Join (20 page)

“You need to find Rope,” Leap says at last.

Chance has been trying not to think about her own situation, focusing instead on what's happening with Leap. Chance's drives have woken in a cold sweat five or six times in the last week, and Chance has been fantasizing about bringing all the drives to the Olympic Archipelago to hide out in Leap's house, behind Leap's surveillance. She's surprised to hear Leap ask about the nightmare they would be living in if they weren't living in Leap's nightmare.

Chance says, “I think we should leave that to the Directorate.”

“Maybe. But you said yourself that he has a way to elude them.”

“After everything that's been happening,” Chance says, “I don't think we should go looking for more trouble. I just scattered the ashes of my Three. We did the ritual for you. I want to get back to normal life.”

“Chance, I know you don't believe this. But just hear me out. Please. The network—the quantum network—has properties, usable, important properties that Vitalcorp doesn't make public.”

“No, not that again, Leap. Not here. Not now.”

“Please, Chance. Consider it.”

Chance closes her eyes. She sees a faint red afterimage of the bright sky above.

“Chance, I'm going to die.”

They pass several minutes in silence.

“I know you've met a couple of the first five hundred,” Leap says. “You've read papers by them, about them. Did any of that prepare you for Rope? You said Rope is one of them and that he knew Music. Rope is different. What if he knows something that could help me?”

They're approaching the steep, wooded shore of a small island. In a neat clearing, set back a hundred yards from the water, are the blue-and-slate-gray angles of Leap's home.

“It's a fantasy,” Chance says. “Rope is a sick fuck who's incredibly dangerous. He doesn't know anything that can help you. There is no way to treat what you have. Finding Rope will just get me killed along with you.”

Chance can hear that last sentence tailing away in the still air of the pod, along with its implications:
You're going to die. I am not going to die. I won't help you.

Directorate staff eventually get in
touch again through the office where Chance One works. They want Chance to come in and answer some questions, but they don't seem to be in a hurry. A join named Interest, who identifies himself as Chance's contact at the Directorate, collects a statement by video. After that, he becomes very difficult to reach. He sends Chance a list of requests that need immediate attention but lets several days go by without answering clarifying questions. When Interest finally does respond to Chance, he says the investigation is proceeding, but there are legal issues. Chance asks what they are, and Interest says he can't go into them.

Frustrated, Chance demands to know what's being done about Rope. Interest sympathizes, but he can't offer anything further at this time. Chance insists—Chance's drive was killed, and the Directorate doesn't seem to be taking the situation seriously. Interest understands that Chance is concerned and will see what he can do.

Chance wants to follow the news, which makes the self-imposed, protective isolation from the net difficult to maintain. Several people—colleagues and friends—have made an effort to reach out. Chance finally augments the auditing of personal activity, creating a more complete record of all online contacts in case Rope makes an appearance. Then Chance One logs in to Civ Net and gives up trying to hide. Maybe Leap is right and Rope is busy trying to survive.

Chance connects with people who worked on research projects with Chance Three, hoping one of them can help get information from the Directorate. They listen. A few try to help, but nothing comes of it.

Days later, Interest finally suggests a date for a follow-on interview. It's in three more weeks. The Directorate doesn't think it needs additional information until almost a month and a half after the killing.

Leap Four and Leap Two
are running over a woodland trail, a six-mile loop. The air is crisp, with a very mild savor of coastal spray. The Doug firs are widely spaced, the underbrush thinner than in the ungroomed native rain forest. An occasional sunlamp hovers above, brightening a limpid, mellow gloom.

Leap loves running through the forest, and today it's better than on any other day Leap can remember. Her bodies' arms are pumping, right arms forward together and left arms forward together. With Leap Four, who is a bit shorter, but healthy and young, Leap stretches her stride. With Leap Two, whose extraordinary proprioception makes her balance effortless, Leap runs at a relaxed pace. Their feet touch the uneven duff at the same moment and lift away together.

Leap fills her lungs, her two drives breathing deeply in near synchrony, and fills her awareness with details—the smell of moss, the seemingly crafted perfection of slices of sunlight falling between the shoulders of the forest giants, the pleasurable impact of landing without worrying about her footing, the freedom from pain as the joints of her two bodies flex and strain. Her physical confidence.

Since joining with Josette, Leap's appreciation of sensual experience has intensified. And the loss of Josette's body, devastating initially, has also been an unbelievable gift. Leap sometimes becomes aware of reveling in simple physical tasks like lifting a basket of clothes or running down a staircase, mundane moments filled with something close to a sense of flying.

But the join has given many of Leap's intimate memories an almost frightening quality. Memories as simple as Josette enjoying the touch of her own hand on her waist can waver with a queasy uncertainty, or Ian intently searching his damp teenage face in the mirror for blackheads.

And surrounding everything is a creeping fatigue, a pain whose borders advance day by day, so that even as the movement of drives takes on a shine of fresh interest and wonder, Leap aches with the trickling return of decay.

The airliner's cabin is quiet,
the passengers either sleeping or immersed in stories, their fingers, wrists, and mouths twitching to control the interfaces on private systems. Leap Four is finding sleep elusive under a thin wool airline blanket. She shifts position and then is still again, her mouth slightly open. Leap has continued to dye her hair red, even now, when it's stubbly and only beginning to recover from being shaved for the Ritual of Retirement.

With her blond hair tied in a low ponytail, Chance Two's eyebrows arch as she elaborates energetically on techniques for cycle management that might help Leap with the effects of the flip. Leap One, on the other side of Chance from Leap Four, leans forward, listening carefully, occasionally pulling on his beard.

The practice and central tenets of cycle management were an early attempt to address unforeseen consequences of Join. Initial marketing described Join as an evolutionary step that would help the human race meet intractable challenges, like global warming and interstellar travel. The mind would no longer be limited by a resource design evolved to protect a grasslands animal. But as millions paid licensing fees and created the new race of enhanced beings, it became evident that when left to their own devices joins were happy and unambitious, given to noodling. Art and science blossomed, but in curiously unfocused ways. In the first few years, it seemed that every join was a conceptual artist working on an intimate scale. Many became collectors of whatever type of oddment struck their fancy.

The world thickened with a baroque density of minutely elaborated objects, mathematics and theoretical physics made great strides, but progress on large engineering projects actually slowed. This was bad for Earth's living creatures. Global water levels continued to rise, and the weather convulsed. To keep the developed world on its feet, to keep productivity from cratering when so much of civilization's attention was focused on the confusing opportunities of the new technology, environmental regulations were actually eased.

Joins also helped puzzle out new nanomaterials and a variety of printing processes designed to assemble everything from lattices formed of individual molecules to towering, purpose-built habitats. Heretofore undreamed of miracles were mass-produced and widely released, but a small percentage of those miracles were profoundly toxic. There were three worldwide plagues. New revelations in genetic science bent links in the food chain. The consequences of so much change multiplied, and the world began to witness massive die-offs. In coastal cities, millions of bodies drowned as hurricanes and tsunamis delivered the news of increasing change. Growing swaths of the planet became hostile to life.

Joins made two critical adjustments. First, they realized that they weren't prioritizing their activities well. They could think more clearly than most solos but weren't being good about managing their fascinations. They needed to improve their judgment.

Cycle management, as practiced by joins, is the science and discipline of remaining present. The nearest analog for solos might be stress management. Every drive has cognitive potential beyond what it needs for moment-to-moment operation. When a join is stressed, it can find a drive that isn't at capacity and “borrow cycles.” Additional cycles clarify the join's awareness. A clearer awareness means a greater reserve of willpower with which to make and take considered choices. Some degree of cycle management happens naturally, but joins realized that they needed to improve it and developed a formal practice.

Chance has always been good at it. Both Chance Two and Three studied it before they joined.

The second adjustment was more difficult. As stories of drives dying from gross negligence began to pile up, a joke circulated. How do you know if two bodies are joined? Put one in mortal danger. If the other tries to save him, they're not joined.

The second adjustment was born from the realization that, on average, solos simply cared more about survival. Given a long-range plan to clean up the environment, solos would work harder to figure out how to implement it. For the time being at least, until the legacy problems of human evolution could be addressed, a portion of the population would remain solo, to actually do things the joins thought of. Of course, because solos are naturally xenophobic, many of them resented being directed by joins. Tension developed.