Join (23 page)

The workday is over, so Chance decides to go with his One, as well as his Five, to watch Apple from different angles. If Apple is hiding something, Chance wants to know. Chance, uneasy after their other visits to solo neighborhoods, considers bringing Four, as the drive best equipped to handle herself in trouble, but decides the two male drives should be enough. Leap Four goes with them.

The same bartender watches them as they enter. Three of the patrons who were in the bar when they first visited are still rooted to the same locations. Three new people are gathered around the pool table. Two patrons have one of the booths, and Apple Two is sitting in the other, a beer and four full shots of whiskey on the table in front of him.

Apple doesn't greet them as Leap Four and Chance Five sit across from him. Chance One gently touches his shoulder to alert him to the need to make room on his side of the booth. Apple Two says softly, nervously, “This has all gone to shit.” Apple's face is reddened. His eyes are bloodshot. His breath is heavy and sour. He's clearly been here for a while.

“What?” asks Chance. “What's happening?”

Apple glances up at Chance One. “You don't have to read through me. I'm not going to lie to you,” he says. “Just the opposite. You didn't have to bring two.”

“What's happening?” Chance One says again.

Apple downs one shot, then shifts over to make room for Chance One. Apple pulls the other three shots and his beer down the table, one hand protectively cupping the beer mug. “They're gonna find me,” he says morosely.

“Who is?” asks Chance.

“The Directorate. You don't know the half of it.”

Chance is watching him closely with both of his drives. He quickly realizes that there's no reason to. It's not just the drive, Apple Two, who is drunk. Apple is drunk.

Chance remembers Apple Two saying that he could drink without getting drunk. He seems to be proving himself wrong about that, and he's obviously not thinking clearly. A pall of misery hovers around the drive. He's not able to take his eyes off the drinks in front of him.

“I thought you would enjoy it,” Apple says. “I've been doing it for years. People who come and talk with me, they want it.”

“What are you talking about?” Chance says, annoyed at what sounds like rambling.

Apple scoffs at the three of them, then looks back at his drink. “I thought it would just be a temporary problem. But they're cleaning me up. Reason isn't talking to me anymore. He's blocked the encrypted line.”

Apple eyes one of his shots. He picks it up and tosses it back, turns the glass upside down and sets it on the table. He smiles sadly at Leap and Chance.

“Chance,” Leap says calmly, “it's him. This is Rope.”

The drive they'd thought was Apple says, “Yeah, it's me. Still giving your life meaning.”

Chance's sight blurs. It's as though he sat down next to a scorpion. Both of Chance's drives flinch away from the drunk in the booth. Rope regards Chance One, who is closest to him.

“This one's okay,” he says. “The data modeler. And that's the sick one, isn't it? The one with cancer, that's gonna die?”

“Yes,” says Leap.

Rope's face has gotten redder; his eyes more bloodshot. He nods toward Leap Four. “And you've flipped,” he says.

“Yes,” she replies.

“Ahhh, this is all such a joke,” Rope says, shaking his head at the drinks on the table. “It just makes no difference at all.”

He turns to Leap. “I am Rope. I am Apple. Apple is a fiction. You guessed it. You're a smart cookie. Apple doesn't exist, except as a hiding place for two of my drives. My emergency escape route, if you will. But in fact, this”—he motions at his body—“is my eight-hundred-twenty-eighth drive. I think. I've probably lost count.” He motions vaguely with one hand. “Things . . . shift.”

Leap is stunned. “Eight hundred . . . How?”

“Just by doing it. By joining. Though that makes it sound easy, and it's been a lot of work. I've joined with a lot of small joins, threes, fives, sevens, you know. That's helped.”

Chance finally regains his voice. Bile is burning in the throat of his One as he says, “Why did you kill my drive?”

Rope looks slightly sideways at Chance One, as if he's been reminded of something annoying. “You got over it,” he says. “I knew you would. Back in the bar I warned you, but then you came over to talk to me. I know what kind of person you are. If things had gone according to plan, this would be a very different kind of conversation.”

Leap says, “I don't believe it. What about the risk of running more than twenty drives?”

“Yes,” Rope says. “I've only ever run more than twenty drives for a very brief time. I always keep the number of drives down.”

Leap's eyes are wide. She says slowly, “Then, you've killed—”

“Yes, I have. No one else would.”

As Chance and Leap sit, stunned into silence, Rope adds, “And we had to know what it means.”

Chance One says, “I don't understand.”

Rope looks at Chance Five, who is watching him in horror. “Would either of you like a drink? No? Well.”

He hoists his beer, nods at Chance One and at Leap Four, then drains the glass. It takes him several gulps to do it. When he's done, Rope studies the empty mug. He sets it down carefully and pushes it toward the end of the table. He wipes his lower lip with the back of his hand, takes a deep breath, and widens his eyes briefly. “Now we'll see how long I can do without another.”

Leap says, “You're looking for the vanishing point?”

Rope laughs, lifts an empty shot glass off the table, and watches it as he turns it in a circle. “The vanishing point. Stupid. That was my original goal. I was working to answer the question, at what point is joining just the same as dying? The answer? I don't know. I think I've passed the vanishing point. I think that these days, when I join, the part of me that comes from the new join essentially disappears, but I just don't really fucking know. I mean, I think I'm still here, all of my selves. But I don't know. If I were to join with you, I don't think it would change me much. You would just become me, though you would still think you were you. That's what I think, but it's hard for me to know. I'm inside the picture so I can't”—he sets down the shot and then moves both his hands in circles as if against an invisible wall—“see the whole picture.”

He turns back to Chance Five. “What I told you before is true, but it leaves a little out. Way back when, I was two of the original team, a psychologist and the only philosopher. We, the two of us, never believed in the immortality that everyone else was squawking about. We're all gonna live forever, blah, blah, blah. I mean, people have always imagined immortality, but the world, the real world, never worked that way. So, physically, something like it is clearly possible, as long as the Earth survives. But we didn't think a personality could persist through endless joins.” He smiles. “Personality. Who cares? No one really bothered to disagree with us. They just didn't think it was an interesting question.”

Chance Five says, “Perspective coheres through time.”

Rope turns a look of utter disdain on him. “So what? What does that mean? Your perspective coheres through time. Softheaded commercial-marketing crap. So you remember yesterday, and the day before. And then you're part of me, and you experience today. And to you, it seems like it's all the same, except now you remember eight hundred childhoods, and you like things you didn't like and dislike things you used to like. And to you it all just feels like you've grown, you're different. And then you see all of the days as they arrive out of the future and you remember each one as it passes, each one”—he snorts out a sudden laugh—“to the last syllable of recorded time. But who are you? The things that you did, the things you believed, the people you loved? You”—and Rope leans over the table to drunkenly poke Chance Five in the chest—“are one tiny perspective among my more than eight hundred. That ‘perspective coheres' crap just means you don't notice that you're already dead.”

“That's been said,” Chance One says coldly, “mostly by solos, who haven't experienced join and don't know what they're talking about.”

“But that's where I'm different, isn't it? Aren't I different?” Rope takes a moment to carefully steady himself. He says, “I'm going to be serious now.” He downs the third of his shots. His face becomes still. In a moment he appears temperate, tranquil.

“You see,” he continues, “I am, literally, over eight hundred dead people. And I know they're all dead. Despite the fact that none of them experienced death, I know it beyond a shadow of doubt. Despite the fact that each of them is me, and I am alive. Despite their experience of living through me.”

“I don't know what you are,” says Chance Five. “There are no real records of who you are on the network. We could just be speaking to a three, or to a developing meme virus.”

“Of course,” Rope agrees. “You could be. But you know you're not, don't you. I know more about life than any living thing before me ever has known.” Rope puts a finger to his temple and presses, hard. His voice has risen, and he spits as he speaks. “I remember living over eight hundred lives. I know everything worth knowing. And that makes me, what?”—with a flourish that the table prevents from becoming a drunken bow or a forward tumble—“A gateway to the underworld.”

“Why?” Chance Five says. “Why are you doing it?”

At the question, Rope stretches his neck and makes a visible effort to relax again. “I might be insane. I might be. I started just trying to find the vanishing point. For every one of who I am, the vanishing point was an important question. I watched what people did online and found people who had the same questions, the same needs, as I have. I would join, then kill drives, then join. Everyone I join with knows what I'm doing and agrees to do it. The network requires agreement. And we join, and I kill a drive. And so we become an experiment.”

“I don't see how you ran an experiment at all,” Chance Five says. “Your perspective should shift with each join. You add the new life experiences, you add the new ideas. How could you maintain a plan through hundreds of joins? This just isn't believable. You either used a fixative, or you've got some kind of virus.”

“Either way,” Leap says, “you're not whatever it is you say you are. You're something else. You're a bogeyman, someone who just enjoys killing bodies.”

As Leap says this, it suddenly strikes Chance as unlikely that Rope would have come to meet them with only a single drive. He quickly gets Chance One out of the booth and looks around the bar. But none of the other patrons is paying attention to them.

The bartender has seen him jump up and is clearly annoyed. Chance ignores the unspoken question of whether they want a round.

Rope, watching Chance One, says, “Don't worry, I really only have this drive left. And one more that's down. You know her. The waitress. I'm borrowing cycles from her. So this is it. This is all I have. If I
had
other drives, you'd be in trouble. I've killed a few others, like yours. I might be starting to like it. But the Directorate took my supplies, my things.” Rope's eyes widen with a parody of scary intensity that actually is scary. “They found me in my
lab-o-ra-tory
,” he says. “They're not interested in my experiment anymore.”

“Why now?” asks Chance Five. “Why not before?”

“They don't tell me. Changes to the network? I don't know.”

He drinks the fourth shot, then turns to Leap. “As to what you said before, I don't have a virus. I'm not using a fixative. I autopsy drives, or did. No prions. I'm careful because the work is important, the search for a join's natural life span. If a join lives thousands of years, tens of thousands, it's the sum of many, many people. As I am. I'm a simulation, as close as science can come to immortality, but without the wait. And I found the vanishing point, or maybe it found me. But I don't know where it is, or what it means.”

“You're saying that you're what we're heading for?” Leap asks.

“Yes. That is what I'm saying.” He glances at Chance Five and Chance One, then looks back at his empty shot glasses and continues, “At first, ferals joined me because they understood. They believe join is murder. Wanted to prove it. For a while, they were enough. But everyone I am shares one particular thing. A two-sided coin, hope on one side, hate on the other. Hope for a better world. Hatred for this one. That is what I am now. It's all that's left. So I have become a drunk.”

Leap asks, “How did killing Chance's drive help the experiment?”

Rope is becoming even more bleary eyed. He speaks slowly and carefully. “Look, nothing personal. I killed you because you wanted me to. And because it's what I do. Maybe. Or no, I killed you because killing is . . . killing is a funny thing. It has meaning. It's real change.”

Chance Five shouts, “Killing my drive didn't change anything!”

“Well, it changed my legal standing, for one thing. You'd think we'd have sorted that out by now.”

The last few words are nearly inaudible, spoken through a yawn. Rope looks very tired, and his head is slumping toward the table. Leap Four rises quickly off the bench, leans across the table, puts a hand on both of Rope's shoulders, and pushes him savagely up against the back of the booth.

“You know I've flipped,” she says. “Can anything be done?”

“Hey, hey!” shouts the bartender.

Rope regards Leap, blinks, but it's clear that he's still fading. Leap slaps him, hard, snapping his head to the right.

“What do you know?” she demands. Rope doesn't respond. Leap grabs the back of his head, gripping what she can of his hair, and shakes him.