Half blind with fury, Elin strode through a residential settlement. The huts glowed softly from the holotapes playing within-diffuse, scattered rainbow patterns unreadable out-side their fields of focus. She'd left Tory behind, bewildered, two terraces above.
Elin halted before one hut, stood indecisively. Finally, because she had to talk to somebody, she rapped on the lintel.
Father Landis stuck her head out the doorway, blinked sleepily. "Oh, it's you, Donnelly. What do you want?"
To her absolute horror, Elin broke into tears.
Landis emerged, zipping up her jumpsuit. She cuddled Elin in her arms, made soothing noises, listened to her story.
"Coral," Landis said. "Ahhhh. Suddenly everything falls into place."
"Well, I wish you'd tell me, then!" She tried to blink away the angry tears. Her face felt red and raw and ugly; the wet ware paint was all smeared.
"Patience, child." Landis sat down cross-legged beside the hut, patted the ground beside her. "Sit here and pretend that I'm your mommy, and I'll tell you a story."
"Hey, I didn't come here-"
"Who are you to criticize the latest techniques in spiritual nurturing, hey?" Landis chided gently. "Sit."
Elin did so. Landis put an arm about her shoulder.
"Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Coral-I forget her last name. Doesn't matter. Anyway, she was bright and emotional and ambitious and frivolous and just like you in every way." She rocked Elin gently as she spoke.
"Coral was a happy little girl, and she laughed and played, and one day she fell in love. Just like thatl" She snapped her fingers. "I imagine you know how she felt."
"This is kind of embarrassing."
"Hush. Well, she was very lucky, for as much as she loved him, he loved her a hundred times back, and for as much as he loved her, she loved him a thousand times back. And so it went. I think they overdid it a bit, but that's just my personal opinion.
"Now Coral lived in Magritte and worked as a wetware tech. She was an ambitious one, too-they're the worst kind. She came up with a scheme to reprogram people so they could live outside the programs that run them in their every day lives. Mind you, people are more than the sum of their programming, but what did she know about free will? She hadn't had any religious training, after all. So she and her boyfriend wrote up a proposal and applied for funding, and together they ran the new program through her skull. And when it was all done, she thought she was God. Only she wasn't Coral anymore-not so as you'd recognize her."
She paused to give Elin a hug. "Be strong, kid, here comes the rough part. Well, her boyfriend was brokenhearted. He didn't want to eat, and he didn't want to play with his friends. He was a real shit to work with. But then he got an idea.
"You see, anyone who works with experimental wetware has her personality permanently recorded in case there's an accident and it needs to be restored. And if that person dies or becomes God, the personality rights revert to IGF. They're sneaky like that.
"Well, Tory-did I mention his name was Tory?-thought to himself: What if somebody were to come here for a new personality? Happens about twice a year. Bound to get worse in the future. And Magritte is the only place this kind of work can be done. The personality bank is random-accessed by computer, so there'd be a chance of his getting Coral back, just as good as new. Only not a very good chance, because there's lots of garbage stuffed into the personality bank.
"And then he had a bad thought. But you mustn't blame him for it. He was working from a faulty set of moral precepts. Suppose, he thought, / rigged the computer so that instead of choosing randomly, it would give Coral's personality to the very first little girl who came along? And that was what he did." Landis lapsed into silence.
Elin wiped back a sniffle. "How does the story end?"
"I'm still waiting on that one."
"Oh." Elin pulled herself together and stood. Landis followed.
"Listen. Remember what I told you about being a puppy tripping over its paws? Well, you've just stubbed your toes and they hurt. But you'll get over it. People do."
"Today we make a Buddha," Tory said. Elin fixed him with a cold stare, said nothing; even though he was in green and red, immune. "This is a higher-level program, integrating all your mental functions and putting them under your conscious control. So it's especially important that you keep your hands to yourself, okay?"
"Rot in hell, you cancer."
"I beg your pardon?"
Elin did not respond, and after a puzzled silence Tory continued: ' 'I'm leaving your sensorium operative, so when I switch you over, I want you to pay attention to your surroundings. Okay?"
The second Trojan horse came on. Everything changed.
It wasn't a physical change, not one that could be seen with the eyes. It was more as if the names for everything had gone away. A knee-tall oak grew nearby, very much like the one she had crushed accidentally in New Detroit when she had lost her virginity many years ago. And it meant nothing to her. It was only wood growing out of the ground.
A mole poked its head out of its burrow, nose crinkling, pink eyes weak. It was just a small, biological machine. "Whooh," she said involuntarily. "This is awfully cold."
"Bother you?"
Elin studied him, and there was nothing there. Only a human being, as much an object as the oak, and no more. She felt nothing toward or against him. "No," she said.
"We're getting a good recording." The words meant nothing; they were clumsy, devoid of content.
In the grass around her, Elin saw a gray flickering, as if it were all subtly on fire. Logically she knew the flickering was the firing of nerves in the rods and cones of her eyes, but emotionally it was something else: It was time. A gray fire that destroyed the world constantly, eating it away and remaking it again and again.
And it didn't matter.
A great calmness wrapped itself around Elin, an intelligent detachment, cold and impersonal. She found herself identifying with it, realizing that existence was simply not important. It was all things, objects.
She could not see Tory's back, was no longer willing to assume it even existed. She could look up and see the near side of the earth. The far side might well not exist, and if it didn't, well that didn't matter either.
She stripped away the world, ignored the externalities. / never realized how dependent I am on sensory input, she thought. And if you ignored it-there was the void. It had no shape or color or position, but it was what underlies the bright interplay of colors that was constantly being destroyed by the gray fires of time. She contemplated the raw stuff of existence.
"Please don't monkey around with your programming," Tory said.
The body was unimportant, too; it was only the focal point for her senses. Ignore them and you could ignore it. Elin could feel herself fading in the presence of the void. It had no material existence, no real being. But neither had the world she had always taken for granted-it was but an echo, a ghost, an image reflected in water.