Chapter Twenty-NineGhosts

Nine ghosts on the quad, and it wasn't even lunchtime. Soph counted them on Friday, the week the Link went on sale. One girl stopped to explain hers. Her sister, who couldn't come to Stanford herself. Wasn't it amazing?

It was. Soph said so. She wasn't going to tell a stranger she'd been doing it for two years, though she wanted to more than she liked to admit.

April was three months late for the company and nine months early for Max. She agreed to a limited release after the independent hardware review. No stimulation boards in the units sold. People with recalled helmets wrote to complain that the old ones did more. Well, yes. Max read some of the messages out to Richard.

"Will an update bring the touch back?" a man asked at the briefing.

"There's nothing left in there to update. We took it out," Max said.

She answered another question before leaving for one of the meetings about her experimental work. That was suspended. Atom's care could continue under outside clinical supervision; an order protected the power, staff and supplies. Max had the old notebooks in her bag again. Soph was getting used to seeing her carry them.

Richard had stopped running Solenoid. The borrower was closed, its customers notified, and there were still two investigations. Soph had to give a statement about the mill. Rat did the tavern. There were boxes for who made the tool and who carried it. Where did she put the boy's name? The lawyer added a page, and Soph checked it before signing.

On the way home she saw a ghost in the back of a car, trying to point something out to the driver. She looked away. She had counted enough for one day.

In May Eliza could finally tell her own lawyer what to do. Only about Sentek's equipment, the lawyer explained. She sent three pages about everything the ruling didn't settle: citizenship, identity papers, the next court. Eliza asked her to put dates beside the things they would do later. She didn't much like later anymore.

The barkeep said welcome to the judge, apologized, and did it again after the recess. Five months awake, and it still came out of his mouth. He wanted to visit the tavern again, he told her, but could he keep his new room? He liked the room.

Jeff had spent January arranging the move. Every client needed to stop at the same point so he could collect the state without another part going ahead. They tried it on ordinary characters, then a small piece Eliza lent from herself. Only after the readbacks agreed did he ask the serving boy. The boy wanted a hill. Jeff showed him one through a window and asked several times whether it was the hill he meant.

They stopped the old instance, carried all its state across and resumed it once. The boy remembered Jeff asking six times and complained about it before walking past Eliza up the hill. She waited at the bottom. He knew where to find her when he was ready.

The barkeep followed. Neither left an old self awake in Alius. The fragments from Sentek stayed separate; Eliza knew some of them, but wasn't ready to merge them, especially the ones that disagreed. The ISIS drives remained preserved while they worked out safe restoration. Villanueva kept both on the monthly agenda. No news was still a reason to ask.

For her birthday Eliza chose the day of the copy. She asked the lawyer to put the passenger's name beside hers in the raid record. The same name? For now, she said. She didn't choose another one.

"I haven't been uploaded," Atom said again. "My brain's still in there. That's why it's taking so long."

He'd asked to move in January. By June the medical review was done, the money was out of Solenoid, and another team knew how to run the pumps. In between there were hearings, where he said the same things to different people. Richard heard most of them. He also heard what Atom thought of having his visits switched off.

"The live access had to go," Richard said.

"I know, Dad. I know that. Why couldn't I call you?"

Richard didn't answer that one right away.

"You could have told me what I could still do."

"Yes. I could have."

That helped. Atom hadn't thought it would, after waiting so long to hear him say it. At the new facility there were six trustees to deal with the money and equipment, including Richard. Treatment was Atom's decision. An independent advocate would help if he needed to challenge a restriction. Annoying someone wasn't a reason to cut off his calls, which he was glad to have in writing. Max made him test the call button before signing. Someone answered. Good.

A medical crew took him to Stanford, where the second set of pumps was already running. They went past a bakery he liked.

"I'm not taking you through a drive-through," Max said.

"It doesn't have one. I used to go there."

By evening he was beside the mainframe. Richard stayed at the glass after the technicians left. Villanueva found him a chair.

Atom could also request an approved camera as his viewpoint through the restricted picture-and-sound terminal. Public Links still bound a visitor to a person in frames. His clinical interface didn't have to. He chose Richard's ten-year-old weather camera on the lakehouse dock.

He didn't tell Soph he was going.

That afternoon he wasn't in her frames. She took them off and tried again. For a few seconds she was sixteen in a hospital bed. Then she remembered to look in the cottage. He had spent weeks teaching the interface his handwriting and used it now for a note. Gone to the lake. Back for dinner. Don't come. Love you.

Don't come! She laughed. He had gone somewhere and actually told her not to follow. She left the frames on the table and went to get lunch, almost turning back for them on the stairs before remembering she didn't need to.

At dinner he reported a board missing from the dock, high water and wolf tracks by the boathouse. He watched the light for an hour. She waited for the important part. It was fine, he said, only the lake, he didn't know what he expected.

"Was it good?" said Soph.

"I'd like to go again," said Atom. "With you next time."

"I'd like that," said Soph.

She had spent several weeks being his friend, going home before the visit became difficult. She talked to Eliza without him there. Once they spent most of the time complaining about him and laughing. Soph enjoyed it, then felt bad about enjoying it, which was becoming a familiar way to feel.

"I want to try again," she told him now. "I know you love her. I'm not asking you to stop."

He waited.

"Tell me when something changes. Before everybody else knows. And when we're out together, you can't keep half a conversation going with her."

"Yes."

"And I want to talk to her about it myself. You can go bother Gideon while we do."

"I will."

Soph reached for her bag. "And the first date can be something you haven't built. I'm tired of you knowing where everything is."

Daun came through the doors at Vancouver International on the last day of June with one bag and a return flight booked for ten days later. She had traded ten days of shifts with Jeong. Rat had covered the cost of a substitute ranger from the business account. The squad still expected its Thursday payments.

Rat was by the pillar, where she had been for two hours. Buying a shirt had seemed a good idea until she put it on. She should have worn the old one. She kept her hands in her pockets to stop herself pulling at it, then took them out whenever the doors opened.

Daun checked the photograph on her phone and came over. Rat forgot to ask about the flight.

"You didn't say you were this tall," Daun said.

She thought she had, but they could argue about it another time. Daun looked at the shirt.

"You bought that for this."

"Yeah."

"Stop pulling it. Here."

Rat took the bag a little too late, making it awkward. It was heavy for ten days. Daun wanted to know whether it was cold. Rat said it was June, then had to explain that winter was different. She had told her it was cold. There was a stove anyway.

"Good. Show me the stove."

At the door Daun took the other handle. Rat had imagined this part too, without making any allowance for a bag between them. They carried it to the curb.

On Saturday in July Soph drove past the entrance to her father's care home, went another mile to the next vineyard, and turned around. She'd seen it the first time. She didn't know why she kept driving.

She'd arranged the visit yesterday and called Max on the way. Some days he knew people. Some days he didn't. Max had told her before, but Soph made her say it again.

The garden was overgrown, except for the paths. Her father had a bench and a closed sketchbook. Gray hair, much longer than she remembered, and her own nose. She'd kept him young in her head by looking at his painting. It was a shock to find that he hadn't stayed that way.

"Hi," Soph said.

"Hello," her father said.

He seemed to be waiting for someone behind her. She hung on to her bag.

"I'm Sophia."

"I know who you are. You've got my nose. Sorry about that. Your mother's was better."

He moved the sketchbook, and she sat down before she could change her mind. There was paint beside his thumbnail. She ought to ask about the sketchbook. Instead she opened her bag and got the frames out.

"Mom made these. Well, Mom and Richard. I've been working on them too. And Atom. He's a boy."

Oh, she was doing a terrible job. Her father took them from her and turned them over.

"The eye things! She used to draw these on napkins when you were small. I kept some."

"Would you like to try them? I brought a place to show you."

"Alright. How do they go?"

She helped him put them on, put her own on, and took the rig out of her bag.

Atom built the scene from ten years of the dock's weather camera. She chose sunset. Gold on the water, gray where the trees reached across it. The skiff was tied up beside a little stone on the dock. Atom hadn't mentioned putting that in.

Her father turned toward the far shore. Good, he could see it. She'd been about to ask whether the frames were working.

"Wrong blue," he said.

She laughed, then had to wipe her face.

"Atom said that about your painting. He made his own and got it wrong too."

"I never got it. You look up and it's changed again. Then you try to fix it and you've spoiled the bit that was any good."

He reached for the frames, but left them on.

"Tell your mother I like these."

"I will."

They sat on the bench in the garden and on the dock at the lake and watched the light go. After a while he said, "There's a stone," and she said, "Yes."

"Is it anything?" he said.

"It's a canoe," she said.

He nodded, as though that were the right answer, and didn't ask.

They went to the lake for real in August.

Richard opened the house to everyone who had helped them that night, then asked Soph who else she wanted to invite. She gave him a list. By the time she finished, he was counting beds and asking whether anyone minded sleeping outside.

Gideon brought a hammock and a beer. Mim came because Max asked. Teo, Priya and Wes broke down twice on the drive. Rat brought Daun down from Canada on her second visit, and she unpacked a stove and asked how many people needed feeding. Max sat with a book she didn't read. Richard went down to the cave with Villanueva, who had come, and showed her the mannequins in their suits and the paintings of bison on the walls. She tried on an old Manipulator and asked him to show her what had replaced it.

Jeff came with copies of the tavern drawings. He and the barkeep had been reconstructing the place from the character's memory, which disagreed with the original map. The barkeep insisted the window had been farther left. Jeff moved it. The serving boy wanted another way out of the kitchen.

A camera and display stood at the end of the dock. The game terminal in the cave connected to the approved visitor system at Stanford. The isolated mainframe sent it pictures and speech through Jeff's window. Eliza could look along the shore. The barkeep could see the porch. The serving boy kept asking Gideon to point the camera farther up the hill.

At sunset Soph sat on the end of the dock with her feet in the water. The cold began to hurt her ankles, but she wasn't ready to pull them out. Atom sat beside her. He wore the duster, translucent at the edges, with his knees up on the boards. She could have looked past him at the water, but she didn't want to. He pointed to the stone beside her foot.

Gideon and Mim spent an afternoon finding it. Atom wanted one like the stone in the frames and told them where to leave it. Now he couldn't pick it up. Soph did that part and held it for him to see.

"It's a canoe," said Atom.

"Yeah," said Soph. "It's a canoe."

She put it in her pocket beside the stone from the last night she was fifteen. The next hearing date was folded in there too. She turned the new stone with her fingers until it was warm.

The trees blackened as the light went, and a wolf called above the house. Daun made Rat laugh on the porch. Gideon was moving the camera again; the boy had seen something on the path.

Eliza asked him to leave it there. For a while the three of them watched the gap between the trees.

Atom stood up. He looked back toward the house as the lights came on, then down at Soph with her feet in the water. She knew that grin. He had thought of something to do, and was about to make it everybody's problem.

"So," he said. "You guys wanna go do a quest or something?"