“I think you had some Lethe,” Seth says. “It was starting to work but hadn’t got very far. But if you were to go back there with no Lethe at all –”
“It is too late,” Tomasz says. “You are already dead there.”
“What’s dead there, though? There was a malfunction. A simulation of me died. A simulation that knew a whole lot less than I do now.”
Tomasz is shaking his head. “I do not see how it can work. How you will not just go back and die there and then die here and be lost to us.”
“I’m not sure, either,” Seth says, “but doesn’t it feel like it might work? Regine went back and remembered who she was. And then, Tomasz, we got her out again.”
Tomasz starts to argue, but then his eyebrows raise, in surprise and a little delight. “You mean, you would come back?”
Seth looks at him, then looks at Regine, who’s still staring at him, hostile, he can see, but maybe hopeful, too.
“Absolutely, I’d come back,” he says.
75
Tomasz licks his lips, and Seth can almost see him thinking. “But how would you do it, though?”
“Well,” Seth says, starting up the display on Regine’s coffin, “I’ve been thinking about it. This one’s broken. Regine must have damaged it when she came out of it.”
“I thought I was fighting someone,” Regine says. “Lots of kicking and pushing.”
“Yes,” Tomasz says, “that sounds like you.”
“But I’ve been reading this,” Seth says, tapping the display. “Half of it doesn’t make sense, but it looks like putting someone back in there isn’t actually all that difficult.” He presses a box, and the coffin creaks open, not smoothly like the ones in the prison did. Regine and Tomasz come round to look. Seth picks up a particular tube. “This is Lethe, I think.”
“You think?” Regine says.
“You had it in your mouth. I think you breathe it in. And when I interrupted the process, you didn’t get the full amount. You got just enough to make you aware without being able to fight it.”
“But if you went back without breathing in the tube . . .” Tomasz says.
“Maybe you’d remember everything. Maybe you’d remember who you were and where you were and maybe, maybe, you’d be able to do what you used to do when the online world first started. Go in and out as you pleased.”
But Regine is already shaking her head. “There’s no way you can be sure that’d happen. You’d probably just go back and die over and over again like I did, and even if you didn’t, how do you know you wouldn’t get stuck? I don’t remember any doors marked EXIT.”
“I’d have the two of you here,” Seth says.
“We could pull you out if anything went wrong,” Tomasz says.
“You don’t know that we could,” Regine says. “Not if you were all the way in. We had to die to get here.”
“I got you back. And people used to go back and forth all the time. We could try really brief trips to start –”
“If you could even get it to work. And why? Why go back at all? It’s not real.”
Seth takes a deep breath. This is the big question. He wonders if he’s as sure as he thinks he is. “Because I know more now,” he says. “It felt like the world had closed down to nothing, but that wasn’t true, was it? I mean, it’s not perfect, but I was wrong about how hopeless it was. By accident, we all got a second chance. I want to take it.”
“And you want to see your Good Man again,” Tomasz says.
“Yes. I can’t lie. My body is here, but he’s across an ocean and a continent, so if I want to see him again, I have to go back. And I want to find him somehow. Tell him I understand. Find H, too. Even Monica.”
“But you’re dead there,” Regine insists. “You died last week or whenever it was. I’ve been dead there for months –”
“But it’s also winter where I live there. It sure as hell isn’t winter here. Like I said, maybe time doesn’t work the same way. You went back before your death. And if you could go back knowing enough to change things –”
“Then all of those people who went to your funeral are just going to go, Whoops, our mistake?”
“They changed the memories of everyone who knew my brother to make it seem like he hadn’t died. Don’t you think it could be re-adjusted even easier for a real live person? I mean, there’s got to be glitches all the time, people remembering stuff they shouldn’t –”
“Could we go back to any time?” Tomasz interrupts. “I could go back before my mama talked to the bad men. I could save her. . . .” He falters. “But of course she died there properly. She would be dead for real for a very long time.”
“I’m sorry, Tomasz,” Seth says. “I don’t think it would work, anyway. There was a specific time on the panel when the Driver put Regine back in the coffin, and it’s the same one here.” He turns on the display again and points to a date. “I can’t find any way at all to change it. I think we’ve only got a loophole because it needed to fix a mistake. That’s what its job was, after all.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Regine says.
“If you’ve got a better explanation, I’m willing to hear it.”
She sighs. “I wish this was all happening in your head.”
“Look,” Seth says, “I may be completely wrong, but don’t you think it’s worth a try? Can you imagine what it would be like if we could go back and forth from there to here? We could tell people. We could remind them of who they were.”
“They wouldn’t want to hear it,” Regine says.
“Some of them wouldn’t, but others might. And if we found a way to wake them up –”
“They wouldn’t want to come,” Regine says. “Why the hell would they want to leave a world where everything works for one where everything’s dead?”
“Your mother might want to. If we could find a way in and out, maybe –”
He stops because she looks like she wants to hit him. “Don’t you talk about my mother,” she says. “Don’t you promise things about her that can never be.”
“I didn’t mean –”
But she’s sitting back down in her chair, blinking away angry tears. “People are harder to save than you think. And you keep forgetting they went there for a reason. The world is over.”