Chris Adrian - The New World

For him, it was like getting to be a chaplain again. That was a habit of his old life, he knew, something he wasn’t supposed to be holding on to. In fact, he had been forgetting his favorite patients all week long, and he knew it wouldn’t be too long before he forgot he had ever been a chaplain at all. But talking with Sondra right now helped him with his own work. It helped him to call up his own memories, to get them ready to go into his book. Often he’d take whatever he’d just told Sondra to his office, and if she asked him the next day to continue the story about (for instance) his grandfather’s candy store, Jim would have no idea what she was talking about. But lately, Sondra was mostly interested in hearing about Jane.

He looked up at the ceiling and folded his hands on his belly. “Jane was always mistaking her emotions. You know, like a toddler who thinks he’s angry when he’s actually just terribly sleepy.”

“I never had one of those,” Sondra said. “A toddler, I mean.”

“Me neither,” Jim said. “But you know what I mean. She’d think she was anxious when she was actually angry. Or think she was angry when she ought to have been depressed. With most people it’s the other way around, you know. Show me a depressed person and I’ll show you someone who just needs to go punch somebody in the face.”

“I don’t think they have depressed people anymore, darling,” she said. “Except me. And maybe you. Are you depressed?”

“Just sad,” Jim said. “I think it’s just how the… process makes you feel. You know? The emptying out. That can feel like sadness, but it’s not sadness. It’s just…”

“Eternal desolation?” she said.

Jim almost grinned. But then he got a better hold on himself, and on his pastoral authority. “Anticipation,” he said. “Isn’t this what they would all want for us? To be happy and free?”

“ They don’t want anything anymore,” Sondra said. “They’re dead. All that’s left is memories. Maybe it would be easier if we could just betray them, but it’s too late for that, right?” She sighed expansively. “Sorry. I think maybe I just need to try something a little different, you know? Like maybe gardening should just be to make the salad. And for remembering and all that other stuff, for getting rid of it… something else.”

“Like what?” Jim asked.

“Macramé?” she said. “Lassoing? Who knows?” She stretched and yawned. “Anyway, all this personal-growth talk is exhausting. Let’s just cuddle some, huh?”

“Sure,” said Jim, opening up his arm so she could put her head on his shoulder. She nestled against him like a puppy, but just as Jim drifted off to sleep, she said, “I just keep thinking of Jason. You know, Frank’s partner. Once upon a time Frank lay right here and talked about him. And now Franklin’s gone. And you know what that means?”

No , Jim said innocently. What does it mean? But he wasn’t actually speaking. He tried hard to clamber up out of drowsiness, but when he woke it was late in the afternoon and he was alone in her room.

Sondra wasn’t at tea, or evening calisthenics, which he’d never known her to miss, but Jim didn’t start to wonder where she was until dinner. He sat quietly at the table drinking wine and trying to figure out how to introduce Jane into his book — what scene from their life could he finally start with? — but he was increasingly distracted by Sondra’s absence. At first he was just a little worried about her, but then he started to feel very strongly that she was not just missing but gone to her Debut. He said as much to Folly, who was sitting nearest to him.

“Then I congratulate her,” Folly said stiffly.

Or maybe you’re just jealous , Jim wanted to say. But instead he said, “Something wonderful has happened.” And Folly said, “Indeed.” So that refrain went around the table. But the Alices looked reserved, and his own Alice said that no one had ever left the house for the city in the evening before, and Sondra’s Alice only shrugged emphatically when Jim’s Alice whispered something to her. When they had all gathered in the great room after dinner, he saw his Alice and Sondra’s Alice slipping away and followed them. “But couldn’t she just have departed without you noticing?” he asked when he caught up with them.

Sondra’s Alice shrugged, and his Alice said it would be very unusual.

Then maybe, he said, she just had a headache. Or maybe she had gone to the city in a unique manner because she was a unique person And then he said maybe she was gardening at night, and that before they knew it she’d be doing something amazing like gardening on the walls or in the air. But he knew before they got to her room that when he had said something wonderful had happened he had just been too afraid to say that he really had meant something horrible , and he was already crying before they knocked open her door, and before they found her alone in her bed, and well before he saw how she’d used an old-fashioned straight razor (and what was one of those even doing in the future) to cut her own throat down to the bone.

There wasn’t actually a bomb, and Jane, if she made it all the way into the Polaris Dewar of Dewars, need not actually blow them all up, or sacrifice her own life to reclaim her husband’s dignity. It was just a little powder Hecuba called the Kiss. All Jane had to do was puff it into a piece of the cryonics technology, and the rest was all small molecules riding on microscopic winds of chaos, getting in where they didn’t belong, thawing heads and, if you believed in that sort of thing, setting captive spirits free. It was Medea666, a university chemist in her offline life, who made it.

Jane didn’t say anything to Brian about applying; she just filled out the preliminary forms, which were more a declaration of interest than anything, a few pages of ordinary questions about her background and health that reminded her of hospital credentialing paperwork. Only at the very end was there anything like an essay question: In 120 characters or fewer, please tell us why you deserve to live forever.

She might have written, Because I am terrified of death . But she wrote, Because no one deserves to die, which was what Hecuba had told her to write.

Now we wait, Hecuba said after Jane submitted her preliminary application. It can take up to six weeks to process, so don’t worry about rejection until then. We usually make it past this stage. It’s the next one that kills us. But that same day Brian sent her a text, just a beaming smiley with his eyes screwed tight with pleasure.

A small box arrived. Inside there was a shiny silver thumb drive, labeled with the blue Polaris pyramid. Are you sure this is safe? Jane asked Hecuba before she inserted the drive. What if it’s a trap? Or it spies on us?

They’re far too arrogant to ever doubt your interest. Do it.

She plugged the drive into her laptop and when the icon appeared — it was another Polaris pyramid — she opened it. Her computer asked her if she was quite sure she wanted to open the program, because it was from an unrecognized source, and Jane hesitated again, but clicked yes. Her screen went dark for a moment before it turned Polaris blue. Jane pushed a few buttons in a panic, trying to get her desktop back, but her computer only responded by turning on its fan and making a long trill of high clicks. She stabbed at the escape button, and then pulled the plug, but the computer had a nearly full battery and didn’t notice. An animation was starting in the distance of the flat blue field. Jane had just remembered to push the power button when a woman’s face suddenly rushed to the foreground.