“Yes. You would. The Link isn’t just a variation of the world. It is the world, put into a safe place. Your jobs would be the same, your house would be the same, your family, your friends – the ones who have already entered it anyway, and again, that’s going to be everyone very soon. It feels and looks completely real because it is completely real.”
“How would we interact with people who aren’t in it, though?” his father asked. His mother scoffed again, as if this was the stupidest question she’d ever heard.
The woman from the Council didn’t blink. “The same way you interact with people who are in it now. That’s one of the cleverest things about it. We’ve flipped it. When you’re there, it’s this world that seems online, and that’s how you interact with it. You send the same e-mails and messages. And if someone in the real world tries to tell you that you’re online, well, Lethe makes you forget again and again.”
Her voice turned more serious. “But, and I mean this, we really are nearing a tipping point. Pretty soon these questions won’t matter, because there won’t be a world here to interact with. We’ll all be there, living out happier lives, in a world that isn’t already used up.”
“I don’t want to live here,” his mother said. “In this town, I mean. In this stupid country. Can you arrange that?”
“Well, again, we can’t just plant you in a whole new life, there’d be no memories to work from, but moving around there is the same as moving around here. If you want to leave, then you can leave.”
“I want to leave.” His mother looked around the sitting room again. “I will leave.”
“The practicalities are simple,” the woman from the Council said. “We get the nodes implanted, get your memories actualized, and then we place you in the sleeping chambers. We’re reaching capacity in our current facility, but we’re expanding all the time. If we need to, we can easily install one here in your own home and move you when space becomes available.”
“That easy?” his father asked.
“I could manage it within the week,” the woman said. “You could see your son again, and all this pain you feel now would be gone.”
His mother and father were silent for a moment, then they looked at each other. His father took his mother’s hand. She resisted at first, but he held on and eventually she let him.
“He wouldn’t be real,” his father whispered. “He’d be a program.”
“You wouldn’t know,” the woman from the Council said. “You’d never ever know.”
“I can’t take this, Ted,” his mother said. “I can’t live in a world where he’s gone.” She turned back to the woman. “When can we start?”
The woman smiled again. “Right now. I brought the paperwork. You’ll be amazed at how quickly we can get things moving.” She took three large packets out of her briefcase. “One for you, Mrs. Wearing. One for Mr. Wearing. And one for young Seth.”
His parents turned to look at him, and Seth was certain they were surprised to find him sitting there.
“The woman from the Council must have been right,” Seth says after he’s told Regine and Tomasz this story. “There was some kind of tipping point, when the final parts of it happened faster than they expected. No one ever moved me out of my house to the prison.” He looks at Regine. “Or you, either. And no Driver ever came to guard me or you. Whatever systems they meant to set up, they obviously didn’t get all the way done. They had to protect what they could and hope for the best. The world must have been right on the point of collapse.” He breathes. “And then it collapsed.”
“But,” Tomasz says, “you cannot just replace a whole person. Your brother –”
“Yeah,” Regine demands, heat in her voice. “Why would my mother marry my bastard of a stepfather if she could have had my father back?”
“I don’t know,” Seth says. “It’s like you said, every time we find something out, there are a hundred brand-new things we don’t know.” He turns back to the grave. “But you can imagine what happened, maybe. It started as a fun thing to dip in and out of. And then people began staying there, leaving the real world behind, and the governments of the world think, Hang on, this could be useful. Then people started being encouraged to stay, because hey, you’ll save us money and resources and maybe, as a bonus, we’ll try offering you things that aren’t even there anymore. But then maybe everything just got too bad too fast. People were forced to stay, like the woman said, because the world became unlivable.”
“And now everyone is there,” Tomasz says. “Even the ones who wrote the programs that made your brother. No one to fix it. No one to make it better.”
“No,” Seth says, “he never did get better.”
“But no one there knows any different,” Regine says, still sounding angry.
“I’m not sure that’s true, actually,” Seth says. “I think they do know, on some level. They feel something’s not right but refuse to think about it. Haven’t you ever felt like there has to be more? Like there’s more out there somewhere, just beyond your grasp, if you could only get to it . . .”
“All of the time,” Tomasz says quietly. “All of the time I feel this.”
“Everyone does,” Regine says. “Especially when you’re our age.”
“I’ll bet my parents knew,” Seth says. “On some level. That he wasn’t real, no matter how real he seemed. How can you truly forget making a choice that awful? It was there in how they treated me. Like an afterthought. Like a burden, sometimes.” His voice drops. “And I thought they just didn’t forgive me for being there when Owen was taken.”
“Ah,” Tomasz says. “When you said it was little bit your fault.”
Seth places his hand on top of Owen’s grave. “I’ve hardly ever told anyone. The police, who told my parents, but no one else.” He looks up into the sunshine and thinks of Gudmund. “Not even when I could have.”
“What can it matter now, though?” Regine asks. “The truth as you knew it isn’t true.”
He turns to her, surprised. “What do you mean, what can it matter? It changes everything.”
Regine looks incredulous. “Everything’s already changed.”