Right, Macy cut in. I’d recognize that I’m a nothing and you’re a genius, and I’d get the hell out of your head.
—Yes.
Sorry, Hamlin. You’re wasting our time asking me to. Why should I commit suicide just to give you a second chance to mess up your life?
—Suicide! Suicide! You’ve got to be alive before you can commit suicide!
I’m alive.
—Only in the most narrow technical sense.
Fuck you, Hamlin.
—Let’s try to keep the conversation on a friendly basis, okay?
How can I be friendly when you invite me to kill myself? Where’s the advantage for me in accepting your deal? What do you have to offer that makes it worth my while to give you this body back?
—Nothing. I can only appeal to your sense of equity. I’m more talented than you. I’m more valuable to society. I deserve to live more than you do.
I’m not so sure of that. Society’s verdict was that you had no value at all, in fact that you were dangerous and had to be destroyed. Not even rehabilitated, in the old pre-Rehab sense of the word. Destroyed.
—A miscarriage of justice. I could have been salvaged. I went insane, I don’t deny it, I did a lot of harm to a bunch of innocent women. But that’s all over. If I came back now, I’d be beyond all that crap. I’d keep to myself and practice my art.
Sure you would. Sure. Look, Hamlin, if you want this body back, take it away from me—if you can. But I’m not giving it to you just for the asking. I don’t think as little of myself as you do. Forget it.—I wish I could make you see my point of view.
Half past seven. Still no Lissa. Macy switched from sherry to bourbon. Also lit the first gold of the evening. A deep drag; instant response, lightheadedness, a loss of contact with his feet. Just a touch of pot-paranoia, too: suppose Hamlin made a grab for his brain while he was fuddled with liquor and fumes? Could he fight back properly? His skullmate had been quiet for ten or fifteen minutes now. Gathering strength for an assault, maybe. Keep your guard up.
But no assault came. The intoxicants that lulled Macy seemed to lull Hamlin as well.
Eight o’clock.
Hamlin? You still there?
—You rang, milord?
Talk to me.
—Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and—
No, be serious. Tell me something. What’s it like for you, inside there?
—Crowded and nasty.
How do you visualize yourself?
—As an octopus. A very small octopus, Macy, maybe a millionth of an inch in diameter, sitting smack in the middle of the left side of your head. With long skinny tentacles reaching out to various parts of your brain.
Can you see the outside world?
—When I want to. It uses some energy, but it isn’t really hard. I hook into your optic input, is all, and then I see whatever you’re seeing.
What about hearing?
—A different kind of hookup. I keep that one patched in nearly all the time.
Sense of touch? Smell? Taste?
—The same. It’s no great trick to cut into your sensory receptors and find out what’s going on outside.
What about reading my thoughts?
—Easy. A tentacle into the cerebral cortex. I monitor you constantly there, Macy. You think it, I pick it up instantly. And I can sort out your consciously directed mental impulses from the mush of mental noise that you put out steadily, too.
How did you learn these things?
—Trial and error. I woke up, see, not knowing where I was, what had happened to me. Lissa gave me a telepathic nudge, not even realizing she was doing it, and there I was. Locked in a dark room, a coffin, for all I knew. So I started groping around in your head. Accidentally touched something and made a connection. Hey, I can see! Touched something else. I can hear! What’s this? Somebody else is wearing my body! But if I make contact here, I can pick up his thoughts. And so on. It took a few days.
And you keep learning things all the time, eh, Hamlin?
—Frankly, I haven’t been making much progress lately. I’m finding it hard to override your conscious control, your motor centers, your speech center. To make you walk where I want you to walk, to make you say what I want you to say. I can do a little of that, but it costs me a terrific load of energy, and sooner or later you pull me loose. Maybe there’s a secret to overriding you that I haven’t found yet.
You manage to mess with my heartbeat pretty easily, though.
—Oh, yes. I’ve got decent control over most of your autonomic system. I could turn your heart off in five seconds. But what’s the use? You die, I’d die too. I could play with your digestive juices and give you an ulcer by morning. Only this is my body as much as yours: I don’t gain anything by damaging it.
Nevertheless you can cause me plenty of pain.
—Indeed I can. I could harass you most miserably, Macy. How would you like the sensation of a toothache, twenty-five hours a day? Not the toothache itself, nothing a dentist could fix, just the sensation of it. How would you like a premature ejaculation, every time? How would you like a feedback loop in your auditory system so that you heard everything twice with a half-second delay? I could make your life hell. But I’m not really a sadist. I don’t have any hard feelings toward you. I simply want my body back I still hope we can work things out in an amiable way, without the need for me to apply real pressure.
Let’s not start that routine again. Macy reached for the bourbon. I want to know more about you. What it’s like for you in there. Can you actually see the interior of my brain?
—See it? The neurons, the synapses, the brain cells? Not really. Only in a metaphorical sense. A visionary sense. I can set up one-to-one percept equivalents, such as my perception of myself as a miniature octopus, do you follow? But I don’t actually see. It’s hard to explain. I’m aware of things, structures, forms, but I simply can’t communicate that awareness to someone who hasn’t ever been on the inside himself. You have to remember that I don’t have an organic existence. I’m not a lump of something solid under your headbone, a kind of tumor. I’m just a web of electrochemical impulses, Macy, and I perceive things differently.
But aren’t we all just webs of electrochemical impulses? What am I if not that?
—True. Except that you’re linked with this brain at so many points that you don’t have any sense of yourself as something distinct from the bodily organ through which you perceive things. I do. I’m dissociated, disembodied. I sense my own existence as something quite separate from the existence of this brain, here, through which I get various sensory inputs when I ask for them, and through which I can force an output by working at it. It’s weird, Macy, and it’s lousy, and I don’t like it at all. But I can’t achieve a real hookup, because you’re in the way in so many places, entrenched too deeply for me to dislodge you.
What are we going to do, then?
—Continue annoying each other, I suppose.
Quarter to nine. Really ought to check up on Lissa somehow, go down to her apartment, ask the cops to investigate. Not very ambitious right now, though. Maybe she’ll come in soon. A long long walk on a spring night, home after dark.
—You’re in love with her, aren’t you, Macy?