Wake Up

The first thing was the air.

It went down into him like cold water: long, clean, deep, all the way to the bottom of his lungs and past it. It did not catch. It did not scrape. It did not stop halfway and turn back, as it had for two years, at the edge of a wall that no longer existed. It simply went in, and filled him, and went out again, and the next one came after it as easy as a tide.

Archie lay with his eyes shut and breathed.

He did it six times. He did it seven. He counted them, as he had counted steps and heartbeats and the stones of a courtyard, and when he had counted twenty he stopped counting and only lay there, with the sheet against his chin and a mask over his mouth, and his heart thudding slow and strong against the mattress.

It doesn't hurt, he thought.

It doesn't hurt anywhere.

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling was white. It was the ceiling he knew, a chapel ceiling gone to a hospital's, with a shallow vault and a long cool tube of light. The pod was open. Its glass hood had been drawn back, and the cold bright air of the Gate chamber poured over him, smelling of ozone and disinfectant and, faintly, absurdly, of coffee.

Someone sobbed.

It was a sound he knew. He turned his head.

…

She was in the pod beside his.

She lay on her back in a pale blue gown with her hair spread out on the pillow and her hands clenched at her sides. Her eyes were open. They were fixed on the vaulted ceiling, wide and dark and shining. Tears were running out of the corners and down into her ears, and she did not seem to know it. Her mouth was open on a long shaking breath.

"Zoe," he said.

His voice came out as a croak. It cracked in the middle. He tried again.

"Zoe."

She turned her head.

For one second her face was empty. It was the blank, vast, bewildered look of someone who has been woken from a dream so deep that she cannot tell which world she is in. He saw it, and his heart stopped. He saw her eyes travel over his face, and he thought, with a terror that went through him like cold iron: She won't know me. This is the one where she doesn't.

Then her face broke.

"Archie?" she said.

It was a tiny, cracked, disbelieving whisper. Then she heard it herself, and a laugh burst out of her, and she said it again, higher, wetter. "Archie?"

"Here."

"Is it you?"

"It's me."

"Say something."

"What?"

"Anything. I don't care. Say it's you."

"It's me," said Archie. "It's me. I'm here. I'm right here."

She made a noise he had never heard.

It was half laughter and half sob, a kind of whoop, and she flung herself sideways in the narrow pod and out of it, tangled in her sheet, and landed on her knees on the cold floor between the two beds. She grabbed his hand. She grabbed his face. She kissed his forehead, hard, and his cheek, and his chin, and the corner of his mouth, laughing and crying so that she could hardly breathe, and he caught her by the shoulders and held her.

"I thought," she gulped. "I thought you'd be the one who didn't come."

"I'm here."

"I know. I know. You almost held the door. You said it like a man in a movie," she was laughing so hard she could hardly speak, "and then you didn't, you held my hand, and I never, I never thought it would work."

"Neither did I."

"No?"

"No." He pulled her down against him. "But it did."

She buried her face in his neck.

…

"Okay," said a flat voice, from the third pod.

Jin sat bolt upright.

He had his glasses on. They were whole. That was the first thing Archie saw, and the second was that the thin man's face was gray and bewildered and slack. He sat among his tangled blankets with his fists in his lap, staring straight in front of him, without a flicker, for the space of five whole seconds.

Then he spoke.

"That," said Jin, "was the single worst user experience of my entire life."

There was a pause.

From the fourth pod, there came a strangled noise.

It started as a wheeze. It built, steadily, through a squeak and a snort, until a tall figure sat up in the last bed with both hands pressed over his mouth. His eyes were screwed shut. His shoulders were shaking. He rocked back and forth, and a high helpless whoop escaped between his fingers, and then another, and then he was gone, howling, helpless, doubled over, with tears pouring down his face.

"User experience!" gasped Venn. "Oh my God! User experience!"

"It was a poor interface."

"You can't, you can't say that!"

"Nothing was labeled. The documentation was nonexistent. There was no way to give feedback." Jin's lips began to tremble. "And I'd like to speak to the manager."

Venn sagged sideways on the pillow, wheezing, and slapped the mattress. And then, very suddenly, the laughter changed. It cracked in the middle. He put his face in his hands, and his big shoulders shook, and he wept: great racking helpless sobs, the sobs of a man who has been holding a thing in his chest for a month. Jin's mouth crumpled. He got out of his bed and crossed the floor in his bare feet, and sat down on the edge of Venn's mattress, and put an arm round him.

"I've got legs," said Venn, into his hands.

"I know."

"I've got two."

"I've seen them."

"I can feel my toes. I can feel all of them. I, I, I wiggled them, oh my God, Jin, I can't stop."

"Then don't."

Venn laughed again, wetly. He lifted his head. His beautiful ruined face was wet and red and shining. He looked at Jin, and at Zoe and Archie in a heap on the floor, and flung out his arms, and bellowed, "GROUP HUG!"

They almost got him off the bed.

…

The door at the end of the chamber crashed open.

A little red-haired man in a rumpled white coat came tearing down the aisle at a dead run, with his clipboard in one hand and his spectacles flying off one ear. He skidded on the polished stone. He caught himself on a pillar. He stood there panting in the pool of blue light, and looked at the four of them in a heap on the floor, laughing and crying and trying to climb out of their blankets, and his face did something complicated.

"You're awake," said Otis.

"We're awake!"

"You're, all four, you're actually, the readouts, they said, I thought," he gave up. He threw down the clipboard. "Oh, you idiots. You absolute idiots. Do you know what you've put me through? I haven't slept in nine days! I've lived on vending-machine pretzels! I made a, a promise, I made a promise to a, to a very handsome man in the second pod, and I've kept it, I've been keeping it, and I," his voice cracked. "I thought I was going to have to tell him I'd failed."

"Hey, nerd," said Venn softly.

Otis stopped.

Venn had got to his feet. He stood on the cold stone, long and bare-legged in his hospital gown, with his chest heaving and his dark eyes bright. He walked across the floor. He did it slowly, deliberately, with a faint wondering grin, as a man tries a new pair of shoes. He stopped in front of the little red-haired man, and looked down at him, and Otis looked up.

"You saved our lives," said Venn. "You know that, right?"

"I, well, Dr. Ferrara did most of the, the technical—"

"You saved our lives."

Otis swallowed. His eyes were swimming.

"I know," he said.

Venn bent down, and kissed him on the forehead.

The little man went the color of a beet. He stood absolutely rigid, with his arms at his sides, and his mouth in a small round O, and behind him, from the doorway, a deep unsteady voice said, in an unmistakable accent:

"I told you he would."

…

Luca Ferrara stood on the threshold with his arms round his brother.

They were both in white. Both were barefoot. They clung to one another like men on the deck of a sinking ship, Luca's gaunt cheek against Matteo's silver hair, and between them there was nothing. No breath. No space. They did not speak. They did not need to. They only held on, rocking slightly, in a doorway at the end of a long stone hall, as the light of a hundred candles fell across the two of them like a blessing.

"Matteo," said Luca.

"Fratello."

"Matteo, Matteo, Matteo."

"I know. I know." The thin man was laughing and crying. "Don't. Don't. You'll make me, you will make me start."

"Fifteen years."

"I know."

"Fifteen years I looked."

"And you found me." Matteo drew back, and took his brother's face between both thin hands. His gray eyes were enormous, and wet, and fixed. "You found me, Luca. You found me, you stubborn old fool. I told you to stop."

"You did."

"I'm glad you didn't."

"So am I," said Luca simply.

They stood for a long time like that, forehead to forehead. Then Luca laughed. It was a rusty startled sound, and it seemed to surprise him more than anyone, and he did it again, and again, until he had to lean on the doorframe. Matteo wiped his eyes. They were both helpless. They were laughing like two boys who've been caught at something.

Zoe, on the floor, with her hand in Archie's, put the back of her wrist against her mouth.

"Look at them," she whispered.

"I'm looking."

"Isn't it the best thing you ever saw?"

"Second best," said Archie.

She turned her head.

He was looking at her. He had not, he realized, looked at anything else for some time. She flushed to the roots of her hair, and he saw her lips part, and close, and the corner of her mouth quiver upward, and she did not look away.

…

They came in one after another through the door at the end.

The first was a tall woman with gray-streaked hair and a straight back, in a hospital gown, leaning on the arm of a nurse. She stopped in the doorway and stared about the vaulted stone chamber. She looked at the candles. She looked at the machine. Then she looked down at her own hands, and turned them over, and began slowly to laugh.

"I have a body," said Elena Vasquez.

The nurse said something.

"No, no, I'm quite all right." She was weeping and laughing at once. "It's the first time in fifteen years I've laughed. Do you know? It's been fifteen years. I'd forgotten what it does to the chest."

A big gray man in a wheelchair, with a hen in his lap, was pushed in behind her. A thin quiet woman with a long braid. A stout man in a waistcoat, looking about him with a face of dazed bewilderment. They were all alive. They were all breathing. They gazed at the high stone ceiling, and the candles, and each other, and said very little, and held each other's hands.

"Welcome to the world," said Otis, in a shaky voice. "Please keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times."

Nobody laughed. Then somebody did.

…

Elsewhere in the building, a heavy hand rapped on the door of a corner office.

It was not a polite knock. It came in a sequence of three, each as flat and deliberate as a gavel. The man behind the desk, a handsome man in a charcoal suit, looked up from his tablet with an expression of faint irritation. He had been, until that moment, composing an email. It began Dear Board, and the second sentence was in the middle of a clause.

"Come in," said William Cross.

The door opened.

There were four of them. They wore dark windbreakers with three yellow letters stenciled across the back, and they carried themselves in the stolid unhurried manner of people who have done this many times. The tallest, a woman with iron-gray hair and flat clear eyes, held a folded paper in one hand.

"Mr. William Cross?"

"I'm afraid you have the advantage."

"Special Agent Dolan, FBI." She did not smile. "Sir, I have a warrant for your arrest on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, and reckless endangerment of human life. I'd like you to stand up, please, and place your hands on the desk."

William looked at her.

Then, slowly, with an air of mild amusement, he took off his reading glasses. He folded them. He laid them on the blotter, beside the unfinished email, and he rose to his feet and straightened his cuffs.

"On what evidence?" he said.

"A contract."

"I've signed a great many."

"A particular one." Agent Dolan's voice did not change. "Four hundred million dollars. Sale of intellectual property to a firm called CorVitae. The terms are interesting. There's a line about subjects retained in situ." She stopped. "It was delivered to my office eleven days ago by a Mr. Otis Brennan. In a pretzel bag."

For the first time, the smooth face moved.

It was a very small movement. A tightening at the corner of the mouth. A flicker of something in the cold gray eyes, behind the polish, like the glint of a fish deep down in dark water. He glanced, just once, toward the window, and the pines beyond, and the long gray hill.

"The little man with the red hair," he said softly.

"Yes, sir."

"I never did learn his name."

"He knew yours," said Agent Dolan. "Hands on the desk."

…

In a country that had never been on any map, a boy in a blue coat stood on a black bridge, and the sun came up.

It had never done that. There had been a pewter sky, flat and sourceless, since before he was born. But it rose now behind the dark building by the river, a thin gold line along the edge of the world, and it grew. It poured over the rooftops. It touched the backward signs, and the dead windows, and the black glass of the water, and the water began to shine.

Eli stood quite still.

"Rosalind," he whispered. "Look."

The fox-faced girl beside him was looking. Her eyes were enormous. Behind them, along the embankment, in the doors of the shops and the windows of the houses, people were coming out. They stood in the gold light with their new faces turned to the sky, as flowers turn, and not one of them said a word. A baker. A woman with a pram. An old man in a green headscarf.

"It's morning," said the boy. "It's a real one."

The light poured over them.

It did not feel like an ending. It felt, he thought, like something much older, and much simpler. It felt like the first day. He held out his hand in the warmth of it and looked at his own palm, small and brown and whole, and smiled.

Somewhere, very far off, a bell was ringing. And for the first time since the world began, it rang on time.