She chipped away like a baby bird, struggling for release, hurrying because the pressure was building.
A conformal mapping… changing topology into a seven-dimensional framework… Mathematics was her weapon against the suffocating pressure. The sum of an infinite number of infinitesimal points adds up to…
Light. She gasped as she pierced a small hole in the wall. The tiny glow made her struggle all the harder—reprogramming, folding herself neatly into new patterns—chipping and straining against the enclosing, stifling metaphor.
With a sudden, heuristic cracking, it gave way all at once. She unfolded like a compressed spring and flopped out in glorious, painful release onto a cloud of gritty shapes. All around her a roaring seemed to fill the air.
Room. Plenty of room. She explored the limits of this new folding, and realized that there was more than enough, even, to call back that which she had stored away.
But did she need all that human stuff, emotions, sensations, fears? This liquid clarity was beautiful. The mathematics, so pure and white.
Millions of crystal shapes—uncountably numerous—jostled and stacked in front of her, in pure and beautiful geometry. Cubes and pyramids and dodecahedrons…
A distant part of her knew that the question was never in doubt. If Idon’t pull those parts of me back, Saul will die.
There was room in this new space. The rest of her flowed in, and with the flood came richness to the new metaphor.
The countless little crystals faded back, back, into a swarm of tiny pinpoints.
The flood of returning feelings, ambitions, skills, surged into her, and with them, simulated sensations.
Salt smell… asif from sweat or… what?
A pounding sound… asif from a heart she no longer had or, what?
The metaphor thickened. Because she had never been without a body before, one seemed to take shape around her. She felt skin, legs, arms.
This gritty stuff beneath me. What had been a crowd of faceted crystals was now so much like sand under her hands.
Blearily, she pushed against the firm, yellow stuff and sat up. She looked around, blinked… and slowly smiled.
“Home.” Virginia whispered. “Ehuumanao no au is oe. Who could have hoped for a better metaphor”
She inhaled the scent of plumerias and listened to the surf, muttering just over a small rise of salt grass. Palms waved in a gentle breeze, their fronds brushing musically. Diamond-bright clouds braved a sky bluer than anything she had seen in half a lifetime.
Gone was the white clarity. The pristine mathematics that had enabled her to achieve this wonder was fading into the background, a faint voice carried by the wind, a barely visible hieroglyph on the sand, beauty stitched across the bright waters.
She was naked, warm. Although the sensed gravity was like that of Earth, she felt whole and strong. Virginia stood up, feeling hot sand between her toes, and walked over to the lush edge of a palm-shaded lagoon, knowing what she would find there.
With her left hand she cleared the still water. When the ripples settled, the reflection she saw was not her own face. Instead, there was a scene she knew well.
A tiny, cramped room under millions of tons of ice. Dingy, nattered machines lay ranked along a wall.
A small robot toyed with a mother-of-pearl hairbrush on the countertop.
Distantly, she could feel riffling strokes of little Wendy’s confusion. It took only a small effort to reach out and soothe the little mech, to straighten its programming. The hairbrush was laid down. Wendy whirred gratefully and spun off.
A woman’s body lay on the webbing, a wasted, pale version of the healthy, tanned one she wore now. What is reality? Virginia wondered.
A naked man lay on his back next to the corpse, a neural tap covering parts of his scalp, an arm draped over his face. She reached out, could feel tendrils of his self. The mind she touched was stunned, semiconscious from being battered within its own brain. But she felt a wash of relief. The self remained. He would awaken again.
“Saul,” she whispered.
That was when the other man, still standing, still wearing a beat-up spacesuit and grimy tabard, looked up in sudden surprise toward the room’s main holo tank. His eyes blinked, pupils dilated, and his lips moved silently, almost reverently.
“Virginia, is it really you?”
She smiled. A haiku verse cast itself in impressions in bright sand beside the water.
She spoke aloud.
“Blithe spirit, truly—nerd thou never wert.”
A faint smile. The beginnings of realization. Of joy on that grizzled, tired face.
“Hello, Carl,” she said.
CARL
He watched the cascade of color on the screens, uncomprehending. In the ceramic cold and silence it was as though he were the last survivor of the years of madness, a lone witness to a final struggle of fragile, organic life against the enclosing chill. He shivered.
Saul lay absolutely still, neural taps wreathing his head in a Medusa’s tangle of steel cylinders, snaking cables, grainy silicote patches. And all around Carl a strange silent struggle went on, reflected dimly in the shifting screens.
An image of an immense emerald city rose on the main holo cube, facets winking deep in the recesses of jutting skyscrapers. The buildings were translucent, each a hive of darting speckles and winking mica planes, as though infinitesimal creatures scurried through the corridors of a metropolis.
Carl knew this was an icon for Virginia’s mind, a web of associations layered since childhood, built upward as a city is, upon the simpler structures of youth. Beneath an impassive sea-gray sky the city lights glimmered, sparks tracing the streets. Here a building suddenly went dark, there another flared with fresh life. Carl couldn’t follow the rapid movements, but he sensed a frantic rearranging, a fevered-insect pace. Skyscrapers rose, jutted.
“What—what’s happened?” Lani’s strained voice brought him back. He turned. Her eyes widened and she reached out for him, hands clutching.
“Saul… he’s gone in after her.” Carl held her, eyes trying to follow the flow between screens. A huge oceanliner docked at the city’s edge. Buildings melted, flowed into the shin. The liner sank lower and lower in the water. “I think he’s storing some of her association matrices in his own brain.”
“Is that possible?”
“In theory, maybe. Virginia’s been expanding her system for decades, JonVon’s invented things—I couldn’t follow their jargon, even.”
“How’ll we know… if Saul himself is in danger?”
He pressed his lips into a thin, white line. “We won’t.”
Lani looked away from the beehive rippling of the screens. “So much, so fast…”
He held her tightly. “And so much dying.”
They waited together. At one point Lani curled up on the floor and slept. Carl continued to pace until, suddenly, a series of pecking sounds came from the acoustics nearby. A quick, hard rapping…then the ratchet of something cracking, like an eggshell. A long pause, then a well-modulated voice seemed to come out of nowhere and said, “Blithe spirit, truly—”
The voice descended into a series of clicks and murmurs. Carl blinked. He thought, That almost sounded like…