The New World: A Novel (8 page)

 

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.

“Greetings and salutations!” the woman said, smiling as she spoke. “Greetings and salutations!” she said again, then closed her eyes in a long blink. “Please state your full name.” Jane hesitated. The woman asked again, so Jane told her.

“Text input!” the woman exclaimed. “Dr. Jane Julia Cotton Polaris Aspirant Number 617.460.666, welcome to Part Two of your application for membership at Polaris. My name is Alice. This is a virtual interview, which should take between fifteen and twenty hours to complete but may be terminated at any time. Shall we begin?” Her blind eyes searched the room for thirty seconds while Jane hesitated. “Shall we begin?” she repeated.

“Sure.”

“There are no right or wrong answers,” Alice said. “This is merely a process of discernment.”

“Are you a robot?” Jane asked.

“I am not a robot,” Alice replied, so quickly that Jane was sure everyone must ask that question. “I am a recording algorithm and a speaking face. All decisions regarding membership are made by the Polaris Membership Board, which receives my reports via continuous feed. Please tell me about the animals in your life. Pay special attention to pets, but do not exclude any animal to which you have had a strong positive or negative emotional attachment.”

“What has this got to do with the future?”

“All information is relevant to the future,” Alice snapped.

She’s very testy,
Jane wrote later to Hecuba.
Be nice
,
Hecuba wrote back.
We need you to get close to the dewars.
So you have to be nice to all of them!
So the next day, when Brian called to leave his customary message, Jane picked up the phone.

“I’m so sorry for my negative tone before,” she said to him. “I suppose I took my anger out on you, but really I just miss my husband. I’m sure you understand.”

“Of course,” Brian said. “Of course I do. And now . . . and now you can . . .” His voice caught in his throat and he began to softly cry.

“I’m sorry,” Jane said. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

“Please don’t apologize. I’m just so happy to be able to finally help.”

“But is it okay that you’re talking to me, now that I’m making an application?”

“There’s no conflict of interest. I’m the director of family services, but I sit on the admissions board, too, and sometimes I wear both hats.”

“Did you take Jim’s application?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m just trying to understand what he saw in you,” she said, too harshly. So she added, “I mean, I think I know, but I want to be sure.”

“He saw the future in us,” Brian said. “And now—” His voice caught again, but he mastered himself. “And now he’s waiting for you.”

Jane didn’t respond to that. She only said she had better get back to the application, meaning she had to get back to Alice, though as it went on over the next couple of days, it felt to her more like all three of them—Alice, Hecuba, and Brian—were interviewing her at the same time, and when she went to bed at night she found herself muttering to them indiscriminately, in the space between waking and sleep.

At hour eleven of the application, Alice asked, “If you could send a message to the future, what would it be?” Then it was Jane’s turn to cry, so she was glad Alice’s blind eyes could not discern her tears. Her mind filled with all the things she might say to Jim, if she could believe for a minute that he was alive somewhere on the other side of time. She pondered over an answer, attempting to ignore the desperate accusations and shrill questions that came immediately to mind—
Always together, never apart!
and
What am I supposed to do now?
and
Why? Why? Why?

“Are you still thinking about the question?” Alice asked, and Jane settled on
I hope you are all very well indeed.

“Do you
really
believe we’re going to wake up?” Jane asked Brian. She knew he wanted her to ask that, and that she could ask it as many times as she wanted. It was like asking a Jehovah’s Witness whether they
really
believed that Jesus was their Personal Savior.

“As certainly as I believe I myself will wake up tomorrow morning.”

“But you might die in the night,” Jane said.

“If I did, a Polaris team would be at my house five minutes after my heart stopped beating. And then I would sleep just a little longer. It’s one of the advantages of living on campus, but we hope that one day everyone in the world will be so close to a doorway.”

Doorway!
Jane wrote to Hecuba.
They’re living in a graveyard!

It’s a cult,
Hecuba wrote.
Of course they say things like that.

But do you think it could possibly be true?

Who cares? Not me. I might almost forgive them for mutilating Albert’s body, but they mutilated the very idea of my marriage, and for that I’m going to destroy them if it’s the last thing I do.

At hour seventeen, Alice asked, “What is the purpose of life?” And Jane thought of all the things she could say that would immediately end her application:
The purpose of life is to not think too much about the future
or
The purpose of life is to do justice to the past
or
The purpose of life is to die one day
. Or even:
That’s not really something you ever really know, except temporarily, the answer changes as your life changes
or
That’s not something you know in just your head, it’s something you figure out, day by day, in relation to one other really important person.
These were all things that Jim had actually said to her, at one time or another. But she knew that none of them could have been what he had said to Polaris. Barely any of it was really amenable to articulation, anyway. “Do you need more time for the question?” Alice asked, and Jane said, “Yes, please.”

She couldn’t write:
I try not to think about this sort of thing without my husband around
, though that was still the truth. Or even,
Life doesn’t have any purpose now that my husband is dead.
Alice asked her a few more times if she needed more time, and Jane pressed her snooze button while she tried out her answers in pencil on the back of a grocery receipt. She wished she had time to call Hecuba, but Alice was starting to seem impatient, the intervals between her repetitions steadily decreasing. So at last Jane went with what seemed like her best answer.

The purpose of life,
she wrote,
is to live more life.
Alice closed her eyes and looked thoughtful for a moment. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, but Jane thought it must have been forever, in computer time.

“Dr. Jane Julia Cotton,” Alice said, “your application is terminated. Congratulations, you are invited for a personal interview on the Polaris Campus in Oviedo, Florida 32788. A Polaris representative will contact you shortly to arrange your appointment. It has been a pleasure conducting your interview. Good luck to you!”

 

Everyone in the house promised Jim they’d come to Sondra’s funeral service, though none of them seemed too troubled by her death. “She’d made such progress this time,” Sondra’s social worker had said, tsking over the corpse.

“Wait, what? This time?” Jim had asked. He’d seen plenty of death in the hospital, but he’d never visited a crime scene. He’d turned away from the horrible gaping wound in Sondra’s neck, from the dull glint of bone deep in the cut, and buried his face in his Alice’s shoulder.

“This was not her first incarnation,” his Alice said, a little sadly.

“Or even her second,” said Sondra’s. “Though she stayed with us two weeks longer this time.”

Alice patted Jim on the head and explained that they would begin the process of waking Sondra again tomorrow. “Don’t be sad,” she said. “It’s not like she’s
exploded
. Sondra’s connectome endures.”

She led Jim out of the room, and the three of them went back downstairs to break the news to the others. Heads shook but no one shed a tear, and dinner went on as if nothing of particular note had happened. Jim got very drunk, and moved around the table, gathering
rsvp
s for the funeral service and saying, “Someone has
died
!” To which the reply was always, “But not
really
,” and eventually Alice asked him, politely but firmly, to stop saying that, and when he didn’t stop, she escorted him up to bed.

“But what about the latest part of her?” Jim asked her as she tucked him in. “The part since you woke her up. Isn’t that part dead?”

“Well,” Alice said thoughtfully, though she looked a little exasperated at the question. “I suppose it is.”

“But isn’t that
terrible
?” he asked. “Don’t you think that’s
terrible
?”

“No,” she said. “It’s not particularly terrible. This iteration of Sondra wished to destroy itself, and now it has got what it wanted. Tomorrow, the iteration of her that wants to live forever will awaken again. What’s terrible about that?” Alice’s smile was so genuine and unconflicted that Jim wondered for a moment before he fell asleep if it wasn’t so terrible after all. But he woke three hours later, sober and ill, to remind himself that at least the latest iteration of Sondra should have a funeral. He turned on his light and walked softly to his desk. Turning his book over and flipping to the end of it, he spoiled page after page with a funeral sermon for his minimally deceased friend.

The next day was a holiday (which nobody would hear of canceling): a new client had come to the house in the night. Jim asked stupidly if it was Sondra come back again already, but Alice only shook her head. Still, he sneaked out of his room when the social workers told them all to disappear so the new client could have a tour, but all he saw was a head of short dark hair disappearing down the central staircase, followed by a social worker whom he’d never seen before.

No one volunteered to help with the service. “I like a Viking service best,” Jim said to Alice, “and I think Sondra would have too. Though of course we didn’t talk about it. What do you think?”

Alice said the manufacture of loveliness was always to be encouraged, but asked him if he really thought a funeral was strictly necessary.

“Yes!” he said crossly. “It really is!” He calmed down as he set up the chairs outside. He supposed he couldn’t expect Alice to really understand anything about a funeral. They probably didn’t have them anymore, in the future.

He put the chairs in a semicircle, a safe distance from Sondra’s bier, then made the punch and cake, and reviewed his sermon. He’d hardly ever presided over a formal funeral, though he’d given dozens of little services in the hospital, rituals tailored on the fly to the needs of the survivors gathered around the late person always (even if they had been dying for weeks or months or years) so suddenly and shockingly dead. The mourners usually seemed to him to be waiting for someone to organize their grief, to close the endlessly strange, eternal moment of death enough for them to escape it, however briefly, and leave the bedside and the body and the hospital behind. Not that everybody needed this done for them, but the people who needed it the most seemed never to know to ask for it.

He laid the hymn he’d chosen down on each chair, weighting each paper with an apple from the orchard so it wouldn’t blow away, and he scattered some apples on the bier (not thinking, until much too late, that along with the applewood fuel they would make Sondra, as she burned, smell a little like dinner) and straightened Sondra’s robe, and moved the chairs back a bit more, and then everything was ready.

He waited as long as he could stand to before he started. He went inside once to call up the stairs, “Hey, everybody, it’s time!” but he didn’t go knock on any doors. A few of them, including his Alice, came to their windows to look at the fire once it really got going. “My dear friends,” Jim said to the empty chairs, “let us celebrate the life and the memory of an extraordinary human being. Let us celebrate the story of our friend, and hold the meaning of it together, in this moment which we sanctify together in love.” He paused.

He didn’t ordinarily need notes for a funeral. If he had time, he’d write out an order of service and a sermon, but he didn’t ever read them—they always stuck in his head. Now, though, everything he’d written down so carefully the night before was lost to him, even though he’d been careful not to put it in his book, and been careful not to think of it, as he wrote it, as a story to forget. Nonetheless, that ten-minute story of her life, her fiercely striving, fiercely loving existence, was gone. He could just go upstairs for his notes and read them aloud, but he didn’t want to go inside.

Instead, he sat on the grass next to the bier, and never-minded the sermon and the absent audience. He just talked to her.

“Well, my friend,” he said. “I guess it’s time to say goodbye. To this part of you, anyway. I feel that we’ll meet again, though you won’t know me, will you? Maybe, after my Debut, I’ll come back here as a social worker. I wonder if that’s allowed? If anybody but an Alice could do it? I think it would be a good idea. You know, like how in halfway houses the counselors were usually junkies, once upon a time. Which is exactly what makes them good at their job.” He scooted closer to the bier and took an apple from among the wood, polishing it nervously on his shirt.

“I usually have all sorts of things to say to a dead person,” he told Sondra. “You know, ‘You will be missed. Your life mattered. I could feel the love your family has for you when I walked into the room.’ Half-made-up, of course. But half-true, too. Or true because I believed it, if that makes sense. True for that moment, anyway, because I chose for it to be true, with every death. It’s different when everybody else has left the room. When it’s just you and the body. I have all these lovely one-liners, but I can’t really say them now. I haven’t forgotten them all. I just don’t know what they mean anymore.”

It was the taste of the apple that made him burst into tears. Of course he had cried during funerals all the time, but it was unprofessional to
sob
. He knew he couldn’t have looked very dignified, with snot in his mustache and apple bits inside his mouth, but he kept talking anyway. “They should know it, shouldn’t they? They should know back home, back then, that we might be sad too. They should think about how we’re holding funerals too, way out here on the other side of life, for all of them. They should all stop thinking about themselves sometime—it’s so
selfish
, isn’t it?—and think for a minute about how we’re the ones who are actually alone. About how
they
left
us
.” He sat and finished his apple, and then he lit the fire.

He added his chair to the flames, and then the other chairs too, and then as many vegetables as he could pull out of the earth, tossing them from a distance as the fire burned hotter and hotter. It was a shame, then, that the others weren’t there, because it would have been nice for everyone to throw a carrot or something on the fire. So he kept an eye on the door into the house, telling himself that his anger toward the others would be undone if just one other person came out to say goodbye to Sondra. Nobody came out, but he could see through the window that they had started to gather in the kitchen. Then, just at the tail end of dusk, a stranger emerged from the orchard, bramble-scratched and sunburned and dehydrated-looking. “Thank goodness for that bonfire!” she said. A tall girl with a pixie haircut, she looked too young and too pretty ever to have died. “I might never have found my way back if I didn’t see it! I’m Olivia. You must be one of my crèchemates!” She stuck out her hand.

“I suppose I am,” Jim said. “And let me be the first to wish you a happy birthday.”

“It kind of
is
my birthday, isn’t it? Something smells delicious. Is that dinner?”

“Inside,” Jim said. “I think the others are all waiting for you.”

“That’s awesome,” the girl said, still pumping Jim’s hand and looking all around at the house and the sky and the orchard and the dwindling fire. “This is
awesome
. Are you coming in too?”

“Not right now,” Jim said. “I have a lot of work to do.” When Alice called him to dinner a little later, he said he would come when the fire was out, but when the flames had died to nothing, he went inside through a door close to the stairs and went up to his room. There he began to write out all the memories of his wife he had been holding on to in the secret, stupid hope that he would be allowed to carry them along with him into the new world. He quietly and diligently inscribed his love upon the page, pressing firmly as if to pin the words and their feelings to the paper. But since he could still remember what it had been like to want something with his whole heart and know he couldn’t have it, he said to himself,
Now
it really does feel like being alive again
.