“I’m sorry, too,” Regine says. “But I don’t understand. How can this be your brother? You said he was –”
“Still alive,” Seth says. “I grew up with him. I sat through his clarinet lessons. Tomasz reminds me of him so much I can hardly look at him sometimes.”
“But . . .” He can hear Regine trying to keep the impatience out of her voice. “But he’s here. He died. In the real world.”
“If this is real,” Tomasz says.
“We’re going to have to say it is sometime,” Regine snaps. “I know I’m real, and that’s all I’ve got to go on. You’ve got to hang on to something.” And then she says it again. “You’ve got to hang on to something.”
“So how can this have happened?” Tomasz says.
Seth doesn’t turn away from the tombstone. “My parents,” he says, “were given a choice.”
“You’ve heard about Lethe?” the woman from the Council asked them over the same dinner table where Officer Rashadi had broken the news just three nights before.
Seth’s mother frowned. “The place in Scotland?”
“No, that’s Leith,” his father said, his words slurred. He nodded at the woman from the Council. “You mean Lethe.” He pronounced it Lee-Thee. “The river of forgetfulness in Hades. So the dead don’t remember their former lives and spend eternity mourning them.”
The woman from the Council didn’t look too happy to have been corrected, but Seth saw her choose to ignore this. “Indeed. It’s also the name of the process people have started to undertake when they enter the Link.”
“Enter and don’t come out again,” his mother said, her voice even, her eyes on the table in front of her.
“Yes,” said the woman from the Council.
“They just give up their lives,” his mother said, but it was a question, too.
“Not give them up. Exchange them. For a chance to make something out of themselves and their futures in a world that hasn’t been so damaged.” The woman’s posture changed to a less formal one, one that seemed to suggest she was going to share something secret with them, off the record. “You’ve seen how things are. How they’re going. And it’s only getting worse and faster. The economy. The environment. The wars. The epidemics. Is there really any question about why people are wanting to start over? In a place where at least they’ve got a fair shot?”
“People say it’s as bad as this world –”
“Not even close. You can’t stop a human from acting like a human, of course, but compared to what we have now, it’s paradise. A paradise of second chances.”
“You never get old and you never die,” his father said, sounding as if he was quoting something.
“Actually, no,” the woman from the Council said. “We can’t perform those kinds of miracles. Yet. The human mind can’t quite take it. But everything else is fully automated. You’ll be under permanent guard. You’ll get medical treatment when you need it. Your bodies will remain physically viable, including keeping your muscles toned, and we’ve just developed a hormone to keep your hair and nails from growing. We’re even on the threshold of actual reproduction and childbirth. This really is our best hope for the future.”
“What’s in it for you?” his mother asked. “Who gains?”
“We all do,” the woman from the Council said immediately. “It takes power, sure, but far less than humans walking around do. We shut off everything except the connection to the chambers, and we take what we’ve got left and put it to proper use. At the very least, we sleep our way through disaster and come out the other side.” She leaned forward. “I’ll be honest with you. There’ll come a day, and soon, when you may not have a choice, when even I don’t have a choice. Best to do it now, on your own terms.”
His mother looked at her carefully. “And you’re saying we’ll have Owen back?”
The woman got a funny little smile on her face. It was meant to be kind, understanding, but even Seth, sitting unobserved at the far corner of the table, could see that it was also a smile of triumph. The woman from the Council had won, and Seth hadn’t even known they were fighting.
“The simulation programming is a prototype,” the woman said. “I want to stress that.”
“‘Yet’,” his father said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said ‘yet’ earlier about miracles. This is the ‘yet’, isn’t it?”
“If you like,” the woman said, in a way that made it clear she didn’t like it. “But I can tell you two things. One, Lethe will make sure you never, ever know the difference, and two, the results we’ve had so far in initial testing have been beyond the participants’ wildest dreams.”
“And we’ll just . . . forget this all ever happened?” his mother said.
The woman from the Council’s mouth went tight. “Not quite.”
“Not quite?” his mother said, suddenly harsh. “I don’t want to remember anything. What the hell do you mean, not quite?”
“Lethe is a subtle process, one with amazing properties. But it has to work with what’s already in you. It can’t erase memories as big and important as what’s just happened –”
“Then what’s the goddamn point of it?”
“ – but what it can do is give you an alternative outcome.”
There was a silence. “What do you mean?” his father finally asked.
“Any detail I would give you here would be speculation until we got your nodes implanted and did a full actualization, but I suspect that you would probably remember the abduction of your son –”
His mother made a scoffing sound.
“ – but that it would have a much happier ending. He would be found, alive, possibly injured, possibly in need of recovery and rehabilitation – this would be what Lethe would have you believe as you adjusted to the new Owen – but he would no longer be dead. He would be created from your memories of him, and he would grow and develop and respond to you, just as your son would have. For all intents and purposes, he’d be alive again. So much so, you’d never know the difference.”
His mother started to speak but needed to clear her throat. “Would I be able to touch him?” she asked, her voice rough. “Would I be able to smell him?” She covered her mouth with her hand, unable to go on.