tmp0 (29 page)

“It’s
the same,” Chal said. “Mostly, anyway.”

“Wonderful,”
he repeated.

“So,”
Chal said, a smile in her voice, “is this one of the skills you
pick up immediately?”

Alan turned his head
lazily.

“What do you
think?” he said. His eyes sparked with mischief although he
kept his mouth set in a solemn line.

She pressed a kiss
against his temple and let herself dream about the sorts of ideas
that might be wheeling around in his mind.

We never knew what
our lovers were thinking, but we always guessed. We told ourselves
that we knew what our loved ones
would think
. Whenever Chal
saw a particularly stupid TV show, she would often think about her
mom, and what her mom
would think
about the show, or what she
would say about the characters. Sometimes it felt as though her mom
was in the room, whispering her thoughts from the invisible place she
occupied in Chal’s mind and memory.

Chal had read in a
book somewhere that this was the only kind of immortality that
existed. If your mind was replicated inside of someone else’s,
you lived inside of them. She had never understood what it meant
until now. She felt as though Alan was a part of her, and she a part
of him.

“I love you,”
Alan said.

“I love you
too,” she whispered, and realized as she spoke the words that
she had never meant them so truly.

Chal’s eyes
mirrored his, and their breath drew from the same small space. But it
was not the space that separated them. No, this was the mistake Chal
had made before and would not make again. The air that hung between
them was life itself, another part of the universe that tied Alan and
Chal together. They were inseparable for that reason alone, Chal
thought. There was no difference between her and the rest of the
world, no outer boundary that enclosed her, her person,
Chal
,
whatever that was. Her consciousness.

Even now her skin
pressed against his in something more than a tender embrace. There
were pores and hairs that mingled, and molecules of water and air
flowing in and out of these membranes of skin. The oxygen that was
absorbed into her bloodstream, that was shunted to her brain. All
this nourishment, all these cells living and dying and being consumed
and transformed inside of her.

None of this was
her, though. There was no single neuron that encased her being, no
set of dendrites she could point to and say: “That. That’s
me.”
This, the hard problem of consciousness that had
bothered her since she knew enough to be bothered, was no longer a
real problem in her mind.

All of the academic
questions left unanswered, the unfinished research – none of it
bothered her anymore. Everything was happening exactly as it should,
and her curiosity shifted to the current moment, to her experience,
every nerve attuned to the world as it was.

She was part of him,
part of everything. It was not enough to know that every interaction
she had with the universe was bound up together, but now she felt it
as well. Alan was not a person – but neither was she. They were
both pinpricks of consciousness woven into the fabric of the
universe, that was all.

That was enough.

***

THE
END

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