“That’s who he is. Captain Holden.”
“He’s not your captain.”
A flash of surprise passed over Timothy, like it was a thought he’d never had. “I guess he ain’t,” Timothy said, and then a moment later, and more slowly, “I guess he ain’t.”
“Dad says he’s afraid,” Teresa said. “Holden is, I mean. Not Dad.”
“They both are,” Timothy said, picking his knife back up. “Guys like them always are. It’s people like you and me that aren’t scared.”
“You’re never scared?”
“I haven’t been scared since I was younger than you, Tiny. I had a rough start.”
“Me too. My mom died when I was a baby. I think my father doesn’t like having women around me because it feels like replacing her. All my teachers have been men.”
“I never knew mine either,” Timothy said. “But I put something together later that I could sort of pretend was family. It wasn’t bad for someone that grew up on my street. While it lasted. I’ll tell you what, though, as fucked up as my childhood was? It’s got nothing on yours.”
“My life’s perfect,” Teresa said. “I can have anything I want. Anytime I want it. Everyone treats me well. My father’s making sure I have the training and education to govern billions of people on thousands of planets. No one has ever had the advantages and opportunities I have.” She paused, surprised by the hint of bitterness that had crept into her voice.
“Uh-huh,” Timothy said. “That’s why you’re always looking over your shoulder when you sneak out to see me, I guess.”
That night, back in her room, she couldn’t sleep. The small nighttime noises of the State Building took on a weird power to distract and startle her. Even the gentle ticking of the walls as they radiated away the day’s heat felt like someone knocking for her attention. She tried turning her pillow to press her cheek against the cool side and playing gentle, soothing music. It didn’t help. Every time she closed her eyes and willed herself down toward dream, she found herself five minutes later with her eyes open, halfway through an imaginary debate with Timothy or Holden or Ilich or Connor. It was past midnight when she gave up.
Muskrat rose with her, following her from bedroom to office, and then, when Teresa sat on one of her workbench stools, curled up at her feet and fell immediately to snoring. Nothing bothered her dog, or at least not for long. Teresa pulled up an old movie about a family living in a haunted apartment on Luna, but her mind slid off the entertainment as quickly as it had off the pillow. She thought about going out and walking around the gardens, but that annoyed her too. When she realized what she actually wanted to do, she’d already known it for a while. Admitting it to herself felt like a surrender.
“Security log access,” she said, and her room’s system shifted from the haunted corridors of Luna to a businesslike user interface. Even as honored and important as she was, there were logs that she didn’t have access to. No one except maybe her father and Dr. Cortázar could have access to the recordings from the pens, for instance. That was normal. And it didn’t matter for what she needed. No one was worried about preserving Holden’s privacy. She could have watched him sleep if she’d wanted to.
She set the system to generate a full track for Holden over the past week, then scrubbed through it. She knew that the State Building had ubiquitous surveillance built into it, but it was interesting to see where exactly the microlenses were and how much they could capture while staying invisible themselves. As she scrubbed through Holden’s passage in the buildings and the gardens, she thought about all the other things she could watch on the feeds. Connor and Muriel, for instance.
On one of her screens, Holden sat on the grass, looking out at the same mountain where Timothy lived. The accelerated scrubbing made his casual gestures and adjustments seem spasmodic. Like he was vibrating. Then Muskrat was there with him. Then she was. She didn’t like looking at herself on camera. She didn’t look the way she felt like she d
id. In her mind, her hair was smoother and her posture was better. Without meaning to, she shifted on her stool to sit up straighter. Holden flopped to the grass and sat up with his back wet, and then she and Muskrat zipped out of the frame. She forgot her posture again and leaned forward.
Holden fidgeted on the screen, then rose and sped off. Her scrub was at twenty times faster than base. In under an hour, she could take in the shape of his whole day. Holden at his dinner reading something on a handheld. Holden walking through the same common area her class had been in, pausing to talk to a guard. Holden in the gymnasium, exercising on the old-style machines that they used to use on ships. Holden sitting at a table on a veranda overlooking the city with Dr. Cortázar and a bottle of wine—
She tapped the feed, dropping back to normal speed, and found an audio track.
“—also jellyfish,” Cortázar said. “Turritopsis dohrnii is the classic example, but there are half a dozen more. An adult reverts to a polyp colony form under stress. Like an elderly man turning into a fetus. That’s not the model we’re using, but it means the organism has no set maximum life span.” He took a long sip from his wineglass.
“What model are you using?” Holden asked.
“The original inspirations for the work were corpses that the repair drones got hold of. Not really immortality at all, but the new organisms had some improvements. That’s where the breakthrough comes. That’s what we should really be focusing on, sacrifice or no. Healthy subject with a well-recorded baseline instead of this…”—his voice rang with contempt—“this fieldwork. How to achieve a more robust homeostasis. Just because it’s difficult to do doesn’t make the principal science unsolvable.”
“So not unnatural at all,” Holden said, tipping a little more wine from the bottle into the doctor’s glass.
“Meaningless term,” Cortázar said. “Humans arose inside nature. We’re natural. Everything we do is natural. The whole idea that we are different in category is either sentimental or religious. Irrelevant from a scientific perspective.”
“So if we get to a place that we can all live forever, that’s not unnatural?” Holden sounded genuinely curious.
Cortázar leaned in toward the prisoner, gesturing with his left hand while he swirled his glass in his right. “The only limits on us are what we can do. It’s perfectly natural to seek personal benefit. It’s perfectly natural to give advantages to your own offspring and withhold them from others. It’s perfectly natural to kill your enemies. That’s not even outlier behavior. That’s all in the middle of the bell curve all the time.”
Teresa rested her head in her hands. She was pretty sure Cortázar was drunk. She’d never been herself, but she’d seen some adults at state functions get the same vague focus and sense of being a little off their own points.
“You’re right, though,” Cortázar said, “You’re exactly right. The foundation needs to be broad. That’s true.”
“Immortality is a high-stakes game,” Holden said, like he was agreeing.
“Yes. Plumbing the depths of the protomolecule and all the artifacts it opens up is the work of a hundred lifetimes. Making the researchers die and be replaced by other people with a less advanced understanding is clearly—clearly—a bad idea. But that’s policy. This is the way forward. So this is the way forward.”