It was the space between one breath and another, no longer, a long, sighing exhale, in a room so white it hurt Max's eyes, so sterile and pure that he felt dirty, and clumsy, and dross.
And then he'd died, just like that, code singeing through his implant, singing along the suit's circuitry, and it had been nothing like what he'd dreaded, nothing like what he'd been fighting all these years. Death was a release, though there was a moment of terror, a moment of attenuation, as though he was getting sucked through a straw to some powerful place. And he felt, just as he shed it, all the pain of his body: broken wrist, bruised limbs, the bone ache of the suit's screws into his hot flesh, hard bones, the radiation running laps around his body, in his blood, leaching away his life. He felt all that pain the way you do a heavy weight when you put it down: a sort of almost grateful lightness, bobbing upward, free.
It had been so simple: the press of a button, the release of breath, and the fighting was over. Finally over, another burden he could lay aside, another weight he could free himself of.
But then he realized it wasn't death, at least, not entirely. He could see his body in the sudden darkness, slumped, face slack and empty like an old, dirty sock, scarred and sweaty, and he could see Spider, and the Elysium droids, and he knew, even though he couldn't know, that that one, the one to the right, had been one he'd made, almost as though he could see his own fingerprints on it. He was floating, outside his body, expanded, released.
He breathed, or tried to, and the world came back to light and life.
"Spider," he said. Or tried to, halfway through the second syllable realizing he hadn't heard his own voice. He tried again, louder, trying to feel the pressure of his lungs, the vibration of his vocal cords. Nothing. No sound.
But Spider turned, some reaction, from the black security droid to the battered portable computer he'd dragged all the way from Earth, lunging toward it, peering at the screen.
"Max," Spider said, and Max heard his voice, saw the flicker of confusion on his face, eyes flicking to the brownish slump of meat and blood and metal on the floor and then back to the screen. "Max."
Why was he staring at the screen?
It clicked, suddenly, strands connected by the long line of cable that connected his head to the computer, and he figured it out just as Spider said, "Max. You're in the mainframe." He didn't need to see 'Spider' typed out, twice, the second in all caps, in green letters on Spider's laptop. His voice, at least now.
He wasn't in the mainframe: he was the mainframe. And Elysium was his, or rather, he was Elysium, his mind uploaded into the torus's mainframe: all his memories, all his meager joys and ruinous pains, all his frustrated anger at the world, all the dreams he'd dreamed: Elysium, the perfect world, unreachable and tantalizing above him.
Max found himself swimming through the mainframe, as white and pure and beautiful as the protocol central complex, and he was a shadow, a ghost, moving through the station, his thoughts its data, the pulse of its systems his heartbeat. He could see wealth beyond imagining, luxury, comfort, rooms so big they seemed like habitats, swaths of growing green things, plants, mosses, flowers cascading in a wild, beautiful profusion, food laid in pantry shelves, things he couldn't even name.
There was Drake's body, the mercenary crawling broken-spined toward a medbed, and there was Delacourt's body, where they'd left her, and there was Kruger, shattered armor and bone and blood.
And there was Frey, hugging Matilda, her face the kind of joy he'd seen on the orphanage altar, the cheap copy of the Ecstasy of St Teresa, whose bliss seemed to defy the smoke-caked, chipped plaster, sublime, numinous. He'd never brought that look to her face before, even as children, with the open purity of a child's emotions. But here she was, so far into joy that tears sparkled in her dark eyes, and he knew, finally, he'd done something good, something worthy.
It hurt, suddenly, a pang that resonated through his whole body-the station-to think that he'd never touch her again. Then again, he'd never been good enough. He'd always known that, and this joy of hers was a tribute, the best he could give the woman who had seen...something in him, even if she let her faith be dimmed.
It was him, now, Elysium, his spirit animating the central core. It had been the work of a thought to dispatch the medical ships, starting with the LA favela, sending down the riches of Elysium, the gift of no more pain, no more suffering, a gift because Max finally had something to give, something worth giving. It was his first thought: to heal, to help, to make things right.
Funny how he'd come up here to try to save himself. Without a self, he just wanted to save, to give others the chances he'd never had. He didn't know what would come of it, how long he could sustain it, or if he'd die, fizzle and fade into the Elysium net, but if anyone knew, Max did, what a difference one small chance, one small change could push into being.