Guy Haley - Omega point

"What now?" he asked. Otto already knew the answer, for it was popping off the Grid into his head. His unit had been among the first Ky-tech; Bergstrom's Syndrome had come later. As soon as the tech had been declared safe, he'd cajoled Honour until she'd agreed to undergo the augmentation. He'd told her of all the benefits, but the truth was he needed her to be closer to what he had become, so she could understand. How was he to know there would be a whole new disease to go with it?

"When it does become manifest, it is too late to provide anything other than palliative care," the surgeon said. "Had we caught it earlier, a complete removal of healthtech and the cerebral implant would have been recommended, but that is a complex and risky operation, far more so than the installation procedure, as it involves actual ganglionic separation of nerve from machine. If it is successful, the patient has to readjust to the life of the unenhanced, which provides a great shock and many inconveniences. If this is overcome, they suffer from many infirmities, and a greatly shortened lifespan. Most of them suffer profound mental problems." Her accent was soft but still apparent, and Otto wondered which part of Brazil she'd fled. "This is all academic. I am sorry, Mr Klein. It is too late. The best we can do is boost her tech from a base unit, prepare her for the end and make her comfortable. The hospital computer is running her mind now."

"There are other options." Otto looked at the consultant.

"Yes. There is one more option: neural patterning. It needn't be painful; we can gather much of her information from her mentaug."

"Copy her? A post-mortem simulation?"

"Together with her soul-capture data from the mentaug, a pattern taken directly from her mind now would be her entirely, to all intents and purposes. She would have her memories, right up to the moment we moved her across. We would cease life functions in your wife's original body at the same moment we brought the AI unit online, to avoid confrontation between the two. From there, she can operate a variety of sheaths, and interact with the world normally."

"Would it be her?"

Dinez shrugged. "I am not a philosopher. In effect, yes. In actuality? Some say no. This is new technology."

Newer than him. New technology every damn day. "What do we need to do?"

"First," said Dinez, "we need to ask her."

"No," she said. She was small, Honour, but she had the heart of a lion, one of the reasons Otto loved her. "Absolutely not. Don't make me into a machine."

Otto gripped his wife's hand "There is no other way. You'll just go to sleep and wake up in a new body and we can carry on like before."

Honour spoke levelly and with force, although her voice was weak. A unit by the bed boosted it, investing her objections with a quality of digital perfection; too smooth, fake, like a damned number. "Don't you see? You will lose me, it won't be me! It'll be a copy, not me, a facsimile, a Frankenstein."

"It is the only way."

"Don't you dare do it, Otto Klein, don't you dare! If you ever loved me like you say…"

"I still do, I always will." He meant it, he hoped she could see that.

"Then don't soil my memory by having me copied, like a, like a spreadsheet! I'll be dead, and you will be being unfaithful to me with something that is not me. It will only think that it is, something with my memories. Can't you see that that would be horrible? A sex toy, a monster."

"That's not true."

She looked deep into his eyes, her sclera reddened with clots. "Darling Otto, you know it is." She struggled up onto her elbows. Slowly, painfully, she leaned forward, moving the tubes aside like a curtain so she could hold him as best she could. "You don't have to be alone. Find someone new, but don't try to keep me. It is my time, don't you see?" She turned her head from him, painfully. She was getting weaker. "Ms Dinez, how long do I have?"

The consultant moved out of the shadows, where she had been keeping a discreet watch. "I am sorry, but it is not long. We had to amplify the healthtech input and reactivate your mentaug so your husband could talk to you. As the technology is the cause of your condition, your wakefulness is accelerating it. If we put you back under now, you could have another few months, but you will be rarely conscious, and the level of dementia would be such that you will have little idea of who you are."

"And if you let the machines run?"

"Then you have hours, a day at most. I am sorry."

"Don't be, we all have to die. Even you will, Otto, but not for a long time, not for the longest time. Promise me that, won't you, Otto?"

"Yes," he whispered. "I will try."

"I love you," she said. They held each other for a long while, then she pushed him away a little. "Ms Dinez."

"Yes?"

"Let the machines run."

It took, in the end, less time than Otto had expected, and that time galloped by. He told Honour over and over again how much he loved her, whereas she seemed intent on reliving all the things that had made them laugh together. It annoyed him that she did not share his sense of gravity, his anger rising, and that shamed him. He was always so angry. But that was her through and through, contrary to the last, and she scolded him fondly for his tendency to melodrama.

"You know that I love you, and I know that you love me. So why lie in each other's arms crying like babies? I want to remember our life. It has been a good life, a happy one. I would not change a moment of it."

So they did, the good and the bad. The long nights together, their travels. She confessed that she had never liked his mother, and he wasn't surprised. They talked, and they giggled, and they cried. And then the end came, so suddenly, a tremor, a cry from Honour: "I am frightened, Otto, don't let me go."

"Don't be frightened," he said, though he was more scared than he had ever been before, and he had seen things that would test the sanity of most.

"Don't let me go." Her real voice was nearly inaudible, the ghost of a voice, overwritten by the smooth boosting of the hospital machine.

"I won't." And he didn't. A harder shudder passed through her, as if she were about to have a fit. She became limp. Her chest continued to rise and fall, pushed in and out by the machines, but Otto had seen enough of death to know that she was gone. For an hour he held her, then gently he laid her down, smoothed her hair and stepped away.

"We have all of her post-augmentation data, all soul captured, together with impressions of her pre-mentaug organic memories," said Dinez to him, entering quietly through the door. "What shall we do with it?" She hesitated, examined his face, then went on carefully. "I, I am not inclined to lose life, Mr Klein, not when there is a way of preserving it. All lives… they are precious, every one. I have seen a lot of death." Her words hung on the air between them.

"The war?"

"The war."

A lifetime of memories. Every waking minute, every dream, recorded. And within, like a phantom, perhaps an echo of what Honour had been. He considered asking Dinez if she was really proposing that he break the law, and was tempted to say yes, upload her; only for a second, but that was long enough.

He exhaled a shuddery breath that tasted of tears. He tried to sound strong. He had never felt weaker, a weak child in a titan's body. "Archive it," he said.

Dinez raised an elegant eyebrow.

"I will keep the memories; her imprint. But I will not bring her back. It is not what she wanted."

"As you wish," said the surgeon.

Otto disengaged the mentaug, and realised with some embarrassment that his face was wet. The barman looked at him as if to ask if he were OK, but the returning glare Otto favoured him with changed his mind.

Otto downed his drink and left.