More Than This (44 page)

“He was offering you friendship,” Regine says.

Seth nods. “He was lonely. He missed me, missed his friends, and telling me about Monica was probably, for H, the biggest act of friendship he could have done.” Seth has to clear his throat again. “I wanted so badly for there to be more. I
ached
for there to be more than my crappy little life.” He shakes his head. “And there
was
more. I just couldn’t see it.”

Regine sits back. “And that’s why you’ve got more to tell us, isn’t it?

Seth doesn’t respond.

“Tell us what?” Tomasz says. No one still answers. “Tell us
what
?”

Regine never stops looking at Seth. “That’s why he’s about to tell us he’s going back.”

“He is WHAT?” Tomasz says, standing up.

Regine just keeps a challenging gaze on Seth.

“Is she right?” Tomasz demands. “Tell me she is not right.”

“Yeah, Seth,” Regine says, “tell Tommy I am not right.”

Seth sighs. “She’s right, but –”

“NO!” Tomasz shouts. “You want to go back? You want to
leave
us? Why?”

“I don’t want to leave you,” Seth says, firmly. “That’s kind of the whole point –”

“You want to go back, though!” Tomasz’s face crumples. “You always have. Since you arrived. One way or another, you have always wanted to leave us.” He makes a frown so sad, Seth can hardly bear to look at it. “I do not want you to leave us.”

“Tomasz,” Seth says, “when Regine went back, she
remembered.
She remembered who she was and how she got there.” He turns to Regine. “Didn’t you?”

She looks uncomfortable. “Vaguely, though. Not enough to change anything. Not enough to not make anything happen.”

“Are you sure?”

She opens her mouth to answer, but then stops. “I never even thought about that. I just knew what had to happen and that I had to do it.”

“I think you had
some
Lethe,” Seth says. “It was starting to work but hadn’t got very far. But if you were to go back there with no Lethe at all –”

“It is too late,” Tomasz says. “You are already dead there.”

“What’s dead there, though? There was a malfunction. A
simulation
of me died. A simulation that knew a whole lot less than I do now.”

Tomasz is shaking his head. “I do not see how it can work. How you will not just go back and die there and then die here and be lost to us.”

“I’m not sure, either,” Seth says, “but doesn’t it feel like it
might
work? Regine went back and remembered who she was. And then, Tomasz, we got her out again.”

Tomasz starts to argue, but then his eyebrows raise, in surprise and a little delight. “You mean, you would come back?”

Seth looks at him, then looks at Regine, who’s still staring at him, hostile, he can see, but maybe hopeful, too.

“Absolutely, I’d come back,” he says.

Tomasz licks his lips, and Seth can almost
see
him thinking. “But how would you do it, though?”

“Well,” Seth says, starting up the display on Regine’s coffin, “I’ve been thinking about it. This one’s broken. Regine must have damaged it when she came out of it.”

“I thought I was fighting someone,” Regine says. “Lots of kicking and pushing.”

“Yes,” Tomasz says, “that sounds like you.”

“But I’ve been reading this,” Seth says, tapping the display. “Half of it doesn’t make sense, but it looks like putting someone back in there isn’t actually all that difficult.” He presses a box, and the coffin creaks open, not smoothly like the ones in the prison did. Regine and Tomasz come round to look. Seth picks up a particular tube. “This is Lethe, I think.”

“You
think
?” Regine says.

“You had it in your mouth. I think you breathe it in. And when I interrupted the process, you didn’t get the full amount. You got just enough to make you aware without being able to fight it.”

“But if you went back without breathing in the tube . . .” Tomasz says.

“Maybe you’d remember everything. Maybe you’d remember who you were and where you were and maybe,
maybe,
you’d be able to do what you used to do when the online world first started. Go in and out as you pleased.”

But Regine is already shaking her head. “There’s no way you can be sure that’d happen. You’d probably just go back and die over and over again like I did, and even if you didn’t, how do you know you wouldn’t get stuck? I don’t remember any doors marked
EXIT
.”

“I’d have the two of you here,” Seth says.

“We could pull you out if anything went wrong,” Tomasz says.

“You don’t know that we could,” Regine says. “Not if you were all the way in. We had to
die
to get here.”

“I got
you
back. And people used to go back and forth all the time. We could try really brief trips to start –”

“If you could even get it to work. And why? Why go back at all? It’s not real.”

Seth takes a deep breath. This is the big question. He wonders if he’s as sure as he thinks he is. “Because I know more now,” he says. “It felt like the world had closed down to nothing, but that wasn’t true, was it? I mean, it’s not perfect, but I was wrong about how hopeless it was. By accident, we all got a second chance. I want to take it.”

“And you want to see your Good Man again,” Tomasz says.

“Yes. I can’t lie. My body is here, but he’s across an ocean and a continent, so if I want to see him again, I have to go back. And I want to find him somehow. Tell him I understand. Find H, too. Even Monica.”

“But you’re dead there,” Regine insists. “You died last week or whenever it was. I’ve been dead there for months –”

“But it’s also
winter
where I live there. It sure as hell isn’t winter here. Like I said, maybe time doesn’t work the same way. You went back
before
your death. And if you could go back knowing enough to change things –”

“Then all of those people who went to your funeral are just going to go,
Whoops, our mistake
?”

“They changed the memories of everyone who knew my brother to make it seem like he hadn’t died. Don’t you think it could be re-adjusted even easier for a real live person? I mean, there’s got to be glitches all the time, people remembering stuff they shouldn’t –”

“Could we go back to any time?” Tomasz interrupts. “I could go back before my mama talked to the bad men. I could save her. . . .” He falters. “But of course she died there properly. She would be dead for real for a very long time.”

“I’m sorry, Tomasz,” Seth says. “I don’t think it would work, anyway. There was a specific time on the panel when the Driver put Regine back in the coffin, and it’s the same one here.” He turns on the display again and points to a date. “I can’t find any way at all to change it. I think we’ve only got a loophole because it needed to fix a mistake. That’s what its job was, after all.”

“You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Regine says.

“If you’ve got a better explanation, I’m willing to hear it.”

She sighs. “I wish this
was
all happening in your head.”

“Look,” Seth says, “I may be completely wrong, but don’t you think it’s worth a try? Can you imagine what it would be like if we
could
go back and forth from there to here? We could tell people. We could remind them of who they were.”

“They wouldn’t want to hear it,” Regine says.

“Some of them wouldn’t, but others might. And if we found a way to wake them up –”

“They wouldn’t want to come,” Regine says. “Why the hell would they want to leave a world where everything works for one where everything’s dead?”

“Your mother might want to. If we could find a way in and out, maybe –”

He stops because she looks like she wants to hit him. “Don’t you talk about my mother,” she says. “Don’t you promise things about her that can never be.”

“I didn’t mean –”

But she’s sitting back down in her chair, blinking away angry tears. “People are harder to save than you think. And you keep forgetting they went there for a reason. The world is over.”

“It is not over,” Tomasz says. “The world is healing itself. There are deers. There is us.”

“The
world
is half a burnt-out neighborhood and another one covered in mud,” Regine says. “No, what’ll happen is Seth’ll get back there, everyone will be
so
happy he isn’t dead, and he’ll have all his
real
friends back, his
real
family, and he’ll just –”

She stops dead, frowning ferociously.

“I’ll just what?” Seth asks. “Forget about you? Is that what you think?”

“Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t anyone?”

“Because, you idiot,” he says, finally snapping back. “The reason I killed myself was because I was certain there wasn’t anything more. That there was never going to
be
more. That I was alone and unhappy forever.”

“Yes, yes,” Regine says, acting grandly bored, “and now you’ve learned your valuable lesson about how people aren’t spending all their time just thinking about poor old Seth and all his terrible, terrible problems.”

“No,” Seth says, firmly, “what I’ve learned is that there actually
is
more. There’s you guys. You guys are my more.”

“Oh, now, see,” Tomasz says to Regine. “This is very nice thing for him to say.”

“Saying it is all well and good,” Regine persists, “but what if you go back and die? Are we supposed to give you a nice funeral because you
like
us?”

“Look, I know it’s a risk –”

“A risk with your life.”

“A risk worth taking. Look, I want both. I want them
and
I want you. Now that I know there’s more? I want to
have
more. If there really is more to life, I want to live all of it. And why shouldn’t all of us? Don’t we deserve that?”

There’s a long silence while Tomasz and Regine exchange looks.

“It may not even work,” Seth says again.

“But it may,” Regine says.

Seth sighs. “Make up your mind, Regine –”

“It would change everything, wouldn’t it?”

“And what’s wrong with that? Don’t you think things
need
changing? Don’t you think people need to wake up? Literally? If we could figure out a way to get in and out, maybe we could figure out ways to change other things, too.” He looks at her. “Make it better.”

But Regine looks skeptical. “Well,
you’ve
gone all heroic.”

“You’re the one who’s been trying to get me to face reality. You yell at me for thinking this is all in my head –”

“Oh, you’re finally believing this is real, are you?”

Seth makes a scale-like motion with his hands. “Sixty-forty.”

“What if I told you it
was
all in your head?” Regine says. “And that we were just making it easier for you to accept your death?”

“Then I’d keep my eyes open, remember who I was, and go in swinging.”

Regine is surprised into silence by hearing her words said back to her.

“There’s more than this,” Seth says. “So let’s go find it.”

“Well,” Tomasz says, after a moment, “I do not know about either of you, but I am feeling
very
stirred up!”

They decide to make a first try that afternoon. Seth is eager to go, but even he can see the sense of a nap after the morning they’ve had.

None of them can sleep, though.

“Forget it,” Regine finally says, rousting Tomasz and Seth from their bedroom. “Let’s just go and you can fail and then we can all get some proper rest.”

“That’s the spirit,” Seth says.

They start gathering things to take to Seth’s house, which seems the most likely place to try first. They’ll see if his coffin is less broken than Regine’s and go from there.

“I like what you say about changing the program, maybe,” Tomasz says. “I could learn to do that.”

“It’s pretty sophisticated,” Seth says.

“And I am
very
clever. I am sure I could figure it and
shazam
! Tomasz saves the world again.”

“You could probably save the world just by combing that hair,” Regine says, handing Tomasz a bottle of water. “It was shaved when I found you. How can it be such a briar patch?”