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He stands. His feet swollen and dull, his skin dark against the cool, honey-colored hardwood. His body unbends slowly as he moves toward the bathroom. His lower back aches.

As Chance One steps into the bathroom and the lights come up, he makes a gesture toward the mirror above the sink to activate its interface. He summons vids of the house perimeter. Nothing worth noting. Perhaps Rope is busy with whatever legal fallout has come from the assault. Chance One taps above his temple to switch on retinal displays, then logs in through the airline account. He sleepily reviews some weather data, brushing fingers against the palm of his left hand to help manage the display as he pees.

He shuffles into the living room and the built-in lights begin to glow. It's dark out, and the big windows onto the lawn and park reflect the inside of the house. Chance sits on a broad couch and watches the late news on a wall display. He says, “Scan for Rope, please.” His personal agent knows he's spent some time with a join named Rope, and it knows which Rope, so related stories are prioritized, and he learns immediately that Rope has been arrested.

Civ News only has a few terse reports. The Vitalcorp Directorate is investigating Rope. Questions arising from inconsistencies in Rope's statements and the statements of other interested parties have led to an inquiry. The Directorate has launched exhaustive autopsies and a full forensic analysis. Rope's access to the net has been suspended, and the Directorate is in the process of finding and detaining his remaining eight drives. The whereabouts of two of Rope's drives are currently unknown.

How the hell is Rope hiding drives?

The sheets slide off of Chance Four as she sits up. She rubs her sore shoulder, then walks to a desk in the bedroom. She unfolds a personal display and also starts reviewing news.

Nondestructive truth techniques can be applied to a captive drive to determine the whereabouts of a join's other drives. Through Chance Three's work at Shine's Join Praxis Center, Chance actually pioneered one of them. Chance Four reviews recent literature about drive triangulation, searching for details that might help explain things, while Chance One continues scanning the news. The idea that two of Rope's drives might be hidden creates a credibility problem with the entire story. The Directorate still hasn't contacted Chance.

After what's happened, and the stress of Chance Five's illness, Chance knows that paranoia is a health risk, but that doesn't slow the flood of possible scenarios. What if Rope has simply planted this slant on the story to lure Chance back to unrestricted network access? Could Rope be that influential?

The three major news agencies are all covering the story through brief updates. Stories like this are often single sourced, though. Rope wouldn't necessarily have to influence all three agencies. But Rope would have to influence the Directorate. Rope would have had to use the Vitalcorp Directorate to build the story, and that would be a risky move, even for an executive senator. Which Rope is not.

That morning before sunrise, Chance
Two rolls out of bed in a guest room at Leap's house in the Olympic Archipelago, a bit groggy from the long flight and late landing. The storm they'd flown into was part of what's beginning to look like a full split of the Great Central megastorm. Its quick formation in a low-probability location is consistent with the other two megastorm splits from the last two decades. The event profile is a very close match to the Bengal megastorm split that ravaged New Dhaka. That storm brought on the worst loss of solo life since the era of coastal flooding drowned the original Dhaka, along with many other major cities.

Chance and Leap had fought through the storm for an hour and then finally gone north to avoid it, dodging spirals from the northeast storm as they went. They had endured hours of rough flying, Chance helping as personal emergencies allowed. It had been a long day.

Chance Two stands and walks heavily to the door. Leap lives on an island in the archipelago. Leap's house is built in the UMI (Universal Modal Infrastructure) Craftsman style—meant to resemble old homes of the Pacific Northwest, but on the modern service grid and with adaptive nanomaterial. It was Leap One's childhood home, originally built by Leap One's mother.

Chance pops the bedroom door open. The hall glows softly so the door to Leap's room is visible despite the darkness of early morning. Chance stands in front of Leap's door, waiting for the house to rouse her friend with the customary mild light, warm breeze, and soft tones.

“Chance, what got you up?” Leap One says from behind her, surprising her. Chance turns to face him. Leap One is leaning into the hall from the staircase. He doesn't have a job, and Leap has him on an alternate schedule. She often keeps him awake while her other drives are asleep.

Chance pads over to the staircase.

Leap One says, “Let's talk downstairs.”

PART TWO

Things are exactly what they appear to be, just not what you think they appear to be.

—Adofo, from the

Seventh Pan-African Address

 

You mean you remember.

No, I mean when my loved ones slip away from this life
they continue to live with me.
Just as you are the spirit of many,
so am I.
What you do with technology
nature has done through love since the mind began.

—Joseph Rex,

Poe's Mission
, Book I

“
I got in touch.”
Leap One is leaning against the kitchen island. Behind him is a large, hardbound book with a metallic silver cover adorned with two bright yellow
X'
s, made to look as though they've been applied with dripping paint.

Fortyish, short, and lean, Leap One has dark brown hair and a full beard, both starting to gray. He moves slowly, as if containing agitation. Chance Two is sitting at a breakfast table across from Leap One, her back to a window. The calm and lack of sentimentality that reads as a hard edge in Leap Two has always struck Chance as slightly creepy in Leap One.

“What do you mean you ‘got in touch'?”

“I vidcast the Directorate and filed a formal Friend of the Deceased brief on behalf of your Three drive.”

“What?”

Leap One waves a hand, then says, “I think it's important that they—”

“But that could have led Rope to this home!”

“I guess it could have.”

“While I'm here!”

“Yes,” Leap admits.

“Christ,” Chance says. “You put us both in danger. Are all of your drives really here, in this house, Leap?”

“That's right.”

“Leap, he killed my drive and at least one of his own, but very likely several of his own. He's sick. Really sick. He may have a meme virus. Whatever's wrong with him, it's at that level. If all of your drives are here, he could clean you up completely, just by coming here.”

“No. He's under arrest, and the Directorate is hunting for him. He's busy saving himself. And we're on an underpopulated island with limited access. I have perimeter surveillance and video-alarm defenses. If someone were approaching the house, I'd know.”

“At least two of his drives are still out there, running around.”

“I'd know.”

Chance is thin on resources right now, and she keeps seeing the two Ropes grinning as their Twenty-One drive's head hit the table.

She says,  “There are at least three theoretically foolproof ways to locate all of a join's drives if you have custody of one. Why can't the Directorate find two of Rope's drives? Why? Rope has influential friends. And there's something about him that's not right. He is not a normal join!”

“I think you may have just answered your own question.”

“What?”

“You said, ‘theoretically.'”

“Oh, don't give me that alternate tech crap again!” says Chance, frustrated by Leap's unrepentant lack of intellectual discipline, Leap's gullibility. “You are killing me,” she says softly.

“No, cowboy. The cancer's doing that. And this Rope guy.”

Chance can't think of anything to say. Leap continues, “I know you don't believe in a lot of it. A lot of it is crap. But there are real results that contradict what the Directorate is telling us. A quantum network implant? Do you really know what the hell that is? Do you actually know? The materials do something predictable, so you trust them. A scientist stumbles across a material with ridiculously powerful properties, and then it's been forty years since the first join and we still don't have a theory that really explains it!”

“We do,” says Chance.

“And the psychotropics we take during cooldown,” Leap says. “Chance, all you really know—and you were an actual join doctor—is that there's a predictable interaction between consciousness and quantum phenomena. You don't even know
how
the drugs help!”

“Of course we know how they help.”

“Break down rigid modes of perception? Establish conditions favorable to reimagining the self? Fine, but how
exactly
does your
state of mind
influence the
network
?”

“You make it sound like we're children playing with fire,” Chance says. She stands and walks to the kitchen island, across from Leap. She grabs the silver book. “And you're reading science fiction by feral solos who can barely fabricate basic plastics!”

“‘God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.'”

“God?” They stare at each other for a moment, neither backing down. Then Chance says, “We know more than that.”

“Oh, really? What else do you know?”

Chance sets the book back down.

“What else do you know, Chance? Try me.”

“I'm not going to get into it,” Chance says. She walks back to the table.

“Oh, okay.” says Leap One. Chance notices that Leap Two, in her nightgown of yellow cotton, is leaning against the threshold to the kitchen. Leap Three, a tall, rangy man in his late thirties, is standing behind her. “You're not going to get into it,” Leap One says, drawing Chance's attention back to him, “because you don't believe I'll understand it.”

“No,” Chance says, “it's not that.”

“It's not?”

“No! We just don't have time.”

“You think I wouldn't understand,” says Leap One, bitterly. Chance is struck again by how alien Leap seems, how unlike her old friend. As if reading her mind, Leap Two takes a step into the kitchen and says, “As for time, that's all we have. We're right here, in my house. And because of that storm and your little incident while we were flying through it, we probably won't have another flight for at least a couple of days. Chance, you might not have any more flights at all. You're worried about Rope, but after our flight today, you should be worried about your job.”

“He's out there, Leap! He's out there, and now you—and this house—have popped up on his radar!”

Leap Two speaks slowly, enunciating each word. “No. No. No. He. Is. Not. Coming. Here. Chance.”

Chance's fingers are cold. She wants to close her eyes. Leap's anger, combined with a sense of injustice that Chance hasn't felt from Leap before, seems aimed at her. It's like she's talking to a stranger. Chance Two says, “Why do you have three drives in the kitchen right now?”

Leap Two gestures at herself and Leap Three. “These two are hungry.”

The quiet sound of footfalls. Chance turns back to Leap One as Leap Four enters the room behind him. Leap Four is a young Japanese woman with hair dyed the color of rust. Squat, powerfully built, with a broad, thoughtful face.

“You're all here,” Chance says.

Leap Four says, “It's my home.”

Then, in unison, as if in a scene from a vidcom or a nightmare, all four Leaps convulse at the same time. Their upper lips rise. Their shoulders jump. They pant loudly. Then all four are looking at Chance as if nothing has happened.

The trial of one thousand
was the first public demonstration of Join. Five hundred pairs of prequalified volunteers were chosen by lottery to become five hundred individuals. It was a sensation. Despite the emergence of megastorms and indisputable new evidence of an imminent catastrophic rise in water levels, those five hundred new individuals and their “I am both of us!” campaign dominated international news for months. The public was transfixed. “Would you?” seemed the only relevant conversational gambit.

There were also immediate questions about which agencies could regulate Join. The government's positions were weakened by the debate about what Join was and what it meant and by a fragmented international response. Vitalcorp had also recruited influential investors. In the end, despite committed resistance, the public's enthusiasm for the sheer audacity of the product proved decisive. Only a year after the last couple in the one thousand became a single individual, Join was approved for, and released to, the general market.

In that initial release, Vitalcorp included a prohibition against a join of more than two, with exceptions allowed for research. The process had been discovered almost by mistake. Vitalcorp wanted to introduce it in stages. But people petitioned for exceptions and squeezed into rapidly proliferating studies. Within a few years, the largest legal join was Excellence, the CEO of Vitalcorp, who was a twelve. (Excellence also set the tradition for naming joins.)

Since then, the science has progressed. While Vitalcorp discourages large joins through its fee structure, the legal limit for “active,” or living, drives is now twenty. (A join may include more than twenty people if some drives are deceased.)

But the largest join ever recorded was illegal and kept secret for most of its existence. It had one hundred fifty-three drives, some of whom had been key scientists at Vitalcorp and all of whom had been early investors. It called itself Music.

While negligible for legal joins, it's now clear that the likelihood of a dangerous failure increases rapidly above twenty drives and becomes certain just above two hundred. There are two main categories of join failure: collapses—in situations like a flip, a cumulative coma, or a beta-wave resonance collapse—and meme viruses. Both are deadly. Music was the first known incidence of a meme virus.

Before much of this was understood, the One Hundred Fifty-Three revealed itself. The drives started buying yellow paint and painting two yellow
X'
s anywhere within reach. They painted nonstop, literally without rest. They didn't sleep, didn't eat. Several wandered into traffic as they were painting. Some wandered off cliffs. A few electrocuted themselves.

There was no record of them being joined, but this was just before the government merger, and Vitalcorp was a behemoth, distorting international politics. Excellence, combining the resources of a titanic corporation and the personal influence of twelve wealthy and highly connected individuals, was among the most powerful people in the world. Vitalcorp really had nothing to fear, even in the face of the scandal.

To end the painting incident, Vitalcorp put Music's eighty-one remaining drives on ice and seized all of Music's corpses. Two years later (and after the government takeover), Vitalcorp revealed that Music had fallen victim to a previously unknown pathological agent. Vitalcorp's forensic team found the same prion, a self-replicating form of protein, in the brains of each of Music's drives. Unlike other prions, which replicate until the host dies or until all available raw material—e.g., the brain matter within a given skull—is altered, this one appeared to reach a nonlethal steady state and then stop growing. In each drive autopsied, examiners found a lattice of interconnecting molecules so similar as to be a statistically impossible expression of prion growth. And yet there they all were.

The disease, referred to in most research as “reflective spongiform encephalopathy,” was termed a meme virus by the popular press, though it only distantly implicated memes and was not in any way a virus. Infected joins would develop an absolute fixation on an idea or complex of ideas. Vitalcorp said that in the previous two years it had found other cases, though it did not release evidence. It provided studies showing that joins of fewer than twenty active drives are perfectly safe. The Roman numeral for twenty—two
X'
s—in yellow became a new symbol of terror.

Many years after those events
began to change the world, Leap was created through an act of love—the joining of Ian, who became Leap One, and Aurora, who became Leap Two. When the two met, Ian was twenty years old and Aurora was eighteen. They discussed how they both felt about Join in their very first conversation. They fell in love, and with each successive day the two of them grew happier and more certain that they wanted to join.

Aurora's parents were easy to convince. They had divorced when Aurora was in elementary school. Aurora's mother, Colleen, had remained single and hadn't made her mind up one way or the other about Join. Her father, Winston, had spent every penny he possessed to buy into a join with three college-aged women. Aurora's parents were also easy because she didn't really care what they thought.

Ian was an only child, and his mother, Josette, was firmly against it. “No divorce if you join,” she would say. “Why would you eliminate the single greatest satisfaction of marriage?” Ian's father, Josette's second husband, had died that year of a venous thromboembolism.
It should have been detected, but he didn't like doctor visits.