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whole recruitment into the Stasis to replace your conscript youth with a disloyal impostor from the
outset, or to decline the invitation altogether, and go underground.
But, I. Him. I m not him, exactly.
She let go of his elbow. Not unless you want to be, my love.
Am I your love? Or is he?
That depends which version of you you want to be.
You re telling me that essentially I can only be free of Internal Affairs if I undo what they made me
do.
There s a protocol, she said, looking away. We can reactivate your phone. You don t have to
reenlist in the Stasis if you don t want to. There are berths waiting for all of us on the colony ships
&
But that s just exchanging one sort of reified destiny for another, isn t it? Expansion in space, instead
of time. Why is that any better than, say, freeing the machines, turning over all the available temporal
bandwidth to timelike computing to see if the wild-eyed prophets of artificial intelligence and ghosts
uploaded in the machines were onto something after all?
She looked at him oddly. Do you have any idea how weird you can be at times?
He snorted. Don t worry, I m not serious about that. I know my limits. If I don t do this thing we re
discussing, him upstairs will be annoyed. Because Kafka will have all those naively loyal young
potential me s to send on spy missions, won t he? Pierce took a deep breath. I don t see that there s
any alternative, really. And that s what rankles. I had hoped that the Opposition would be willing to
give me a little more freedom of action than Kafka, that s all. He felt the ghostly touch of a bunch of
raisin-wrinkled grape joints holding his preteen wrists, showing him how to cast a line. He owed it to
Grandpa, he felt: to leave his own children a universe with elbow room unconstrained by the
thumbcuffs of absolute history. Will you still be here when I get back?
She regarded him gravely. Will you still want to see me afterward?
Of course.
See you later, then. She smiled as she stood up, then departed.
He stared at the spot where she d been sitting for what seemed like a long, long time. But when he
tried to remember her face all he could see was the two of them, Xiri and Yarrow, superimposed.
Saying Good-bye to Now
Twenty years in Stasis. Numerous deaths, many of them self-inflicted, ordered with the callous
detachment of self-appointed gods. They feed into the unquiet conscience of a man who knows he
could have been better, can still be better if only he can untangle the Gordian knot of his destiny
after it s been tied up and handed to him by people he s coming to despise.
That s you in a nutshell, Pierce.
You re at a bleak crossroads, surrounded by lovers and allies and oh, so isolated in your moment of
destiny. Who are you going to be, really? Who do you want to be?
All the myriad ways will lie before you, all the roads not taken at your back: who do you want to be?
You have met your elder self, the man-machine at the center of an intrigue that might never exist if
Kafka gets his way. And you ll have mapped out the scope of the rift with Xiri, itself rooted in her
despair at Stasis. You can examine your life with merciless, refreshing clarity, and find it wanting if
you wish. You can even unmake your mistakes: let Grandpa flower, prune back your frightened
teenage nightmare of murder. You can step off the murderous infinite roundabout whenever you
please, resign the game or rejoin and play to win but the question you ve only recently begun to ask
is, who writes the rules?
Who do you want to be?
The snow falls silently around you as you stand in darkness, knee-deep in the frosted weeds lining the
ditch by the railroad tracks. Alone in the night, a young man walks between islands of light. A
headhunter stalks him unseen, another young man with a heart full of fears and ears stuffed with lies.
There s a knife in his sleeve and a pebble-sized machine in his pocket, and you know what he means
to do, and what will come of it. And you know what you need to do.
And now it s your turn to start making history &
(THE END)
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