Atonement

Kara was sick and Charlie was trying to figure out what to do about it. High fever, vomiting, chills. It was driving him nuts, even though he was trying not to show it for the sake of the children. Mary, now six years old, knew something was wrong with Mommy and it scared her. Charlie Junior, just two, was too young to know much of anything, other than Mommy wouldn't hold him.

Doctor after doctor had been to see her, and each one walked away with the same patented advice: drink more liquid, take aspirin, cold compress for the fever. One had suggested an iced water bath, which had helped for a bit. But then the fever hit again and Kara moaned in pain and it made Charlie crazy that he couldn't help the woman he had come to love.

Kara being sick had made all the news shows. Of course. They had talking heads spouting hot air about her illness, and whether or not it was connected to her first generation neural lace. Some of the more idiotic ones had clips of the loser Fundies, who claimed it was God's punishment for her heresy, or for her sins, or for something else. Fuck them, Charlie thought. That was his wife they were talking about. The mother of his children. But of course she was more than that. She led a Church (or cult, as some persisted in calling it) that had more than 5 million members across the world. There were hundreds of sanctuaries now, scattered in all 51 states and in more than 30 countries. There were even a few sanctuaries in the Middle East – and hadn't those come at a pretty price? Not a week went by that some asshole Imam issued a fatwa or whatever it was called, calling for Kara's death by stoning or by whatever means they could find. Those fuckers must be purely loving this, he thought.

Kara lay sicker than he'd ever seen anybody, and she might actually die. What the fuck was he going to do?

CGR people kept peeking into the room. Outside there was a prayer vigil going on. Some of the Church leaders huddled in groups, trying to figure out what they were going to do if their spiritual leader died. The Church would go on, of course, but it wouldn't be the same. Who would the next leader be, and how would they be chosen? Nobody knew but the truth was: nobody really wanted to find out. They all loved and respected Kara; they really couldn't bear the thought of losing her.

One of the leaders, some guy in a golden cap named Bill Something-or-Other, came up to Charlie and held out his hand. "I'm so sorry," he said. "I know this must be so hard on you and the kids."

Charlie nodded. There was nothing to say.

But Bill Whatever-His-Name-Was kept on talking quietly. "Chuck," he said, "We have got to plan for the worst. We'll hope for the best, but we need to plan for the worst."

Charlie nodded again. This guy was talking about Kara's death but she wasn't even dead yet. What a putz. He tuned the guy out and tried to think about what else he could do for his wife.

Suddenly Charlie's earwig went active. It had been a long time since he'd heard Research 3.0, and he'd kind of gotten used to being on standby status. The voice in his ear was like a wake-up call.

"Attention. New orders. If primary protectee dies, protect the children. Is that understood?"

Had Research gone crazy? Protect his children? As if that wasn't going to happen! But the voice wasn't done.

"You are engaged in a discussion right now. Please pay attention to it. It is a critical discussion and you will obtain important intelligence."

Hearing that, Charlie refocused on the Bill guy in front of him, who was in the middle of saying something about preserving Kara's legacy. Preserving her legacy?

"—Chuck, we can do this now. We have been working on this technology for years. She already has a neural lace, albeit an early model. We can link to the lace and then upload her consciousness into a computer network. That way she'll live on in some form, guiding us and helping us to move her Church forward—"

What the hell?

Charlie tried to focus but the words just didn't make any sense. He knew Kara had a bunch of wires in her brain. Hell, everybody knew that. She had an accident and she would have been paralyzed, but a miraculous computer link allowed her to walk again. And now this Bill guy wanted to hook her up to some other computer and do … what, exactly? It didn't make any sense.

Bill sighed. "Let's try this again."

Charlie nodded.

"You know your wife received the first neural lace, right?

Charlie nodded again. Duh.

"And you know the neural lace transmits and receives signals – electronic signals?"

Charlie nodded. Of course. Charlie decided right there and then that he was going to keep on nodding and not saying anything until this Bill guy got to the point and then he was going to run back to his wife and hold her hand. They didn't call him "Silent Chuck" for nothing.

Bill Whatever-His-Name-Was continued. "So we can hook up those signals to a computer outside of Kara. We can transmit and receive signals and store them in a computer. Many scientists have been working on this project for many years. Millions and millions of research dollars have been spent. We can do this now, though it hasn't ever been tested on a human before. Just like Kara was the first to receive a neural lace, she can be the first to be uploaded into a computer."

Charlie nodded but something prompted him to speak. "You want to save her life … but putting her into a computer?"

The Bill dude winced. "Chuck, we can't save her life. The most we can do is save her mind. Her body is going to die; we want to save her consciousness."

"Are you fuckin' kidding me?"

And that was when something in Charlie snapped and he turned right around and trotted back into his wife's room, because that Bill guy was a fuckin' putz and he didn't know shit, and he didn't have to deal with telling two very young children their mommy was about to die.

Kara was fading. He could tell. But he held her hand and prayed. He had never been religious like her, but on this day he prayed like he had never prayed before. He prayed for another miracle that would save her life.

She whispered something to him. He didn't want her to waste any energy so he tried to shush her, but she whispered something and he had to lean very close to her in order to hear what she was saying.

"Let them do the procedure. This is God's will. Let them do it, please. Not for me, but for them."

So of course he said yes and then she was taken from him. There were doctors and nurses and scientists and technicians. They had already prepped the room. Of course they had; they knew he was going to say yes. What else was he going to say? Whenever Kara said "God's will" or "God has spoken" then that's what happened.

He and the kids saw her on the operating table. She waved a little wave before they put her under and removed the top of her skull (the better to access the lace). Then somebody closed the curtain and he held the kids and told them everything was going to be okay.

Which was a lie, he knew. But he didn't know what else to say.

She died shortly thereafter. That Bill guy told him. Bill was going to be the next leader of the Church, he had said. He said anything that Charlie wanted, he could have. He said the Church would take care of Charlie and the kids for the rest of their lives. But Charlie didn't pay any attention to that stuff because none of it mattered without Kara in his life.

He kept going, day after day, week after week. They had to find a place to live, a place for the kids to go to school. He worried about security because there were people who wanted to hurt Kara, even after she was dead. He remembered his last direction from Research 3.0: "Protect the children."

Which had seemed to be about the stupidest, most unnecessary orders he had ever received, until he realized that simple direction gave him purpose and focus, and allowed him to keep going when all he wanted to do was curl up into a ball and cry his eyes out.

He got a new place in a new city and they had started to settle down a bit. The kids slept with him every night, and sometimes they asked when Mommy was coming home. "Soon," he said. And then they fell asleep, hoping Mommy would be there when they awakened. But she never was.

One day Charlie answered the door and Bill Ledbetter was there. Charlie was wary but invited him in. The CRG had been doing well under Bill's leadership, Charlie knew. He couldn't figure out why Bill was here, though.

Bill sat down, refused an offer of a drink, and started preaching. At least, that's what it sounded like to Charlie.

"Chuck," he said, "have you ever heard the word 'atonement'?"

"Sure," Charlie said. "People atone when they've sinned, right?"

Bill nodded. "That's close. Atonement is an action people take in order to reconcile with God for their sins. The theory is that sin takes people away from God, and atonement brings them back. It restores the relationship, so to speak."

Charlie nodded.

"But if you look at the word closely, it can be broken apart. 'Atonement' can be interpreted to mean 'At – One – Ment' – meaning to be at one with God. Atonement is an action that makes people one with God. It's a spiritual thing."

Charlie nodded again. He didn't need or want another fuckin' sermon from Kara's Church. He had had enough of those over the years.

"I wanted you to know that Kara's procedure was successful. Her mind was successfully uploaded into a computer – the first procedure of its kind. So even though her body died, her consciousness still lives on, just in a different form."

That's when Bill opened the laptop he had been carrying and showed Charlie a picture of Kara, only it wasn't a picture. It was a video. Only it wasn't a video because the video looked at Charlie and said, "Hello, my love."

He didn't understand but it was Kara and so he said hi and she said some things and then he couldn't see or hear any more because he was crying and then she was crying, too. Somewhere in the back of his mind that surprised him, because he thought computers didn't cry or feel any emotions.

Charlie never told the kids about their Mommy living in a computer. In fact, he never spoke to her again. It was just too much. Too much pain, too much longing, too much obsessing over the lost past and not getting on with things.

And so Charlie and his kids got on with things. After a while he took out the earwig and put it into a dresser drawer. He got involved with the kids' PTA and there he met another mom, a widow whose husband had been lost in combat. They shared a mutual pain and a mutual desire to get on with things. They made some jokes about The Brady Bunch but they decided to try it and it seemed to work out okay.

Once a year, on Kara's birthday, he and his wife and the kids visited the local CGR sanctuary to hear the members celebrate her life. He was struck by the language they used. She hadn't died; instead, she'd 'made a transition to a different state' or a 'different way of being'. Nobody ever specified exactly what that new way of being was, but Charlie figured he knew a lot more about it than most people. Afterwards, they all headed to the veterans' cemetery to pay respects to his wife's first husband. He thought Kara would have appreciated the symmetry.

And indeed, watching him from inside The Machine, she did.