Zima Blue and Other Stories

  'Easy, boyo. It's coming back. The software's rerouting things one spinal nerve at a time. Just hold on there and it'll be fine.'

  Mick tried mumbling something in reply, but his jaw wasn't working properly either. Yet it would come, as Joe had promised. On any given day, thousands of recipients went through this exact procedure without blinking an eyelid. Many of them were people who'd already done it hundreds of times before. Nervelinking was almost insanely safe. Far safer than any form of physical travel, that was certain.

  He tried moving his arm again. This time it obeyed without hesitation.

  'How are you feeling?' Andrea asked.

  Once more he tried speaking. His jaw was stiff, his tongue thick and uncooperative, but he managed to make some sounds. 'Okay. Felt better.'

  'They say it's easier the second time. Much easier the third.'

  'How long?'

  'You went under on Sunday of last week. It's Sunday again now,' Joe said.

  A full week. Exactly the way they'd planned it.

  'I'm quite hungry,' Mick said.

  'Everyone's always hungry when they come out of the coma,' Joe said. 'It's hard to get enough nourishment into the host body. We'll get you sorted out, though.'

  Mick turned his head to look at Joe, waiting for his eyes to find grudging focus. 'Joe,' he said. 'Everything's all right, isn't it? No complications, nothing to worry about?'

  'No problems at all,' Joe said.

  'Then would you mind giving Andrea and me a moment alone?'

  Joe held up his hand in hasty acknowledgement and left the room, off on some plausible errand. He shut the door quietly behind him.

  'Well?' Mick asked. 'I'm guessing things must have gone okay, or they wouldn't have kept me under for so long.'

  'Things went okay, yes,' Andrea said.

  'Then you met the other Mick? He was here?'

  Andrea nodded heavily. 'He was here. We spent time together.'

  'What did you get up to?'

  'All the usual stuff you or I would've done. Hit the town, walked in the parks, went into the hills, that kind of thing.'

  'How was it?'

  She looked at him guardedly. 'Really, really sad. I didn't really know how to behave, to be honest. Part of me wanted to be all consoling and sympathetic, because he'd lost his wife. But I don't think that's what Mick wanted.'

  'The other Mick,' he corrected gently.

  'Point is, he didn't come back to see me being all weepy. He wanted another week with his wife, the way things used to be. Yes, he wanted to say goodbye, but he didn't want to spend the whole week with the two of us walking around feeling down in the dumps.'

  'So how did you feel?'

  'Miserable. Not as miserable as if I'd lost my husband, of course. But some of his sadness started wearing off on me. I didn't think it was going to . . . I'm not the one who's been bereaved here - but you'd have to be inhuman not to feel something, wouldn't you?'

  'Whatever you felt, don't blame yourself for it. I think it was a wonderful thing you agreed to do.'

  'You too.'

  'I had the easy part,' Mick said.

  Andrea stroked the side of his face. He realised that he needed a good shave. 'How do you feel?' she asked. 'You're nearly him, after all. You know everything he knows.'

  'Except how it feels to lose a wife. And I hope I don't ever find that out. I don't think I can ever really understand what he's going through now. He feels like someone else, a friend, a colleague, someone you'd feel sorry for--'

  'But you're not cut up about what happened to him.'

  Mick thought for a while before responding, not wanting to give the glib, automatic answer, no matter how comforting it might have been. 'No. I wish it hadn't happened . . . but you're still here. We can still be together, if we want. We'll carry on with our lives, and in a few months we'll hardly ever think of that accident. The other Mick isn't me. He isn't even anyone we'll ever hear from again. He's gone. He might as well not exist.'

  'But he does. Just because we can't communicate any more . . . he is still out there.'

  'That's what the theory says.' Mick narrowed his eyes. 'Why? What difference does it really make, to us?'

  'None at all, I suppose.' Again that guarded look. 'But there's something I have to tell you, something you have to understand.'

  There was a tone in her voice that troubled Mick, but he did his best not to show it. 'Go on, Andrea.'

  'I made a promise to the other Mick. He's lost something no one can ever replace, and I wanted to do something, anything, to make it easier for him. Because of that, Mick and I came to an arrangement. Once a year, I'm going to go away for a day. For that day, and that day only, I'm going somewhere private where I'm going to be thinking about the other Mick. About what he's been doing; what kind of life he's had; whether he's happy or sad. And I'm going to be alone. I don't want you to follow me, Mick. You have to promise me that.'

  'You could tell me,' he said. 'There doesn't have to be secrets.'

  'I'm telling you now. Don't you think I could have kept it from you if I wanted to?'

  'But I still won't know where--'

  'You don't need to. This is a secret between me and the other Mick. Me and the other you.' She must have read something in his expression, something he had hoped wasn't there, because her tone turned grave. 'And you need to find a way to deal with that, because it isn't negotiable. I already made that promise.'

  'And Andrea Leighton doesn't break promises.'

  'No,' she said, softening her look with a sweet half-smile. 'She doesn't. Especially not to Mick Leighton. Whichever one it happens to be.'

  They kissed.

  Later, when Andrea was out of the room while Joe ran some more post-immersion tests, Mick peeled off a yellow Post-it note that had been left on one of the keyboards. There was something written on the note, in neat, blue ink. Instantly he recognised Andrea's handwriting: he'd seen it often enough on the message board in their kitchen. But the writing itself - SO0122215-meant nothing to him.

  'Joe,' he asked casually. 'Is this something of yours?'

  Joe glanced over from his desk, his eyes freezing on the small rectangle of yellow paper.

  'No, that's what Andrea asked--' Joe began, then caught himself. 'Look, it's nothing. I meant to bin it, but--'

  'It's a message to the other Mick, right?'

  Joe looked around, as if Andrea might still be hiding in the room or about to reappear. 'We were down to the last few usable bits. The other Mick had just sent his last words through. Andrea asked me to send that response.'

  'Did she tell you what it meant?'

  Joe looked defensive. 'I just typed it. I didn't ask. Thought it was between you and her. I mean, between the other Mick and her.'

  'It's okay,' Mick said. 'You were right not to ask.'

  He looked at the message again, and something fell solidly into place. It had taken a few moments, but he recognised the code for what it was now, as some damp and windswept memory filtered up from the past. The numbers formed a grid reference on an Ordnance Survey map. It was the kind Andrea and he had used when they went on their walking expeditions. The reference even looked vaguely familiar. He stared at the numbers, feeling as if they were about to give up their secret. Wherever it was, he'd been there, or somewhere near. It wouldn't be hard to look it up. He wouldn't even need the Post-it note. He'd always had a good memory for numbers.

  Footsteps approached, echoing along the linoleum-floored hallway that led to the lab.

  'It's Andrea,' Joe said.

  Mick folded the Post-it note until the message was no longer visible. He flicked it in Joe's direction, knowing that it was none of his business any more.

  'Bin it.'

  'You sure?'

  From now on there was always going to be a part of his wife's life that didn't involve him, even if it was only for one day a year. He would just have to find a way to live with that.

  Things could have been worse, after all. r />
  'I'm sure,' he said.

  Unlike a lot of my stuff, 'Signal to Noise' is set on Earth in the relatively near future. I probably do more of these stories than is generally appreciated - I'm not exclusively a writer of galaxy-spanning New Space Opera - but I'll admit that most of my pieces do tend to take place off-Earth. It's not for want of trying, but most of my attempts at writing near-future SF have resulted in abandoned stories and a lot of personal grief and frustration. I don't know why this should be the case. I like reading that kind of SF as much as I like the epic, big-canvas stuff. I think I'm alive to the world around me, and as interested in the texture and trajectory of the near future as anyone else. Perhaps it's because, while I think I can do the extrapolative world-building, and I think I can inject the necessary number of sideways-swerves and eyeball-kicks, I have a hard time coming up with the kinds of plot conceit that can form the basis of a story. It could be that I'm just genetically programmed to write stories set in space, in the middle-to-distant future, in which case I'd best accept my fate. 'If it doesn't come naturally, leave it,' as another Al once wrote.

  But I'm not giving up on the near-future just yet.

  CARDIFF AFTERLIFE

  Cardiff's gone.

  The epicentre of the explosion, appropriately enough, was just outside the 'D' gate entrance into the Millennium Stadium. So it went first, before the rest of the city. It was always a mistake, building it where they did. The Taffs always agreed on that. They should have built it west of the city, where people had a chance of actually seeing the thing. By the time I moved down from Hull the Millennium Stadium was a thing you only saw in furtive glimpses, peeking between newer, shinier buildings that had gone up around it during the thirty years since it was opened.

  Well anyway. It's gone now. Problem is, so has everything else.

  I presenced into Cardiff less than a day after the atrocity. Most civilians - whether they were in that timeline or not - couldn't get near what was left of the city. But because of my connection to the cold-calling project, and because so much of our equipment was in the university basement at the time of the detonation, I got a security pass and freedom to wander as I chose. I couldn't presence in via a live body, not with the radiation levels as high as they were, and I didn't fancy (though it was always an option) using a recently deceased corpse, puppeted back to life by electrical stimulation. So I presenced via a robot, a clunking military-grade thing with tracks and arms and armour shielding. It was like a souped-up version of the kind of thing the army used to use to defuse bombs, back when terrorists were content with blowing up small things like cars and buildings.

  From the point where I assumed control of the machine, it took six hours to creep and crawl through the devastation to the remains of the university labs. There were other robots about, there were Chinook helicopters scudding through the mustard-yellow sky and a few soldiers and government personnel in full protective gear, but I didn't see anyone else alive. Apart from a few stragglers who didn't want rescuing, everyone who had survived the blast was now being treated in the emergency field clinics beyond the radiation zone. Tens of thousands had died in the first twelve hours. For tens of thousands more, the prognosis wasn't exactly rosy.

  Because our equipment was important, we'd taken pains to protect it against all eventualities. A plane could crash into the university and we wouldn't feel it down in the basement with the cold-calling machines. Cardiff could have a magnitude eight earthquake and the instruments wouldn't register more than a blip. Terrorists letting off a homemade atom bomb was at the extreme limit of what we could reasonably protect ourselves against, but it had still been factored into the plans.

  Better safe than sorry, eh? Not (we told ourselves) that it would ever happen.

  So what had survived? Fuck all, truth to tell. The surface buildings were scorched rubble. It took an hour of digging before I found the secure, pressure-tight hatchway that led into the basement. I opened it (I knew the keycode, of course) and managed to get the robot down the stairs, its tracks orientating to keep the body upright even as it descended.

  What did I find?

  Me, for a start. I'd been on duty in the version of Cardiff that had taken the hit, just as I was on duty at the time in the version that hadn't. And, miracle of miracles, the cold-calling machines were still running, being fed by a backup generator in a separate part of the basement.

  Actually, it wasn't a miracle at all. I knew at least one of the machines had to be running, or we wouldn't have been able to establish the cross-link that permitted presencing. The question was, how stable was that cross-link? Was it going to hold out for another five or six days, or pop at any moment?

  No use asking me, Joe Liversedge. I was dead to the world. Literally: when the robot encountered my body, it was slumped over a workstation console. I'd been the only person down in the lab at the time, since it was a Sunday and most of the other departmental staff didn't work weekends if they could help it. Me, I was a proper little workaholic.

  'Paid for it now, didn't you, you silly sod,' I told the corpse, speaking through the robot's voice system. 'You daft bugger, Joe. Why couldn't you have gone with Mick to that beer festival in Stoke?'

  Arguing with a corpse, of course, doesn't tend to get you very far.

  It wasn't immediately obvious why I'd died. The life-support system was supposed to be able to keep us alive in the basement for weeks on end. Then I noticed that there was a note in my - Joe's - handwriting, next to him.

  'Dear Joe,' it said. 'Air fucked - dodgy seal, I reckon. But machines okay. Link holding. Cheerio, old mate - it's been a blast. Yer pal, Joe.'

  Followed by:

  'PS - have a round on me.'

  Clutched in his hand was a twenty pound note. Nice touch. When was the last time twenty quid got you more than a pint and a packet of crisps? Typical tight-arsed Yorkshireman, as Mick would have said.

  I couldn't take the money back with me. But I suppose it was the thought that counted.

  Maybe I need to back up a bit.

  If it seems I was acting more than a little oddly on being confronted with my own corpse, there are perfectly sound reasons for that. Thing is, it isn't the first time I've met my counterpart - another version of me, Joe Liversedge. In fact, it happens all the time. So much so that I've become more than a little hardened to the idea that there are multiple copies of 'me' out there, going on with their own lives. If one of us dies, then there are still a lot more carrying on. I know that. So did the version of me in the basement.

  Twelve years ago, my team at Cardiff University was the first to open a portal into a parallel world. We did it with one of the big machines in the basement - 'cold-calling' across quantum reality until we established a lock with an identical copy of that machine in another version of the lab, in another version of Cardiff. The way it works, the two Cardiffs are identical at the moment the lock is established - and everyone living in those two Cardiffs has exactly the same identity, exactly the same past. But from the moment the lock is established, the two worlds start peeling apart. Although both versions of me had come into the lab on a Sunday, the one in the basement had a shaving nick on his right cheek and a different shirt on. We were only a couple of days into the lock. By the end of the week, the two histories would have pulled so far apart that Cardiff City might get a win in one and lose in the other. Having terrorists let off a bomb in one Cardiff and not the other was a huge deviation to happen at this point in the lock, but sometimes that was how it played out. I wondered what had happened to our terrorists - had their bomb not worked, or had Secret Services caught up with them before they had a chance to let it off? No one was saying much yet, although there were rumours of 'intelligence leads'.

  Big-scale changes or not, sooner or later the cumulative differences would become so acute that the quantum link couldn't be sustained. The portal closes on that world, leaving its occupants to carry on with their lives without being in contact with ours. Eventually we'
d establish a lock with another Cardiff and begin the whole thing again. And always it was me, Joe Liversedge, who I spoke to the first time.

  It does things to you, that. It's why Rachel left me, in the end. She said she couldn't deal with living with a man who had such a warped take on reality, let alone my own mortality.

  'Do you talk about me behind my back?' she'd asked. 'The two of you, comparing notes?'