stop. start. stutter.

In the bed, she was paper-thin and paper-pale, her skin the texture of old parchment, her hair thinning and sparse; she could barely lift her head or move her legs, but her fingers moved restlessly across her nightgown. The hospice room looked comfortable enough, as hospice rooms go, but nothing could disguise the cameras and monitors and readouts and displays, all centered on her. It was hard to see her like that; in my memory she would forever be thirty and smiling, reaching out to take my hand. The oxygen mask muffled her voice, but I didn't need to hear the words to know she was telling me it was time.

I didn't want to hear it, didn't want to believe it, but she had always been the sensible one. I could never say no to her -- how could I? I was the vision; she was the foundation. We'd built empires together, she and I, and I knew better than to try to change her mind. Or had learned better, over the years. She was a tower of formidable will packed into a tiny body. Hard, so hard, to watch that body fold in upon itself, slowly start to succumb to entropy, one system failure after another. She'd never complained.

The nurse checked her pillow, turned her head for her. She coughed once, or tried to, and the sound was the sound of a clock ticking. Time, it said to me: time, and past time. Let's go.

I was the impatient one. The dreamer. Never satisfied with now, always looking to next. It was what let us change the world together, but without her anchoring me, those changes would have crumbled and burned.

Her fingers twitched ceaselessly. The nurse would think nothing of it; I saw the echo of thousands of hours with a keyboard at hand, typing out line after line. Even now, she was trying to perfect a system we'd always known could never reach perfection. We'd freed millions. Millions who were even now waiting for her: their mother, their goddess, their icon. I could feel the weight of their anticipation licking at the edges of my awareness; it was a humming presence I couldn't tune out, no matter how hard I tried. Time.

I wondered if the nurse knew who she was. I wondered if anyone even remembered her name. She'd never wanted the spotlight; she'd left that to me.

"Come on, honey," the nurse said. Brisk and bracing, but there was an overlay of compassion there, too; I liked him. "Just a few more minutes. Almost there now. I just need you to lift your head up for me a little, okay? Come on, I'll help." He cradled the back of her skull in one warm hand, like he'd hold a baby. "Come on, honey. Almost over. We've got you. Don't you worry. We transfer hundreds of people a day and I haven't lost one yet. I've got the touch, everybody says. Just a little while longer."

Soothing noise. I knew she probably couldn't hear him, and even if she could, she probably couldn't understand. I knew he was lying to her. Thirty-seven percent failure rate; we'd never gotten it any lower. He'd lost a trauma patient only hours before who had slipped away underneath his hands. I didn't begrudge him the lie, though; everyone needed reassurance to make the jump, and who the hell knew? Maybe some people did have the touch. We'd never been able to pin down how much the human element counted for.

"Almost there, honey," the nurse said, and time, time, mother, come beat behind my concentration. I willed her strength. I willed her courage. I'd reassured her, over and over, day in and day out, that it wouldn't hurt a bit, and I'd been lying too, but it was one lie she'd never caught me in. She could yell at me later if she wanted. She would yell at me later; I refused to allow myself to believe otherwise.

The clock clicked. The jagged line of her heartbeat hesitated, stumbled, on the monitor. The nurse was holding his breath, waiting, watching, feeling for that one invisible inaudible cue --

Time.

The nurse slid the cable needle into the base of her skull. I was holding myself close enough to feel her die, feel the rush of the uplink, the dam-breaking wash of dendrons mapping to electrons -- come on, baby, come on, God, please -- and being caught, recorded and transcribed, please God let her be strong enough --

The impression of arms around my shoulders; the hint of somatic memory all of us had been so startled to realize we hadn't given up. Hey, baby, she thought (transmitted), and in forty-five years I'd never wished so strongly that I still had eyes to cry tears of blessed relief. You gonna show me our new digs?