More Than This (35 page)

Owen Richard Wearing.

Taken from this world, aged 4.

His Voice was Musick and his Words a Song

Which now each List’ning Angel smiling hears

Seth has brought them to a cemetery.

To a tombstone.

To the place where his brother lies buried.

It was how silent his parents were at the table across from Officer Rashadi that upset him the most. They weren’t crying or yelling or visibly distressed in any way. His father sat glassy eyed, staring unfocused at a spot somewhere over Officer Rashadi’s shoulder. His mother, head hung low, unkempt hair hiding her face, made no sound, gave no signal she knew anyone else was there.

“This will be no solace,” Officer Rashadi said, her voice low, calm, respectful, “but we have very strong reason to believe that Owen didn’t suffer. That it happened soon after the abduction and was done very quickly.” She reached forward across the table as if to take one of their hands. Neither his mother nor his father responded. “He didn’t suffer,” she said again.

His mother’s voice, raspy, quiet, said something.

“What was that?” Officer Rashadi asked.

His mother cleared her throat and looked up slightly. “I said, you’re right. It’s no solace.”

Seth was sitting on the bottom step in the hallway. Neither Officer Rashadi nor the other officer who’d come in saying that Valentine had been found was watching out for him after they’d sent him from the room. He’d snuck back down and listened.

“We’ll take you to see him,” Officer Rashadi said. “We’re just waiting for the all clear, and then we can go.”

His parents still said nothing.

“I’m so, so sorry for your loss,” Officer Rashadi said. “But we’ve caught Valentine, and he’ll pay for what he’s done, I can promise you that.”

“You’ll put him back in jail?” his mother said. “So he can read his books and do his gardening and walk right out again whenever he feels like it? Is that your idea of him paying for what he’s done?”

“There are other ways, Mrs. Wearing,” Officer Rashadi said. “All prisoners are now automatically placed into –”

“Shut up,” his mother said. “Just please, shut up. How will anything ever matter again?” She turned to his father, still glassy eyed, as if barely there. “I was going to leave you.”

His father didn’t seem to have heard her.

“Are you listening to me?” his mother said. “I was going to leave you that day. I’d stashed money away. That’s what I went back to get that morning. I’d managed to leave it on the counter of that stupid bank.” She turned to Officer Rashadi. “I was going to leave him.”

Officer Rashadi looked back and forth between them, but his father wasn’t reacting and his mother remained in a kind of terrifyingly still anger, like a leopard waiting to pounce.

“I’m sure that’s something that can be worked out later,” Officer Rashadi said. She paused, then her voice changed slightly. “Or maybe it’s something you don’t have to work out at all.”

The other officer piped up at that and said what must have been Officer Rashadi’s first name. “Asma –”

“I’m just saying there may be a way,” she said. “A way so that none of this ever happened.”

For the first time, she had the attention of both his mother and father.

“The world was changing,” Seth says quietly, his eyes still on the tombstone. “Had changed. Become almost unlivable.”

“Well, that much is obvious,” Regine says. “Just look at this place.”

Seth nods. “For a long time, people had been living two lives. And at first, I think, it
was
two. You could do both. Go back and forth. Between the online world and this one. And then people started
staying
online and that seemed less weird than it was even a year before. Because the world was getting more and more broken.” He looks back at Regine and Tomasz. The sun is shining behind them, and they’re almost in silhouette. “At least it’s what I think happened.”

Regine hears the question. “I don’t remember anything from before,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s how we made it, I think,” Seth says. “So we’d forget there was ever anything else. Your own memories rewritten to make it all work, and then your life was there in front of you. Online. The real one, as far as you ever knew.”

Seth turns back to the tombstone. He runs his fingers across the carved letters of Owen’s name.

“He died,” Seth says simply. “The man who took him murdered him. He never came home.”

Seth can sense grief stirring in his stomach, his chest, but the weight of new and old knowledge is still too heavy to deal with, and all he feels at the moment is numb.

“Oh, Mr. Seth,” Tomasz says. “I am so sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Regine says. “But I don’t understand. How can this be your brother? You said he was –”

“Still alive,” Seth says. “I grew up with him. I sat through his clarinet lessons. Tomasz reminds me of him so much I can hardly look at him sometimes.”

“But . . .” He can hear Regine trying to keep the impatience out of her voice. “But he’s
here.
He died. In the real world.”

“If this
is
real,” Tomasz says.

“We’re going to have to say it is
sometime,
” Regine snaps. “I know I’m real, and that’s all I’ve got to go on. You’ve got to hang on to something.” And then she says it again. “You’ve got to hang on to something.”

“So how can this have happened?” Tomasz says.

Seth doesn’t turn away from the tombstone. “My parents,” he says, “were given a choice.”

“You’ve heard about Lethe?” the woman from the Council asked them over the same dinner table where Officer Rashadi had broken the news just three nights before.

Seth’s mother frowned. “The place in Scotland?”

“No, that’s Leith,” his father said, his words slurred. He nodded at the woman from the Council. “You mean Lethe.” He pronounced it Lee-Thee. “The river of forgetfulness in Hades. So the dead don’t remember their former lives and spend eternity mourning them.”

The woman from the Council didn’t look too happy to have been corrected, but Seth saw her choose to ignore this. “Indeed. It’s also the name of the process people have started to undertake when they enter the Link.”

“Enter and don’t come out again,” his mother said, her voice even, her eyes on the table in front of her.

“Yes,” said the woman from the Council.

“They just give up their lives,” his mother said, but it was a question, too.

“Not give them up. Exchange them. For a chance to make something out of themselves and their futures in a world that hasn’t been so damaged.” The woman’s posture changed to a less formal one, one that seemed to suggest she was going to share something secret with them, off the record. “You’ve seen how things are. How they’re going. And it’s only getting worse and faster. The economy. The environment. The wars. The epidemics. Is there really any question about why people are wanting to start over? In a place where at least they’ve got a fair shot?”

“People say it’s as bad as this world –”

“Not even close. You can’t stop a human from acting like a human, of course, but compared to what we have now, it’s paradise. A paradise of second chances.”

“You never get old and you never die,” his father said, sounding as if he was quoting something.

“Actually, no,” the woman from the Council said. “We can’t perform those kinds of miracles. Yet. The human mind can’t quite take it. But everything else is fully automated. You’ll be under permanent guard. You’ll get medical treatment when you need it. Your bodies will remain physically viable, including keeping your muscles toned, and we’ve just developed a hormone to keep your hair and nails from growing. We’re even on the threshold of actual reproduction and childbirth. This really is our best hope for the future.”

“What’s in it for you?” his mother asked. “Who gains?”

“We all do,” the woman from the Council said immediately. “It takes power, sure, but far less than humans walking around do. We shut off everything except the connection to the chambers, and we take what we’ve got left and put it to proper use. At the very least, we sleep our way through disaster and come out the other side.” She leaned forward. “I’ll be honest with you. There’ll come a day, and soon, when you may not have a choice, when even
I
don’t have a choice. Best to do it now, on your own terms.”

His mother looked at her carefully. “And you’re saying we’ll have Owen back?”

The woman got a funny little smile on her face. It was meant to be kind, understanding, but even Seth, sitting unobserved at the far corner of the table, could see that it was also a smile of triumph. The woman from the Council had won, and Seth hadn’t even known they were fighting.

“The simulation programming is a prototype,” the woman said. “I want to stress that.”

“‘Yet’,” his father said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said ‘yet’ earlier about miracles. This is the ‘yet’, isn’t it?”

“If you like,” the woman said, in a way that made it clear she
didn’t
like it. “But I can tell you two things. One, Lethe will make sure you never, ever know the difference, and two, the results we’ve had so far in initial testing have been beyond the participants’ wildest dreams.”

“And we’ll just . . . forget this all ever happened?” his mother said.

The woman from the Council’s mouth went tight. “Not quite.”

“Not quite?” his mother said, suddenly harsh. “I don’t want to remember anything. What the hell do you mean, not quite?”

“Lethe is a subtle process, one with amazing properties. But it has to work with what’s already in you. It can’t erase memories as big and important as what’s just happened –”

“Then what’s the goddamn point of it?”

“ – but what it can do is give you an alternative outcome.”

There was a silence. “What do you mean?” his father finally asked.

“Any detail I would give you here would be speculation until we got your nodes implanted and did a full actualization, but I suspect that you would probably remember the abduction of your son –”

His mother made a scoffing sound.

“ – but that it would have a much happier ending. He would be found, alive, possibly injured, possibly in need of recovery and rehabilitation – this would be what Lethe would have you believe as you adjusted to the new Owen – but he would no longer be dead. He would be created from your memories of him, and he would grow and develop and respond to you, just as your son would have. For all intents and purposes, he’d be alive again. So much so, you’d never know the difference.”

His mother started to speak but needed to clear her throat. “Would I be able to touch him?” she asked, her voice rough. “Would I be able to smell him?” She covered her mouth with her hand, unable to go on.

“Yes. You would. The Link isn’t just a variation of the world. It
is
the world, put into a safe place. Your jobs would be the same, your house would be the same, your family, your friends – the ones who have already entered it anyway, and again, that’s going to be everyone very soon. It feels and looks completely real because it
is
completely real.”

“How would we interact with people who aren’t in it, though?” his father asked. His mother scoffed again, as if this was the stupidest question she’d ever heard.

The woman from the Council didn’t blink. “The same way you interact with people who are in it now. That’s one of the cleverest things about it. We’ve flipped it. When you’re there, it’s
this
world that seems online, and that’s how you interact with it. You send the same e-mails and messages. And if someone in the real world tries to tell you that you’re online, well, Lethe makes you forget again and again.”

Her voice turned more serious. “But, and I mean this, we really are nearing a tipping point. Pretty soon these questions won’t matter, because there won’t be a world here to interact with. We’ll all be there, living out happier lives, in a world that isn’t already used up.”

“I don’t want to live here,” his mother said. “In this town, I mean. In this stupid country. Can you arrange that?”

“Well, again, we can’t just plant you in a whole new life, there’d be no memories to work from, but moving around there is the same as moving around here. If you want to leave, then you can leave.”

“I want to leave.” His mother looked around the sitting room again. “I
will
leave.”

“The practicalities are simple,” the woman from the Council said. “We get the nodes implanted, get your memories actualized, and then we place you in the sleeping chambers. We’re reaching capacity in our current facility, but we’re expanding all the time. If we need to, we can easily install one here in your own home and move you when space becomes available.”