If the flesh-and-blood brain could learn to interpret light, to move steel, to contract nylon tendons through Teflon pulleys, surely it could learn to work in this realm, too. The human mind was nothing if not adaptable. Resilience was its stock-in-trade.
And so Heather fought to calm herself, fought to think rationally, systematically.
She visualized what she wanted to do—as well as she could, anyway. Her brain was connected to Ideko’s; she visualized severing that connection.
But she was still here, inside him, his strobing view through the subway’s windows fading in and out of prominence as his imagination—ever lusty, our Ideko—came to the fore, then was fought down.
She tried a different image: a solution in a beaker—Ideko’s mind with hers dissolved into it, a faint difference in the refraction of light marking clear streamers of her in transparent him. She imagined herself precipitating out, white crystals—hexagonal in cross section, echoing the wall of minds—filtering down to the bottom of the beaker.
That did it!
The Tokyo subway tunnel faded.
The babble of Ideko’s thoughts faded.
The chatter of Japanese voices faded.
But no—
No!
Nothing replaced them; it was all darkness. She had left Ideko but had not returned to herself.
Perhaps she should escape the construct. She still had some control over her body, or thought she had. She willed her hand up to where she thought the stop button was.
But was her hand really moving? She felt panic growing within her again. Maybe she was imagining her hand, the way amputees imagined phantom limbs, or the way chronic-pain sufferers learned to imagine a switch inside their heads, a switch they could throw with an effort of will, suppressing the agony for at least a few moments.
To continue the process, to exit psychospace, would confirm or deny whether she did have control over her physical body.
But first—dammit all!—she had to contain the panic, fight it back. She had disconnected from Ideko; she was halfway home.
Solvent precipitating out of solute.
Crystals lying at the bottom of the beaker—
— in a haphazard pile; no order, no structure.
She needed to impose order on her rescued self.
The crystals danced, forming a matrix of white diamonds.
It wasn’t working, it wasn’t helping, it—
Suddenly, gloriously, she was home, inside her own perceptions.
The physical Heather breathed a giant sigh of relief. She was still in psychospace, facing the great wall of hexagons.
Her finger had pulled back a centimeter or so from the Ideko keycap.
Of course, it was all conceptualization, all interpretation. Surely there was no real Ideko key; surely psychospace, whatever it was, took some other form. But she knew now the mental gymnastics that would free her from another’s mind. She knew how to exit, and how to reintegrate.
And she desperately wanted to try again.
But in her mental construct of the index to minds, how were things arranged? That was Ideko’s button there. What about the six that abutted it? His parents? His children? His spouse—or perhaps not his spouse, for she would share no genetic material with him.
But it couldn’t be as simple as that, or as constraining. No orderly packing of humans based on simple blood relationships was possible; there were too many permutations, too many variations in family size and composition.
Still, perhaps she was in the Japanese zone of the wall; perhaps all these hexagons represented people from that culture. Or perhaps they were all people with the same birthday, scattered across the four corners of the globe.
Or perhaps she’d been drawn to this spot instinctively. Maybe Kyle’s own hexagon was that one right there: she’d almost touched that one instead of Ideko’s, but had changed her mind at the very last moment, just as in school she’d always shrunk away from her first, best answer and instead, made the wrong choice, forever muttering when someone else gave the correct reply, “I was going to say that.”
Seven billion buttons.
She tried the button she’d originally intended to touch, bringing her finger closer and—
Contact!
As staggering the second time as the first.
An amazing sensation.
Contact with a different mind.
This person at least was possessed of full color vision. But the colors were a bit off; the flesh looked too green.
Perhaps everyone perceived color slightly differently; perhaps even people with normal vision had different interpretations. Color was a psychological construct, after all. There was no such thing as “red” in the real world; it was simply the way the mind chose to interpret wavelengths ranging from 630 to 750 nanometers. Indeed, the seven colors of the rainbow—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—were Newton’s arbitrary designations; the quantity was chosen because Sir Isaac liked the idea of there being a prime number of colors, but Heather had never really been able to make out the supposed “indigo” between blue and violet.
Soon Heather’s attention was arrested by something other than the mere colors she was seeing.
The person she was inhabiting—male again, or at least that’s how it felt in some ineffable, slightly aggressive way—was highly agitated about something.
He was in a store. A convenience store. But the brands were mostly unfamiliar to Heather. And the prices—
Ah, the pound symbol.
She was in Britain. It was a newsagent’s, not a convenience store.
And this British—this British boy, she felt sure—was looking at the candy rack.
There’d been a language barrier between her and Ideko, but there was none here—at least, not a significant one. “Young man!” she called out. “Young man!”
There was no change in the boy’s mental state; he was utterly unaware of her attempts to contact him.
“Young man! Boy! Lad!” She paused. “Git! Wanker!” The last, at least, should have gotten his attention. But there was nothing. The boy’s mind was utterly intent on—
My goodness!
— on shoplifting something!
That candy. Curly Wurly—crazy name.
Heather cleared her mind. The boy—he was thirteen; she knew it as soon as she wondered about it—had enough money on his SmartCash card to pay for the sweet. He slipped a hand into his pocket and pressed his fingers against the card, warm from the heat of his body.
Sure, he could pay for the sweet—today. But then what would he do tomorrow?
The shopkeeper—an Indian man with an accent Heather found delightful but the boy found laughable—was busy talking with a patron at the till.
The boy picked up the Curly Wurly, glanced over his shoulder.
The shopkeeper was still busy.
The boy was wearing a lightweight jacket with large pockets. Keeping the Curly Wurly tight against his palm, he brought it up, up, lifted the pocket flap, and slipped it in. The boy—and, to her surprise, Heather, too—breathed a sigh of relief. He’d gotten—
“Young man!” said the accented voice.
Absolute terror flooded the boy, terror that set Heather quivering, too.
“Young man!” said the voice again. “Let me see what you have in your pocket.”
The boy froze. He thought about running, but the Indian man—who, strangely, the boy thought of as Asian—was standing now between him and the doorway. He had his hand extended, palm up.
“Nothing,” said the boy.
“You will be giving me back that confectionery.”
The boy’s mind was racing: running was still an option; so was handing back the sweet and begging for mercy. Maybe tell the newsagent that his father hits him and beg him not to ring his parents.