The Long War

remember? In the Home, in Madison West 5. You had already been given the last rites. You were suffering, Agnes.’
    ‘I’m not about to forget that.’
    ‘And Joshua asked me to ease that suffering. Surely you would have wanted that—’
    ‘Joshua. Of course he’d come.’ Of all the children she’d cared for in her years in the Home, Joshua Valienté had always been the most – remarkable. It was typical of him never to have forgotten, not to have stayed away – to have come back when she needed him most, as her life, after too many decades, guttered like a fading candle. Come back to try to put things right. ‘Joshua would ask for help. I suppose you weren’t about to refuse him.’
    ‘No. Especially as he asked me through gritted teeth; we did rather fall out after the Madison incident.’
    ‘But he was surely merely asking you to ease my way. I would never have expected this – blasphemy!’
    Now at last the chair swivelled, and Lobsang faced her, in an orange robe, his head apparently shaved. She’d seen him in person only once before, and she remembered that face – eerie, not quite the human norm, of no clearly identifiable age, like the reconstructed face of a burns victim perhaps. She remembered her own reflection; her new mechanical carcass was better quality than this . Evidently she was a later model.
    He asked, ‘Blasphemy? Must we talk in such terms?’
    ‘Then in what terms do you want to talk?’
    ‘Perhaps about the reason I . . . brought you back.’
    ‘Reason? What reason could there possibly be?’
    ‘Oh, a very good one. I would be very pleased if you would rise to this unusual occasion and consider a proposition – a new purpose, which I believe will accord with your own disposition. Will you hear me out?’
    Sister Agnes took a seat in an almost identical overstuffed chair, opposite him.
    ‘How are you finding your body, by the way?’
    She raised her hand, looked at it, flexed her fingers, and imagined she heard the whirring of tiny hydraulic motors. ‘I’m finding you’ve turned me into Frankenstein’s monster.’
    ‘Actually Frankenstein’s monster was considerably more learned and worthy than his so-called master. Just a thought.’
    ‘Get to the point. What do you want ?’
    ‘Very well. Agnes, knowing a great deal about you from Joshua, and from other sources including your own diaries – and knowing your most excellent sympathy for an irrevocably flawed humanity – I have shanghaied you, so to speak, on behalf of said humanity. I have a mission for you. It is this: I need an adversary.’
    ‘A what?’
    ‘Agnes, you know me. You know what I am. I span the world! Indeed, the worlds. I wield an enormous amount of power, starting with the ability to fix parking tickets and working on up to a scale that no tyrant in all of history has been able to boast. I have no master. I report to nobody save myself. Even Douglas Black is only a patron, a facilitator. He could not stop me. And that’s what worries me.’
    ‘It does?’
    ‘Of course. Shouldn’t it? I need an adversary, Agnes. Somebody to tell me when I am out of order. When I’m being inhuman. Or being too human, even. It seems to me, given all that Joshua has said about you, that you are uniquely placed to be that person.’
    ‘You brought me back to life to be your conscience? This is ridiculous! Even if I agreed – how could I stop you from doing anything that you want to do?’
    ‘I will give you the means to shut me down.’
    ‘What? Is that even possible?’
    ‘It’s tricky,’ conceded Lobsang. ‘There are now a number of iterations of myself scattered across the world, the Long Earth, and even various locations around the solar system. You can’t have too much backup . . . But, yes, I can find a way to make it happen. To have me deleted from all those places.’
    ‘Hmm. And in all those places,’ said Sister Agnes, ‘where is your soul?’
    ‘Here, talking to you like this, in these new bodies, surely we can agree that the soul has no boundaries?’
    ‘Do I have a choice in any of this?’
    ‘Of course. You can walk away now and you will be taken anywhere on the planet that you wish. You will never hear from me again. Or – well, you too have an off switch, Agnes. But I know that you are not going to take those options.’
    ‘Oh, you do, do you?’
    ‘You see, when I came to visit you with Joshua that day, and I asked you if you had any regrets – do you remember? You