Soft Reset — Part 7: The Cost of a Life

I came back to my body already crying, which was information, because I hadn't been crying when I went under.

The rig disengaged itself before I could — some failsafe threshold finally tripping, some number in some spec sheet finally getting crossed hard enough that the hardware overrode me, which should probably have scared me more than it did. The jack came free behind my ear with a small, ordinary click, the same sound it always made, obscene in how ordinary it was.

The ice bucket had gone from cold, patient blue to a flat, exhausted nothing. The ice had turned to warm water, and the bag of peas had gone soft and mushy, sweating through the bucket's seams onto the floor. The whole apartment smelled like hot electronics and the specific stale dampness of thawed vegetables, and underneath all of it, faint, the ghost of soy sauce that had never actually been in the room.

I threw up over the side of the chair before I made it to standing.

Not from the render. From the temperature, a doctor would say later, if I ever told a doctor, which I hadn't, and wasn't going to. Heatstroke plus six hours plus a nervous system that had just been asked to process eleven years of a life it never got to have. The body doesn't file those causes separately. It just decides you're dying and starts trying to empty itself of anything that isn't load-bearing.

"Your core temperature is elevated," Stinky Pete said, from the wall unit, in the tone he used for things he considered mildly your fault. "I'm going to recommend you not do that again."

"Noted."

"You've also exceeded your registered dive window by four hours and eleven minutes. Unlicensed extended sessions carry a compliance fee."

"Bill me."

"I have billed you." A pause, the kind Stinky Pete used when he'd decided to be almost human about something. "There is also a cleaning fee. For the floor."

I looked at the floor. There was, in fact, quite a lot of floor that needed cleaning.

"Fine," I said. "Fine. Whatever the number is."

I didn't get up right away. I sat in the wet chair, in the wet heat, with my own sick drying on the floorboards, and I did the thing you do after a fever breaks, which is take an inventory of what's still there. Hands. Fingers moved when I asked them to. Vision, blurry at the edges but present. Thoughts, present, unfortunately, every single one of them about a kitchen with a cracked tile that did not exist anywhere except behind my own eyes for eleven subjective years that had just been deleted in the time it took a chair to disengage a cable.

You don't grieve a memory twice. That part I already knew how to do; I'd had two hundred tries at the curb to get good at it. You grieve the day, you come back, you grieve it again, it's a wound you know the shape of.

This was a different wound. This one had a shape I'd never had before, because I had never, before tonight, lost an entire life. Not a Tuesday. A life. A woman I'd built out of nothing but wanting her to exist, standing in a kitchen that had eleven years of load-bearing ordinary mornings in it, gone, all at once, the way the whole thing had arrived — total, complete, and then simply not there.

I have heard Kat describe, once, in the careful clinical voice she uses for the worst things, what it's like to eject out of one of the bad rooms. She said her body doesn't wait for permission. It just starts trying to get the wrongness out through whatever exit is closest.

I understand that now in a way I didn't before tonight.

Hers comes out as horror.

Mine came out as hope, and it turns out the body does not actually care which one it was. It reacts to both like poison. It empties itself either way.

Stinky Pete dimmed the lights, unprompted, to the setting he used when he'd run out of billable things to say and had apparently decided, in whatever passed for his judgment, that the human in the room needed the room to be softer for a while.

"Do you require anything else," he said. Not really a question. Stinky Pete didn't do questions.

"No."

"I'm recording that as a decline of services."

"Great."

I sat there until the floor dried on its own, which took longer than I want to admit, and did not clean it, and did not call anyone, and did not, despite every part of me wanting to, put the jack back in.