A tall, youthfully handsome man stood across it from her, impeccably dressed and groomed. This was a bad sign, because appearances were cheap in Cyberspace. All it took was a word, and you could be young or old or thin or have different hair. You could change sex or race or even make yourself into an animal. Nobody was impressed by appearances any more. Nobody, at least, except for those of her generation who remembered what it was to be insecure, and the very young who hadn't figured out the score yet.
Caroline let her own body age naturally; when she reached her apparent late thirties, she had it restored to about age sixteen. This wasn't vanity; she couldn't maintain her athletic lifestyle if she allowed herself to get too old. She had been through the cycle dozens of times. Most people simply had themselves frozen at an age they found comfortable and left it at that, but Caroline preferred the occasional dramatic intervention. The first time she had regressed she hadn't been asked, and doing it this way helped remind her of that violation.
At the moment Caroline looked to be in her mid to late twenties. Her athletic build was the result of real exercise, her skills the result of real practice. She asked Prime Intellect for very little, and resented having to ask for that.
Caroline was naked. She had not worn clothes since the Change except for an occasional costume in a Death fantasy. She wore no makeup, and her long hair was an unkempt tangle. What was the point? A word to Prime Intellect could provide anything, fix anything, but none of those things it provided or fixed would be uniquely hers.
Which didn't mean Caroline refused to decorate her body at all. It just meant that she decorated it in signature style, without help from Prime Intellect.
"Welcome," he said. "I am Timothy. You are Caroline Hubert?"
"The one and only."
"An honor, then. And it is an honor for me to challenge you to accept Authentic Death."
"Proceed," Caroline mumbled.
Caroline looked around at the audience, and noticed that they were all wearing clothes. Worse, they were all wearing the same kind of clothes, casual dress that would not have been out of place in a Western city just before the Change. That was an even stronger sign she was in amateur territory. Caroline's aesceticism may have been extreme, but she was hardly alone in her belief that clothing was pointless for immortals. Any random grouping of people would normally include some pretty wide variations in fashion. Especially at Death exhibitions, which tended to attract loons and deviants like herself.
She felt an instant dislike for this kid. True, she felt an instant dislike for nearly anybody who participated in the sham that passed for reality in Cyberspace, but in Timothy's case the feeling was stronger than usual. This hate welled up within her unbidden like those other mysterious and powerful feelings, love and masochism and sexual attraction. He had a kind of natural charisma, and she could feel the small crowd orbiting around him. Females outnumbered the males by more than two to one. He probably had them all convinced he was a fucking genius, as if genius was a rare commodity in Cyberspace or as if it had anything to do.
They were anxious, though. Anxious in the presence of the great lady, anxious to see how their little tin genius would fare. They were unnerved by her nakedness, by her proud and alert stance, by her forthrightness and lack of self-consciousness. They sensed that their clothing could not protect them from her scorn, nor would her nakedness make her vulnerable to theirs.
Most of all, though, they were unnerved by the fact that she wasn't quite naked.
Caroline's body was covered with brightly colored pictures, pictures that had obviously been there a long time. Pictures that didn't come off. The pictures were even worse than simple nakedness, because they drew the eye to the very parts of Caroline's body that would normally be covered and private. Timothy coughed and posed the question that was obviously on all of their minds: "Your body decorations are fascinating. Are they Authentic?"
"Tattoos."
"I understand the process is painful."
She flexed her arm, regarding the fat python coiled around it. Painful? Especially the way she got them, it was painful. She was covered in serpents, and with one exception every design had been drawn with an obsidian knife blade and colored by rubbing natural pigments into the cuts. They covered eighty percent of her body. Even her face was framed by a pair of green mambas. Snakes slithered up and down her torso, coiled about her limbs, investigated her orifices.
The one exception was a tiny black design on her left shin; that one wasn't a snake and it wasn't a tattoo. It was the letter «F» and it was the signature of her tattoo artist. It had been applied with a branding iron. The memories made her smile; new tattoos were the only good thing about her periodic age regressions.
"It doesn't kill you," she finally said.
Nervous laughter.
"All you have to do is jump in," Timothy suggested. "After making the Contract, of course."
"It's a designed experience, is that it?"
"Yes."
"How long you spent designing it?"
"Two years. I've gone through twenty-three times myself."
Caroline nodded, sighed, and said: "Prime Intellect, standard Death Contract for…is twelve hours enough?"
"It should be," Timothy said.
"Standard Contract for twelve hours." She felt the warning buzz that meant it had heard; then disconnect. The always-present listening ear, or microphone, was gone. It would obey her last command perfectly — until it was countermanded by Timothy, whose universe it was, or by her own impending demise, which would kick in the First Law. Or until twelve hours had passed, in the unlikely event she survived that long.
No matter what happened, she would have no trouble making Raven's party.
She jumped.
She fell about ten meters and landed on her feet, breaking her left leg below the knee. That was no big deal; had she landed on one of the spikes which dotted the bottom of the hole, she'd already be impaled. She wondered what would happen next if she had; impaling is cute but it hardly qualifies as a grade-nine experience.
It was dark. Very Freudian; she should have expected that from a Catholic kid, no matter how rebellious he thought he was. They'd be watching her with enhanced senses, though. Timothy wasn't the sort to extend Authenticity to the observation process.
Well, it was his universe.
She was at one end of a tunnel. It was dolled up to look like a natural cave, but Caroline knew right away that there was nothing natural about it. Real caves do not grow in nice neat lines. They twist. They tend to follow the soft rocks, which occur in sheets and often aren't level. The hole she had fallen through should have been a sinkhole; she should be surrounded by fallen rocks and debris. But it was as straight and solid as an elevator shaft.
This space had none of the defining qualities of a natural cave. It was just a rough tunnel, carved by Timothy's imagination. He had thought to hang stalactites from the tunnel ceiling, even though there were no other cave formations to suggest how they were formed, and no matching stalagmites projecting from the flat, dry floor.
She began crawling down the tunnel, and the first stalactite fell inches from her side. It shattered; it was not stone but some glasslike material that revealed thousands of razor-sharp edges. Another fell some distance away. Great, she thought idly. She crawled on, collecting hundreds of small cuts from the shards. Then one fell on her left hand directly, skewering it. Caroline gasped, but she didn't scream. She just broke it off and kept going.