a single line of text: SO0122215. Like a phone number or a postal code, except it was obviously neither.
'That's all?'
Joe sighed heavily. 'I'm sorry, mate. Maybe she was just trying to get something through . . . but the noise won. The fucking noise always wins.'
Mick looked at the numbers again. They began to talk to him. He thought he knew what they meant.
'Always fucking wins,' Joe repeated.
SUNDAY
Andrea was there when they brought Mick out of the medically induced coma. He came up through layers of disorientation and half-dream, adrift until something inside him clicked into place and he realised where he had been for the last week, what had been happening to the body over which he was now regaining gradual control. It was exactly as they had promised: no dreams, no anxiety, no tangible sense of elapsed time. In a way, it was not an entirely unattractive way to spend a week. Like being in the womb, he'd heard people say. And now he was being born again, a process that was not without its own discomforts. He tried moving an arm and when the limb did not obey him instantly, he began to panic. But Joe was already smiling.
'Easy, boyo. It's coming back. The software's rerouting things one spinal nerve at a time. Just hold on there and it'll be fine.'
Mick tried mumbling something in reply, but his jaw wasn't working properly either. Yet it would come, as Joe had promised. On any given day, thousands of recipients went through this exact procedure without blinking an eyelid. Many of them were people who'd already done it hundreds of times before. Nervelinking was almost insanely safe. Far safer than any form of physical travel, that was certain.
He tried moving his arm again. This time it obeyed without hesitation.
'How are you feeling?' Andrea asked.
Once more he tried speaking. His jaw was stiff, his tongue thick and uncooperative, but he managed to make some sounds. 'Okay. Felt better.'
'They say it's easier the second time. Much easier the third.'
'How long?'
'You went under on Sunday of last week. It's Sunday again now,' Joe said.
A full week. Exactly the way they'd planned it.
'I'm quite hungry,' Mick said.
'Everyone's always hungry when they come out of the coma,' Joe said. 'It's hard to get enough nourishment into the host body. We'll get you sorted out, though.'
Mick turned his head to look at Joe, waiting for his eyes to find grudging focus. 'Joe,' he said. 'Everything's all right, isn't it? No complications, nothing to worry about?'
'No problems at all,' Joe said.
'Then would you mind giving Andrea and me a moment alone?'
Joe held up his hand in hasty acknowledgement and left the room, off on some plausible errand. He shut the door quietly behind him.
'Well?' Mick asked. 'I'm guessing things must have gone okay, or they wouldn't have kept me under for so long.'
'Things went okay, yes,' Andrea said.
'Then you met the other Mick? He was here?'
Andrea nodded heavily. 'He was here. We spent time together.'
'What did you get up to?'
'All the usual stuff you or I would've done. Hit the town, walked in the parks, went into the hills, that kind of thing.'