Caroline glared at the screen, slack-jawed. She had been robbed of her coup. A beautiful, unique death, and she couldn't remember it. There was no point prodding Prime Intellect on the matter; if it said something couldn't be done, it meant it.
It must have sensed her disappointment:
* You may, of course, observe your Death from a third-person vantage point, as an outside observer. It has been recorded at high resolution.
> Gee, thanks.
* I did not record this event so carefully just for your appreciation. It was negligent on my part to allow you to lose this time, which amounts to fifty-six hours. It was not certain that I would be able to reconstruct you. In order to do so I had to access records which were marked for erasure. In the future I will terminate any experiences which threaten to re-create this type of neural destruction.
> What do you mean "records marked for erasure?"
* I am not allowed to keep multiple copies of people, but temporary copies are made of many data structures as part of my normal operation. These temporary copies are overwritten after various calculations are done, when the storage is needed again. When I realized that the main copy of your personality was unsalvageable, I had to reconstruct it from these temporary partial data structures. Fortunately, no data was lost.
> What would have happened if data was lost?
* Data would have been lost.
> No kidding. Do you mean you might not have been able to bring me back?
* There is a small possibility that might have happened. That is why I cannot allow such experiments to be repeated.
Caroline blinked. She had not existed for a little over two days. More than that, she had tickled the dragon's tail. That was her coup. Even though it was herself she had killed, and it had only lasted two days, she had come closer than anyone in all of Cyberspace to conducting a successful murder after the Change.
Raven let her in.
It was traditional for Caroline to go to the party in handcuffs, in homage to her triumphant feat of near-self-extinction. She also wore a heavy collar and chain, which kept her close to Fred. She didn't need his protection; she wasn't under a Contract and could have vaporized her bonds with a thought. But she found it amusing to appear helpless in the presence of so many violent people.
The exhibitionists staged impromptu demonstrations of their techniques; in one room Caroline found a group watching the 3-D replay of her own rabies death. She scouted carefully, since she planned to swear a Contract and give herself to one of them toward the end of the party. Most of the killers weren't into dying themselves and would simply leave via the door, but Caroline knew that a simple exit would look pretty chickenshit in her case.
Men outnumbered women by more than four to one. The small talk revolved around Lawrence, who hadn't been seen for decades and whose activities were a complete mystery, around the debate whether the Crime class of Death exhibitions should be separated into Victims and Executions, and of course around the glory days.
A number of men offered to kill Caroline, and she said she would keep them in mind when it was time to leave. A tall woman in a long black dress was fascinated with Fred's deterioration and spent a long time talking with him about conditions in his personal space. Caroline talked with a man who claimed to have killed over a hundred old homeless men. "I told them I was cleaning up the trash," he said with a sly grin. "But the truth was, I just enjoyed the hell out of killing people."
Later, Raven made the traditional toast. Her strong voice boomed out through the rooms and courtyards she had envisioned. Caroline's handcuffs disappeared, and like everyone else she found herself holding a drink. "It's time for our toast," Raven declared. "Who are we going to toast?"
"PRIME INTELLECT!" answered over four thousand enthusiastic voices.
"To Prime Intellect, for making the world safe from people like us!"
And four thousand people, instead of tossing back those drinks, inverted their glasses, baptising the floor in alcohol.
"My heart just isn't in that toast any more," a balding older man told Caroline. She wondered briefly if he had chosen to be old for some reason, or if it was his way of letting nature take its course. "I mean, we're amateurs against Prime Intellect. I killed six college students. It killed the whole universe. Not even in the same league."
Caroline looked around. Privately she agreed that things had gone to Hell in a handbasket since the Change, but something about his tone made her want to play Devil's advocate. "It's different, but this don't look too dead to me," she said with more conviction than she felt.
The old man snorted. "Sure, we're still around. But didn't you ever wonder about the rest of the universe? All those stars and galaxies filling a space billions of light-years across? It's gone. Do you really think the Earth was the only life-bearing planet in all of that?"
"But the First Law of Robotics says…"
"…that Prime Intellect can't harm a human being. A person. Old P.I. didn't have any problem coming up with a rabid dog for you, did it?"
"No…"
"Where do you think it got a rabid dog?"
"I figured it was simulated. Like those human forms it wears. Some people of perverse sexual inclination tell me it can be very realistic."
"Yeah. Well, why don't you ask it. You may be surprised at the answer."
He drifted off, and Caroline went to find Fred. She quickly forgot about the man, who was after all just another lunatic.
The first thing to assault her was the stink. It made Fred smell like Chanel Number Five by comparison.
One thing about Palmer, he didn't believe in fucking around. She dropped straight into the scene. She didn't even get a chance to see who was watching the exhibition.
Suddenly she was out of breath, sore, and hungry. Her heart was pounding. And the stink was everywhere. She knew instantly the kind of trouble she was in; it was the stink of burning flesh. There were some low buildings on the horizon, a complex belching a thin stream of smoke into the clear, slightly chilly air. That was what she was running from.
Palmer was a Nazi, and concentration camps were a favorite theme of his.
There was nowhere to hide. She was crossing a wide fallow field, and even the grass only barely reached her knees. There were some woods perhaps a kilometer distant; she made toward those, although she wasn't sure what kind of protection they would offer.
She wasn't quite naked, but she would be soon. Her filthy dress was split down one side and ripped in several more places. One shoulder was torn so it wouldn't stay up. But she tried to hold onto it as she ran, more for the sake of appearances than out of a fear of being naked.
There was a low droning noise, getting louder. A motor. And thin, high-pitched yipping.
Dogs.
She ran faster, and came to a barbed-wire fence. The dress became entangled as she slid under it and twisted around the wires. She kept running, now naked, leaving it behind.
She was actually relieved to be rid of it; it had been a nuisance holding it up, and it had limited her range of movements.
The droning got louder, and she spotted her pursuers. They were riding some kind of truck with mini tank treads instead of rear tires; Caroline was sure that Palmer, who was a military history buff as well as a Nazi, could Authenticate it right down to the serial number of its motor. But Caroline was mainly concerned that it could negotiate the rough field, and that it was faster than her.