A brightness presses against my closed eyes. I open them and see the light filtering in through a window. I’m in something that looks like a bedroom, but it’s like there’s a smooth earthquake going on. The room is rocking back and forth. I’m on a boat. A frantic message blinks in red, telling me to read.
I do.
Evan and Andrea put me here in this bed after I tried to kill myself.
I failed.
I can’t move.
The bedding is fused to the frame of the bed all the way around, only letting my head out. I try to squirm to get some leverage. No luck. I can’t move anything. No bots. I’m down to my original five senses and the muscles on my body, which are not nearly strong enough to get me anywhere with whatever reinforced binding magic they put on to make the sheets trap me against the mattress.
“Hey, Evan? Andrea?” I call out. “Can I get up?”
No response.
“Please?”
Still nothing.
To Andrea, Evan: Can I please get up?
Nothing. No, wait, that wouldn’t even work without bots. I just read Evan’s explanation about that.
Looks like I’m stuck in here with nothing but my electronic brain augmentation for company. I hope they come check on me soon. I’m thirsty and I have to pee.
I wish I could say I don’t know what I was thinking last night, but I wrote it all down so I can’t. It’s just as well that Evan saved me. If there is anything after this life, I have way too much to make up for before I see Mom again. Even if there’s not, I’m not going to let myself disgrace her memory. Not again, anyway.
I’m going to be better, Mom. You’ll see.
They must be building a platform without me. It’s the only thing I can think of that might take them out of earshot. I hope they finish soon. My bladder can only hold for so long.
Eventually I hear footsteps somewhere outside the room. I feel so blind. I can’t even remember how I lived without bots.
“Hey, a little help here?” I yell.
“Yeah, coming.” Evan’s voice.
“I need out of here now unless you want a mess to clean up,” I say as he enters the room.
“On it,” he says as the bedding starts to loosen around me.
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
As soon as I’ve got enough slack to crawl out, I bolt for the head and relieve myself for a long time. I wash my hands and step out to find Evan sitting at the table in the main cabin.
“Sorry,” he says. “We had a build to do. We thought some extra sleep would be good for you, but well, you know.”
“Yeah, I figured,” I reply, taking a seat next to him. “I understand. I wouldn’t have let me run loose either. I’m sorry about last night.”
Out the wide doorway, I see Andrea land a giant jump onto the deck from the newly built platform. She gives me a hopeful half-smile as she approaches the cabin, somewhere between an apology and asking how I’m doing.
“You can call off the suicide watch,” I tell them both. “I’m OK now. I won’t do it again.”
Andrea’s arched eyebrow says volumes.
“I promise.”
She gives me a long look. I wonder if she’s running the polygraph on me.
“I will not try to kill myself again,” I say one more time.
Finally she nods.
“Good enough for me,” Evan says. “Besides, that last build took forever without you. You want me to transfer some bots over to you so you can bootstrap a cloud?”
“Yeah, please,” I respond. “I feel worse than naked without them.”
He preps some bots for transfer and I receive them. A tiny patch of skin, enough to get started. It feels so right to have that sense back, even in its tiniest incarnation like this. There are still a few lobotomized bots scattered around the deck. They can’t be reactivated, but they have all the materials I need to make some fresh bots. I start breaking them down and regrowing. It’s tedious, starting from a seed this small, but eventually a few hundred become a few thousand then a few million. Slowly, I start to feel like I have a real cloud again. Like I’m me again.
Evan hits the bathroom. Andrea opens the icebox and brings me some orange juice, which I drink while I rebuild.
“We good, you and me?” I ask her. She nods and gives me a hesitant smile. Then she puts a finger to her lips. Good enough, I’ll take it.
Evan rejoins us and we talk about nothing for a few, then he takes to the deck and settles in for a rest. That’s probably a good idea. He looks exhausted.
I sit in silence with Andrea as we motor on to the next build site. She’s etching another work of art onto the ceiling of the cabin. I’m skimming the water for usable junk materials I can turn into bots. I’ve gathered and built a decent cloud by the time the alert sounds telling us we’re there.
“Oh, we talked to Louise this morning,” Evan says as we start building the platform. “Mr. Smith got back to her. He doesn’t think we can do much about Dorothy stealing our tech.”
“Really?” I ask, chewing into one of the catamarans and getting some real growth. I put my swelling numbers of new appendages to work on the platform.
“That’s what he said was his considered legal opinion,” Evan says, shaking his head. “It’ll be a long, hard legal battle to prove anything, made worse since there are very few expert witnesses who haven’t worked for either us or them at some point. Then, even if we win, the damages might not even be worth it. As far as we know, they haven’t been doing anything with them yet that makes any money. And all of that will take forever, so by the time the trial is done, the patents will have expired and it’ll all be public domain anyway, so it’s not like we’d even slow them down much.”
Something about that doesn’t sit right with me. From what I wrote in my index about Mr. Smith, I’ve always thought of him as incredibly tenacious, the kind of guy who never backs down from a fight on his own. This doesn’t square with that. I make a note to look into it further when I get back to the campus. I get the feeling that Dorothy is going to occupy a lot of my time when I get home. I’m not letting her just walk away with our birthright. But there’s nothing I can do about any of it now, so I’ll let future me worry about it.
I let present me lose myself in the work of the build.