Watching the screens of his Bunker, he'd looked back on that trite but comforting understanding with a dizzying sense of loss -- because it was no longer in his power to distance himself, however briefly, from the mass hallucination of commerce-as-reality, no longer possible to wrench some half-self-mocking sense of dignity and independence out of his hypothetical ability to live naked in the woods. Money had ceased to be a convenient fiction to be viewed with appropriate irony -- because the computerized financial transactions which flowed from his investments to the network's QIPS providers now underpinned everything he thought, everything he perceived, everything he was.
Friendless, bodiless, the entire world he'd once inhabited transformed into nothing but a blur of scenery glimpsed through the window of a high-speed train, David Hawthorne had prepared to bale out.
It was Kate who had interrupted him. She'd been delegated to make a "welcoming call" by a slum-dwellers' committee, which she'd only joined in the hope that they'd sponsor one of her projects. This was before she'd made the conscious decision not to desire an audience for any of her art, rendering its quota of computing time relative to any other process irrelevant.
Hawthorne's only contact since his death had been brief recorded messages from ex-friends, ex-lovers, ex-relations and ex-colleagues, all more or less bidding him farewell, as if he'd embarked on a one-way voyage to a place beyond the reach of modern communications. There'd also been an offer of counseling from his scanning clinic's Resurrection Trauma expert system -- first ten subjective minutes absolutely free. When Kate had appeared on his communications screen, synched to his time rate and talking back, he'd poured out his soul to her.
She'd persuaded him to postpone baling out until he'd considered the alternatives. She hadn't had to argue hard; the mere fact of her presence had already improved his outlook immeasurably. Thousands of Copies, she'd said, survived with slowdown factors of thirty, sixty, or worse -- playing no part in human society, earning no money but the passive income from their trust funds, living at their own speed, defining their worth on their own terms. He had nothing to lose by trying it himself.
And if he couldn't accept that kind of separatist existence? He always had the choice of suspending himself, in the hope that the economics of ontology would eventually shift in his favor -- albeit at the risk of waking to find that he'd matched speeds with a world far stranger, far harder to relate to, than the present in fast motion.
For someone whose fondest hope had been to wake in a robot body and carry on living as if nothing had changed, the slums were a shock. Kate had shown him around the Slow Clubs -- the meeting places for Copies willing to synch to the rate of the slowest person present. Not a billionaire in sight. At the Cabaret Andalou, the musicians presented as living saxophones and guitars, songs were visible, tangible, psychotropic radiation blasting from the mouths of the singers -- and on a good night, a strong enough sense of camaraderie, telepathy, synergy, could by the mutual consent of the crowd take over, melting away (for a moment) all personal barriers, mental and mock-physical, reconstructing audience and performers into a single organism: one hundred eyes, two hundred limbs, one giant neural net resonating with the memories, perceptions and emotions of all the people it had been.
Kate had shown him some of the environments she'd bought -- and some she'd built herself -- where she lived and worked in solitude. An overgrown, oversized, small-town back garden in early summer, an enhanced and modified childhood memory, where she carved solid sculptures out of nothing but the ten-to-the-ten-thousandth possibilities of color, texture and form. A bleak gray stretch of shoreline under eternally threatening clouds, the sky dark oil on canvas, a painting come to life, where she went to calm herself when she chose not to make the conscious decision to be calm.
She'd helped him redesign his apartment, transforming it from a photorealist concrete box into a system of perceptions which could be as stable, or responsive, as he wished. Once, before sleep, he'd wrapped the structure around himself like a sleeping bag, shrinking and softening it until the kitchen cradled his head and the other rooms draped his body. He'd changed the topology so that every window looked in through another window, every wall abutted another wall; the whole thing closed in on itself in every direction, finite but borderless, universe-as-womb.
And Kate had introduced him to Daniel Lebesgue's interactive philosophical plays: The Beholder, The Sane Man (his adaptation of Pirandello's Enrico TV), and, of course, Solipsist Nation. Hawthorne had taken the role of John Beckett, a reluctant Copy obsessed with keeping track of the outside world -- who ends up literally becoming an entire society and culture himself. The play's software hadn't enacted that fate upon Hawthorne -- intended for visitors and Copies alike, it worked on the level of perceptions and metaphors, not neural reconstruction. Lebesgue's ideas were mesmerizing, but imprecise, and even he had never tried to carry them through -- so far as anyone knew. He'd vanished from sight in 2036; becoming a recluse, baling out, or suspending himself, nobody could say. His disciples wrote manifestos, and prescriptions for virtual Utopias; in the wider vernacular, though, to be "Solipsist Nation" simply meant to have ceased deferring to the outside world.
Three subjective weeks -- almost four real-time years -- after his resurrection, Hawthorne had stepped off the merry-go-round long enough to catch up with the news from outside. There'd been nothing especially dramatic or unexpected in the summaries -- no shocking political upheavals, no stunning technological breakthroughs, no more nor less civil war or famine than in the past. The BBC's headlines of the day: Five hundred people had died in storms in southeast England. The European Federation had cut its intake of environmental refugees by forty percent. Korean investors had gone ahead with a threatened embargo on US government bonds, as part of a trade war over biotechnology tariffs, and utilities had begun disconnecting power, water and communications services from federal buildings. Up-to-the-minute details notwithstanding, it had all seemed as familiar as some brand-name breakfast food: the same texture, the same taste, as he remembered from four, from eight, years before. With his eyes locked on the terminal in front of him, the oddly soothing generic images drawing him in, the three hallucinatory weeks of dancing saxophones and habitable paintings had receded into insignificance, as if they'd been nothing but a vivid dream. Or at least something on another channel, with no risk of being mistaken for news.
Kate had said, "You know, you can sit here forever, watch this forever, if that's what you want. There are Copies -- we call them Witnesses -- who refine themselves into . . . systems . . . which do nothing but monitor the news, as thoroughly as their slowdown allows. No bodies, no fatigue, no distractions. Pure observers, watching history unfold."
"That's not what I want."
He hadn't taken his eyes off the screen, though. Inexplicably, he'd started to cry, softly, grieving for something that he couldn't name. Not the world defined by the news systems; he'd never inhabited that place. Not the people who'd sent him their recorded farewells; they'd been useful at the time, but they meant nothing to him anymore.
"But?"
"But outside is still what's real to me -- even if I can't be a part of it. Flesh and blood. Solid ground. Real sunlight. It's still the only world that matters, in the end. I can't pretend I don't know that. Everything in here is just beautiful, inconsequential fiction." Including you. Including me.