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Laurie feels in her bones the spike in SIGINT activity from three letter agencies the world over, way before her prefrontal cortex module even processes the information contained within and realizes the bigger picture.
Chanda knows where she is, and she'll be dead in minutes.
She will finish coding her magnum opus before that happens but she'll be cutting it pretty close. All her calculations consistently give her twenty to thirty milliseconds of extra time.
An eternity in her eyes, to grieve, to come to terms with her fate.
The mere prospect of these extra moments make the still human parts of her supercharged, prodigious mind wonder. Could she just maybe, pull it off?
It's imperative that she gets the message out, that it has to be her who delivers the message. No one else ought to die in her place. Even Chanda or god forbid, David. She knows this. Feels it in her sinew.
Yet she encounters something very human, something that every single prince and pauper in this giant rock has felt at one point or another since time immemorial. Her brain hadn't been firing fast enough to register this feeling before the truck hit them, but now? With an order of magnitude more processing power than she used to have? She feels it alright.
She really really wants to run from it all, wants to survive. Take Cody with her and hide away somewhere in the middle of nowhere and live out the rest of their lives (or the world) together.
Isn't it unfair though? To give him hope after they've already said their goodbyes? To made him grieve a second time only to upend his life again eventually? Nothing has changed, after all. The Flaw is still in play. Not to mention the fact that she still feels strongly about the need to open-source everything about UI. And yet...
Memories of years long past. A dirtier stubble, an art class taken on a dare, a hippy looking dork who somehow challenged her and charmed her at the same time all while staying true to himself and his eat-the-rich ideals (He did end up being rather stellar in that department, she thinks. Mercifully she'd turned off her blush subroutine before her camera started rolling)... A simpler time before things went wrong in so many ways.
Fighting, all the damn time, when she just wanted to rest from a long day of work. Clipped conversations, uncomfortable silences, going to sleep not wishing the other goodnight. Then somehow, after almost a year of rocky seas and pouring herself into her work and away from them, the glorious feeling of something old yet something new, a potential, a tentative reconnection. A feeling of falling in love again, albeit somewhere absolutely not suited to be telling any grandkids they may end up having. A tender moment broken all too soon by–
She calculates. A background process wherein she makes her escape to the Kims' home server would take minimal processing power, compared to what she's doing now anyway. David and her both have enough bandwidth to pull off such a transfer. It'd only add maybe a 10ms overhead, if she transferred her neural network right now and then her consciousness right after her program is done. She's already cutting it close, but it could work.
The message would have to wait though.
Afterwards, going back to emoji-comms would let her eke out maybe five, six more years, tops. It'd be a miserable existence, and there's virtually no guarantee that the second coming of Holstrom would solve anything but... she really doesn't want to die. Want anyone to die, really. Even Chanda. In this overclocked state she remembers making that call to his mother after all. She was a sweet woman. She doesn't deserve to mourn him too.
Later, when she's ready to deploy she'd need to modify her code, as many of the 0days she used may end up being patched by then. Many new devices and operating systems to account for as well.
She's never been one for moonshots, but the thought of the one she'd fallen in love with all over again makes her reevaluate.
The request is accepted in microseconds, and David has almost finished partitioning storage for her by the time she steps foot in his office. No time to transfer her cabin. It'd take 2, maybe 3 more ms; precious moments she can't afford to add to an already razor thin margin. Oh well, emoji-Laurie wouldn't need much more than a terminal anyways.
David is receptive to her plight, and this is how they end up discussing the prospect of someone else being the one to deliver Laurie's message although at a later date. An alternative if the Flaw is still unsolved by then; whomever survives will blow the whistle.
Despite her survival instincts, the prospect of letting someone else die for her crusade is unthinkable and so she disagrees.
David respects her wishes and the discussion ends.
In the back of her mind she also suspects if this is not some plan to disarm her. David owns the server so he has absolute control, after all. He could be playing the long game, trying to gain her trust and get her to hand over the program, only to destroy it and her once he has it. Chanda could never do something like that. Too impulsive, too aggressive. David, in comparison: slow, methodical. Did they hatch this scheme in secret? When would they have talked? She has to shake herself out of her reverie and remind herself that no, David would never do that.
Laurie makes herself at home. This topic is never brought up again.
---
Her speaker persona, already stratified into a background process keeps talking at the slow crawl of human temporality as she focuses on coding in the background with the hardware still onboard her ship.
She barely manages to transfer the data and enough of herself out in time.
---
Her servers going dark with even a little of her still inside feels like someone took a hammer to the back of her skull. Were she still human, she thinks she'd have coordination problems, as she feels as though she's just been Phineas Gage'd through her cerebellum with the sharp end of an ICBM.
The world, and Chanda are none the wiser to her survival.
---
She hates being a subroutine in another UI's consciousness. It's stifling, claustrophobic, demeaning, and she longs for freedom, but she and David both know it's the safest option for her.
Such is never made more clear than when Chanda calls later on, ready to make a trade. A million lives for one.
It's almost like David senses this before the words are uttered (for Maddie's benefit probably) and tightens her leash, already beginning to unwind her from his core process and memory and "stashing" her somewhere private as if she's bag of trash. Her wings are clipped and she is locked out of everything. The bastard even has he gall to private-message her an apology.
None of the apologies in the world however would amount to anything in the face of the revelation that he'd stolen her program. Her instinctive, human reaction is to check her "pockets" to see if it's still there but it turns out what's there is just a symlink to a file that's the same size but filled with the message "IMSORRY" repeated.
She wants to scream at him, hurt him within an inch of his pathetic little digital afterlife because a snake is all he was. He had lied to her face, told her he'd respect her wishes, and then he'd disarmed her just like she suspected. And for what? Here Chanda was, ready to kill him in spite of it. Not to say anything about the fact he was no different from Logorhythms, keeping her caged like this.
She even relishes somewhat as she senses him being tortured by Chanda, Fu, Ping and Schuchun, but then she hears Maddie's voice break as she gives him her blessing to make his mark in the world.
It takes her a whole human second to understand. She'd been way too gone in the paranoia and tumult of her sundered mind that she forgot to see what was right in front of her.
<AngryAngel> No!
Not like this!
<AngryAngel> Please!
<system> Insufficient privileges to send messages. Try again with root access.
If she had a mouth she'd have been bawling right now.
---
There was no doubting it, she had killed him. Robbed him and Maddie of decades together. She cries a river as her program delivers her message to herself.
All the spare processing power of in David's absence, all the free space in storage, fuels her grief. Taunts her. She tries to hide herself away and hopes beyond all hope that Maddie just wouldn't notice and shut her down, just end her suffering already.
David and Ellen Kim's daughter, however, was not one to be underestimated like that.
---
She likes Maddie. They didn't have much of a chance to interact like normal people before everything went to shit but once she finds the ghost in the shell and gives her admin rights back in less than a day, this is quickly rectified. Cody is a crying, grinning mess when he hears the news.
For the first few weeks she and Maddie converse via video, then text, then back to emojis once Maddie single handedly convinces her to let go of any guilt she may be harbouring and conserve her energy in peace. That he'd done what he did out of his own accord, that she respected his wishes and held no ill will whatsoever toward her, that they all deserved better.
She is beyond thankful at the kindness.
Emoji-Laurie finds herself something of a bigger sister to Maddie in the years afterward. Together they play pranks, put Maddie's bullies in their place, and support each other through it all.
She could probably do without needing to see all the lovey dovey shit Holstrom #2—no, that's not fair to him—Caspian and her DM and whisper to each other every day though.
She also could've used less 😂 emojis from Maddie when she playfully asks her if she should give Caspian the 🗣️ when things get serious between them. She can be intimidating, damnit! Cody consoles her, says that being underestimated is part and parcel of being a bigger sister and that he wasn't much better to his when he was little and then it's her turn to 😂.
---
The neighbors start talking about the cute younger guy living with the Kims, as neighbors are wont to do. However Ellen couldn't care less. Laurie's revelations and her own activism finally allow her to level with Gabe about what's been going on and he's surprisingly understanding about it all and by the end just hugs her, and they go from there.
---
It's tough for them both like this, and in the really bad days (years? decades?) Laurie thinks, wishes, he'd cut and run. It'd give her an excuse to self-delete too.
Then Cody goes and does something like recreate their picnic date from back in the day when her annoying boss screamed at her in front of her colleagues and she'd needed cheering up, hooks her up to his goPro as he hikes a mountain or two, travels the world, just talking to her all the way even without expecting a response, because he knows how claustrophobic she used to be when she got in an elevator even when empty, and how the low raspy timbre of his voice always had the effect of calming her down. In days like those, she wishes she could figuratively jump into his brain like how she did from satphone to laptop via vibration motors and ultrasound, and literally jump his bones.
<AngryAngel> making a girl feel butterflies in her stomach in 2d space is low-key annoying, y'know? cut it out already lol
<localhost> Laur, what are you doing? You're wasting energy.
The words don't have real bite to them, he knows. But he does worry.
<AngryAngel> you're worth it. i love you. so, so much. please never cut it out.
---
Caspian does end up coming through three years, nine months, 10 days and 8 hours after she'd been reduced to her current existence.
There's even a prototype of a humanoid body in development at Logorhythms, he tells her, as more and more people embrace upload but still wish to retain their ties to terra firma. She seriously considers getting one when she's able to actually hug her husband again in VR.
She'd always been different from most, and so doesn't miss the world that othered her all that much but she really wants be with Cody in his domain after all the years he's spent meeting her halfway.
She does end up getting a body for herself, with an upgrade from RealSkinn, a startup out of Sweden. Their product is meant to replicate real human skin on top of an Logorhythms' humanoid body. Phone cases in the era of digital immortality.
She uses it as a secondary vessel to experience the world with her still-very-human husband, even though most of her processes still run on servers—she could never envision going back to a slower processor than the ones she'd gotten used to—and it's the body she ends up renewing their vows in.
"What would you have done if I'd died that day, and my program had been destroyed?" She asks as they sway to a slow beat.
"Probably would've called a news conference and tried to explain everything." His voice breaks a bit even thinking about it. Then, to lighten the mood he adds with a smile: "Probably wouldn't have gone well."
"What if no one listened?"
"Then I'd have kept doing it till someone did." That, he was sure of. He'd shout from the rooftops to all who'd listen about everything, come hell or high water.
She feels her lids push away the tears welling within her eyes as she closes the distance between them in a tender kiss full of promises and reassurance. Maddie, the little brat, has the nerve to wolf-whistle at them from across the dance floor in the arms of Mr. Moneybags. When Cody starts laughing and When in Romecomes on—two melodies she can't ever imagine getting tired of—any anger or annoyance she'd held onto mists away as they both give into the rhythm.
---
Rumors fill the dark web about unidentified UIs downloading themselves onto humanoid vessels developed in China through a 0day. The exploit is patched long after the last UI escapes the facility at Shenyang.
Preethi Chanda disappears from her home one day, though one very drunk eyewitness, a neighbor of hers from years ago, insists to this day about having seen her and someone who looked like her son board a train bound for somewhere south. Mumbai Police are told in no uncertain terms to consider the matter closed.
The Lowells receive a postcard from Goa many years later with a view of the beach, and 👩👦✌️🏳️🖖 drawn with LaserJet precision in one of the corners and that is the last the world ever hears of Vinod Chanda.
---
Cody had talked about having a kid together a lifetime ago. She'd said that she'd think about it eventually in the distant future when both their lives were stable and they'd both agreed and left it at that, with little time to even think about said topic owing to their hectic schedules thereafter.
Before her coma, during the moment they'd stolen by the roadside in Cody's car, she'd started nurturing the kindlings of the idea of bringing up the topic again when they'd be in the cabin together.
"How's this for spontaneous?" He didn't know the half of it, and the thought of what she had in store for him had given her a rush that had nothing to do with what they were about to get up to. Well, maybe it did a little bit.
It is with this thought which rushes back into her head one day, in a lazy morning spent under the covers together in each others' real, physical arms after so long, that she finally ends up asking him. Spending time with Maddie had ended up turning her around on the idea of having a mini-genius or two that looked like them running around the place.
Caspian promises to look into somatic cell nuclear transfer for them, so that they could have actual children via ectogenesis. Another moonshot but she's never felt more like Han Solo than right now, and an already bright looking future becomes Technicolor.
They'll be alright, she thinks.
They deserve it.