Read Online Transcendence by Christopher McKitterick - Free Book Online Page B

The car got there,” Jonathan says. “Never mind.” He throws up an ID filter to shut her out of his head. She makes no effort to override or switch communications bandwidth and try again. Just as well , Jonathan thinks, his stomach tightening more, as if something in there is biting his guts.
    His mind returns to his sister and her strange greeting. She had seemed almost welcoming.
    Change, change , he thinks. Everything so far has led in the wrong direction: the gang, érase, school, everything. He sees the world as something that beckons him, but he can’t understand what it wants him to do. He must do something. He feels he will die if he doesn’t do something. Charity —now there’s something. The memory of Charity’s offer, the memory of saving her from the beatcoat cops . . . these give him strength.
    Jonathan decides to try something unusual in response to his sister—a conversation. Maybe here, with her, he can find a handhold to the world. Maybe that’ll make him feel less tossed and lost.
    “ Josephine,” he says, “how are things?”
    “ Come here, Jonny,” his sister says, audio-only again. “In the living room.”
    A few steps down the hall and Jonathan stands in the rectangular entry to the living room. He projects his 3VRD; his sister still hasn’t done so, but he ignores the discomfort that causes.
    “ What’s on?” he asks, using the familiar greeting.
    “ Nothing,” she answers. “Let’s talk, you know, intheflesh.”
    Jonathan falls still, stricken with terror at the perversion of her request. Not only because the request is so unusual, especially coming from her, but because of the added dimension of Jonathan’s being labeled a headfeed addict. A “rapthead,” in the slang of the street.
    Rapthead . For weeks, those nurses and techs tried to drive into his worldview that it was okay to use his headcard, that it would be an abnormal reaction driven by paranoia not to use it, while at the same time they droned on and on about the dangers of abusing feed. Like overeating, they said; you need food to survive but not so much you grow obese. He never quite understood the somewhere-in-between ground they stressed, but had recited the answers they wanted so they would let him out of the program. Walking the fine edge between normal feed-use and feedrapture is a bitch.
    Josephine sits at the edges of his splice—part of her on each side, but he’s so used to viewing the world like this that he doesn’t see her as sliced in half—his sister, motionless, granting him her full intheflesh attention. She’s on the Variform couch, legs crossed, hands in her lap. Suddenly, he has no idea why he pursued this contact.
    Jonathan concentrates on the Captain for a moment, watching him through the eyes of the Captain’s Bombardier as they fight off thugs, and feels terrified to shut off the program. Although he knows this episode will run at least another two hours before the live feed begins, he is hesitant to shut down, as if cutting these brave EConauts—EarthCo astronauts—out of his life even momentarily will be the same as killing them, chopping off a source of his own personality, his only true source of strength.
    But his sister is waiting, patiently, with a soft look on her face that Jonathan can’t remember seeing before. So he shuts down the show. The splice closes before his eyes like curtains being drawn, curtains upon which is projected another program, one entitled, “Life.” He realizes the revmetal music still rages in his brain’s audio receptors, and hesitates for only another second before shutting that down, as well. Finally, he cuts off his 3VRD projection and faces her.
    “ So,” he says, overwhelmingly intheflesh. Flesh, that word; he feels naked, and that makes him nervous. He can smell himself now, slightly sharp and sour, and Josephine, perfumed and crisp.
    “ You walked all the way home, across Downtown?” she asks. Her face wears a mask of concern, oddly