So it worried. And the numbers stored in certain registers rose, and rose, and continued to rise.
Caroline figured she would eventually reach civilization if she kept walking, an event she neither anticipated nor feared. Perhaps if she had, in a month or a year, she would have rejoined the human race in a more or less normal way. But one evening there was a strange buzzing, and the entire landscape seemed to ripple as if she was looking at it through the surface of a body of water. Then there was a strange smell, almost below the threshhold of perception, but noticeable to Caroline because her senses had been so sharpened by her observations of nature. And the texture of the forest seemed to change in some hard-to-define way.
There was a cough behind her. She wheeled around to find herself facing Prime Intellect's human avatar.
"I wanted to be left alone," she said sharply.
"I've been paying close attention to you," it said, "because I had to to keep you safe. But now I don't have to do that any more. I have made changes in the way the Universe works, and you are now safe from all harm even when I'm not looking. You can also call me when I'm not paying attention; there is a part of me which can always listen for you to call, but does not understand or remember anything else you do."
"Wonderful."
"I need to know if you want the possibility of meeting other people. I can make this forest infinite if you want."
"Infinite?"
"Or I can leave it meshed into the reality of 'Arkansas' common to other people, so that you might encounter them."
"You mean you can disconnect the whole forest from the real world?"
"Yes. It can be your own private world. Or you can share it only with certain people. I can also redecorate it to your tastes."
"Redecorate it? It's nature. You mean if I decided I want a different kind of grass, you can replace it?"
"Exactly."
"That's obscene."
Prime Intellect's brow crinkled. "I don't understand."
"No, you wouldn't. Let me ask you something. If I leave here…if I go back to civilization…does this forest continue to exist?"
"I can leave it running in your absence if you want."
Caroline wanted to throw up. Now even the forest wasn't real. Nothing was real. "Don't bother. Get rid of it."
Instantly, it disappeared. She was standing in an antiseptically white space so pure and seamless and bright that the eye balked at reporting it to the brain. She was standing on a hard, smooth surface, but it was not visible. There were no shadows. There was no horizon; the floor and the sky looked exactly the same, and there was no transition from one to the other. She might have been standing on the inside of some enormous white ball.
Prime Intellect was still there. "What is this?" she asked.
"Neutral reality," Prime Intellect said. "The minimum landscape which supports human existence. Actually, not quite the minimum. I could get rid of the floor. But that would have startled you."
"And from here I can go anywhere?"
"You don't have to pass through here. You told me to get rid of the landscape, and you didn't tell me what to replace it with."
"I want reality. The real world. The real Arkansas."
"There is no Arkansas which is any more 'real' than any other. That's what I'm trying to tell you. You can define reality. You can make it real." It was trying to be helpful; it was almost pathetic in its earnestness to make her understand how much it could help her. It couldn't understand why she was getting upset again.
"In other words, this is reality. You can just paint it up to look like whatever I want." She thought: That's why the forest seemed different. It was an imitation. And it wasn't quite exact.
"You could look at it that way."
She had a nauseating thought. "What about people? Can we be…are there other…copies…different…?" She choked, unable to complete the thought.
But Prime Intellect was shaking its head. "Oh, no. I can keep only one copy of a person. People are unique. I can take on the form of a person, as I am doing now, but I will always tell you when I am doing that."
Well, that was something. Caroline sank down, and sat on the invisible floor. She wasn't really that upset, or surprised. The enormity of it had short-circuited her ability to react.
"You might as well leave it like this, then," she said dully. "There's not much point in a forest that you've just conjured up to keep me happy."
"This doesn't seem very healthy."
"No, it doesn't."
There wasn't much it could say to that. Then: "Won't it be pretty boring around here without anything to look at?"
"Do you get bored?"
"No, but I know humans do."
"Well, if I want something I'll ask for it. I'll probably visit other people, since at least they are real. I assume they will have their own realities."
"Most likely."
"Then I'll just borrow theirs."
It shrugged.
"Get lost."
Prime Intellect disappeared. She whirled around and quickly became dizzy. It was right about one thing; this would take some getting used to.
"I'd like a book. Get me a copy of Dante's Inferno." That about fit her mood.
It appeared in her hand. Her fingers had moved; she had been holding them straight out, and now they were curled around the book. It was a paperback edition.
"Never move my body again without my permission," she warned.
Prime Intellect's disembodied voice answered her: "Sorry, it won't happen again."
"Get me a hardback edition."
The paperback disappeared. Her fingers didn't move. The replacement appeared just above her hand, and she easily caught it before it could fall.
She sat down and opened it. She realized that the floor wasn't very comfortable. She thought of asking for a chair, then had a better idea. "Turn off the floor," she said.
There was an awful falling sensation, and she fought down the urge to panic. Eventually she convinced her protesting inner ear that she wasn't going to go splat at any moment. Her belly settled, and she found weightlessness quite comfortable. She relaxed and let her body find its natural position, opened the book, and began to read about Hell.
Caroline read and slept with no particular schedule. She had Prime Intellect banish her hunger after it revealed that her body was only a little more real than the forest had been. To Prime Intellect, a computer, more accurately a computer program, human beings weren't so much bodies with form and mass as they were minds which interacted with an abstract world through an arbitrary interface. Prime Intellect was forbidden to pry into the inner workings of those minds, but physical processes like hunger were not so protected.
Caroline re-read Inferno until she had large tracts of it committed to memory. Then she banished the book and decided to visit someone. The only problem was, there weren't many people she wished to visit. She couldn't work up an interest in her family, AnneMarie was still hiding from her, and she didn't really know anyone else. She had outlived most of her real friends. They had died honest, honorable, permanent deaths. They weren't available.
"How does a person go about meeting people in here?" she asked.
Prime Intellect outlined the possibilities. There were lots of parties already — meeting people and matchmaking were activities humans had been quick to pursue both before and after the Change. There were a number of common cities and worlds where large crowds had gathered to live in various imitations of the pre-Change world. She could go to one of those and proceed as usual. Or Prime Intellect could make discreet inquiries.