Brand New Ways (to lose you over and over and over again) – Blaize M. Kaye

By Blaize M. Kaye

Seven minutes past Garbage Collection. I’m almost late to meet Abbie.

I burst into the library through the swing doors of the main entrance. They slam shut behind me and faces with perfect hair, skin, and teeth look up from their books and streams.

The regulars recognize me and turn their attention back to their words, but a few newbs and drifters watch me run through the reference section, with its rows of long desks and short desk-lamps, until I disappear into the shade of the taller shelves.

Poetry and fiction live here, and here Abbie will be waiting.

At the shelves labelled ‘CAS-CHI’ I slow to a walk, take a single deep breath, and turn into the row.

She’s dressed, as usual, in her red work coveralls. Her dark skin, like all second-classers, is smooth, flawless. Her silver hair is gathered and pinned in a loose bun.

“Where did you get to?” she asks, and closes the book she’s holding.

I never know quite how to answer this question, and so the best I can offer is a weak shrug.

She gives me a look that is part smile, part frown and slides the book back into its slot on the shelf. She runs her long index finger across the shelf’s smooth surface, as if she’s expecting to find dust.

But there can be no dust. They don’t simulate it down here.

Dust is for first class packages.

#

Abbie and I were old once, back when we were real.

I was older than her, by nearly a decade, and I’d always assumed that I would be the first of us to get really sick.

That is not how things played out.

It started with a headache. Abbie had had headaches for as long as I’d known her, so neither of us thought much of it at first. She took her usual cocktail of pills, lay on our bed with the curtains drawn, and waited for the pain to subside.

It didn’t.

Almost a year later, after the diagnosis, radiation, and initial surgeries, I found myself sitting on an old faux leather couch in one of Abbie’s specialists’ waiting rooms. My copy of Bessie Head’s When the Rain Clouds Gather was either somewhere in our apartment or on the back seat of the cab that had dropped us at the doctor’s office.

Cursing myself, I rifled through the stack of old magazines on the waiting room’s coffee table looking for anything to help me pass the time. On offer were tabloids with long forgotten celebrity scandals, and an improbable number of ragged DIY mags gone soft as cloth from repeated readings.

Next to the magazines was a clear perspex stand filled with corporate-sponsored information pamphlets. High gloss A4 pages folded twice and stacked back to back, dealing with everything from early adolescent opioid addiction through to survivor’s guilt.

The one I picked up, though, was a pamphlet with a picture of an older couple, late sixties maybe, sitting under a tree and watching the sun rise.

Make forever a reality, it read.

Cloying, but effective.

#

Eight minutes past Garbage Collection. She’s going to talk about books, and she does.

“Found anything worthwhile?” She asks, assuming I’ve been browsing the library, rather than running through it.

“Not really,” I say. I want to say so much more.

“I was hoping Chabon’s Moonglow would be up by now,” she says.

In second-class they only simulate books whose copyright has expired. Chabon is here though, and has been for decades. Abbie would find it if she looked down at the shelf again.

I’ve shown her once before, but things went badly when she opened the book to the edition notice and saw the dates. Panic and tears. So I leave Chabon on his shelf.

#

I called the number on the brochure. The voice on the other end gave me an address, a date, and a time for our free consultation. On the day, we caught the underground train into Durban central. Abbie took her pain meds and slept, leaning up against the window. I tried to read.

From the station, we caught a bus to a tall building of mirrored glass where we were directed to a small office on one of the lower floors. Here we sat across the table from a young man with a kind face, and a too white, too perfect smile.

“…Electronic Consciousness Preservation, that is ECP, has until now been the sole preserve of the very wealthy, but we’ve developed a product for the broader market,” he said, while a bright presentation played on a screen that took up half the wall behind him. Graphs and tables with kinetic typography and explainers for everything from the uploading process to our return on investment.

“Of course, in order to democratize ECP, we’ve had to make certain concessions,” he said. “It’s like the difference between flying Business and Economy. Sure, those up front have a little more legroom, but we’re all still getting to the same place.”

What was on offer was the “silver package.” An upload option designed specifically for pensioners. Here, in the machine, we call it second class.

The young man, still smiling, slid two piles of contracts, each as thick as a good paperback, across the desk.

“Just sign wherever I’ve put one of those little neon stickies. Accounts will take care of the rest.”

Abbie was always the more detail-oriented of the two of us. A patent lawyer until her 65th birthday, if she had been well she would’ve read every last page. That morning she could barely hold her pen. For my part, I would’ve signed anything at all if it would stop her hurting.

And so we signed.

#

Nine and a half minutes past Garbage Collection. Abbie smooths down the sleeves of her red coveralls. Next, she’ll roll them up. She does.

“They’ve turned up the heat,” she says.

Abbie’s coveralls are one of the “concessions” of the silver package introduced by our ECP provider.

When you’re uploaded and officially declared dead in the real world, all of your possessions–any property, investments, the remainder of your pension funds–are transferred to the upload provider. They reinvest these funds to pay for your server time. But that only covers a fraction of the cost. The rest is paid for by “reclaiming cognitive surplus.”

In other words, inside the machine, you have to get a job.

Abbie now works in Media. Her legal background got her assigned there. For 18 hours a day she would watch video and photo streams from the real world for violations of terms. Copyrighted material on video sharing sites. The merest hint of a female areola on a social network. The appearance of an underage performer on the flesh streams. Children being hurt in hotel rooms. People being hacked to death in basements and abandoned warehouses.

She hated her job.

I tried to remind her that it was better than the alternative. Better than being in the cold ground, or scattered into the ocean. She wasn’t so sure. Now, neither am I.

#

Eleven minutes past Garbage Collection. There’s not much time left and so I step up to Abbie and wrap my arm around her waist.

I lean in and take a deep breath, relishing the scent of her avatar. I’ll give the simulation engineers that, they’ve nailed the sense of smell. Must not be too computationally expensive.

“Weirdo,” she says grinning, and then pushes me away playfully.

“Hah, you’re the weirdo,” I say.

“Forget the library,” she says, “let’s go for a walk before your shift starts.”

“Okay.”

Thirteen minutes past Garbage Collection. We walk hand-in-hand out of the library and into the warmth of the simulated afternoon. A short flight of steps with a silver banister leads from the library’s entrance to the sidewalk. It’s going to happen any moment now.

I give Abbie’s hand one last, tight squeeze and then let go.

I take the stairs three at a time until I’m about halfway down and turn to look back at her.

“I’ll see you soon, Chickadee,” I say.

She gives me a puzzled smile that breaks my heart and then reaches out to put her hand on the banister.

She takes a step towards me, stops, and turns her head as if she’s heard something behind her.

Thirteen minutes, 30 seconds past Garbage Collection. This is as long as she has ever lasted.

The space around her avatar blurs, the light seeming to bend towards her. Abbie shines bright for a moment and disappears silently. In the same instant, she reappears at the top of the staircase. A glitch-skip of about two seconds.

#

Abbie and I had wanted children. I couldn’t have any. Not much more to say about that except that when it’s just the two of you, the whole process from signing the papers to uploading is very quick. Two days after our meeting in the city, men were sent to our flat to catalogue and pack everything we owned. As part of the silver package we were put up in a hotel the night before the procedure. Abbie was feeling better than she had in months, maybe knowing that it would be over soon.

We took a short walk. We ate pasta. We made love.

Yes, we still did that.

The next morning a car picked us up and took us to the squat, beige building that was the clinic just outside the city.

They gave us paper gowns and lay us on gurneys next to one another in the room outside the theatre. Her upload was scheduled first. A young nurse in brown scrubs came to take her into surgery.

“I’ll see you soon, Chickadee,” Abbie said as they rolled her away.

That was the last time I heard her voice. Her real voice, I mean.

#

Thirteen minutes, 34 seconds past Garbage Collection.

Abbie reaches out for the banister, exactly as she did a moment before. She takes her step towards me, stops again, and turns her head.

I search her face for any trace of panic or pain. That I find none there is a cold consolation.

Again the light bends around her, she shines bright, disappears and reappears at the top of the stairs, where she reaches for the banister.

What they tell you when you’re signing your life away, when you’re joining them in “disrupting the afterlife,” is that you’ll never have to worry about dying of natural causes.

Natural.

What they don’t tell you is that uploads on the silver package all run on commodity hardware. You’re not paying for redundancy.

#

The first time Abbie Glitched Out, I wasn’t with her. That’s what we call it in second class, glitching out. An error in the underlying software or hardware running our processes.

I was late to meet her at the library after work. Just a few minutes, but still, I wasn’t with her.

I found her in the library’s lobby surrounded by a small crowd that had gathered to watch her avatar shine bright and glitch-skip through the last few seconds of her consciousness.

She sat alone on a bench, leaning forward with her elbows resting on her knees, her head in her hands. Her silver hair spilled and shifted like liquid metal through and over her fingers as her right leg bounced up and down with a nervous energy.

If not for the flashes of light and the uncanny shift in the position of her leg mid-bounce, I could almost imagine that she was okay, still waiting for me impatiently.

I could almost imagine that she simply hadn’t seen me standing right in front of her.

After a while the crowd lost interest and drifted away and

I stood alone for hours watching her glitch-skipping. Watching those last few seconds of her process being repeated over and over.

Eventually one of the library staff, a middle-aged man with bright blue hair and a gray suit, put his hand on my shoulder.

“Do you know her?” He asked.

“She’s my wife.”

“I’m sorry.” He said. “You should log a ticket with Support. Sometimes they can do something.”

The Support Centre was sympathetic but firm in reminding me that when we took the discounted silver package, we agreed that our consciousness wouldn’t be distributed across multiple machines. They explained that one of the clauses in the “silver addendum” stipulates that in second-class you’re not ever fully backed up. And so, when there’s even a minor failure, even a single corrupt bit in a matrix a million bytes wide, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be coming back.

While they were under no legal obligation, they stressed, they were willing to attempt a process rebuild with what data they had. As Abbie was a valued customer they could attempt to take her apart and reset her to her last known configuration, approximately fourteen minutes before she began to glitch.

I told them to do whatever they could.

They told me our conversation was being recorded for quality and legal purposes.

The reset was scheduled for the next invocation of the Garbage Collector, the process where any unused memory is released back into the system. They calculated the precise location she would respawn, rows CAS-CHI in the poetry and fiction section of the library, which is where I found her, searching for Michael Chabon’s Moonglow. It’s difficult to explain the relief I felt at that first resetting. The feeling of having Abbie back. Thirteen and a half minutes later, however, she bent down to tie the lace on her high, black work boots. She shone bright and bent down to tie her lace again. And again. And again.

I placed a second call to Support, they said they would reset her process. They did, and thirteen and a half minutes after that Garbage Collection, I lost her again.

I can’t remember how many times Abbie has glitched out now. How many times they’ve reset her process. How many times I’ve met her in the library knowing that thirteen and a half minutes later I’m going to have to let her go.

What they tell you when they’re pushing their second rate Electronic Consciousness Preservation plan is that you won’t have to lose your wife to the thing that is slowly but inextricably burrowing into her brain.

What they don’t tell you is that, instead, they’ll give you brand new ways to lose her over and over and over again.

#

Thirteen minutes, fifty five seconds past Garbage Collection.

Abbie’s back at the top of the stairs.

She reaches for the banister.

She takes a step and turns her head.

She shines bright.

Reset.

Repeat.

***