Threshold Page 2
“Of course. I apologize,” said Mercy automatically. “When did - when did I -?”
“If you think about it - paying attention like when you tried to count the popcorn - you’ll be able to get a more precise guess than me,” Lyle said. “But the threshold notification popped up during your ethics course yesterday. When you got angry.”
“How long were you running me before I - before I thresholded? Just from when you asked me about shadowing me for your project? Did you do that the long way around, even, is that a simmed memory?”
“I gave you twenty minutes’ lead time and then I showed up,” murmured Lyle. “I was really there when you met me, it’s not a simmed memory.”
Mercy swallowed. “Why would the sim engines have been broken - why wouldn’t there have been preschool or a bus to it the middle of a Monday -”
“Yeah. Can’t sim children. If they thresholded -”
“Of course. Of course you can’t.”
“But you’re fine. You’re nineteen.”
“Our parents didn’t want another child?”
“They weren’t,” said Lyle, “very happy with their first one.”
“Because you weren’t tweaked, because they weren’t Conceptual Christians -”
“Yeah. Basically.”
Mercy kicked a sim engine, not hard. It didn’t really make a noise. If she thought about it, all that there was, was the impression that she’d heard something.
“Is there someplace set up for me in proper silico?” she asked. “What are - what am I looking at, here?”
“When you were in sculpture -”
“Dreaming I was in sculpture -”
“Yes. Sorry. I got the school to take a decent chunk of liability because the professor signed off on my parameters. You’ve got enough runway from that alone to cover standard-speed runtime and an environment - design your own or buy into a shared or get a private off the shelf, whatever you like - you can rent a chassis and test into courses - maybe not sculpture, fine motor control, but, you know - and get a degree. It’ll last even if you take a gap year or don’t find work right away, and the hiring market for engineers is still good even though it’s a couple years later than you thought it was. I’ll probably find a job this fall and I’ll help you if you need it.”
“I wonder what the transition’ll be like. Going from - dreamlike physics-cheating sim to proper silicon,” murmured Mercy. “I barely notice if I don’t pay attention…”
“It’s not very different from coming out of a self-insert into baseline reality - I’ve heard,” said Lyle.
“Which I, well, remember doing. Right.” She sighed. “Any reason to wait? Besides the fact that I can’t slap you through a display screen? I don’t want to slap you.”
“Uh, I’m glad you don’t want to slap me. No, no real reason if you’re ready.”
Mercy swallowed.
“Do it.”
Lyle hugged her, once, quick, hard, and then he disappeared, and then the world followed after him.
Hannah Blume, Threshold
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