I closed the file. I closed my eyes. I considered, for a moment, releasing my hold on this virtual environment, allowing the code to claim me. This would be easier, in the code. That was why I decided I must remain. I did not deserve easy. I did not deserve peaceful. I needed to decide whether I would allow this thing, this thing that could not save my mother, or whether I would be petty, and small, and say that if I must suffer, everyone must suffer.
It was . . . tempting, in a way it never could have been, when my mother had been alive and I had been innocent, Dryad daughter of the cybernetic world. Death had been a mystery to me, real but untouchable, and always as reversible as Li Qin said it would be now. When someone went offline, they could be rebooted. When someone fell, they could get back up.
What it was that the night-haunts represented, that my mother’s machine had stolen and somehow preserved . . . I was sure some would call it the soul, although the fairy tales in Li Qin’s files used the word “vitality” with reliable firmness. It was difficult not to think of it as the operating system for the body. So long as it could be reinstalled, they could come back.
Barbara, Yui, Colin, and Peter had all been killed by my mother’s machine, and their unique operating systems were on file, ready to be restored. Even Terrie’s partitioned OS was still available. My mother, however, had been killed with an ax. She had been—
She—
I opened my eyes.
She had been killed with an ax, yes. But, according to October, the blood in her body had been as lifeless as the blood of all the others. Her operating system had been transferred to another location. The ax had not been Gordan’s only weapon.
My body, made of pixels and thought, felt strangely heavy for all its insubstantiality. I thought this might be horror. I thought I might deserve it. On the walkway, when Gordan and October had fought, when Gordan had threatened to upload Quentin as she had uploaded the others, Gordan had claimed my mother could not be recovered, because she had not been backed up to the server. She had said my mother was lost forever.
But she had not used the machine again. I—and October—had stopped her, had taken the machine away without destroying it. The machine, which was designed to operate despite power outages; which was meant to preserve data at all costs.
The machine, which possessed its own local backup system.
The capacity was limited and the battery was small—the battery might already have died, after all this time sitting unused—but it had been my mother’s intention never to risk anything being lost simply because the timing of a transfer happened to synchronize with some issue on the server.
Gordan had stated that my mother’s data—her operating system, her vitality—had not been transferred to the server, but she had not said anything about wiping the machine’s local memory.
I stood. The idea of my legs did not wish to support me. I compelled them to do so anyway. They were an idea, this place was an idea, I was an idea, and they were not going to defy me when I had need of them.
Would Gordan have lied? Could Gordan have lied? Or—no. I could review the footage in my mind’s eye, recalling it as easily as I would open any other file. Li Qin likes to speak of the fallibility of memory, but she refers to the memory of meat, to the hot and anxious data contained in neurons and flesh. My memory is electronic, as still and unchanging as the people trapped in my storage banks, and it never changes.
Gordan, on the walkway. Gordan, enraged. Gordan, striking October and saying, “Do you know the real reason I killed her that way? I didn’t back her up, that’s why—even if the others come back, she won’t. She’s gone, and nothing your masters do will bring her back.”
She never said she had wiped the upload device’s local memory.
She never said she had removed the battery.
She never mentioned the upload device at all. Had she been able to successfully copy Quentin’s data into the machine—killing him in the process, but that had not been a concern for her, not by that point—she might have overflowed the buffer and overwritten the data it contained. She never had the chance to do that. October had stopped her. October had prevented the machine from being used again.
This time, when my legs attempted to buckle, I allowed them to do so. I did not hit the ground. Instead, I disappeared, dissolving into light and code, racing from Li Qin’s preprogrammed environment and into the comforting embrace of my living network of connection and ever-flowing data.
Transition between one point on the network and another is close enough to instantaneous as to make no difference. Still, I paused, allowing myself to hang suspended, bodiless, defined only by my thoughts. Somewhere outside the network, the modified server interlaced with pieces of the tree that had been my first home and harbor continued to function, keeping me connected, keeping me tethered to myself. As long as it existed, so did I, even when I chose, as now, to be nothing more than an idea.
Time did not pass here as it did outside. I could see it ticking by, seconds building into minutes, but it lacked the urgency of the material world. I could stop. I could think. I could . . . not breathe, not exactly. I could allow myself to take a moment, as I had done when I was a true Dryad, as I could not do when I walked among the people made of blood and bone.
If my mother’s data was contained in the backup machine, then what? Her body was gone. We had burned it, taking Gordan at her word. It seemed a glaring error now, on the precipice of hope, but at the time, we had been traumatized and frightened and willing to accept certain things as inevitable. I had been sliding into adulthood, aging myself by the hour, and had not been best equipped to judge what was the right thing to do. Li Qin had not yet come home. I had not yet heard Elliot speaking to her on his office phone, trying to fumble his way through the words that would make her a widow and me a widow’s daughter in the eyes of Faerie, not only in the eyes of what was known and true. I had not yet survived so many things.
We might have my mother’s operating system prisoned on a piece of equipment that had never been intended to contain a living mind for any length of time, and no way to restore her to flesh. What then?
Then we would find a solution. We would build her a server of glass and wood and circuitry, as she had built a server for me. We would save her. What is a daughter for, if not the salvation of her mother?