"Oh, yes, therapy!" Renie bit her lip to keep from saying something that would lead her on into screaming and cursing. !Xabbu put his arm around her shoulders. She closed her eyes, suddenly sick of the place, the lights, everything.
Orlando broke the startled silence. "That still doesn't explain me. Why am I here? Maybe if you've got super-hypnosis power you can tell someone, 'Be in a coma!' or 'Feel like you're on fire if you go offline!' and it works, but you can't just tell somebody who's dying, 'Don't be dead.' Sorry, but they wouldn't even try that in a Johnny Icepick flick."
"We have not had much chance to talk, you and I," Sellars told him, "but I suspect you guess the answer already, Orlando. You have received the same kind of virtual mind as the Grail Brotherhood were expecting for themselves." He turned briefly to look at the Nemesis thing, which still seemed lost in some deep meditation. "And a body, too, like that one meant for Ricardo Klement, which was . . . borrowed, instead. But yours was constructed for you by the Other, just as he did for Paul Jonas—he may have been using some version of the Grail process on you the entire time you were in the system, letting your own brain build itself a virtual duplicate. He did follow you closely, Orlando, that I know for certain. Perhaps he felt some unspoken . . . affinity to you. To your illness, your struggle."
Orlando shook his head. "It doesn't matter. Dead is dead, and that's what I really am."
Before Sam Fredericks or anyone else could protest, they were distracted by a sudden movement from the Nemesis creature, who stood.
"The next ones are almost ready," Nemesis said. "I have a . . . feeling, I think it would be called. That I . . . desire waiting to end. Is that a feeling?"
"What's that fenpole talking about?" growled T4b. "What 'next ones'?"
Renie, who had been present for the Klement-thing's first groping explorations of language, could not help feeling disturbed that it now seemed to think it was having feelings, too.
"What it is talking about is the last part of these long explanations," Sellars said. "The reason we are here—and my most shamed confession." He extended his thin arm to indicate the honeycomb of lights. The gleam of it was less now, as though the fires were banked, but its bizarre potentiality still set Renie's nerves twitching. Sellars seemed oddly nervous, too. "These are the Other's true children."
"What—another abomination?" Nandi from the Circle spoke lightly, but Renie heard a flash of real rage.
"But this can't be them," Sam Fredericks said indignantly. "All those teddy bears and Bubble Bunnies and things like that, the ones that didn't get killed, they were still up there like half an hour ago, up at the top of the pit. How did they get here?"
"They are not here. These are something different. Please bear with me a little longer, Sam," Sellars asked her. "Just a little longer.
"Most of you do not know my true story, but I will spare you all the details now. I have certainly talked enough already, and there is much more that must be said, and quickly."
Sellars hurried through an explanation of the PEREGRINE project and its tragic ending. Renie found herself almost overwhelmed. Is there no end to these strange stories? she wondered. How much more can we absorb?
"So there I was—the only survivor," Sellars told them.
"An embarrassing secret kept under military house arrest for decades. Because of my bizarre communications capabilities I was not allowed to use the net, but I managed to trick my captors, upgrading myself until I could easily access the world's telecommunication infrastructure without them even guessing.
"But even with all the world's data resources at my fingertips, I grew bored. As bored men will do, I sought diversion. I have always liked to grow things. So . . . I grew things.
"Because my original purpose was to be the focal point of a multibillion dollar starship, and because I was so completely filled and transfigured by micromachinery, I had been given a complement of internal antiviral programs that were, for the time, the absolute state of the art. No computer viruses were to be allowed to destroy my very expensive functions, since in space I would be far beyond repair or replacement. I was given the newest and most effective sort of self-ordering antibodies—coded creations that could adapt and grow within my information system. But as time moved on in the real world, the net's own viruses became just as adaptable, which prompted programmers to create a whole new evolutionary round of antivirals.
"It fascinated me. Like most prisoners, I had nothing but time, so I began to experiment. I had little internal storage to speak of—that is the one way I have never been able to upgrade myself suitably—so to contain my experiments I had to find and use large-scale storage sites I could reach through the net—unused memory belonging to governments, corporations, educational institutions.
"This was dangerous foolishness, of course. I realize now how bitter and disaffected I must have been. The original antivirals from my own system were considerably more powerful than even what was in use in the mainstream net twenty years later. Put into direct competition with advanced viruses, they quickly became something even more exceptional, which provoked the viruses in turn into new adaptation. And as indicated by the very fact that I had reached these locations of unused memory through the world's communication system, if something went wrong with my protective arrangement, my . . . creations . . . could find their way off, out into the world grid.
"When I was only in the initial generations, this would not have been so much of a problem. Things as complex and dangerous were already all over the net. But as I refined my experiments—my games, as I carelessly thought of them—I forced up the cycle time, so that thousands of generations were breeding every week. The things I had created fought, experimented, changed, and replicated, all within my artificial information-world. Evolution shoved them forward in paradigmatic leaps. The adaptations were sometimes quite startling.
"One day, some ten years ago now, I found that several strategic approaches—different creatures, in a sense, but all sprung from the same shared root—had developed a symbiotic relationship, become a kind of super-creature. This is one of the things that happened on the long road to animal life in the real world—we have arrangements in our own cell structure that were once completely separate organisms. I began to realize what I was risking. I had created the beginnings of something that might conceivably become another true life-form—perhaps even a rival life-form. Information-based, as opposed to the organic life which has been the standard here on Earth, but life nevertheless. My games were clearly no longer just an amusement."
"You made . . . life?" Renie asked.
Sellars shrugged. "At the time, it was highly debatable. There are some who think that anything that is not organic cannot by definition be alive. But what I had created . . . or to be accurate, what evolution in information space had created . . . fulfilled all the other criteria.
"It is possible that what I should have done then was to destroy these nascent life-forms. I had many sleepless nights, and have had many since, wondering about my choice to keep them. You will perhaps think a little better of me when you remember that the military had taken my health and my freedom away from me. I had already been a captive for something like forty years. All I had were these . . . creations of mine. They were my entertainment, my fixation—but also my posterity. I thought that if I could get them to a point where I could prove what I believed was happening, I could reveal it to the world. The government and the military would find it very difficult simply to discredit or kill someone whose experiments were being examined by scientists all over the globe.