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Chance faces the prospect of dying and surviving his own death. “Volatile emotional response with significant drive variability” is how Chance might characterize his reaction to Chance Five's diagnosis, if this were research.

•

Chance One, trim and naturally charismatic, is possessed of innate self-assurance that inspires confidence in others. He works as a data scientist at a public-private cooperative. When he told his supervisor about the cancer, she was surprised. She asked—though he was certain she already knew—how long he'd had his fifth drive.

“About six months,” Chance One had said. And then Chance had to worry about embarrassing himself by crying. That level of instability was very surprising in Chance One.

His supervisor nodded and said, “I see. I'm so sorry.” But there was a different message in her look. She was thinking, It's better that it's the new drive.

And maybe it is better. Chance Five is a student, just starting out. Losing him might be less disruptive. No one would say something like that, of course.

•

Before joining, Chance Two was quick-witted, opinionated, and given to crafting exceptionally well-reasoned arguments for preserving the status quo. Chance Two continues to give an impression of reserve and matter-of-fact competence. She's an airline pilot with a specialty in long-haul atmospheric aviation and has been the least affected of Chance's drives.

•

Chance Three is currently splashing his face with water from a cold tap in a hospital restroom. His straight black hair lies neatly flat on his squarish head. He is a large man, and though he appears stolid, he is the most emotionally responsive of Chance's drives and often has powerful, sometimes-distracting, reactions to trauma.

Chance Three is a specialist in the quantum personality matrix—a “join doctor.” It's a job that requires presence and empathy. Chance is having trouble focusing, and Chance Three has evaded his patient.

•

When she is awake, Chance Four is about motion and precision. A short (close to the Earth), thirty-eight-year-old woman who is fast and light on her feet. The fact that Chance Four is currently sleeping is helping Chance deal with the traumatic news.

•

The year before he joined, Chance Five and a girl named Shawna flew a pod over the salt flats to a place that Nana called
llanura de las bestias
. The plain of the beasts. Beside scattered steel beams and shattered pyramids of yellow, crusted soil lay rotted, riveted husks—the loosely articulated bodies of ancient locomotives.

“I love it here,” Shawna said, one hand against a pitted gray-and-orange plate. “This is everything that came before. But we're so lucky. We can live forever now.”

And then in cool shadows, he reached for Shawna's warmth, her soft skin, her breath on his neck and cheek.

And in the heat after, he felt a leaden pull into the drifting world, where long molten channels creep through their fiery beds, where blast furnaces roar, and there is the deafening whine of disks biting steel and a flaring out of burning swarf.

Chance Two and Leap Two
trained together—flexorology, mechanics, aerodynamics, flight systems administration, electromagnetism, macro-meteorology. Chance tended to score just above Leap in their coursework and has always enjoyed a slight professional edge.

When they were in school together, Leap still had only two drives, but Chance rarely saw Leap One. Leap would say that Leap One was an introvert. Chance knew what Leap meant—one of the nice things about having multiple bodies is the ability to devote different bodies to different temperaments.

Since then, Leap has grown to a four, and Chance has spent at least some time with each of Leap's drives. Chance One even had a short fling with Leap Two. (And Chance can still distract any drive by picturing her naked.)

A couple of years ago, Leap declined a promotion in order to keep flying with Chance. Chance had been pressing Leap's case to their boss when Leap, in direct contradiction to years of moaning over meals and margaritas, turned the opportunity down. Leap said she just wanted to keep flying with Chance. The routes they traveled were better, she said, and she was set in her ways. Chance was touched, and a little puzzled. Then their boss transferred into low-orbit freight hauling, and they haven't talked about it since. Leap is like that sometimes—contrary. For the last month or so, Leap has also been gloomy, but whenever Chance tries to find out why, Leap shakes it off and perks up.

The flight they're on today is a low ten-percenter, with no real weather. The Great Central storm has been subdued for over a week—retracted into a core lightning maze that crouches over the hardball, the charred, lightning-grooved ruin of what was once about ten thousand square miles of prairie.

In an era of megastorms and sudden formations, Chance and Leap—as pilot and copilot—are responsible for rerouting the airliner toward lesser weather while balancing increased distance with schedule requirements. But the flight automation is pretty good at avoiding the worst surprises that storms generate, and the planes are highly instrumented and closely monitored. Having a crew on board provides a safety in case of network flakiness and helps to calm customers, but they spend most of their time reviewing reports from the various flight systems. They aren't usually needed to fly the plane. Except, as the saying goes, when they are.

About an hour after the
first one, Leap does it again, the tic. They're beginning the pre-descent review when Chance Two happens to glance over just as Leap Two spasms in the same way. Only this time, her shoulders hump up as well.

Chance Two stares, but Leap gives no indication that she's aware it happened. It wasn't a sneeze and was definitely bigger than a hiccup.

Afterward and without any preamble, as Leap Two is reading her screen intently, she says she's sorry. If Leap is sorry there must be something to be sorry for. Chance examines a chart that maps actual humidity to expected humidity over the last half hour and projects forward for the next thirty minutes to landing. She says to Leap, “Do you want to talk about it?”

When she says it, she has her back to Leap Two, but she knows that Leap has stopped moving. Chance continues the protocol.

After a few moments, Leap Two says, “You only have one drive dreaming?”

What does Chance's dreaming drive have to do with anything? It's strange, alien, for Chance to feel this uncomfortable while talking with Leap.

“Yeah,” she says.

“You've got terminal cancer,” Leap says. “That has to be stressing you out. Maybe you're not as rested as you could be. You've been working a lot of hours.”

This is not the conversation Chance wants to have with Leap. Now that the illness is a reality, and Leap knows, Chance wants to talk about the stress after the preliminary diagnosis, about premonitions of disaster. Chance wants to tell Leap about her anger and about wanting to distrust the data, about suddenly becoming furious with a saltshaker because high-sodium diets are associated with poor stress management. In fact, she took the saltshaker with her during her commute this morning and then felt absurd, holding it white knuckled before stuffing it into a public waste processor.

Leap says, “Have you thought about putting a second drive into storage for a while?”

Of course Chance has thought about it. And this is what Chance needs—a review of the data, a consideration of options, an analysis of possible outcomes. But Leap's voice is wrong. What should sound sympathetic is anything but.

Chance doesn't look at Leap. She focuses on her job.

Leap Two says, in an irritated tone that's almost threatening, “Should I be worried about you?”

“
You'd think this stuff would
get easier,” Chance Three grumbles, not sure and not caring what he really means by “this stuff.”

When Chance Three finished his sixteen-hour shift at Shine University's Join Praxis Center, he ended up here, at Whatever You Want, the restaurant and bar across the street from the hospital. Bottles behind the well-stocked bar diffract an occasional sparkle. The walnut furniture is dinged and comfortably worn. Weak parabolas of blue- and red-tinged light hover around glow bulbs shaped to imitate twentieth-century lamps.

Chance looks at a small drop of condensation on his glass and at the bent image within it. He's thinking about Chance Three's parents, Angela and Sarawut. Chance Three was an only child. His parents married late in life, and he was born to them late. He now believes that having a child was an early attempt by his parents to bridge their differences. But they fought ferociously throughout his childhood, shouting terrible things at each other, whatever might wound. Throwing things. Chance wished for different parents.

And then, right after he graduated from high school, they joined, becoming Ultimate. The parents who had raised him both remained and disappeared. Ultimate was a calm, realistic, grounded, and loving individual. Ultimate was magnificent. It was very weird. Chance had to think of the two of them differently, as one person. His imagination balked at it. He did learn to see them both in Ultimate, but they were healed and happy. Ultimate never joined again, and now Ultimate is gone.

A few feet from Chance Three, the bartender is leaning back against a heavy shelf, arms crossed. The waitress is sitting to Chance's left. The two of them are a join named Apple. There's only one other customer in the bar, so Apple has been killing time with Chance.

A big chunk of human mental resources are mapped to facial recognition, the subtle detection and decoding of emotion. What Apple is doing right now, watching Chance Three from two perspectives and integrating impressions, is referred to as “triangulating” or “reading through.” Practically, it means that it would be very difficult for Chance Three to successfully lie to Apple.

It's uncomfortable to be the focus of both of their attention.

“I've just found out I'm sick,” Chance says.

“Oh?” says the waitress, Apple One. “Nothing contagious, I hope.”

“Not contagious, but possibly terminal,” says Chance.

“Ouch. That's too bad,” says Apple One. “Hey, at least you're not solo.”

It's a defensive response and almost shockingly uncharitable. As Chance has discovered, joins want to believe that because they can defeat mortality, the loss of a single drive is easily managed.

The truth is more complicated. Some of Chance's patients have years of phantom pains and phantom experiences—hunger, excitement, even visions—that seem to come from drives that have died. Drive death can be so traumatic that fringe groups like the Safe Hemlock Society advocate “practice dying” and stage elaborate “mortality events.” The Safe Hemlock Society actually teaches that the only way joins can embrace their true, immortal nature is to experience the traumatic death of a drive.

“Part of me was solo until last year,” Chance says. “Part of me is scared.”