Chapter TenThe Last Time

In January, about a year after the crash, Atom disappeared for a day.

Soph wasn't worried at first. He liked to be there when she woke up, sitting on the bedpost as a bird or in the chair as himself, but he had things to do. He had been spending more time on his own projects, which she had encouraged. She didn't want him to feel he had to follow her around all day. Still, by the time she had messaged him at nine and noon without an answer, she was having trouble paying attention to her classes. At three she tried calling from the back row. The girl two seats over looked at her, and Soph lowered her voice and tried again. Atom had never gone this long without saying something. She couldn't think who else to call who would know where he was.

She went home after class. She had meant to go to Gideon's, but she wanted Max, and she waited on the couch even though Max wasn't home either. After a while she took her frames off. She was getting a headache from looking around every time she thought she saw something move. When she heard cars outside it was already dark. Richard and Max had both pulled into the driveway, and she got up to meet them. Soph hadn't seen Richard look like that since the hospital, and when Max asked her to sit down she said, "Is he dead?"

"No, honey. Come and sit with us," Max said.

"Just tell me."

"His body is failing. We've been trying to manage it, but the treatment isn't doing enough," Max said.

Soph sat at the kitchen table. "What treatment?"

"He's been on dialysis for a month. I thought we had more time when we started it. His kidneys were the worst of it then."

"You thought?"

"His heart got worse. And this morning there was an infection. We couldn't keep his blood pressure up, so the team sedated him while they worked on the support. That's why he hasn't called."

Soph took out her phone and looked at the messages she had sent him. The one from class said she was going to be angry if he didn't answer.

"Can he hear anything?"

"He's still sedated, honey. He's not in pain," Max said.

"But he's going to die?"

"He will if we can't do something else."

Richard sat down beside Max. "We've been working on something. Phase Three. Atom knows about it."

"Okay. What is it?"

Max explained. She and the team had built a perfusion system to take over from his failing organs. If they could keep blood going through his brain, they could keep him alive. But fitting him into it meant keeping only his head and part of his chest. His arms and legs would be removed, along with most of the body she remembered. There would be a new visual connection, so he wouldn't need the frames anymore. Soph tried to picture what Max was describing and then wished she hadn't.

"How long would he live?"

"We don't know. Years, we hope. Possibly a lot longer," Max said.

"And he said you could do this?"

"Yes," said Richard. "A month ago. He wanted to tell you himself."

"A month? Richard, I've been asking you if he's getting better. Both of you."

"We thought he should have a chance to explain it," said Max.

"He had a month. You could have told me."

Max didn't answer. Soph could see the lake painting in the hall over her shoulder. She tried to follow the edge of its frame with her eyes while she waited for Max to say something.

"You wanted him to do it so you wouldn't have to."

"Sophia," said Richard, but he didn't seem to know what ought to come after her name.

"Can I see him?"

"That's why we came," said Max. "If you want to see him before the procedure, it needs to be tonight."

The Lab was in a basement in West Oakland. Soph had been there before, but not for a long time. There had always been some reason she couldn't go: a test coming up, a class that ran late. Atom had told her she wouldn't like it and she had been happy to believe him. They saw each other every day anyway. Now she wished she had gone, if only so she would have been less surprised by how thin he was.

They went through two doors with badge readers. The room beyond was cold, with a number of machines running around a glass chamber. The lid was open. Atom lay tilted back inside it, rather like someone waiting for the dentist, except for all the tubes. He was wearing a blue gown. The back of his head had been shaved and wires ran from it to the machines, including a thick black cable. He still had his frames on.

Richard sat against the wall. Max stayed near the door while Soph went up to the chamber. She wanted to see his eyes.

"Can I take these off?"

"Yes. He's not using them while he's sedated," Max said.

The frames were heavier than hers. She held them in one hand and looked at his face. After a while his eyes opened. They were blue, as she remembered, but he didn't seem to be looking at anything. Then she thought he looked at her.

"Hi, Adam."

"That can be a reflex," Max said gently.

"I know."

She didn't really know. She wanted him to have seen her, and she kept looking at him in case it happened again. It was strange how much she wanted an answer from his mouth. She had known for a year that he couldn't speak, and she talked to him every day through the Link. It had been easy to forget what that meant for him here.

She took his hand. It was warm and dry. The last time she could remember holding it like this, it had been on the gearshift in his car, under hers. She thought she might throw up if she let herself remember any more of that evening.

"I'm going to be here when you wake up," she told him. "You asked me on the hill if I still loved you, remember? I said forever. Well, I meant it."

She was crying now. She had his frames in one hand and his hand in the other and she didn't want to let go of either to wipe her face.

"I don't care what you look like. You can be a bird if you want. But I wanted to see you like this too. I should have come before. I'm sorry."

She stayed until Max came over and touched her shoulder. There were people waiting to prepare him. Soph put the frames back on him and kissed his forehead, taking care to avoid the wires. When she got to the door she wanted to turn around, but she didn't. She had looked at his face for a long time. She wanted to keep remembering that, and she was afraid that if she looked back all she would see was the chamber.

Later Soph asked Max to tell her exactly what they had done. Max brought the record and went through it with her. Some of it was difficult to explain, and some of it she plainly didn't want to explain, but Soph kept asking.

The operation took eleven hours and there were nine people in the room. Max had spent six months getting ready. She had brought in clinicians who knew things she didn't, and between them they had solved enough of the problems to begin animal trials. An ethics reviewer had worked with them for a while, then withdrawn when Richard gave her the timetable. Richard had kept the date. Soph found a page with the remaining team's signatures and thought that must be the permission they needed. Max told her to read the heading. They were saying they were willing to proceed. The missing approval was still missing.

Farther on she found the surgeon's condition. He wanted Atom asked about stopping treatment, and his answer recorded, before he would agree to operate. Soph read that part twice. Atom was supposed to tell them now whether he might want to die later? Max had thought it was a terrible thing to ask him just then. She was trying to keep Atom alive; she didn't like having to talk about how they would let him die. Then Atom had asked the same question himself, and she had been ashamed of wanting to leave it out.

"You told me he might have years," Soph said. "Did you really believe that?"

"Yes, I did. I still do," Max said. "But I was getting some silly numbers out of the model. Eight hundred years, if you gave it all the best assumptions. I couldn't put that in front of the team."

"Eight hundred?"

"I know. I took it out before anyone saw it. Here we were talking about centuries and we didn't have a human being who'd survived a week on the thing. The anesthetist kept asking me about the next morning. Would Atom be alive then? I wanted to say yes, but I couldn't give him much to back it up."

While the team worked, Richard was at the lakehouse. He had driven the three hours there because he couldn't bear to sit outside the operating room. The cave under the house was quiet. He sat with the mannequins and the painted bison and thought about his wife, Lauren. He had been able to do so little for her. With Atom he could hire somebody. Buy the equipment. Ask Max what else she needed. Slow down, people kept telling him. Would they say that if it were their son? He'd nearly asked the surgeon. Now he wished he had, so he could sit here arguing with an answer instead of making one up. The papers were signed. He went over them in his head anyway.

Max called him at six in the morning. Atom had survived the procedure.

When Atom woke up he was standing in his room in Alius. He usually woke in the bed. He had put it there because he liked having a bed to wake up in, even if he didn't really need one, and for a moment he wondered whether he had already got up and forgotten.

He wasn't sure how much of this Max had tested while he was out. He tried moving his fingers and touching his face, then went over to the window to try the glass. It felt cold under his palm, and the floor felt the same as before. He was pleased about that; he had spent a fair amount of time getting the window right. The mountain outside hadn't changed either.

There was something missing. Before, even when he was having a good day and wasn't thinking about the chamber, he had always had a sense of his body somewhere behind him. He couldn't move it or do much to find it, but he knew it was there. Now he couldn't feel it at all. His brain was still alive in The Lab; he knew that. He just couldn't find the rest of himself in the way he was used to.

He sat on the floor against the bed. Max called to ask whether he could see.

"Yes," he said.

She sounded relieved. He stayed on the floor for a while after the call, trying to get used to it.

Soph asked Max to drop her at the trailhead that morning. She sat on the gate with her hood up and her frames on. A few joggers passed her while the fog cleared over the bay.

Atom came walking up the trail from below. Usually he appeared right beside her, wherever she happened to be. She watched him approach with his hands in his pockets. He had the same blond hair and the same duster, and she could still see through him a little at the edges. She had known he would look the same. She was relieved anyway.

"Hi," he said.

"Hey."

"You waited."

"I said I would. How are you?"

He put his hand on her knee. She felt it through the suit.

"I'm okay, I think. It's different. There's nothing behind me anymore."

"What do you mean?"

"My body. I used to be able to feel where it was. It's weird. I keep trying to find it."

"Does it bother you?"

"A little. I thought it would feel better right away, and I guess it does, but I don't know what to do with myself yet. Will you come back tomorrow?"

"Of course. I can stay now, too, if you want."

"Don't you have somewhere to be?"

"I'll tell them I'm not coming. Here, sit down."

She moved along the gate and he sat beside her. When he put his arm around her she leaned into him, a little too far before her suit caught up. She had to shift back to get comfortable. He waited while she did it and then she settled against his shoulder.